Bringing together the cast of The Sandlot for some easy laughs mixed with nostalgia is brilliant; keeping the episodes to only 4-5 minutes is merciful genius.
1-Sentence Xmastime Review – Dugout Dads
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Comedy
Eephus – 4.5 stars
As explained by one of the characters, Eephus is the name of a baseball pitch so slow it mesmerizes the batter such that he is either too late or too early when he swings.
This quirky, meditative, and maybe too low-key gem of a comedy feels like the pitch, a nice, floating firefly you enjoy even as it flummoxes you. The story depicts the last baseball game on “Soldiers Field,” a ratty Massachusetts park soon giving way to construction of a school and ending the years-long tradition of a bunch of townies. Their skills, conditioning, and waistlines are vastly disparate, but they are inexorably drawn to the place. They carry the wizened irony of knowing they suck, but also, the hope that they can shine. The inconsistent fire in their belly is one of many charms of this languorous debut.
Co-Writer and director Carson Lund presents the ballfield as church and purgatory, both hallowed and a crappy, interminable penance. The players are of all walks and skills, from the super competitive to easy lopers to ex-jocks with nothing better to do but try and catch an old spark. Some come solely to get out of the house for minimal exercise while draining Narragansetts. They have the same arguments, bits, and chatter they’ve been having for years, and the demise of their weekly tradition seems half mournful and half relief.
There are no great stakes, no “let’s get this out in the open” showdowns, just a few flaccid tiffs. It is implied that the manager of one of the teams may have a tangential connection to the closing of the field, yet there is no overt confrontation. It’s just a bunch of dudes in uniforms giving varying effort to passing the time.
Thankfully, Lund shuns the elegiac baseball-as-metaphor for life story and even slyly makes fun of Field of Dreams as people just seem to wander on and off the field as from a mist, be they stoners, kids, strangers, or even a former weird pitcher from the Red Sox.
I have been playing basketball with the same group of guys since around 2000, over a quarter of a century. As one of the, if not currently the oldest participants, I’ve seen a lot of players come and go. My skills – never formidable to begin with – have diminished such that every 6 months, when the time comes to re-up, I contemplate retirement like smarter, older players before me. Such is my tenure, they call me “the Commish.” Rhetorically, at least, I have been relegated to a desk job.
Every time I think about leaving, if not quite on top, on my own terms, sans a ruptured Achilles or torn ligament, I realize that those terms are non-negotiably, “I will go down with the ship.” This is not good news for the others, who are better and who likely sigh when I am assigned to their squad. But you know what? Fuck them. For all my handicaps, a good night on the court on the verge of 62 is simply too sweet an elixir to voluntarily forego. Last week, 5 of us, undersized in each matchup by an average of 3-4 inches, took the last three games of the night. I felt like a member of the ’80 Olympics hockey team. This week, I turned an ankle on someone’s foot, hit the deck in the lane, and caught a driving knee to the back of my head. Later, I caught a slap to the front. All fine, but I also singlehandedly lost 2 games with turnovers, bricks, and very bad decisions. To make matters worse, I celebrated a win with a fist pump when, in fact, we merely tied the game, which we then lost when I decided to switch off my man, who hit the game winner. I felt sick.
So, the film spoke to me in a manner that probably warrants recusal.
But you know what? Fuck that.
On Amazon Prime, for free.
Good Morning Vietnam – 1.5 stars
Based on a true person if not story, Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is a popular disc jockey stationed in Vietnam where he entertains the troops with his wacky hijinks, falls in love with a local gal, has a run in with her Viet Cong brother, and finds out that the true enemy is not the North Vietnamese, but an uptight sergeant (J.T. Walsh) who hates his funny so much he routes him through a VC-controlled highway, presumably, because he hopes he will be killed.
Because Cronauer is a wise ass, and later, a humanitarian, he must die.
Barry Levinson’s (Diner, The Natural) schmaltz fest is really just a vehicle for Williams to be zany. He more than delivers. In the doing, the men love him and snigger at the squares who do not, including the sergeant who so hates bits, sound effects, impressions, and double entendres he tries to have Cronauer killed.
But our watermelon-smashing Gallagher Christ, he won’t be held down. Not after this pep talk:
EDWARD
And I literally think that you owe it to all of them to get your ass back on the air.
ADRIAN
If you haven’t noticed, the army doesn’t really want me, Ed. They’ve been harassing me since the day I got off the plane.
EDWARD
So what? It’s the guys in the field that matter, remember? Those are the guys that are dyin’.
A homogenous 80s sit-com fluff ball with half-hearted altruistic pretensions, powered solely by Williams’ manic energy, which, to be fair, can be entertaining.
Busting – 3.5 stars
Like Walter Hill, Peter Hyams is a workmanlike director with several efficient and entertaining movies under his belt. Capricorn One, Outlander, and Narrow Margin are crisp commercial fare with occasional flair. While Hyams does not have a masterpiece in his oeuvre, unlike Hill (The Long Riders), after watching this flawed debut, you feel one was in there.
Busting tracks its’ early buddy cop kin, Freebie and the Bean, but swaps out the verbose and frenetic James Caan and Alan Arkin for the dour and focused Elliott Gould and Robert Blake. The latter are two LA vice detectives who are becoming disillusioned with the pointlessness of rousting massage parlors, gay bars and porno shops. They become obsessed with a corrupt crime lord (Alan Garfield) who thwarts their work by paying off the cops, politicians, and judges.
It’s an uneven picture, sometimes quietly comic, then discordantly violent. The camera work, however, is superb. In particular, a stunning extended foot chase shootout through Grand Central Market at night. The dolly shot was filmed decades before the pool scene in Boogie Nights and the nightclub scene in Goodfellas and was made all the more difficult because the leads flow, dodge and weave through dozens of terrified extras screaming and crouching as bullets whiz about. The scene is not an anomaly. Hyams has a deft feel and eye that portended a more illustrious career.
Other notes.
Gould is an LA detective who wears a Washington Redskins winter hat, which is cool.
As with Freebie and the Bean, if they showed this politically incorrect picture at Oberlin, the student body would revolt.
The movie is also said to have been the inspiration for Starsky and Hutch.
During the shootout, Hyams does things often ignored in such scenes. People fall. An innocent bystander get shot. And lo and behold, both Blake and Gould reload their revolvers.
Quentin Tarantino’s take:
On Amazon.
The Birdcage – 5 stars
My daughter has been keeping an eye out for special screenings of older films, and Sunday, we went out to Tyson’s Corner to see Mike Nichols’ adaptation of La Cage au Folles, The Birdcage.
The film is a classic combination of crack timing, unrestrained joy, and comedic generosity. If you haven’t seen it (and it is currently on any number of streaming services, including Netflix), you are engaging in unnecessary self-neglect.
Since it is a well-known classic, I’ll just offer a few observations.
1. It is a crime no one was nominated from the picture. Not the uproarious Nathan Lane, the surprisingly canny Gene Hackman (who was just coming into his own as a comic force after the prior years’ Get Shorty), or the gut-busting Hank Azaria, the butler who can neither cook nor walk in shoes. Not even …
2. Robin Williams, who plays well-off character as the straight man, allowing Lane to fill the zany and manic spaces he normally occupies. Williams is the glue. Sure, he is funny, but he’s largely setting up everyone else, and in the rare moments of genuine drama (which are smartly short and tender), he packs a wallop.
3. The set-up is ingenious. The daughter (Calista Flockhart) of a scandal-escaping conservative moral majoritarian senator (Hackman) falls in love with the son (Dan Futterman) of a gay couple who own and perform at a South Beach drag club (Williams and Lane). At the behest of the smitten son, Williams and Lane try to tone down their gayness and play as straight, conservative Greek diplomats (Williams the father, and Lane, the uncle) while entertaining the senator and his wife (Diane Wiest) for dinner. In the wrong hands, that same set-up could portend a preachy lesson-fest that has a few yuks, but Nichols (or rather, his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Elaine May) is having none of that. May is about the laughs and any zingers are broadly comic, more cultural than political, and woven tightly in the larger bit. Her bon mots never get in the way of the physical comedy, they enhance it.
Case in point.
Wonderful picture.
Jay Kelly – 5 stars
I was hoping this touching film would be properly rewarded at Oscar time, but it was ignored. The omission is even more galling given the Academy’s decision to nominate 10 films this year, including the dreck of F1 and Frankenstein. Getting an Oscar nomination is never a confirmation of merit. But with 10 nominees? Please. Noah Baumbach’s story of mega Hollywood star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) in midlife crisis is clever, entertaining, and tender, and Clooney gives his best performance since The Descendants. The picture deserved better.
After the death of a mentor, the man who “discovered” him, Clooney is approached by an old friend from acting school (Billy Crudup). In the hope of establishing more of a real connection with both his past and normality, Kelly invites Crudup for drinks to reminisce about the old times. Unfortunately, Clooney is a massive, unknowing target, and he becomes the repository for Crudup’s bitter regret, as well as a TikTok sensation when the two get into a fist fight in the parking lot. Clooney, however, is not deterred, and takes his retinue, led by longtime manager Adam Sandler and publicist Laura Dern, to chase his younger daughter through France on his way to a tribute ceremony in Italy. To be unencumbered is a freeing experience for Clooney, albeit one that is laughably abnormal. He is recognized, fawned over, and catered to by a staff of five, and soon, even he sees the absurdity in his efforts.
The trek is infused with real heart and pathos, and throughout, Clooney flashes back to his ascent to stardom. While he seeks to reconcile himself to failures with family and friends, including his father (an irascible Stacy Keach) and an older adult daughter, who is estranged and embittered and attributes all of her mental torments to her wanting father, ultimately, they are not there for his moment. Clooney is left to the expected support from his longtime manager and assistants, but Sandler himself is going through his own crisis, realizing the limits of friendship in his uneven relationship as the fixer of all things for megastars. Dern has had it, and bolts with a “save yourself, this man does not love us” warning for Sandler. Eventually, Clooney is alone.
There are wonderful exchanges, poignant moments but, thankfully, no real resolution. Baumbach studiously avoids the pat. This type of film would normally result in some kind of oath, or commitment, or suggest a rapprochement, a teachable moment. Here, it ends with Clooney at the festival given in his honor to credit him for his life‘s work on the screen, and his lesson is not quite clear. Yes, like all men and women, Clooney has made mistakes, but when you get to see the joy in the faces of the people who love his work, work that has accompanied and maybe even inspired many of the moments in their own lives, there is at least a rebuttal to the regret.
For some, this, I suspect, may be too much sentimental log rolling for Hollywood. I ate it up with a spoon and wanted more.
A lovely film, one of the best of the year, replete with fantastic, unheralded performances. Sandler is particularly good, vulnerable and piercing. Though he has impressed enough, however sporadically (Punch Drunk Love, The Meyerowitz Stories, Uncut Gems, Hustle) that I can no longer register surprise.
One Battle After Another – 4.25 stars
A wild, screwball thrill ride, Paul Thomas Anderson infuses adrenaline with wit and a surprising knack for action sequencing. Leonardo DiCaprio, after Once Upon a Time In Hollywood again demonstrating he is our most accomplished dramatic/comedic actor, plays Bob, a former American domestic revolutionary. Think Weathermen, or Symbionese Liberation Organization, but hyper-charged with comic book pizzazz. Bob got out of the game when he had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When Willa is endangered by the past, DiCaprio must save her from a dangerous man on a mission, the government, and a white supremacist society that feels like a mix of Eddie Bauer and SPECTRE. If you wish to stop the review here, as this is a current release, no worries. Enjoy and come back. This is one of the better flicks of the year.
*MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*
DiCaprio’s wife, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), is a mix of Coffy and Angela Davis. After Willa is born, Perfidia cannot quit the rush of the struggle or face the yoke of motherhood, so she abandons the family, continues to participate in robberies and bombings, and is eventually captured. Her kick-ass bravado exposed, Perfidia squeals on her fellow compatriots, leaving DiCaprio vulnerable and forced to lam it with infant Willa. Bob gives up the life and settles in a quiet town a fat happy stoner, where Willa’s safety is priority number one. 15 years later, a loose end from the past, Sean Penn as Colonel Lockjaw (yes, this is indeed a comic book), needs the daughter, DiCaprio must rouse his flabby mind and body to save her, and the giddy, hilarious chase and race are on.
**MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**
On the minus side, and the basis for deductions.
The film is overlong. Penn is offed twice, to no good end in a film nearing 3 hours. Anderson also tacks on a sop, Willa reading a “Fight the Power!” letter from Perfidia, which, if you do not see it coming means you do not watch many movies.
Penn is also problematic, some of it his fault, some not. He is well-developed as a rigid, top-of-food-chain guy who is so sexually attracted to Perfidia (and she to him) his obsession seems genuine and all-encompassing. They are warriors, on opposite sides, feral, carnal, battle junkies. But when Perfidia is gone, and 15 years pass, Penn’s fixation stems from a funny cartoon creation. “The man,” as in white supremacist corporatist types in a suburban star chamber, come calling for Penn and offer him entree’ to their racial purification club. To enter this august body, however, Penn must erase the fact of his mixed-race daughter. If Anderson had expeditiously grounded Penn’s desires for acceptance and/or the roots of his racial enmity as well as he did his hunger for Perfidia, the film would have been stitched tighter, and Penn’s dilemma would have been more interesting.
Penn himself is also over-the-top at times, which is sometimes called for (Mystic River) and sometimes not (his William Holden in Anderson’s Licorice Pizza was a masterclass in cool understatement, but he still has the sin of Casualties of War for which he must atone). Given that we spend so much time on Penn’s fate, he needed to be better fleshed out and ratcheted back.
There is also the matter of the film’s politics. While the revolutionary group opposes all forms of classist, misogynist, racial establishment dominance, ICE-like deportation raids are at the center of the story. Indeed, DiCaprio is ensconced in a sanctuary city. Naturally, this has raised the hackles of observers on the right, another sad development in a world where you can’t even eat a Chick-Fil-A sandwich or drink a Bud Lite without a political colonoscopy. Nonetheless, Anderson is not interested in proselytizing. He wants action, slowing only to have a little fun, such as when DiCaprio forgets a password and must deal with a punctilious comrade much as we all have to deal with help desks and call centers:
- Bob: I need this rendezvous point, you understand what I’m saying? I need it.
- Comrade Josh: I understand and the question is “What time is it?”
- Bob: Fuck! If you don’t give me the rendezvous point, I swear to God I will hunt you down and stick a loaded, fuckin’ hot piece of dynamite right up your fuckin’ asshole.
- Comrade Josh: Okay, this doesn’t feel safe. You’re violating my space right now.
- Bob: Violating your space? Man, come on – what kind of revolutionary are you, brother? We’re not even in the same room here. We’re talking on the phone, like, man!
- Comrade Josh: Okay, there’s no need to shout. This is a violation of my space to me. These are noise triggers.
- Bob: Fuckin’ noise triggers? Listen, I wanna know something. I wanna know one thing when this is all said and done: what is your name? I need to know your name.
- Comrade Josh: My name is Comrade Josh.
- Bob: Comrade Joshua? Get a better name. “Comrade Josh” – that’s a fuckin’ ridiculous name for a revolutionary. First off. Second off, I want to know your coordinates. I want to know your location right now. What is it?
- Comrade Josh: I’m in a secure location somewhere between the stolen land of the Wabanaki and the stolen land of the Chumash.
- Bob: You’re fuckin’ intolerable, man. You’re really intolerable. This is not the way revolutionaries do shit. Do you know how hard you are to talk to? Do you know the information I’m trying to give you? You’re a little nitpicking prick! That’s what you are: a little nitpicking prick. And do you know what I’m gonna do to nitpicking pricks? I’m gonna call in a Greyhawk 10.
- Comrade Josh: You’re calling in a Greyhawk 10?
- Bob: I’m calling in a Greyhawk 10, all right? I want you to get your supervisor on the phone right now, because I know you’ve got one. I know you’ve got one, Comrade Josh. All right, I’m going way over your fuckin’ head. Way over your head, all right? Put your commanding officer on the phone now!
- Comrade Josh: Cause you’re calling in a Greyhawk 10?
- Bob: I’m calling in a Greyhawk 10, Comrade Josh.
- Comrade Josh: Please hold.
The interlude is a reminder that this is a trip, not a treatise, and the revolutionaries and their adversaries on the ground are presented as professionals or cogs rather than ideological heroes or villains. They never veer too far from a wink and a nod.
Ultimately, I think liberal audiences will love the flick no matter their artistic sensibilities. As I feel the excitement of conservative retributive justice (rights be damned!) in a Dirty Harry or Equalizer movie, this flick is the fantasy of glorified gutsy, cool, strutting anti-fascists who possess skill, discipline, and smarts. As opposed to their meh real-life counterparts, living in their mother’s basement, contributing to the revolution one bag of Cheetos and social media post at a time.
Catch-22 – 2.75 stars
Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Joseph Heller’s dark comic novel is energetically brisk and sometimes entertaining. Tonally, however, the film is an uneven mess, a pointless downer playing bleakness for laughs.
As the original Corporal Klinger, Alan Arkin’s Captain Yossarian is the engine of the picture, a bombardier stationed in Italy who is losing his nerve and wits. His superiors (Bob Newhart, Buck Henry, and Martin Balsam) vex him by upping the number of bombing missions necessary for a ticket home to curry favor with their commanding officer (Orson Welles). Yossarian’s fellow fliers (including Martin Sheen, Richard Benjamin, Anthony Perkins, Charles Grodin, Bob Balaban, Jon Voight, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford and Norman Fell ) all suffer under the same yoke, but with cheerful acceptance or apathy rather than the indignation of Arkin’s whirling dervish. How the Academy overlooked Arkin astonishes me; whatever the flaws of the picture, his commitment and on-the-edge turn requiring an actor’s entire skill set is unforgettable.
The film’s main problem is rooted in the see-sawing expanse of the endeavor. Yes, war is FUBAR, and aspects of it are both craven and bizarre. In the world of Nichols and Heller, the poor bombers are riddled with asinine and unctuous leadership, wackadoodle stir-crazy types, suicidal loons, sex-crazed fiends, one murderer, and one uber-capitalist who trades parachutes for commodities on the open market.
When played for laughs, the picture is solid, and no one is begging for verisimilitude. However, when pathos is introduced, such as truly tragic deaths of compatriots (including a particularly brutal death of a young flier) and civilians, the film feels incongruously cruel.
Worse, the picture is more than anti-war. It is anti-American, maybe even anti-everything. As nothing matters, there is no investment in the fates of anyone. A fair juxtaposition is Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, in which the madness of the endeavor is clear but even in that madness, the professionalism of the medical staff is unquestioned and laudable, the loss of life truly sad. Nichols himself felt M*A*S*H did his picture in: “We were waylaid by MASH, which was fresher and more alive, improvisational, and funnier than Catch-22. It just cut us off at the knees.” All of which is true. But M*A*S*H also had heart and a respect for the craft of combat surgery. Here, there is no respect for anything or anyone and the characters seem more from Looney Tunes than Heller’s book.
Indeed, every hallmark of the American ethos is there for Nichols to malign. The military leaders are insecure dolts, silly and moronic, who care not a whit for the men. The fliers are chumps or burn outs, pawns in the great game, either oblivious or devious in their plans to get out and shirk. Everyone is also an automaton, caring for nothing, even each other. The goal and aim of the war, and this is World War II we are talking about, is at best corrupt and ultimately criminal, as we bomb not only towns with no military significance, but, in a perversion of capitalism, we allow the Germans to bomb our own base for profit. The Italians are victims of the Americans, just as they were victims of the Germans, because, you see, there is no difference between the two. By the end of the picture, the genius behind the corporate conglomerate, Jon Voight, is now close to full Nazi in regalia and trappings.
Hell, even parents who come to Italy to see their dying son are treated as props for a goof.
Yes, yes. None of this is to be taken literally in a “war is madness” story, and the film is a black comedy grossly overgeneralizing for the laughs. Still, it’s the kind of smart set entertainment that fairly encapsulates the philosophy of the sophisticate, a sneering besmirchment that puts the last torpedo into a sinking ship.
I wonder what Heller made of the movie’s iciness. Obviously, his book was a cynical send-up (I read it in high school, along with Vonnegut’s SlaughterHouse-Five), but Heller also flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier during the war.
On Amazon Prime.
The Naked Gun – 5 stars*
Liam Neeson is an inspired successor to Lt. Frank Drebben. Proof? His Sam Spade voiceover estimation of the physical gifts of Pamela Anderson.
“And she had the type of bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown.”
Enough said.
And if you are surprised by Neeson’s comedic chops, you should not be:
*You have to love this stuff, which I do.
The Ballad of Wallis Island – 5 stars
A sweet, bumbling but well-meaning widower (Tim Key) pays a hefty sum for a reunion concert of a busted-up (professionally and romantically) folk duo (Tom Basden and Cary Mulligan) at his home, a remote island off Wales, without telling one that the other will be attending. Funny, charming but never saccharine, smart, short, restrained, and not bound by the prerequisite of tying it all up in a bow. Felt like one of my favorite flicks, Local Hero. One of the best I have seen this year. Streaming everywhere for $9, free on Peacock.
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