“Pay attention,” a cheeky title card for “Cold Storage” declares, “this shit is real.” Well, it is and isn’t. In adapting the screenplay from his own 2019 novel, writer David Koepp has utilized the real-life 1979 incident in which the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, burned up, broke apart, and scattered debris across Western Australia. Though all the remains were eventually collected, what “Cold Storage” presupposes is, what if it wasn’t? Written by middling thriller hall of famer David Koepp, adapted from his own 2019 novel, and directed by Jonny Campbell, this jovial horror/thriller/comedy hybrid begins with a biochemist (Sosie Bacons) and a pair of black biochemical op agents, Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), investigating a leftover Skylab oxygen tank that has been transformed into a makeshift Australian museum and is now oozing some type of mutated green fungus. It’s a snappy opening defined by a dexterous camera that is always pulling back or craning up to both elicit surprise and dispense information. And because mankind can’t leave well enough alone, the group takes a fungus sample for study, subsequently transporting it to a federal cold storage facility in Kansas that via time lapse photography we see sealed off and mutated, itself, into an unsuspecting self-storage company.
That’s where “Cold Storage” mostly takes place, at the self-storage company, picking up 18 years later as security guards Travis (Joe Keery) Naomi (Georgina Campbell) settle in for the night shift. They are not slackers, exactly, just two people trying to get things together, and bonding from both desire and necessity when a faint beeping drives them crazy, sending them hacking through drywall to find the source and into a situation that spirals quickly out of control as the green fungus oozes amok. When it does, Quinn is summoned from retirement by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), a deskbound military bureaucrat ignoring the nothing to see here admonishment of her commanding officer (Richard Brake), a storyline that neatly splits the difference between big government proactivity and paranoia. Eventually, Quinn re-teams with the also-retired Trini to make haste for Kansas to help Travis and Naomi prevent an impending global calamity.
Neeson finds a sweet spot between Frank Drebin Jr. and all his characters through the years with names like Bill Marks and Mike McCann while Manville is wry in a way that is baked into the character rather than a wink at the audience. If anything, “Cold Storage” might have used more Neeson and Manville, though on other hand, just as the story ultimately turns on Travis and Naomi so does the movie turn on Keery and Campbell. They are going concerns on account of two popular TV shows, “Stranger Things” and “Black Mirror,” respectively, though I have seen neither, making this my first experience with them, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed their warm and amusing performances as two people having the time of their lives while having to stay alive. They find the perfect middle ground of never taking it all too seriously but never devolving into full-throated send-up, evoking the same B-movie spirit as “Cold Storage” itself, summarized in the climactic show-stopping moment when Quinn dispatches Travis and Naomi on a mission to, like, you know, save civilization: “You two may have started the night minimum wage guards,” he says, “but you’re a green light team now.” I was watching alone in my living room, but I stood up and cheered.
Four-time César Award winner Nathalie Baye died on April 17th at the age of 77 from Lewy body dementia. She worked with a who’s-who of French directors, including Godard and Truffaut, and in 1980 she starred in Bertrand Tavernier’s “A Week’s Vacation,” a movie I watched for the first time in April 2025 on The Criterion Channel. As I did, I must have thought to myself at least five times, “Is this my new favorite movie?” I wrote a review but was not entirely happy with it and in her honor, I tried again. RIP.
Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. He hops out of the vehicle and chases her down, just as the handheld camera does too, though both ultimately relent, hanging back and helplessly watching from afar as she walks away into a sudden downpour: offering support is futile. The reasons she eventually gives for this breakdown are specific, though the feeling of wanting to forgo facing another day and renounce shining it on is universal, nevertheless. Her doctor prescribes a week off to rest and spiritually recuperate, which is much less universal, at least to an American, given that over here hard work is peddled as the answer to everything. Not that Laurence’s holiday proves a complete panacea. If the episodic nature of director Bertrand Tavernier’s film seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something more like a French version of a classic Onion article: Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results.
“A Week’s Vacation” begins with Laurence drawing back a curtain on her window to reveal an elderly woman in the apartment across the way and wondering who she is and where she came from. Tavernier turns this image of Laurence spying on her lonely neighbor into a recurring one, giving life to what she says in voiceover, “I’d like to be an animal to watch others without speaking.” It’s not a quite a National Geographic special for people, “A Week’s Vacation,” but Tavernier and his co-writers Marie-Françoise Hans and Colo Tavernier stitch it all together with scenes of Laurence quietly observing the world around her and listening to old friends and new acquaintances, students and parents of her pupils, express their own feelings and recount stories of their own lives. These scenes take on different tenors and tones, but they are all unified by Baye, giving a surprisingly airy performance despite the air of melancholia that otherwise hangs over her character. In Laurence’s solitary moments, Baye evinces a bemused skepticism, as if she is the process of appraising the value of life itself, and in scenes opposite other actors, she radiates genuine joy at listening to their characters’ typically droll stories of woe, smiling and laughing in a way that seems to let us in on the grand cosmic joke of the whole human condition.
If there is a specific reason for Laurence’s emotional exhaustion, it ties back to her career. She believes in the mission of teaching, though its effectiveness is conveyed as debatable, glimpsed in flashbacks with students apathetic to learning and incapable of listening, evoking how despite doctor’s orders, her problems cannot help but intrude on her thoughts. At the same time, her father is wasting away in the French countryside, seen briefly in one scene where she pays him a visit and finds him unable to do much with his hands after a lifetime of working with them, sitting there with a sad smile on his face, happy to see her but having reached the point where living has given way to subsisting. Taken in tandem, these narrative threads suggest the poles of life, as if one’s existence is navigating from youth to the figurative infirmary, leaving the journey in-between as the time afforded to make sense of life’s significance. The pressure to do so feels amplified in Laurence’s case given that she’s 31 and is hesitant not only about continuing her career but about having children, the latter decision complicated on account of Pierre, a genially deft characterization of that most archetypal of dudes: oblivious.
Laurence is not a static character, by any means, but neither does she experience a Hollywood-like climactic epiphany showing her the light. This is underlined in how she never meets, never talks to, never even learns the name of the elderly neighbor across the way. The woman is there when Laurence’s holiday begins and gone by the time it ends as if life and all that it entails is but a week’s vacation between whatever precedes it and whatever comes after.
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.
It turns out that “Crime 101” is not a title generated by AI but a strained pun referring to a Los Angeles jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), pulling heists near US 101 to provide himself a convenient escape route. He’s pulling one as director Bart Layton’s crime-thriller begins, and doing so all on his own, establishing a lone wolf air. The investigating detective, Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), is convinced this robbery fits a pattern, one tying to both the 101 and a conspicuous lack of violence, only to be told by his superior to back off because reopening closed cases would wreak havoc on the department’s clearance rate. That marks Lou as something of a lone wolf too, though that’s not to say he and Mike are quite mirror images. There is a comical match cut in which we see the dapper Mike exiting a door and then a rumpled, just-awakened Lou plodding through his bathroom door, eventually sitting on the toilet while brushing his teeth and reading about the latest jewel heist on his phone.
“Crime 101,” though, adapted by Layton from Don Winslow’s novella of the same name, is not merely abut a cop and a robber but also a claims adjuster, Sharon, who does not come between the cop and the robber but instead becomes intertwined with them. I know, I know, a claims adjuster? But this is a glamorous claims adjuster, working for a high-end insurance firm and played by Halle Berry with a trove of statement jewelry. Then again, glamorous though she may be, we meet her botching a big meeting with a rich doofus (Tate Donovan, firmly in his rich doofus era) and the sleep app on her phone constantly taunts her for failing to get a good night’s rest. The latter is the germ of a good idea also briefly evoked in the schlub-like Lou taking up yoga that needed more follow through or to be dropped altogether given how Layton never quite decides if he is being sincere about the idea of wellness or sending it up.
Sharon might excel at reading people in her job, but she can’t quite read herself, stuck as a 53-year-old woman partner in an ageist, sexist firm with nowhere else to go. That is why when Mike seeks Sharon’s help in ripping off her place of employment, she is intrigued, evoking such drastic measures as the only means to security for a woman of a certain age, a plot point undergirded by Berry’s own career struggles with Hollywood ageism. This inside job could double as Sharon’s unlikely One Last Job, in other words, just as Mike is hoping to make it his One Last Job too, frequently referring to a financial number he has in mind that will set him up for life. He references this number in conversations with Maya, his kinda, sorta girlfriend, a truly thankless role into which Monica Barbaro at least manages to breathe some bright life. Mostly Maya is there to spotlight Mike’s emotional emptiness, and while Hemsworth fatally cannot make the turn to real emotion when that is eventually required, as if he has dug himself too big a stoical hole, he brilliantly plays a blank slate, emotions just bouncing right off him, sort of channeling, I swear to God, Kylie Sven Opossum in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” (“Can you give me some kind of signal once in a while,” you can imagine Maya saying to him, “just so I know any of this is getting through to you?”)
In seeking to leave the criminal world behind, Mike is forced to break contact with his longtime fence (Nick Nolte), who enlists a younger and much more reckless thief, Ormon (Barry Keoghan), to take Mike’s scores and to take down Mike too. The part of Ormon is just a standard-issue antagonist, there to muck everything up and create some action scenes, but Keoghan’s malevolently kooky performance is also “Crime 101’s” most thrilling element. Keoghan takes his character repeating his dad’s mantra, “You have to break some eggs,” noticeably absent the part about also making an omelet, and running with it, playing the whole part like a guy running down the supermarket aisle of life, taking eggs from their cartons, breaking them, and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. His jewel store robbery that goes wrong without entirely going wrong is weirdly, hilariously exhilarating.
True, during the big closing sequence in which Ormon sneaks his way into a hotel suite through a kitchen, you half expect to see him watching what is tantamount to the same scene from “Heat” on his smartphone as he does so, like an instruction manual, evoking the blatant and myriad parallels to Michael Mann’s 1995 ur-Los Angeles crime text. Surprisingly, however, “Crime 101” does not spiritually evoke “Heat” in the end so much as a noir version of another southern California epic, Lawrence Kasdan’s striving-to-be-great but just so-so “Grand Canyon” (1991) about the lives of disparate Los Angelenos intersecting. In “Crime 101,” three disparate Los Angelenos converge to get a leg up.
Part of it is undoubtedly the era in which “Slap Shot” was filmed, but there is a distinct grainy tinge to the cinematography that both embodies the harsh nature of an American northeast winter and captures the mood of the fictional rust belt city of Charlestown, Pennsylvania where both its steel mill and beloved minor league hockey team the Chiefs are on the verge of folding. The fur coat that Paul Newman’s character sports might be a relic of the era, but it also might be necessary given the weather, and in his way, the actor manages to pull the look off while also looking like he might have just grabbed it out of a lost and found for warmth. Improbably, that coat speaks to the impressive dual tones of comedy and commentary in director George Roy Hill’s cult classic. Indeed, through the prism of time, “Slap Shot” has the feel of something like a revisionist sports movie, taking the piss out of so many sentimentalized underdog stories in the way so many later-era westerns critiqued their predecessors. Except, “Slap Shot” came before almost all of them, suggesting the reverse, that after seeing such a bare-knuckle black comedy, so many sports movies were prompted to shine it on. 1989’s “Major League” was not without its own ribald comedy, but if you compare them side-by-side, it is as polished and slick as “Slap Shot” is unvarnished and blunt.
Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, player and coach of the Chiefs, who given their precarious state, spurs ticket sales by encouraging his players to focus on dropping their gloves and throwing down as much as putting the puck in the goal. If it bleeds, etc. “Slap Shot” does not satirize the sport’s violence so much as lay it wide open for all to see, its rough and tumble aesthetic and raggedy narrative making it feel as if the movie itself is a half-second away from flying off the rails as much as its out-of-control on-ice fights. Its collection of what might discreetly be deemed colorful characters, like The Hanson Brothers triumvirate based on the real-life Carlson Brothers, do not so much separate the men from the boys as they do demonstrate how the line between men and boys is virtually non-existent. Newman has said that Dunlop was his favorite character he ever played, and it feels that way, free, loose, gleeful, giving a performance approximating leaving the toilet seat up or peeing outdoors.
That freedom, it turns out, correlated to exacting research. Writer Nancy Dowd’s brother, Ned, played minor league hockey, tape recorded conversations of his teammates and then gave those tapes to his sister who wrote the coarse attitudes and severe language right into her screenplay, fashioning nothing less than an x-ray of boys will be boys hockey culture. That came to mind in the wake of the post-USA Men’s Hockey Gold Medal locker room brou-ha-ha. Before the recent Winter Olympics began, I rewatched “Miracle,” Disney’s 2004 retelling of Team USA’s so-called Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. 1980 was three years after 1977, of course, which would suggest that its real-life hockey playing characters would have not been too far off from the hockey-playing characters of “Slap Shot,” though instead, every rough edge is smoothed out if not entirely glossed over. I do not mean to besmirch “Miracle,” a movie I quite like and that is good at what it does, but simply to point out how it takes immense care to ensure that everything you see in “Slap Shot” stays, well, in a manner of speaking, in the locker room.
When I read that Nicole Kidman, her eminence, was training to become a death doula, I knew what I had to do: pitch a fake movie. It’s a pitch that goes like this: The economy of Svenborgia, the country only rich people know about, has taken a turn for the worst, and rather than rallying to the cause, the relatively few citizens flee this proverbial sinking ship, causing the Sovereign Prince (Billy Nighy) and Prime Minister (Colman Domingo) to enlist Nicole Kidman (Nicole Kidman) to serve as the Death Doula to an entire nation as it peacefully but lugubriously transitions to dissolution.
“Dead Man’s Wire” does not tell the real-life story of Tony Kiritsis so much as the real-life act that made Tony Kiritsis famous, or infamous – that is, in February 1977, he took hostage the son of the mortgage broker he accused of ripping him off. Working from a screenplay by Austin Kolodny, director Gus Van Sant tells the this incident from beginning to end as Tony (Bill Skarsgård) shows up at the Meridian Mortgage building and promptly wires a shotgun to the back of the head of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) before ferrying him to his booby-trapped apartment where he winds up in an intentional standoff with the police outside, demand both $5 million and an apology from Richard’s father, M.L. (Al Pacino), for having swindled him. He never gets that apology, not even when he takes a phone call with the elder Hall, a deliberately disinterested Pacino talking to him like he’s talking to an aggrieved customer on the customer service line, an effectively bleak reminder that the fine print trumps all ethics and morals.
That moment, though, also demonstrates the tendency of “Dead Man’s Wire” to work best in flourishes and isolated moments than overall. Tony virtually invites the spectacle that crops up around him, talking on the phone with a local radio dee jay, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), throughout the standoff, while cub reporter Linda Page (Myha'la) follows him to his apartment complex and begins broadcasting much to the delight of her bloodthirsty producer back at the studio. These are interesting threads, but Van Sant never entirely pulls them, both these stories petering out. If Tony craves the spectacle more than he rejects it, Van Sant gets that across best in the sequence when he drives Richard home, scored to pop music of the era as myriad police cars crawl along behind, a precursor to the white bronco the L.A. freeway and a reminder that such sensationalism has always been in our American DNA.
Skarsgård is tremendous as Kiritsis, profane, polite, and self-pitying. What’s less clear, however, is what Van Sant wants us to make of this man, broadly speaking. Though chunks of “Dead Man’s Wire” are filtered through the prism of television news, sending the story to a wider audience, we never really see that wider audience and so, are never quite sure if he’s being made out as the American hero he claims to be or if that’s mere delusion. And though Skarsgård’s air hints at delusion, that is never clarified either, the conclusion in which the ensuing trial finds him not guilty by insanity still leaving it up in the air. By sticking just to the incident itself and never doing much to reveal who he Tony outside this context, “Dead Man’s Wire” comes to feel deliberately, diabolically evasive, not so much refusing to judge its character as leaving it open to interpretation so that every viewer can retrofit Kirtsis’s act for their own personal thesis.
Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer secured the production rights to Jim Lovell’s book about his 1970 Apollo 13 mission, “Lost Moon,” before it had even been published and you can understand their enthusiasm. Triumph can make for good drama, but the twisted truth is that failure frequently makes for even better drama. And the Apollo 13 mission, as a line in Howard’s 1995 movie says, was considered NASA’s most successful failure, one in which the third mission to the moon transformed into a mission to return to earth when an unexpected explosion aboard the service module disabled its electrical and life support systems. That explosion is what accounts for the famous real-life line, “Houston, we have a problem,” one spurring “Apollo 13” the movie’s best moment. Once Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) advises mission control of a serious complication, chaos ensues as the three astronauts and the whole terrestrial NASA gang attempt to ascertain that complication. Eventually, Lovell notices oxygen is leaking aboard the spacecraft, engendering an eerie calm that Howard and his Oscar-nominated editors Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley create from almost nothing but faces, close-ups and medium shots as everyone registers the problem, giving way to controlled pandemonium as they then get to work solving it. It evokes the immense craft of “Apollo 13,” direction, editing, music, and writing harmonizing to maximize drama but also to effectively streamline a non-stop flow of information and terminology through whip-smart similes and clever dramatizations.
Given that Lovell and his two other crew members, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), are forced to minimize power aboard their spacecraft and wait on instructions from mission control, it can sometimes feel as if “Apollo 13’s” heart is situated more on earth than it is up in space. Indeed, Howard proves much more adept at conveying straightforward problem-solving than the encroaching isolation in space. Hanks’s preternatural calm as Lovell is convincing, though not necessarily interesting, and Haise and Swigert remain underdeveloped, a brief moment of tension between the two feeling a paint by numbers for such an intense situation. The similar preternatural calm of Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranzen hits harder as does the angst that Gary Sinise quietly carries in his performance as Ken Mattingly, the crew member forced by Lovell to bow out when he is exposed to measles (which he never contracts).
Much was made of “Apollo 13’s” technical accuracy and it is on full display, often infusing the finished product with the feel of a docudrama, albeit a stirring one. But that emphasis on precise detail over complicated emotion is also what hinders it. Apart from Lovell’s wife and family watching from back home in Houston, “Apollo 13’s” one other subplot involves America’s waning interest in moon landings, evoked in a live broadcast from the spacecraft before things go wrong that the networks drop in the middle to show something else. No one tells the astronauts, which may or may not have been true, but either way, goes to show how the movie itself never wrestles with this flagging interest in any real way. Howard clearly wants to reignite our nation’s passion for space beyond a mere space race, but by never much broadening his viewpoint beyond the mission itself, “Apollo 13” never suggests why America might have become apathetic in the first place, as if afraid of introducing pesky politics. And if the argument is that the thrill of going to space is the end unto itself, Howard’s style is not the kind to illustrate the wonder of spaceflight, more suited to the drama of returning home.
Culled from previously unreleased 70mm footage documenting the preparation, launch, flight, and surrounding hoopla of the July 1969 Apollo 11 lunar mission, Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 direct cinema documentary begins with up-close images of the mammoth 6-million pound Crawler-Transport hauling the Saturn V rocket to the launchpad off the coast of Florida, this fragmented presentation making it feel even larger than already it is, before cutting away to a wide shot of the whole vehicle and its significant cargo. It is an effective demonstration of scale and a tactic that Miller repeats throughout this half-hour pre-launch sequence to show both the technical and cultural magnitude of the mission. We see Mission Control from high above and then we see it up close, the camera pulling backwards past row after row after row of NASA technicians, underlining the countless people it takes to achieve such a mighty task, and we see helicopter shots of the people that have gathered at then-Cape Kennedy watching the Saturn V lifting off before Miller lingers on close-ups of three faces: white, black, and brown. More than the real-life Walter Cronkite commentary deployed to add contextual gravity, these shots do it for us. A close-up of the massive orange flames as the Saturn V initiates launch and the accompanying roar and rumble of the camera inspire primal awe at what it takes to leave this planet behind as do ensuing images of the rocket surging through the Earth’s atmosphere.
There is an underlying feeling in the lead-up to this event of something akin to a rock concert, and though the score by Matt Morton deliberately utilizing only musical instruments available in 1969 helps to evoke prog rock of the era, hurtling us into the future right along with it. No image, though, in this opening half-hour is any more moving or revealing than the one of the camera looking up at the Saturn V getting smaller and smaller in the sky, virtually lost against the blue backdrop. This image takes my breath away. It is real, this image, but resembles a painting, that one orange-ish splotch amid a canvas of blue and white, blurring this awesome man-made accomplishment with the natural world until they are almost indistinguishable. In doing so, Miller is not diminishing Apollo 11 but illustrating how such feats of human ingenuity can ironically provide immense perspective on our infinitesimal place in the world, this image rendered as a lyrical variation of the 1990 photo of The Pale Blue Dot.
It is an image I have been returning to in my mind as Artemis II makes it way to the moon, scheduled to fly by the damn thing today. I am sympathetic to the argument that federal funds might be better used elsewhere; hell, part of me agrees with it. But part of me also thinks there is something not just beautiful but utterly useful in being reminded that despite all our imaginative, practical might, we remain cosmically insignificant. I am not sure there has ever been a moment during my lifetime when we have needed that reminder more.
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.
Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Mel Brooks’s “History of the World – Part 1” received mixed, often harsh, reviews. “Rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure,” the esteemed Roger Eber wrote in a two-star review that reads like a one-star, lambasting it for being “unfunny (in its) bad taste.” Yet, what Ebert viewed as its worst quality, is what The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael saw as its best, commending his “audacity – his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke.” Having watched “History of the World – Part 1” again for the first time since the last time, whenever that was, rented on VHS, so a long time ago, I side with Kael, even if I acknowledge all the ways in which it comes up short. In fact, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I rewatched this and then rewatched “The Producers” right after, and I was struck by something Kael also alludes to, how in both, Brooks is sort of a Broadway producer disguised as movie director: that is, he essentially stages scenes for the camera rather than staging scenes with the camera.
“History of the World – Part 1” is not so much a history of the world as random bits and bobs pulled from both the Bible and history texts (was the dinosaur eating the caveman a dig at creationism, I honestly have no idea), an overview of the Old Testament and then extended riffs on the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, and finally, the French Revolution. Indeed, if Ebert and Kael agree, it’s on the lack of narrative propulsion. “His ‘history’ framework doesn’t have an approach or point of view,” Ebert writes, while Kael deems the whole thing “a jamboree, a shambles.” And in Brooks’s first-person New York Times accounting of how he conceived of the movie, that’s exactly how it reads, as a jamboree, a shambles, everything just sort of randomly occurring to him in different places, a collage thrown together. It’s not just that “History of the World – Part 1” is uneven, that it hits and misses in its gags, but that it feels longer than its not-that-long hour-and-thirty-two minutes, owing to the kind of dead space that is unacceptable in a rapid-fire comedy. It can occasionally seem as if Brooks is trying to marshal all the elements of his massive sets as much as he is trying to land a joke.
In his New York Times piece, Brooks notes that his overriding theme was the meek will not inherit the earth, a good one, and though it often comes across like he’s just blindly finding his way into that theme as opposed to manifesting it with razor sharp precision, when he gets there, the jokes hit with guillotine-force. As Emperor Nero, Dom DeLuise is giving what I will cite as retroactively one of 1981’s best performances, a debauched infant that cuts to the heart of the matter in a way no staid sword and sandals epic ever could while Brooks’s “It’s good to the king” schtick crudely but effectively portrays the monarchy as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Nothing is better, though, than Brooks transforming The Inquisition into a big Busby Berkeley-style musical number to comically, sharply evoke a truth that America has been in the process of living all 2026: state-sanctioned violence is just show business.
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.
Given the success of “Knives Out” and its subsequent sequels whose exclusive rights were scooped up by Netflix, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” feels like a smart Netflix hybrid, a mash-up of a crooked cop crime-thriller and an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It begins with Miami police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) being murdered by masked men, setting in motion a federal interrogation of Velez’s specialized Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, as if subliminally communicating its desire to be a TNT Movie by Netflix) in an effort to determine who might be responsible. After all, rumors abound that certain cops are taking those eponymous Rips - seizures of drugs, guns, or money - for themselves, and the Feds wonder if a TNT somebody might be responsible. This introduces us to the whole crew, including Velez’s second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck) with whom she was in a relationship. After this inquisition, the TNT quintet pulls up camp chairs outside headquarters to vent, a nice touch, making them seem like heavily armed boys and girls in an Old Milwaukee commercial. This is when we also meet DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler), rolling around in an armored vehicle that you know is going to turn up again by movie’s end. Indeed, Dumars get a crime-stopper tip via his phone about a Rip and enlists his team to go investigate, setting the mystery in motion.
At first, “The Rip” generates genuine dread and tension as the team arrives at the home at the end of a caul-de-sac and craftily talks its way inside, discovering an immaculately kept crawl space hiding significant contraband in the form of a lot of money. As a couple team members sledgehammer the wall to get at the barrels containing the cash, Dumars and Byrne interrogate the homeowner, Desi (Sasha Calle). It’s an electric scene in which the sound of the sledgehammer echoing throughout the wall underlines her increasing stress while the cross examination of Damon and Affleck’s characters puts their effortless chemistry on full display. And when the amount of the money is revealed, the tension escalates, especially when a couple cops from the district turn up outside, not-so-subtly implying that TNT is not wanted here. What ensues evokes both “Rio Bravo” and “Assault at Precinct 13” but with some nifty modern flourishes, like a streetlight blinking in morse code and ghost stories of entire blocks like this one bought up by Colombian cartels.
Yet rather than yield an external threat, the menace comes from within, and from this point forward, “The Rip” becomes as talky as it does action-packed, cop against cop as TNT tries to ferret out where this money came from, who wants, and what they’ll do to get it. This, however, transforms “The Rip” into something more character driven and the characters never amount to much Velez’s death is supposed to hover over everything, but we never spend sufficient time with her for the character to be anything other than a device, while the electric presence of Teyana Taylor as Det. Numa Baptiste is figuratively sidelined for almost the entire movie. Carnahan falls back on Damon and Affleck’s shared history to fill in character where this none otherwise, but Dumars and Bryne’s feints toward the dark side of the force never feel believable. Indeed, Dumars has a tattoo on each knuckle, not unlike the priest played by Robert Mitchum in “The Night of Hunter” having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. Those, however, were competing ideas, evoking an ambiguity that “The Rip” mostly forgoes in any real or interesting way. One of Dumars’s tattoos, in fact, is a question that the tattoo on the other knuckle answers, effectively solving “The Rip’s” riddle long before it’s solved. What, you thought Boston’s favorite sons were a couple Bad Apples (TM)?
The 1973 crime-thriller “The Outfit” is based on a novel Richard Stark’s celebrated Parker series, yet in changing the character’s name to Earl Macklin, writer/director John Flynn is essentially remaking the role in the no fuss no muss air of his lead actor Robert Duvall. As the movie opens, Earl is released from prison to find his brother Eddie (Edward Ness) has been killed by a crime syndicate called The Outfit. Turns out, Earl and Eddie robbed a bank that was a front for The Outfit some years back and now that syndicates wants revenge. Rather than go on the run or wait around to get offed himself, Earl enlists his old cohort Cody (Joe Don Baker) to go on the offensive, working their way from Outfit goon to Outfit goon, and eventually all the way up to the man on top, Mailer, appropriately played by the dude of dudes, Robert Ryan, evincing the air of someone who has necessarily strained so much from his life as necessary protection that he has also strained out any sense of joy. He watches professional football games with the air of a man who has no interest in the game itself, just the money he wagered on it.
Like all the women in “The Outfit,” Mailer’s trophy wife Rita (Joanna Cassidy) is only half-acknowledged, but the script at least half-acknowledges that all the women in “The Outfit” are half-acknowledged. That includes Earl’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black) whose presences mostly ensures that 70s audiences wouldn’t get the wrong idea since the real romance is between Earl and Cody. Indeed, Duvall and Black sculpt a genuine lived-in relationship as two guys getting too old for this kind of life but unable to part ways with it, nonetheless. That way of life involves some traditional action, a few shootouts and the like, but “The Outfit” surprises in just how much drama and tension it mines from moments in-between, like Earl and Cody having a stare down with two men from whom they hope to acquire a getaway car, a scene sculpted from nothing but pure attitude. Time and again Flynn’s script seems to set Earl up for an action hero wisecrack only for the character to decline, as if too serious for such childishness, echoed in Duvall’s turn. “The Outfit” never cuts loose until the last possible second, after Earl and Cody have completed their getaway, falling into a spate of laughter, as if the once the job has been completed, then, and only then, are dudes allowed to rock.
The Major League Baseball glossary explains the roots of the Eephus pitch are in Hebrew, the word eefes loosely translated to nothing, as described by a teammate (Maurice Van Robays) of the pitcher (Rip Sewell) who first regularly threw it: “Eephus ain’t nothing.” Carson Lund’s 2025 movie that takes the pitch’s name for its title is not nothing, either in a Seinfeldian sense or more broadly, but I have never seen a movie that so implicitly captures the deliberate, relaxed rhythms of a baseball game quite like this one. That is because unlike virtually all other baseball movies, which tend to climax a larger narrative through a game while sprinkling in snippets of other games via montage, “Eephus” just is a baseball game: one recounted from beginning to end. It’s as if Lund and is co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher adapted Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” but instead of recounting Game 1 of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians are recounting a fictional 1990s New England rec league game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint.
There are a multitude of players, but “Eephus” proves less interested in developing their personal stories then in demonstrating how they all relate to one another in the context of the game. There are hits, and outs, and runs, but the camera is just as often pointed away from home plate, toward the fielders, and the base runners, eavesdropping on their between-pitch chatter and conversations in the dugout. The result of the game does not even seem to matter all that much, evoked in how one player arrives to the game late and another departs early, committed to a prior engagement. Even the umpire bails early, forcing a spectator to step in and call balls and strikes, albeit from the stands. This makeshift arbiter taken in tandem with a couple young people in the bleachers wondering what all the fuss is about and a vendor outside the stadium quietly suggest that the only thing holding the nature of any game together, really, is the collective importance we impress upon it.
The field is scheduled to be torn down after this game, though it is not making away for something like a Kmart or a Walmart, however, but a school, shading this finality with melancholy rather than anti-capitalist fury. What, precisely, will become of these teams is never explicated, and all the men playing would rather not talk about it, and as the game stretches on, nine innings giving way to extras, day ceding to night, forcing the players to turn on their car lights and aim them at the field, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fuses with Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and the latter’s observation that “baseball time is measured only in outs” takes on the absurdist quality of the former, making it truly feel as if “the end of this game may never come.”
My full-time devotion to college basketball has been dwindling for years, but it bottomed out this season. Due to a confluence of the Winter Olympics taking up my attention for two weeks, the ever-lengthening college football season preventing the formerly neat turning of the calendar from one sport to the other at New Year’s, and life and all that it entails, I hardly watched any college basketball in 2025-26. And yet, there is something to be said for coming into the first weekend of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the best part of America’s best sporting event, with few expectations and little prior knowledge, just ready to be surprised and captivated. And boy, was I. Granted, this first weekend had less upset-laden madness than so many Marches past, a continuation of a new but troubling trend, but to paraphrase noted metaphysicist Stevie Nicks, when it was good, reader, it was very, very good. A few notes by way of a team.
For the fourth time in five NCAA Tournaments, Akron’s Zippywas the best mascot of March.
My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team
Rob Martin, High Point / Nick Boyd, Wisconsin. I enjoy the three-point revolution in basketball, and High Point is committed to it, what with a player who essentially only shoots three-pointers. But High Point versus Wisconsin was my favorite kind of basketball, nevertheless, where the playground version merges with the one played inside a gym as two teams space the floor and let their respective point guards try and break down the defense by attacking the rim, again and again. Boyd had 27 points and 6 assists in a magnificent losing effort while Martin put up an equally magnificent 23 points and 10 assists before outdoing himself in his own losing effort against Arkansas in the second round with 30 points and 5 assists. Objectively, he was outplayed by his Razorback counterpart, Darius Acuff Jr., who finished with 36 points and 6 assists. But the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is not about future NBA lottery picks like Acuff but comets like Martin who invoke fleeting wonder*. And just as Martin’s lilliputian counterpart Max Abmas once momentarily transformed Oral freaking Roberts into a school worth rooting for, so, too, did Martin give what seems to be a furniture empire-infused finishing school for rich kids a glint of the old Cinderella story. That is the magic of March Madness™.
*Honorable Mention: Francis Folefac of Siena, freshman and Kinesiology Major, whose team damn near became only the third sixteenth seed to topple a one, mighty Duke, and who was absolutely fearless in repeatedly going right at Cameron Boozer, widely expected to be the top pick in the NBA Draft. Vaya con Dios.
Tyler Tanner, Vanderbilt. As good as Wisconsin v High Point was, the best game of the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament was the second-round tilt between fourth-seeded Nebraska and fifth-seeded Vanderbilt. There was an edge to this one, born, I suspect, of desperation fueled by two teams who rarely find themselves on such a stage. Indeed, Nebraska, having only won its first NCAA Tournament game ever but 48 hours earlier, had literally never been in this position and to win their second game they had to fight off the Commodores’ jitterbugging, pickpocketing, trash-talking point god Tyler Tanner who early in the second half hopscotched past, I think, three defenders in the lane while keeping his dribble to get off a scoop shot that did not go in but still made me think, “Was that that the best missed shot I’ve ever seen?” Little did I know! Trailing 74-72 with 2.2 seconds left, Tanner launched a 60-foot shot that did not just do everything but go in, no, it did go in...and then came back out of the basket, the greatest March Madness™ buzzer beater that was not. If I had not seen it, I might not have believed it, and though I was rooting for Nebraska, and though I was ecstatic that they won, I confess, Tyler Tanner won my heart. You will never convince me that the bad juju incurred from four years of the Scott Frost football era at Nebraska did not cause the hand of fate to intervene in that missed shot.
Robbie Avila, Saint Louis. Avila was not a surprise, exactly. I have been hearing about this guy for several years now, first at Indiana State and then down the road at Saint Louis University where he transferred when his Indiana State coach took the gig. After all, in his 6'10" height, 240 lbs, and rec specs, he has become folk hero with a multitude of colorful nicknames like Cream Abdul-Jabbar and Milk Chamberlain. It was not, however, until his team’s first round game against Georgia that I finally sat down and watched him play. And though his team was no way, shape, or form just him, he was the spark plug. He knocked down threes and had a soft touch around the rim but as much as anything, it was his passing, out of the high post and all manner of long and short outlet passes to his speedy guards that kept the Billikens’ motors permanently revved en route to a 102-77 eating of Georgia’s lunch. More than that, though he might appear a plodder in his build, he was incredibly nimble on his feet, running up and down in the court all game long in a manner reminiscent of Newman’s unlikely agility in sprinting after Kramer when the latter is hurrying down the street with the Risk board (it’s a long story) in a sixth season episode of “Seinfeld.” Ultimately, Saint Louis could not hang with top-seeded Michigan in the second round but even in losing by almost as many as they beat Georgia by, they put on a rattling good show, and who is the official best team is of no concern to this movie blog writing about basketball anyway. The Saint Louis Billikens win our Rainbow Heart Syrup national championship.
Saint Louis Center Robbie Avila on the fast break.
Tavion Banks, Iowa. Banks is my preferred college basketball type, an anomaly that makes pedantic NBA scouts cringe, a power forward with a shooting guard/small forward combo’s 6'7" height who might be emblematic of the current nomadic incarnation of college basketball by going from Northwest Florida State College to Drake University to, finally, the University of Iowa but also demonstrates that for many, frankly, the college experience is circuitous, not linear. The whole Hawkeye plane felt like it was made out of Banks-like characters and after cement-mixing Clemson in a first-round game that was fun, really, only if you had a rooting interest in Iowa, they ousted defending champion Florida in a seismic second-round upset by paradoxically pulling the high-flying Gators into the glorious muck of their slow-paced swamp where Banks and his undersized, outgunned mates wrestled them to a one-point defeat and reached the second week of the tournament for the first time since 1999. Former Iowa Hawkeye running back and momentary Heisman Trophy candidate Tavian Banks, still fourth on the school’s all-time rushing list, undoubtedly assumed his place as the foremost Tavian Banks in Hawkeye lore was assured, but as Tavion Banks goes to show, history is always being revised.
Sixth Man: Dion Brown, Saint Louis. Speaking of 1999... I think the best college basketball regular season game I have watched in the last five years, if not more, was a random mid-February one between two teams with losing records, the Syracuse Orange and the Boston College Eagles, both of whom fired their coach this year, and which I watched only because I sought a college basketball game while My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife did the NYT crossword and she prefers that if I watch a game, it’s one with a good mascot, which Syracuse has in the form of Otto the Orange. He’s an orange! Lo and behold, a triple-overtime spirited rec league-feeling game broke out and reminded me of the January and February Saturdays of my youth when I would get deeply involved in the doubleheaders of old Big 8 and Big 10 games on the central Iowa local affiliates between middle-of-the-pack teams while a syndicated re-run of “The Breakfast Club” on another channel that also seemed to air every weekend underlined these precious reprieves from school. I digress. That Boston College team had this guy who was dead ringer for Prince. And as I watched Saint Louis turn Georgia into gruel, I thought, “Wait, that guy looks a little like Prince.” It was him! Dion Brown, who has trimmed his hair, unfortunately, and does not look quite as much like Prince as he previously did, and who, it turned out, transferred to Saint Louis from Boston College where he had transferred from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lending an appropriate figurative wail to the last 4 days of basketball, “a wonderful trip through time where laughter is all you pay.”
SID (Sports Information Director): Hailee Steinfeld, State Farm Commercial. It’s just a version of captive consumerism, surely, but I saw that “Livin’ on a Prayer” State Farm commercial about 456 times during the last four days and Steinfeld’s double-take reaction shot to the over-aggressive lunacy of Keegan-Michael Key and Danny McBride really started to feel like an impeccable summation of suffering through the global madness unleashed by one deranged lunatic.
“Quantum Hoops” (2007) does not conclude with a blooper reel, a la so many comedy movies, but begins with one instead, or what might as well pass for one, a montage of the Caltech basketball team failing all over the court. After all, at the time Rick Greenwald’s documentary was shot in the mid-aughts, the woebegone Beavers had not won a game since 1985. (They would eventually end the streak at 310 games on February 22, 2011.) That’s failure on a mathematically improbable scale, as “Quantum Hoops” tells us, and perhaps operating with a mathematician’s mind, it explains the logic behind chronicling such long-running failure while giving a pass to the cosmic absurdity. The whole movie assumes the low-key, even nonchalant, air of its narrator, David Duchovny, a 20-year losing streak treated as something like a passing sun shower. I did not need it to drill all the way down to the very essence of the human condition, necessarily, but when one former Caltech hoopster noted that the 1960s passed on campus with nary a peep of the noise from the outside world, I might have liked at least one follow-up question.
Though “Quantum Hoops” nominally chronicles the Beavers’ 2005-06 season, Greenwald eschews embedding with the team, so to speak, by recounting each game, checking in with the players before and after, or even, really, seeming to go into the locker room at all. Given the described workload of basketball and academics and barely having time to sleep, maybe that would have been impossible, but it makes the approach feel impersonal despite so many talking head interviews. Instead, Greenwald opts for broad overview of both Caltech as an institution and of the basketball program. But because there seems to be virtually no footage of the hardwood team’s past glories and agonies, this overview essentially just consists of past players and coaches remembering them aloud, which only goes so far. It also underlines the lack of visual flair overall, utilizing clips that do not really enhance what's being said, only occasionally underscoring the action, mostly just coming across like something to fill the screen.
No, Greenwald is content to let talking heads do most of the walk for him. And they are chipper bunch, granted, from the current and former players to current and former coaches to Gregg Popovich, formerly head coach of Pomona-Pitzer, who lost to Caltech in 1980. He mentions a chill that went through his body when he realized he was going to lose to the sport’s most woeful program, yet even by the end of his interview, the famously acerbic Hall of Famer is waxing inspirational in a way that mirrors the Explosions in the Sky-like music. If the Caltech players feel sorrow, they never really express it, hardly show it, and when one-time coach Gene Victor does allow a brief admission that it was “hard” to lose so much, he fails to expound, probably because he wasn’t even asked to. There is no room for wallowing. In accordance with a university like Caltech, everything is framed as a learning experience.
The run-up to the 98th Academy Awards was frequently cited by Oscar prognosticators as perhaps the most unpredictable ever, at least among three of the acting categories (Jessie Buckley had Best Actress locked up virtually from the beginning). Yet, the awards season has become so long, that by the time of the actual Oscar ceremony itself, that unpredictability had looped back around, transforming so much surprise into predestination. Not even Sean Penn eschewing showing up at the ceremony to collect his Best Supporting Actor trophy for “One Battle After Another” was all that surprising. “Frankenstein” collected three Oscars, “Sinners” earned four, and “One Battle After Another” won six, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Andy Jurgensen made a two-hour-and-forty-minute feel like one, tops), and the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. I would have voted for “The Secret Agent” in the latter, but Cassandra Kulukundis was no less deserving. For casting newcomer Chase Infiniti, yes, and for all the impeccably chosen faces comprising The Christmas Adventurers Club, certainly, but also for getting Eric Schweig back into the masterpiece-making business. I hope Schweig was there last night. If there was a true surprise at the 98th Academy Awards, it was Best Live-Action Short ending in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” It warms my jaded heart that the Olympics still allows ties, and it turns out, the Oscars warms it for allowing them too.
Unpredictability, however, does not in and of itself make for a good Oscar show and the 98th was plenty good, fun and dumb, heartfelt and affecting in equal measure. Conan O’Brien returned as host after last year and can return next year, as far as I’m concerned, so ably has he filled this role; to paraphrase Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton,” he’s found a niche for himself. He’s good at his gig because he excels at taking the piss out of what he has just genuinely exalted and lets us in on the joke without making the whole thing a joke, not least because he really seems to love movies. The best bit of the night was sending up streaming movies that require dialogue to continually restate the plot for so many people listening as much as they are watching by recreating a scene from “Casablanca” as so comical exposition with a game Sterling K. Brown in the Dooley Wilson role. Honestly, he could have turned that into a recurring bit throughout the show. How about Conan and Jennifer Lawrence as “McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” True, the scripted banter between presenters was even worse than usual, which caused so many of those moments to drag, but then again, enlisting Nicole Kidman to present Best Picture was perfection. I know, she was there with Ewan McGregor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Moulin Rouge,” but I saw it more as Kidman’s Pure Camp as AMC ambassador taken to its apex. She should be grandfathered into the role of Best Picture presenter for life. Kidman is here! Sit up straight!
Even if the outcomes skewed inevitable, how can you be bored when history is made? Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and, by extension, the first woman of the color to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for “Sinners.” Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for the same movie and referenced the five Black men that won Best Actor before him, as well as Halle Berry, the only Black woman to win Best Actress, placing his victory in a historical context. No-show Penn joined the three-timers club, going to show once again that even if nobody seems to like him, everybody seems to like his acting. If Paul Thomas Anderson earning Best Director for “One Battle After Another” was not historical, it was momentous, one of our foremost modern auteurs finally, deservedly winning an Oscar. And when he mentioned his fellow nominees, I took heart in knowing that even if Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for “Sinners,” that someday he will win for Best Director too. Nothing filled my heart with joy as much as Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for “Weapons.” At first, I really thought hers was just a happy-to-be-nominated deal, but somewhere along the way, momentum built, maybe because 40 years between nominations in a business where for women it can feel like it’s getting late early, as the sage Yogi Berra once said, she demonstrated that no, nuh uh, it’s never too late. Plus, it was an important, oft-forgotten reminder that she and Ed Harris are one of our Top 5 Celebrity Couples: not quite an indie Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but something in that vein.
As if taking presenter Jimmy Kimmel’s words to heart about documentary filmmakers being the truth-tellers, the winners for both documentary short and feature were the ones who most openly acknowledged the current political realities of our tumultuous world. Well, them and Javier Bardem who in presenting Best International Feature with Priyanka Chopra literally said “No to war and free Palestine” with what appeared to be a smile on his face. He wasn’t making light of anything, of course, but to my eye, appeared to be demonstrating how easy it is to simply say something while cheerfully communicating to multitudinous bad faith actors he knew were lying in wait: Come at me, bro. Whining about people being woke is just another way to bury your head in the sand.
The one detail that even good iterations of the show have gotten wrong in the past, this version got right - the in-memoriam segment. Maybe losing so many vital names of the industry snapped the producers into focus, but for once they forewent yoking some other performer or performance to the segment and just let the segment speak for itself, buttressing it with brief commentary on some of the biggest names: so many tear-filled faces for Rob Reiner, Rachel McAdams testifying to Diane Keaton and her fellow Canadian Catherine O’Hara, and Babs on Bob (Barbra Streisand’s ode to Robert Redford). It was the first in-memoriam I can recall that truly let us linger on the names and faces and think about what they meant. It was heartrending, and wonderful, and in a way, made me even madder that the Honorary Academy Awards are shunted to their own ceremony months earlier. Why on earth would the Oscars not want Tom Cruise receiving his first Academy Award at the actual ceremony? That is to take nothing away from his fellow honorary award recipients Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas, but my God, this is Tom Cruise; he was literally name-checked in this year’s Best Picture!
Cruise has left significant footprints on the history of cinema and so, too, has Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s why it was so moving to see him finally be recognized by the Academy. Is “One Battle After Another” really his best movie? God, I don’t know and I don’t know that I can think of a more boring question today. In speaking after winning Best Picture, in fact, Anderson sort of summarized that point and the point I was trying to make on Friday by literally naming all five Best Picture nominees from 1975. “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” I don’t know how my mood is going to be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, or Oscar Sunday next year, but after that show last night, I gotta tell you, in a way I did not see coming, it’s pretty good. I guess there was some sort of surprise after all.
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