Cinema Romantico

Pitch Meeting: Death Doula

2026-04-15T06:00:00.008-05:00

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

2026-04-13T06:00:00.001-05:00

“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.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Apollo 13 (1995)

2026-04-10T06:00:00.026-05:00

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.

keira knightley contemplates the hideous lonely emptiness of existence

2026-04-08T06:00:00.017-05:00

Some Drivel On...the first 30 Minutes of Apollo 11

2026-04-06T06:00:00.084-05:00

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.

In Memoriam: Suki Lahav

2026-04-04T08:00:00.065-05:00

Bruce Springsteen and Suki Lahav, 1974.

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

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

Friday's Old Fashioned: History of the World – Part 1 (1981)

2026-04-03T06:00:00.015-05:00

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 Memoriam: James Tolkan

2026-04-01T06:00:00.014-05:00

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.

The Rip

2026-03-30T06:00:00.001-05:00

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)?

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Outfit (1973)

2026-03-27T06:00:00.009-05:00

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.

Eephus

2026-03-25T06:00:00.050-05:00

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 All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

2026-03-23T10:00:00.048-05:00

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 Zippy was 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.

Some Drivel On...Quantum Hoops

2026-03-19T06:00:00.005-05:00

“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 Show Goes On: the 98th Academy Awards

2026-03-16T12:00:00.005-05:00

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.

(Big) Best Picture Questions

2026-03-13T06:00:00.126-05:00

“Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” – Comrade Josh, One Battle After Another

What, exactly, do we want from the Academy Award for Best Picture? Should it be the movie that most captures the public’s imagination? Should it be the movie that makes the most money? Are those two things interchangeable or are they incompatible or are they somewhere in-between? Should it be a movie that says something? If so, what should it say, and how should it say it? Subtly or with great force? Should it take sides, or should it take no sides at all? Should it be topical, or should it be more universal? Should it be, simply, the best movie of the year? But how on earth do you quantify the best movie of the year? You think it’s “Oppenheimer,” but I think it’s “Barbie,” and it was “Barbie,” you’re wrong, sorry, but where does that get us? Do we really want art to be an ice dancing competition? But then, I’m not voting and you’re not voting; the Academy is voting. What does any of it have to do with us? Maybe they just want to reward the movie that gave the most people jobs.

Maybe what the collective “we” wants more than anything, though, is a Best Picture winner that stands the test of time. That is what so many lists sprouting up this time of year would seem to suggest, anyway, the ones counting all times the Oscars got it wrong, and the people telling you for the millionth time that “Goodfellas” should have won Best Picture over “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 would seem to suggest it too. But expecting 11,000 people to predict by majority what movie will measure up three or four decades from now is asking a lot. “The Last Emperor” swept the Academy Awards in 1987, winning all 9 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet, who remembers it, who talks about it? There was a whole “Frasier” episode about this phenomenon with the eponymous psychiatrist repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to watch and enjoy “How Green Was My Valley”: “It won five Academy Awards!” he bellows to the indifferent teenage clerk at the video rental store. “It’s a classic!” Twenty years later, that is how I feel about “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that the culture at large discarded. Would I have told people in 2005 that “Million Dollar Baby” would last forever? I did tell people that! But whether something is timeless can only be measured with, well, obviously. “They come where they come from,” the esteemed Roger Ebert said in 2003 regarding this very subject. “You never know until they arrive.” To paraphrase Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” I’ve heard people say for years about certain movies that this one will endure, “trust me, when I know, I know, and when it comes to this movie, I know,” and they don’t.

If aging has taught me anything, it’s that for all their pomp and circumstance, the Oscars are as ephemeral as they are everlasting, and that they tend to capture fleeting moments in time more than they portend the future. “The Silence of the Lambs” became an unexpected pop culture juggernaut and lightning rod in 1991; “The English Patient” put an exclamation point on the 90s indie revolution in 1996; like Kevin Costner and “Dances with Wolves” before him, Ben Affleck and “Argo” were carried away on a sudden wave of goodwill in 2012. On a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Michael Schulman noted that generally the Best Picture nominees of any given year indirectly evoke a larger cultural feeling reflective of their respective moment. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution captured one of these moments in full detail, an awards season pitched between the last vespers of the Golden Age and New Hollywood. I will not launch into yet another impassioned defense of “Titanic,” but at the time of its Oscar triumph in 1997, William Goldman, a fervent admirer of it, was also foreseeing a future in which people wondered what the fuss had been all about. In the moment, everybody knows everything, but in the end, as Goldman said, [say it with me] nobody knows anything.

Ah, and yet, during this very awards season, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has notified us that “Hamnet” will stand the test of time, and Matt Neal of ABC Radio in Australia has advised us that “Sinners” will stand the test of time. All this talk of time is funny because it was a central subject of several Best Picture nominees. “Train Dreams” advances the idea that we can only understand our existence through the rearview mirror; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb “The Secret Agent” demonstrates how history can become buried beneath the sands of time while “Sentimental Value” illustrates that time alone does not necessarily heal all wounds; in one breathtaking sequence, “Sinners” draws past, present, and future all together at once in the same room. “One Battle After Another” draws all those concepts together too. Rather than having a character say, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us,” as he did in his own “Magnolia,” writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson creates a vibe, to use the parlance of our times, that improbably blends the 1960s/70s and the present-day. And in adapting and remodeling Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the story of a burned out revolutionary and his burgeoning revolutionary daughter, PTA embodies the endless tide of the 250-year battle over America’s soul going in and out.

Whether “One Battle After Another” is better than “Sinners,” or whether it deserves Best Picture more, honestly, means less to me than how both movies suggest a way forward in an industry that has been stuck at a crossroads doubling as a cul-de-sac for years now. Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are event films with a pulse, pop moviemaking with a distinct auteurist bent, supreme craft and relentless energy intertwined with a deeper meaning. Of course, both movies were produced by Warner Bros., which is merging with Paramount, run by one our most prominent uncaring idiot sons, and the code that was just cracked might intentionally be lost forever, one more moment in time destined to slip through our fingers.

Harrison Ford: an Appreciation

2026-03-11T06:00:00.097-05:00

A few months ago, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I started watching “Shrinking,” the Apple TV show in which Harrison Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the unlikely patriarch of a makeshift family of therapists in his practice and all the people in their lives. It is firmly in the “Ted Lasso” dramedy vein, one where the comedy can sometimes hinder the drama, and vice-versa, allowing difficult ideas to go down a little too easy, though such sentimentality is counterbalanced by Ford’s irascible vulnerability. Everything that Ford is blossoms in the role of Paul, so much so that the character’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s forcing him to confront his mortality feels on some level like it is preparing us all for the eventuality of Ford’s death. I don’t mean to be dark. There is something refreshing about such honesty in our age of longevity-obsessed bros and Ford, after all, is the one who thought Han Solo should be killed off all the way back in “Return of the Jedi,” demonstrating that he already knew in a way that so many do not that not everything is meant to last forever. What’s more, in recently accepting the SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ford nodded at that reality too. “I am in a room of actors,” he began his acceptance speech by saying, “many of whom are here because they have been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.” In that moment, taking a beat after the self-deprecating punchline for a deadpan stare, it was hard not to think: the old guy’s still got it.

To a person of my generation, Ford is a big deal, having starred in touchstones whose names do not even need mentioning. Roles like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are iconic, but they became iconic later. He made them what they were, and he was virtually inextricable from them, and it’s why I’m almost positive that he was the first actor, nay, movie star whose name I really, truly knew. Now, the line on movie stars is that their persona tends to overwhelm the role, and while Ford’s characters almost always have that same gruff, laconic exterior, he creates interiors, too, as he did in the (more than middling) thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive.” He spends so much of that movie alone, and yet we also not only always know what his character is thinking but who he is. Ford’s pause before his character leaps off the dam turns a stunt set piece into an emotional leap of faith, the nexus of movie star acting. His craft tends to disappear before your eyes, which is why, I suspect, he never won an Oscar and was only nominated once; those fellow Academy actors like to see the acting.

There was no bigger box office star in the 80s, and there were only a handful of box office stars in the 90s who were bigger, but as the industry changed in the new millennium, turning its attention to superheroes and more youth-oriented franchises, it was hard not to feel Ford’s star dim. He spent a couple decades starring in vanishing middle-class movies that felt like they were transplanted from the 80s and 90s (“Firewall,” “Morning Glory,”) and hawking bottled nostalgia in the new Indiana Jones movie and the new “Star Wars” trilogy. Where once he helped to create something new and invigorating, now he seemed to struggle from lack of a better idea. In 2010, one line in the “Extraordinary Measures” trailer turned him into a meme, and it felt like a demarcation between generations, one that remembered who he had been and one that wasn’t sure what to make of this curmudgeonly old coot. He finally conceded in 2025 and appeared in “Captain America: Brave New World,” the fourth movie in the “Captain America” series. Reviews were mixed.

That movie was an extension of a TV series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” evoking the blurring lines between the big screen and the small screen in our current entertainment landscape, a reality that Ford seemed to acknowledge by returning to scripted television for the first time since his big break. I don’t want to turn this into another movies versus TV debate, but I had always hoped that Hollywood could mount one more movie project worthy of Ford to give him a proper send-off. Yet, appropriately for someone essentially self-taught as an actor, he manifested that send-off for himself in his SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. In briefly remembering his own career while noting the whole purpose of SAG in the first place as protection and fellowship, he gave something that sounded a lot like a Hollywood farewell address. Even more than that, it was how he gave it. We live in an era of attention-seeking bluster and noise and yet, here was Ford with an innate master class in acting on camera, effortlessly drawing and holding the attention of everyone watching without raising his voice or over-exaggerating, epitomizing a movie star’s sense of presence. The pictures have gotten smaller, that’s indisputable, and Ford is living proof, but in that moment, he still felt larger than life.

1995 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

2026-03-09T06:00:00.058-05:00

The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtrack compilations and 1995 was the peak. The #1 selling single on the Billboard Hot 100 was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” culled from the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack, while the #4 selling single, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” was included on the “Batman Forever” soundtrack. Other big Billboard hits of the year like Diana King’s “Shy Guy” and Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came from the “Bad Boys” and “Friday” soundtracks, respectively. The “Friday” soundtrack spent two weeks as the top-selling album in America and the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack was the top-selling record for all of September. Oh, but there was so much more.

There were soundtracks with contemporary appeal, like those for “Empire Records” and “Mallrats” reflecting the era of alternative rock, and soundtracks with a historical pull, like “Dead Presidents” collecting so many great old R&B and Soul tunes that it released a Part One and Part Two. The Parker Posey-fronted cult classic “Party Girl” would have been unthinkable without its club-ready soundtrack while the “Boys on the Side” soundtrack was like proto-Lilith Fair. I requested for the latter for Christmas in 1995 and though Bonnie Raitt’s “You Got It” was the big single, as a Sheryl Crow stan, I most enjoyed her giving the Derek and the Dominos slice of blues-rock “Keep on Growing” a pop bent. (Wait, I have to stop and listen again right now. We continue.) Raitt’s song was a cover too, of Roy Orbison, and that brings me to my point: virtually none of the music I have mentioned was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Covers are disqualified. That’s why Whitney Houston could not be nominated, never mind win, for her globe-conquering “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard” in 1992, remember. Songs not written specifically for the movie itself are ineligible too, which disqualified “Kiss from a Rose,” plucked from Seal’s eponymous album released a year earlier. Songs that include samples are also ineligible which is why “Gangsta’s Paradise” in addition to “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” and “Shy Guy” could not make the cut. In a year where so much current pop music bled over into the movies, so much of it could not be recognized, leaving a Best Song category that looked like so many Best Song categories before it, not quite five unsalted crackers lined up in a row but close. And that is why I am here to reimagine this category if I, and I alone, were the judge and jury. Because what a category it could have been.

1995 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees (winner in bold):

Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas - Music by Alan Menken and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Dead Man Walkin’ from Dead Man Walking - Music & Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? from Don Juan DeMarco - Music & Lyrics by Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen & Mutt Lange

Moonlight from Sabrina - Music by John Williams and Lyrics by Marilyn Bergman

You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story - Music & Lyrics by Randy Newman

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means that “God Moving Over the Face of The Waters” by Moby in “Heat and “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley in “Strange Days” are ineligible. Add, say, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia in “Casino,” “Come Here” by Kath Bloom in “Before Sunrise,” and, of course, “Techno Syndrome” by The Immortals in “Mortal Kombat” and, my God, what a category. Alas.

In researching this post, I was shocked to learn that the “Don Juan DeMarco” soundtrack was initially slated to include a duet recorded by, get this, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe. That song, “It Might Hurt a Bit,” was not included and never released, shunted for a Bryan Adams ballad that despite featuring preeminent flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia still, in the end, feels like a Bryan Adams ballad. And arriving as it did on the heels of both “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers,” this one was like the dishwater left in the sink after all the dishes have been cleaned. Enough was enough, alright, Academy. It was time to move on to other things. Like Salt-N-Pepa’s body-positive “I Am the Body Beautiful” off the “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar” soundtrack that as best I can tell, deployed a wholly original beat which would have made it eligible.

Ok. Time to address the elephant in the room – my main man, Bruce Springsteen. His theme for “Dead Man Walking” is solid. His musical spareness in this era could sometimes get the best of him, but it works well for this one, and though he cribs one lyric from his own songbook, he splits the difference with one that is just classic Bruce: “Sister, I won’t ask forgiveness. My sins are all I have.” But the truth is, Springsteen wrote a similarly themed sort of song the same year, “Highway 29,” that is vastly superior, as was his Oscar-winning Best Song two years prior, “Streets of Philadelphia.” And anyway, while “Dead Man Walking” is a very good movie, “Clueless,” strange as it might sound to compare them was better and deserved a Best Picture nod and the principal song of the “Clueless” soundtrack, Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel,” which was, in fact, written for the movie and therefore eligible under the Oscar’s rules, deserved a Best Song nod too. Springsteen is out and Sobule is in.

I am tempted to include “Ask for You” from the “Higher Learning” soundtrack, Raphael Saddiq’s bop that got all the way to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, but I can’t bring myself to leave off “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the foundational linchpin of “Toy Story” and the whole subsequent series. Of the actual nominees, that probably should have won, and it will be the only song to retain its nomination, even if I suspect that Randy Newman would tell me to keep it if he’s not getting the retroactive win.

The easy listening of “Moonlight,” meanwhile, is barely worth a mention, reminding me of a line from Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”: “When ‘A Quiet Storm’ comes on I fall asleep.” The winning “Colors of the Wind,” meanwhile, is fine, I guess, but mostly just riding the coattails of the Disney songs that won this same award three of the four years preceding it. Because there is one soundtrack that some astute readers may have noticed I had not yet mentioned: “Waiting to Exhale,” a Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced record so good that it was #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1996, earned 11 Grammy nominations, and even forced self-proclaimed dean of the rock critics Robert Christgau to grudgingly grade it an A-. That none of its songs were nominated speaks to the 68th Academy Awards nominating but a single black nominee in all categories, leading to natural backlash, fury, and protest, much of it spurred by the recently deceased Jesse Jackson a couple decades before #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, no one could even mount a bad-faith argument about the American cultural meritocracy when it came to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack because if that were true, the album would have had two nominations in this category, at least.

The lead single was Whitney Houston’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys and was #14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1996. It was a quality song, you don’t need me to tell you that, but remember, I’m judge and jury here and I’m giving the first spot to TLC’s “This Is How It Works.” Because I love the song, of course, and also because I like imagining a bunch of white septuagenarian and octogenarians watching a performance of a song by three black women coaching their men through sex while a person in the production room sits there the whole time on panicked edge like Beaker with his finger hovering over the broadcast delay button. It might have been the greatest five minutes in Oscar history. Alas.

But. In the end, the faux retroactive Oscar can only go to one song off the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, and it goes to Toni Braxton’s. If you ask me now, 30 years later, to explain what 1995-96 sounded like, well, I might just play you Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: Nowhere to Hide (1987)

2026-03-06T06:00:00.024-06:00

“Nowhere to Hide” ends with a car chase in which a helicopter is chasing a car, which is just how you want a mid-80s conspiracy thriller to conclude, but what stuck with me more was when in the middle of an earlier car chase, ex-Marine Barbara Cutter (Amy Madigan) is forced to change a tire when one goes flat. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen that before: a mid-car chase tire change. And whether a spare could hold up under car chase conditions when the pursuit continues, well, I was less concerned with that than how the episode demonstrated Barbara’s cool resourcefulness. It’s one element that did not feel straight off the shelf, as so much of “Nowhere to Hide” does, one part “Commando,” one part “Hard to Kill,” one part “Rambo.” Why there is even a macabre nod to the space shuttle Challenger in so much as this conspiracy thriller turns on a defective military helicopter C-ring.

The last one is being investigated by Barbara’s husband (Daniel Hugh Kelly), promptly killed when he gets close to the truth, and right in front of his and Barbara’s young son, Johnny (Robin MacEachern). That distinguishes “Nowhere to Hide” as an 80s movie, alright, quite happy to blend gruesome violence with a tender mother/son relationship. Granted, the son is often treated less as a character than a plot device, unwittingly toting around both the C-ring waiting to expose the truth and the homing beacon that ensures he and his mom can never get too far away from the bad guys, but Madigan’s emotional ferocity makes you believe all this is happening, nevertheless. It’s why even if one part of me thinks “Nowhere to Hide” could have used more Michael Ironside as Barbara’s survivalist Vietnam-vet brother, another part of me knows nothing would surpass Madigan embodying Barbara’s maternal hysterical strength, changing a car tire in lieu of lifting a car.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

2026-03-04T06:00:00.006-06:00

When the credits rolled on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” I noticed that Josh Safdie, of the erstwhile Safdie Brothers, served as one of the producers. That felt right to me because the preceding 114 minutes felt like an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy Safdie-like joint. That is not to divest writer/director Mary Bronstein of her auteurist imprint. Bronstein made “Yeast” in 2008, back when the Safdies were just starting out, and it, too, was an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy joint. I say all this to contextualize what you go through in watching “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which is not about addicts, or petty criminals, or a fanatical table tennis player, but a mother, the hardest job in the world. That’s sort of what Bronstein’s movie is, a dramatic thriller about motherhood, starring Rose Byrne as Linda, taking care of a young daughter with a feeding disorder that necessitates virtual round-the-clock care. Bronstein chooses never to show Linda’s daughter in a full shot, reducing her almost entirely to a voice. That choice is disorienting and effective, as if taking the notion of an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter and shattering it, amplified through the frequently intense close-ups of Linda and the cacophonous, unrelenting sound of her daughter’s voice, evoking the strange feeling of loneliness that comes on from never ever having the chance to be alone.

Linda is virtually on her own as a caretaker because her husband Charles is a ship captain who is always away at sea. Stop and think about that for a second. It’s funny, albeit in the darkest way possible and as such, indicative of the darkly comical streak coursing through “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” one furthered in Linda’s occupation as a therapist, dispensing psychoanalysis even as both the script and Byrne cultivate the air of someone who looks like she’s on the couch even while she’s in the chair. She finds herself treating a new mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), suffering from postpartum depression and an absent husband, and who thinks Linda is failing to meet her needs just as Linda herself receives treatment from a colleague (Conan O’Brien) who she is convinced is failing to meet her needs. A rare foray into legitimate acting, O’Brien is quite good, though in so many ways, Bronstein helps to sculpt his performance. By yoking the movie so resolutely to Linda’s point-of-view, it is difficult to surmise her reliability as a narrator, and how much her colleague’s brusque, even dismissive, attitude is the reality of what is occurring of merely her perception. “What is it you’re so sure I can’t help you with?” he asks at one point, a breathtaking moment that feels like a moment where we might be seeing him unadorned…but we can’t be sure.

That unreliability extends to the hole that opens in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place, and forcing her and her daughter to evacuate to a seedy motel. She keeps returning to the apartment, anyway, transfixed by the hole, and whether this is pure symbolism or something more supernatural is a question that Bronstein is content to leave unexplained. Those dueling sensations coalesce in Byrne’s mesmerizing turn, in equal measure conveying realism and madness, comedy and horror, and inviting as much disdain as empathy; you don’t necessarily like the destructive decisions she’s making even if you understand why she’s making them. Whether you take the conclusion to be real or imaginary, it can’t help but feel telegraphed, from a thousand movies before it as much as “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” nodding toward it the whole way. It also doesn’t much matter because Byrne sweeps you up and carries you along, making it feel as if Linda herself is being swept along by some unstoppable current, increasingly unable to fight against it, as if no longer living life but left wholly at its mercy.

F1 the Movie

2026-03-02T06:00:00.032-06:00

Like a Hollywood movie studio from the golden age running back a hit formula, producer Jerry Bruckheimer simply re-enlisted the same directing and writing team – Joseph Kosinski and Ehren Krueger, respectively – behind “Top Gun: Maverick” for last year’s “F1 the Movie” and then transplanted it from Naval Fighter Weapons School to the auto racing world of Formula 1. After all, in structure and in spirit, “Top Gun: Maverick” was essentially a sports movie, and so the same formula proves a natural fit in the world of open wheel racing. And if that means you know narratively what’s coming the whole way through, well, there is something reassuring in that, like an F1 driver who knows every turn of every track, when to brake, when to go, what line to take. We’re here for precision maintenance and reliability, not revelation. Not that “F1 the Movie” is wholly unrevealing. I confess, I’m less a connoisseur of auto racing than I am of movie stars and what fascinates me most is not the Formula 1 of it all but how Brad Pitt, who doubles as producer, filters his persona through Formula 1.

Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a one-time F1 wunderkind who has been wandering in the racing wilderness ever since a terrible crash. After helping a racing team to win 24 Hours of Daytona, carving space for a Shea Whigham appearance that is all too brief, Sonny is called to his adventure in a laundromat, a nice locational touch evincing his nomad tendencies, by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), a one-time teammate who now runs a struggling F1 team that his board is in danger of selling lest they win one of the season’s remaining races. Sonny is not just there to drive, of course, but to bump heads with his rookie teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), to fall in something approximating love with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), and to be Essentially, “F1 the Movie” is just “Talladega Nights” in reverse, with a hotshot American invading Formula One rather than the other way around, illustrated when Sonny first meets Ruben’s team, walking down the track in long shot, as if emerging from the desert. He might as well be wearing a cowboy hat. This shot made me laugh out loud which I mostly mean as a compliment.

Much of “F1: the Movie” takes place on the track, of course, and Kosinski and his production team, cinematographer Claudio Miranda, composer Hans Zimmer and the sound department create a spectacular series of racing scenes, evincing the on-track frenzy as sensory explosions of sight and sound, music and racing crew chatter and TV commentary and car sound effects all layered on top of one another, furthered in close-ups of the drivers waging all-out war against g forces just in trying to turn the wheel and this all-encompassing, stomach-dropping sensation of speed, of always being one brief moment away from losing control even as the drivers somehow almost always maintain it while navigating their way between cars. And all of it builds to one astonishing final moment that to its immense credit, is less about a narrative result than a feeling, one in which the notion of being out of control seems to loop back around and improbably meet being in complete command, like a dream where you’re running and your feet don’t touch the ground but if you were driving a car at high speed instead. It’s so good that you wish the screenplay did not underline what is transpiring with dialogue. Alas.

If the scenes on the track are sometimes spectacular, those of it are strictly painted by numbers. There is no tension in any of the interpersonal relationships because the characters are all archetypes and because the character of Sonny flouts the single most hard and fast rule: he never changes. He is virtually the same person at the end as he is at the beginning. Chris Stapleton’s song “Bad as I Used to Be” epitomizes it, but believe it or not, Sonny most evokes a Kate McKinnon line when she played Hillary Rodham Clinton back on Saturday Night Live: “flawed yet perfect.” Sonny is vincible, but also invincible, not always right, but never wrong, all brought home in his observation that when you lose, sometimes you win. When he has the winning hand in a game of cards with Joseph but declines to show them to let Joseph win instead, there are no points for exclaiming, “I knew it,” because, of course, you did; we all did; that’s Sonny Hayes. Even the eventual revelation of his perilous physical nature is mostly brushed aside, exemplifying how Sonny spends the whole movie walking between raindrops, and I could not stop wondering if Brad Pitt thinks of himself as someone who walks between raindrops too.

From the Couch: the 2026 Winter Olympics in Review

2026-02-23T06:00:00.027-06:00

The last Italian Winter Games 20 years ago in Turin were the worst Olympics of my Olympics-obsessed life. This had nothing to do with the Games themselves and everything to do with my physical health having fallen off a cliff at the start of 2006. Something was terribly wrong with me, and at that point, no one knew what, and so even though I watched the Olympics that year, I watched less of them than usual, and almost all my memories of doing so melted in real time. The only one I retain is U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen’s long program. She was in second place after the preceding short program, but had a reputation for struggling under pressure, and I wanted so much for her to excel. That same day I had been scheduled to see a gastroenterologist who would cancel on me at the last minute, foreshadowing how unhelpful and uncaring he would be, and so, I was already glum when I went to a sports bar with friends. I had avoided Cohen’s results all day, because 20 years ago NBC still showed everything on tape delay, but when she took to the ice for the make-or-break moment, a woman a couple tables over, in the air of someone who only finds fun in ruining everyone else’s, loudly declared: “She doesn’t win.” That is my foremost Turin takeaway: sitting there in that moment, feeling like I wanted to cry and not because I was watching a medal ceremony. I still can’t make peace with that joy-taker in my own mind, though in her wretched way, she encapsulated my experience of the Turin Games: they were ruined before they had even begun.

The Olympics are not just about America, never have been, never will be (should be), but considering that we’re the one making a mess of things in the international order, I admired so many American athletes in Milan and in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the 2026 Winter Olympics wrestling with those mixed emotions, like curler Rich Ruohonen and freestyle skier Hunter Hess. The latter stoked the ire of our know nothing President who in his third-grade syntax deemed Hess a real loser and hard to root for, contradicting his own Vice President’s self-congratulatory banalities about rooting for all Americans despite political affiliation. Hess’s teammate Chloe Kim might be right that we should lead with love and compassion, but occasionally it’s refreshing to hear the candor of someone like Greenland biathlete Ukaleq Slettemark who said of the American President: “I hate him.” Thankfully, Hess did not require a humanitarian visa a la Krystsina Tsimanouskaya at the 2021 Summer Olympics after she criticized her native Belarus, though the President would undoubtedly prefer America to be a place that imprisoned people for being mean to him. It’s an extension of his T*ump brand totalitarianism, described by Thomas Friedman as a Me First policy, an inescapable thirst to infect every aspect of everyone’s daily life, as The Onion once put it. He’s a joy-taker, in other words, that woman in the bar recast as the chief executive of the federal government. And you know what, after waiting 20 years for an Italian Winter Olympic do-over, I decided that I would not let him take my joy.

Joy is virtually inseparable from wonder and wonder is what Dana Milbank of The Washington Post argued in December we all need more of in our lives. His search for wonder was framed through the visual arts and, more specifically, through a program at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. titled Finding Awe. I find plenty of awe in the visual arts – this is chiefly a movie blog, after all – but upon experiencing my first Olympics 38 years ago this month, I innately recognized the quadrennial sporting spectacle as a fount for wonder. And though their all-encompassing nature might seem at odds with slowing down, which Milbank wrote was a crucial ingredient in finding awe, well, I have always viewed those two weeks when the Olympic torch is lit as a chance to slow down, to disengage from the larger world and to center myself, like my favorite snowboarder Maddie Mastro taking a few extra breaths before her next descent into the halfpipe.

I have developed true fondness for snowboarding, not least because its competitors seem to seek wonder as much as medals, and though most of the sport’s terminology eludes me, I don’t really need to understand it to know when it fires my neurons. Indeed, it goes so to show how a “lack of knowledge can be helpful, as National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told Milbank. “That moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder.” The Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Klæbo so empathetically broke away from the pack on the last uphill climb in the men’s cross-country sprint in Cortina that the skiers behind him looked like little kids trying to keep up with dad made me say oh my goodness – well, “oh my God.” In his last race, the revered 50k, Klæbo and his two fellow Norwegians Martin Loewstroem Nyenget and Emil Iversen surged to the lead and spent most of the race skiing by themselves. Milbank wrote about visual art opening portals to our past, and in these images, I felt connected to mine through a painting on our living room wall of three cross-country skiers alone amid the trees, which I always imagined as my dad, my grandpa, and my dad’s best friend. I was transported, watching these three Norsemen ski, even if I knew the idyll belied the coming Klæbo storm. I did not feel tension so much as anticipation, waiting for him to make his move, which he finally did on the same hill as in the men’s sprint, just this time after 2 hours of skiing. In earning victory, he won his sixth gold medal, the most of any one person at any single Winter Olympics ever, though more than that, I will always remember three Norwegians in the middle of an Olympic race looking like they were out for a ski through the woods.

When I was an impatient kid, I preferred the sprints in long track speed skating, but over time, I have come to love the longer distances so much more and how the skaters’ cool, composed faces at the start gradually become unmasked with each lap of the oval. In the women’s 5,000m, though, the mask of Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida did not just come down, no, the burden of the last few laps became so palpable in her face and in her form that American commentator Joey Cheek spent the last few laps insisting she could not possibly hold her lead, until she did. The whole thing reminded me of the reaction of Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton in the wake of becoming the first woman to win gold in the inaugural ski mountaineering competition: she looked into the camera, smiled, and shrugged, wonder rendered as the inexplicable.

As much as the first Summer Olympics were made in the image of Athens, the first Winter Olympics were made in the image of the Alps, and though the view from on the ground rather than from my couch suggests the experience in Cortina was fraught, the pollyannish parts of my heart yearn for the IOC to work out a way for more such places to host without being ridden roughshod over because these Games benefitted from an infusion of alpine wonder missing from so many recent entries. That wonder was exemplified in the women’s giant slalom. I watched it to see if America’s Mikaela Shiffrin would win gold (she did not, though she won later in the slalom), but then, the Olympics always make your memories for you rather than the other way around. For a time, the giant slalom suggested my favorite ski race ever, with Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund and Sweden’s Sara Hector tied for first, their arms around one another in the leader’s box as if they were just trying to hang on. They needn’t have worried, however, because Italy’s Federica Brignone made the host country proud by making like the tiger on her helmet and roaring to victory by six-tenths of a second in a sport where six-tenths of a second is like an epoch. It was so resounding that the silver medalists did their finest Wayne and Garth – “We’re not worthy!” – by literally and amusingly bowing to Brignone before the trio had the time of their lives on the medal stand, emitting enough joy to power Cortina’s snowmaking system.

If wonder is inextricable from joy, well, in a competitive arena like the Olympics, so, too, is it inextricable from agony. When American Lindsey Vonn ruptured her ACL just before Milano Cortina, she chose to compete in the downhill race anyway, and then crashed 13 seconds in, breaking her leg and getting airlifted off the mountain. If some thought it reckless, or vainglorious, I was awestruck. I thought she infused the jejune phrase the glory of sport, the one in the Olympic creed, with more blood, muscle, and bone than just about anyone. Vivre sa vie.

America’s male figure skater Ilia Malinin, the self-dubbed quad god, was thought to be such a foregone victor that when he took to the ice for his long program after several competitors before him struggled, NBC’s Terry Gannon wondered if Malinin should simply skate to win or to make a statement. He did neither. Proved mortal, Malinin came undone, finishing eighth, and while waiting for his scores afterwards, essentially broke the fourth wall, saying for the benefit of the television camera hovering nearby, “It’s not that easy,” as if he were imploring a nation that had already feted him for grace. Malinin would say he could not process what happened, and the unexpected gold medalist, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, looked like he could not process it either. Adorned in braces, his coach raised his arm, encouraging him to celebrate, though Shaidorov just sort of stood there with an almost dazed childlike wonder.

For most of the women’s gold medal hockey game, I did not feel joy or agony, just tension, so much so that I kept involuntarily giggling. Canada led most of the way 1-0, trying to hold off theretofore ultra-dominant Team USA until their captain Hilary Knight read the stage direction in the screenplay and tied it with a couple minutes left, setting the stage for teammate Megan Keller to win the game in sudden death on a dipsy do goal that blew even this hockey agnostic’s mind. And though I will remember Team USA singing our national anthem on the podium, I will also remember Team Canada’s Daryl Watts looking at the stuffed mascot she was handed along with her silver medal with incredulous agony, like she wanted to hurl that stoat all the way to Switzerland. Respect.

The color of your medal is relative though. Curling in Milan Cortina became mired in minor Over the Line-like controversy, but you will have to read about that elsewhere; I just want to talk about America’s all-Duluth, Minnesota mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse (pronounced: Tee-see) and Korey Dropkin, my favorite team since the 2022 Chicago Sky, and only the third American curling team ever to win a medal. (Thiesse became the first American woman to win a medal in curling.) In advancing to the medal round, they found themselves tied with defending champ Italy late in the semi-final with a chance to play conservatively for one point or aim higher and try to score two. The Duluthians opted for a Vegas mentality, played for two, got it, and that proved the difference in a 9-8 win. In the gold medal match, they found themselves in a similar situation, went big, and poetically, went bust. My oh my goodness became an uff-da. Afterwards, Dropkin remarked, “Obviously would have loved to come home with a gold medal, but Sweden earned that.” The power of the negative in that statement was so purely How to Talk Minnesotan that it brought a tear to my eye. And though some knuckleheads in this country think it’s all about winners and losers, that’s what makes the Olympics so wonderful – the silver lining is baked right in there.

What I have come to love so much about biathlon is how its design, cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting that yields a penalty lap for each missed shot, can allow for races to be totally upended right in the middle of themselves. That’s what happened in the women’s 12.5km mass start when at the last shooting target, almost everyone who was anyone started missing shots left and right, and suddenly Czechia’s Tereza Voborníková, who had never finished on the podium on the Biathlon World Cup circuit, never mind at the Olympics, so unheralded the NBC announcers confessed they had not mentioned or thought about her once during the race, found herself in the lead with a couple kilometers to ski. And that is how I found myself in the middle of the truest Olympic experience: fervently rooting for a Czech I had never heard of 17 seconds earlier. Alas, she could not hang on for gold or silver, passed by France’s more expected duo of Oceane Michelon and Julia Simon, earning bronze instead. And though biathletes typically splay exhausted on the ground upon crossing the finish line, Voborníková looked less exhausted than still high on wonderment. “It was incredible to lead the race for a while,” she said afterwards. “This bronze medal means everything to me. It definitely tastes like gold.” I submit to you, no one went home from Cortina happier than Tereza Voborníková. Well, on second thought, there was one person that might have gone home happier.

20-year-old U.S. Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said that in coming to Milan, she did not need a medal, and though that sounds like off the rack athlete-speak, the thing was, to see her skate in the long program, which she entered in third place, was to believe it. I have been watching figure skaters crack under pressure all my life. I watched Malinin crack one week earlier. (I watched Sasha Cohen crack in 2006.) Liu, however, did not skate like someone overcoming pressure or ignoring it; she skated like someone who was completely at peace; she skated her competitive program the way you typically see people skate their exhibition programs in the Olympic-ending gala. In that way of overbearing youth sports, Liu had essentially already lived a whole life, retiring from the sport at the ripe old age of 16 because she had tired of it only to eventually return after uncovering a true sense of self. Coaches are always yammering about breaking down athletes to build them back up, but in stepping away, Liu broke herself down to build herself back up as the person she wanted to be. And so, she became the first person with a frenulum piercing to win a gold medal (editor: plz fact check) and quite possibly the first gold medalist with a healthy work/life balance. When she left the ice after her triumphant long program, the one that would ultimately lift her from third to first, and looked right into the camera, she effused, if you will permit me to honor the spirit of the f-bomb she dropped on the whole world, nothing less than pure fucking joy.

Olympic greatness in the genuine Faster Higher Stronger sense is not merely measuring up to your own sense of excellence, but reorienting what is possible for your sport. Ever since I first watched a figure skating competition, the fabled Battle of the Carmens in Calgary, I understood on some level that the sport was about toil, tears, surrender coded as sacrifice, and conceding your own identity to your coach and choreographer. Alysia Liu came along and reoriented the sport as one of joyful, mindful self-expression. Imagine if the whole sports world had the courage to follow her lead.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Fight Without Hate (1948)

2026-02-20T06:00:00.006-06:00

As I continue winding my way through all the official Olympics documentaries, there has been one emergent trend: they are rarely weird. “White Rock,” chronicling the 1976 Winter Olympics was eccentric in a cheerful prog rock sort of way, and it was a little strange to hear Don LaFontaine narrate the 1992 Winter Olympic documentary to someone like me who grew up with him as the original trailer man, but neither of those weirded me out. Not like the official documentary of the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. And that is weird in and of itself because these were the first Olympics since 1936, emerging from the unremitting darkness of WWII, none of which is eschewed in “Fight Without Hate” but openly addressed in a nifty prologue that takes us from the first modern Olympics up through Berlin and footage of you-know-who. Granted, even as it shows this, the narration remarks that sport rises above politics which is not quite true and not just because I say it is not. The documentary notes that Korea is only the Asian representative at the 1948 Winter Olympics, forgoing an explanation of why Japan is not present, but surely, viewer, you can guess. Still, you can understand the inclination to lighten the mood, though “Fight Without Hate” takes lightening the mood to the pre-second wave feminism extreme.

Despite recounting the truly extraordinary St. Moritz locations, hockey and skating rinks plunked down before awe-inspiring Alpine vistas, and skeleton and bobsleigh chutes of ice that the movie shows us painstakingly being constructed, what stands out most about “Fight Without Hate” is often not the action itself but the commentary. Director André Michel’s foremost artistic choice, it turns out, was to invent a narrator, one called Gaston, who not only adds cheeky fashion commentary and cracks jokes but throughout his narration is also forced to deal with his nagging wife, one who keeps interrupting him to ask questions that he waves off with no small amount of sexism. It’s like you’re watching the Olympics with a Blondie comic strip running concurrently next to it. Indeed, at one point Gaston notes that someday the athletes’ uniforms might “appear naïve and old fashioned,” not realizing he’s referring to himself. It was a different time, as they say, and that is certainly true: it would be 12 years before speed skating was added as a medal event for women, and it would be 66 before ski jumping was added. What would Gaston make of that?

“Fight Without Hate” works better when it puts its cheekiness toward the actual coverage of events, like situating a camera in front of a bobsleigh so that we get a point-of-view shot the whole way down the track. Michel showcases the downhill skiing event with aerial shots and wide views that not only capture the many spills and tumbles but provides thrilling context as to just how massive the vertical descent for this event really is that even modern television coverage can never properly evoke (at least, not until NBC’s drone shots here in 2026). And for a surprisingly long stretch during figure skating competition, “Fight Without Hate” indulges in nothing more than a montage of the skaters’ twists and turns. It might be lyrical overkill for some viewers, it might have been lyrical overkill for me, but it’s also the one sequence where Gaston finally shuts up.

In Memoriam: Robert Duvall

2026-02-18T06:00:00.057-06:00

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

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

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

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

Jay Kelly

2026-02-16T06:00:00.025-06:00

An aging white male whose life has turned out empty despite so much fame and success is not a new story, but what counts is in the telling. And that is where I am afraid to report that despite some expressive performances and scenes, Noah Baumbach’s telling of the story of fictional movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) ultimately comes up empty, never demonstrating enough courage in its own convictions, and not quite sure whether it wants to be an easygoing Netflix comedy or something more avant-garde that just happens to be streaming on Netflix. Partly a road trip movie in which Jay journeys from Hollywood to Italy to accept a lifetime achievement award at a Tuscany film festival, it’s clear that Baumbach and his co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also features in a small role) are nodding at Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” though what ensues only occasionally seeks, nevertheless reaches, such metaphysical heights. Despite the fictional movie star’s name essentially being a mirror of the real movie star playing him, “Jay Kelly” remains just outside the looking glass, never bold enough to go all the way through.

“Jay Kelly” begins with a bang by way of a long tracking shot roaming through so much chaos and noise on a movie set before ending with the eponymous character having to go in front of the camera and nail a take. It evokes the actor’s paradox, that despite being surrounded by multitudes, when the camera rolls, the actor is all alone in front of it. It also becomes a metaphor for Jay himself, virtually alone, divorced and with two daughters, one from whom he is estranged and one whom he hardly ever sees, with no real friends other than Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler) who is not really even a friend but his agent. Jay is a ghost in his own life, an idea that Baumbach evokes when Jay re-encounters his old acting school buddy Tim (Billy Crudup) from whom, it turns out, Jay essentially stole the role that turned into his big break. Throughout this sequence, Crudup evinces a mischievous gleam in his eye that you can sense is always half-a-second away from turning to maliciousness, and finally does, their catching up becoming a confrontation. Baumbach seems to play this moment for comedy, but Crudup feels realer, and scarier.

If Crudup steals the movie, then Sandler salvages it. Because this journey to Italy is not just Jay’s, it is Ron’s too, forcing him to come to grips with the fact that he has essentially lived his life on behalf of someone else. And though Jay’s publicist Liz (Laura Dern) decides to walk away from this life, Ron cannot bring himself to, seeing Jay’s career as an extension of his own. It is an affectingly bittersweet character and performance that puts into perspective why actors are always thanking their agents in award speeches whether you like it or not. In a way, the complexities of Ron and his devotion work to explain the emptiness of Jay, but only up to a point. Jay is deliberately written as an empty vessel, a person whose only memories, as he says, come from his own movies, a notion that Baumbach literalizes in flashbacks staged to feel like movie scenes with Jay standing off to the side, as if appraising them. If the emotions these scenes generate can feel pat, they are at least baked in an interesting filmmaking idea, which is more than I can say for how Baumbach treats Jay Kelly as what he nominally is: a movie star.

Jay never comes across larger than life as intended, illustrated in a scene aboard a European train where he is gawked at and talked to but never in a way that borders on the edge of mania: he feels like, gosh, I don’t know, Charlie Hunnam, not Tom Cruise. What’s worse, Baumbach never infuses a sense of Jay’s work, meaning we never see his onscreen persona contrasted against his real one, to see the gap between the two that ostensibly is supposed to be his emotional fault. All we ever see is a quick highlight reel at the award ceremony and all those highlights are culled from real George Clooney movies. A genial nod to the actor, it might have suggested something more, erasing the lines between actor and character until we realize they are the same, but “Jay Kelly” is not reaching that high and it never seeks to tease out that thin line anywhere else. It is as if by walking up to the edge of actor and character being the same, Baumbach becomes afraid to push it too far, given the unlikable qualities of the character, tying his own hand behind his back, always a little too eager to redeem Jay despite simultaneously suggesting redemption is not so easy. It’s a contradiction he can’t solve, and it causes a closing line that might have landed like a punch to the gut to feel more like a wistful sigh.

Friday's Old Fashioned: IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964

2026-02-13T06:00:00.003-06:00

Shot using the German film stock Agfacolor, what stands out most about Theo Hormann’s official documentary of the 1964 IX Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – given the utilitarian title of IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 – is the photographic brilliance of its images. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian (!) jerseys in their ice hockey tilt pop off the screen like they just came out of the laundry in one of those vintage Tide commercials, bobsleighs come across like vibrant toboggans, and the snow looks the way you imagine a snowy day in your mind. Hormann’s movie must have been striking to contemporary viewers, what with the paucity of color television sets at the time, but it’s equally striking to a modern viewer given the omnipresent gunmetal grey of so much prestige TV. The color renders these Olympics as something like a living parade of nations.

IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964, alas, is not, itself, as striking as its images. Hormann recounts myriad events and athletes but tends to provide little context to put into perspective what all this agony and triumph means, citing results here and there like reading from a two-sentence Associated Press recap. The one time he does, with German Georg Thoma overcoming faulty skis to earn Bronze in the Nordic Combined, suggests what the whole film might have been. (I learned from Motoko Rich and Josephine de La Bruyère’s Athletic article about the residents of current Olympic host city Cortina that Gildo Siorpaes won Bronze for the Italian bobsled team at the 1964 Winter Olympics, but that he was an alpine skier at heart and was forced on to the bobsled team against his will and that all things considered, the medal was not that special to him. I mean, there is a story this movie could have told!) Nor is the visual poetry enough to sustain it. When the narrator mentions the rhythm slalom skiers must use to be successful, we are never made to understand just what that rhythm entails, or how it is accomplished.

Oddly enough, IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 works better away from the competition, like a brief interlude with athletes breaking bread by way of feasting on authentic Tyrolean Holzhackerschmarrn. There is also one heartening passage about Innsbruck itself, the narrator noting how “the mountains peek through the window of the house,” reinforcing what he says elsewhere, and that the images of Innsbruck homes, and businesses, and streets set down in the shadow of the Nordkette manifest, “that in this setting, the link between man and alpine sports seems to have come about on its own.”