YOU CAN GET FURTHER WITH A KIND WORD AND A GUN THAN YOU CAN WITH JUST A KIND WORD

“1930. Prohibition has transformed Chicago into a City at War. Rival gangs compete for control of the city's billion dollar empire of illegal alcohol, enforcing their will with the hand grenade and tommy gun. It is the time of the Ganglords. It is the time of Al Capone.”

It is the time for MEN. The Untouchables is the kind of picture they used to make all the time before the fall of the studio system, and aside from a couple blood squibs and fuck bombs (okay, aside from a lot of blood squibs and fuck bombs), it could have been made in the 40s or 50s. It is, top to bottom, a Hollywood Movie, featuring the finest talent money can buy. And whoa baby is it fucking awesome.

Now, since this my 100th post (or 99th, whichever, do you really give a fuck? I don't really give a fuck) and I'm in a good mood, I'll concede that there are some mildly ridiculous things in The Untouchables; Roger Ebert wasn't on his period when he cracked on the script, performances, and direction. David Mamet, who scripted, is frequently guilty of jerking off to himself, and this is no exception: the language is hugely overblown, several florid shades of purple, and there's an undercurrent of “history is for faggots” at play, since according to Mamet Frank Nitti both is Southern and gets killed (Nitti lived until 1943 IRL, and took over for Capone after Eliot Ness took Capone down) and there are a third as many Untouchables as there were in real life and half of them die (none of them actually did). Also, the whole bit about upholding the law whether or not it makes any sense is something I can't get on board with morally, but, on the other hand, Mamet's script is also fucking great, so na na na na na na.

As for the performances, well . . . as much of a novelty as it is to see Kevin Costner appear smart (his 1986-89 run as coolest motherfucker on the planet notwithstanding, the only other person who ever made him look smart was Ron Shelton) he's still a movie star, not a Serious Actor. Sean Connery's accent in this is widely held to be one of the worst movie accents of all time, even though he's just doing his Sean Connery voice (again, sigh, movie star, not Serious Actor). Overweight Bobbert has his moments, but the problem with every Bobbert performance is every other Bobbert performance: you can never escape that this is the guy who was in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Godfather II and Mean Streets (and subsequently Midnight Run and Goodfellas and Heat).

And the direction, well, it's time for an emperor's new clothes moment: Brian De Palma tends to do better whoring himself out to a studio and doing someone else's script. Some of his “own,” (read: more auteur-y) pictures are okay, but his 60s counterculture ones suck, only one of his companion piece voyeur/hooker things from the 80s was good, and his Mars picture was a fucking felony, but his career low was putting a lesbian scene in Femme Fatale that wasn't even hot. It's not like Brian De Palma is a shitty director or anything, but he is extremely erratic and errs on the side of style over substance (which still doesn't explain the crappy lesbian scene . . . Jesus Christ, Brian, with great power comes great responsibility, if the studio lets you do it, DO IT RIGHT GODDAMMIT). Now, The Untouchables is probably De Palma's best movie (the rest of the top 5: Obsession, Carrie, Blow Out, and Scarface), but still he's mostly just whipping his dick out.

That, however, is why The Untouchables is such a fucking badass movie. It's an entire movie that just has its dick out, which is why Pauline Kael liked it. From the opening scene, where we see the press eating out of Al Capone's hand while he has a shave—they don't notice the brick the barber shits when he accidentally nicks Capone, who probably only lets the guy live because there's reporters there—and puts on this “I'm a businessman” act, only to cut to a scene where one of Capone's dudes blows up a bar (and a little girl) because the barkeep won't buy Capone booze, The Untouchables does not fuck around. The word subtlety was razor-bladed out of this movie's dictionary, and Frank Nitti rolled a cigarette with it.

Introduce Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), a straight-shooting Treasury officer sent on a fool's errand to Chicago to stop Capone. However, he finds himself having to liaise with a police department that's about 98% on Capone's payroll, thus leading to the inconvenient situation wherein Ness decides to raid a Capone warehouse, Capone finds out about it way the hell in advance, and gets all his shit out of there, embarrassing the crap out of Ness all over the front pages (goes to show cultivating a good relationship with the press never hurts).

Humiliated, Ness goes for a walk. He crumples up the newspaper and tosses it in disgust, only to get popped for littering by beat cop Malone (Sean Connery). Since littering is hardly the biggest law-enforcement issue in Chicago at the time, Malone just busts his balls a bit, until he sees Ness is packing heat.

Malone: OK, pal, why the mahaska? Why are you carrying the gun?
Ness: I'm a treasury officer.
Malone: Alright. Jusht remember what we talked about now.
[Malone walks away]
Ness: Hey, wait a minute! What the hell kind of policemen you got in this god damn city? You just turned your back on an armed man.
Malone: You're a treasury officer.
Ness: How do you know that? I just told you that.
Malone: Who would claim to be that who was not?

In spite of the initial antagonism, Malone sympathizes with Ness, and since the two of them are just about the only honest cops for a hundred miles, they bond. Eventually, Ness turns to Malone to help him assemble a team of “untouchables,” uncorrupted cops driven by honor and the genuine desire to do good. Malone, a cynic, resists at first before relenting, but he wants to make absolutely sure Ness knows what he's getting himself into (and, in his warning, represents his set better than any human being ever):

“You wanna know how you do it? Here'sh how: they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He shendsh one of yourzh to the hoshpital, you shend one of hizh to the morgue. That'sh the Chicago way . . . and that'sh how you get Capone!”

(Ed. Note: one night, the author was watching The Untouchables with two friends from Chicago, and on that line, they nodded and clinked beer bottles. That is all that need be said about that).

The new partners go to the police academy to recruit, under the theory that that's the one place to find a cop Capone isn't bribing yet. Sean Connery asks the instructor to send over his two best marksmen, one of whom is a mumbling stuttering fuck who causes Sean Connery to sigh “There goes the next chief of police,” but the second of whom is Andy Garcia.

Sean Connery: George Shtone, that'sh your name? What'sh your real name?
Andy Garcia: That is my real name.
Sean Connery: What wazh it before ye changed it?
Andy Garcia (sighs): Giuseppe Petri.
Sean Connery: Ah, I knew it. All you need is one thieving wop on the team.
Andy Garcia (pissed, but maintaining): What's that?
Sean Connery (pokes Andy Garcia in chest with clipboard): I shed you're a lying member of a no-good raysh.
Andy Garcia (has someone get a wheelbarrow for his balls, pulls heat on Sean Connery): Much better than you, you stinking . . . Irish . . . pig.
Sean Connery (smiles): Oh, I like him. Shun, you jusht joined the Treasury Department.

I hadn't seen 8 Million Ways To Die yet at this point, so I had no preparation whatsoever for this nuclear blast of badass Andy Garcia unleashed in this movie. On the sole basis of The Untouchables, Andy Garcia is in the Hall of Fame.

So the three comrades are getting ready to go raid a Capone warehouse off a tip Sean Connery picked up, and as they're on their way out the door, Charles Martin Smith (an accountant who was sent by the Treasury department as Ness' assistant in an apparent sick joke) walks in with some ledger or other going “Gosh, I don't think Al Capone pays any income tax!” or some such dorkiness.

Sean Connery: You carry a badge?
Charles Martin Smith: Yeah?
Sean Connery (hands him a shotgun): Carry a gun.

And the Untouchables are complete. Charles Martin Smith shows surprising balls and rather enjoys big swinging dick police work (“It's much more diverting than accounting!”) Our heroes hit Capone, who grows displeased, and being a psychopath with terminal syphilis, Capone's displeasure manifests itself in dudes having their fucking heads caved in with baseball bats, and purple shit coming out.

Our boys fend off bribes from corrupt politicians who want them to leave poor Al alone, and press on with the investigation. They get wind of a huge shipment of booze coming in from Canada and go up to take it down. The blowhard Mounties fuck the whole thing up, and it turns into a firefight, where Charles Martin Smith gets to kill a couple guys (and, in a crowd-pleasing moment, does a shot of the bootleg whiskey out of a bulletholed barrel after offing the last one) and Ness does too, only he finds it less of an adventure than Charles Martin Smith does. Connery gives him the boilerplate movie “you or him” speech, and, slightly mollified, Ness heads inside to interrogate this one guy Sean Connery took alive. The guy isn't giving anything up, so Sean Connery improvises a bit of theater, taking the guy Ness killed, and holding him up, making it look like he's still alive and resisting interrogation. Sean Connery blows the corpse's head off (a little extreme, but nonetheless pretty cool) and the prisoner shits himself and starts blabbing about everything. On the way out:

Blowhard Mountie: Mr. Ness! I do not approve of your methods.
Ness: Yeah? Well, you're not from Chicago.

Man, this movie makes me wish I was. Anyway, having turned the prisoner, they bring him back to Chicago to snitch on Capone, only Frank Nitti disguises himself as an elevator operator and gets the guy alone with Charles Martin Smith. Thus perishes one of the coolest nerds in cinema.

Sean Connery tells Ness to stall the DA for a little bit (the case having hinged on the guy who died), and goes to talk to his old high-ranking cop buddy (whom he apparently met at the Bad Irish Accents Club), which devolves into a fistfight, which concludes with the cop buddy telling Sean Connery about Capone's main bookkeeper, who can make their whole case.

While Ness and Andy Garcia are off stalling the DA, Sean Connery goes home, has himself a shot of bootleg booze (naughty, naughty Sean . . .) and then finds out that all the POV camerawork is because a scared lookin' dude broke into his house with a knife.

Sean Connery, not realizing that these are about to be his last words, nonetheless comes up with one last badass/racist epigram:

“Trusht a wop to bring a knife to a gunfight.”

Sean Connery pulls heat and chases the fucker out of his apartment . . . but there's Frank Nitti with a tommy gun. Sean Connery gets lit the fuggup. He staggers back into his apartment, dying operatically (intercut with Bobbert taking in Pagliacci at the opera house, because remember, subtlety is for homosexuals), dragging himself down the hall to his sitting room, where he has the evidence he needs to give to Ness . . .

So Ness shows up, and Sean Connery, still dying, still noshing on scenery, gives him the intel about where the accountant's coming in, as well as his St. Jude's medal, and, at the perfectly calibrated moment for maximum emotional impact (Ed. Note: this scene and the end of Field of Dreams are two of the only known instances when it's okay for heterosexual men to cry) Sean Connery shuffles off thish mortal coil.

A new, improved “I don't give a fuck” Kevin Costner rolls with Andy Garcia to the train station to meet the accountant. They, of course, know that Capone dudes are going to be there, so they know shit has a 98% chance of going down. But there's a woman with a baby carriage. Costner can't help it, he's a straight arrow, he has to help the poor woman get her baby carriage up the stairs. Terrible timing, though: that's exactly when the accountant comes through, and armed Capone dudes materialize from everywhere. Costner has to let the carriage go to blast a motherfucker with his shotgun, and the carriage goes thunking down the stairs . . . maybe it's just me, but I could have sworn I saw that in another movie . . . nah, Brian De Palma never steals shit from other movies, I must have been high.

Anyway, a sweet slow-motion shootout ensues as the carriage thunks down the stairs. At the very last minute, Andy Garcia ex machina slides in to a) stop the carriage with his foot, b) take aim on the last surviving Capone dude holding the bookkeeper hostage, and c) toss a spare piece to Costner. As the ensuing standoff develops, and the Capone dude starts nervously monologuing about how he plans to leave with the bookkeeper, Costner asks Andy Garcia, “You got him?”

Andy Garcia practically fucking yawns as he says, “Yeah, I got him.” In that moment, Andy Garcia makes any argument about him not being one of the coolest motherfuckers of all time completely null and void. This is no longer a matter for debate. Infidels shall be put to the sword. When Andy Garcia puts a bullet through the Capone dude's open mouth mid-monologue, that is but the grace note concluding the symphony of badass.

The trial is a zoo. In spite of the fact that the good guys have an ironclad case against Capone, Capone has an ironclad bribe infrastructure. The level of confidence in the Capone camp is such that Nitti openly swaggers into court with a gun hanging out of his jacket to whisper in his master's ear. Costner gets pissed and has the bailiff escort Nitti out into the lobby, where Costner frisks him and starts up a round of cop vs. scumbag, until he finds a signed note from the mayor permitting Nitti to carry the gun. Costner, frustrated, demands that Nitti not be allowed back in the courtroom, and goes to light a frustrated cigarette with Nitti's matches . . . which have Sean Connery's address written inside. Costner knows. Nitti realizes, whoops, I just got made as a cop killer; he busts a couple shots into the bailiff and takes off.

Costner chases Nitti up on rooftops, eventually cornering Nitti as he dangles from a rope. Nitti taunts Costner: “Arrest me! Arrest me!” Costner pulls Nitti back up onto the roof, and begins the process of arresting Nitti. But Nitti can't resist the urge to talk a little more shit.

Nitti: Your friend died like a pig.
Costner: Excuse me?
Nitti: Your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that while I beat the rap.
[Costner grabs Nitti and throws him off the fucking roof. Nitti falls through the air, screaming]
Costner: He sound anything like that?

Oh, man. I miss the days when Kevin Costner was cool. He was pretty fuckin all right for a few years there. So, Nitti having been dispensed with (he crunches rather indelicately on a parked car), Costner heads back inside, where Andy Garcia has some evidence that Capone's bought the jury. Then, noticing something awry:

Andy Garcia: Where's Nitti?
Kevin Costner: He's in the car.

Now that right there is dialogue, by God. David Mamet can be kind of ridiculous sometimes, but he can hang his hat on that line (and, from Heist, Danny De Vito's immortal “Everyone wants money. That's why they call it money.”)

Costner goes into the judge's chambers with Capone's list of bribed jurors, and convinces the judge to switch the juries. Capone's lawyer panics and changes Capone's plea to guilty. Boo ya. See ya later, Al! Costner's metamorphosis into man of testicles complete, he swaggers up to Capone and talks shit while twelve dudes hold Capone back from kicking his ass (well . . . maybe it isn't that complete, but hey, even talking shit to Al Capone under those circumstances takes some balls).

So Costner closes up shop, bequeaths Sean Connery's St. Jude's medal to Andy Garcia, and goes home to his wife. An earnest reporter, who's been popping up here and there throughout the movie, runs into Costner on his way home and says to him, they're thinking about repealing Prohibition, what'll you do then? And Kevin Costner gives us a classic last line:

“I think I'll have a drink.”

Ah, man. What a fuckin' movie. Sure, it's got nothing to do with reality, sure it's style over substance (score by Ennio fuckin Morricone, costumes by Giorgio fuckin Armani, that's some style that'll win out over most substance), sure it all ties up a little neatly. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the fucking point. It's a movie meant to be enjoyed, rather than nitpicked to death, so you can nitpick if you want to, but just know, the rest of us will be over here having fun.

* * * *

Postscript: since this is (or isn't) the 100th post, let's take a look back at some of the highlights of the brief but fun history of this-a-here blog:

Tony Scott
Kathryn Bigelow
James Bond
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Paul Verhoeven (and parts 2 and 3)
The Evil White Guys In Suits Theory
Star Wars
Tango & Cash
Dennis Hopper
Ocean's
Meryl Streep
Gangsters
Inception
The Terminator
Terry Gilliam

Anything you like that I forgot to mention? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading! I hope you're having as much fun with this as I am.

ZOMG U GUISE! EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!

Normally, trying to predict box-office results is a gigantic waste of time. The only way it's not is if you actually are a movie studio. Ordinarily, I would completely dismiss the whole enterprise—the only reason I care about how much money a picture makes is its career implications for my favorite directors—except for the fact that occasionally, audiences will be like “Oh, I don't want to go to this picture, it's flopping,” like when Fight Club was in theaters and despite being both wildly entertaining and having something interesting to say politically, people bought into Joe Lieberman's whole Columbine-inspired crusade to cut Hollywood's balls off and the picture would have flopped (and David Fincher would have been through) if it hadn't miraculously turned a profit on DVD.

Columbine was already awful enough. The two jerkoffs responsible ended up trivializing a very real problem in American culture—the relentless bullying of those who do not fit by those who do—and gave people a new reason to harass weirdos, thereby exacerbating the problem. But, because politicians do not understand outsider culture (because the only people who have ever or will ever win elected office are insiders to some degree or other), the way they decided to fix this problem was by making the entertainment industry “police itself” or something. Since Hollywood is a market-driven business, a whole lot of fretting ensued, and the fact that interesting, transgressive pictures had been making healthy profits for the entire decade went out the window in a scared desire to prove to Middle America that “hey, we're not sick and depraved! And those Columbine psychos, it was their fault!”

A decade later, the movie business is in its usual state: neither unacceptably awful nor incongruously awesome. This year in particular has been an interesting one, featuring any number of sequels, cash-ins, and the usual exasperating bullshit, but the odd really interesting picture (like Inception, and a couple kinda cool things at the art houses). This coming weekend, something that used to happen a lot but that I honestly cannot remember the last time it did is looming: two pictures I really want to see are coming out at the same time.

This raises an interesting question: when did Hollywood studios stop competing with each other? Counter-programming—putting out a “chick” picture the same weekend as a “dude” picture—is fucking retarded because it assumes that no chicks want to see dude pictures and no dudes want to see chick pictures; granted the former is a lot more common than the latter, but still. This coming weekend's head-to-head seems like counter-programming, and it's probably a mark of my otherness that I feel like either could have been made personally for me. But let's look at the situation a little more carefully:


Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: dir. Edgar Wright, starring Michael Cera, a couple cute girls, and a bunch of handsome dickheads.

Wherein Scott Pilgrim (Cera) has a fairly mundane problem—dealing with his new girlfriend's dating history—turn comic-book epic end-of-the-world life-or-death on him, as he has to battle her Seven Evil Exes, who are all better looking and more confident than he is, all of whom can beat the living shit out of him unless he musters some inner strength or something. I don't know, I haven't seen the picture yet.

While the premise certainly isn't irredeemable or anything, the main attractions here are Edgar Wright and Michael Cera, both of whom are nerd gods. Edgar Wright's resume is short and to the point: Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. He knows nerds. He is a nerd. He's a very talented director with a rare ability to balance subtlety with over the top orgasmic geek-out. Scott Pilgrim marks his first foray into a world where Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are no longer there to be awesome, though Michael Cera is definitely of that phylum.

And Michael Cera, despite teetering on the brink of overexposure from having seemingly done the same picture where he shyly romances the cute hipster girl about twenty-five times in a row (even though it's really only three), is finally breaking out of the mold in a very smart way, since he's still shyly romancing the cute hipster girl, except now instead of a bunch of twee faggots with acoustic guitars on the soundtrack providing the only dramatic tension, he faces the threat of people like Chris Evans frat-douche-ily stomping the shit out of him. This bodes well, and the inevitable triumphant third-act table-turning when Michael Cera grows a pair and kicks ass cannot but be one of the funniest fucking things you or I will ever see.

Therein lies the appeal for me. A picture where the nerds get one over on the handsome douchebags who get all the girls is one that will always have an audience of at least yours truly. Even though, fortunately, I'm no longer as awkward as I was in high school (and, let's be real, college, and, let's be more real, my mid 20s) part of me will always identify with the underdog nerd. Although Michael Cera, as the skinny, stuffed-into-locker variety of nerd, is of a slightly different stripe than my hulking and brooding, he's still my people. And I thus support any enterprise that involves Michael Cera hooking up with hot girls. It'll take some of the sting out of never getting to nail Maeby Fünke.


The Expendables: dir. Sly, starring Sly and just about everybody with balls except Danny Trejo.

Of course, this has an entirely different appeal. Back in the 80s when men were men and extras were filled with holes, action movies were not something “real” actors did in between Oscar-bait roles as gay retards with leukemia. Action movies were something you did if you were the personal trainer for one of those “real” actors and had a shapely, steroidal figure.

I've always respected Sly more than I actually like most of his pictures; my favorite things he's done are the sort of things his big fans tend to hate, like Tango & Cash and Demolition Man. I've never seen any of the Rambo movies and only the first Rocky movie, and swear up and down til I'm blue in the face that the best picture he ever did was Nighthawks, which in spite of having Billy Dee Williams and Rutger Hauer (and Joe Spinell!) in it somehow managed to slip through the cracks of history.

This, though, is different. The Expendables has one of the most impressive arrays of large, gruff voiced dudes ever. There's Sly, as the head of a team of ass-kickers for hire or something, who has a summit with Arnold and Bruce Willis which results in Sly and retinue going out and blowing shit up. Who needs details? It's Sly, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, and ericrobertsandmickeyrourke *cough cough*.

Now, of course, I want to see this, but I'm resisting for a couple reasons. One is that big-budget homages to low-budget movies (lookin at you, Grindhouse) tend to miss the point and, by the very fact of having more than $1.50 are a totally different kind of picture. Real low-budget action movies have the one guy on steroids in the lead, the one girl no one's ever heard of before who's kind of cute but can't act, the one drunk character actor phoning it in and hamming it up as the villain for that fall's rent, the one other big muscular dude as the villain's number one henchman, and a wise-cracking sidekick (who was sometimes also muscular).

The second reason is that the example I'm about to use of the aesthetic purity of that template is not in The Expendables: Jean-Claude Van Damme. As readers of the Bordeaux, France/Seattle, WA based zine Louis Liard are aware, I am the world's foremost authority on Jean-Claude Van Damme, the king of kings in low-budget action cinema. Genetic engineering could not have produced a better low-budget action star than Jean-Claude Van Damme. He had very large muscles. His near-complete inability to speak English made his acting seem shitty (though, as we discovered in the brilliant, revelatory JCVD, he actually can act). And he kept it simple. Let us take, as an example, Double Impact:

1---Leading man on steroids? Check, times two: Van Damme plays twins
2---Girl no one's ever heard of who's kind of cute but can't act? Meh, the blond can't act but she isn't attractive, ditto the “lesbian” working for the villain.
3---Drunk character phoning it in/hamming it up? Again, slight departure; Geoffrey Lewis isn't the villain, but he sure is drunk and screwing around. Philip Chan, though, HOLY SHIT is he hamming it up, and you can smell the Remy Martin on that dude's breath.
4---Other big muscular dude? Bolo motherfuckin Yeung. The only reason this dude wasn't the biggest fucking superstar in the fucking world was racism; it was always barely plausible that Van Damme could kick his ass. I submit Bolo could have killed Arnold. Yes, that's right, and I'll say it again so there's no ambiguity. Bolo could have fucking killed Arnold. And, don't get me wrong, I love Jean-Claude Van Damme, I love Arnold, but why can't a Chinese guy be big, muscular, not be able to speak English and star in a movie? Huh? Riddle me that, Menachem Golan.
5---Wisecracking sidekick? Not applicable, but let's take Bloodsport as an example—Ogre was fucking great in that as Jean-Claude's wisecracking sidekick, who multitasked as a big muscular dude, and the crippled/dead friend JC has to avenge, only being Ogre he's enough of a badass that he recovers from Bolo crushing his skull within days and is drinking beer like nothing ever happened. Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but Ogre was fucking awesome in Bloodsport.

Now, Sly isn't a retard. In fact, in the discussions here regarding Tango & Cash and Victory, I reiterated several times that Sly is, to the contrary, rather intelligent. Sly offered Jean-Claude Van Damme a part in The Expendables. But Jean-Claude Van Damme turned it down, I guess out of an ascetic loyalty to the purity of low-budget action cinema or something (JC is fuckin weird), thereby putting Sly in the awkward position of, due to circumstances completely beyond his control, being unable to perfectly make the all-star team kind of picture he wanted to. Of course, holding that against him would be ridiculous, and I won't do it.

Sly's mistake that he didn't have to make, and that I will hold against him, is cutting Danny Trejo out of the picture (AFTER PUTTING HIM ON THE MOTHERFUCKING POSTER). It's very simple. You cannot make any kind of definitive cinematic statement about anything male without Danny Trejo being involved. Anything testicular with which Danny Trejo is not involved needs to be compared to Danny Trejo. Those stupid Dos Equis ads would be awesome if Danny Trejo were in them, because he is that guy. So what the fuck, Sly? First you cast Danny Trejo, then you decide to merge his character with either Eric Roberts or Mickey Rourke (I forget which)? This is utterly unacceptable, and should have been decided with a bare-knuckle boxing match, which prison boxing champion Danny Trejo would have won, and ended up playing both Eric Roberts' and Mickey Rourke's roles. Sure, Eric Roberts matured into a pretty cool reptile, but Mickey Rourke has looked like fuckin Rocky Dennis for about 20 years now, and the whole point to Mickey Rourke was that he was good-looking. Even in his prime, a half-asleep Danny Trejo with one leg chainsawed off by Mickey Rourke's wisecracking sidekick would fucking destroy him.

But, still. Even if it's imperfect and exempt from the grand tabulation of Statements on Masculinity due to one annoying violation of the statutes, it should be a hell of a lot of fun. Thus presenting the dilemma: The Expendables or Scott Pilgrim? For me, the answer is moot, since I'm going to be spending the weekend reviewing plays for nytheatre.com and trying to have production meetings for a movie I'm directing the end of the month (many self-indulgent plugs to come). But if I were to go to something this weekend, it would probably end up being The Expendables, even if it came down to a coin flip. I have the feeling Scott Pilgrim will benefit from a DVD-and-a-joint viewing at home more than a see-it-in-the-theater-completely-straight experience. Of course, I could be wrong, and probably am.

And, for the biggest question, the one I care the least about: which will be #1 at the box office? Neither. Eat, Pray, Love is going to gross $40 mil. (EDIT: 40 million rubles, maybe. See what I mean about box office predictions being fucking stupid?)

"HOW MUCH YOU TAKE 'EM FOR? 20 DOLLARS? LET'S GO TO THE MOVIES!"

In these days of zillion dollar tickets, broke-asses like me don't get to see as many movies in the theaters as we used to (and, alas, $20 no longer lets three Mean Streets mooks all go to the movies). This is kind of a mixed blessing, actually, because for the last few years as society descends deeper into the void and common decency gradually becomes a thing of the past (sorry, I held a straight face for as long as I could, gimme a sec: hahahahahahahahahaha! Okay we're back) people generally act like assholes in movie theaters. The talking, the cell phone screens showing up in your peripheral vision, the people who take calls during movies, a lot of it kinda sucks. Unfortunately this didn't cause a rise in more people going to art houses, because art house audiences are awesome. They shut up during the parts when they're supposed to show up, laugh when they're supposed to laugh (if the New Yorker told them it was okay to, an important wrinkle to not forget in arthouses; more later on why you need to check the ruling of the cognoscenti beforehand) and generally, you're in the presence of people who like and respect movies.

And, really, a lot of what makes going to the movie fun is going to the movie, the experience. I find watching at home I get to focus a lot more on the movie itself—again, a mixed blessing; if the movie sucks, there's nothing to do except turn it off. But in the theater, if the movie sucks, you can either make out with your date, open one of the beers you smuggled in, look around and enjoy the pained expressions on the audience's faces, so on and so forth. Occasionally, too, crazy shit happens. Some choice anecdotes:


Tombstone (1993) dir. George P. Cosmatos (and, allegedly, an uncredited Kurt Russell)
Location: Metropolitan Cinema, downtown Brooklyn, NY
Crazy shit: dislocated shoulder on way to theater

So, yes, technically, this isn't a story that took place in a theater, but it affected the experience and is at least 75% of the reason why I like Tombstone even though the structure's clunky, it's too long, and Dana Delany is ditzy in it. But anyway. So it's the winter, the streets are all icy, it's about one fuckin degree outside, and—foreshadowing!—I was watching football just a little while before and had seen (newly elected Hall of Famer) Emmitt Smith skullfuck the Giants with a dislocated shoulder.

I think my mom and I were actually talking about that game while walking down 10th street in Park Slope down a fairly steep hill along a stretch of sidewalk with no houses around so the sidewalk wasn't plowed or salted or anything. Naturally, the sidewalk was pretty treacherous, and although I was being very careful, I slipped and went horizontal. Mom slipped and went horizontal, and her right foot flying up just fuckin nailed my right shoulder, and then I crunched on the ground. BAM, dislocated shoulder. Ow.

Mom, being a mom, was very upset and kept saying “I'm so sorry.” I, on the other hand, was 15 and a man-in-training so I had to represent, and I really wanted to see the movie, so I insisted that I was fine, tried to hide the fact that my shoulder was hanging off at some bizarre angle, and we continued on our way to the subway to downtown Brooklyn.

So. We get out. Shoulder still hurts. We're walking down Fulton Street to get to the Metropolitan. A very large Afro-Klingon man is walking toward me, glowering (in fairness, I kind of looked like the Master Race's CPA at the time and it looked like he was having a bad day) and as he walks by me, he tries to knock me down. By aiming at my right shoulder. BAM. Shoulder knocked back in. And suddenly barely even hurts anymore.

My mom looks at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that guy knocked my shoulder back in.”

“Oh good, it was—wait a minute, was it dislocated????? Oh fuck, why didn't you—”

“MOM, we're gonna be late for the movie!”

So we hustled in and watched the movie. If you've ever had a serious injury, or migraines (both of which I can tell you all about) you know the best part is after the worst of the pain has faded, and that strangely euphoric sensory sharpness takes hold. I sat there and enjoyed the living shit out of Tombstone—Val Kilmer's glorious hamminess as Doc Holliday, Michael Biehn being fucking terrifying and fucking awesome as Johnny Ringo, all the cameos from people like Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum narrating. I've never enjoyed it quite as much ever again, and am thus ever convinced that the shoulder was worth it. Even though for the last sixteen-plus years my shoulder hurts when it rains, hey. Tombstone.


South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) dir. Trey Parker
Location: Pavilion Theater, Park Slope, Brooklyn NY
Crazy shit: Well-behaved children

Of course, an explanation is necessary, but fear not, I will oblige. I was on summer break from college, and naturally as a mature, progressive man of taste, I was very geeked about the South Park movie. So much so that I forgot that school was out, and there were going to be dumbass kids at the theater.

Ironically, considering that the premise of the movie involved the underage protagonists sneaking into an R-rated movie, the theater was packed with diminutive, shrieking fucktards. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against kids, I just like them quietly reading in another room. These kids were neither quiet, reading, nor in another room. I took one of the only unoccupied seats left, near the front, which was, unfortunately right in front of an unsupervised group of very loud, very stupid kids.

WASPs are generally pretty good at keeping it together, and being as these were my college years, I was doing my obligatory dabbling in the philosophies of the East and was thus trying to calm the beast within with Zen, the Tao, and all that jazz, and basically, I was like this: they can talk during the previews, but the second the movie proper starts, if they're still talking . . . this means war.

So the movie starts. The kids, very excited that they're at an R-rated movie by themselves, are still babbling, and quoting South Park episodes to each other. The first song starts, and the kids instead of shutting up start talking louder.

I turned around and looked the loudest one, the one behind me, dead in the eye and I said “Shut. The Fuck. Up.” And I turned around and thoroughly enjoyed the movie . . . and didn't notice until about thirty minutes in that I was enjoying the movie in silence. I briefly wondered if the kids had just left, but then funny stuff started happening and I forgot about them.

It wasn't until the movie had come to its very entertaining conclusion, and I was standing to go. I saw the four kids who'd been sitting behind me for the whole picture, getting up quietly and making their way out. Let that be a lesson, ladies and gentlemen: all you have to do to keep kids in line is curse at them. You're welcome.


Bamboozled (2000) dir. Spike Lee
Location: Upstate Films, Rhinebeck, NY
Crazy shit: Progressive, white, upper-middle-class wrath

Getting off campus to the movies when I was in college was always a bit of an event, as I had no car and generally had a mountain of work to do, when I wasn't so high I thought I was off campus already. The nearest movie theaters were a bit of a shlep, but fortunately we had an art house in nearby Rhinebeck so we weren't stuck with the horseshit playing at the mall. I got out there for, among other things, Ghost Dog (which wasn't much of a story, we smoked a joint in the jeep on the way over, really liked the movie, smoked another joint on the way, back, and then decided, hey, let's smoke some weed) and Dancer in the Dark (which wasn't much of a story either, that picture was just depressing). But the night a friend of mine and I got in a fight with some middle-aged progressives, we had just seen Bamboozled.

Let's first establish two universal truisms about Spike Lee. First, he's a brilliantly talented director; the only other director I can think of capable of creating as genuine, visceral excitement in an audience using nothing but cinema vocabulary (camera moves, edits, sound) as Spike is Martin Scorsese. Spike's from New York, that's how we are, we're fucking enthusiastic, man. That does, however, lead into the second universal Spike truism: the thing that trips him up is a tendency to not know when to take his foot off the gas with the politics. This is especially unfortunate because he has very important things to say. The bits about the cops murdering people in Do The Right Thing, Spike did not pull out of his ass. That literally happened every fucking day in New York in the 80s, and Spike was incredibly influential in getting that bullshit to, if not stop, at least get a bit less frequent. Malcolm X was one of the two or three best biopics ever made, and reintroduced Malcolm into public discourse as a fully rounded tragic hero, and the movie cannot be underestimated in helping Malcolm maintain his proper place in the history of this country.

But occasionally, Spike swings and misses. Bamboozled was one of those cases. Again, the source of the main premise was not Spike's ass—racism in the media is all over the goddamn place. Spike's premise—a TV network that airs an actual, blackface/shuck & jive minstrel show set in a watermelon patch—is, much like Network, one that only seems over the top until you think about it for a second. Or however long it takes to look up The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer on imdb. Yep, a sitcom about slavery. Jesse Jackson's fucking head exploded when that show hit the air; unlike a lot of the lesser controversies where you can tell Jesse's just phoning in the sincere, reproaching disappointment, you could tell he was actually fucking really pissed when this happened. As was just about every single black person in the United States not directly employed by that show, including Spike, naturally.

If anything, Bamboozled suffers from Spike's apparent, understandable, furious need to get the picture on a screen and get people to watch it as soon as possible. It has a great premise and a lot of real shit to say, a lot of which could have been said more effectively if Spike had done another draft or two of the script. Damon Wayans' performance in the lead is really weird; people dismissed it as being shitty, which is only a little reductive. There are elements of a really good performance in there, and he has some excellent moments, but his character's arc from bored, annoyed yuppie to righteous moral crusader to whore bathing in filthy lucre is too complex for some of the lazy choices Damon Wayans makes (and that Spike didn't tell him to knock the fuck off), primarily his arch stand-up comedian white guy accent. His best scenes are the ones where you can tell he's not putting it on as strong, like when he gets pissed off in a writer's meeting at a white woman who self-righteously asserts that she knows about black people due to her degree in African-American studies and calls her a “niggerologist,” a line my friend and I found hilarious. (Hold that thought, reminiscence after only a smidge more plot recap) Spike's choice to shoot the whole thing on grainy videotape was a little odd too, as it took the audience out of the story he was trying to tell, and not in a good way. And, ultimately, the picture goes on a little too long, and having Jada Pinkett-Smith pull out a gun and shoot Damon Wayans at the end was too melodramatic and didn't contribute at all to the points Spike was trying to make, it was more that Spike himself wanted to shoot this horrible motherfucker and did by proxy.

Now, the press that greeted Bamboozled, like most of Spike's bad press, was largely motivated by the two-front assault of racists who want Spike to shut up and accept that racism is over because they only lynch one black person a year in Arkansas these days, and pussy-ass progressives who think Spike has the right idea but ruins everything by being too angry (ironically, a perfect justification for Spike to stay pissed). Spike, to his credit, handled this by giving everyone the finger and telling them “Go fuck yourself, if you ban this movie you're proving my point that the media are racist cowards.” Naturally, with all this hubbub, a certain percentage of the pussy-ass progressive demographic wanted to go see Bamboozled so they could be solemnly, deeply upset. My friends and I wanted to see a new Spike Lee joint.

If memory serves me correctly, we stopped off for some beers on the way there, but however it happened, we were definitely scruffier and rowdier than most of the buttoned-down Rhinebeck citizenry there with us. So we were talking, in typical college-student patois (erudition + fuck you motherfucker + loud lack of regard for bourgeois decorum) and a thin, severe, middle-aged woman in glasses turned around—this is before the previews even started, mind you—and asked: “Are you going to talk like that through the whole film?”

I was confused. “The picture hasn't started yet, ma'am.”

“Ma'am? Did you . . .” and she started sputtering, which confused me even more, until the woman turned to her husband and muttered something about “he just called me ma'am,” at which point I realized I hadn't gotten the memo from the feminists about which words were off-limits that week. But, whatever, I didn't press the point. I even lowered my voice and stopped cursing.

So the picture starts. No more reprimands. However, a ways into it, my friend and I found ourselves laughing quite a bit. This isn't because we're insensitive assholes, or racists, or anything like that. Spike Lee is fucking funny, and Bamboozled is deliberately funny on any number of occasions. The scene where Mos Def is sitting there talking about something or other and there are like three jump cuts in the middle of his monologue showing that he's still not getting to the fucking point is hilarious, and I would like to point out, for the record, that the fact that we were laughing at a jump cut was in and of itself a badge of sufficient cultural sophistication that the Rhinebeckers should have fucked off and left us alone. But I started noticing after a while that every time my friend and I laughed, heads would turn around to (indirectly and non-confrontationally, of course) stare at us. After a while we even got that patented leftie sound that I can only describe as a cross between “tsk tsk” “shh” and steam escaping. In stereo. A ways through the second act I muttered to my friend, “Dude, we should probably keep it quiet,” and he looked around at an apparent theater full of politically left-of-center teakettles and nodded.

So the movie ended, and my friend went to go hit the men's room before we headed back to campus. While I was waiting for him outside in the fresh air, the same woman who got pissed off at me for calling her ma'am comes out with her husband and another couple. Ma'am says to me, “You should be ashamed of yourself for carrying on like that during a film.”

Boy, she's good at confusing me. “What? I was . . . laughing . . .”

“Yes, you were laughing. Honestly, that's disrespectful.”

Okay, confusion metamorphosizes into anger: “Lady, the picture was funny. When a thing is funny, normal people laugh.”

She gets sarcastic, folds her arms. “Oh, normal people laugh at racism.”

“Listen, ma'am, the director intended the picture to be funny. If he were at this screening, he'd be pissed off at you and asking who rammed that stick up your ass.” (Good breeding failed me)

At this point her husband turns a little red. “Don't you talk to my wife like that.”

I turn to him. “Goes both ways, sir, she shouldn't talk to me like that.” And I was in the middle of failing to come up with some brilliant addendum to that when my friends got me the fuck out of there and into the car to go home.

As we were heading home, one of my friends said to me: “Only you, man, fuck . . . you managed to get into a fucking fight in Rhinebeck.”


The Rock (1996) dir. Michael Bay
Location: somewhere around Caterham, Surrey, England
Crazy shit: Slept through car chase

Summer of '96, in between graduating high school and starting college, I went on a student-exchange trip to England. The English kids had come over to New York the previous winter, and we were all basically trapped indoors in a blizzard for about four days, during which I got Gareth, the kid I was hosting, hooked on both my stealth bomber computer game and basketball (“This is fucking magic, mate, it's like football with more black blokes and more scoring!”) and watched a shitload of movies he'd never seen, like El Mariachi and The Godfather, and made plans for me to direct a movie someday with him playing a South African villain. Good times.

Naturally, when my plane landed, the first thing Gareth wanted to do was take me out for a pint and go to the movies. As I was seventeen, this sounded awesome. (Ed. Note: at 31, it still sounds awesome) So we got a pint or four and staggered over to the cinema to see The Rock. “Michael Fucking Bay,” Gareth said, with a big smile on his face.

“Yeah, man, Michael Fucking *yawn* Bay . . .”

Gareth looked at me and said something typically sarcastic about how my backward colonial upbringing hadn't properly prepared me to drink, and I yawned again, conceded his cultural superiority, and settled down into my seat. The movie started, and the usual Michael Bay Ritalin editing and retarded exposition ensued. I tried, in vain (as it so often goes), to figure out what the fuck Nicolas Cage was on, and eventually let jet-lagged drunk oblivion do its work. Next thing I know, I'm being woken up with an elbow to the chops. “Wha . . . the fuck you do that for?” I said to Gareth.

“Mate, you just slept through the fucking car chase,” he replied, radiating contempt and disgust.

“Oh. Sorry. What'd I miss?”

“Nothing. That's not the point. You slept through the fucking car chase.”

“Oh. Sorry, won't let it happen again.”

(Ed. Note: the car chase in The Rock is, although no classic, still of sufficient caliber that the author quotes this story with the proper degree of shame, and with firm assurance to the reader that he has since learned to drink properly)


The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) dir. Joseph Sargent
Location: Film Forum, New York, NY
Crazy shit: An outpouring of love from New York's finest movie nerds.

This one isn't so much weird as it is just one of the most fun nights I've ever had at a movie. A very dear friend of mine heard The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was playing at Film Forum, I heard it from him, and put my fuckin boots on to go the fuckin movies. Because, as a movie nerd, I have to show love for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and as a New Yorker, I have to show that love demonstratively. It's one of the tightest, most exciting action pictures in the first and most fertile decade of the modern action picture, and few movies have ever captured grouchy, proletarian Old New York quite like it. And, since we had three or four people there with us who'd never seen it, this was important shit.

We sat down and started talking very excitedly about how awesome this movie was, and, because I cannot but be circumspect, I noticed that in several other groups throughout the theater, other pairs of friends were very excitedly explaining how awesome this movie was to their friends, and all the new people were getting on the vibe as well. The place was buzzing before the lights even went down.

The first trailer got a standing ovation. Now, sure, you've seen this happen when some picture has like The Dark Knight or Star Wars or some such trailer attached, and the nerds applauding are more likely than not just there at that movie because they heard their trailer was attached (this is how, with both my mom and my Pelham One Two Three friend, I came to see Dreamcatcher; one of the Animatrix shorts was showing first). But this time, at Film Forum, was fucking special. The trailer went a little something like this: a shuffling jazz beat starts playing. Then, on separate title cards—

BAND
OF
OUTSIDERS
A FILM BY
JEAN-LUC GODARD

It was like a game-winning home run in the bottom of the 9th in Game 7 of the World Series. Film Forum went fucking apeshit. The second the trailer ended, about ten people—including, I confess, me—all said in unison, “WE GOTTA COME BACK!” and then the whole place laughed.

We had a couple seconds to chill and catch our breath, and then David Shire's funktastic score started playing, and the titles of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three started rolling. For the whole hour forty-five, the entire theater kept that same level of energy. Every word of Walter Matthau's mouth was the funniest thing we ever heard. Robert Shaw sitting there doing his crossword puzzle: awesome. The last scene when Walter Matthau hears Martin Balsam coughing, then pokes his head back in with his Walter Matthau basset hound face: standing ovation. It was a good night.

The thing about nights like these at the movies is, you never know when they're going to happen. You can't plan them. You just have to go to the movies and let them unfold all by themselves. Sometimes the movie isn't that good. Sometimes the crowd is annoying. But when everything falls into place, or falls apart in just the right way, there's nothing quite like it.

THIS GAME IS FUN . . . LET'S HAVE SOME FUN OUT HERE!

It's fun, goddammit.

GAMBLING IS STUPID

Over a friendly game of cards last night, some friends of mine and I had a discussion about whether or not No Limit Texas Hold 'Em really counts as gambling. We decided it didn't; it's only a game of chance in the sense that everything in life is as well. True, occasionally you'll get fucked over by the wrong card hitting the board, just like occasionally meteors fall out of the sky and destroy 90% of the organic life on Earth, but hey, shit happens. If you can exert rational control over a game, it's not gambling, and ultimately what you're doing is betting on skill.

This, of course, is why betting on sports is one of the dumbest fucking things imaginable. As a fan, you have no rational control. You can collect all the information you want about West Ham's second-string goalkeeper starting the next match because Robert Green was assassinated (hypothetical, but English people are displeased with that cat), about a point guard not having any cartilage in his knee anymore and his team, ergo, not being as good anymore, or about a star pitcher missing his next start and some dork from the bullpen going instead. You can analyze historical trends about this team beating that team, this player deviating from the mean consistently against this other player, all the livelong day. In the end, no one has any fucking idea what's actually going to happen. Except the players themselves.

Gambling in sports goes back as far as sports do. I'm sure, in Ancient Greece, some shady lookin' dude in a silk toga was giving odds on which naked guy could throw discuses the farthest, Roman shylocks (moar like Venetian Shylocks, amirite?) would give you 2/1 on an over/under of three Christians eaten by the lions, and so forth. But no supposition is necessary when looking back at gambling in the 1910s in baseball. It was an institution.

One of the game's most talented players in the 'teens, a first baseman named Hal Chase, was banned from the game for taking money from gamblers to lose on purpose. And, of course, 70-odd years later, the man with more hits than anyone else in the history of the game, Pete Rose, was banned for life for gambling on baseball. However, neither of these were the most infamous gambling scandal in baseball history. That (dis)honor belongs to the 1919 Chicago White Sox, or as they are more commonly known, the Black Sox.

In 1963, Eliot Asinof published an excellent book about the affair, entitled 8 Men Out, and in 1988, John Sayles' screen adaptation, Eight Men Out, hit theaters. For a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the whole thing, one should read Asinof's book, although Sayles does an excellent job of telescoping everything into a compelling, clear two-hour movie, making one of his best pictures in process.

The story: the 1919 Chicago White Sox clinch the pennant, only to find that their miserly owner, Charles Comiskey, has given them bottles of warm, flat champagne as a bonus. Furthermore, star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (played by the venerable David Straithairn), after winning 29 games, asks Comiskey for a performance-based bonus in his (far-below average salary for the time) contract, since he was benched for two whole weeks, during which he undoubtedly would have won a 30th game. Comiskey tells him only, “29 is not 30, Eddie.”

Since, although he clearly had a gift for arithmetic, Comiskey was a raging fuckface, some of the other players start grumbling about being underpaid. First baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), an aficionado of nightlife and women who counted gangsters among his casual friends, and shortstop Swede Risberg (who, ironically, was part of a Detroit Tiger team that, in 1917, took money to lose a series to the White Sox that gave the White Sox the title, before later joining the White Sox in a move that was widely regarded as a “thanks for the help” gesture) have a conversation about taking money to lose the World Series, and begin to compile a list of the players they'd need to have in on the scheme for it to work.

Several different groups of gangsters all offer the players money, though the biggest name among them, Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner), wants his name nowhere near any talk of the World Series, lest it affect the odds. Eventually, a core group of involved players met with the various gamblers and agreed to accept a fee of more than each of their salaries for the year to lose to the underdog Cincinnati Reds.

After dutifully losing the first two games, the players still had not been paid (aside from a token “good faith” gift to Eddie Cicotte to get him to lose the first game) and, in any case, the starting pitcher in the third game was golly-gee straight arrow Dickie Kerr, who was not in on the scheme because he was considered a “busher” (read: useless fucktard) who would lose anyway. However, as per the earlier statements about sports and luck, young Kerr pitched a three-hit shutout, and the lower-end gamblers all lost their entire bankroll, thereby screwing the players out of their promised fee. Rothstein himself allegedly even pulled all or most of his money out of the Series at that point; he'd not been wild about betting on the Series in the first place, and as Johnny Caspar said in Miller's Crossing, “if you can't trust a fix, you're left with anarchy.”

The players, pissed off at getting nothing in return for compromising their professional pride, proceeded to turn it around and, for the most part, start kicking ass for the rest of the Series, to the point where game 8 (the series was best 5 out of 9 that year) gangsters of some still-involved party or other were forced to remind starting pitcher Claude Williams of his involvement in the fix by threatening to kill his wife. Williams reluctantly agreed and pitched dreadfully, clinching the series for Cincinnati.

If the events of the previous decade had taught baseball insiders anything, it was how to spot the tell-tale signs of a fix. Otherwise awesome players suddenly playing like shit and occasionally not even bothering to hide deliberate errors was right up at the top of that list. It was thus that journalist Ring Lardner (played by Sayles himself in a fucking brilliant performance) starts going around and asking people, “Yo, what the fuck happened?” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) and eventually starts learning shit about payoffs and so forth.

"I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know, if I was the best at something. I mean, we're the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain't a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who's holding the money and look at who's facing a jail cell. Talent don't mean nothing. And where's Comiskey and Sullivan, Attell, Rothstein? Out in the back room cutting up profits, that's where. That's the damn conspiracy." -David Straithairn, being awesome, as Eddie Cicotte.

The story of the fix ends up going public and the players go on trial for fraud. During this trial, the owners of the 16 Major League teams collectively hire a “Commissioner” to oversee the integrity of the sport, as a public relations move intended to convince the public—who were increasingly like “why the fuck should I give you my money, when it's the 'teens and literally the only people with money are evil white guys in suits, to watch a game whose outcome has already been decided?” and staying away from the ballpark—that baseball could be trusted. (One other by-product of these public-relations freakouts was a forced sale of Boston Red Sox star Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to maximize his media exposure; don't ask me for a source on that—people who know people have known that's how that happened for 90 years now.) However, the man the owners approach, judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, insists on absolute power and a lifetime contract, to which the owners, backed into a corner, agree.

What Landis does is, in spite of the players being acquitted of fraud and there being no hard evidence that any of them actually took any money, unilaterally decide to ban all eight accused players from the game for life. And so, in order to protect the public images of the men who forced them into a terrible ethical compromise by not paying them a living wage, the Black Sox were summarily exiled from the game and forced to stand for eternity as avatars of corruption and greed.

The movie doesn't have time to get into what a fucking asshole Landis actually was, nor how hypocritically he enforced his dictum, as outlined in the movie, that “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes, or promises to throw a game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it will ever play professional baseball again,” nor the fact that the ban against black players in the major leagues was single-handedly enforced by Landis during his quarter-century reign of terror, over the protests of baseball men like Branch Rickey (who, a year after Landis' death, signed Jackie Robinson less as a great blow for civil rights than as a “fuck you” to Landis, and was always annoyed that he was deprived of a good three or four prime years of Robinson's Dodger career due to Landis' racism). So I'll do it here. While Sayles does a pretty good job of establishing Landis as a mean, cold, selfish, and cruel man, knowing what a truly bad person Kenesaw Mountain Landis actually was makes those scenes in the third act that much more powerful. Landis would ban other players for gambling, like Phil Douglas, Jimmy O'Connell, Gene Paulette, Hal Chase, and Heinie Zimmerman, on hearsay testimony (well, except Chase, but Hal Chase was so fuckin dirty it's amazing he was never killed, let alone banned). However, confronted with iron-clad proof that stars (and, parenthetically, members of the Ku Klux Klan) Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker had thrown games in 1919, Landis granted them amnesty due to it being “old news” and for Cobb and Speaker's services to the game. Riiiiiight. Funny how the only people he ever banned aside from the Black Sox were people no one had ever heard of (again, excluding Chase, who was mostly only famous for being dirty). And funny how those guys shared membership in a certain secret white-sheeted organization as Landis . . . oh, wait, sorry. That's never been proven (in Landis' case), and it could besmirch his reputation. How's your own medicine taste, you fucking disgrace?

Anyway, sorry 'bout that little digression. As I was starting to say before thinking about Kenesaw Mountain Landis for more than two seconds made me start spitting blood (as it does), one of the problems with Eight Men Out is that, unless the viewer already knows the story the movie tells, the emotional impact of certain aspects of it might be muted somewhat. The first example, discussed above, is just how fucked up sturmbannfuhrer Landis' decision to ban the players without proof really was. The decision, made on behalf of the owners who paid Landis' salary, had very little to do with gambling, instead motivated by ticket sales and the desire to artificially enforce a below-market-value level for players' salaries (hey, at least we don't have that problem anymore!) If the real story got out—that an owner was paying his players so little that they couldn't afford medical care for severe chronic pain in the shoulder and elbow, like Eddie Cicotte, or forced to live in slum neighborhoods despite generating massive profits for the owner—a public increasingly interested in radical and progressive politics might not be so happy. (Sayles touches on this briefly in the movie, as Ring Lardner, when he grumbles, “If Landis is serious about cleaning up the game, he should start with those birds [the owners] up there on the steps with him.”) The bitterest irony of the Black Sox' fate was that, after the desperate measures to which they resorted to make some extra cash, the fact that Babe Ruth (whose own boozes-and-whores private life was the subject of a league-mandated press blackout) publicly flaunted the fact that his salary was higher than the the President of the United States meant that it was harder to underpay star players, which had a hell of a lot more to do with the end of gambling scandals than fear of Landis did.

Still, in spite of the fact that there's only so much historical context you can pack into a two-hour movie, Sayles pulls off Eight Men Out with flair. He deliberately looked for actors who could actually play baseball, so the baseball scenes are a lot cooler than they usually are in movies (much as I love Bull Durham, for instance, Tim Robbins looks like a fucking moron trying to throw a baseball), including one awesome take where D.B. Sweeney, as Shoeless Joe Jackson, whacks the fuck out of a ball and legs out a triple while the camera keeps both him and the ball in frame for the whole uninterrupted duration of his trip to third, culminating in a dramatic slide. David Straithairn, unsurprisingly because David Straithairn is fucking awesome, even throws a fairly convincing knuckleball (which causes Studs Terkel, playing Sayles' grizzled, cigar-chomping colleague Huey—boy those two are a fucking team in this movie—to come in his pants: “Did you see that pitch?” and have it not be patently ridiculous). And of course, Charlie Sheen, who demonstrated similarly impressive baseball playing skills in Major League, does some cool shit as outfielder Happy Felsch.

The cast, as befits a movie about a team said in its day to be comprised of all-stars, is a massive collection of talent. A lot of them, unfortunately, have been forgotten and/or slept on as time passes. Of course, there's David Straithairn, who I will literally defend to the death (do not force me to prove I know what the word literally means, people), but holy shit . . . Michael Lerner? What the fuck happened to Michael Lerner? He was killing shit in the late 80s and early 90s, not only in this, but in Harlem Nights (it's possible to be good in a bad movie, just ask Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Danny Aiello, to name three more examples from the same cast), Barton Fink (genuflect RIGHT FUCKING NOW) . . . and then a whole lotta nothing for a really long time (though him turning up as “Mayor Ebert” in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla was, aside from some random thing Jean Reno did, the only cool thing in that picture) until showing up in the awesome Ralph Macchio web short “Wax On, Fuck Off.” Apparently he's in the movie they made of Atlas Shrugged, which makes me facepalm and want to make some phone calls making sure he's not getting fucked over by people who think he's the Michael Lerner who edits Tikkun.

In spite of the presence of these two titans (and oh, man, is David Straithairn amazing in that scene where he's giving the deposition and he goes, “We were crooked . . . we were crooked.” The power of the shame and self-loathing he invests in those three words, fuck me, that's what this acting thing is all about right there) the best performance in the movie might be John Mahoney as earnest, guileless manager Kid Gleason. It's hard in a cynical, self-aware era, to seem like anything other than a dipshit playing someone who genuinely believes in purity, but John Mahoney is so good in this that he will seriously make you want a glass of milk, a slice of apple pie, and a fucking American flag to salute. When he's in court and the asshole lawyer asks him what he thinks of his players, John Mahoney fights with it—you can tell the fact they might have profaned his beloved game upsets him—but ultimately he firms up his jaw, looks the guy right in the eye and says, “I think they're the best. Period.” And the whole courtroom erupts in applause. THAT'S FUCKING LOYALTY, GODDAMMIT! That's how you roll as man, an actual man, not some macho penisface. Te salud, baby.

There's also, in the massive cast, one of the best John Cusack performances ever as Buck Weaver, the only member of the eight who not only never went to any of the meetings about the fix, but refused to accept money (Shoeless Joe Jackson apparently was handed an envelope with money in it, but no one could ever prove he really understood what it was for, especially since he busted his ass the whole Series, hit almost .400 and had the Series' only home run) and who spent the rest of his life quixotically trying to clear his name. Then there's Christopher Lloyd, who's almost unrecognizable because he's not overacting. And of course, Sayles and Turkel, as a sportswriter version of Statler and Waldorf.

In spite of its showing that the Black Sox, for the most part, were either naïve, dumb, or in Weaver and Jackson's case, falsely accused, Eight Men Out still serves as a cautionary tale about gambling, but not in the way baseball traditionalists would have you believe. The kind of old fart who gets all misty-eyed by the very mention of Wrigley or Ebbets Field, or Stan Musial, or bunting, or playing catch with his dad/son would get all huffy and start declaiming about the purity of the sport, but fuck that shit in the ear. Sports isn't pure, it's a metaphor for either gladiatorial combat (individual sports) or war (team sports). It's one guy or bunch of guys (of any gender) against another guy or bunch of guys. Athletes are not heroes, they're guys who are good at sports. This is why people like John Sayles should make more sports movies, because his characters are always people, and his worlds (even in Brother From Another Planet) are recognizably grounded in the real.

So where, you may ask, is the cautionary tale about gambling? In the cruelty and capriciousness that their fate is decided, the players show that, even if you actually win (which they kind of did, getting acquitted in court), you still shouldn't gamble, because the element of chance (sturmbannfuhrer Landis) loves the taste of ass, specifically yours, and will randomly bite you in it when you gamble. Sure, the natural perversity of the universe makes the very act of waking up in the morning a gamble, but you shouldn't push your luck. Like Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe, but if you play blackjack against that motherfuckin' gonif you're a farkakte putz.”

BONUS CHARGE UP SAN JUAN HILL

Holy shit, Terry Gilliam is filming the Arcade Fire MSG webcast? Whatthefuck? The world just got about 2.78 times more awesome.

Incidentally, even though blogging legend Ken Tremendous tweeted sardonically the other day: "I'm already annoyed about how many people are going tell me how awesome the new Arcade Fire album is," I gotta say, it really is (good thing KT is too busy as the showrunner for Parks & Recreation to read this blog). It's better than Neon Bible, and it's almost as good as Funeral. Yes, flay me alive for the hipster twatrocket that I am. But man those fuckers can play. And despite Mr. Gilliam's crankiness, I'm sure that'll be one great-lookin' fuckin' webcast.

THE TEDDY ROOSEVELT OF MT. NERDMORE

I, of course, mean the title as a compliment. Being a nerd, it pleases me that my people have joined the mainstream culturally, as our unabashed, unironic enthusiasm for the often uncool is by no means a negative character trait. Like what you like, I say. Except juggalos and furries: you can all go fuck yourselves.

Terry Gilliam, though, has never and will never go mainstream. Otherness has followed him his whole life. Chased out of the US by police harassment for being a longhair before long hair was cool, Terry Gilliam settled in the UK, where he became a citizen (after holding dual citizenship for decades, he renounced his US citizenship as a protest against George W. Bush). He then, legendarily, became the only non-UK native in Monty Python (Welsh-born Terry Jones being the only other non-Englishman), about which wink wink say no more.

As the non-performing Python (he'd do bit parts, mainly stuff the others didn't want to), Terry Gilliam was responsible for the absolutely fucking daft animation that became one of the show's defining traits, as well as directing; he co-directed the first Python movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Terry Jones. He first went solo with 1977s Jabberwocky (which featured Michael Palin though was not a Python movie), which launched a succession of visually dazzling, utterly insane pictures, full to the brim with subversive content and wearing their disregard for commercial convention—and even, occasionally, the audience—as a badge of honor.

Inevitably, such a singular artist, especially one who once said, “I'm a better cartoonist than I am a bomb maker. That's why so much of the US is still standing,” ran into trouble with movie studios, most famously on Brazil, of which approximately 90 different versions exist. High profile commercial disasters (Baron Munchausen cost $46 million and grossed 8) and a complete absence of ass-kissing or any desire to conform have made it a constant struggle for Gilliam to get movies made.

This has led to more than a few of the greatest “what ifs” in recent cinema history: Gilliam tried twice to get an adaptation of Watchmen off the ground, unsuccessfully; Zack Snyder's glitzy but shallow version so many years later invites speculation as to how Gilliam's take would have looked, though arguably Snyder's Watchmen, for all its foibles, was more faithful to the source material than Gilliam's would have been. Later, though, in an even more wistful “what if,” Warner Bros rejected Gilliam's active and passionate campaign to direct the first Harry Potter movie. While it's possible to split hairs about whether Gilliam's aggressively unique visual style and two middle finger “I'm an auteur, back away now or taste my wrath” method of dealing with studio exec evil white guy in suit types would have been an asset or a debit to Watchmen, there can be no argument whatsoever that Terry Gilliam would have made a better Harry Potter movie than Chris Columbus. The facts:

Terry Gilliam—Nonpareil visual stylist, director of Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen (fuck the grosses, Baron Munchausen is fucking tight), as effective a bipartite demonstration of an understanding of children's fantasy as any filmmaker can make; able to both make a picture that would enthrall kids and imbue the first picture with the darkness that the series had begun to explore at the time they were putting the first movie together.

Chris Columbus—Cunt.

Reversals like the ones Gilliam suffered on Watchmen, Harry Potter, and the Job-like struggles he had on his Don Quixote picture make it hard, at times, for me to watch a lot of his pictures. As much as I'd like to watch the movies and not worry about the tsuris involved in their production, I'm too emotionally invested in Terry Gilliam to be able to separate them. When I was a little kid and still in my “the actors make it all up as they go along, don't they?” phase in my education as a cineaste, I could name three movie directors: Steven Spielberg (the most famous and successful at the time), Martin Scorsese (one of the most critically acclaimed), and Terry Gilliam. Why Terry Gilliam? Time Bandits.

I could, if I so chose, go picture by picture through Terry Gilliam's whole career and explain why each one—even the ones I don't like—are awesome. But rather than go overboard and make the same points a dozen or so times, I'm going to stick with the one I know best, have seen the most times, and have lived with the longest.

Time Bandits opens in a way that really makes the Harry Potter thing sting, since its protagonist is an 11-year-old English boy, Kevin, whose suburban parents are materialist dipshits who ignore him and yell at him to not make any noise. Left to himself, Kevin reads constantly, with a focus on history. One night, after a weird dream involving a knight charging through his bedroom wall the previous night, a cantankerous sextet of midgets (dwarves? Let's stick with “midgets,” since it's inaccurate, politically incorrect, and I like the sound of the word more) materializes in Kevin's closet. Possessing a map of all of space and time, which they've stolen from their boss, the Supreme Being, the midgets are searching for “The Most Fabulous Object In The World.” Kevin is still processing the arrival of his bizarre houseguests when the Supreme Being shows up and the midgets, terrified, find an exit through Kevin's bedroom wall.

Their ensuing journey introduces Kevin and chattering, larcenous entourage to such luminaries as Napoleon (played as a shitfaced neurotic obsessed with people shorter than him by Ian Holm; needless to say, after our heroes sing “Me and My Shadow,” Monsieur Bonaparte wants to hang the fuck out) and Robin Hood (John Cleese in full-on “I'm John Cleese, old chap, pity you aren't as well, it's rather a lark” mode, with the best line in not only the movie but the universe: “The poor are going to be absolutely thrilled. Have you met them at all? . . . Oh, you must meet them. I'm sure you'd like them. Of course they haven't got two pennies to rub together, but that's because they're poor!”)

Our diminutive protagonists rob Napoleon blind only to have Robin Hood nationalize their shit (“Oh yes, and believe you me, the poor are going to be, well, not just absolutely thrilled, but also considerably less poor, aren't they, Redgrave?”) Kevin, thoroughly fucked off at being the most sensible (and tallest), strikes out on his own and ends up inadvertently saving the life of King Agamemnon (Sean Connery):

Sean Connery: “Where didzhyou come from?”
Kevin: “I'm not really sure.”
Sean Connery: “Who shent you? The godsh? Wazh it Zeush? Apollo? Athena?”
Kevin is silent
Sean Connery: “Well, you're shertainly a chatty fellow, aren'tshoo?”

Sean Connery takes Kevin to live with him as his son, and Kevin, keen on the Greeks as he is, is happier than he's ever been in his life. He even survives a minor palace intrigue before his midget comrades return and steal him away into the recesses of space-time once more.

Kevin, pissed, finds himself on the Titanic with his reluctant cohort, and once the boat, of course, sinks, the villain (named, simply, Evil) springs a trap and lures our protagonists to his Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where they navigate a series of deadly obstacles to confront Evil, and discover that there's no such thing as The Most Fabulous Object in the World.

*dispassionately watches the concept of materialism writhe around on the ground after that steel-toed kick to the nuts*

Eventually, the Supreme Being intervenes to save the day, kill Evil, and raise the dead. The way Ralph Richardson plays the Supreme Being is absolutely perfect—what is God if not old, white, male, English, drunk, and kind of a dick? And wearing a suit, no less . . . I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

So after the Almighty Ralph Richardson has the midgets clean up all the “concentrated evil” and whisks them back off to work on shrubberies, Kevin finds one last chunk, which emanates thick black smoke . . . and suddenly, Kevin is being rescued by firemen, back in good ol' modern-day England. Turns out it was all a dream . . . or so it seems, until Kevin finds photos of his adventures in his satchel, sees a fireman who looks like Sean Connery, and mum and dad find a chunk of concentrated evil in the toaster oven. Kevin warns them not to touch it, but they don't listen, and they explode. The only thing saving that from being one fucktastic bummer of an ending is George Harrison's awesome song over the closing credits:

Sláinte, George.

Of course, a Terry Gilliam picture is far more than its story. The visuals defy description, so rather than describe them and fuck up, let's watch the (kind of Python-y) trailer:

One of the reasons why, all sentimental attachment aside, Time Bandits is still my favorite Terry Gilliam picture—yes, even over Brazil; no, it doesn't mean I love Brazil any less—is that he didn't have any money. This means that his visuals, which always look kinda low budget even when he has $40-50 million to play with, take on a charming, handmade quality (even though Handmade Films, which produced Time Bandits, was George Harrison's company, it was the perfect name for a Terry Gilliam picture).

That visual sense of the personal, that one guy actually made all this stuff out of shit he found in his garage, is my favorite thing about the look of Terry Gilliam pictures. Formal perfection can often come across as cold and uninviting. The warmth conveyed by the low-budget, handmade look goes a long way to conquering the crankiness and the go fuck yourself that pervades Gilliam's work.

It's a shame that, after a career now entering its fifth decade, Terry Gilliam still has such a bitch of a time making a picture. Completely aside from his uncompromising vision and the troubles he has getting evil white guys in suits to give him money, this man has the worst fucking luck of any director ever. While most directors with more than a handful of pictures under their belt have the odd story about that one picture where something went wrong, Terry Gilliam seemingly cannot get through one shoot without the picture either flopping on a near unprecedented scale (Baron Munchausen), actors destroying their back (Jean Rochefort, Don Quixote) or dying (Heath Ledger, Dr. Parnassus), or a studio sprouting horns and chasing him through the editing room with a pitchfork (Brazil). From what I've heard, the smoothest process Gilliam has ever had was on Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, when a protracted dispute over screenwriting credit led to Gilliam resigning from the WGA in disgust.

Just once it'd be nice, for his sake, if Terry Gilliam could get through a nice, smooth picture, have everyone get along, no evil white guy nut flexing from the studio, and have the fuckin thing actually be good and turn a profit. It's like David Rapaport says about the nonexistent Most Fabulous Object In The World: “You just have to believe in it!” Too bad the proverbial harmonious Terry Gilliam process seems just as imaginary.