The Conversations: Trouble Every Day

I’m pleased to announce that The Conversations: Trouble Every Day is live at The House Next Door. In this edition, Ed Howard and I go into detail about that 2001 Claire Denis film and then step back a bit to discuss the horror genre and whether Trouble Every Day belongs to it. If you’ve never seen Trouble Every Day, here's an excuse to watch it. And here’s my advice: go blindly. This is one of those films that’s evocative and yet elusive. Rather than letting a critic’s review set your expectations, see how the film speaks to you.

This is the least mainstream film to serve as the sole focus for The Conversations, and that’s part of the fun of it. (Next month will be quite the opposite.) So, if you haven’t yet, check out Trouble Every Day and then head on over to The House Next Door. As usual, Ed and I hope that our discussion leads to an even larger conversation among readers. The comments are always open.

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)
Overlooked - Part I: Undertow (March 2009)
Overlooked - Part II: Solaris (March 2009)
Star Trek (May 2009)
Werner Herzog (May 2009)
Errol Morris (July 2009)
Michael Mann (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part I (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part II (September 2009)
Pixar (WALL-E) (October 2009)

Fighting a Legend: Muhammad and Larry

There’s no glory in following a legend. Larry Holmes realized that even before he stepped into the ring with Muhammad Ali in 1980 for their notorious title fight. Holmes was 35-0 at the time with 26 knockouts. He had defended his heavyweight crown a remarkable seven times in two years. But when people looked at Holmes they didn’t see a great champion. They saw someone who wasn’t Ali. This is hardly a rare phenomenon in sports, but it’s especially notable here for two reasons: 1) Ali was a greater legend than most – an adored and charismatic figure who was as significant culturally as athletically; 2) Holmes wasn’t just misfortunate enough to come into his prime after Ali’s reign; he also had the thankless task of beating the over-the-hill but still beloved fighter with his fists in the most gruesome loss of Ali’s career. To Ali’s fans, this was adding injury to insult. Holmes, just doing his job, could have more effectively won the love of the people by getting arrested for dog fighting.

This famous and unfortunate clash of boxing titans is the subject of Muhammad and Larry, the fourth and thus far best documentary to be released as part of ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series. It’s directed by Albert Maysles and Bradley Kaplan and it utilizes a great deal of never-before-seen footage that Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) shot for a planned 1980 documentary that was never released. Given the public fascination with Ali, it’s staggering to think that it’s taken almost 30 years for the footage to be unearthed. Then again, it isn’t a surprise at all. Maysles’ 1980 footage is a record of devastation. As heartbreaking as it is to see Ali now, crippled by Parkinson’s syndrome, this is almost worse. In 1980, Ali was 38 and hadn’t fought in two years. Just two months before the fight, he was overweight – ultimately slimming down by misusing thyroid medication as diet pills. Beyond all of that, it’s obvious now, if somehow it wasn’t then, that a career of taking blows to the head had taken a toll on Ali’s speech and motor skills. The beloved “Greatest of All Time,” whose most celebrated fights were the ones in which none of the experts gave him a chance, was brain damaged and about to step into the ring with Holmes, who at 29 wasn’t a dope who could be roped into a mistake – not that Ali was in any condition to capitalize on a mistake if Holmes made one.

For sports fans these are painful images, all too easily avoided, which is precisely why sports fans should confront this documentary. Interestingly, Muhammad and Larry comes along just after the publication of “Offensive Play,” an examination of the debilitating long-term effects of repeated blows to the head that are inherent to football, by Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker. Gladwell’s article hardly mentions boxing, but that’s not because there isn’t evidence that the sport can lead to premature dementia; presumably it’s because the dangers of boxing are old news. The tragedy of Ali’s disintegration, even before his Parkinson’s syndrome diagnosis, is case in point. Yet somehow mixed martial arts, a sport that is in many ways more violent than boxing (though perhaps not specifically to the head), is increasing in popularity. And football, of course, is America’s game. Watching Muhammad and Larry it’s baffling that the Ali-Holmes fight was allowed to happen, until one remembers the underlying motive: money. It wasn’t just Ali who risked his life for a promised $8 million payday. Promoters benefitted. Las Vegas benefitted. Sports entertainment as a whole benefitted. Ali’s well-being was sacrificed in the name of fortune. (One wonders: How many NFL players would need to suffer premature dementia for football to dial back its violence?)

Muhammad and Larry isn’t only about the tragedy of Ali, however. Implicitly the documentary suggests that there was another victim on October 2, 1980, and he was the guy administering the beating: Larry Holmes. Holmes, who for years had been one of Ali’s sparring partners, had no desire to punish Ali, and Holmes so respected Ali that he went into the match believing that maybe, just maybe, Ali might still be dangerous. If a washed up Ali had managed to give Holmes a fight, boxing historians would have held it against the reigning champion. As it was, Holmes, sensing Ali’s weakened state, seemed to try to coax the legend into submission, unable to go in for the killer blow against a defenseless opponent. The match was so lopsided that during multiple rounds Ali didn’t land a single punch. Just like he had against George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali took a beating against the ropes, only this time he wasn’t deflecting the blows with his arms. Holmes kept pounding Ali, thus proving his mettle as a boxer while becoming the villain he never wanted to be.

The Ali-Holmes footage is difficult to watch, but Muhammad and Larry manages to be as sweet as it is upsetting. Holmes, whose younger-years lisp is similar to that of Mike Tyson, is soft-spoken, tender and, for a boxer, rather humble. One shot from 1980 finds him lying on the trainer's table and reaching back to touch his baby’s foot and stroke his wife’s cheek as if oblivious to the world around him. Ali, meanwhile, is ever the showman; at one point we’re treated to a terrific montage of Ali performing magic tricks. Both men knew they were on camera, of course, and Ali was almost always “on,” but it’s hard to overlook how relaxed both men seem to be. In that respect, Muhammad and Larry is a snapshot of a lost era in sports and journalism: a time when athletes weren’t as rehearsed, guarded and skeptical as they are today (with good reason). In the archival footage, both Holmes and Ali welcome the camera into their lives like school children inviting a new kid into their playground games. The intimacy is striking.

It would be tempting to mention that Muhammad and Larry doesn’t pack the emotional wallop of that other tremendous Ali documentary, Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, but to do so would be to treat this film like boxing historians treated Holmes. The truth is that for a documentary that must come in at under an hour Muhammad and Larry is impressively rich, complimenting its archival footage with some eloquent modern interviews with subjects ranging from Holmes to Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s fight doctor of 15 years who quit because Ali wouldn’t. If Maysles and Kaplan had 30 more minutes, they would have been obligated to include one more unfortunate detail: Holmes, the man who exposed an over-the-hill Ali, also didn’t know when to quit, making several comebacks in his 40s before fighting his last bout at the age of 52. The power of the payday is extraordinary. Muhammad and Larry isn’t hell-bent in assigning blame for these chronic sports tragedies, which is fortunate because there would be a lot of it to go around. But it’s clear that someone needs to save these men when they get to the point that they can no longer save themselves. In the fight between Holmes and Ali, everyone lost, except those who profited at their expense.


Muhammad and Larry premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.

Weekly Rant: Apocalypse Now (No Italics)

It’s 7:59 am, and I am not here. Not on this blog. Not online. Not even at a computer. Instead I’m near Arlington National Cemetery about 2 miles away from The Cooler’s home office. It rained last night, but right now the weather is dry and crisp, about 52 degrees. I am standing in a sea of thousands, about to run my second consecutive Marine Corps Marathon. The question is: “Why?”

It’s not just a rhetorical question for print. I promise you that at this very moment the word “Why?” is running through my brain as I try to stay loose behind the starting line. You can’t see me now, but it’s a safe bet that I’m wearing a stupidly giddy expression like Will Ferrell in Elf, or I look as miserable as Francis Ford Coppola on about the 212th day of shooting Apocalypse Now. If not, it’s something in between, like Dirk Diggler’s expression just before he shoots his first porno in Boogie Nights – excited and terrified. Anyway, regardless of my expression, I guarantee you that I’m asking myself “Why?” I must be, because there’s just no logical reason to run 26.2 miles voluntarily – never mind paying for the right to do it.

To be absolutely clear, today’s race isn’t just my second MCM, it’s my second marathon. Last year I wrote about my first marathon experience using comparisons I thought movie fans would understand. In that piece I mentioned that my goal was to break 3:30, but I failed, finishing the race in 3:35:11, in large part because I made a rookie mistake and got too frisky too soon, leading to a total collapse around the 24-mile mark. What I didn’t mention in last year’s recap, because I didn’t want to “play the blame game,” as A Serious Man’s Sy Ableman would say, is that part of the reason I got too frisky too soon is because a woman running next to me gave me bad information around the 12-mile mark – leading me to believe I was running behind my goal pace when really I was already ahead of it. Of course, I’m the math-challenged dummy who didn’t trust his own watch and gobbled up her poison like Snow White biting into the apple, so it’s my own damn fault. Nevertheless, given that episode of, um, influenced self-destruction I came off of last year’s race determined to keep training and come back this year stronger and smarter and ready to break 3:30.

So, yeah, that’s part of the reason I’m about to run my second marathon: I want to break 3:30. Alas, after an injury-plagued training it will feel like a tremendous accomplishment if I’m able slip under 3:35 (which just goes to show the inherent dangers of sequels, I guess). Barring some major catastrophe that makes me give up running for good, this won’t be my last marathon. I’m sure of that. My training was too frustrating this season to go out this way. I want to get healthy and start it all over again and finally get it right. But today I’m like a director who has just wrapped primary production on epic only to realize that his lead actor can’t carry a film; I’ve got to go with what I’ve got. At 8 am that process begins.

Why am I doing this? I’m not lying when I say I don’t know. Because I don’t. Not exactly. In part it’s because I want to challenge myself. It’s because running makes me healthier than I would be without it – physically and mentally. It’s because long runs help the world slow down long enough to ponder everything from the big picture to the big screen. By the end of this race I don’t expect to fully understand why I run, but if I’m able to cross the finish line having figured out what I think about A Serious Man, that’ll be good enough.



Addendum (10/26): Thank goodness that’s over. My 2009 MCM was a success in one way: I finished. Other than that it was a struggle. Long story somewhat short, the first 13 miles went better than expected. The next 2 saw my pace slow a bit, even though the effort felt the same, which is to say that it still felt effortless. I knew that wasn’t a good sign if I was going to try to set a personal record and get under 3:35, but there was still hope. By the 18-mile mark, however, it was starting to become serious work, and given my aforementioned problems with training this year I knew I wasn’t going to find a second wind. With my hope of a personal best busted, I shifted my mindset and became immediately and totally content to just manage my way through the rest of the race, finishing in a time around 3:40, maybe 3:45 at the very worst. As much as I could, I was going to “enjoy” the rest.

For a while, it worked. At the 22-mile mark, I was on pace for nothing worse than a 3:43 finish, and I was wholly content with that. Then disaster struck. Absolutely out of nowhere my right hamstring cramped. I came to a dead stop and it took me at least a minute just to get the cramps to stop to the point that I could figure out how to hobble off the course. A few minutes later I’d stretched out my hammy enough that I could walk. Then I was able to run. Alas, over the final miles I couldn’t run more than half a mile before my hamstring would start to tighten (along with other muscles) and I’d have to walk. (My first marathon I never walked once.)

But walk, jog and stagger I did. And I finished ... in just under 4 hours: 3:58:something. It was not the race I had hoped for, but it was somewhat fitting given my injury-plagued training. (Interestingly, I had no IT band pain during or after the race, even though that was the injury that threw off my training program. Also, I’ve never cramped before on a run, and I haven’t had any leg cramps whatsoever in maybe 2 years. Strange.) While I know I’m a better runner than the performance of Sunday, in some ways the 2009 MCM is my proudest accomplishment as a competitor. Believe me: When your hamstring is cramping to the point you can’t move (in fact can hardly breathe), finishing the race doesn’t just seem unattractive, it seems impossible.

But I didn’t quit. Of that I’m proud.

Go There: Where the Wild Things Are

When I tell you that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are takes me back to my childhood, I’m of course referring to the numerous moments when mundane objects – a wooden fence, a nylon stocking, a toy ship cresting the waves of blue bed sheets – are made to feel deeply magical or fascinatingly mysterious. I’m also referring to the “wild things” themselves, which in addition to being Maurice Sendak illustrations made flesh, er, fur also look like they crawled out of the brain of Jim Henson, who was my childhood auteur of choice. (This isn’t a coincidence: The costumes were designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.) More than anything, though, when I tell you that this film reminds me of what it was like to be 9-years-old, like its main character Max, it’s because Where the Wild Things Are tickles memories of movies I watched repeatedly when I was that age, particularly Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. Those classic films are filled with magic, mystery and costumed creatures, too, just like this one, but the three movies are united in my mind for a more important reason: they take place in lusciously tangible worlds.

I didn’t realized how much I’d come to miss environmental tangibility in movies until I watched Jonze’s film, but 30 minutes in I was painfully aware (again) of how often the physical paradises of old now get paved over by flat CGI parking lots. Jonze’s film isn’t without CGI landscaping – the fort Max designs with the wild things is a digital doozy – but the effects here are minimal and practical. Most of the film’s shooting, under the guidance of cinematographer Lance Acord, was done on location in Australia, marrying actual three-dimensional environments with actual three-dimensional performers – a combination that seems so simple, not to mention natural, but that has managed to become endangered in fantasy films. The results are awe-striking: boulders and cliff faces that evoke the Tunisia-as-Tataouine locales of Star Wars, gnarled forests that evoke The Wizard of Oz, rolling sand dunes that evoke Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. Max, in his furry white pajamas, isn’t the only one who gets dirty whenever there’s a rumpus; the beasts get dusty, too, and that’s significant.

The genuineness of these environments might not be consciously recognized, but it’s deeply felt. There’s an intimacy to these images that CGI-dominated films never match. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series got all sorts of hype for shooting in New Zealand, but those pictures don’t feel anywhere near this organic. How could they, when so much of their authentic detail is covered up by computer illustrations? For all the progress of computer-generated effects over the past 20 years, digital approximations of reality remain mostly sanitized visual pleasures. By comparison, Where the Wild Things Are is visceral and untamed. That makes it old-school. For someone who never understood why George Lucas thought the digital backdrops of his Star Wars prequels were an upgrade from the brick-and-mortar sets of the original trilogy, it’s an absolute joy to encounter a fantasy that requires no heavy lifting in order for its universe to come to life. Watching Where the Wild Things Are we needn’t squint. We needn’t convince ourselves. We needn’t suspend disbelief. We just watch.

I wish I could say that everything that happens in this film is as magical as the enchanted world in which it unfolds, but that’s not the case. In fact, dramatically speaking, Jonze’s film has more charm when it operates in the real world than in the one of Max’s fantasies. The opening scenes allow us to experience life through Max’s eyes and heart. We feel the rambunctiousness, playfulness and loneliness of childhood. We feel the security of small forts, and then we see how easily a 9-year-old’s sense of security can be crushed. We are reminded that a simple toy ship and a Valentine made out of construction paper and Popsicle sticks can be all-important treasures to a child. And we are put in touch with that too brief time when being in the company of our parents offered so much comfort that we were happy to lie at our mother’s feet just to be near her. If Jonze’s movie had been allowed to stay here, in reality, Where the Wild Things Are might have offered one of the most poignant renderings of childhood spirit since To Kill a Mockingbird. Alas, there are wild things to get to, and there are rumpuses to start.

Jonze and fellow screenwriter David Eggers can’t be faulted for following the path designed by Sendak, and in fact they do a fairly commendable job of creating a complete story that feels mostly faithful to the spirit of Sendak’s minimalist triumph. But inherently there’s a problem when the movie’s wild things don’t feel wild and when Max’s adventures in this faraway land aren’t as wondrous as the faraway land itself. A few rumpuses aside, the wild things spend most of their time brooding, whining and sulking. It’s still a treat to watch Max, played tremendously by Max Records, trying to figure out his place in this new world, but it comes at the cost of seeing his spirit swallowed up by these massively dreary creatures. When about two-thirds of the way through the film Max proposes a dirt clod fight to – get this – raise morale, it feels not like boundless fantasy but like an inmate’s improvised pastime. In that context the giant fortress Max builds with the beasts feels more like court-ordered hard labor for his initial bad behavior than a tribute to childhood imagination. Whereas Sendak’s book thrives on escapism, Jonze’s film is always dragging a ball and chain.

Still, there are worse places to be imprisoned. Though the drama is drab the visuals are vibrant. Jonze succeeds in transporting us to this fantasy environment precisely because he makes the fantasy so attainable. It is out of this world and of this world simultaneously. That said, I could have done without the vocal contributions of James Gandolfini as Carol and Catherine O’Hara as Judith, precisely because they are too of-this-world to fit the fantasy; at some point I stopped seeing the puppets and began to see their vocal puppeteers. Then again, it’s refreshing to see mystical creatures lumbering across the screen with real gravity and awkwardness, something computers are still learning to replicate. By the end, I was ready to be done with these friendly beasts, I admit, but I was heartbroken to leave their world. More fantasies should take place where the wild things are.

Unevenly Cooked: Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?

Watching Mike Tollin’s contribution to ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series is like being on the receiving end of a college term paper that has 2-inch margins and type large enough for grandma to read it without her glasses. Tollin is a capable storyteller and there are good ideas to be found in his documentary, but the highlights of his effort are let down by the overall sloppiness of the presentation. Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? feels rushed, overly casual and frustratingly scattered. Surprising for something that’s partially autobiographical, it’s a film with too many voices that thus lacks a unifying one. It’s a first draft in need of polishing. It is without question the least impressive of the three “30 for 30” docs released so far, and yet it’s absolutely worth watching because of its terrific subject matter. Small Potatoes lacks the stuff of memorable cinema or journalism, but it’s fascinating all the same because it unearths an important story that the sports world has managed to forget.

The United States Football League enjoyed a three-year run from 1983-1985, during which it evolved from an amateurish sideshow act to an emerging threat to the National Football League, and yet no one talks about it, ever. The USFL drafted three straight Heisman Trophy winners away from the NFL, and yet no one talks about it, ever. The league was the professional starting point for four eventual Hall of Famers – Jim Kelly, Reggie White, Steve Young and Gary Zimmerman – and yet no one talks about it, ever. It had coaches like Lee Corso, Jim Mora and Steve Spurrier, and yet no one talks about it, ever. It flew, temporarily, on wings made of wax that were crafted in part by one of the USFL team owners, Donald Trump, who was so low-profile at the time that ESPN’s Bob Ley called him “low key,” and yet no one talks about it, ever. Small Potatoes remedies these omissions. Its 51 minutes on the USFL are likely to be the first 51 minutes most sports fans have dedicated to the defunct league in 15 years or more. In that respect, Small Potatoes is something to cherish. Otherwise there’s little to praise.

Ironically, Small Potatoes’ undoing might be the filmmaker’s familiarity with the material. You see, during the USFL’s brief run Tollin headed up the production studio that had exclusive rights to USFL footage, repackaging highlights each week for ABC. Consequently his documentary is something of a homecoming, and it often feels that way, though rarely for the better. For example, Tollin narrates portions of the film with the goofy air of someone who is slightly embarrassed by his yearbook photos but is determined to show them to us anyway. For background on the USFL, Tollin borrows generously from a Howard Cosell report that he is too fortunate to remember, as it emits the feeling that the USFL is a minor treasure not worth a fresh coat of paint. And then there’s Tollin’s relationship with Trump, without which Trump probably wouldn’t have agreed to an interview, and yet this too proves to be a curse disguised as a blessing, prompting Tollin to bookend his film with an interview of his high-profile subject that appears to be no longer than 10 minutes and reveals nothing we didn’t already know (Trump is full of himself). Perhaps with the benefit of distance another filmmaker would have brought a virginal enthusiasm to the USFL that Tollin seems to have outgrown. Small Potatoes is personal, yes, but it doesn’t feel intimate. Not when Tollin is doing the talking, at least.

Then again, what’s striking about the film is the reverence that former stars like Kelly and Young prove to maintain for the league. These are men who went on to distinguished NFL careers, and yet they don’t talk about the USFL like it’s a back-alley embarrassment, nor do they laugh it off, as Tollin does, like some screwball experiment. Quite the contrary. The USFL was serious business, even while it positioned itself as an offbeat alternative to the “No Fun League.” Kelly and Young have reason to be proud of their past. The USFL was never held in the same regard as the NFL, sure, but back then the NFL wasn’t held in the same regard as Major League Baseball, which is why the NFL had reason to worry when the USFL started shelling out then-record salaries for the likes of Herschel Walker and Young. Alas, the USFL – perhaps manipulated by a self-serving Trump – became overconfident, expanding too quickly, moving games from the spring to the fall to directly compete with the NFL and then taking on the NFL in a monopoly lawsuit in which both sides came away losers.

It’s intriguing to imagine what might have happened if the USFL had played it safe and given their league time to mature. (Can you picture Mel Kiper breaking down college talent for two professional football drafts?) On the other hand, it was the USFL’s willingness to operate on the edge that gave it a fighting chance in the first place. One of the most entertaining portions of Small Potatoes is a montage of elaborate touchdown celebrations, each of them far more flamboyant than the NFL would allow today and yet somehow less obnoxiously self-congratulatory than the tiresome shimmy-shake NFL players bring out after every tackle or first down. The USFL thrived on its individuality, and somewhere along the way Tollin appears to have swallowed some of the Kool-Aid: Though he’s correct in suggesting that the USFL influenced the NFL with its implementation of instant replay as an officiating tool, Tollin goes too far when he credits the league for prompting the NFL’s adoption of the 2-point conversion, given that the post-touchdown play was used in college football dating back to the late 1950s and in the American Football League prior to its merger with the NFL. Details, details.

That twisting of history isn’t the only time Tollin gets a bit careless with his filmmaking. For example, there’s an outdoor interview with ESPN’s Bill Simmons, the guy who dreamed up the concept for the “30 for 30” series, in which Simmons is so poorly lit that it seems as if the interview was done on a whim using a flip camera that Tollin had in his back pocket when he went to the company picnic. And, of course, there’s the Trump interview, which gets more attention than it warrants. Although Tollin succeeds in tracing the fall of the league back to Trump, the appeal of his film turns out to have more to do with resurrecting the USFL in our memories than sleuthing its demise. “Who killed the USFL?” is a question that’s worth asking, but for now a better question might be this: How did we manage to forget the dead so completely?


Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.

Weekly Rant: Wait Until Dark

I don’t particularly enjoy the experience of being scared in a movie theater, and though I’m not exactly squeamish about fake blood, I experience no visceral thrill watching big screen dismemberments. Consequently, I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, whatever the term “horror genre” means these days. (Aside: For more on the “What is horror?” debate, check out the November edition of The Conversations in which Ed Howard and I discuss Trouble Every Day. I mention this now in case anyone wants to track down the 2001 Claire Denis film in advance of The Conversations piece. Heads up.) Anyway, given my lack of fondness for the horror genre, I often find myself on the outside looking in come October, when theaters show fright fests and bloggers debate various scary movies I haven’t seen and likely never will. It’s just not my cup of tea.

But this week’s rant isn’t about the emptiness of the horror genre. (To each his/her own.) Instead this is my opportunity to pay tribute to one of my favorite scary movies (not exactly horror), Wait Until Dark, while also ranting about the element of the film that makes it unfortunately preposterous. If you’ve never seen Wait Until Dark, stop reading now and go rent it (or download it, or whatever). One night this week, turn off the lights and watch the movie without interruption. I promise you’ll jump out of your skin at least once. It’s unavoidable. That said, if you have seen the movie, read on.

Wait Until Dark thrives on a (mostly) clever (but sometimes too clever) story that’s built around an Oscar-nominated performance by Audrey Hepburn as Susy, a woman recently blinded who is struggling to adapt to her darkened world. For my money, it’s Hepbern’s ideal role. I can’t think of another actor who is so effortlessly vulnerable (and that’s before factoring in the character’s blindness) and yet so full of moxie. (Audrey lost the Best Actress race to Katharine Hepbern for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner in a packed field that included Anne Bancroft for The Graduate and Faye Dunaway for Bonnie and Clyde, in case you were curious.) But equally terrific is Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, a diabolical thug determined to find a doll filled with heroin that he’s convinced is in Susy’s apartment. Roat is unflinchingly vicious, truly one of the most terrifying villains you’ll ever come across. And that’s why Wait Until Dark is a fun to revisit, now that Arkin only lands the cantankerous yet cuddly grandfather type roles (Indian Summer, Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine Cleaning, Get Smart, etc.). And that’s also why Wait Until Dark is sometimes absurd.

See, this is Harry Roat …


But then so is this …


And so is this …


That’s right. Harry Roat’s ingenious plan to trick the blind Susy into revealing the location of the doll requires not only that his two conmen associates pretend to be an old friend (Richard Crenna as Mike) and a police detective (Jack Weston as Carlino) but also that he play-act two parts, the grumpy Roat Sr. and the mild-mannered Roat Jr. Both of these characters are played well by Arkin, of course, but it’s utterly ridiculous to imagine Harry Roat, who has an accent as thick as the hull of a battleship, stepping into these roles. It’s a cute idea on paper, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test on the big screen.

The best way to illustrate the preposterousness of the play-acting is to imagine Harry Roat outlining his plan:

Roat: “We’re gonna get the blind lady to tell us where to find the doll.”

Carlino: “Great idea. You can rough her up and she’ll never be able to identify you because she’s blind.”

Roat: “No, I don’t want to hurt her.”

Mike: “Why? I mean, you left a dead woman in the closet. You just threatened us with a knife. You love violence.”

Roat: “Yeah, I know. But it just doesn’t seem very sporting. The blind lady couldn’t defend herself.”

Mike: “So what do you have in mind?”

Roat: “Well, you and Carlino used to con people with that old jealous-lover bit, and that gave me an idea. You’re not the only ones who can act, so I figured I’d infiltrate her apartment by going in disguise.”

Carlino: “Disguise? Why? First of all, she’s blind. Second of all, you already walked into her apartment without a disguise. How come you’re suddenly worried that people in the building will see your face?”

Roat: “Worried? Oh, I’m not worried. But I’m Method actor and I really draw a lot from props. I can’t just do the voice. I’ve got to inhabit the whole character, walk in their shoes.”

Mike: “That would explain the dark sunglasses and the leather jacket, because your personality sure matches your wardrobe. I, for one, can’t picture you playing anything else. How are you going to get past that accent? It’ll never work.”

Roat: “You doubt me?! Normally I kill people who doubt me, but not when someone challenges my acting ability; then I want to prove it on the boards. You’ll see. I’m an incredible character actor. When I’m not breaking people’s legs I like to squeeze in a little dinner theater. One summer I did Shakespeare in the Park. I showed up for auditions and immediately they wanted to cast me as Tybalt. Such lazy type-casting. That really pissed me off, so I tried out for the part of Juliet’s nurse just to spite them. Got it, too. And I was terrific.”

Carlino: “So you’re going to impersonate a woman?”

Roat: “No, no. I’ve been working on a character I call Roat Sr. He looks a bit like a grayer Mark Twain, and he’s a gruff prick. But I’m also fond of a character I’m calling Roat Jr. He’s a soft-spoken guy. The first one is more of a physical performance, and I didn’t buy all that stage makeup for nothing. The second one really stretches me emotionally. I’m torn. I think I’ll play both of them.”

Mike: “Wouldn’t it just be easier to ransack the blind lady’s apartment when she leaves to go to school or to wait until her husband comes home, jump him, blindfold him and then rough up his wife until he gives up the doll?”

Roat: “Easier, sure. But even though I make my living as a murderous thug, my first love has always been the theater.”

That's what they all say.

Playing Love Songs: The Band That Wouldn’t Die

There are a number of clever elements within Diner that help make it a classic, but nothing is more singular to the 1982 comedy than its famous football quiz. The premise alone is hilarious: Steve Guttenberg’s Eddie is to give his fiancée a football exam – multiple choice, true/false and short answer – that she must pass in order for him to go through with their wedding. Dramatically speaking, the principal intent of the quiz is to underline Eddie’s immaturity and his genuine fear of the opposite sex. Yet the true genius of the quiz isn’t what it tells us about Eddie but what it tells us about Diner’s setting: Baltimore circa 1959. It’s important to note and yet easy to overlook that while Eddie’s friends question whether their pal would actually call off the wedding, they aren’t the least bit fazed by the quiz in general or the ultimatum attached to it. Neither are the parents of the bride and groom, but then how could they be, given that the wedding is set to take place at a church festooned in the blue and white of the Baltimore Colts, with the bride walking down the aisle to the Colts fight song? Eddie’s football obsession might seem like farce, but Diner plays it mostly straight, because in 1959 there was no love greater than that of the people of Baltimore for their Colts.

If Barry Levinson didn’t make that clear with Diner, the director makes it impossible to miss with a new documentary, The Band That Wouldn’t Die. Specifically the story of how the Baltimore Colts marching band refused to disband after the franchise was shipped out of town under the cover of night back in 1983, The Band That Wouldn’t Die is more broadly about the relationship between a city and its team. Levinson’s documentary is the second release of ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, and it’s the perfect follow-up to Kings Ransom, which in remembering the trade of Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings profiles a similar heartbreaking exodus. But where Peter Berg’s film is told through the experiences of the famous (Gretzky) and infamous (Oilers owner Peter Pocklington), Levinson’s abandonment story is told by the little people (the fans) who on December 18, 1983, watched helplessly as moving trucks shipped everything belonging to the Colts to the team’s new home in Indianapolis. Well, almost everything.

By pure luck, the band uniforms got left behind; they were at the cleaners. Quick-thinking band president John Ziemann got to the uniforms before anyone realized they were missing and, with help, smuggled them to a plumber’s workshop, then to his own home and then to a cemetery where the uniforms were stored inside a mausoleum until the wife of Colts owner Robert Irsay negotiated for the band to legally retain them. “We were the band that wouldn’t die,” band vice president Bill Turcan quips in reference to the resurrection from the mausoleum. “The band was saying, ‘We’re not going away until an NFL team comes back.’” And they didn’t. Quite the opposite, actually. They played on, marching in parades and going on the road to other NFL venues. The Colts now belonged to Indianapolis, but the band played as if the Colts had never left Baltimore. They were a band without a team that came to symbolize a city’s unending desire to rally around an NFL franchise.

This cute story that first seems like a colorful anecdote turns out to be the crux of Levinson’s film, often for richer but sometimes for poorer. By the end of the documentary there’s no question that the Baltimore Colts marching band made a difference. If nothing else, they helped rally support when a new stadium needed to be built in order to lure the NFL back to town in the mid-1990s. As former gubernatorial press secretary Bob Douglas suggests, the band proved what an NFL team would mean to Baltimore in the present by reminding people what the Colts meant to the city in the past – a past that extends back to the NFL Championship teams of Johnny Unitas. The Colts fight song “reaches deep,” Douglas says, and he gets emotional just thinking about it. He isn’t the only one. Just about everyone interviewed in this picture seems to get choked up talking about the significance of the Colts band and the team's battle hymn. And as touching as that is, it’s also a little strange. As the documentary rolls past its halfway point it’s hard to keep from getting cynical: “All this over a fight song? Really?”

That’s the problem with The Band That Wouldn’t Die. The story of a relationship between a community and its team has universal appeal, but after a while Levinson’s picture is perhaps too personal. Too much about the Baltimore Colts. Much too much about its band. Ziemann is a passionate man without a hint of genuine arrogance, but there are only so many times a guy can gush about the importance of his marching band and his herculean efforts to keep it together before he seems to take himself too seriously. Even if you come away convinced that without the band Baltimore might not have been able to build a stadium worthy of landing the Ravens (formerly the Cleveland Browns; how’s that for irony), in the end the band is just a band. If it disappeared tomorrow it’s hard to imagine many people crying about it 25 years later, though Levinson finds several Colts fans who can’t watch the footage of moving trucks rolling out of Baltimore in 1983 without spilling tears. These old-timers might have the Ravens to cheer for now, but their agony over losing the Colts is still fresh. One fan says it was like losing his best friend. Another compares it to a divorce, saying that when he first saw the Indianapolis version of the Colts on TV it was like seeing his ex-wife with another man. “You couldn’t quite watch,” he says. “It hurt too much.”

This pain turns out to be more compelling than the triumph of the band, and in that sense Levinson’s film withers as it unfolds. And yet The Band That Wouldn’t Die goes down as a terrific companion piece to Diner. Levinson’s 1982 ode to his childhood home was in theaters well before the Colts left for Indianapolis, and that’s significant because it demonstrates that Diner's football subplot wasn’t created as a tribute to a departed team but as a monument to an era when there was no better place to love professional football than Baltimore. Levinson makes no direct reference to Diner in his “30 for 30” feature, but he doesn’t need to. His name and casual presence within this documentary provide connection enough. Thus it came to be that while watching The Band That Wouldn’t Die I couldn’t help but imagine how Guttenberg’s Eddie would have felt seeing the Colts leave town and how poignant the team’s fight song would have been for him forever after. Eddie would have cried at the sound of it, I'm sure, just like the rest of them.


The Band That Wouldn't Die premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.

Weekly Rant: The Office, Season 6

If there’s been a better comedy than The Office on American television over the past five years, I haven’t seen it. Then again, that says as much about me as it does about the show. The Office is the only comedy I even attempt to follow on network TV or cable. 30 Rock? I couldn’t get into it. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Weeds? I know them only by their advertisements and Emmy Awards hype; I haven’t watched so much as a scene. Not that I’m complaining. The Office hasn’t been immune to unavoidable peaks and valleys, but on the whole it has proved as dependable as my other all-time favorite comedies, Cheers and Seinfeld, albeit over a shorter period. I never miss an episode and I always leave at least mostly fulfilled. Until this season.

Four episodes in – including the two-part Pam & Jim wedding called “Niagara” – The Office’s sixth season hasn’t just been underwhelming, it’s been downright problematic. It’s one thing to come up short of expectations while following the model that created those lofty standards, but it’s another thing to fail while abandoning the very formula that made the show a smash success in the first place. Unless these recent episodes prove to be the exception to the rule, The Office is smack dab in the middle of a mid-life identity crisis, and for the first time I’m skeptical that the show’s talented writing staff can climb out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. It might still be a bit soon to sound the alarm, but here are two big reasons that fans of The Office should have their fingers hovered over the panic button.

1. Jim as Co-manager
Beyond suggesting that the writers have run out of ideas within the show’s original framework, this seemingly small plot twist upsets almost everything we’ve come to expect from The Office. Until now the show has relied upon two “us vs. them” models for dramatic and comedic tension: the first pits “us” the exasperated workers against “them” the clueless management; the second pits “us” the relatively sane against “them” the workplace crazies. According to both models, Jim has always been our most reliable audience surrogate, rolling his eyes on behalf of “us” at each impropriety committed by “them.” But now that Jim has a management position, he’s less of an “us” and more of a “them,” because his newfound authority allows him to act on the inappropriate behavior that he used to have to suffer quietly.

Within the world The Office has created over five full seasons, this doesn’t work. There’s no joy in watching Jim bungle his management role, because it subverts our principal understanding of Dunder Mifflin, which is that it’s a business so straightforward even an idiot could manage it (as Michael Scott repeatedly proves). If Jim can’t handle the job, it suggests that we can’t. If Jim is as inept as Michael, it suggests that we are. If being the boss is tougher than we think, it means we’ve been wrong all those times we laughed at Michael and wondered why he couldn’t see the obvious. In other words, it takes away the fun of laughing at “them,” because the line between them and us blurs.

In addition, Jim’s leadership position makes some scenes involving Pam difficult to read. In the intro to “Niagara,” for example, Jim stands by his pregnant almost-wife’s side as they request that their coworkers go out of their way to avoid triggering Pam’s nausea with odoriferous foods and fragrances. Does this request come from Jim the supportive partner, or does it come from Jim the boss? The former would make sense and play true to the Jim we know and love, but the latter would make Jim a lot like Michael in one of those moments when he uses his position of authority to issue an all-about-me demand that makes us shake our heads. Scenes like that one reveal that for The Office to work, Jim needs to be the Jim he’s always been – ever sensible, normal and relatable. We must be shaking our heads with him, not at him. Otherwise he’s just another crazy creature in the Dunder Mifflin zoo, and there are plenty of those already.

2) The YouTube Wedding
If you were unfamiliar with the popular YouTube clip of a wedding party dancing down the aisles to Chris Brown’s “Forever,” the booty-shaking escapades at Jim and Pam’s wedding couldn’t have made much sense. Alas, if you had seen the YouTube clip, the climactic moment of “Niagara” was disappointingly familiar. That the talented writers of The Office drew inspiration from viral video isn’t what’s disturbing. The problem is that this creative staff essentially quoted the scene verbatim, and in doing so sent the Dunder Mifflin employees into an alternate universe in which they all work well together and get along. The dance sequence of “Niagara” is a love fest for a group that otherwise spends the majority of its time bickering with one another, not to mention that it’s a successful covert-op for a group that rarely gets the simplest things right. It doesn’t make sense within the established Dunder Mifflin world.

If The Office writers had their heads on straight, the YouTube allusion (and it would have only been an allusion) would have been constructed so that Michael, in his desperate attempt to be the star, pressed play on his own personal stereo just before Pam was ready to walk down the aisle. Painfully alone, Michael would have danced down the aisle to “Forever,” perhaps even recording his dance moves with a video camera in the hopes of being a YouTube sensation himself. Per usual, Michael would fully expect to be embraced for his performance but would instead draw horrified stares. At that point Jim or Pam, whose hearts have always been too big to watch Michael crash and burn, would have rushed to Michael’s side and joined in the dancing, sacrificing their own dignity to save his.

From there, if the writers wished, “Niagara” could have climaxed with an all-in dance exhibition that stayed true to the spirit of the characters. Michael would have been reinforced as criminally naïve but well intending, Jim and Pam would have been reinforced as caring and good-natured and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin crew could have done what they always do and followed their lead. That approach would have been both funny and honest. Instead, the wedding dance-off isn’t as entertaining as the YouTube clip it rips off (minus Dwight’s accidental kick to the face, of course), and Jim and Pam are forced to the margins in their big moment, smiling back and forth at one another as the camera struggles to give everyone a closeup.

Thankfully, the cutaways to Jim and Pam’s private nuptials at Niagara Falls save the episode from being an almost complete flop, but it’s hardly an episode to cherish. By my count, The Office has gone for laughs with dance sequences three times now in the past two years. It’s as if the writers are so desperate to find new laughs that they’ve abandoned the formula that’s gotten them here. Righting the ship shouldn’t be a huge problem for The Office, which has bounced back from other not-so-great ideas (Ryan as drug-addicted big-shot) and avoided forcing the typical bullshit relationship drama on Jim and Pam (a functional sitcom couple? what a concept!). But The Office needs to get back to basics and quit trying to reinvent itself.


Addendum: I already had this written when I noticed that friend-of-The Cooler Craig of The Man from Porlock has a kinder view of The Office's sixth season. Check it out.

Speed Skating: Whip It

Back when I was in college and music on the Web was in its infancy, hanging out with buddies often entailed going through our CD collections and playing songs for one another’s enjoyment. Sometimes that meant playing tunes we genuinely liked, but at least as often it meant playing songs off the albums of chart-topping, one-hit-wonders that we were ashamed we bought in the first place but couldn’t bring ourselves to throw away. Those extra-embarrassing yet nostalgically pleasing songs were called “treats,” as in, “I’ve got a treat for you,” or “Wow, that’s a treat!” The process went like this: a song would begin, the conversation would stop long enough to recognize the “treat” or perhaps to sing a few lines and then we’d return to talking as one of us flipped through our massive CD binders looking for the next “treat.” This would go on for hours – breathlessly catching up on one another’s lives and pressing play on a new song every few minutes. Unless my buddy Brew was playing deejay, that is.

See, Brew was always so excited about playing the next treat that he never gave the rest of us a chance to enjoy the current song in its entirety. With Brew at the controls, a song would get played just long enough to reach the first chorus (maybe) and then the CD would be removed in favor of a new “treat.” Instead of getting to a new song every three or four minutes, it was a new song every 45 seconds. What does this have to do with Whip It? Quite a lot, actually, because Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut unfolds with an equally staggering ability to shuffle through songs (75 of them in 111 minutes, according to the Los Angeles Times) and with a similar assaultive impatience. Like Brew playing “treats,” Whip It repeatedly sacrifices our enjoyment of the here and now in its almost constant rush to take us someplace else. The result is a movie that feels more like a highlights reel than a complete dramatic experience.

The root of the problem can be traced back to Shauna Cross’ screenplay. Whip It has more tired clichés than it has songs. Ellen Page’s Bliss, for example, is at once (1) the small-town girl looking to break free of the sticks, (2) the ugly duckling trying to become a swan, (3) the micro-managed daughter seeking independence, (4) the raw athletic talent with untapped ability and (5) the girl who catches a few breaks and winds up hurting her best friend in the process. Then there’s Juliet Lewis’ villainous roller derby star Iron Maven, who magically pops up like a prairie dog whenever the plot requires a jolt of conflict, including a scene in which she hangs out behind the bleachers at the roller derby arena in order to deliver a threat right out of the villain handbook, beginning by menacingly repeating the hero’s name (“Bliss, Bliss, Bliss…”) and ending with the ubiquitous girl-movie guilt-trip that goes like this: “What do you think will happen when your friends find out you’ve lied to them?”

Still, Barrymore’s directing and/or the editing by Dylan Techenor do little to obscure Whip It’s paint-by-numbers design. As if acknowledging that we’ve all been here and done that, Whip It plows through plot points like a speed-eater chomping through hotdogs. Numerous scenes might as well be subtitled with “blah, blah, blah,” “yadda, yadda, yadda” and “bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” and its only fair to question whether the rapid-fire soundtrack is meant to inject life into tired material or to simply distract us from it. The first half of Whip It truly whips right by, with nary any actual tension or even the pretense of it. Bliss proves to have no problem making the roller derby team, or commuting from sleepy Bodeen to Austin, or winning the acceptance of her teammates, or conning her parents or landing a boyfriend. But what’s depressing is how all this haste doesn’t take us to a pleasing destination. When about two-thirds of the way through Bliss proves her growing sense of self by escalating a food fight, an all too familiar comedic device that I’m not sure has delivered any genuine laughs since a 1986 episode of Cheers, the emptiness of this enterprise is unmistakable.

So how come by the end of Whip It I found myself choking back tears, as embarrassed by that pitiful display of emotion as by the fact that I once owned a Color Me Badd album? The answer is twofold. First, Page is irrepressibly charming as Bliss. Second, Barrymore slows down just enough to film a handful of effective Bliss-centric scenes, most notably an entirely implausible but undeniably romantic underwater makeout with Oliver (Landon Pigg), a sweet father-daughter bonding moment with Daniel Stern’s Earl and a perfectly conceived mother-daughter confessional with Marcia Gay Harden’s Brooke. Whip It doesn’t come anywhere close to fulfilling Howard Hawks’ “three great scenes and no bad ones” design for cinematic excellence, but it proves that one very good scene can often make up for two very bad ones.

Alas, Whip It has too many poor scenes to break even. The roller derby action is confusingly staged and is overly reliant upon the mostly lame commentary of Johnny Rocket (Jimmy Fallon). Even worse, it all feels inconsequential anyway. Still, amidst this hyperactive mess there are moments, like when Bliss and best-friend Pash (a scene-stealing Alia Shawkat) dance around and turn Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” into a song about getting out of Bodeen, that Whip It delights. Those treats just pass too quickly.

The Conversations: Pixar

It's Pixar Week over at The House Next Door, and thus I'm pleased to announce the posting of The Conversations: Pixar. It's not as massive a read as it might sound. This time around, Ed Howard and I focus our discussion mostly on WALL-E, but we also take tangents into The Incredibles and Ratatouille, in addition to debating some topics that apply to Pixar in general.

Pixar Week has already produced some terrific pieces, so head on over to The House Next Door and devour what's there. As always, Ed and I hope that our debate is the starting point for a larger discussion among readers. So check out The Conversations: Pixar and leave your comments at The House Next Door.

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)
Overlooked - Part I: Undertow (March 2009)
Overlooked - Part II: Solaris (March 2009)
Star Trek (May 2009)
Werner Herzog (May 2009)
Errol Morris (July 2009)
Michael Mann (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part I (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part II (September 2009)

When Arthur Left Camelot: Kings Ransom

He bites his lip. He sniffles. He exhales. He chokes back tears. He tries to speak, but the words won’t come out. He laughs. He dabs at his eyes with a tissue, and then he repeats the whole cycle. He tries to speak once more: “There comes a time when … when, uh …” His voice fades. That’s all he can say. This is Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, and his heart is breaking. The date is August 9, 1988. Gretzky isn’t injured. He isn’t sick. He isn’t retiring. In fact, his playing career will go on for more than a decade. All that’s happened is that Gretzky has been traded in a blockbuster deal that he approved that will allow him to become the highest paid player in the NHL. Nevertheless, Gretzky looks as if someone has died. Nearby, his now former coach and owner sit watching the press conference with the kind of pained, shell-shocked expressions that you’d expect to find on parents checking a teenager into an inpatient rehab facility. This isn’t just another press conference. This isn’t just another sports transaction. This is the end of a love story and the most important event in hockey since the United States upset the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics.

That you probably don’t remember that day with the clarity reserved for “The Miracle on Ice,” or never noted it the first time around, or haven’t thought about it in a while, is part of the reason it’s being memorialized now in a documentary called Kings Ransom. Directed by Peter Berg (The Kingdom), Kings Ransom is the first release of a new series of documentaries from ESPN Films called “30 for 30,” which will explore some of the most significant but often forgotten or otherwise under-appreciated sports stories of the past three decades (the amount of time that ESPN has been on the air). August 9, 1988 is a great place to start, because the deal sending Gretzky (along with Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski) from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings for $15 million and three first-round draft choices is almost undoubtedly the most significant trade in any North American team sport in the past 30 years. The only reason you might not think of it that way is because it happened within a sport that most Americans didn’t pay attention to then and/or don’t pay attention to now.

As Berg notes in the film, the Gretzky trade is without parallel. The Oilers were coming off their fourth Stanley Cup win in five years. Gretzky, still only 27, was in his prime. Trading Gretzky from Edmonton was like trading Arthur from Camelot. That’s why the title of this documentary is so perfect, because it (1) evokes the name of the team Gretzky was traded to, (2) refers to the extreme cost of bringing Gretzky to L.A. and (3) alludes to Gretzky’s importance to the hockey-loving town he left behind. In Edmonton, Gretzky was royalty. With one transaction, Edmontonians lost the best player in the NHL, the star of their team, their hero and their brand. When they lost Gretzky, they lost their identity. This isn’t like Michael Jordan retiring to play baseball after three straight NBA titles, because fans felt Jordan was doing that in honor of his deceased father, and because Jordan wasn’t donning a Detroit Pistons uniform and because Chicagoans had other sports passions to distract them – the Bears, the Cubs, the White Sox and maybe even the Blackhawks. This also isn’t like Brett Favre leaving Green Bay, another town with a one-pro-team religion, to suit up for the New York Jets and then the Minnesota Vikings, because Favre was well past his prime when that drama began to unfold and he’d worn out his welcome (among some) with years of self-centered maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won’t retirement waffling. Gretzky’s departure was swift, and even if Favre had been traded from Green Bay just as quickly back in 1998, coming off three Most Valuable Player awards and back-to-back Super Bowl appearances, that still wouldn’t rival the Gretzky trade, because – get this – Favre has never been as dominant in football as Gretzky was in hockey.

If none of the above has ever occurred to you it’s probably because you don’t follow hockey. Though the sport has long-time fans in the Midwest and Northeast, ours is not a hockey-loving nation, which is another reason that losing Gretzky was such a bitter pill for Oilers fans to swallow. Edmonton’s adopted son went from a community that worshipped him for all the right reasons to a city that embraced him for all the wrong ones. At the time, most L.A. residents knew as much about hockey as they did about ice fishing. But they knew the name Gretzky, and on that name alone the Kings regularly sold out the Forum. Of course they did. Americans are drawn to greatness and hype. Gretzky had both. He was even nicknamed “The Great One.” Hockey ignoramuses flocked to the Kings like Dan Brown acolytes descending upon a historic site that they had no interest in the day before but now needed to experience for themselves. Hockey had been in L.A. since the late 1960s, but it took Gretzky coming to the Kings to put the sport on the map in the West.

Berg’s film touches on all of this, and yet if Kings Ransom has a weakness it’s that in 51 minutes it only has time for touching. The film is focused and efficient, and it’s especially effective as either a first-timer’s introduction or an expert’s refresher course. Alas, there’s so much meat here that Berg doesn’t have the opportunity to bite into. In that respect, the Gretzky trade is an imperfect subject for this series because it’s too monumental to be contained in documentary that has to come in at 1 hour with commercials. Of course, this is a just typical sports-fan lament: each triumph only increases the desire for more, rather than satisfying the itch. Journalistically speaking, Berg does a remarkable job of parachuting down onto this small historical target and making us appreciate the view on the ground without the luxury of context. And cinematically speaking Kings Ransom manages to feel at once calculating (a present-day Gretzky is filmed contemplatively gazing across an empty arena) and casual (Berg interviews Gretzky on a golf course driving range).

It also feels honest. Rick Reilly, who acted as the ghostwriter on Gretzky’s autobiography, wrote in 2001 that getting Gretzky to talk about himself “was like trying to draw personal revelations out of a 1970 Plymouth Duster,” but you wouldn’t detect that from Kings Ransom, in which all the subjects – including Gretzky’s wife Janet, his old coach Glen Sather, former Oilers owner Peter Pocklington and former Kings owner Bruce McNall – seem forthcoming and sincere. There’s only one debate about the facts here, involving Pocklington and an interview he gave after Gretzky’s departure, and beyond that there isn’t a whiff of spin (which isn’t say that the film is truly without spin). Just as significant, there isn’t a whiff of something else: ESPN’s notorious self-adulation. When Reilly wrote the above quip he was with Sports Illustrated, but now he’s an ESPN guy. Given such, it must have been tempting for ESPN to demand that one of their most prominent personalities be included as an expert in Berg’s film, but Reilly and other national boasters of his ilk are nowhere to be found. Thank goodness.

Kings Ransom feels intimate, personal, and that seems to be the point. Each film in the “30 for 30” series has its own director with, according to ESPN, “complete creative control.” Diner’s Barry Levinson will chronicle the departure of his beloved Colts from Baltimore. Bull Durham’s Ron Shelton will apply is love of the minor leagues to Jordan’s failed attempt at baseball. Shut Up & Sing’s Barbara Kopple, New York-raised, will examine the reign of George Steinbrenner. Those are just three of the features that will be released on an almost weekly basis heading into 2010. In this procession, Kings Ransom is a promising first step. Berg’s documentary isn’t a story about statistics or even athletic prowess. It’s an analysis of a day when a business deal created broken hearts. Even if you never fully appreciate the significance of August 9, 1988, you’ll be sure to feel its power.


Kings Ransom premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.

Weekly Rant: Punish Polanski

When the news broke a little over a week ago that Roman Polanski had been detained in Switzerland relative to an international alert from 2005 and a crime from 1977, I had no reaction. No joy. No outrage. I couldn’t even muster up the energy to yawn, though such a gesture would have accurately reflected my feelings. My thoughts at the time were that, yes, Polanski absolutely deserved to be arrested but that, no, it didn’t make sense for the American legal system to waste much time on a 76-year-old man who as a result of his flight from justice has been out of the United States for three decades and who in 1993 settled a lawsuit with his victim, Samantha Geimer. But as Hollywood has rushed to support Polanski, creating a petition demanding his release that’s been signed by, among others, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, Pedro Almodovar, Michael Mann and (you can’t make this stuff up) Woody Allen, I find myself with a strong opinion. I hope Polanski is extradited to the United States and winds up in a courtroom, hopefully for a long and humiliating trial.

Why? The better question is why not? In 1977, Polanski (1) brought a then-13-year-old Geimer to his friend Jack Nicholson’s empty house, (2) encouraged the girl to let him photograph her, (3) gave her champagne and quaaludes and then (4) had sex with her (5) against her will. This is rape. It’s also something else: premeditated (no matter what Polanski says). And it’s something even more: totally and completely wrong from the get-go. I’m not suggesting that if Polanski had only invited a 13-year-old girl to spend time alone with him at Nicholson’s house that he should be jailed for that potentially harmless offense, but right then and there Polanski was stepping over the line, the same way NFL player Mark Chmura made a mistake the moment he got into a hot tub with teenage girls at a prom party in 2000, regardless of what happened next. Even before you get to the part where Polanski forces himself on an under-aged girl, Polanski’s transgressions are entirely indefensible and, you know, illegal.

Having said that, I have tremendous empathy for those who love Polanski’s films and find his crime difficult to reconcile, but I’m flabbergasted by the Hollywood mob that considers Polanski’s arrest some kind of injustice when in fact it’s a step (and only a step, mind you) toward the opposite of that. According to the Guardian, via Hollywood Reporter, producer Henning Molfenter (The Pianist and Inglourious Basterds, among others) decided to boycott the Zurich film festival, where Polanski was heading when he was detained, because “you can’t watch films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5 kilometers away.” Huh? So apparently Molfenter is quite comfortable watching films in the company of a rapist but takes offense when said rapist is prevented from having a good time like the rest of us. Sure, that makes sense.

Somehow many of Polanski’s supporters seem to think he has been punished enough by his exile. They ignore that Polanski has been allowed to pick his own punishment – if you can call living in France, making movies and a winning an Oscar punishment – and that Polanski has always had the option to return to the U.S. and face the music, but he hasn’t. Instead, Polanski has hidden in plain view, proving himself a coward as well as a criminal. Yes, I understand that the enthralling documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired raises important questions about the ethics of the judge who handled Polanski’s case, Laurence J. Ritterband, thus putting Polanski’s 1978 flight from justice in somewhat less nauseating context. But Ritterband died in 1993. Polanski can face a new judge now. He just doesn’t want to. What criminal does?

In that sense, the fact that Polanski has gone 32 years without taking his medicine makes his arrest more justified, not less. I don’t care that Geimer is ready for this to all go away and seems satisfied with Polanski never again appearing in a court room. She has moved on, as she should. The trouble is, until last week, Polanski had moved on too. He violated a girl who was closer to 9 than to 18. This wasn’t something that just happened, as Polanski has claimed. He didn’t trip and wind up raping a girl. He committed a crime, and until now he’s gotten away with it. Polanski thought he was above the law then. He continues to think he’s above the law now. That bothers me.

This bothers me, too: I wonder, what if Polanski had raped the 13-year-old daughter of Jack Nicholson rather than raping a non-celebrity 13-year-old at Nicholson’s house? What kind of petition would the Hollywood elite sign then? Quoted in the Guardian, Harvey Weinstein says he wants to “fix this terrible situation.” Well, that’s simple, Harvey. Get Roman Polanski back to the United States and march him into a court room. Allowing a rapist to go unpunished is the thing that’s “terrible” here, and all of this should have been resolved a long time ago. If you want to blame anyone for Polanski only now being detained, blame Polanski.

Diablows: Jennifer’s Body

Blaming Diablo Cody for the atrocity that is Jennifer’s Body is like blaming a child who has only ridden the merry-go-round for getting bucked off a wild bronco. There’s no question that Cody fails here. That’s her lying in the dirt, covered in bruises inflicted by clumsy one-liners that trampled her reputation as America’s hot young screenwriter. But if we’re going to critique Cody – and we will – we should also ask ourselves what she’s doing in this rodeo to begin with. One film removed from the breakout debut of Juno, which owes its wild success as much to director Jason Reitman and actors Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner as to its Oscar-winning screenplay, Cody finds herself as the marquee attraction of an R-rated horror/comedy that’s directed by someone who hasn’t helmed a film since 2005’s AEon Flux (Karyn Kusama) and stars an actress best known for running from CGI explosions (Megan Fox). As challenges go, this isn’t just riding without a saddle. It’s like straddling a galloping horse that’s been covered in grease.

Cody isn’t up to it. But how could executives from Fox, the studio that purchased the rights to Cody’s follow-up (not to be confused with the uber-hyped actress who stars in it), think she would be? With Juno, Cody had help. Lots of it. All celebrated screenplays do. That’s how they become celebrated. If it’s true that actors are only as strong as their material, it’s truer still that screenplays are only as strong as their actors. You can take out your highlighter and mark the classic lines in the script for Casablanca, but all that yellow ink wouldn’t undo the fact that those lines were given life by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains and Peter Lorre. The actors didn’t design the clever product, but they did something at least as important: they manufactured it with expert prowess. Here, Cody’s latest screenplay is in the hands of less distinguished craftsmen, and as justifiable as it is to criticize the design of a two-legged table, which is what Jennifer’s Body resembles, it’s also worth pointing out that its manufacturers struggle to hit a nail with a hammer.

As culpable as Cody is Kusama, whose directing doesn’t do the screenplay any favors. Jennifer’s Body is rife with pointless slo-mo and camera choices that are curious at best. For example, early in the film Kusama gives us at least three nearly identical shots of a fire breaking out at a packed tavern without providing any sense of where the flames are in relation to the principal characters, Megan Fox’s titular Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried’s Needy. Not long after that, Jennifer and Needy have an ostensibly private conversation while speaking in hardly-hushed voices in the middle of a packed classroom. Then, late in the film, Kusama makes an out-of-nowhere switch to tight, straight-on close-ups of Jennifer and Needy that disturbs the rhythm of the film’s most pivotal scene. Of course, Kusama’s biggest shortcoming is her inability to create the kind of fantasy environment that would allow Cody’s colorful dialogue to rocket like fireworks instead of plummeting like bombs. Where Juno was taut and punchy, Jennifer’s Body is limp and lifeless.

For most of that, Cody will and should get the blame. Jennifer’s Body isn’t merely poorly written, it’s crawl-under-your-chair embarrassing. It’s as if Juno’s worst one-liners – a “home skillet” here, an “honest to blog” there – found a way to procreate, giving life to cringe-inducing lingo like “cheese and fries” (an expression of surprise), “move-on-dot-org” (an expression of exasperation) and “penis cheese” (an expression of I-don’t-know-what). Cody’s witticisms run the gamut from clever but forced (calling a creepy van “an ’89 rapist”) to just plain forced (having Needy’s mother call herself a “hard-ass, Ford-tough mama bear”) to, in the film’s vernacular, totally “freak-tarded” (like the moment when a character raves that something is “the best thing since Jesus invented the calendar,” which could only have been funny if people actually raved about calendars).

If a weekend filmmaker emulated banter like this on YouTube, Cody would likely take offense. Or maybe not. Ironic is the moment when the same character who earlier utters the phrase “Nice hardware, Ace,” puts down another character’s one-liner with “Nice insult, Hannah Montana.” Cody’s dialogue here is so unbelievably lame that it’s impossible to know when we’re supposed to be laughing with the movie and when we’re supposed to be laughing at it. Consequently, my audience did the only logical thing: we didn’t laugh at all. The only audible responses that Jennifer’s Body earned were groans in response to a colossally terrible line involving a box cutter and an even worse visual gag involving a road sign. Forget Oscar-worthy, this screenplay isn’t even matinee-worthy. It’s nothing short of disastrous, which is why it’s so awkward that the material seems so desperate for affection.

It’s no coincidence then that Jennifer’s Body is at its best when it doesn’t seem to be trying so hard. Fox, as Jennifer, may be an empty vessel, but Seyfried manages to make Needy endearing, in part because she has multiple scenes opposite Johnny Simmons, who so underplays his role as Needy’s unhip boyfriend Chip that he proves impervious to Cody’s overstated dialogue, even managing to make the expression “zombie-mannequin-robot-statue” seem plausible. Adam Brody is equally sharp as the lead singer of a band called Low Shoulder, and he seems to be the only actor who is playing the dialogue rather than letting the dialogue play him. It’s a juicy little scene-stealing performance. Sure, Brody’s lip-synching is only slightly more plausible than Michael J. Fox’s in Back to the Future, but I welcomed each Low Shoulder performance of “Through the Trees” because the lyrics of that song are more pleasing to the ear than any of this movie’s dialogue.

Damning as that is, accurate as that is, let’s make one thing clear: The flop that is Jennifer’s Body by no means tarnishes the (flawed) triumph that is Juno. Those who continue to criticize that Best Picture nominee for its unrealistic dialogue ignore that Ellen Page’s Juno MacGuff isn’t meant to be anything less than an original. Juno remains finely directed and acted – sometimes in thanks to Cody’s screenplay and sometimes in spite of it. That’s the way movies work most of the time. Jennifer’s Body was never going to make a great film, that much is obvious, but the studio made it altogether worse by not putting Cody’s screenplay in more capable hands. Debate all you want whether Cody deserved her Oscar for Juno. No one deserves this.