My Favorite College Football Games: Game 5 redux

October 21, 1989: Alabama - 47 Tennessee - 30

In early 2011, someone professing to be Al from Dadeville called the long-running college football radio show of Paul Finebaum and claimed to have poisoned the historic oak trees at the intersection known as Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University. It did not take long for police to connect the caller’s nom-de-guerre to that of an Alabama football superfan named Harvey Updyke, arresting him on a charge of first-degree criminal mischief. He would eventually plead guilty, serving 180 days in jail and ordered to pay $796,731 in restitution, though he never came close to fulfilling that obligation prior to his death at the age of 71 in 2020. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Updyke provided various hedges, even fabrications, like claiming someone else had told him about poisoning the trees and he merely appropriated the story as his own. Whatever his shifting narratives, the phone call to Finebaum always made it clear to me that Updyke grasped from the outset the gravity of his deed. Because if we accept that Finebaum is something akin to the supreme pontiff of southern college football then, in effect, Updyke’s calling him was a confession in a religious sense as much as a criminal one. And though he would say he did it because of how much he hated Auburn, his beloved Crimson Tide’s archrival, in his 2011 ESPN profile of Updyke, Wright Thompson knew better when he wrote, “He loved a football team so much he ruined his life.”

Almost from the beginning, college football has been compared to religion. John Tunis made the comparison in 1928 writing in Harper’s that college football seemed poised to become America’s national religion. He was criticizing, not praising, but in his negative assessment, he was, nevertheless, concurring that in its customs, fellowship, and belief in something akin to an unseen order, to paraphrase Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Religion Wayne Proudfoot, the sport did, in fact, function as a religion. If it was a problem to Tunis in the 1920s, it has only grown worse, and I wonder what he would make not only of declining church attendance and football’s increasing popularity but modern coaches like Dabo Swinney and the late Bill McCartney seeking to blur the lines between church and state. Yet, if the whole sport might be deemed a religion, no place in America remains more religious than the Bible Belt, and the Bible Belt loves college football more than anyone. There was a reason that the late Alcorn State coach Marino Kasem’s famous regional classification of college football saw fit to ascribe a holy purpose to one sector only: “in the South, football is a religion,” he said, “and Saturday is the holy day.” That’s merely a more lyrical version of the Southeastern college athletic conference’s highfalutin present-day slogan, It Just Means More, just as Wright Thompson’s poetic love letter to southern football, Pulled Pork & Pigskin, innately demonstrates how every southern football fan is but one more bourbon and cola solo cup away from metamorphosing into Harvey Updyke whether they know it or not. I am from, and live in, and root for a team affiliated with Big Ten country but I know it means more down there.

19th century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “a minimum definition of religion” could be defined as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” The title of his treatise, Primitive Culture, mirrors the primitive cultures that Emile Durkheim examined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in which a belief in a god manifested itself in the form of a totem, symbolizing the deity, to paraphrase Michael Serazio, associate professor of communication at Boston College, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, while “also implicitly offer(ing) vessels for fellowship.” Ida Mae Kilgore Bryant, mother of Paul Bryant, nicknamed Bear, wanted her son to go into the ministry, though he opted for coaching college football instead, reasoning that they were virtually the same. Indeed, in coaching his alma mater the University of Alabama from 1958 to 1982, he resurrected it into the premier program of the sport, so worshiped in the Magnolia State that all kinds of unsanctioned art, from decals to postcards, proliferated in the 1960s of the ceremonial Bear walking on water while his signature houndstooth hat turned that two-tone pattern into a totem of team as much as its own school colors. In saving the football program, he also redeemed the Old South, the antebellum mystic referenced in the title card of “Gone with the Wind,” an eyebrow-raising idea advanced by both Warren St. John in his 2004 book about Alabama football fandom “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer” and Frank Deford in his seminal profile of the coach for Sports Illustrated in 1981. Deford also noted that the Bear scoffed at such water-walking allusions, though that did not mean their prevalence was any less telling. When Deford dared humanize the Bear in that very same profile, he was besieged by letters from angry Alabama fans. Of course, Deford himself was not above religious allegory, deeming Bryant “football incarnate” in the state and noting how hard it would be for whomever was eventually tasked to succeed him.

That happened two years later in 1983 when Bryant retired and subsequently died at the age of 69 from a massive heart attack. Ray Perkins was first into the breach, getting so much flack for decent-enough success that still paled relative to the Bear, he jumped ship of his own volition by going to coach what was then the nadir NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If Perkins was an alum of Alabama, at least, his successor Bill Curry was not, and if Bryant’s houndstooth hat was the totem of Crimson Tide football, then the brick that was thrown through Curry’s office window early on the morning of October 9, 1988, might have been its most cursed object. It was the day after Curry’s second Alabama team not only lost to the University of Mississippi for the first time at home but lost to them for the first time at home on homecoming. Appropriately, the brick comes with its own conspiracy theory intimating that Curry threw it through his own window in the manner of the speculation that tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand might have put a bullet in his own mailbox, which is just the crimson icing on the white cake, blaming the victim to try and mask the setting of unattainable standards. And yet, the next season in 1989, Curry seemed positioned to, if you will permit me, turn the tide by starting the season 5-0, including a revenge game against Mississippi in which his squad overcame a 21-point deficit by detonating for 62 unanswered points, and ascending to #10 in the country ahead of meeting 6th-ranked and also undefeated Tennessee on, as tradition once dictated, the third Saturday in October.

Growing up in Big Eight and Big Ten country meant those were the games I usually watched, but the Alabama versus Tennessee showdown was nationally televised by CBS, and I happened to be watching, praise be. It was not a dramatic contest, per se, but a fun, high-scoring one with Alabama forging a big lead and Tennessee futilely trying to play comeback. The Crimson Tide asserted itself with one big play early in the second quarter. Leading 10-7 and lined up 75 yards from pay dirt in the shotgun formation, string bean Tide quarterback Gary Hollingsworth received the snap and drifted back a couple steps to intentionally invite the Volunteer defensive line toward him before flipping the ball forward to running back Siran Stacy, previously lined up to his QB’s right. Stacy sliced through a hole opened by that little bit of misdirection and his offensive line, angling at first toward the left sideline before reading a block out wide by a receiver and gently slaloming back to the right. As he approached midfield with one Tennessee defender hurrying to try and catch him from behind and two converging on him from both the right and the left, Stacy accelerated, not so much shedding or even slipping the last desperate attempt at a tackle but surging beyond it, making it look for all the world like Tennessee was trying to catch the wind. He coasted alone into the sun-filled end zone, a 75-yard-touchdown as exultation, echoed in the overwhelming roar of the crowd and CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who no one would accuse of being a man of few words, tingling the spine by shutting up and laying out after just three of them: “Siran Stacy explodes!” By modern-day standards, this touchdown might appear prosaic, nothing more than a little shovel pass. Yet, that underlines its timelessness, living the apotheosis of football since the beginning by transforming the muddle of so much helmeted humanity into the divine.

I had never thought much about Alabama football, or the SEC, until this game, or until this play, really, though in the new century of the sport, I had to think about them a lot as Nick Saban fashioned an evil empire out of his cherished process. If you’re not from Alabama, or maybe just not from the south, you’re not supposed to like them, and I suppose I don’t, though I must confess that this Siran Stacy touchdown caused me to see the light. I have often wondered if in its aftermath, if Curry thought that Alabama fans had seen the light, if he had been redeemed. This victory would spur them toward winning the conference, after all, going to the Sugar Bowl, and inching as high as #2 in the national rankings. But they would lose the Sugar Bowl to Miami and worse than that, they would lose their last game of the season to archrival Auburn, unforgivable, conference title or not, evincing that strange college football version of math where a 10-2 season equals 0-2. In the offseason, like Perkins before him, Curry ditched, taking the Kentucky job and his career never recovered, though maybe it was unrecoverable the moment that brick went through his window.

Writing in 2021 for the most southern-coded magazine ever, Garden & Gun, Tommy Tomlinson surmised that college football in the south was not so much religion as it was spiritual, “the hunger for that rare and precious moment of transcendence.” I think Tomlinson is underselling how the religious-like structure of the sport can help stoke that transcendence, even as he hints at that idea throughout, but I take him at his larger point, ending on a note that might as well be describing Siran Stacy’s touchdown: “(O)ne Saturday night, late in the game, your man breaks into the clear. You rise and shout. Rapture.” Up until then, college football had hinged for me on victory and defeat for my chosen team, whether it was my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, or my native state Iowa Hawkeyes before that. Stacy’s touchdown, however, made me realize that gridiron transcendence could exist independently of rooting interests, and that the momentary rapture could matter as much if not more than the result. College football has always been based on results, of course, though that sense of the bottom line has only been amplified in the new-fangled 12-team playoff era as athletic directors, commentators, and fans have taken What Have You Done for Me Lately to unprecedented extremes. It’s as if every college football team is fast becoming like 1989 Alabama, destined to suffer spiritually winless seasons no matter how many games they technically win if they don’t make the playoffs. It’s only natural. In sports we tend to overrate the outcome and undervalue the experience. It’s times like those when I want to sit down, bring up YouTube, find Siran Stacy’s touchdown run from that sunny day in October 1989, and get some of that good old-time religion.

 

Song of the Summer

Unlike last year, in which no clear-cut song of the summer emerged, the 2026 song of the summer appears cut and dried. As of me writing this, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has tied the record as the second-longest number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 at 19 weeks, a distinction of which it is more than worthy. Its indelible but easygoing hook rewards repeated listens and would sound as appropriate wafting out of a car window, drifting across a beach, or floating above a backyard deck on a warm night at dusk as it would leading a legion of two-steppers at a Lone Star honkytonk. Its lyrics exploit the innate infectiousness in getting to sing the names of places – Tennessee, Abilene, the Smoky Mountains, Memphis, Amarillo, and, of course, the titular capper that is accentuated with the preceding word that honors the regional dialect by dispensing with the g and flattening it. It’s a neat songwriting trick that Langley pulls because, in effect, “Choosin’ Texas” is a sad song, saying goodbye to a cowboy who is choosin’ Texas by choosin’ another gal even as you can sense 80,000 people in Cowboys Stadium singing along at a Langley show ratifying that choice. Who wouldn’t choose Texas? Even Langley’s wistful vocal is fessing up to that fact. It’s a helluva song, maybe even the song of the year, but it’s not the song of the summer.

I mean, the song of this summer, the summer of 2026? Hello, earth to human inhabitant. 2026 has been the summer of apocalyptic skies and smoky air, of torrential rain, melting glaciers, flash floods, insane heat waves, and the hottest month in U.S. history for the contiguous lower 48 states. It has been the summer of ICE and of VAR, of poisoned lettuce and Lake America. It has been the summer of the first-ever Forever War that has Already Been Won and of a reflecting pool as the improbable, indelible emblem of the shape of the United States on its 250th anniversary. Through that lens, I can understand why people would covet a timeless song of the summer more than a timely one, a song into which they can escape four minutes at a time. But then, looking reality in the eye and denying it is becoming America’s métier. “I don’t wanna know,” Wild Pink wryly sings in another song from this summer, “I keep my head down.” And though Charli XCX is a British citizen, not an American one, she does maintain a home in Los Angeles, and anyway, by this point, the pop star is nothing less than a true Global Citizen. And though the cover of her new album might feature Martin Scorsese, and though David Cronenberg might have a crucial cameo on the record’s closer, her song SS26 makes me think of John Carpenter’s “They Live”: it’s summer 2026 and Charli XCX is making us put on the sunglasses. 

More than any other season, the sensation associated with summer is a fleeting one, which Shakespeare wrote about in Sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and all that, and in SS26, XCX twists that fleetingness into something else. The title is short for Spring Summer 2026, establishing the context as utterly present tense, a pop song as IMF message from “Mission: Impossible” designed to self-destruct once we reach late September. Her verses and pre-chorus are a patchwork of familiar denials, deflections, and excuses that evoke a modern propensity for saying whatever one must to make it through whatever moment they are in and once they have, wiping their hands clean of it: “No, it’s not my fault / I wasn’t there.” And though Sonnet 18 argued that art is the only way to make something last, XCX is dubious of what that might mean to the people experiencing that art in the moment. SS26 itself is a testament to the value and pleasure of art even as it simultaneously ridicules music, fashion, and film as being unable to save us.

Indeed, in her video for 1999, she recreated the movie “Titanic,” but in the video for SS26, she virtually turns a fashion runway into the Titanic, dressed in her best and prepared to go down blinkered and beautiful. It might suggest a kind of release, yet in the song’s minimalist production and the way it repeatedly teases at shifting into a higher gear only to decline at the last minute, tapering out at the end, XCX impudently denies us the very catharsis we crave. Summer’s over! Now what?

 

New Adventures in Modern Slang

As a middle-aged movie blogger who eschews Letterboxd and artificially intelligent writing assistants, I do try to maintain contact with elements of pop culture geared toward younger generations. At least where movies are concerned, I feel dutybound on some level to do so. More than that, though, the desire stems from my genuine interest in art and, by extension, a genuine interest in what (some) younger artists are up to and because I have always promised myself that as I age, I will not forget what it was like to be young. I will not fall into the Boomer vs. Millennial and/or Gen Z trap. Still, there are plenty of moments when I must admit to my brewing inner-old fogey. Like the phrase low key for instance. I started hearing the yutes say this all the time a while ago and was pretty sure I understood it to mean something niche. If, say, there was a really good taco place in your neighborhood that only a few people knew about then you’d say, “low-key, they make the best tacos in the city.” Except then Friend of the Blog Christy explained that her children had begun saying high key in addition to low key and that high key and low key appeared to be interchangeable. Wouldn’t this suggest that low key or high key as a modifying adjective is superfluous? Isn’t this just like the President applying excess adverbs to everything?

My notions of modern slang only grew more confused this week when I read Marie Solis’s piece at The New York Times examining the phrase “kinda chic” proliferating on Instagram and TikTok. This phrase, as Solis noted, was essentially in opposition. “Chic,” Solis wrote, “is a high bar,” and dug up an 1877 definition on the Times’ own site to prove it: “What is chic may, in a sense, be fashionable, but what is fashionable cannot be chic.” “(T)he deliberately lowbrow use of ‘kinda,’” Solis explains, “undercuts the less attainable state of ‘chic.’” The BBC spoke to a psychologist from Durham University, Dr. Niklas Ihssen, who summarized utilizing the phrase kinda chic as “allow(ing) you to be special while being normal,” which echoes how the ever helpful Know Your Meme describes it. Chic had always seemed to me an either/or proposition, either you are chic or you are not chic. To be kinda chic sounds like being, I dunno, kinda rock ‘n’ roll. Is being kinda rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, being rock ‘n’ roll in this brave new world? Is everything a half-caf from Starbucks now? 

Yet, in being confronted with such revisions in terminology, I did not simply want to sigh, throw my hands in the air, and theoretically scream, “Get off my lawn!” by logging off. I wanted to know. And so, being a movie blog, after all, I decided to try and contextualize high key, and low key, and chic, and kinda chic on my terms. 

Let me see if I understand this...

High key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Low key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Chic is Audrey Hepburn wearing all black in “Charade.” 

Kinda chic is Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” after several introductory fakeout jump scares to communicate that her character is still in the throes of TRAUMA taking a bag of potato chips to bed.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Strange Victory (1948)

In watching the recently reviewed “Pressure” about the D-Day invasion, I was reminded of Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in-advance speech to his troops in which he declared that “nothing less than full victory” would be acceptable. But what, exactly, constituted full victory in WWII? That’s the question director Leo Hurwitz puts forth in his aptly named “Strange Victory,” finished all of three years after the second world war, by demonstrating with blunt style that the United States of America could not claim to honor all the ideals it had ostensibly fought and died for in the name of liberal democracy. Stitching together archival footage and dramatic re-enactments to underscore the various points of the archival footage, “Strange Victory” was deemed a documentary but comes across more akin to a visual essay. That sensation is brought home in the voiceover by co-writer Saul Levitt which is not dispassionate but barely concealed rage at what is being conveyed onscreen. An introductory overview of WWII’s conclusion is constructed out of graphic imagery that cuts the heart right out of any nostalgia and evokes a collective trauma that has been repressed rather than dealt with and fuels the anger and fear in the form of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism coursing the post-war America, as Levitt asks, again and again, “If we won, what did we win?”

If it’s freedom, “Strange Victory” illustrates, we have a funny way of showing it. In Hurwitz’s most daring conceptualization, he blends a brutal rundown of the effects Jim Crow laws with a montage outlining the insidious rise of the Third Reich and in effect, links our own post-war fearmongering with theirs, providing a different spin on that old standby line of scriptural reassurance: if God is for us, who could be against us? He even mixes and matches images of newborn babies, black and white, and their black and white mothers, with images of whites only signs and colored entrances, living the idea that while all men might be created equal, as the declaration says, the society we have constructed once newborns leave the hospital proves just the opposite. In demonstrating oppression of the era, predictably “Strange Victory” was suppressed itself, with a lack of major distribution making it difficult to see. It calls to mind what is currently transpiring with the suppression of history by the current Presidential administration at the Smithsonian, as if embodying “Strange Victory’s” own conclusion, that there is a war still going on at home, waiting to be won. 

Some Drivel On...Inside Man

Released 20 years ago, Spike Lee’s rare foray into something approximating genre filmmaking suggested Sidney Lumet’s own New York bank robbery classic “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) played at a different tempo. The latter’s bank robber, Sonny Wortzik, was not only based on a real person but animated, high-strung, and forced to improvise when his plans go awry. The bank robber of “Inside Man,” on the other hand, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), is a cool cucumber. “Don’t I sound relaxed to you?” he asks the hostage negotiator at one point in the voice of a man who has mapped out every possible contingency. Indeed, the meta structure of Russell Gerwitz’s elaborate screenplay is established with Dalton breaking the fourth wall as the movie begins by explaining directly to the camera who he is and what he plans to do, that is, “execute the perfect bank robbery.” So, he does. The remaining two-hours-and-nine-minutes is showing how he executes it, though without giving away the most crucial elements until the very end, giving “Inside Man” the feel of a deconstructed magic trick, like David Copperfield telling you he is going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and then showing you exactly how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dalton Russell is the perfect role for Clive Owen. The part requires outsized self-confidence, and Owen has always excelled at imbuing outsized self-confidence without appearing to exert any effort at all. His face is hidden behind a mask and sunglasses virtually the entire movie, yet the baritone of his voice and his presence make the person unmistakable even if the screenplay by design is never really infusing a sense of personality to keep him a mystery. Denzel Washington, then, makes for the perfect counterpart as boisterous Detective Keith Frazier who is enlisted as lead hostage negotiator when Russell and his small team take 50 hostages inside the Manhattan Trust Bank and put their exacting plan in motion. Even when Frazier is forced into a bout of introductory exposition, Washington sells it with genuine crackle, just as when he walks, he struts in the manner of his Detroit Red version of Malcolm X. Frazier’s boss is throwing him a bone, so to speak, after a run of bad luck and Washington seizes on that bit of backstory, moving through the movie like his character is seizing the day. Yet, if Frazier is smart enough to know Dalton is frying bigger fish, he is too much a small fry in the pecking order to do something about it. That is reflected in the harsh light of the third key character, Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a nebulous if high-powered fixer who has to broker the robbery for the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) hiding a crucial secret. Palpably relishing the opportunity to play against type, Foster’s own enthusiasm deliciously melds with the character’s enthusiasm for virtually eating the lunch of everyone in her orbit. And though White is shorter than all the surrounding characters in height, in her tall stilettoes, not to mention Foster’s imposing aura, she seems no less towering, a gargoyle on the edge of a building come to life.

And so, these three characters circle one another as events play out, Dalton seeming to deliberately stall for time, and Frazier sensing that he seems to be deliberately stalling for time. Lee interrupts this straight-forward structure throughout with scenes in the aftermath of the robbery as Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), interview the hostages, all of whom are suspects given the sly diversionary tactics that Russell employs not only to confuse the police but to throw them off the real scent. It’s an ingenious device that not only heightens the tension but evokes how Lee is deconstructing the nature of the bank robbery movie itself just as a sequence later in which the police prepare to storm the bank, we see imagined scenes of how it might unfold, as if Lee is showing us how such a movie might typically stage its conclusion and then pulling the rug out from under us just as Dalton pulls the rug out from under Frazier and White and everyone else. The ending relies on a striking bit of coincidence, I grant you that, but I also can’t say that I mind. Dalton had already made the Statue of Liberty disappear, after all, so why couldn’t he perform one last miracle?

Normal

The small Minnesota town giving Ben Wheatley’s action-comedy “Normal” its name is reminiscent of the English village Sandford in 2007’s action-comedy “Hot Fuzz” in so much as its idyllic nature belies a bevy of unhinged arms-toting citizens. The latter held that twist for a good chunk of its running time whereas “Normal” gives it away immediately in its Tokyo-set prologue where a Yakuza boss dispatches a pair of underlings who have failed him to the American Midwest. This is one of the more interesting decisions that screenwriter Derek Kolstad (he conceived of the story with star Bob Odenkirk) makes. It means that Normal’s interim Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) is the only one unaware of the town’s nefarious underbelly, including the audience, stressing the feeling of his being an outsider. Gradually, as he gets to know the tiny police force and meets other members of the community, he begins to suspect something is amiss in the death of Normal’s previous Sheriff, setting out to uncover the truth.

It’s a solid-enough set-up, an American western on the frozen tundra, but Kolstad’s script never finesses its ideas. There is something potentially interesting in a small town circa Right Now choosing to go all-in with the Yakuza to survive but “Normal” isn’t sure what to make of it – right, wrong, or in-between – and lets it burn out while Sheriff Ulysses’s backstory is hopelessly wan and means the conclusion lacks additional emotional punch. Indeed, the ever-changing factions of Normal, good helping bad and vice versa, provides some spark that never quite goes anywhere because eventually it’s revealed as mere twisty structure for the sake of twisty structure. And fair enough. Normal, Minnesota might as well be a soundstage, a depressed cop movie giving way to a western giving way to Japanese gun-fu, and so on, as if Normal, Minnesota is really just a “Blazing Saddles”-style series of soundstages, one genre followed by another, an elaborate excuse to shoot some people’s limbs off, proving there is more than way to skin a cat.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Violent Saturday (1955)

The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.

Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.

But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?

Some Drivel On...The Contender

Released in the fall of 2000, meaning into a contentious American Presidential election in addition to the roiling wake of the Lewinsky scandal and Starr Report, writer/director Rod Lurie’s political thriller “The Contender” was designed to make waves even as it wound up engendering some unintentional waves too. Its eponymous character is Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), tapped by President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) to be his next Vice President after the death of the current one, though the Republican chair of the nominating committee, Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), plans not merely to oppose this but to “obliterate (her) life.” A smear campaign, in other words, and so perhaps it’s appropriate that “The Contender” not only divided the critics but became victim of something akin to a smear campaign itself. That occurred when co-star Oldman’s words in one publication were misconstrued in another, making it seem as if he insinuated that Lurie caved to his production company Dreamworks and its patron saint, Steven Spielberg, to make the movie more big-D Democrat-friendly. Afterwards, Oldman contended his issue was only with Lurie in so much as the filmmaker compromised “The Contender’s” ethical and moral ambiguity to render it a more straightforward story of heroes and villains. Frankly, Oldman is not wrong in his assessment. A genuine melodramatic entertainment, “The Contender” also seems to come bearing sharp fangs in depicting statecraft until they are revealed as nothing more than a set of costume teeth. 

Runyon’s ammunition for character assassination is explicit photos that emerge of what is purported to be a college-age Hanson engaging in lewd acts at a frat house. The Senator from the great state of Ohio not only does not confirm nor deny their legitimacy, but she also publicly refuses to even acknowledge them, much to the chagrin of White House Chief of Staff Kermit Newman (Sam Elliott). Newman even yearns to hit back at Runyon with some character assassination ammo of their own. “Come on, Kermit,” Hanson derides, “if we do that, we’re no better than he is.” “We are,” Newman replies with Elliott emphasizing the second word, “no better than he is,” a line that has been ringing in my head during this whole divisive midterm election season. Like it or not, Laine is judged in the venerable court of public opinion, even if that venerable court is shown to be influenced if not outright shaped by the media and by political actors goosing the media. When Runyon rhetorically asks why the American people will believe him, he says, “Because I will have a big microphone in front of me,” evocative of “The Contender’s” oft juicy dialogue. Politics, however, do not take place only in front of the camera, but off them, and in an astonishingly deft performance, Bridges creates one of our all-time great movie presidents. Evans is a chameleon who is skilled at operating in either environment, virtually glowing with affability in the presence of others while simultaneously maintaining an unmistakable assertiveness (the running gag of Evans procuring food in meetings from the White House chef is as funny it is telling) while coming across cunning and even savage behind the scenes.

Evans is practicing politics, in other words, in the true sense of the word, all their wheeling, dealing, and not so much persuading as bulldozing, demonstrating how even what might be noble ideals are always swimming in raw sewage-infested waters. Even noble ideals are in question, however, as President Evans wanting to install Hanson as VP is summarized as being less about what she stands for than POTUS’s own “swan song” while Runyon never even explicates a good reason why he wants to do her in. “She’s no good,” he tells his wife Maggie (Irene Ziegler) in the middle of the night in his pajamas and slippers while sipping milk, a shot that truly makes him look like nothing beyond a bitter old man. Yet, even if “The Contender” does a bang-up job demonstrating “politics as power, nothing more,” as the philosopher X once said, where the notions of character are immaterial in more ways than one, Lurie pulls his punch at the conclusion with two revelations that repaint the political arena as angels and devils and a place where character counts after all. Maybe he could have swung it had he stuck to the complicated portraits of these people that he seems to be generating, but the two climactic twists negate that possibility. And whether from narrative cowardice, or bleeding-heart intentions, Lurie inadvertently yet revealingly transforms “The Contender” into a manifestation of the most dangerous kind of politician: one that believes in their own bullshit. 

Pressure

There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.

“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.

As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.

For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.

Choose Your Agamemnon

Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.

Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.

Songs of the Potential Siren(s)

On Monday, I lamented that in his version of Homer’s Odyssey, Christopher Nolan saw fit to figuratively put wax in the audience’s ears by not letting us hear the song of the sirens. Maybe that was a wise creative decision, sometimes what you don’t hear is more powerful than what you do, and I’m willing to be swayed, though I mostly meant it as an emblem of the director’s overall lack of imagination. But it also invites the question, who would I cast to sing the song of the sirens? True, that’s a little too close to Diane Sawyer once upon a time in an interview criticizing the erstwhile Dixie Chicks for criticizing President George W. Bush’s foreign policy without formulating a foreign policy, as ordinary citizens so often do, of their own. Reviewers need not be in the business of rewriting the movie they are reviewing. That’s not how it works. Still, the question was tantalizing, so much so that I worked through it, even if I am mostly considering a siren in the singular form rather than the plural. Hey, that’s the beauty of using your own imagination. 

My first thought was, Emmylou Harris. The ethereal nature of her voice fits the bill and even more, it would sound so eerily enticing drifting over water crashing against rocks, a lulling in spite of yourself. But then I remembered that The Coen Brothers had the same thought when they enlisted the singing voices of Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch to be their sirens in their own version of Homer’s Odyssey, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Geniuses and idiots think alike, I guess?

If we had access to a time machine, the haunted nature of, say, Billie Holiday would no doubt work since that voice knows more than all our 8 billion people put together, or even Edith Piaf. What was that moment with the phonograph ahead of “Saving Private Ryan’s” big final act if not a sort of song of the siren?

En Vogue could recalibrate the song of the sirens as one so smooth you suddenly just find yourself in the water without knowing you had jumped in.

Zola Jesus (i.e. Nika Roza Danilova) feels less like a siren, more like a witch, which I mean as a compliment, not unlike the ultra-iconic Stevie Nicks, though that goes without saying.

I was going to say Natalie Merchant, and I suppose I still am, yet, as soon as I thought it, I thought, hers is the voice of a mermaid, not a siren. 

The soprano of Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li is in the key of the siren, yet, paradoxically, her voice is so sad it would just make you fall down and cry rather than swim over to your doom.

I have a strong desire to cast Neneh Cherry in the role, not so much because her Swedish-West African heritage would tick off the right people but because her beguiling spoken-word style would break the song of the siren mold.

Hope Sandoval’s voice would lead you into temptation and inevitable doom, there is no doubt about it, and if you don’t think so, buddy, I triple dog dare you to eschew wax in your ears without tying yourself to the mast. Could Sandoval’s voice, though, infuse you with the knowledge of the whole world as do the sirens? Could anyone’s voice? Is it such a tall task that it’s insurmountable? Was Nolan right, after all, to leave it alone?

He wasn’t. Reader, have you heard the mighty alto of Neko Case, and have you heard it intertwined with her longtime harmony vocal compatriot Kelly Hogan? They will lead you into temptation while simultaneously impressing upon you the beauty and horror of the whole world, reconstituting the biggest branch on the tree of knowledge into a shiv so delicately you won’t even realize that it has already impaled you.

The Odyssey

“A time of apparent magic” explains the title card that opens Christopher Nolan’s two-hour-and-fifty-three-minute version of Homer’s Odyssey. You can practically hear the scoff just off camera. For all that’s been made about Nolan’s commitment to putting us there, the Bronze Age, that is, from practical effects, to lighting, to a score utilizing era-appropriate instruments, “The Odyssey” proves more modern, and not just because everybody is speaking in contemporary American accents. Nolan’s version of Odysseus (Matt Damon) is one conspicuously in the throes of PTSD brought on by a Trojan War unpacked as a traumatic event while the gods are minimized, underscored in a crack of thunder that may or may not represent Zeus, like a special effect in a middle school play, which I might take to be Nolan’s tongue in his cheek if I thought he ever laughed. Humorless, revisionist, just as every translation of Homer’s Odyssey adopts its own point of view, so does every adaptation, like this one, in which the fabled ancient Greek epic poem is transformed into, uh, well, what else: a Christopher Nolan movie.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has been away for 20 years, 10 spent fighting and winning the Trojan War, 10 wandering in his struggle to return home. This has left his kingdom in peril with suitors occupying his home, seeking to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) looks on, wanting to help, but not sure how. Honoring both Homer and his own nonlinear propensities, Nolan has chosen to use the chunk of time Odysseus spends on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as his unconvincing framework. It’s not so much that in his version Nolan plays coy with why Odysseus is trapped there, and as if afraid to render his protagonist contemptible for stepping out on his wife eschews Calypso repeatedly taking him to bed, as it is an overriding air so morose as to beggar belief when she remarks on their having such a good time together. No, these scenes are just a flagrant vehicle for him to process his trauma, never dramatic in and of themselves, and with a staid air that weighs the whole enterprise down.

The Odyssey emerged from songs and spoken tales that preceded it and has in effect been influencing stories of all varieties in the centuries since, and so anyone that it takes it on is naturally going to see it in their own way. Still, there are times when it feels less like Nolan is interpreting The Odyssey so much as he is repurposing it for parts to construct a sort of spiritual summation of his whole oeuvre. You see it straight away in one of the movie’s first shots of the trojan horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the concluding image of “Planet of the Apes” and immediately impressing upon you the sense of destruction rather than victory, foreshadowing the war between the Greeks and Troy as nothing less than an ancient world atom bomb a la “Oppenheimer.” In wandering those 10 years afterwards, Odysseus has lived long enough to become a villain, cough, cough, at least in his own mind, not so much the complicated man of Emily Wilson’s famous 2017 translation, never mind the wily trickster of the original epic, as a one-note brooding stoic. If The Odyssey is in so many ways about homecomings, this might be where Nolan’s own identity, or at least, his predilections, most tellingly merge with Homer’s ultimate intent: of course, his King of Ithaca would become Batman.

Robert Pattinson, at least, is not brooding as Antinous, the foremost suitor of Penelope (along with Corey Hawkins as Polybus), giving some real president of Alpha Beta fraternity energy. In a weird way, Pattinson might be having too much fun, in so much as his malevolent sniveling invites a bloodlust in the denouement that inadvertently runs counter to the lessons that we are supposed to have learned along the way. Antinous meets his match, however, not in Telemachus, whose arc can feel perfunctory with all that’s going on, but Penelope. Along with Samantha Morton giving life to Circe’s righteous anger, Hathaway’s performance is “The Odyssey’s” best, both honoring Nolan’s modern vision while still effusing grand melodramatic flourish. And though Nolan generally prefers medium shots to close-ups that would befit these larger-than-life characters, in a reverse shot over Holland’s shoulder, Hathway suddenly lunges forward in the frame, fashioning a close-up all on her own. 

She fares better than Zendaya, anyway, who is ostensibly playing Athena, though like Theron, seems to intentionally downplay, thinking the performance will be made in the camera, only to be stranded in diminishing, dull frames unworthy of a Greek goddess. (She has resembled a Greek goddess on the red carpet for the movie’s promotion more than in the movie itself.) Then again, Nolan sees Athena less in terms of mythology than psychology, turning her into nothing less than an Imaginary Friend, providing a form of recurring consultation for Odysseus so that when she ultimately disappears, we know he is now emotionally and mentally healed, the hoariest trope in the screenwriting manual. It is emblematic of how Nolan sees the gods in more abstract terms, evoked in Odysseus’s struggle to believe in them at all, which on some level makes it both his most audacious and most cautious revision in so much as it feels like he is taking this 3,000-year-old story of polytheism and revising it for vacation Bible school.

The presentation of Athena, however, ties back to the presentation of Calypso, both of which relate to “The Odyssey’s” biggest problem, Nolan’s filmmaking style, or a lack of one, more accurately, meaning that no matter how spectacular the scenery and sets, there is a pervasive stodginess. He filmed on 70mm IMAX cameras, the first feature film ever to do so, and yet, it feels like a crutch for his own lack of visual imagination. He essentially transcribes what is on the page to screen rather than bringing it to life, like Penelope’s burial shroud, or Odysseus’s faithful dog Argis, but two plot points that Nolan injects with no real feeling. Would it have been impossible to render the song of the sirens as bewitching as the poem says? Perhaps, but isn’t that why you go into filmmaking, to envision and make perceptible that which seems impossible on the page? Isn’t that the dream of filming The Odyssey, not just to rework the text for our own times but to animate one of our world’s foundational stories? You’d think, but in the end, Nolan’s Odyssey lives its title card a little too much: a movie of apparent magic.

Project Greenlight

There are two Onion articles that are never far from my mind. One I referenced just this week: Harsh Light Of Morning Falls On One-Night Stand’s DVD Collection. That one was from 2003, the other was originally published in 2007 and also involves movies: All You Had To Say Was ‘Owen Wilson Befriends A Dolphin’ And I Was Sold. That one was written from the perspective of a fictional Hollywood producer, Howie Sandberg, receiving a pitch and being utterly satisfied with nothing more than half a sentence.

Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! “Owen Wilson befriends a dolphin and…” And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

As it happened, that article also came back to me this week not so much when I read about Anna Kendrick’s new streaming series for MGM+, “Embassy,” but when I saw the accompanying photo announcing the streaming series. It was a photo of Anna Kendrick and her co-star Sam Heughan in an air duct. And I immediately thought, I don’t need to know the rest. That photo is genius! Anna Kendrick in an air duct and... And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

Well, on second thought, maybe one “and.” Anna Kendrick in an air duct and it’s a movie, not a streaming series, a hundred minutes, tops.

In Memoriam: Glen Hansard

John Carney’s 2007 little musical indie that could “Once” opens with an unbroken shot of a nameless street busker (see bottom of the post) played by Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard standing on the street at night strumming guitar and singing. Utilizing a handheld camera, Carney starts the scene in long shot, conveying how the street is deserted and that Hansard’s character is not so much busking in this moment as singing just for himself. In the song, one that is both Hansard’s composition and his character’s composition within the movie, evoking its blurred lines, “Say It to Me Now,” he at first seems to plead with an unnamed lover to tell him what she needs to tell him, if there is, in fact, something to tell. As the song moves to its conclusion, however, the subject whom he is addressing seems to shift, from an unnamed lover to the Lord Almighty, pleading with Him that if he has something to say to our unnamed busker, to say it now. He is no longer performing, even, he is shouting into the void, even as Carney gradually moves his camera into close-up, intimacy, intensity, and emptiness in equal measure. Then, Carney takes a couple steps back with the camera to reveal that the nameless busker has acquired one listener, a nameless girl played by real-life Czechian singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová. His moment effectively becomes her moment too, the camera letting her into it just as he will let her into his life as they go on to make literal music together, filling up that aching void we have just felt. I remember seeing this sequence for the first time almost 20 years ago at the Landmark Century in the mall that time forgot like it was yesterday, how music and just a few shifts of the camera could say everything.

“Once” was a runaway success, first at Sundance and then out in the world, commercially and critically and Hansard and Irglová proceeded to win the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly.” That there was a mite of controversy as to whether having been composed a couple years earlier it had technically been written for the movie, as Academy criteria dictates, only underlined how dumb the rules of that category are in the first place and how even the sullen sticklers of such dumb rules were swept away by the movie’s ineffable spirit. Though Hansard had cultivated a successful career in the music industry up to that point as frontman of the Irish rock band The Frames, the fame and success with “Once” was on a different level, and even given their 18-year age difference that we might say, charitably, was, ah, a bit discomforting, it was also maybe inevitable that Hansard and Irglová would wind up together, a relationship based on an intense experience, to quote Sandra Bullock in “Speed.” Of course, Bullock’s character said such relationships did not last, and neither did Hansard and Irglová’s, recorded for hard-to-watch posterity in the 2011 documentary “The Swell Season,” though even as they both went on to marry other people, and have kids, their musical partnership endured; they released an album together just last year. No one else knew what Hansard had been through except Irglová, and vice versa.

Prior to 2007, Hansard had only acted once, in 1991’s Irish rock band comedy-drama “The Commitments,” and even then, he “was basically just doing what I was told,” he would explain to the Montreal Gazette. Unwittingly, the singer/songwriter was describing what a lot of movie acting is, a performance shaped by the director and the camera as much as the performer. Yet, even if Carney did that to some degree in “Once,” he also honored his formal training-less leading man’s request to frequently keep the camera far away, even hidden, to encourage naturalism, demonstrating that there are many ways to string one’s guitar. Originally, County Cork native Cillian Murphy was going to play the role, getting cold feet and bowing out due in part to the octave-changing nature of the songs that he felt he could not handle. Those octave changes of Hansard’s, as the “Say It to Me Now” opening suggests, from tender to full-throated, melded with his performance, not hesitant in moments when he was not singing, but more reserved, even a bit sheepish, only to unleash behind the microphone. He might not have possessed the technique to evince a truly complicated individual, but in his way, did something more than that, manifesting the way in which recording artists tend to express themselves through their music and embodying an earnest belief in that music that, I suspect, only a non-actor could.

I thought of “Once” last year while watching the disappointing Bruce Springsteen movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere” about his recording the “Nebraska” album. Those sessions also famously included he and The E Street Band recording what would become the title track to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a performance so exhilarating that producer Jon Landau deemed it “the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio.” You see the moment in “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” and it’s effective in a classic Hollywood sort of way, if not quite the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio. In “Once,” on the other hand, when Hansard and Irglová’s characters scrounge up enough money to lay down a studio demo, Carney imbues a D.A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall feel, a la his documentary recounting the recording of the Original Cast album for the Broadway musical “Company.” That included an unforgettable sequence of Eileen Stritch doing take after take, deep into the night, trying to nail the solo for “Ladies Who Lunch,” going to show how what might sound spontaneous on record is often anything but. Sometimes it is, though, as it was with “Born in the U.S.A.” and as it is when Hansard and Irglová and their makeshift band lay down one take of “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” It’s thrilling, the way Carney frames and editor Paul Mullen cuts it, so that you implicitly feel how the electricity coursing between the nameless guy and girl and the electricity coursing through the performance itself is one and the same. (During the beach montage scene not long after, Carney, in fact, runs the song back again, as if this moment is so overwhelming we need to hear it a second time to process it.) It might not, itself, be the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio, but it probably comes closer than anything we have to capturing what it must have been like for Jon Landau to hear Bruce throw down “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time. 

Glen Hansard died on Wednesday July 29th in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash west of Dublin. He was 56.

Postscript (8/3/2026): The American singer songwriter Neko Case remembers a much different Glen Hansard. A reminder that people like you and me tend not to really know these people at all. You can read it at her Substack. Click here.

The Worst Movie I Have Ever Watched in a Theater

A couple weeks ago the staff at Defector was asked to name the worst movie they had ever watched in a theater and provide a brief explanation why. The post has since received over a thousand comments, as you might expect, and it naturally made me reflect on the question, though I wondered if it was a good idea to contribute with a post of my own. I wasn’t sure if I felt like going negative at a moment when everything already feels so negative in the first place. It sometimes feels easier to reflexively lambaste a movie you dislike than elucidate a movie you love. But the thing is, even seeing a bad movie in the movie theater can be illuminative. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was dreadful and made worse from my perspective because it was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic, but it also provided an essential moment of clarity: what “Star Wars” meant to me when I was a kid did not matter anymore, had stopped mattering to me a long, long time ago, and I could just put the whole thing up on a figurative shelf. When I saw “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the theater in the spring of 1990 at the age of 12, I had the profound realization that, hey, you know what, not all movies are good. 

I stayed ‘til the end of “The Rise of Skywalker,” and even more unbelievably I stayed ‘til the end of “Reindeer Games” (and saw it at all even though the person working the box office literally laughed when I said what show I wanted to see) in the winter of 2000, but I did not stay ‘til the end of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” in 2007. The first one, honestly, is overrated, inflated by the immense quality of Johnny Depp’s performance, the second one sagged, but the third was at once so gluttonous and so moribund that I simply reached a point where I literally thought to myself, “I cannot take another second of this,” stood up, and walked right out of the theater. It is the only movie I can recall paying for and leaving early. I did not walk out of “The Scorpion King” in 2002 but only because I was seeing it with my friend Nicolle and her family and because we were seeing it at the late, beloved second-run West Des Moines movie house Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, meaning I could just order another cheap light beer to power through. 

See, I worked at a movie theater in the late 90s and worked for much of it as a projectionist and/or manager, meaning I was tasked with screening virtually every movie we got after hours to ensure the film reels had been properly put together. That meant seeing a lot of dreck and so, occasionally, if there was another manager willing to endure the whole thing, there were movies I walked out of, I just didn’t pay for them. That makes leaving early a little different, a little easier to give up, like I did on “The Postman,” or on “Varsity Blues.” Once, a fellow manager and I started “My Favorite Martian,” just the two of us, and found it so affectless that we fast-forwarded the reels on the projection platter to the end so we could just go home. 

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife reports that she has never walked out of a movie, though she has seen some bad ones in the theater, nevertheless, so many bad ones that she could not narrow it down to single title when I put this question to her. “Legal Eagles,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” much to the chagrin of Jack Donaghy, “Light of Day,” which breaks her heart because she was a Michael J. Fox stan long before the term stan even entered the cultural lexicon, and “Gung Ho,” were all movies she provided as being among the worst of the worst she has seen in a theater. They were not, as she explained, schlock, a critical designation meaning they were not low budget cheesy fun but the tedious horse latitudes of Hollywood. Those four titles she supplied all sound like part of the bad DVD shelf from The Onion. 

“Pushing Tin” was on The Onion’s figurative bad DVD shelf and was also mentioned by someone in the Defector comments as the worst movie they had ever seen in a theater. And that’s what a lot of the movies I watched in the theater during those days were like – “Pushing Tin.” They were watched but not necessarily remembered; transitory in the bad way. And it does invite a question: is the worst movie watched in movie theater one that spurs nothing more than total lack of interest, or is it one that provokes intense dislike? My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife also mentioned “Under the Skin” as one of the worst movies she has seen in a movie theater, not because it washed over her unremembered because she was disgusted by it just as I was disgusted by “The Trip to Italy” as tantamount to a three-hour Widespread Panic concert with celebrity impressions in place of guitar noodling. She and I can agree to disagree on those movies (I loved “Under the Skin”; she loved “The Trip to Italy”), but I think we would both agree those movies are doing something, they are just doing something that each of us personally rejects. I mean, I have not yet mentioned “Armageddon”, which I generally cite as the worst movie I have ever seen, and I did see it in a movie theater. But even I will admit that Michael Bay is an auteur in his way, and even if his aesthetic made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs, he did not cause my eyelids to droop, and then to ultimately close.

In 2004, on the other hand, I fell asleep watching “Van Helsing” in a theater. Why did I see that movie? Probably because of Kate Beckinsale, if I’m being honest, or maybe because back then I saw almost everything on opening weekend and there was nothing else opening that week in central Iowa. And the thing is, that’s really all I remember of the experience: falling asleep. I could not recite a line, a scene, a moment, nothing; I do not remember a single thing that happened aside from suddenly waking up from a nap I did not realize I drifted into and thinking, “Hey, when did Frankenstein’s monster get here?” I might have walked out right then except I was mired in that post-afternoon nap state of grogginess, could not really bring myself to move, surrendered, fell back in my chair, and apropos of the worst movie I have ever watched in a theater, dozed off again. 

In the Grey

“In the Grey” is the figurative place where Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works as a debt collector for shady investment firms lending massive sums of money to unscrupulous borrowers. Borrowers like criminal tycoon Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), from whom Rachel is hired to extract the one billion he never paid back, the narrative engine of writer/director Guy Ritchie’s action-thriller. You cannot, alas, just sit down and ask a criminal tycoon’s lawyer, Mr. Horowitz (Fisher Stevens, having the most fun of anyone in the cast, I swear), for the money, though she does just that as something of a feint before pressuring Salazar by dispatching her team of furtive operatives led by Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill) to sabotage his various businesses and bring him to the table. If this set-up raises some comical notions of criminal code, like the pseudo-ethical line between going after someone’s business investments and someone’s personal investments, Ritchie mostly just treats all this financial gobbledygook as pretext for ravishing scenery and an ultimate showdown with Salazar’s private army on his private island. Rachel might technically be in charge, but Ritchie’s heart is with Bronco and Sid.

That’s a little ironic because between and this and Ritchie’s previous action opus, “Fountain of Youth,” it would seem he wants to help make González a star. His idea of doing so here, however, seems to be nothing more than putting her in fabulous costumes. Indeed, those costumes, courtesy of Loulou Bontemps, are the real stars, including a flowing white get-up in a brief desert scene that looks plucked from luxury Tatooine fashion magazine, and a half-black, half-white dress that suggests a wearable black and white cookie commissioned for the Met Gala. As far as her vaguely defined character goes, Rachel’s team codenames her mom, seeming to paint all these buff, proficient, weapon-toting operatives as her sons, except that in Gyllenhaal and Cavill’s understated, frequently deadpan chemistry there is no mistaking the unmentioned but obvious homoerotic undertones between Bronco and Sid. Are they sons or lovers, Ritchie does not seem to know, nor care, never committing, mere allusions ultimately signifying nothing even if glimpses of the fun Gyllenhaal and Cavill are having still emerge now and again. 

Often Ritchie the screenwriter is just teeing it up for Ritchie the co-producer and location manager Nicolás Kico Aráez to shine, marshaling I-don’t-know-how-many locales and places, and teeing it up, too, for editor Martin Walsh to stitch so many scenes and accompanying exposition together. It’s nothing if not a professional production and that professionalism echoes Bronco and Sid’s habitually unfazed approach, so unfazed as to be damn near aloof. They are so good at what they do, that even as the plot picks up speed and the stakes theoretically increase, everything fits together with minimal fuss, so much so that the one hitch consciously feels like screenplay engineering, underlined in how Ritchie never even really lets the nominal emotion of it resonate. It’s ultimately evocative of “In the Grey” itself, a slam-bang thriller that passes like an inconsequential breeze.

Friday's Old Fashioned: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has one of the greatest movie character introductions: a solitary figure virtually hidden beneath an enormous fur coast astride a horse in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902. When the figure finally reaches its destination of a rugged mining town, it dismounts and removes the coat. You expect, say, Tom Hardy as a neanderthal-like mountain man and instead, Warren Beatty emerges. He is John McCabe, wearing a suit, albeit a bit rumpled given the circumstances, and dons a derby hat, tipping it to a passerby, cutting the image of a displaced dapper gentleman. The town is named Presbyterian Church, but its central gathering place is the saloon, not the chapel, where McCabe promptly heads, throws a cloth over the table, as if seeking to class up the joint a little, and fires up a card game to start making some money. The saloon owner, Patrick Sheehand (René Auberjonois), approaches, asking if they go into business together by working out a cut of the proceeds, but McCabe begs off. The scene is infused with Altman’s patented style of overlapping dialogue, myriad conversations happening at once, and has the effect of establishing the town itself existing independently of McCabe while simultaneously imbuing the sense that McCabe exists always at center of his own universe.

His universe is thrown for a loop when he purchases three women and opens a brothel, one that only starts turning a profit, however, when the recently arrived Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) convinces him to make her a partner and let her run the place since it’s clear his business acumen lags behind his braggadocio. Indeed, Beatty gives an exemplary performance of a man putting on airs who almost, but not quite, knows he is putting on airs and which pairs perfectly with Christie’s raw candor; there’s this thing she does with her face, occasionally twisting it into a kind of confounded grimace, not able to fathom this blustery half-imbecile before her. When they sit down for breakfast to hash out the details of their partnership, Mrs. Miller orders almost as much as Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” though it’s not a come-on as it was in that 2017 movie but a throwing down, leaving McCabe to look on like a lost little boy. He might become attracted to her, and she to him, but when they eventually wind up in bed together, Altman’s camera drifts away from them and to Mrs. Miller’s dresser where he has put the cash to pay for her time, as funny and sardonic a shot as you’ll see. 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is all business. Even the rumor that he McCabe a gunfighter of some renown known as Pudgy McCabe, which is eventually called into question, comes to feel mostly like a matter of branding. McCabe might claim to have poetry in him, but we don’t hear any of it. The world that Altman cultivates in the dim interiors and frequently harsh exteriors, a town with mud for streets and lumber stacked high is still in the process of building itself, is one that does not make room for poetry. Merely surviving day to day is the highest priority. That becomes an open question for McCabe when the powerful mining company with a hold on the town dispatches a couple representatives to try and buy out McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s successful operation. And though “The Art of the Deal” might not have been published until seven decades later, McCabe proves its ideas are timeless, spurning the initial entreaties as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger payout, only to peeve the negotiators and wind up with three men sent to kill him in lieu of any further bargaining. Art of the deal, indeed.

In another movie, this might be the moment when McCabe finds something within himself that he did not know he had to become a hero. That very notion is mocked by having McCabe meet with a politically ambitious lawyer (William Devane) who suggests taking the mining company to court, sticking it to large corporations and making McCabe a hero of small business owners everywhere, an idea that McCabe quite likes, even repeating it to Mrs. Miller. She looks at him like his days are numbered. He can’t stop what’s coming, though there will be no quick draw or ten paces, foreshadowed in one of the hired guns, a sadistic kid (Manfred Schulz), killing a goofy innocent (Keith Carradine) just to kill him. There is no gallantry here, just gutless desperation, and the ensuing shootout between McCabe and the three men is as funny as it is tragic with our nominal hero mislaying his shotgun and having it confiscated by a minister, of all people, stopping off for a beer and a bump midway through, scurrying around in the falling snow, and shooting people in the back. As it plays out, the Presbyterian church catches on fire, causing the town folk to rally together to save it, a sly juxtaposition to the gunfight that only emphasizes its meaningless. As the town is saved, McCabe winds up dead in the snow and Mrs. Miller winds up in a drug-induced stupor, just one more failed business venture, the American Dream brutally reconstituted as an opium haze.