Category Archives: Popular culture

OK, I finally saw the flick, and I was impressed

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Matt Damon did a good job of humanizing Odysseus. Beside him is the unprepossessing Athena.

Wow. That was quite an experience, seeing “The Odyssey” last night. It’s one of the few times I’ve been at a film that the audience applauded at the end. I joined in.

Christopher Nolan really accomplished something here. I was very impressed, and not a bit disappointed — which is unusual for me, with things I’m familiar with when I go in.

I highly recommend it.

I do have one BIG complaint, which is definitely not Nolan’s fault. I went to see the movie in Imax, so it looked great. But the first thing I did when I got there was turn off my hearing aids, and that wasn’t enough to shut out the painful noise. You’d think that would be great for a guy who’s hard of hearing, but it isn’t. Loud sounds produce a tremendous buzzing distortion in my ears. I couldn’t make out dialogue; I could only understand about 20 percent of what was said. (Sometimes it helped to put my fingers in my ears.) I knew the story, so I usually knew what was going on. But I can’t wait to see it again with normal sound — and maybe subtitles.

Another thing that helped me follow and enjoy the flick was that it followed the original about as faithfully as you can in just three hours of running time. There were changes, but they were very inventive and helped move the story forward convincingly. Examples of that:

  • In Homer’s verson, a priest at Ismarus gives Odysseus a supply of sweet, super-powerful wine that a normal human needed to dilute 20 to 1 before drinking. Later, our hero uses the uncut stuff to drug the Cyclops so he and his men can escape. In the movie, there’s no stop at Ismarus, so no wine, and Odysseus just waits until the Cyclops is asleep before blinding him. It works.
  • He doesn’t stop in the land of the lotus-eaters, either. Instead, Calypso feeds lotus flowers to Odysseus to give him amnesia and keep him around for seven years. This works on a couple of levels. First, it sort of exonerates Calypso because she ultimately decides to let the hero go, and even helps him remember who he is and where he wants to go. First step: stop eating the flowers!
  • Secondly, it exonerates Odysseus for leaving his loving wife in the lurch back in Ithaca while he spends every night in the bed of a nymph for seven years. Hey, he forgot! This is not the only thing Nolan does to make Odysseus a more sympathetic figure to a modern audience. Between all the slashing bloodshed and hanging girls who slept with the enemy and selling captive women into slavery, and lots of lying, Homer’s character wasn’t quite the thing for moderns seeking a hero. He had problems. But by skipping and soft-pedalling a lot of that, plus casting Matt Damon in the role, Nolan made Odysseus someone a 2026 audience could cheer for. It was very artfully done, and he didn’t overdo it and make him fake or too vanilla.
  • He also toned down Athena. She keeps showing up, but she’s a very unprepossessing goddess, considering. People tend to think of her as the goddess of wisdom, like her Roman rip-off Minerva. But she’s also the goddess of war — a tall, strong figure who wears a soldier’s helmet. She was into bloodshed, and was always counseling Odysseus — and Telemachus — to man up and swing the sword about. In this, she wore a lovely white robe and imparted Wisdom to our man O during relatively quiet moments (as in the still you see above). I mean I think she did. Since I couldn’t hear dialogue, especially quiet dialogue, I admit she could have been saying, “Get on out there and kick some ass, ya sorry wuss!” But in a quiet, philosophical kind of way.

Anyway, all those changes worked. What were the best parts?

My son was there with his family, and in discussing it with them after, I brought up the scene with Polyphemus, the Cyclops, which I thought was very well done, as I said above.

But after I got home, I remembered the very best part — when Circe turns O’s men into swine. It was astounding, and it was done without CGI, which makes it more amazing. I won’t tell you how she does it, but it’s not your garden-variety, wave-a-wand hocus-pocus. SPOILER: It’s particularly shocking to see after the way Circe appears (and hasn’t identified herself) — not as a foxy enchantress, but like somebody’s mom, utterly terrified to find armed soldiers in her home. She looks like an everyday middle-aged lady throughout the scene, but by the end there’s no doubting her power. Earlier I quoted Jack Aubrey as saying, “… as for that tale of all his foremast-hands being turned into swine… why, he might tell that to the Marines.” He would not have doubted had he seen this.

As for least-favorite part… above, I said I was “not a bit disappointed” by anything, but I’d have been happier if I’d seen some sirens. Oh, Odysseus gets tied to the mast, and acts out the words of my fave Cream song, “How his naked ears were tortured/By the sirens sweetly singing…” But I saw nothing. I was eager to see whether they looked like this or like this. I would have preferred the former, but been happy to see anything.

Oh, about those controversies: I wish I could say Lupita Nyong’o was awesome as Helen, but I can’t. And it’s not just because, her face aside, she’s too skinny for me to think of her as the world’s most beautiful. She just wasn’t as good in the role as she needed to be to shut the complainers up. She wasn’t, say, as good as Sophie Okonedo as Queen Margaret in the recent production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. When I first saw that, I kinda went, “Huh?” (I mean, she was supposed to be from Anjou), but was deeply impressed at what she did with the role. Not so in this latest instance. But it didn’t matter much given that Helen wasn’t as critical to this particular story, once the war was over.

I did have a “Huh?” moment early in this masterpiece early in the story, when I thought, “Why is there a girl dressed as a Greek soldier on that beach?” I finally decided it was supposed to be a very young boy, and I was right. It was supposed to be Sinon, who wasn’t actually a character in The Odyssey, but was added by Virgil in his Latin version. Nolan had added Sinon to set up something involving one of Penelope’s suitors, showing you what a bum that guy was (paying a kid to go to war in his place). Later, I learned Sinon was played by the same person who starred in that charming and witty movie “Juno” quite a few years back, who later became a trans activist. Which explained things, sort of. Maybe Nolan wanted to tick off somebody else out there besides Elon Musk. But what I don’t understand is why Odysseus would have sent this kid Sinon on essentially a suicide mission. Sinon sort of had the same question when O later looked the kid up in the realm of Hades.

As for the other casting choices I had been wondering about… I already said Matt Damon was perfect as the guy who could present O as someone who appealed to a Hollywood audience. He really made the movie work. Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland did fine as Penelope and Telemachus (the loved ones O was forgetting while shacking up with Calypso). And believe it or not, the “Twilight” guy was good as the very worst of the suitors, Antinous. I suppose he’s matured as an actor.

I said above that this was one of a very few films I’ve seen that caused the audience to applaud. There was another thing that has seldom happened in my adulthood: I came out of the theater feeling like I was still in the movie. It took awhile to shake. When I saw (and then reviewed) “Star Wars” in 1977, I was having trouble shaking the feeling that my Chevy Vega was an X-wing, and I was swooping in to finish off the Death Star (which was not the safest illusion to have while zipping East on Walnut Grove in Memphis). I had a similar experience after seeing “Apocalypse Now,” which haunted me the rest of the day.

I had that experience a lot when I was a kid living in Ecuador. My best buddy Tony Wessler and I would go to the Variedades theater near my house, pay the equivalent of two cents to get in, and sit on plain wooden benches to watch Italian (and sometimes French) movies with classical themes — gladiators or Hercules or whatever. The special effects were terrible, and if not for the Spanish subtitles we’d have understood none of the dialogue, but these shows were about the action. Afterwards, walking the six blocks or so home, we’d pass by construction sites littered with pieces of bamboo (they used it for scaffolding), and use them to swordfight constantly, all the way. We were IN the movie.

But since I’ve been grown, movies have to be something really special, do something new and different to give me that feeling. Last night, when I got to my car, I felt it strongly. Before driving away, I texted my wife, who had not come along, to say that after three hours of what I had experienced, I had this feeling it was going to take me another three to get home. She took it as a joke, but I actually felt that way.

I hope ol’ Tony has been to see it. This was everything those cheap flicks we enjoyed so much back in the day wanted to be…

What WOULD Helen have looked like?

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In this depiction from 550 BC, Helen’s white, but everybody else is black. Go figure.

OK, here we go again…

Yesterday, I questioned the casting decisions for the new film I still haven’t seen, but am anxioius to see — “The Odyssey.” But I did so optimistically, thinking it’s likely that Christopher Nolan knew what he was doing, and has more imagination regarding such things than I do.

Then, I listened to the third of four podcasts (yesterday I forgot the one in the video) that “The Rest is History” put out about about “The Odyssey” (both Homer’s and Nolan’s versions). And I found myself groaning when Tom Holland and his guest, classicist Daniel Mendelsohn cited the first of the “controversies” that have cropped up about the film.

And of course, this being the 21st century, it was about Identity Politics.

It seems that the actress who plays Helen of Troy is black. Her name is Lupita Nyong’o. So here we go.

Well, she definitely fulfills the primary job requirement: She’s beautiful. Does that make her the best choice for the role? I’ll get back to that. Meanwhile, the “controversy” seems to have been kicked off most prominently by a guy who, now that he’s the richest guy in the world, seems to have decided to dedicate the next chapter of his life to reinforcing every negative stereotype about white South Africans:

Sheesh. You’ll notice that in my previous post, I didn’t mention who was playing Helen in this film because I didn’t look to see. It didn’t even occur to me that she would be depicted, since this isn’t the Iliad, but the story about what happened to this one guy and his crew after the Trojan War is over. But apparently it includes the part when Odysseus wins the war by coming up with that big wooden horse trick.

I did raise the question of whether Matt Damon was right to play the star, and so did Holland and Mendelsohn, pointing out that Damon is sort of the ultimate whitebread All-American boy type, which the ancient Greeks were not. And one of the guys on the podcast, at some point, asked one of those overused points of the PC universe by asking, Why don’t they question that, huh? Well, I did, but I’m hoping Damon does a good job with it.

From there, they took the discussion in an intellectually respectable direction by discussing the question: How DID Homer picture Helen?

To encapsulate what they said, they made two excellent points: The first was that Homer was careful not to give many details about what she looked like. (Although he did say she was “white-armed,” but I see that as a reference to class rather than pigment. Upper-class ladies stayed out of the sun. Also, her father was a “swan.”) That, of course, left it up to the reader or listener to picture Helen according to whatever standard of beauty was admissable to those audience members.

Secondly, they made the logical point that what Homer and other ancient Greeks were picturing was probably someone who looked like them and their immediate neighbors. It’s extremely unlikely that they pictured in their minds either a blonde such as the one who played Helen in this flick, or a sub-Saharan African like, well, Lupita Nyong’o. (Although technically, she’s from Mexico. Still, her parents were Kenyan.)

Personally, that’s the way I would have gone. I wouldn’t have taken it to extremes — I wouldn’t say, insist upon a Greek woman — but I would have gone for a more or less Mediterranean look. Or at least sought a beautiful woman with dark hair, like Anne Hathaway — who plays Penelope in the film.

I thought the makers of “Troy: The Fall of a City” did a good job when they chose Bella Dayne to be their Helen. But, possibly illustrating the idea that we all have our own notions of beauty, I thought the most attractive actress in the series was Frances O’Connor. She was cast as Hecuba, Paris’ mom. (Still, she’s a lot younger than I am.)

Anyway, what do y’all think? Who would be the perfect Helen? To get you started, I’ll throw out a few names, and link to images. It’s not a Top Five List or anything. I didn’t think that hard about it. I just thought:

  • Who is really, really beautiful, the kind ancient men might have gotten into a huge scrap over? Not only that, but what does she have that’s extra, the X factor, that turns heads?
  • Who looks vaguely Mediterranean, or at least isn’t a blonde or redhead or East Asian or sub-Saharan African or anybody who makes the average viewer go “Huh? I thought she was from Greece!” Although if she has the other qualifications and is at least a brunette, I’ll give her a pass on the olive complexion (yeah, I’m cheating to give Anne Hathaway a chance).
  • Who is a real actress, preferably with the chops to handle the role — not just some hot pop singer or model?
  • She doesn’t have to be the right age for the role NOW. That’s too restrictive because I’m not likely to think of actresses who are that age (which I suppose, given the place and time, would be somewhere between 20 and 30 during the years of the war) at this moment.

Here are my suggestions (not in order):

  • Penelope Cruz. Admittedly, I didn’t think of her on my own, but she came up when I Googled beautiful actresses who looked Mediterranean (just to kind of get me started), and she fit the bill.
  • Rashida Jones. Wait, you say, her father is of African descent! And you’re thinking that because you’re thinking in racial, Identity Politics terms. I’m thinking looks. And in this case, a combination of a man of African descent and the chick from the Mod Squad gives us the right look. And she certainly has the X factor.
  • Rachel Weisz. Dang. I just said “X factor,” and I’m not going to keep repeating myself.
  • Emily Blunt. OK, OK, I know — too Northern European. But there’s something Hellenic there that I think the costume and makeup people could work with.
  • Gal Gadot. I was done with this list, then someone on the telly mentioned her name, and I had to come add her.
  • Marisa Tomei. I’m going to say “X factor” again because she’s got more of it than anyone here. As for unmistakeable Mediterranean (or at least Caribbean) allure, did you ever see “The Perez Family?”
  • Marisa Allasio. Mentioning the other Marisa made me think of this one, whom I admit I’ve never seen act, possibly because she retired and married a count when she was 22 and I was 5. She’s way more Helen than those gorgeous Itallian actresses who came along in the ’60s (sorry, Sophia). OK, she’s blonde, but give her a break; she’s from Turin, not Naples! But she’s way Italian, so dye her hair.

That gives us something to start with. But we’ll need a time machine to get them. That last one retired in 1958.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I actually saw the film last night, but nothing in this post reflects that. I mostly wrote it yesterday, but wasn’t done before I had to head to the theater. I just did some editing and fleshing-out of points this morning before posting it. I’ll make observations later about what I saw.

Tom Holland and Tom Holland both say it’s good

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Of course, one of them — the Tom Holland we know better as Spider-Man — has a vested interest. And the other Tom Holland is an enthusiastic classicist, and co-host of my fave podcast, “The Rest is History.” The latter is particularly a fan of The Odyssey, and had been looking forward to Chistopher Nolan’s new film version for some time. The younger Tom Holland plays Telemachus in the movie.

Still, I appreciate their recommendations, which reminded me to buy a ticket. Not for tonight (opening Fridays are such a mob scene), but for soon. I didn’t really need the video reminder, though, because the elder Tom and his podcast partner Dominic Sandbrook have done no fewer than three episodes on the Homer’s epic this week.

I’m still listening to the first one. And no, The Odyssey isn’t itself a work of history. But it is about a key figure in the defining story that loomed over and fired the imaginations of the ancient Greeks and Romans — the Trojan War. The entire Greek culture is called Hellenism, for the woman whose beauty started that whole 10-year contretemps in the Hellespont area. And as we know, the Romans were too busy conquering people to create their own culture, so they just stole the Greeks’. Remember Romulus and Remus? In one version of their story, they were descended from a Trojan War veteran.

And when I say defining story, I mean the way the Arthurian legends were in England (you know, the Matter of Britain). And the Trojan saga was at least as big as everybody in the Marvel Universe is in America today. They were sort of like all those superheroes (wrap in D.C. as well) combined with George Washington and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. (These days, we do have some tiny awareness of actual history. But history was not a thing before Herodotus invented it.)

And frankly, I’ve always been more interested in the story of Odysseus problems getting home after the Trojan War than in the war itself. Maybe I’d understand the actual war and its motivations better if I could just once see a photo of Helen herself. Lacking that, I’m more into the Sirens and the Cyclops and the lotus-eaters and Calypso than a 10-year siege.

But that’s not the only reason I’m pumped about the movie. I’ve never seen anything in the IMAX format. I’m eager to see how film can produce better resolution than most digital images. More than that, this flick is the first to be shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film, and to be processed without any digital tricks — things like adjusting color tones were done by filter overlays, old-school. Since I’m sharing videos, take a look at this clip:

Finally, I’m intrigued by Nolan’s casting choices. Some were unexpected, but I hear they worked out well:

  • Matt Damon as Odysseus. I think Damon is great, but I never saw him as a mythical hero on this scale. No, I didn’t think, like Paul Rudd’s character in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that he was a “kind of a Streisand” (Will Hunting was a pretty tough kid), but I truly didn’t see him as an action protagonist until “The Bourne Identity.” Yet he was awesome in that. So maybe, despite not being Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglas, he’ll be just as awesome in this.
  • The aforementioned younger Tom Holland as Telemachus. Really? Peter Parker as the young son of Odysseus whose father has been gone so long he doesn’t remember him? Maybe. We’ll see.
  • Anne Hathaway as Penelope? Admittedly, she’s beautiful enough to play Helen herself, but I’ve got to get “The Devil Wears Prada” and “The Princess Diaries” out of my head.
  • Charlize Theron as Calypso? Well, maybe she could be a nymph. Maybe. Even if she is (and I’m going to get myself in trouble, but the thought insists on coming to the fore) 50. But hey — if she had existed, Calypso would probably have been older.
  • Robert Pattinson as Antinous? Isn’t this the teen heartthob from “Twilight?” I don’t picture him as one of Penelope’s thuggish suitors.

But based on what I’ve heard from the Tom Hollands and others, I expect to be surprised by their performances. So I’m very much looking forward…

OK, the BoSox are no longer in the cellar…

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This just happened last night, when the Red Sox beat the White Sox, 8-1.

And it’s been awhile.

So you know what this means, right? Haven’t you ever seen a baseball movie about a hapless but loveable team that goes from worst to first? Think “The Natural.” Think “Major League.”

This is the point in the plot — somewhere near the middle of the season, or a bit past that — when the team makes the turnaround, but the pennant still seems beyond its grasp.

You might run some numbers and say with the number of games left, it’s highly, highly unlikely. But remember, we’re now in the era of playoffs, and it’s possible for a Wild Card team to win it all.

Oh, I should add: This formula also applies to basketball. Think “Hoosiers.”

Happy Birthday, Mel! Now, the rest of you — let’s have this out, right now!

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I really enjoyed the tribute The New York Times posted today, on Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday.

And it was certainly well-deserved. Mel is a genius, and maybe the funniest guy to live anytime in the past, well, century.

I liked that they included this Brooks quote, which I read a bunch of years ago, but enjoyed reading again:

My God, I’d love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, “Well done, you goddam genius.”

It makes me want to do the same with regard to Mel. Trouble is, I can’t dig him up, because he’s still alive. Is he actually shooting for 2,000?

But while we’re on the subject, I want to settle something. The NYT’s piece today makes the same mistake people have been making since 1974. When it says….

In 1974, two of his most beloved hits, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” began their climb to the top of the box office.

It shamefully neglects to add: “Of course, ‘Young Frankenstein’ is at least 10 times better than ‘Blazing Saddles.”

They’re always leaving that out. Worse, a lot of people go so far as to say that “Blazing Saddles” was his best, funniest movie — which of course is raving nonsense. It’s embarrassing.

Sure, it was funny, in a “let’s see how tastelessly outrageous we can be” kind of way. I mean, stuff like that can be funny — or rather, could be funny, back in the days when you could get away with it.

And let me defend it from the low opinion of very young people who congratulate themselves that they are part of a society that has grown beyond laughing at scenes such as this:

These enlightened young folks don’t know that in 1974, we lived in a society that had much earlier ceased to laugh at such things, like a decade or two earlier. And Brooks was rebelling against that self-restraint. He was removing certain fetters of decency from comedy — as he had done with “Springtime for Hitler” and as SNL, building on Brooks, would do one year later with this skit.

Now that I’ve stuck up for that freedom of expression, and admitted that it made me laugh, I have to be honest and add that… it’s not really for me. I laugh, but then I’m embarrassed for laughing. Especially if my wife is in the room.

But “Young Frankenstein” gives me guilt-free laughter. And the humor is on a higher plane. Sure, there are laugh lines like this one:

But that’s not only funny, it’s positively genteel compared to half the humor in “Blazing Saddles.” Also, it shows that Mel Brooks is still running the show. And it’s good to be the king. And the king is in on the joke that sex makes us, up to a point, very comical creatures.

Speaking of being in charge — you may say I’m taking away from Mel by preferring YF, because it wasn’t his idea. It came from Gene Wilder, who pitched it to him when they were making BS. But beyond that, it was a collaboration that has Mel Brooks’ fingerprints on every monochromatic frame. If Wilder had tried to make it on his own, or with a different collaborator, it would have flopped.

In the end, it just has a magical, special feel to it — a feel that has a lot to do with the faithful reproduction of presenting the brilliant humor within the context of an early-30s horror flick. It has class, at least in an aesthetic sense, all the way through it, a kind of class that BS not only lacks, but fiercely rejects. And that raises it to a level well above the junior-high humor of the predecessor. Even though a lot of it is the same humor, from the same guy.

Beyond that, it’s just funnier.

Many of you will disagree. This is a fact of life. There are still people going around insisting that “Godfather II” was better than the original. Which is nuts, but — despite our current president’s most determined efforts — it’s still a free country. I defend your right to say such things, despite the fact that you are so clearly and embarrassingly wrong…

You thought Madeline Kahn was funny in ‘Blazing Saddles?’ Fine. But for FUNNY, see her in ‘Young Frankenstein.”

 

 

How famous are these celebrities to you?

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Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho on Celebrity Jeopardy.

Here’s another one for my “Aging” catergory — although I suspect that’s not the whole story.

For quite some time — for decades, really — I’ve had this happen a lot: I’ll see someone on a magazine cover, or on a TV screen. This person is being presented in a context that indicates that he or she is a celebrity, and I as the beholder am expected to know who that is. There are hints. For instance, the magazine will be one that pretty much only features “celebrities” on its covers. Or the person will be identified by first-name only, as though I were a fantasist who imagines that I am on such intimate terms with that person. Or, the writer of that text believes that I would be insulted by anyone assuming that I would need to see a surname to know who it is.

As for television… I’ll give you an example from this evening. I was over visiting my mother, and she was watching “Celebrity Jeopardy.” Only I didn’t know who the people were. There was a man flanked by two women. The man looked familiar, but I couldn’t name him or recall where I had seen him. I had no clue with the women.

Fortunately, there’s the Web. I looked, and saw they were Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho. Patton was the guy who seemed familiar, and now that I saw it, so was his name. And I had heard or read Margaret Cho’s name quite frequently in recent years, in connection with comedy, but I could not have identified her by her image. This was worsened by the fact that when I Google her image, she looks different. But I wouldn’t have recognized her when she looked like that, either.

I thought “Celebrity Jeopardy” had more recognizable names and faces. Admittedly, I’m basing that on those SNL spoofs, which at least in the past have been hilarious. My favorite might have been the one with “Sean Connery,” “Burt Reynolds” and “French Stewart.”

And I actually knew whom they were impersonating.

Now I’m going to really embarrass myself. When I was quite young, I watched pretty much everything on the three channels available, and that includes the game shows. And I knew who all those people were — even on “Hollywood Squares.” Do you know who all these people were?

Well, I did. Even though that’s a very blurry picture. (I probably wouldn’t have complained about that in 1968, though. I was also watching it in black and white.)

I’m pretty sure that if I were younger, I would have known who those affable people were on Jeopardy tonight. After all, I knew the guy’s face and one woman’s name! I must apologize to Ms. Thede, though — I had no idea.

But I knew all those people on the Squares, and looking back, some of them were pretty marginal celebs. But I knew them, and could tell you where I’d seen them. For instance, Wally Cox had once played a birdwatcher on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I think I’d also seen him do standup. So there.

There were some people who were famous to me simply because they were on game shows a lot. I’d known Kitty Carlisle and Orson Bean for a couple of decades before I learned they were actors.

So some of it’s age. But here’s something I think is a significant contributing factor. I’ve mentioned this before in a different context:

It’s the profusion of available media in the post-cable, streaming world that makes it impossible to see and know everyone being beamed at us. So many people who are intensely famous within genres and subgenres of public entertainment, but not as known to the full population.

Back in the day, we ALL knew who all the “famous” people were.

I wasn’t the only person watching those three stations all the time in the ’60s. Everybody was, to some extent. Even old people saw The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, Robert Goulet, the inescapable Topo Gigio, and the guys who spun plates atop sticks. And with the possible exception of the guys with the plates, people of all ages could probably name them. That’s because they HAD to come to their fans and everyone else through the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Smothers Brothers, or Dean Martins’ show, or Andy Williams’, or Merv Griffin’s daytime talk show.

The supply was limited. That’s my excuse for sort-of knowing who “Charlie Weaver” was.

 

 

Remember that noise on ‘Lost?’

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After the infinitessimal bit of “rain” we got this morning, I went out to look at the garden — my fig trees, and the okra I recently planted.

And it was nice out there, with the world slightly moist, and everything green except the grass.

But it was hard to fully enjoy for the noise. I shot some footage (above) of the “forest” behind our deck, which has a sort of subtropical lushness, to capture the difference between that and the obscene, crashing mechanical noises filling the area.

It immediately reminded me of the bizarre noises the people on “Lost” kept hearing in the jungle, before they ever knew about the “smoke monster.”

That’s not what this was, though. About two houses away from us, workmen with large, clanking vehicles — including a huge, self-propelled chipper-shredder — were chewing up some trees that were recently felled in a neighbor’s yard.

Sounded like more than that, though…

Uh… what’s that noise in the jungle?

Impromptu Top Five List of Favorite Painters

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This is not a thoughtful list. I’m just throwing it together because something made me think about John Singer Sargent, and that made me want to do a Top Five list, so I’m assembling this hastily because I’ve got a lot to do today.

It’s also not an honest list, because an honest list of favorites would consist entirely of people in my family, but my wife would give me trouble if I showed any of her watercolors, so consider this a Top Five List of Painters to Whom I Am Not Related by Blood or Marriage.

Maybe I’ll do a more thoughtful one later.

Here goes:

  1. John Singer Sargent. Y’all are probably tired of him because I know I’ve mentioned him before, such as when we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Now I’ve gotta to BACK to Boston because I just learned about his Triumph of Religion set of murals that he spent the last 29 years of his life trying to finish. I love his range, as well as his mastery in achieving he’s trying to do. He’s called an impressionist, but he’s good at whatever style you choose. Check out his use of light in this, or the hypnotic eyes in this. And dig the shadows in my very favorite, El Jaléo, which I encountered at Isabella’s museum.
  2. Caravaggio. I learned about Caravaggio from a print that hangs in a hallway of my church, The Calling of St. Matthew. That’s it at the top of this post.
  3. Vermeer. Everybody talks about the Girl with the Pearl Earring, but my fave is Het melkmeisje, which I saw at the Rijsmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s not very big, but it is very impressive. I saw a lot of Rembrandt there, too — some greats including The Night Watch and those dudes from the Dutch Masters cigar box, but that would be so cliche to choose him, right?
  4. Anders Zorn. OK this is almost the same as picking Sargent, because I mistake his work for Sargent’s sometimes, but I like his work on its own. Especially his portait of the aforementioned Isabella (which is better than Sargent’s portrait of her), and The Omnibus. Although, as I’ve said before, I like George William Joy’s version of the omnibus them better (more communitarian, or something — more people, anyway). Y’all know how I love public transportation. And though I definitely don’t love tobacco, I like this one as well.
  5. Boticelli. Nope, not the Venus one. My fave is Primavera, especially this detail.

That’s it. Thoughts? I know a lot of this is repetitive, but I don’t remember doing a Top Five on painters, and am curious to see what y’all will tell me I left out.

Don’t mention Michelangelo, though. I’ve got a bone to pick with him, which I’ll explain in a subsequent post…

On the brilliance of Christopher Guest’s voices

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Thinking back to my “Top Five Best Actors” list from last month…

One thing that was wrong with the list — not as wrong as leaving out Gene Hackman, but wrong — is that it fails to acknowledge comic actors.

I thought about that the other night while rewatching “Best in Show,” that descendant of the ultimate mockumentary, “This is Spinal Tap.” This is the one that did for dog shows what, say, “A Mighty Wind” did for folk music. Or “Waiting for Guffman” did for… well, you get the idea.

It struck me again that Christopher Guest, who is in all of those films (and I think directed all of them but Spinal Tap), is a wonder. Let’s just focus on one of the essential skills that distinguish a great actor — accents. (Or perhaps I should say “voices.”)

Among all those mockumentary roles, it’s easiest to remember Guest as Nigel Tufnel in “Spinal Tap.” Listen:

It’s a good accent, although that doesn’t really set him apart. Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are just as good as his bandmates. Americans can take pride in their portrayal of the Three Stooges of rock. We see Brits put on convincing American accents all the time (Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, or about half the “American soldiers” in Easy Company in “Band of Brothers,” or Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, and so forth). It’s nice to see we have some talent over here as well.

(Of course, one might note that Guest had an unfair advantage — his Dad was a British diplomat, and he spent part of his childhood in his father’s country. In fact, he ascended to the House of Lords when his father died. But Nigel Tufnel displayed an accent that was very different from the RP we generally associate with lords.)

But what really got me was his accent — and general characterization — of the man from a small town in North Carolina who brings his bloodhound to the dog show. It’s not just the accent, as perfect as that was (definitely not a cheesy Hollywood imitation of a generic Southern manner of speaking). It was the quality of his voice behind the accent, his facial expressions and other facets that made me like he was a true, unique individual I had met sometime in the past — not a “type.” Listen:

Hear it? There’s finesse in that voice, as well as in the accent, that few actors are able to display.

And it’s much the kind of finesse that Robert Duvall brought to his roles.

I just thought I’d acknowledge that…

Top Five Actresses ever in film history

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Listen for the family whistle… and don’t take drugs!

OK, I hurried up a little too much on the Top Five Actors post — so much that I left off Gene Hackman! — but I confess I’m going to hurry even more on this one, because it’s already been a couple of days…

I limited the men’s list to the last 60 years because I was doing it in the context of thinking about Duvall. I’m going all-time on this one. Well, all-out regarding the history of film (and TV), which is not all that much longer. But I have no means of making an informed judgment of the acting skills of, say, Lillie Langtry. (Although she appeared on film once, in 1913, I never saw “His Neighbor’s Wife.” And even if I saw it, I couldn’t hear her voice — which is kind of key in assessing acting skill.)

Finally, I’m doing my best to make sure this is about acting ability, and not about how attractive these women were or are. Which is not easy to do. Hollywood undermines such a merit-based goal at every step, and has done so since the beginning. It does the same to men — think Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Brad Pitt. But that’s nothing compared to how the principle (or lack of principle) is applied in the case of women.

Why does this happen? Butts in the seats. The casting directors look for people the slobs out here will pay to look at. American casting directors take it to ridiculous levels. You want to see at least some normal-looking people? Check out British film and TV.

Anyway, I promise you won’t find Marilyn Monroe on the list. But whatever I do, a lot of these women will be more attractive than average.

Back to the subject of actual acting…

Top Five

  1. Frances McDormand — Every time I see her, I think, “Greatest actress,” or at least “Greatest American actress.” My favorite role? The mom in “Almost Famous.” See photo above. But let’s not forget “Fargo.”
  2. Marisa Tomei — Great in everything. Who doesn’t love her in “My Cousin Vinny?” Of course, I think my fave might be her leading role in “The Perez Family.”
  3. Rosalind Russell — I’m sort of breaking my rule here of not basing my judgment on a single movie. I’m putting her here purely for her performance in my favorite comedy, “His Girl Friday.” Anyone who’s as good as good as she was in that is simply that good.
  4. Emma Thompson — Good in everything, of course, but I think my favorite three are the wife who is wronged by that scrub Alan Rickman in “Love Actually;” the lead in “Sense and Sensibility,” as my own 15th-great grandmother in “Henry V.” (Yeah, I’m still that crazy about genealogy.)
  5. Olivia Coleman — I’ve really come to appreciate her over the past decade or so. I could pick almost any of her roles as an example, but I’ll go with an unusual bit of casting. She was cast as the case officer of the title character in Le Carre’s “The Night Manager.” The character in the book was a man. But while there were some bad changes from the book in that show, this one improved the story. Oh, and remember — recently, she was the Queen! (I thought about the other Olivia — de Havilland — but I like this one better.)
  6. Jean Arthur — I’m just always so glad to see her pop up in any of those flicks from the 30s and 40s. If you wonder why, go watch “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

OK, I’m running out of time (gotta go to school today), so I’m going to have to really hurry through the…

Honorable Mentions

  1. Katharine Hepburn — Can you believe I left her out of the Top Five? Hey, I’m a rebel. But I place her here with all respect. Certainly go watch “The African Queen” again. But then be sure to check out “Bringing Up Baby.” Very silly, and nowhere near as good as Rosalind Russell’s masterpiece, but I like an occasional screwball comedy.
  2. Jennifer Ehle — Another based on a single role (she was born to star in “Pride and Prejudice“), although I enjoy her in every role — I just don’t see her enough. And before you gripe about too many Brit actresses, remember that this one was actually born in North Carolina.
  3. Emma Stone — In recent years, she’s become an A-lister who can do anything. But I especially like her first big film role, in “Superbad.” Who can blame Jonah Hill for obsessing about her? (And no, that’s not just a beauty thing; it was the kind of kid she came across as…)
  4. Sigourney Weaver — Sure, I liked her in “Alien” and “Alien 2, (speaking of which, guess who I saw at the comic-con at the Fairgrounds last month — Michael Biehn!)” but her all-time best was “The Year of Living Dangerously.” That was also Mel Gibson’s best, and Linda Hunt’s.
  5. Ingrid Bergman — I could say “It’s not because she was beautiful!,” but who would believe me? Seriously, “Casablana” is No. 3 on my all-time films list, and she was perfect in it. So there.

So there you go. I did that too fast, and I’m sure I left out somebody as great as Gene Hackman on the other list, but I’m sure y’all will let me know. (And no, I don’t mean Meryl Streep. She’s good but didn’t make my list. Nor did Cate Blanchett, but I thought about it.)

A single role earned Jennifer Ehle an Honorable Mention.

Top Five Best Actors of the Past 60 years

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Consider this a sidebar to the Robert Duvall obit. My headline said he was “The best actor of his generation,” and wishing to be more generous, I added “or since.” We can argue later whether that was grammatical.

But was he? And who are the others in the Top Five — to employ the Nick Hornby standard? Here’s the list. (And remember ladies, you have your own category. I’ll start thinking about a Top Five Actresses list.):

Top Five

  1. Robert Duvall — For reasons already stated. Although now that I make this list, I’m worrying that maybe he should be second to the next fellow in this lineup. But Duvall is the one we’re mourning, and he deserves it, so here he stays.
  2. Daniel Day-Lewis — I no longer need a time machine to go back and meet, or at least see and hear in person, our greatest president. I’ve seen him in the Spielberg movie, and I’m convinced that’s what Abe looked and sounded like. (This scene alone does that for me.) He was great in another movie in which he outdid our countrymen in portraying an archetypical American character — Natty Bumppo (although they didn’t call him that in the movie). Favorite line: When a British officer asks “How is it you are heading west?” at a time when the King needs him to stay and help fight the French, Nathaniel (as they called him in the film) replies, “Well, we kind of face to the north, and real sudden-like, turn left.”
  3. Denzel Washington — You might not think of him because he fits better into the leading-man movie star category that your great actors seldom enter. But he is a leading man with extraordinary depth. The first time I remember seeing him was in “Glory,” and I just thought, where did they get this guy? He would crack that odd, off-kilter smile that’s hard to read, and you’d realize there’s more to this character than just a bitter man with an attitude. Add to that his deeply flawed hero in “Flight.” Who else could have played that drugged-out pilot? No one, including the others on this list. Perfect fit, without being at all typecast.
  4. Jack Nicholson — How could I put this wiseass on the list? Because he’s a wiseass with depth and range. Consider “As Good As It Gets,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “The Departed.” And then think how his colonel in “A Few Good Men” stands up next to Duvall’s in “Apocalyse Now.” But we haven’t gotten to his best, which you seldom hear about any more. Behold Signalman 1st Class Billy L. “Badass” Buddusky in “The Last Detail.” My dad the sailor was amazed. He felt he knew that guy and served with him on numerous ships.
  5. Robert De Niro — It’s kind of a cliche to put him on such a list and crown him No. 1. Well, he has been great, especially in the first part of his career, in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Mean Streets,” “The Godfather Part 2” (people are wrong to say the sequel was better than the first one, but I forgive them because his brilliance blinded them) and “Raging Bull.” But after that, he started moving toward a formula that was still fun to watch, but he wasn’t growing as an actor. Eventually, we get “Analyze This,” which I loved, but he was doing the formula, with lots of this expression. He deserves to be on the list, but not first.

Honorable Mention

I add this category not because I couldn’t stop myself at five. That would be undisciplined and lazy. I think there’s a pretty clear line between those above and those below. But as the title suggests, I thought them worth mentioning.

  1. Edward Norton — He was a Top Five contender with “Primal Fear,”  “American History X” and “Fight Club.” But then what happened? Sure, I enjoyed seeing him in “A Complete Unknown,” but come on — what had he been doing since “Fight Club?”
  2. Morgan Freeman — Great in everything, but as with Norton (and de Niro), the best stuff was awhile back. He was great in “Glory,” but not as great as Denzel Washington. Great also in “Driving Miss Daisy.” I was impressed by him in “Unforgiven.” I loved him as the Lord in “Bruce Almighty,” but it wasn’t something that puts you in the Top Five.
  3. Colin Firth — Always good, and always entertaining — and he has more range than you might think. I recently enjoyed him in an early film that I had never heard of and ran across by accident — “A Month in the Country” from 1987. He was best in the BBC production of “Pride and Prejudice,” of course. No actor should even try to play Darcy after he did. Next best thing after that? “The King’s Speech,” which also featured a fine performance by the wonderful Geoffrey Rush.
  4. Michael Shannon — This is a guy who has Top Five chops, and I just need to keep watching him, in things like “Elvis and Nixon,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and the recent remake of “The Little Drummer Girl.” His agent needs to make sure he doesn’t do any more turkeys like “Pearl Harbor.”
  5. Wes Studi — I would never have thought of this guy, and maybe you don’t even know who he is. But he’s been good whenever I’ve seen him, and he was bloodcurdling amazing in a film mentioned above: “The Last of the Mohicans.” He was Magua, the truly scary guy (not that some of those palefaces didn’t have it coming). And he made him real.

OK, after thinking how scary Studi was as Magua, I started remembering how terrifying Javier Bardem was in “No Country for Old Men.” And then I remembered “Biutiful,” and that turn he did as Desi Arnaz. But I made myself stop. That’s enough for now.

You ever see his time-travel flick, “Déjà Vu?” You should.

The best actor of his generation, or since

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Tom Hagen dealing oh-so-patiently with the blowhard Jack Woltz in “The Godfather.”

Sadly, this is a week for obituaries. In fact, we received word of the passing of both Jesse Jackson and Robert Duvall in the same news cycle. It’s just taken me a few days to get to both of them.

The loss of Duvall is hard to take because he projects (still, in his films) a depth of humanity that is too often missing, or hidden, today. Not just in film and other arts, but in other aspects of modern life — especially politics. Fortunately, we still have those films. Tragically, he won’t be making more of them.

The best way I can sum him up is that as soon as I learned that would play a part in a “coming attraction,” I would think this is going to be good, and start looking forward to it. (Of course, directors and fellow performers had their own good or bad effects on the production, but having Duvall on board gave the picture a running start.)

My favorite Duvall roles are not always the most popular ones. He was celebrated for his role in “Apocalypse Now,” and loads of fans who thought they were unique could come up to him and say that they loved the smell of napalm in the morning. But while his performance in that was bright and gripping and entertaining — he occupied the screen fully in every frame in which he appeared, eclipsing the other actors — that’s not my favorite. It’s too cartoonish, and I found it distracting in a film that, after all, was a modernized retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At that stage of his career, Marlon Brando wasn’t nearly the actor Duvall was. But his character was far more meaningful to the story overall, and more in keeping with the tone.

What was his most impressive performance? I might think of something else the minute after I post this, but off the top of my head, it would be Tom Hagen in “The Godfather.” He creates a supremely self-controlled man. If you read the book, you know why Hagen was this way. He had learned it from his foster father Vito Corleone. Always keep your cool. Never issue a threat. Never let your enemy see what you’re feeling or thinking. Project yourself as the very model of reasonableness.

That screenshot at the top of this post is from his best scene — when he goes to Hollywood to ask a cartoonish blowhard of a producer to give a movie role to the Don’s godson Johnny Fontane. See that calm, deferential look on his face. That’s all Jack Woltz — the very model of weak man who thinks he’s something special — would ever see of him, until he woke up with a horse’s head in his bed.

It’s hard to project that quality, even when you’re paid to and you’re not personally feeling what the character would feel. Sure, he was a bad guy, but at least a bad guy with admirable qualities.

I also liked his fading country music star in “Tender Mercies,” a beautiful film about redemption. My favorite scene is this one: A woman comes up to him on the street and asks, “Were you really Mac Sledge?” He sort of half-laughs (as I remember; I haven’t seen it in a while), and admits, “Yes ma’am, I guess I was.”

I was never in my life nearly as famous as his character was supposed to be, but I still experience that sort of thing when people recognize me or my name from my newspaper days. I’m no star, but it happens. It last happened just over a week ago. I still haven’t fully figured out how to handle it, beyond saying thanks, but I like the way he did it. (At least the lady didn’t say, “I love the smell of napalm…”)

Duvall traveled around East Texas with a friend preparing for that role. Finally, the friend asked what they were doing and he explained, “We’re looking for accents.”

Again, though I wasn’t a professional actor, I had enough in common with Duvall to identify. Reports The New York Times:

Across a film career that took flight in the early 1960s, he stood out for an intense studiousness that shaped his every role. Even as a boy, in a Navy family that moved around the country, he had an ear for people’s speech patterns and an eye for their mannerisms. “I hang around a guy’s memories,” he once said. Insights that he gleaned were routinely tucked away in his head for potential future use…

I did the same, growing up. I was never fully a part of the communities in which I lived, but I grew up observing them closely and with interest. I suspect that’s a reason why so many military brats become journalists. As for accents — they are a lifelong source of fascination (and imitation, although I’m not as good at them as when I was young). I’ve been meaning to write one of my too-long-to-get-around-to posts on that subject for years. Maybe I’ll get to it soon.

I look at Duvall on the screen, and I see another guy like that.

I’ll close with a mention in that NYT article of his first film role, which foreshadowed the unique power he would bring to the screen:

That Mr. Duvall could become practically whomever he chose was foreshadowed in his first film, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a 1962 classic based on Harper Lee’s novel about racial prejudice in a Southern town. He played Boo Radley, the reclusive, hollow-eyed neighbor who fascinates and ultimately rescues the two small children of the defense lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck).

As Mr. Duvall’s career flourished in the 1970s and ’80s, it surprised many of his fans, on looking back, to discover him in that film. One person apparently not surprised was Harper Lee. When Mr. Duvall landed the part, she sent him a congratulatory telegram. “Hey, Boo,” she wrote. It was, he said later, his only contact with her.

I love that story. That was a very cool thing for “Scout” to have done. And it’s a congratulatory telegram I would certainly frame and put on the wall…

“Boo” Radley at the moment Scout first sees him…

A little bit of something good

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Just thought I’d share this with you because I haven’t posted lately. Occasionally I write something, but then I’m not sure I like it, so it just sits there in draft mode — sometimes for days; sometimes much longer. This happened just yesterday.

And today’s so busy, and tomorrow likely to be more so.

So I just thought I’d share this, which I ran across last night while I was looking for a completely different clip.

And it drew a smile. A brief one. It’s not the whole song — it runs just slightly over a minute. But hey, you’re having a busy Monday, too, right? You don’t need the whole thing. I just thought you’d like seeing Johnny, looking all young and healthy and saying generous things about Bob.

So enjoy this before you move on to the next thing you do. Just give Johnny a nod and continue with you necessaries. You don’t have to thank me or anything. Don’t think twice; it’s alright…

Musicians we lost in 2025

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I almost skipped over my email about “The Musicians We Lost in 2025,” figuring it would be about people I’d never heard of. But no. It turns out that at my age, the people I remember are the ones dying. Which makes a sober sort of sense, I suppose.

The NYT’s Amplifier feature does a good job with these kinds of things. Here’s the whole article, with playlist. I’ll just share below some of those that meant most to me…

  • Sly Stone. The Amplifier chose “Dance to the Music,” which I suppose is fine. I chose to share “Everyday People.” That’s just me. It’s odd the things you remember about people. What I remember is something a psychology professor said to our class about him at Memphis State. This prof was an Indian woman, who seemed mature and sensible enough. But she was talking about drugs — the kinds kids like us tended to stray toward — and telling us that being a drug addict wasn’t a problem, as long as you had enough money to feed the habit. Look at Sly Stone, she said — he’s high-functioning. She also told us at about that time that cocaine wasn’t addictive. (And what was Sly addicted to? Crack. Ahem.) So enjoy yourselves, kids, as long as you can pay the bills! I had some good instructors in college, but some were wanting in perspicacity.
  • Roberta Flack. I’ll go with the one they picked: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” My random memory, which you will share if you’re the right age, is about hearing it for the first time in the Clint Eastwood change-of-pace film, “Play Misty for Me.” It made more of an impression than the song mentioned in the title. Unfortunately, that hauntingly beautiful song is permanently tied in my mind to the image of a sleeping man suddenly opening his eyes to see above him a murderous madwoman with a butcher knife. But it’s still beautiful.
  • Sam Moore and Steve Cropper. Wow, I didn’t know we’d lost not only the tenor half of Sam & Dave, but the legendary rhythm guitarist who played on their greatest hit. The Amplifier notes that “Moore famously immortalizes Cropper’s playing on “Soul Man” with the exclamation, ‘Play it, Steve!’
  • Mark Volman. Volman and the other Turtles were embarrassed by their first and biggest hit, “Happy Together.” They didn’t think it was cool enough. They were wrong. It’s one of the finest pop songs of the 1960s.
  • Marianne Faithfull. This is not possible, because Marianne is 17 years old and always will be. And you can’t see her picture without your heart melting, just a bit. I don’t know whether Mick Jagger was the melting sort, but he was certainly open to her appeal at one point. Of course he was. The NYT chose “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” but I’ll go with “As Tears Go By.”
  • Brian Wilson. They saved the biggest for last, and so will I. And while I was afraid they’d miss on the song, they didn’t. Good for them. They chose “God Only Knows.” If you doubt the choice, I refer you to this scene from “Love and Mercy,” in which Paul Dano, as the young Wilson, shares the song for the first time with his heartless creep of a father. It’s painful to watch, but the beauty of the song comes through. The Amplifier notes that “that Paul McCartney once called the greatest ever written.” Paul was on the right track.

May they all rest in peace. They gave us what they could while there were here.

But these go to 8

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This feels a little like déjà vu, since I just did a post about another NYT feature I’ve praised before, but here goes anyway, because I can’t resist a good Top Five list, even when it inappropriately goes to 8…

I’ve expressed appreciation for “The Amplifier” before, and I’m impressed again by their “8 really great songs from fake movie bands” list, which hit my In box about an hour ago.

Here’s the list:

  1. The Wonders, “That Thing You Do!”
  2. Stillwater, “Fever Dog”
  3. The Soggy Bottom Boys, “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow”
  4. The Folksmen, “Old Joe’s Place”
  5. Josie and the Pussycats, “3 Small Words”
  6. Sex Bob-Omb, “We Are Sex Bob-Omb”
  7. The Lonely Island featuring Michael Bolton and Mr. Fish, “Incredible Thoughts”
  8. Spinal Tap, “Stonehenge”

Excellent, excellent list. I would definitely top my own Top Five list of “songs from fake movie bands” with “That Thing You Do.” (I’m referring, of course, to the peppy version that followed Guy Patterson’s beat — the one that turned the Oneders into “teen sensations” — not the insipid original submitted by that jerk Jimmy, who also thought up “Oneders.”)

I’ve never heard another fake movie band song that comes close to it. I would also include “Man of Constant Sorrow” (although I’m not convinced it fits the criteria, since it was a traditional folk song) and “Stonehenge,” which I would probably place at No. 2, after the Wonders. I don’t know at the moment what the other two would be without thinking about it awhile, and I didn’t want that process to hold up sharing this with y’all.

Enjoy. And react, if you are so moved…

Separated at birth? No, way BEFORE birth…

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As a Superman fan from the Silver Age, I’ve always been kind of frustrated with the casting of some of the key characters in the movies. Especially Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.

The one on the TV show wasn’t TOO bad, but he could have been better. At least he had the costume right, and the attitude as well.

But the makers of the first movie got it all wrong. He acted the part OK, but he didn’t look right, and worse, FAR worse, they took the world’s most famous cub reporter and turned him into a photographer. Inexcusable. Nothing against photogs, mind you, but that not what Jimmy Olsen WAS!

From then on, things got no better. I can’t even remember the subsequent ones I’ve seen. I guess I’ve blocked them out.

But the long nightmare is over, if Hollywood would reach out NOW to New Zealand. In fact, now might be too late, since I’m seeing this guy on a show filmed in 2016. But check him out, anyway.

I’m talking about Nic Sampson, who played D.C. Sam Breen on the cop show “The Brokenwood Mysteries,” currently available on the PBS app. If he hasn’t aged too much since the third season I’m now watching, he’s perfect. Take a look:

So we’re all set, once we ditch the tie and suit, and put him in a bow-tie and sweater vest. And he can play the part. He’s the junior member of the detective (which the Kiwis pronounce “diTEECtive”) team, and his character has a definite cub-reporter feel about him. The other two main characters are sort of Clark (or a cross between Clark and Perry White) and Lois. (But alas, they don’t really look much like them.)

You doubt me? Then I refer you to the one, true version of Jimmy, that is, the Silver Age version:

Admittedly, according to the text on the cover, that’s not actually Jimmy himself, but his evil double. The real Jimmy is apparently trapped in a plastic box or something. I dunno, but a double’s a double, and Nic Sampson is definitely one of those. (Oops! I just read the cover again, and apparently the double is the one in the box, and the apparent bad guy is the REAL Jimmy. Oh, well, whatever. You get my point.)

It’s like the artist used him as a model for this cover. But that’s impossible, because this cover was published in 1965, and Nic Sampson wasn’t born yet until 1986!

Which is impressive. Maybe his mom read a lot of D.C. comics.

So that’s done and dusted. Anything else I can help you with, Hollywood?

No, it’s not the funniest. It’s No. 7

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Just a very quick note to correct something I ran across on YouTube while looking for something else.

It claimed that Woody Allen’s “Love and Death” is “the funniest film of all time,” which it is not.

It’s Woody Allen’s funniest film, (“Bananas” is second, followed by “Play it Again, Sam”). It’s also, to stretch a point, the funniest comedy ever to lampoon uberserious Russian novels of the 19th century. But that’s all that can be said, except that in the larger category of best comic films of all time, it comes in at a respectable No. 7.

I won’t elaborate. I’ll just copy and paste what I wrote three years back (in a post in which I regretted having failed to put Howard Hawkes’ masterpiece “His Girl Friday” on my overall movie Top Five, although it made my Top Ten), and then we’ll move on:

  1. His Girl Friday — Yay, it’s at the top of the list! And deserves it.
  2. Young Frankenstein — Some would choose “Blazing Saddles.” I would not. Have you seen that one in the last few decades? It doesn’t hold up. This does.
  3. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — I was looking at the AFI list of the supposed top 100 funniest movies in American cinema, and at No. 79 they had “The Freshman,” from 1925. Which I’ve never seen, but I did see “The Freshman” from 1990, and it was awesome. I mean, come on, Brando playing a guy who just happens to look like the Godfather? Still, it was not star Matthew Broderick’s best. Ferris was. And it didn’t even make this stupid list. Which is lame.
  4. This Is Spinal Tap — You can talk mockumentaries all day, but this is the granddaddy of them all, and the best ever. Because it goes to 11.
  5. Office Space — In a category by itself.
  6. My Man Godfrey — Another screwball comedy, but I think there’s room for this one and Friday both. It’s certainly different enough.
  7. Love and Death — Say what you will about Woody Allen (and there’s a good bit of creepy stuff to say), but I’ll paraphrase the fan from “Stardust Memories:” I really liked his early, funny ones. And the best of all was “Love and Death.” That’s what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky really needed — a few laughs.
  8. The Graduate — Yeah, this one is on my Top Five best ever. But it’s the only one of those to make this list. Yet I’m not sure it should be here. Was it really a comedy exactly? It’s the most category-defying of the truly great films.
  9. Groundhog Day — I had to get a Bill Murray in here, and I chose this one.
  10. The Paper — Initially, I had American Graffiti here. Or maybe Trading Places, which so brilliantly combined two Mark Twain stories, and two of his best. But I decided to end up where I started — with a film about newspapering that I could really identify with. Funny thing is, some serious journalists hated this film for some of the same factors that might cause someone to reject “Friday” — they were afraid it made us scribes look bad. But again, it was brutally dead-on caricature. Sure, we were more serious and principled that this. But I really, really identified with the Michael Keaton character, who at least had this going for him: He wasn’t as bad as Walter Burns, not by a long shot. Not as funny either, though…

I remain comfortable with those choices, although I hate that “Minions” didn’t make the list (I’m always torn on the last movie I pick). Maybe I should do a Top Five Animated Movies list…

Top Five Favorite Robert Redford Movies

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Note that this is not “Top Five Best…”

If it were that, the unquestioned winner would be “All the President’s Men.” I just watched it again recently, on Criterion. Every few years, I go back and watch it again, and every time, I’m more amazed at how much great it is. It’s the verisimilitude. Nobody’s trying to be cute, or sexy, or fun. It’s deadly realistic. The interviews conducted with people who really, really don’t want to be talking to these two reporters — the awkwardness of both the sources and the reporters themselves, polished stars that they were — is astounding. Other people like slick. I’m impressed by real.

But on this sad day, I thought I’d go with fun. What were the Redford flicks I enjoyed the most? Here they are:

  1. The Natural — It’s only my third-fave sports flick, but it’s my favorite baseball movie (with “Major League” a close runner-up, I think), and you can’t say fairer than that.
  2. All The President’s Men — OK, so Roy Hobbs only knocked it down a notch, but that’s because my appreciation grows each time I see it. I gave it a very favorable review in my first job at a newspaper. But I like it even better now. It’s just not, you know, baseball.
  3. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid — When it came out, I loved it so much that I couldn’t imagine these actors doing anything to top it (and “The Sting” didn’t even match it, despite the obvious effort). So good. Of course, it was sort of a neo-Western, with that Burt Bacharach music. Something special.
  4. Three Days of the Condor — Generally, I’m not a huge fan of paranoia movies (“The CIA’s out to get me!”) But this one really worked. Part of that was Max von Sydow as the freelance assassin.
  5. The Candidate — This one’s less-known, but it was great. The story of a candidate who didn’t want to win — and how difficult it is to maintain such insouciance in the all-enveloping atmosphere of a campaign. And it had Peter Boyle in it, as the guy who enticed him into running.

Anyway, I think those are my faves. How about you?

Goodbye to the Kid

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Robert Redford at (almost) 40.

This is the way time passes.

I had a shock glancing at the magazines at a store checkout back when I lived in New Orleans (OK, technically across the river in Algiers) when I was in junior high.

I saw a headline that said something like “PAUL NEWMAN TURNS 40!” I couldn’t believe it. This was 1965, and he had played Billy the Kid in 1958! He had been the young up-and-comer in “The Hustler” in 1961! So how could he be an old man now?

But sure enough, he was almost four years older than my Dad, so that’s getting on up there.

While I was still in high school, he portrayed Butch Cassidy alongside a guy young enough to pass as the Sundance Kid. Appropriately, Robert Redford was almost a dozen years younger. He’d been around for a bit, but playing Sundance was his big break, immediately making him a major star.

Which is interesting, looking back. Think of all the characters he played later in his huge career — Gatsby (which came out the year I got married, which is why I wore a three-piece white linen suit that day), Bob Woodward, Bill McKay (“The Candidate“), Jeremiah Johnson, Condor, Major Julian Cook (“A Bridge Too Far“), and Roy Hobbs.

He was always the straight man. So serious, hardly smiling. Kind of grim. I’m-just-hear-to-do-a-job- ma’am. When he reassures a source that he’s a Republican in “All the President’s Men,” Dustin Hoffman is suprised, but nobody else is — he looks the part. And would you ever call Jeremiah Johnson a fun guy?

By contrast the Kid was the coolest guy in the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang. Everybody was afraid of him, even Harvey. If it had been present-day, he’d have been the one in a leather jacket. He’s the one who got Katharine Ross!

Anyway, I’m sorry he’s gone, and shocked that he was 89. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people around me are getting old. Plenty of them are over 40 now.

It’s sobering.

As a senior in high school, I had this poster on my wall.

So much for the legendary hero of McNairy County

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The Wikipedia page for Adamsville, TN, features this pic of local boy Buford Pusser’s house.

It’s been so long since Buford Pusser was a household name that this didn’t make all that much of a splash, near as I could tell (maybe it was bigger on TV, which I don’t see). Fifty years ago, it would have been as big nationally as Alex Murdaugh’s crimes — maybe bigger.

Certainly bigger. Alex Murdaugh was a prominent small-town Southern lawyer who murdered his wife and son, among a host of less-shocking crimes. Pusser was a rural Southern sheriff who impressively wielded a big stick in fighting rampant crime in his county, to the point that the bad guys ambushed him and murdered his wife, and Hollywood made him a hero — several times, if you count the two sequels and the made-for-TV movie. Apparently, a TV series as well.

Pauline Mullins Pusser

And now, the authorities say Buford himself killed his wife. This at least has made The New York Times take notice. One wonders how Hollywood will react to the news.

Pauline Mullins Pusser was killed in 1967, and her husband died seven years later. There will be no killer to prosecute, but authorities are pursuing an indictment in the cause of “giving dignity and closure to Pauline and her family and ensuring that the truth is not buried with time.” A good call, I’d say. Called for in this case, if not in others.

“Walking Tall” was something of a national hit in 1973. The NYT cites Variety in saying that it “was made for about $500,000 and earned more than $40 million worldwide.” Not one of the top-grossing films of the year, but impressive nevertheless, given the tiny investment. It reminds me in that regard of “Billy Jack” a couple of years earlier.

It’s hard for me to recall accurately how big a hit is was nationally, because I was living at the time in small-town West Tennessee, where it was a sensation. Of course, my small town was nothing like McNairy County. Millington was just a few miles north of Memphis, and was the home of NAS Memphis (now known as Naval Support Activity Mid-South). I lived on the base. I was a sophomore at Memphis State, but I knew some of the high school kids on base, who attended the local public school. And they were absolutely nuts about “Walking Tall.” Kind of the way kids my age had been about “Billy Jack” in 1971.

This one girl who lived around the corner from us on the base was certainly impressed. I didn’t really know her and don’t recall her name, but I did fall into conversation with her one day in front of her house. I say “conversation,” but I think it was mostly her talking about how wonderful the movie was. So I asked her if she’d like to see it again. She said yes, and I took her to the Millington drive-in that night.

You can forget any sordid imaginings that may conjur — the college kid taking the high school girl to a drive-in. It just seemed a natural thing to do since she was so enthusiastic about the film, and the drive-in was where it was showing.

I sat on my side of the car and she sat way over on hers, with her eyes glued on the screen, rapt. I had felt a bit awkward thinking she might be nervous about this older (like two years, I guess) guy she hardly knew taking her to the drive-in, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. I was not in her thoughts. She was just digging Joe Don Baker up there and all the awesome things he was doing. I’m trying to remember whether her lips moved along with the dialog as she saw it, because it certainly seems likely given she was so fascinated and had seen it before.

I don’t remember interacting with her in any way after that night. There didn’t seem any ground for the establishment of even a platonic friendship. She was only interested in one thing, and it did not lie within my universe of interests.

No matter. I met my wife a couple of months later. The night we met we had a long talk about Jack Kerouac and On The Road. This was a good start, and things got better from there. Did I tell y’all about our big 50th-anniversary celebration with our children and grandchildren last year?

I wonder, though, whether that girl has heard this latest news. I hope she’s not too shaken by it.

Above, I sort of wondered idly how Hollywood would react. Of course, if there is ever a new movie, it won’t be in the same vein at all. It won’t inspire folks across the nation to idolize the ex-professional wrestler who becomes sheriff in a corrupt corner of the countryside and lets no one stop him while he addresses crime by whupping bad guys with his big stick. Or to idolize anyone else.

It will instead be painfully sad. I don’t think I want to see that flick, either…

Joe Don Baker as Pusser in ‘Walking Tall.’