In Memoriam: Sam Neill

Sam Neill’s name came first on the poster for “Jurassic Park” (1993), but he wasn’t really the star. No, the stars were the dinosaurs, and to a lesser extent, Jeff Goldblum and his off-kilter charisma, and so, even though he was at the center of the biggest blockbuster up ‘til then, Neill was the fulcrum, not the lever, to borrow a phrase of the esteemed Roger Ebert. Everybody remembers the scene where Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm takes Richard Attenborough’s dino resurrector John Hammond to task for scientific, if not philosophical, recklessness, but in that same scene, when Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant is asked for his thoughts, the actor assumes the air of a true scientist, cautious skeptic, like he’s waiting for Jurassic Park to be peer-reviewed. It was befitting of the Ireland-born, New Zealand-raised actor’s gentlemanly air and his steady career progression from stage to screen to Hollywood. After all, he auditioned for no less a role than James Bond post-Roger Moore and later admitted that he did not really want the part and was happy not to get it and starred in one of the preeminent dudes rock movies of all time, “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as the most stoical sort of dude of all – the loyal lieutenant. Even in the (more than middling) hall of fame thriller “Dead Calm” (1989), in carrying his non-Nicole Kidman half of the movie almost entirely on his own, Neill gives a delicate internal performance that does not call all that much attention to itself. He always prioritized the movie. 

Not that Neill was just one thing. “I like playing villains and bad guys,” he told The Los Angeles Times during the press tour for “Jurassic Park,” “characters with moral ambiguity, because, in a way, they are easier to play.” His breakout role as the aptly named Smith in Roger Donaldson’s “Sleeping Dogs” (1977) was not a villain, per se, but in playing a character dropping out of a society on the brink only to be unwillingly pulled back in, Neill evinced something like ferocious indifference to the whole world around him. He brought great intensity to the lead role in John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) and in his other 1993 movie, Jane Campion’s Best Picture-nominated “The Piano,” he served as a convincing antagonist. He got to play the bad guy in “Event Horizon” (1997), possessed by the eponymous evil spaceship, delivering the money line as God intended, a perversion of “Back to the Future’s” money line, like he was Doc Brown gone bye-bye. That movie was, uh, not nominated for Best Picture, critically reviled, as its mid-August release date suggests, but it made for one of the great movie-going experiences of my life, an employee-only midnight sneak at the multiplex where I worked that summer that felt as much like watching a college football game as a movie. It’s too bad we didn’t have air horns for Neill’s line.

As fun as it was, that wasn’t my favorite movie-going experience involving Neill. No, that one doubled as my favorite movie-going experience during my brief interlude of living in Phoenix. One Friday night, hot and unhappy as I generally was, I went and saw an Australian movie called “The Dish” (2000) based on nothing, really, but the poster and exited a couple hours later beaming from ear to ear. A comedy telling the true story of the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales that wound up broadcasting the famed images of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Neill starred as the observatory’s chief, Cliff Buxton, giving a performance as warm as the cardigan sweater he is always sporting. It is an ensemble and he both blends in and binds it together, quietly carrying the weight of the death of his character’s wife and never raising his voice, until the one time he does, making it count. It occurs when the stiff-necked NASA man and one of Cliff’s Aussie colleagues butt heads in that way dudes do. “We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted,” Cliff tells his colleague in calling him out. “What are you doing? Standing around bitching.” “The Dish” is a movie of so much goodwill and such little anger, and this lone angry moment, delivered by Neill in such a way to make it clear that he is angry about having to get angry at all, is a breathtaking rebuke not only of his colleague’s lack of goodwill but in a larger way, the cynicism and even nihilism that often feels so pervasive. Twenty-five years on, it still takes my breath away. 

Sam Neill died on Monday July 13th, 2026. He was 78. 

The Cable Guy

As Ted Turner gradually transformed small-fry Atlanta UHF station WJRJ into TBS (Turner Broadcasting System), the first superstation, in the 1970s, he filled airtime by acquiring the rights to broadcast games of the local Major League Baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. He effectively remade them as America’s Team by literally marketing them as America’s Team, like Anheuser-Busch brandwashing Budweiser as the King of Beers, and in an era where the options for watching baseball games was limited, the sometimes-leftist Turner foreshadowed Reagan by essentially decreeing that every American deserved to watch as many baseball games as he or she damn pleased. It helped pave the way for our present-day streaming world were virtually every game in every American sport can be accessed one way or another just as Turner’s founding of CNN started us toward a slew of yammering 24-hour news networks, for better and for much, much worse. He also did his part to alter not just our moviegoing habits but our movie watching habits too. 

Turner, who died on May 6th at 87, could not fill airtime through baseball alone and so he showed movies too, both on TBS and its eventual sister station TNT (Turner Broadcasting Network). In the beginning, many of these movies were culled from the pre-1986 MGM catalogue which Turner took control of through a byzantine deal. He launched TNT, in fact, with a showing of “Gone with the Wind,” which he cited as his favorite movie, though in the early days he also ran “The Slugger’s Wife” incessantly, a 1985 critical bomb, yes, but also a movie all about his Atlanta Braves (he purchased them, too, in 1976) and in which he, himself, had a cameo. He could not turn that movie into a new classic like he might have wanted, but he created New Classics, nevertheless, a phrase he utilized for an America’s Team-like promotional campaign as he struck myriad licensing deals with other distribution companies. Upon obtaining cable rights to “The Shawshank Redemption” in 1997, he essentially incepted it into everyone’s mind as a New Classic by showing it, as director Frank Darabont would jokingly and appreciatively note, “every five minutes.” When a student in my freshmen rhetoric classic that fall at the University of Iowa cited “The Shawshank Redemption” as his favorite movie, I wanted to ask him, “And are the Atlanta Braves your favorite baseball team?”

Turner might have used the phrase New Classic, but I always preferred the more letter-for-letter term of TNT Movies, and as the evidence showed, “The Shawshank Redemption” was a consummate TNT Movie. It was so heavily telegraphed and glacially paced that in its full two-hour and twenty-two-minute form, its impact was deadened, whereas in short bursts, you could better appreciate the solid construction of its engaging individual scenes. “A Few Good Men” was a much bigger box office hit than “The Shawshank Redemption,” but I have long thought it was best appreciated as a TNT Movie where it could live its truth less as a triumphant courtroom drama of truth and justice than a slick Hollywood entertainment in the positive sense, constructed for maximum enjoyment. It is comprised of nothing but good scenes that can be enjoyed in any order, like Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection,” a movie as greatest hits compilation. Another Tom Cruise joint, “Cocktail,” is the ultimate TNT Movie seen through the looking glass the other way – a movie that only works, in a manner of speaking, in 10 to 15 fifteen increments on TNT on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

This might seem like a bastardization of the movies, like Turner infamously colorizing old monochrome classics like “Casablanca” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” to make them more palatable, I guess, for philistines who prefer their solemn national reflecting pools to be Caesars Palace swimming pool blue, but really, it evokes movies at their beginning, a la old nickelodeon shorts, while also hinting at our present of bite-size scenes in the form of YouTube clips or TikTok videos. I mean, really, is turning on “A Christmas Story” during its annual 24-hour Christmas marathon on TNT just to hear “Not a finger!” any different than TikTok distilling the Biblical behemoth “Solomon and Sheba” down to 7 seconds of Gina Lollobrigida?

“Solomon and Sheba” is the kind of movie liable to turn up on yet another Turner enterprise – Turner Classic Movies. Christened in 1994, also via a “Gone with the Wind” kickoff, TCM differed from its namesake’s other TeeVee ventures in so much as it was more akin to a public good, like the Smithsonian, as Maureen Dowd put it for The New York Times. It certainly educated me. The standard cinema classics were available at rental stores where I was from, but TCM allowed me to dig so much deeper and learn so much more; I never would have been able to complete the Jean Harlow filmography without it. And when my beloved 1998 thriller “Ronin” was added to its roster in 2022, it felt momentous, like an Atlantan’s favorite Brave, say, being enshrined by the Baseball Hall of Fame. As billionaires are wont to do, Ted Turner helped reshape the future, yet as most billionaires are not wont to do at all, when it came to cinema, he not only recognized but took substantial action to preserve its past. 

In Memoriam: Jackie Burch

It only took a century, but this year the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences finally added an award for Best Achievement in Casting. To commemorate the occasion, the Oscar ceremony did not simply enlist a couple big names to banter while presenting the inaugural award but brought out a cast member from each nominated movie to say a few words on behalf of his or her casting director. The idea’s heart was in the right place, but the words did not match the moment, too many of them to not say much of anything at all, at least not much of anything until Delroy Lindo brought it home on behalf of “Sinners.” “In ‘Sinners,’” Lindo said, “every character feels universal, distinct, fully lived in. Yet together they form something much larger: a living, breathing world. That didn’t happen by accident.” That, I literally said while pointing at the TV, was all you needed to say! Engrave that on the award! Still, on some level I understand so many futile attempts to sum it up with words because when it comes to casting, it’s right there on the screen.

The first-ever casting Oscar went to Cassandra Kulukundis for “One Battle After Another,” and in her speech, she noted her long working relationship with director Paul Thomas Anderson, serving as the casting director for all his movies dating back to 1999’s “Magnolia.” She was a casting associate on PTA’s second feature film, “Boogie Nights,” on which Christine Sheaks was credited as Casting Director. That is the movie I have always considered an exemplar of modern movie casting. Sheaks epitomized Lindo’s observation that a casting director helps to create a living, breathing world by fashioning a makeshift family of intentionally disparate personalities that all fit together. Even more, while “Boogie Nights” was filled with unconventional casting choices, those choices do not feel unconventional in retrospect as each actor so indubitably inhabits his or her role that ultimately you can’t imagine anyone else. Sheaks saw, in other words, what nobody else saw, until they saw it, which, it seems to me, is exactly the kind of visionary quality you want in a casting director.

The 98th Academy Awards not only introduced a casting award, they also finally got out of their way and put together an appropriately honorific in-memoriam montage, occasionally stopping to remember out loud Hollywood icons who had passed the previous year. They could not honor everyone aloud, of course, and when one of the names and faces that flashed up was a casting director, well, maybe the casting award was still on my mind, I found myself wanting to know more. To be honest, I am deeply ashamed that I did not know Jackie Burch’s name given her massive imprint on the movies and by extension, how many times I must have seen it throughout my life. Because if you first started watching movies in the 80s as I did and have not just one but a few favorite movies from that decade, the odds are good that Burch, who died in September at the age of 74 from endometrial cancer, was its casting director.

Burch cast “The Breakfast Club,” for God’s sake, meaning she had to cast a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse, casting to fit a mold and to break a mold at the same time, and she did it. And though you might think the same person that cast “The Breakfast Club” could not possibly have also cast “Predator” (1987), Burch did, putting together a paramilitary rescue team by intuitively understanding that she was casting a music video filtered through a beer commercial as much as a Sci-Fi/Action epic. “Road House” (1989) became a cult classic for many reasons, not least of which was Burch’s impeccably curated cast, top to bottom, from Patrick Swayze all the way down to the hapless henchman tucked under the CAT cap (John William Young), turning Jasper, MO into an R-rated, movies-for-guys-who-like movies Honalee. Burch cast “Sixteen Candles,” “Mask,” “Three Amigos!,” “Coming to America,” and “Dick Tracy.” Burch cast “Oscar,” the unfortunate Sylvester Stallone attempt at comedy in 1991. Ah, but as Burch would tell the story to the podcast Ghost of Hollywood in 2023, when director Jonathan Lynn was struggling to cast “My Cousin Vinny” a couple years later, Burch suggested Marisa Tomei whom she had cast in “Oscar”: ergo, Jackie Burch is no small way partly responsible for the greatest movie performance in history. Oh, also, Burch cast “Die Hard.”

If I might argue that “Boogie Nights” was the best cast movie of the 90s then I might argue that “Die Hard” was the best cast movie of the 80s. Rather than spend every December rehashing lame, tired arguments about whether the latter is a Christmas movie, people should dispense “Die Hard” calendars a la advent. Each day we open a door to remember all the roles that Burch got just right in ways both large and small, whether it was the 80s asshole central casting pinnacle of Hart Bochner, enlisting her “Breakfast Club” Principal Paul Gleason to play the Deputy Chief of Police as sly commentary on the LAPD, cementing in my mind forevermore the make-believe aesthetic of German terrorists by giving Hans Buhringer his only screen credit, or calling on Kip Waldo to indelibly manifest the air of a convenience store clerk made to work on Christmas Eve. Waldo’s one scene with Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Al Powell, in fact, goes to show that the casting was not only about getting each individual role right but ensuring the whole cast worked together. Indeed, as much as “Die Hard” might look like a star vehicle in the rearview mirror, it’s a true ensemble piece with so many performers complimenting and counterpointing one another in so many ways. More than that, “Die Hard” is a case where key performers frequently do not even share the scene or screen together, rendering the necessary chemistry as an even more dicey proposition than usual, an extra testament to Burch’s intuition.  

As distinct and vital as every casting choice was, though, none were as distinct and vital as the top line choices of Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. Both set a template for hero and villain, respectively, that spawned a thousand pale imitators, such culturally indelible turns that it can be hard to remember just how out-of-the-box it was to choose the guy from “Moonlighting” and a stage-trained thespian who had never acted in a movie in the first place. To that point, Burch has said that director John McTiernan wanted to cast Robert Duvall as Sgt. Al Powell. If it sounds like the most natural choice in the world, casting someone like Robert Duvall in the part of a police sergeant in a movie like “Die Hard,” it also sounds inconceivable, if only because we have seen the movie and consequently seen VelJohnson in the role. That, it goes without saying, was not a luxury Burch was afforded when she was casting it. She had the foresight to see what the rest of could only see in hindsight. 

In Memoriam: Suki Lahav

Bruce Springsteen and Suki Lahav, 1974.

Bruce Springsteen’s back-to-back 1974 and 1975 masterpieces of New Jersey/New York life, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” and “Born to Run,” were records of romantically heightened youth. They captured their creator in a musical theatre mode, pulling as much from West Side Story as Elvis, a mode he would move on from, and a mode defined by a markedly different version of The E Street Band. When he plays songs of this period in concert now, I am always happy to hear them, but I confess, deep down, there is also always a little twinge of disappointment because they are not quite the same. They can’t be. The person he was, the way he felt, how the group sounded, that time has passed. Those records were defined as much by David Sancious’s piano cum Roy Bittan’s piano as Bruce Springsteen’s guitar; they were also defined by Suki Lahav’s violin. Her instrument appears only once on an official Springsteen recording, though that one time is significant, the opening to “Jungleland” that draws back the curtain on something mythic. To get the full effect of Lahav’s violin in the band, you have to listen to the live recordings of the era, like the one from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania’s Main Point in early 1975, recorded for posterity by Philadelphia’s WMMR, which was the first Springsteen bootleg I ever owned and crucial in my education of his canon, going to show that he was so much more than the Reagan-era image that still, to a large degree, defines him. At that Main Point show, Lahav is his only accompaniment on an otherwise solo piano version of “Incident on 57th Street” and she is the most key contributor on a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” that, in my honest opinion, they do better than The Bard himself. That’s the song I listened to first when I read that Lahav had died on April 1st in her native Israel at the age of 74 from cancer.

Lahav being in The E Street Band was some matter of fate. She was married to Louis Lahav, who was Springsteen’s recording engineer in the early years, and when Bruce was looking for a violinist to join the band, he enlisted her. When Jon Landau essentially assumed command of the Springsteen operation not long after, virtually sidelining his previous producer Mike Appel in the process, the Lahavs went their own way. “We were really Mike’s people,” she would tell The Jerusalem Post in 2007 with no detectable notes of bitterness. She and Lahav returned to Israel, divorced in 1977, and going by her Hebrew name of Tzruya, by all accounts, Lahav fashioned a long and successful career in the arts there. For the next 25 years, as Springsteen devoted himself to straight ahead rock and roll, he rarely utilized the violin, but turned toward a more rustic sound around the turn of the century and invited Soozie Tyrell into the fold where she has remained for two decades-plus. Suki Lahav, on the other hand was in The E Street Band from September 1974 to March 1975. In the immense text of Bruce Springsteen, she is barely a blip. But then, the period in which she featured prominently was the one where Springsteen was saying goodbye to his youth, immortalized on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” on which Lahav sang backing vocals, and that’s the thing about youth, seven months can last forever. 

In Memoriam: James Tolkan

In early 2016, I had serendipitous back-to-back movie-viewing experiences. First, I watched the previous year’s “Bone Tomahawk,” S. Craig Zahler’s western-horror hybrid. Most people might remember it for so much gruesome violence, but I remember it most for a scene in which a gunslinger semi-squabbles with a saloon pianist over the price of playing a few songs. When you first see the pianist, slumped at his chosen instrument, head on the keys, you think for a moment that he might be dead until he pops to something like hungover half-life, epitomizing the film’s off kilter sense of humor by essentially living, so to speak, the old joke from “Ishtar: “Not dead, just resting.” The pianist was played by James Tolkan. The next movie I watched, a few days later, was 1973’s magnificent neo-noir “Friends of Eddie Coyle” in which Robert Mitchum plays a glorious sad sack career criminal informing to an ATF agent who finds himself in the crosshairs of The Man. Lo and behold, Tolkan turned up as the contact man for The Man, playing opposite the much taller Peter Boyle but lording over him in his air anyway. I could not remember the last time I had seen the then-84-year-old Tolkan in a new-to-me movie and yet, here he was in two of them, 42 years apart, both one-scene walk-offs in which he left an unmistakable footprint, and both evocative of a career as rich and varied as his life. (Contrary to the famous line about his character in “Back to the Future,” one wondering if he ever had hair, Tolkan did have hair in “Friends of Eddie Coyle” just as he had hair two years later as one Napoleon Bonaparte in Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.”)

Indeed, in reading Tolkan’s backstory upon learning of his death at the age of 94 on March 26th, as I did in this 2021 interview with the military news website We Are The Mighty, I could not believe just how much it felt like a novel. He was born in Michigan, but his family moved to Chicago where he quit school at 15 to work for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad (“which I hated,” he told We Are The Mighty) until his family relocated to Arizona where he re-enrolled in high school, graduated, and earned a football scholarship at Eastern Arizona College before joining the Navy where he made some waves as a boxer. Prior to shipping out, however, he was discharged on account of a heart condition and wound up in Iowa where he drove a cattle truck for a while, eventually attended the University of Iowa on the GI Bill and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He then literally took a Greyhound bus to New York, he would tell We Are The Mighty, with 75 bucks in his pocket to try and become an actor. He started on the stage, understudying Robert Duvall, appearing in several Broadway productions, including 1973’s “Full Circle” opposite Leonard Nimoy. In reviewing it for The New York Times, Clive Barnes would write: “James Tolkan had a marvelous scene as a recaptured prisoner, a Jewish ex‐professor from the concentration camps.” Tolkan starred in the first Broadway production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” in 1984, which I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know, and when I read this, I thought to myself, I swear, “I bet he played Dave Moss,” and turns out, he did, because can’t you hear him saying, “We’re just talking”?

“Glengarry Glen Ross” was also his last play on Broadway perhaps because in the 80s, Tolkan’s movie career blossomed, the supreme force of his 5'6" presence accentuated on the big screen, and though he was always in support, never a lead, he frequently bettered what was already good and still left a mark in what wasn’t. I saw 1987’s “Masters of the Universe” for my 10th birthday party at the Valley 3 in West Des Moines, Iowa and the only memory I retain has nothing to do with He-Man or Skeletor but Tolkan on the other side of the galactic portal as Detective Lubic. (He also co-starred in 1986’s “Armed and Dangerous,” one of the John Candy comedies of the era that my mom, my sister, and I would rent over and over.) Tolkan probably had more screen time total in that critical and box office bomb than he did in the back-to-back box office champs of 1985 and 1986, but demonstrating his gift for conveying authority, he rendered himself a Hollywood immortal, nevertheless, on account of those two movies. In the former, “Back to the Future,” he was Principal Strickland, though Tolkan did not play him as an educational leader so much as a cruel and cocky antagonist to our hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), like an ex-drill sergeant-type coach who became a principal for lack of a better idea. Strickland unforgettably dresses Marty down in a monologue that Tolkan delivered with such committed fury he seemed to conjure the camera’s movement, drifting closer and closer to the two men as Tolkan leans in so close to Fox that their noses practically touch. 

The next year Tolkan appeared in “Top Gun” as commanding officer of the USS Enterprise. Though he was credited onscreen as “Stinger,” that name is never said aloud, because why would it need to be given how Tolkan breathes immense life into the character all on his own in dressing down Maverick and Goose (Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards, respectively) the same way Strickland dresses down Marty McFly, coining an unlikely and profane synonym for worst case scenario along the way: “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit outta Hong Kong.” The whole sequence, really, is nothing more than an exposition drop, explaining Maverick’s backstory and the origin and purpose of Naval Weapons Fighter School, but Tolkan does not merely sell it with maximum gusto, he transforms it into an unapologetically juicy slice of pure verbal entertainment. As much as any scene of aerial combat, Tolkan turns and burns. And at the end, when Stinger dismisses Maverick and Goose, then stops them, then wishes them luck, the way he watches them go, shoving a cigar in his mouth as he does, it’s eerie just how Tolkan effects the countenance of a school principal who know he’s gonna see those two crazy kids again after class real soon.

In Memoriam: Robert Duvall

It’s funny what sticks in a person’s head about an actor, but when you have a career as long and varied as Robert Duvall’s, maybe that makes sense. He was in “The Godfather,” of course, need I say more, and literally started his movie career as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I mean, c’mon now, and is the guy who said he loved the smell of napalm in the morning in “Apocalypse Now,” for god’s sake, and yet I find myself thinking about the disaster movie “Deep Impact.” There’s a scene where Duvall’s astronaut is at a barbecue and drinking a beer with the NASA flight director (Kurtwood Smith), who is wearing a tropical print shirt, and talking about the crew for the big mission and expressing his fear and the whole thing can’t help but feel faintly ridiculous (did I mention Kurtwood Smith is wearing a tropical print shirt?) and yet Duvall just effortlessly speckles over it with this good-natured chuckle. He had a great chuckle, you know; Robert Duvall’s chuckle was as much an American national treasure as the late Gene Hackman’s. That’s not my favorite Duvall memory, though. No, my favorite Duvall memory comes from the same year, as chance would have it, 1998, in “A Civil Action,” where he’s playing the defense attorney who treats the law not as the rules and regulations helping bind together The Great Experiment but as the rules of a game that can be manipulated to engender a favorable outcome. (5 out of 4 Supreme Court justices rate him as their favorite movie lawyer.) Mostly, though, I just like the scene where he excoriates a clerk for daring to interrupt his lunch break, an argument and elegy for finding shelter from the capitalist storm. It’s the greatest courtroom movie speech of all time and it’s not even in a courtroom.

“You know, I’d make a point of taking an hour or so away from all the noise and insanity of this place. I’d find a place that was relatively quiet and peaceful, have a sandwich, read a magazine. Maybe listen to a game if one was on. I’d make sure everyone knew not to disturb me during that hour. Because that would be my time – my own private time, which no one, if they had any sense of self-preservation, would dare interrupt.”

 

After reading that Duvall had died at the age of 95, I reached for my copy of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film to see what he had to say on the actor. He starts by talking about Duvall’s role as consigliere Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” as I suppose one would, writing that Robert Duvall the actor “relates to high stardom like an Irishman among Italians. He is not beautiful or forceful enough to carry a big film. But stars and Italians alike depend on his efficiency, his tidying up around their grand gestures, his being perfect shortstop on a team full of personality sluggers.” There’s a lot of truth to this, and oddly enough, it’s as much epitomized as it is refuted in Duvall’s great passion project, 1997’s “The Apostle,” which he wrote and directed and starred in as a Pentecostal preacher. Indeed, though the name Elmer Gantry might have Irish roots, Duvall is making the Irishman version of that movie, at least, in the way Thomson is cheekily defining it, resisting the obvious stereotypes, effortlessly evincing firm belief in and devotion to the Almighty despite all the baggage the character otherwise brings. It’s Duvall’s version of a personality slugger. 

Kevin Costner’s 2003 western “Open Range” has a climactic gunfight that tends to get cited as one of the genre’s best shootouts, but I have always preferred the moment just before the shooting begins when Duvall’s cattleman, Boss Spearman, goes into a drug store. “My friend and me got a hankering for Switzerland chocolate and a good smoke,” he says. No one ever seized the day with so little fuss. Costner directed, produced, and co-starred in “Open Range,” yet he downplays, to his own detriment even, ceding the stage to Duvall who in his easygoing jocularity appropriately suggests Walter Brennan taking the lead in a John Wayne joint. Costner might lay the American pioneer spirit on thick, but in the end, the movie is less a sentimental ode to American fortitude and independence than a lasting monument to his co-star. 

In Memoriam: Rob Reiner

Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday. He was 78. The couple’s 32-year-old son Nick has since been charged with their murder. It feels impossible to process something so sad, stunning, and ghastly except to say that life is pain and anyone who says differently is selling something. I’m quoting a movie there, of course, Rob Reiner’s own “The Princess Bride” (1987). In doing so, I do not mean to be cruel or trivializing but to demonstrate how for so many of us, quotes from Rob Reiner movies are how we make sense of the world; like his dad Carl’s best friend Mel Brooks, Reiner was a western philosopher filtered through a Catskill comic’s microphone. I don’t know how many times I have contextualized some euphoric or intense experience in my mind by thinking, such and such went to eleven. Why just last Saturday afternoon My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, as she often does when discussing current events, underscored a point by declaring “money talks and bullshit walks.” The first time I told My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife that my favorite kind of pie was pecan, she immediately replied in her finest Billy Crystal, “I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.” It was one of my many early indicators that our love might just be like a storybook story.

The outpouring of grief in the wake of Reiner’s death stems from him being, as they say, a real mensch. A social liberal activist, he put his money where his mouth so often was, doing as much as anyone to help overturn California’s Prop 8 gay marriage ban in 2010. That was genuine winter soldier stuff in the image of Tom Paine. I often wondered if his increasing focus on political activism gradually caused the quality of his artistic output to run dry, but if such noble altruism was the tradeoff, that is a tradeoff worth making. Regardless, he was an accomplished actor, director, and producer who cut a whole swath of America on his way to success. He was born in the Bronx, went to high school in Beverly Hills, attended film school at UCLA, and cut his teeth apprenticing at a playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He came to prominence on the seminal 1970s television show “All in the Family,” winning two Emmy Awards along the way, before establishing himself as a Hollywood movie director in the 80s and helping found the independent film and television company Castle Rock. “Seinfeld,” to my mind the greatest TV show of all time, was made under its umbrella, and it avoided cancellation in its early days in no small part to Reiner going to the mattresses for it. Like I said, a mensch. 

Reiner made his first movie in 1984, right around the time I started going to and watching movies, and so like many people my age, he is synonymous with my first silver screen memories. Born in 1947, Reiner was a baby boomer, and his movies did not always have Gen-X sensibilities, necessarily, but they became our cultural touchstones, nevertheless. “The Princess Bride” was our version of a fairytale in so much as it was such a seamless blend of earnestness and irony that you could not tell where one ended and the other began. “Stand by Me” (1986) was the first movie My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife ever bought, back when buying a movie on VHS ran you roughly the same as a decent Bluetooth speaker. As a director, Reiner did not have a distinct style so much as a sturdy efficiency in the mold of classic Hollywood, underlining his ability to jump between genres. “Each film is completely different from the others,” wrote Roger Ebert in reviewing Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally...” (1989), “each one is successful on its own terms.” A master craftsman of mid-budget, middle class, sheerly watchable movies, I have long deemed “A Few Good Men” (1992) as the ultimate TNT Movie, easily digestible, unfailingly entertaining. His craft was so impeccable that even the heavily improvised “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) felt intentional every step of the way.

It was also his debut and like Guns N’ Roses and “Appetite for Destruction,” on his first try behind the camera, Reiner made his masterpiece. That is not to besmirch his ensuing work, merely to emphasize the immense groundbreaking quality of his debut, “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984).  Effectively the first comedic mockumentary, it remains the exemplar of the genre, and though pinpointing the funniest movie ever made is an exercise in futility, let’s just say, “This Is Spinal Tap” has a strong case, hilarious in every way, musically, visually, and verbally. Chronicling a fading English heavy metal band called Spinal Tap (Michale McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer), we see them through the eyes of Reiner’s documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi, explaining he was drawn to the group as a subject because of its “unusual loudness,” a line he says in consummate deadpan. As an actor, Reiner could be an outsized presence onscreen, as he was in “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), but in “This Is Spinal Tap” he did not go to eleven, more like a one or a two, his stone-faced performance tying the whole movie together. He takes Spinal Tap as seriously as they take themselves which is what makes it loving rather than patronizing.

Oddly enough, this past Saturday evening, a few hours after My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife had quoted Bobbi Flekman for the ten-thousandth time, we noticed “This Is Spinal Tap” was showing on HBO. Once we turned it on, we could not turn it off. And I was reminded that in a movie comprised almost entirely of side-splitting line readings, Reiner has a line reading that is the most side-splitting of all. It occurs when DiBergi asks Shearer’s Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls if playing rock and roll keeps him in a state of arrested development, to which Smalls opines that it is more akin to visiting a national park and seeing a moose that has been preserved. DiBergi repeats Smalls’s own observation back to him: “When you’re playing you feel like a preserved moose onstage?” Reiner’s comically flat line reading might as well be an encapsulation of life itself, the genuine struggle to find clarity where there is none. 

In Memoriam: Robert Redford

In addition to being an actor, activist, and philanthropist, Robert Redford also founded a filmmaking institute and a subsequent film festival with a name culled from one of his most famous characters, Sundance, that became a shorthand for a whole American independent movie movement. That was a movement I essentially grew up on in the 90s when I was first becoming a movie fan. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I watched Tim Blake Nelson’s “Eye of God” for the first time, released in 1997, and which Nelson adapted from his own stage play at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Ryan Coogler, who might well have made 2025’s best movie in “Sinners,” emerged from the Sundance Institute too. That’s what helped make Redford a true icon, worthy of veneration. He wasn’t just an artist; he created a historically significant space to help artists, to foster artistry itself. Do you put that first in the obituary now that he’s dead at age 89? I guess I just did.

With that alliterative name, so poetically plainspoken, it might sound like Robert Redford was born a star, but Charles Robert Redford Jr. took a long, winding path on account of a difficult and hell-raising youth. A college dropout, he was an extremely studious person who just didn’t like to study in a classroom, which is about the only thing I can say the two of us had in common. After roaming Europe, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Art. And though he began as a working actor on stage and television, the big screen truly illuminated his style. “I could do it,” he told The New Yorker’s Richard Rayner in 1998. “And I knew I could do it better than a lot of people. And I don’t know why.” There’s the famous anecdote Mike Nichols told of Redford not getting the lead in “The Graduate” because he didn’t understand what it meant to not get the girl in the end, and I wonder if that also illustrates him not understanding why he could do what others couldn’t. “He seemed to glow gold,” Stephanie Zacharek once wrote to describe Redford’s beauty and as Manohla Dargis noted in appraising Redford after his death, there is a “confidence that is specific to beauty: (he) never had to fight for your attention.”

That might be true and speaks to why he was an actor who never really cut loose, but he knew how to win your attention, nevertheless. He cultivated a distinct air on screen, one of immense restraint, and then calibrated that air in coordination with the character he was playing. If at first glance it might appear that he was just being himself, in so far as his screen persona represented “himself,” it belied the oozing nuance underneath, and suggests why despite being good in movie-movies like “The Sting,” he was best with some meat on the bone. In “All the President’s Men” his calm exterior belied the fast-thinking interior; in “The Candidate” his charming exterior belied a deliberate interior of nothing at all; in maybe my favorite Redford movie “Downhill Racer” he subversively turned his golden features against themselves in a bracingly unsentimental performance as an arrogant, self-absorbed professional skier who puts himself on a pedestal. “Downhill Racer” concluded on a freeze-frame redressing every sports movie freeze-frame ever as so much hooey, but it also epitomized the power of the camera to mold an image. Redford knew that restraint maximized the camera’s power.

Redford demonstrated that restraint in virtually all aspects. He fiercely guarded his private life and despite being one of its biggest stars, maintained a healthy skepticism of Hollywood. He won his Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” in 1980, but it was 1994’s “Quiz Show” where he really made his mark behind the camera, unmasking institutional myths in a way that no doubt felt close to home. In the new century, he did not shun the spotlight, exactly, but receded from it, acting less and less, content to stick to his home in Utah and build Sundance. It’s why even if his final film, “The Old Man and the Gun,” ultimately felt appropriate in its reckoning with time, his late period film I most liked was “All Is Lost” in which he played a nameless man all by himself adrift at sea. Redford has next to no dialogue, and his character has virtually no backstory, save for a few lines in voiceover hinting at the mess he made of things in his personal life. And though that’s typically a red flag, in this case it works, like a moment when the nameless man eats from a can of beans, one Redford improbably invests with so much searching melancholy. 

That can of beans makes me me think of John Saward’s Flaming Hydra piece about Gene Hackman when Redford’s “Downhill Racer” co-star died earlier this year. Saward focused on an image that proliferated the Internet of the elderly Hackman enjoying a cup of coffee and individually wrapped apple pie by himself to convey that after a lifetime of chasing desires and hungers and making messes in the pursuit, your wants and needs are eventually pared down to nothing more, really, than a coffee and a pie. Hackman, as Saward noted in referencing an interview with the actor, didn’t even know where his Oscars were. “You tumble around for years trying to understand yourself, starting fights, seething on four hours’ sleep; you get into debt and out of it and hit some wild jackpots,” Saward wrote. “You get the big house and all the stuff to fill it with, and in the end you try to get rid of it all. There’s a sturdy logic to this. How many different outfits do you need to go get a cup of coffee?” And in its unlikely way, “All Is Lost” brings that sentiment to life over the course of an hour and forty-six minutes as Redford’s man sees his sailboat maimed, transfers to a life raft with what little he can manage, eventually losing even that, and the raft too, shedding everything until all that’s left is whatever awaits all of us next. 

In Memoriam: Terence Stamp

If you believe, as I do, that the movie screen is predominantly a canvas for the human face then few have ever belonged up there more than Terence Stamp. His cockney baritone was distinct, he often had a supercharged presence, but above all else, he had those blue eyes illuminating the celluloid in the dark. And it’s why it made no sense that when he arrived on the scene with guns figuratively blazing in the 60s, earning an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor for his very first role in “Billy Budd” (1962), he virtually disappeared for a time in the 70s. “I remember my agent telling me,” Stamp would explain to The Guardian in 2015, “‘They are looking for a young Terence Stamp.’” Hollywood might be obsessed with age, but age is just a number, and eyes don’t lie. Young, old, middle-age, whatever, Stamp’s star might have waxed and waned in accordance with the industry’s fickle demands, but his eyes never dimmed.

 
When Stamp’s death was announced on Sunday, August 17th, at the age of 87, the film author and journalist Mark Harris took exception with the late actor’s frequent categorization in obits as “Superman” costar. “He was sexier, weirder, darker, so much more interesting than that,” Harris wrote, noting that Stamp’s career contained “Many entry points.” And, well, yeah, sure. Many entry points! And for some of us Gen-Xers, “Superman” was the entry point or “Superman II,” to be more exact, which I would half-watch with a bath towel for a cape while pretending to be the Man of Steel fighting Terence Stamp as General Zod in my basement. Still, I understood what Harris meant. Because even if Stamp’s 1999 revenge fantasy “The Limey” worked whether you knew Stamp’s back catalogue beyond “Superman” or not, it worked so much better when you had a fuller sense of the actor’s history. Because Soderbergh infused the movie with that history (underlined in how it used footage of the younger Stamp in 1967’s Ken Loach film “Poor Cow”), as much about the passage of time and Hollywood itself as revenge, a transcendent thriller as the actor’s culmination, not to mention a close-up laden celebration of his face. 

The real Stamp revelation for me, though, was in 2021, when I finally saw Stephen Frears’s “The Hit” (1984), an existential art film disguised as a thriller, which is pretty much my genre sweet spot. Stamp was Willie Parker, a one-time London gangster who testifies against his old criminal cohorts in court, transforming himself into a marked man. Indeed, a decade later a couple hitmen come for him in the Spanish villa where he’s hiding out to transport him to Paris and bring him face to face with the kingpin he put away for his score-settling execution. Stamp, though, plays with an air of stoic resignation, a man who has spent the last 10 years philosophically preparing for this very moment. When his captors briefly lose track of him, he is found not trying to get away but gazing at a waterfall, hardly bothered by the gun that gets pointed at him as if he exists on some metaphysical plain a bunch of puny bullets could never penetrate. 

Yet, when one hitman eschews waiting to off Willie in Paris and just decides to shoot him on the side of the road, all that reasoned forbearance falls away. “You can’t,” he says, as Stamp’s register switches to a pleading whine, and his heretofore impassive expression to a pitiable wince. “Not now.” Essentially, Stamp pulls the rug out from under his own performance. In the end, everyone is afraid of death. Willie turns and runs, making it just a few steps before getting shot in the back, falling to the ground, dead, of course, and the movie just moves on from him, as the world might.

In Memoriam: Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen had already been on the Hollywood scene for a decade when he figuratively burst onto it in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992’s indie cult classic “Reservoir Dogs” as Mr. Blonde, one of several code-named crooks in a jewelry heist gone wrong. In his most memorable scene, Mr. Blonde gruesomely tortures a cop with a straight razor while Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays in the background. It would have been a great moment for any actor, but Madsen made it indelible. He shimmies to that 70s hit, dancing like no one’s watching except for the guy whose ear he’s about to slice off, as nonchalantly as he slurps a fast-food shake, a magnetic psychopath, doing as much as anyone to establish Tarantino’s career of straddling the line between sadism and swagger.

In his obituary for Madsen, who died on July 3rd at 67 from cardiac arrest, Glenn Kenny compared him to Lee Marvin while Peter Sobczynski suggested Robert Mitchum and Alex Williams of The New York Times analogized his air as “a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone.” Yet, even if Madsen was born in Chicago rather than the Deep South, in his unmistakable cool, pompadour, and 6'0" height, I always thought of him as having something like the career the 6'0", pompadoured, unmistakably cool Elvis Presley would have wanted had he not been eternally typecast by Col. Tom Parker. Then again, despite successfully playing something other than villains both before and after “Reservoir Dogs,” in “Thelma & Louise” and “Free Willy,” Madsen wound up typecast too. “I’ve made 145 films,” he told The Malibu Times in 2009, “and the only film that anyone ever really wants to talk about is ‘Reservoir Dogs.’” Many of those 145 films, and he wound up making far more than even that, are ones you’ve never heard of, that I’ve never heard of, that he was barely in. “Some of them I’m only in for 10 minutes,” he would tell The Independent in 2016, “but they bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun.” That’s an evocatively grim diagnosis of the industry beyond the searchlights.

Despite a brief apprenticeship with John Malkovich at Steppenwolf Theatre, Madsen was a movie actor, not a stage actor, by which I mean he had a sense of presence, of how to exist on camera, of how to maximize the camera’s effect. The problem with such a style is that you tend to need a director who knows what they’re doing and when you’re trapped in direct-to-DVD dreck, you usually don’t. But it’s why he and Tarantino made such a formidable team. And if Q.T. harnessed Madsen’s cool in “Reservoir Dogs,” he turned that cool on its head a dozen years later in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” when he deployed the actor as Budd, one-time assassin turned hard up strip club bouncer. The moment when one of the dancers, Rocket, orders Budd to clean up an overflowing toilet could have been cheap comedy, but Madsen renders it truly heartbreaking: “Ok, Rocket,” he says in the voice of a man who knows where he stands on the ladder of life, “I’ll clean it up.” You understand why Uma Thurman’s Bride might underestimate him.

Madsen was always good with Tarantino, but he might never have been better than he was in Mike Newell’s 1997 mob drama “Donnie Brasco.” He was second banana to Al Pacino and Johnny Depp – indeed, in 2004 Madsen told The Guardian that those two “got all the money” – but his role as Sonny Black was crucial. In her original NYT review, Janet Maslin compliments Madsen’s turn but, tellingly, limits that praise to one parenthetical – “(just right as an imposing new boss)” – in a way that I can only assume would have caused Madsen a wistful laugh. And though Madsen is imposing, he makes Sonny Black so much more, existing somewhere between Mr. Blonde and Budd, not the littlest fish by any means but also not the biggest fish, bitterly convinced he deserves more. Sonny Black probably didn’t, but onscreen, Michael Madsen did.

In Memoriam: James Foley

The great American Greek tragedy of real estate hucksters, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” is considered an actor’s movie, I suppose, because it originated on the stage, which is why it’s also considered a writer’s movie, written by David Mamet, and therefore bursting with unrelentingly rhythmic profanity. In adapting his play for the screen, Mamet included a new scene with a new character (named Blake, though that name is never said and he feels nameless) played by Alec Baldwin who calls out the raggedy sales force right to its faces. (Watch the scene here but, for God’s sake, remember, it’s not safe for work.) That scene was one of many ways in which director James Foley provided a stage adaptation “cinematic value,” as Glenn Kenny noted in his Decider obituary of Foley who died on May 6th at 71 from brain cancer. The acting was extraordinary, that goes without saying, and the writing next level, you know that, but Foley’s direction is so much more than functional, using the camera and camera placement to evoke how Baldwin’s character is an apex predator in a pond of all these hapless little fishes.

Kenny’s obituary also reminded me just how many Foley movies I had seen and enjoyed. (I did not see his two contributions to the “Fifty Shades” series.) “After Dark, My Sweet” was an entertaining neo-noir that Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series pointed me to, and I enjoyed another Foley neo-noir “Confidence,” possibly because I saw it the way it was meant to be seen, on a weeknight on the big screen as a respite from one more long workweek. He brought great gusto to an entry in one of our most important movie genres, John Grisham-based middling thrillers, with “The Chamber” in 1996, and he directed Madonna in “Who’s That Girl” for which, like Kenny, I have a soft spot. And speaking of Madonna, he directed “At Close Range,” a sizzling crime drama in which he helped turn a scene of product placement – Chrisopher Walken saying “You want some Corn Flakes?” – into something truly terrifying, no mean feat.

I say speaking of Madonna because she was married to Sean Penn, star of “At Close Range,” and helped bring Patrick Leonard’s indelible score from another failed movie project to Foley’s instead, a score that would become the chassis for her greatest ballad, “Live to Tell.” Even more memorable than “Live to Tell,” however, and that’s saying something, is the slower instrumental version of it used over “At Close Range’s” opening credits, among the best opening credits sequences in movie history, one of my all-time favorites, at least. This sequence, in a sense, is nothing. It’s just Sean Penn driving around. But that’s the magic. “At Close Range” is set in Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, so not the Midwest, where I grew up, but driving around on rural backroads by yourself on a hot, lonely summer night is a universal feeling. And through nothing more than aesthetic, Foley brings that feeling to life, music and mood and keeping the camera tight on Penn the whole time to evince how such aimless driving is not about what’s around you but getting lost inside your own mind. It’s the essence of a Springsteen song conjured; it’s pure cinema; it’s what only the movies can do. RIP.

In Memoriam: Al Trautwig

Al Trautwig, who died in February at 68 from complications due to cancer, was born in New York, and died in New York, and went to college at Adelphi on Long Island, and in his long career as a sportscaster, he spent much of it working for the MSG network covering the Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees. His deep voice was the kind you could imagine cutting through the harsh wilds of New York talk radio, one that left little room for equivocation, for better or worse. As a Midwesterner, however, I only knew Trautwig for his national sports coverage. He started with ABC both on Wide World of Sports and its Olympics telecasts before transitioning to NBC went the Games took up permanent residence on that network. That meant he was at ABC in the final years under industry visionary Roone Arledge. It was Arledge who recast the Olympics in the image of “Bugler’s Dream,” and it was Arledge who invented Monday Night Football. In other words, Arledge did as much as anyone to transform televised sports into spectacle and entertainment, a belief manifestly instilled in his protégé. 

Al Trautwig preparing to eat sugarcane on live TV at the 1987 Sugar Bowl.

During my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers’ brutal seven-year bowl-less streak between 2017 and 2023, I would instead watch one of their older bowl games on YouTube each December as a semi-satisfactory replacement. One of those games was the 1987 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. Trautwig was sideline reporter for that one though rather than reporting in-game news as the role typically requires, he did things like literally eat sugar, check in on the Superdome’s air conditioning system, and interview, in a manner of speaking, LSU’s live Bengal tiger mascot. It’s all corny, even stupid, but I confess, it also evoked a kind of ballyhoo that once went together with bowl games, meaningless exhibitions, after all, that also tended to have their own parades and king and queen courts. Trautwig understood the Sugar Bowl as show business as much as a gridiron showdown. A year later at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, ABC aired a feature in which Trautwig sampled pastries in the Canadian host city, contemporarily criticized by both Sports Illustrate and the Los Angeles Times. Yet, if choosing pastries over live events might technically be wrong, I remember how much that sequence appealed to me as a kid, opening my eyes to how the Olympics were intended, underline, as a celebration of the host city itself as much as the feats of strength. 

Back then, the Olympics were in limited primetime telecasts and ABC and NBC still packaged many events in heavily edited segments, treating them as stories as much as real-time athletic events. In narrating these, as he did with cross-country skiing, or the cycling road race, Trautwig brought a sense of storytelling melodrama. That approach did not work when he was tasked with traditional play-by-play duties, and even in the settings where it was more suitable, it could rub people the wrong way. For ESPN the Magazine in 2000, Tim Keown lamented that Trautwig turned the inaugural women’s triathlon at the Sydney Summer Olympics “into the Peloponnesian War.” Keown wasn’t entirely wrong, but I remember that women’s triathlon. And though I never became an Olympics agnostic, during the strange period of my life between 1996 and 2000, I sort of lost sight of them, and I will never ever forget how that women’s triathlon and the way Trautwig presented it made the Games instantly click right back into place for me. What drew me to sports, and what continues drawing me still, is competition, yes, and feats of strength, sure, but also, a sense of theater. Trautwig saw sports as theater too. Not for nothing did he appear in the Jamaican bobsled team cult classic “Cool Runnings” (1993) as himself: “Go, Jams!” RIP. 

In Memoriam: Val Kilmer

In an industry that has always sought to capitalize on trends, copy formulas, and roll stars off an assembly line, Val Kilmer was an original. He appeared in some of the most seminal Movies for Guys Who Like Movies of all time while also appearing on posters tacked to the inside of lockers of so many teenage girls of the 80s and 90s, not merely a heartthrob but a sensitive heartthrob. He had the look of a movie star, but the soul of an eccentric. He also had an immense gift for total immersion in his roles, one that too often left Hollywood more mystified than mindful of how to harness his prodigious talent and yielded a peculiar career. In the twenty-tens, he was ravaged by throat cancer, permanently altering his voice, but recovered, only to die last week at 65 from pneumonia. What rattled around in my head upon reading the news wasn’t any line of Kilmer’s, though I have written extensively on those in the past, but the Crystal Gayle song famously recorded by Johnny Cash, “We Must Believe in Magic.” “Mad is the crew bound for Alpha Centauri / Dreamers and poets and clowns.” Val Kilmer was on his own mission, one often inscrutable to the rest of us.

Kilmer’s role as Iceman in the 80s pop culture classic “Top Gun” truly put him on the map even if as a graduate of Juilliard, he didn’t want the role. Harrison Ford didn’t want the role of Han Solo either, but Han Solo, despite Ford’s own trepidation, was a good part; Iceman was something else. It was small, only about ten minutes of screen time, and more than that, it was sorta weird. The character was a scold, a square even, lecturing Tom Cruise’s aptly named Maverick for unsafe flying practices. Yet, in the image Kilmer cut, and the air he evinced, he was somehow still cool, even weird in altogether different ways, so much pen-twirling and wristwatch-fiddling. You can take the boy out of Juilliard, but you can’t take Juilliard out of the boy. Despite all that air combat maneuvering, no one in “Top Gun” goes harder than Kilmer when he smacks his gum.

As good as he was in “Top Gun,” Kilmer was more at home in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” which is to say he could disappear himself completely into someone else, in this case by playing debaucherous semi-poet Jim Morrison. Stone said he should have won the Oscar, but he wasn’t even nominated (absurdly, he never was), probably because unlike most musician biopics, in which the transformation from actor to subject is on full display, Kilmer’s possession of the character was so complete you couldn’t really see the performance at all. In “Tombstone” you could see the performance, though it wasn’t Kilmer’s, it was the performative nature of the famed American gunfighter and gambler Doc Holliday (“Wyatt, I am rolling,” he says on a main street that may as well be a stage) that Kilmer is playing. He physically transformed by losing significant weight to evince Holliday’s tuberculosis, but he was doing so much more than that, juxtaposing the character’s slowly withering away with nothing less than a still zealous appetite for life. He was a tragic hoot.

If Kilmer could summon the countenance of Doc Holliday, however, he could not do the same for Batman, or Bruce Wayne, whichever, both, in Joel Schumacher’s first crack at the franchise in 1995. Kilmer essentially equated the role with the Batman suit itself, meaning there was no one’s skin for him to virtually crawl into. His other 1995 epic, however, Michael Mann’s second of three masterpieces in the 90s, “Heat,” was his sweet spot. He was on the poster with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, yes, but still free to give a character actor kind of performance, moody, soulful, and strange. It’s all there the first time we see him, his character buying explosives with a phony ID, mouth agape, edgy, and a little bit spacy, and just so innately electric.

It was also around this time, however, leading up to the infamous bomb “Island of Dr. Moreau,” that Kilmer’s reputation for being difficult truly took root. Was it fair? I can’t say for certain, of course, but it’s worth noting that in his 2020 memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry,” Kilmer does little to dispel this notion, mostly tapdancing around it. And though it squelched his run as a movie star, he did some of his most interesting work post-squelching, indies like “The Salton Sea,” and with prominent writer/directors like David Mamet in “Spartan” and Shane Black in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” In the latter, Kilmer gleefully played an inversion of a movie star role. That might have suggested a way forward, but instead a marked an end as he went to wander in the direct-to-DVD wilderness with occasional forays into the mainstream like the SNL movie “MacGruber,” or appearing in the latest Francis Ford Coppola self-financed joint.

That sounds like a sad career arc, but both his memoir and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essential NYT profile of him suggest just the opposite, that getting off the main path of stardom liberated him. Indeed, in “I’m Your Huckleberry” he writes of side trips being more revealing in his life’s journey than the main voyage. If the one-man Mark Twain show to which he dedicated himself for the better part of the twenty-tens might was a curiosity to the public, to him it brought genuine fulfillment. That’s what also made it ironic that his last film appearance was the 2022 sequel to “Top Gun,” the movie he never wanted to do in the first place, side trip and main voyage becoming one. In reprising the iconic part of Iceman, Kilmer’s real-life physical ailments were written into it, meaning that rather than disappear into the role, finally, after all those years, he put himself onscreen.

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

In Memoriam: David Lynch

My favorite David Lynch movie is “The Straight Story” (1999), maybe because it’s set in Iowa, or at least, because it starts in Iowa, which happens to be where I’m from. It begins with aerial images of a cornfield, a grain elevator, a main street, quintessential small town Iowa Chamber of Commerce stuff but quintessential small town Iowa chamber of commerce stuff with a purpose. Because it’s the next shot, craning down toward a house, and then in closer on a window, evoking how Lynch gets under that conventional surface to see what’s really under there. Lynch’s work was often classified as strange, or weird, and so much was made of “The Straight Story’s” G-rating, as if Lynch, once famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” was finally just being Jimmy Stewart from Earth. But you can imagine Lynch reading a news clipping of the real-life Alvin Straight journeying 240 miles from Iowa and Wisconsin aboard a riding lawn mower to see his ailing brother and thinking, hey, that’s kinda weird. Because small town Iowans, I can tell you from experience, are a little weird and I say that with all the love in my heart. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight embodied Midwestern stoicism, but he also hinted at the mysteries and passions humming underneath, the kind many might reflexively assume small town Iowans lack. “The Straight Story” ends not with a long conversation between the two brothers but them looking up at the stars in the sky instead and it makes me think of going home and sitting on the deck with my dad and looking up at the stars in the sky and knowing that in sometimes saying nothing you are able to still say it all. 

That ending might have been closer to Lynch than we realize. In interviews he often derided unnecessary conversation and adamantly refused to explain his movies which in their surrealist sensations often screamed out for explanations. I loved this about him. Indeed, somewhere along the way I realized that if a movie had a director’s Q&A afterwards, I never wanted to stay for it lest their explanation ruin my interpretation. Lynch, bless his heart, left it up to each and every one of us. He apparently directed a pilot episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all the way back in 1984 that never saw the light of day because it was too, well, Lynch. It’s not so much the existence of this unaired pilot that intrigues me as it is Lynch being associated with “Star Trek” at all. Because if I wanted to try to describe the experience of watching Lynch movies, I might say it was the closest any of us were ever going to get to being dematerialized into pure energy in those moments between being beamed from one place to another by Scotty. What’s the “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” scene in “Mulholland Drive” if not all the b.s. of the movie business suddenly giving way to the moment when a movie emotionally teleports you to another planet? But look at me, interpreting. Lynch’s movies could baffle me, and his movies could mesmerize me, and his movies could do both at once, and a few of his movies I just plum did not like even if more often than not his movies left me with something I would never forget. Any time I sit down to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I watch more of them than I should, Crispin Glover in “Wild at Heart” is not far from my mind. 

I had been working at the Cobblestone 9 movie theater for about five months when “Lost Highway” was released. It was too arty for a multiplex, frankly, and therefore relegated to theater one, like a room, to quote Elaine Benes, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” Even so, a few of the other concessionists and I would time our breaks to go up to theater one and leave our bodies for a few minutes by watching the scene where Robert Blake goes up to Bill Pullman at the party and tells Pullman to call him at his home where, sure enough, Blake answers the phone despite being right there in front of Pullman, as evocative of Lynch’s delightful, demented interdimensionality as anything. That was the movie, that was the scene, that made me want to go and find out what David Lynch was all about. In fact, upon learning he died yesterday at the age of 78, I was surprised that when I got home, I didn’t get a phone call from Lynch saying hey from wherever or whatever is on the other side. He wouldn’t have told me what it was like, of course. I’d have to wait and figure that out for myself. 

Watch the scene from “Lost Highway” here