Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club” succeeded by impeccably blending playful murder mystery with thoughtful matters of life and death given the eponymous quartet of London pensioners solving cold cases in the jigsaw room of their posh retirement home Coopers Chase. The cinematic version, alas, directed by Chris Columbus is neither playful nor thoughtful; it’s flat; it has, unfortunately, Netflix written all over it. Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s adapted screenplay turns the quartet, each one a fully formed individual in the novel, into what is essentially the four-person rock and roll band from “Almost Famous,” Stillwater, with two members brought way up in the mix (Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth and Pierce Brosnan’s Ron) and the other two (Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim and Celia Imrie’s Joyce) just along for the ride. And that might be fine. Adaptations must make choices, after all, about what goes and what stays and what changes. But then, why make Joyce’s introduction to the group the narrative starting point if you’re going to reduce her to mere cake-baking comic relief? Is there a three-and-a-half-hour cut? (I don’t want to see it.)
This odd sidelining of Joyce and Ibrahim also underlines “The Thursday Murder Club’s” most significant problem: the titular group never feels like one. Columbus evokes no real chumminess between them, never makes it seem as if they are gleefully in on something together, and never invites us, the audience, through those figurative clubhouse doors either. And though the emergent mystery ties back to saving Coopers Chase from dastardly intentions to destroy it, the retirement home never comes alive either, rendered not so much as a lively community but just a series of well-lit rooms. Just as the whole movie feels like an outline waiting for the real one, so does Coopers Chase feel like contrived images from a senior living brochure. And though there is a rather substantial change the film makes to the book’s conclusion, one that has apparently thrown many of the novel’s fans into a tizzy, I hardly felt worked up given how little any of this is made to count in the first place.
I had not seen the seminal dad movie “The Hunt for Red October” since I saw it with my dad on home video in the early 90s, and I had forgotten just how much the recent “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” cribbed from it. In John McTiernan’s cinematic adaptation of Tom Clancy’s best-selling book, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) suspects that when Soviet submarine commander Ramius (Sean Connery) goes rogue with a nigh undetectable new class of underwater warship, he is not seeking to transform the Cold War into a hot one but to defect. Granted three days by the National Security Advisor (Richard Jordan) to prove his theory, Ryan seeks out the Red October in the North Atlantic to confirm its true intent by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier just as in the eighth M:I movie, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) seeks a sunken Soviet submarine in the Bering Sea by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier. Ethan Hunt, however, skews closer to a superhero, and if subsequent Jack Ryans could skew that way too, I had also forgotten the jocularity of Baldwin’s pace-setting performance, truly playing an ordinary analyst rather than a savior-like agent. And given that Ryan wants to bring home a teddy bear to his daughter as much as he wants to prevent WWIII, no wonder desk bound dads everywhere loved this movie so much.
Clancy’s novel was published in 1984 when the Cold War was still in effect, but by the time the movie was released in March of 1990, the Soviet Union was dissolving. In that way, Ramius defecting, with he and Ryan cast as allies, feels like a premonition more than a hopeful wish, underlining what was playing out in real time. Then again, rewatching this conclusion now, with the pathetic American President kowtowing to a Russian one hellbent on resurrecting a USSR-like empire, if not occasionally outright copying his playbook, colors it in a whole new light. (It’s quite a quirk of history that the Political Commissar aboard the Red October that Ramius is forced to kill to keep his plans quiet is named…Putin.) “The Hunt for Red October” might lay America’s semi-self-inflated role as global peacekeeper on thick, in a way that no doubt would make some cringe, but at a moment when it can feel as if The Great Experiment might be failing, Ryan telling Ramius “welcome to the new world” hit me hard, man.
That “The Hunt for Red October” lacked real world Cold War overtones upon its release only emphasizes John McTiernan’s supreme command of craft. The screenplay might be laden with exposition, but McTiernan’s frequently moving camera still seems to be telling the story itself by nudging us toward characters who are about to matter and leading us toward details and events about to matter. What the underwater effects lack, meanwhile, is more than made up for in how the action sequences are composed by McTiernan and editors Dennis Virkler and John Write to illustrate how these vessels are merely extensions of the men running them. That’s the true subject of “The Hunt for Red October,” not geopolitics, not even underwater warships; dudes.
There might not be enough machine gun fire, broken limbs, or dudes thrown through windows to qualify as a Movie for Guys Who Like Movies, but still; McTiernan, his producers, and casting director Amanda Mackey assembled a magnificent stable of dudes. There is Baldwin, of course, at his youngest and frothiest, and there is also Sam Neill as Ramius’s right-hand man exuding the right-hand man loyalty that sends the hearts of assistant coach-loving dudes everywhere aflutter. Courtney B. Vance is a sonar operator, meaning he spends most of the movie just listening to sonar, and yet in his unique casual cool reminded me that, between this and “Cookie’s Fortune,” he should have been a full-fledged movie star. Scott Glenn as the American sub commander is magnetic in how he quietly holds each pressure-packed moment in his utterly impassive face before calmly making a split-second decision. (Fred Dalton Thompson is definitely a dude as commander of the USS Enterprise, but the truth is, in a similar role in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” Hannah Waddingham out-dudes him.) And though what Connery says (in his native brogue, proving once again that movie accents don’t have to matter) as Ramius often carries great weight, what’s more impressive is how the actor carries a lifetime of experience in his air. The script is coy with Ramius’s politics, perhaps not to offend any delicate American sensibilities, and that feels like a checkmark, but Connery makes up for it by maintaining a genuinely moving dignity of purpose.
Friend of the Blog Jaime recently forwarded me a Los Angeles Review of Books piece from March by Clayton Purdom dissecting the oeuvre of Michael Mann, the greatest living American filmmaker, and the work-obsessed men who dominate it. Mann Men, Purdom deems them, tracing them and their professional dedication from James Cann’s titular “Thief” (1981) all the way up to Adam Driver’s eponymous Enzo “Ferrari” (2023). I especially appreciated the latter. Maybe because “Ferrari” was a movie of an all but extinct breed, one in which Mann specializes, the big budget Hollywood art film, it seemed to get lost in the year-end shuffle with so many other releases but was deserving of the rigorous analysis Purdom provides. Indeed, the whole piece is exhilarating, and electrically written, and exhaustive. And yet, in devoting over 4,000 words to Mann’s oeuvre, it never once mentions not just my personal favorite Mann movie but my favorite movie period, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992).
Purdom might reference “Collateral” (2004) as a popcorn movie, but “Last of the Mohicans” is by far Mann’s poppiest movie. It is vintage Hollywood, as Charles Taylor put in his definitive take on the film for Salon, reduced to the most primal of emotions which is, perhaps, why it doesn’t lend itself as readily to academic-styled analysis. Based as it is on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, in a colonial America where indolence, to paraphrase the memoirs of Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, was totally discouraged, Mann’s film adaptation, based in part on the 1936 film adaptation, is in its way about industrious men in pre-industrial America. The two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook (Russell Means) and Uncas (Eric Schweig), and their adopted son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), are hunters and trappers and you’re telling me that ain’t work? Living in 1757 by trapping is harder than cracking safes and winning the Mille Miglia put together.
“Last of the Mohicans” begins, in fact, with the three men hunting an elk. In Native American culture, the killing of an animal is something sacred, which we see in how the three men honor and give thanks to the vanquished beast, and which we see even more in how Mann evokes the hunt itself, venerating these men and their work with a sweeping visual and musical grandeur. Mann conveys their cooperative effort with nary a word, merely the instinctual understanding of a hundred similar hunts, foreshadowing so many ensuing workmanlike scenes, like when they track a Huron war party and rescue a British regiment, chasing off the enemy with a practiced, reverential ease. When Hawkeye dispatches one Huron warrior in hatchet-to-hatchet combat, you sense the choreography of the movie giving way to the choreography of the character, like our hero knows the moves of his opponent in advance. In these moments Day-Lewis exudes Jada Pinkett Smith’s line from “Collateral” that Purdum quotes: “Take pride in being good at what you do?” Indeed, the famed commitment DDL brings to all his roles effortlessly blends with the commitment Hawkeye brings to what he does and the climactic moment when Hawkeye shoots two muskets at once feels less like an exclamation than a variation of Purdum’s cited Mann Men creed: act like you’ve simultaneously shot two muskets before.
Of course, the Mohicans also help rescue the Munro sisters, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), with whom Hawkeye and Uncas, respectively, will fall in love. They might have intended to trap during the fall and winter in Kentucky, but something happens, to quote Susan Sarandon in (forgive me) “Elizabethtown” that is not part of the plan. And maybe that’s why after all these years, “Last of the Mohicans” is still my number one Mann movie. It’s a significant irony, after all, that a guy hung up on what people do is my favorite filmmaker when few things matter less to me than what I or people at a dinner party do. (Tell me your favorite color, your favorite regional barbecue, your favorite Canadian province, anything else!) And so, rather than maintain discipline of a rigid professional code in the manner of most Mann men, Hawkeye eschews his work’s strictures to throw himself headfirst feet-first over the falls of passion. Sometimes, brother, those beaver pelts can wait.
If ever there were a middling thriller that deserved the meritorious distinction of More Than Middling, it is Nick Rowland’s “She Rides Shotgun,” taking the sensational and/or sentimental set-up of a pre-teen girl on the run with her dad from bad dudes and imbuing it with real warmth and weight. Based on a novel by Jordan Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s as if one evening he watched “Commando” (1985), itself a minor masterpiece of its own genre, in which a dad sets out to rescue a daughter taken hostage by warlords, and wondered, what if I tried to write this as a novel without winking? I haven’t read the book, but the movie succeeds, not simply through commitment but care, paying attention to its people, or at least, its two most important people. In fact, if “She Rides Shotgun” has a problem, it’s a nice problem in so much as its central relationship is so well drawn that everything else can’t help but pale in comparison.
“She Rides Shotgun” begins with 11-year-old Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) being picked up from school by her dad, Nate (Taron Egerton), her estranged dad, that is, which is not wholly communicated to us through dialogue but context clues like his jittery air and a car that has clearly been stolen. Indeed, in this introduction, the camera remains yoked to Polly’s point-of-view, foreshadowing how “She Rides Shotgun” prominently sticks to her perspective, refusing to make the audience omniscient for long stretches as we learn new information at the same time as her. When she phones Detective Park (Rob Yang) after seeing news on television about her disappearance, it’s striking how much we are in her same headspace, unsure if he really is someone she can trust. Nate, it turns out, has just been released from prison where he ran afoul of a white supremacist gang that now wants him and his family dead. And because the gang has its tenterhooks in the local police, Nate determines his only option is to pick up Polly and make a run for the border.
Rowland frequently deploys a handheld camera to evoke Polly’s POV, though the device never becomes overbearing in its destabilization, and still captures the feel of the massive and empty southwestern landscape which only makes this small girl feel that much smaller. Though it’s clear Polly has been forced to grow up in a hurry, more aware than oblivious adults might realize, she always feels true to her age as Rowland is careful to emphasize the last few embers of innocence still in the process of burning out. When Nate briefly seeks refuge with an old friend, the way the camera catches sight of Polly marveling over an illuminated fish tank before showing her perspective as she watches the adults talking effectively recounts these dueling ideas. Nate, meanwhile, is both a contrast to Polly and an echo of her, loving if emotionally immature but also her determined physical protector. And though the script embeds the idea of these actions as Nate’s shot at redemption, Egerton’s air makes it feel less obvious than that, like Nate is operating from nothing more than instinctual desperation.
For all its honesty, though, “She Rides Shotgun” still occasionally pulls a punch. A car chase with police in pursuit is punctuated by Polly’s almost ecstatic laugh, opening a can of worms that even this movie isn’t ready to explore, letting it lie there for a moment and then backing off. This sequence, though, scored to Denver Luna’s “Underworld,” demonstrates how Rowland gives the genre machinations some stylistic punch, furthered in John Carroll Lynch’s delicious villainous turn which feels as deliberately broad as Egerton and Polly’s feel purposely three-dimensional. And that’s what “She Rides Shotgun” can’t quite square. As the narrative begins crosscutting between Polly and Nate, Detective Park, and the gaggle of bad guys, it’s self-evident the latter two storylines don’t have the depth of the former, meaning that, oddly, the final product feels disproportionate despite being consistently good. Yet, even if these subplots pale to the main one, they enhance it, nevertheless, the world’s harshness juxtaposed against the straining hope of Polly. You see it best in the final scene, scored to synth-pop band CHVRCHES’ “Clearest Blue,” where the camera recounts Polly in close-up as she learns a new dance from some new friends, trying to shake it off, though Heger’s facial expressions suggest that shaking it off is not always so simple.
There is a phenomenon known to cinephiles as the film festival bubble in which a person attending a film festival, like, say, the Toronto International Film Festival, its 10-day run commencing today, becomes so ensconced in watching movies and thinking about movies that the outside world ceases to exist. I don’t attend film festivals anymore, preferring to watch less and let it digest more, but I do miss that bubble, surfacing afterwards, wondering (or not) what I missed. If, however, you dip into a film festival bubble of life these days in America where the number of atrocities occurring can feel limitless, and their scale can feel infinite, it can also feel as if you’re burying your head in the sand. But then, to not occasionally stop drinking from the unrelenting firehose is unhealthy. They’ve got us right where they want us, in other words, forcing us to try and strike a nearly impossible balance, one that Not-at-TIFF, our annual counter-programmed festival to Real TIFF, did its best to strike, sort of. After all, somewhere along the line, round about 2020, say, Not-at-TIFF’s mission statement merged Here are Some Cool Movies to Watch! with a Festivus-like Airing of Grievances.
11th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival
Who’s Harry Crumb? Real TIFF 2025 opens with the Colin Hanks documentary “John Candy: I Like Me,” a tribute to the late Canadian hero, so Not-at-TIFF 2025 will open with a John Candy movie. The first 100 guests will receive free philodendrons, the legend Shawnee Smith will appear, as will Bonnie Tyler for a special post-screening performance.
Report to the Commissioner. 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Real TIFF, and good for them, but rather than screen some old 1975 warhorse like “Dog Day Afternoon” to commemorate 50 years, let’s screen this down and dirty crime thriller. Because the way New York City looks in “Report to the Commissioner” is basically the way the President of the United States imagines every (blue) American city still looks today. Not that he would know, of course, because like Jack Donaghy refusing to leave his office after being mugged on The Tuxedo Begins episode of “30 Rock,” I imagine that His Imbecility hasn’t gone outside except to play golf since the Central Park Five.
King of Marvin Gardens. Speaking of the President, I just finished Mark Kriegel’s incisive book Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson and was reminded of the outsized role His Imbecility played in the boxer’s ascension, including hosting the mammoth 1988 Michael Spinks fight at the Atlantic City Convention Hall which was attached to T*ump Plaza Hotel and Casino. In fact, Kriegel wrote, T*ump built a walkway between the two so that “high rollers” would not have to see the riff raff and “dilapidated boardwalk” of Atlantic City like the one presented in Bob Rafelson’s 1972 New Hollywood classic “King of Marvin Gardens.” I was reminded of the Tyson/Spinks showdown during the recent P*tin/T*ump summit in Alaska. After all, His Imbecility essentially turned this meeting with an alleged war criminal into a sporting event, including a flyover and a slogan, Pursuing Peace a la Tyson v Spinks being billed as Once and For All. And so, it was only appropriate that just as Tyson KO’d Spinks in 91 seconds, the Russian President essentially laid the American political tomato can out flat in what was tantamount to a minute and a half.
Reality. I would think Sydney Sweeney was a S1M0NE invented purely to feed the discourse if I had not already seen her immense talent on display elsewhere, like this exhilarating 2023 take on the Reality Winner story that was one of the best movies of 2023 and deserves to be seen far and wide. Sweeney spends most of the movie in cut-off jeans rather than regular jeans, so I hope that’s good enough for the pundits and thinkers.
Brain Donors. And because I’m doing it again, by which I mean making Not-at-TIFF too big a downer, here’s a palate cleanser. As “The Naked Gun” reboot has shown, audiences are starving for otherwise extinct 80s, 90s-style rapid fire comedies, and so here’s a deep cut, a 1992 Zucker Brothers-produced Marx Brothers homage with John Turturro riffing on Groucho. Rotten Tomatoes is a little suspicious of it, but I remember watching this on HBO at my best friend’s house and laughing my keister off.
Strange Brew. John Candy is not in this 1983 Canadian American cult classic, but Rick Moranis is, and when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were in Portland, Maine last month we encountered a mailbox with a Rick Moranis sticker plastered to it (see above). And I liked thinking of a whole host of Maine mailboxes with these same stickers. Be the change you want to see in the world, and this person wanted to manifest Rick Moranis back into the movies. And hey, it worked!
Nowhere to Hide. While I was not a fan of “Weapons,” I was a fan of “Weapons” providing a prominent role for Amy Madigan. More of that, Hollywood, please. It got me perusing Madigan’s filmography and in doing so, I discovered this action-thriller in which Madigan plays an ex-marine fending off evil military industrialists and Michael Ironside plays her survivalist brother and why was this not the biggest movie of 1987?
On the 8th day we rest, of course, and just watch some YouTube videos, like this one, which really brings back memories. This was the first George Strait song I ever knew because they played this commercial about a thousand times during college football games that year. And this occurs to me because the King of Country is receiving a Kennedy Center Honor, and why wouldn’t he be, described in that sharp-witted syntax of the Kennedy Center’s cockamamie chairman as “believed to be by millions of people to be just as good as you can get.” And though in this track Strait tells us that “you’ve got to have an ace in the hole, a secret that nobody knows,” the irony is that everybody knows Strait’s secret is remaining politically neutral. Mensch Mel Brooks nobly declined a Kennedy Center Honor that would have been presented by Dubya because he opposed the War on Terror, and though Strait could take the same tack and tell our burgeoning authoritarian to take a hike, as only an artist who would agree to be sponsored by Anheuser-Busch would know, you don’t get rich by sticking your neck out.
Small Town Santa. I’m sorry, but upon forcibly reviewing the Not-at-TIFF schedule, the T*ump administration’s special envoys to Hollywood demanded to include one movie and this title, starring America’s favorite I*E agent, is what they gave me. After all, The War on Christmas continues apace. (Don’t hold it against the blog. You don’t have to attend, that’s fine, because no matter what, we are required to report that all seats for this screening were filled.)
Gypsy 83. I have been dealing with living in America in 2025 by listening intensively to music of my old favorites. Bruce Springsteen, yes, but also my #1 favorite childless cat dog lady, Stevie Nicks, her solo stuff as well as her work in Fleetwood Mac but especially her contributions to “Tusk.” (This was only enhanced by reading, and loving, Andrew Porter’s SoCo-set new novel The Imagined Life in which Nicks’s music is essentially a supporting character.) And so, I felt so much shame and embarrassment that I only learned this year about the existence of this 2001 movie in which two Midwestern goths road trip to New York for an event called Night of a Thousand Stevies. Did I greenlight this in a dream?
The only consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer seems to be that there is no consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer. No pop music hit has gripped the popular imagination the way, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” did in 2024 (even if some, like me, might contend that Carpenter’s 2025 track “Manchild” is superior.). The most popular song of the summer per Billboard metrics is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, who is described by Wired’s Jason Parham as “a YouTuber and founding member of Hype House, the former collective of Gen Z TikTok stars,” which are words I don’t entirely understand. But despite that song’s “chart dominance,” as Parham notes, it “(doesn’t) really capture the spirit of the season.” (It also lives up to its title in the worst way, an incidental music anthem.) Parham also indicates that SoundCloud data has shown people listening a little more to old music than new music this summer. This is likely tied to TikTok and Instagram’s penchant for bringing back past hits, but might also be tied to “the changing cultural dominant” being driven by America’s President, one sort of seeking to install himself as our version of a Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, and causing people to seek, as pop critic Chris Molanphy has deemed it, musical “comfort food.” I can relate.
Bruce Springsteen, who you may remember me mentioning once or twice on this nominal movie blog, released a box set of seven albums of unreleased material in June. Most of these were not even random compilations of never-heard songs but full-fledged records that were cut and then shelved for various reasons, including the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions, one that Bruce very nearly put out in 1994. In the hardcore Boss circles, this album had been known as the loops record, so-called because it was said to consist of songs based around programmed drumbeats and samples. (That turns out to be half true.) And though at the time Springsteen was reticent to release it for what would have been his third consecutive record focusing on relationships, and while it predictably can’t compare to his unrivaled seven-album run from late 1973 through 1987, it’s still quite good, as good, in fact, as anything he has released in the new century. If it had been released in 1994, I suspect it would have received mixed reviews before eventually being reclaimed like some of the less-heralded Bob Dylan albums, say “Oh Mercy.”
They are far from spitting images but still, but I kept thinking of the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions as a Springsteen version of “Pure Moods,” the compilation of new age music that was released in 1994 and that it seemed like everyone I knew bought that summer. But then, new age music is intended to soothe, and though the SOPS sometimes has soothing melodies, the lyrics are mostly anything but, a juxtaposition that Springsteen works to fine effect, like “Between Heaven and Earth,” or “We Fell Down” which truly conveys the sense of something beautiful ending. It also underlines his eschewing the short story set to music mode of 1995’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” for more suggestive lyrics. He gets great mileage from the metaphor of the lead track “Blind Spot,” turns “The Little Things” into a musical manifestation of that barbed wire melded into a heart that Neil gave his girlfriend on Real World London* (*mid-90s reference, so appropriate if obscure), and “Waiting On the End of the World” comes across like both a more abstract and more specific version of “Streets of Philadelphia.” Even the record’s single rocker, “One Beautiful Morning,” is essentially an uplifting celebration of death. One cut, however, stands above the rest.
“Maybe I Don’t Know You” sounds ominous from the start, and in the first two verses, Springsteen sings from the point-of-view of a husband puzzled by his wife’s seemingly newfound taste, in clothes, in music. “What’s that song you’re listening to, baby?” he sings. “I never heard you listening to that before.” (Every time I hear this lyric, I imagine Patti Scialfa in the other room listening to TLC’s “What About Your Friends.”) “Is it something new,” he wonders, “or just something you always hid?” And that leaves him wondering if he doesn’t know her like he thought he did. Springsteen, though, is no unthinking meathead, and his protagonist is not Ray Barone singing to Debra Barone. No, in the bridge, the protagonist turns introspective, confessing how she came to him for “understanding and tenderness,” but he met her with “indifference.” She wasn’t hiding these things from him, necessarily; in his stated apathy, he just wasn’t paying attention. But why wasn’t he paying attention? He explains, sort of: “And I can’t explain.” And though that’s a copout, of course, Springsteen knows it and, well, here’s the thing:
Springsteen songs are not usually about the guitar solo. There’s a reason what might be the most beloved guitar solo in the Springsteen canon is, in fact, played by Nils Lofgren. But when his solos work best, it’s because they truly conversate with the song, like on “Streets of Fire” where the solo seems to erupt like molten lava from the somber melody. The solo on “Maybe I Don’t Know You” doesn’t erupt, it’s not that kind of song, but it feels fully connected to the line preceding it. The solo itself becomes his explanation, or more accurately, his lack of one, this beautiful, pitiful cry of a man who can’t communicate, underlined in his stretching out the pronoun “I” twice as the solo winds up, like he’s gathering himself to finally explain and just...can’t. As the song concludes, you realize, it’s not whether he knows her, because he doesn’t even know himself, and I can’t help but think that such existential failure is a pretty apt illumination of where America stands as the curtain closes on the summer of 2025.
Why did the Heisman Trophy become the preeminent individual award in college football? Was it merely a matter of timing, created a couple years before the unheralded Maxwell Award was established to honor the same thing? Or was it for no other reason than the name Heisman is more distinct than the name Maxwell? I like to think the Heisman has maintained its unique status for 90 years because of the trophy itself. Modeled after New York University’s Ed Smith, the bronze bust by Frank Eliscu is instantly recognizable. Certainly, it is far more aesthetically rememberable than the Maxwell, never mind the predictably benign NFL MVP Trophy. Though the game has been thoroughly revolutionized, Smith’s pose, the extended right arm to ward off imaginary defenders while safeguarding the ball in his left, remains the premiere gridiron emblem. The image is so potent that 1991 Heisman winner Desmond Howard famously brought it to life, a mimicry that has itself been mimicked by other winners over the years, including last year’s Colorado star Travis Hunter. In this data-driven age where athletic greatness is considered quantifiable and provable, the Heisman can feel anachronistic, even irrelevant. But the trophy’s modern critics have never quite grasped that it was always more about creating an image, something halfway between measured and myth.
Initially christened the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935 after the men-only New York social club that awarded it, the moniker was altered the next year not for real-life John Heisman’s gridiron accomplishments as player or coach but because he had been DAC president. And so, the inaugural Heisman winner was Yale’s Larry Kelley, who would recall that upon receiving the telegram of his victory, “didn’t even know there was such a thing,” betraying its paltry origins. Indeed, Kelley spurned professional football and even Hollywood’s offer of a movie based on his life, suggesting the sport’s often fanciful amateur ideals. That quickly changed. 1938 winner Davey O’Brien would sign with the Philadelphia Eagles, 1940 winner Tom Harmon starred in the autobiographical “Harmon of Michigan” for Columbia Pictures, and 1946 winner Glenn Davis would briefly date Elizabeth Taylor. The Heisman’s prominence grew with the game itself, assuming the aura of a gridiron Academy Award, as Dan Jenkins noted for Sports Illustrated in 1969, writing of a “war…waged as earnestly by campus publicity men and by the 1,371 writers and broadcasters who are eligible to vote as by the players themselves.” That’s why Notre Dame’s Joe Theisman literally changed the pronunciation of his last name in 1971 to rhyme with the statue, and why in Hunter’s first game at Colorado in 2023 his coach Deion Sanders was already promoting him in an on-field interview. The Heisman is something to be sold as much as won.
Even as the Downtown Athletic Club remained the award’s stewards for years, eventually giving way to The Heisman Trophy Trust in 2003, it farmed voting out, and at present, there are 928 voters comprised of 57 former winners, 870 media members, and a single vote based on the result of a fan poll. There are probably 928 complaints about voting tendencies too. Accusations of regional and positional bias as well as favoritism toward the game’s biggest brands have existed in perpetuity. ESPN, which began broadcasting the ceremony in 1994, has been charged with promoting certain players ahead of others, typically those featured on their network. Dreaded preseason Heisman watchlists set expectations and narratives that can persist despite evidence while the sheer number of voters tends to elicit a groupthink-induced feedback loop. The hype can become numbing, as it was with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson in 2016, the foregone winner for so long that by the end, certain media members were trying to gin up prosaic lightweights as alternatives. Winners, meanwhile, are often unjustly judged a second time in accordance with their success in the NFL, or lack of it, like judging an apple’s taste by eating an orange. What do I think should define a Heisman winner? I couldn’t hope to explain it, honestly, but I know a Heisman winner when I see one, and as much as Doug Flutie and Barry Sanders are, Chris Weinke and Mark Ingram are not. Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California? He is definitely a Heisman Trophy winner.
A running back, Reggie Bush’s stats were not especially eye-popping, at least, not in comparison to other winners through the years. But that’s why he was the ultimate epistemological Heisman winner, and which is why he remains the ultimate Heisman winner too. How did we know he deserved to win, and how did we know that we knew it? You knew he deserved to win simply by seeing him play, not least because when you saw him play, you could not quite believe what you were seeing. Yet, even if he won the award in what was deemed by most outlets as a landslide, when USC lost the subsequent national championship-deciding Rose Bowl to Texas and the Heisman runner-up Vince Young, so many prisoners of the moment swapped sides and suggested that Young should have won all along. These short-sighted about-faces amusingly and inadvertently epitomized the frequent Heisman critique that it only goes to the best player on the best team but even worse, implied the award should be results-based rather than a matter of taste. And though Young was impressive in imposing his physical will, Bush frequently reconfigured what was physically possible. In other words, Young was inevitable, but Bush was inconceivable. Give me the latter.
Bush was never as inconceivable as he was that year against Fresno State, an indelible 50-42 seesaw. You knew it would be a wild night at the L.A. Coliseum from the first touchdown which occurred when the ball bounced off the helmet of one Fresno State Bulldog and into the arms of another in the end zone. The Bulldogs were at the apex of their Anybody Anytime Anywhere era, the mantra instilled by coach Pat Hill to demonstrate his proletariat program’s determination to battle any willing blueblood. They knocked off a few but taking down #1 USC, the two-time defending champs riding a 32-game winning streak would have been the crowning accomplishment. The two teams slugged it out with a bevy of big plays, and Fresno State’s sustained excellence provoked Bush to go higher than ever before, ending with 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 on the ground, and scoring two touchdowns, though he set up two more with long runs that came up just short of the end zone, demonstrating power, speed, and agility in equal measure. Yet, for all he did on the night, nothing else, and nothing else in his whole career, compared to his 50-yard touchdown run with barely a minute left in the third quarter.
As a game predominantly played with brute force in close quarters, football coaches have since its inception sought ways to manufacture empty space for their fastest players. For all the formational and strategic inventions, however, no grand designs can compete with a player creating that space on all his own, as Heisman winners have done time immemorial, whether it was LSU’s Billy Cannon bulling his way to it, Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers juking it into existence, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel forging it via his unique gridiron acrobatics. But no Heisman winner ever did what Bush did on November 19, 2005, when he took a handoff, surged up the middle, and followed his blockers to the left where three converging Bulldog defenders essentially guided him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Or at least, appeared to guide him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Instead, Bush came to a dead stop on the boundary’s edge, if only for a split-second, brought the ball around his back from his left hand to his right and then ran the opposite direction, leaving dumbfounded defenders in his wake while gliding in for the touchdown. Unlike those other plays, it was not so much exhilarating as it was mystifying, a football player scoring a touchdown by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reggie Bush did not merely make some space, he reversed the whole damn space time continuum, and in doing so, transmogrified the facts and figures of his stat line into folklore. In other words, it was his Heisman Moment™.
That no one has ever been more deserving of the Heisman Trophy than Bush made it ironic when he became the first and only winner to vacate his trophy in 2010 after the USC football program was hit with NCAA sanctions directly related to his receiving so-called improper benefits. In lieu of the Heisman Trust retroactively rescinding Bush’s victory, he gave the trophy back of his own quasi-face-saving accord. He broke the NCAA’s Amateurism rules, it was true, and never exactly apologized for doing so, though even a cursory understanding of the NCAA’s formation and invention of the term student-athlete would reveal those rules as one-sided and cynical, and the NCAA never apologized for them either. In fact, they went to the Supreme Court to try and defend them in 2021, getting skunked 9-0. (“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” wrote Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.) The NCAA had sought to make Bush an example, a warning, and it backfired as the argument to return his Heisman marked a tipping point in public perception. Every supposed scandal in the twenty-tens involving a CFB player benefiting from their name, image, and likeness resonated a little less, so that by the time so-called NIL was decreed lawful, it felt preordained. There were other, more influential pioneers in the push for player compensation, like Ed O’Bannon, but in his public pillorying, Bush played an outsized role, nevertheless. He gave up his Heisman so that one day in 2024 he could reclaim it, eating the NCAA’s original sins so they could be cleansed, a fitting emblem of college sports’ great leap forward.
When you look at it through that light, what Heisman winner’s legacy could possibly compare?
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