The Bug

THE NEUROTIC TIGER IN THE LAND OF THE WIRELESS

2011-09-20T19:09:16-00:00

The Shrine is complete.

When I think back over this tumultuous season for the Tigers, I can't help but wonder why it is that this particular year has had such a grip on my attentions. It's not simply because they've won their division and are heading for the playoffs for the first time in half a decade. Don't forget, the Tigers were a roller coaster earlier this season, trading places with Cleveland (of all teams) and seeming to do their best to throw away a weak division as late as August. Surely they were going to fold in September.

Despite that, I followed the Tigers passionately this year. And I'd be following them today if they'd bottomed out. This is a good team, perhaps a great team, with certifiably great players at the very least. But that's not just what has made them great in 2011. What has attracted me to this sterling club is this: radio.

Outside of being at a baseball game on a brilliant day, there is no greater joy for me than listening to one on the radio. And this year my cornucopia spilled over with the fruit of Tigers radio. At the start of the season, I coughed up the twelve bucks to buy MLB At-Bat 11--the iPhone app that allows that wicked device to become like a little transistor and pick up the feed of every major league club.

Two things: first, this handy-dandy gadget allows me to finally listen to the Twins via the wireless. Covering the team and only getting press access to two games per homestand meant that my pocketbook needed another method of participation.

Not having cable, this means I have to endure the aural horror of the Gordon/Gladden broadcasts. Perhaps I shouldn't bitch about soon-to-be-retired John Gordon, the Twins play-by-play man, but I am: the dude is terrible. He's awful. Add Dan Gladden's bizarre rants and epic flights of worthless banter and you've got what I believe is the worst radio tandem in baseball. (I have not heard every single team's broadcasters--perhaps a dozen. But each and every one I've heard is superior by leaps and bounds.)

Gordon and Gladden are hacks, at least in the booth (I'm not digging on Gladden's ballplaying.) The two of these guys go on silly tangents at the expense of play calling, to the extent that it ruins games. Over the years I've listened to these rubes yammer on and on about some barbecue lunch they ate at Mankato Harley-Davidson while the game was in progress. They interfered with the game, refusing to call plays while they laughed and giggled over all the pork they stuffed in their pieholes.

I was going to write a City Pages piece about this weird phenomenon. My goal was to tune into the game on the local station while simultaneously listening to the opposing team's broadcast on At-Bat 11 and write about the results. My memory told me I was going to hear a shitty broadcast from the Twins, but I wanted definite proof.

On Sunday, July 17 I tuned in to the afternoon game betwixt the Twins and the Kansas City Royals, listening to both broadcasts. Unfortunately for the experiment, Gladden had the day off, no doubt to ride the backroads of Minnesota on his hog. In the booth was Gordon and Chris Attaberry. The formidable trio of Denny Matthews, Bob Davis, and Steve Stewart called the Royals end.

Well, I was surprised to find that Gordon and Attaberry comported themselves well for the first two innings. Ah, but then there was the third inning, when into the booth popped Patrick Klinger, the Twins VP of Marketing. What the hell does he want? Well, he wants to tell Twins fans about this special 1991 Commemorative Bobblehead set that was going on sale soon, how you had to call this 800 number, and how this cheap novelty was going to improve your life in these troubled times. Gordon purred over this thing, sounding like he was drooling over the prospect of having those 25 nodding heads gaping at him from the comfort of his home. It sounded like a QVC broadcast.

Were it not for the Royals feed, I wouldn't have been able to score the game, as balls and strikes were left unmentioned. "These are not your standard bobbleheads," Klinger said, as the game went on behind these two fools. You could hear cheering in spots, but no mention of what made the crowds cheer.

Now, you might say that this isn't Gordon's fault, and to a degree that's true. I believe, however, that most broadcasters with 20+ years of experience could probably tell management to go screw themselves if they wanted to bring a bobblehead salesman in during a game. Still, that aside, I've heard broadcasters from other teams have guys in the booth who had nothing to do with the contest on the field, and yet they still manage to break and call a strike or a ball or a grounder. Ernie Harwell did that fantastically, especially as he was regaling his listeners with a story from his rich past.

Gordon is a man prone to weak calls, to shouting "Touch 'em all!" at every home run (and using that in ads later) as if there were no other way of calling a home run, of babbling incessantly when the game is on, or being a sycophant for Bud Selig or Tim Pawlenty or Patrick Klinger. He's awful, and I for one will not miss him.

But, you might say, aren't you just cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle? Yes, yes, I am cursing the Twins fucking darkness because it should be cursed, since the Twins are hoarding various candles and flashlights as long as they keep Gladden on board and don't get a decent team to handle these broadcasts. They're out there.

I know this because the Detroit Tigers have a pair themselves. You may be forgiven for forgetting that I wrote "two things" and then began my rant, but the second part regards my deepening love of At-Bat 11 and how it has allowed me to come back to listening to the Tigers on the radio, even if that radio's a phone.

At first I thought I would hate Dan Dickerson and Jim Price, the play-by-play and color commentator, respectively. After all, they're no Ernie Harwell. Who is, or could be? But I've come to love these guys, really, really love them. Dickerson reminds me of Harwell's old play-by-play man from 'way back, Paul Carey. Carey was a straight-shooter, good with Harwell, a man who knew how to listen to his better (and no one's better than Ernie.)

So, too, with Dickerson. He's got a nice, clean voice, asks pertinent questions of Price, which is what the play-by-play man's supposed to do during the innumerable times when there's nothing going on. He listens. He calls a great play, doesn't have to gild-the-lily. Dickerson also calls home runs in various ways, and often allows his emotions to get to him at times. This is good, as long as it's in moderation, and Dickerson restrains himself admirably. Homers vary from the simple "Gone!" to "Goodbye!" to "It's a long fly, 'way back... the Tigers win!" in the case of a walk-off. There's no trademarked quip that can be used later in an ad.

Jim Price was a former backup catcher who got his ring with the 1968 World Champion Detroit Tigers. I love this guy--a smooth, clean voice, eager to tell stories that are totally pertinent to the game at hand, none of these rambling tales about nothing or next-to-nothing. Price (and Dickerson) seem to think that you really want to hear this game, and tell you information that augments your enjoyment.

I also really dig how Price reads his advertising. At the start of every half-inning, the guys in the booth have to relay an ad of some sort, even though you've just finished the requisite three minutes of awful AM radio ads as the teams switch. But Price gets through his quickly. Oh, you can tell what he's saying, but he seems impatient to get to the game, as we all are.

Both men also know Ernie's secret: silence. Pausing throughout the broadcast to let the happy sound of the crowd at the ballpark come through. Perfect. Even if I'm no fan of New Tiger Stadium, I'm appreciating it now as a studio within which Dickerson and Price can spin their tales of bat and ball.

The professionalism of this pair pleases me to no end. It pleases me to listen to the Detroit Tigers while I cook, while I cut up buckthorn shoots by the street, while I tend the garden, or just sit in the front room scoring the games. It pleases me to plug my phone into my car stereo and take long drives through the Minnesota countryside and listen to Verlander pitch another gem. It pleases me to walk around with the game to my ear like some old fart with an ancient JC Penney pocket radio, pumping my fist as Miguel Cabrera drives in another run. It even pleases me to hear the cheesy ads about Detroit stores--Belle Tire, the Michigan Masons (?), the strangely effective ones about Comerica Bank, or parking at the Airport Park 'n' Ride. It brings me back to the state I love but will never live in again.

Nothing lasts forever. None of us, none of our heroes. Ernie Harwell had to go, and he lived a wonderful, long, beautiful life that he shared with so many people. I shared him with my Grandma, Aunt Mary, my Mom and Stepdad, Jim (my own Dad would have rather eaten the radio than listen to a baseball game.)

Dickerson and Price have brought me back into the fold, because now they're mine, in my home, here and now. The era of listening to the Tigers at my Grandma's cabin with Mary and John and Ernie and Paul has passed. The new era of my listening to the iPhone while living here in Minnesota has begun--and with it, a fantastic season that resulted in that cardboard Central Division crown. Thanks to the miracle of these often terrible smart phones, I'm plugged back into the Detroit Tigers. And that's a feeling I didn't realize was so important to this foolish baseball fan.

THE NEUROTIC TIGER

2011-09-16T18:45:11-00:00

The Detroit Tigers narrowly missed being no-hit by the lowly Oakland A's today and, as of this writing, lead 1-0 on an Austin Jackson home run. Had they been mowed down without a single hit, it would have been proof positive of one thing, and one thing only: that I have not been diligent enough in warding off evil spirits and bad luck.

Baseball in general, and the Tigers in particular, have turned me into full-fledged neurotic, grasping at tokens, icons, and any number of voodoo charms and curses to help usher this mangy club of mine to a World Series win. Thus far I've been quite successful--they are the division winners, after all, and in pretty heady fashion, if I say so myself. Thanks to my labors there's no question Justin Verlander will take home the Cy Young award, and he might actually win the MVP award. The latter is important because the Tigers have never won a World Series when they didn't have the MVP. Even more intriguing, their last three World Championships their MVP was a pitcher--Hal Newhouser in '45, Denny McLain in '68, and Guillermo "Willie" Hernandez in '84.

Actually, I'm this way with sports in general, as I know deep down that I owe the people of Holland an apology for not wearing my Netherlands World Cup t-shirt during the final, when I'd worn it every game prior (and thus taking that underdog to the championship game.)

Since I no longer have my City Pages gig covering the Twins (having lost it due to low readership, no surprise), I'm going to have the pleasure of covering the Detroit Tigers here, at my blog, for the remainder of the season, and hopefully, oh God hopefully, up to the World Series. Should they fail in that Herculean effort, I'll still do some write-ups on baseball's October Country, as my loyalties will shift, from the Tigers to the Phillies to Milwaukee. Everyone thinks I should love the Diamondbacks for having former Bengal Kirk Gibson at the wheel, with Alan Trammel as his loyal sidekick. But I can't. Whenever I think of Arizona I think of John McCain and that sunburnt state's crazy hatred of immigrants and I want no part of it, not now, not during the All-Star game, nor in the World Series. In short: Arizona can go fuck itself.

But these 2011 Detroit Tigers are exciting as all hell. I love that they're a combination of home grown talent (Verlander, Avila, Rayburn), intriguing trades (Cabrera, Jackson, Peralta, Betemit), and have a nice one-two-three punch on the mound in Verlander, Doug Fister, and Max Scherzer with his one-blue-eye/one-red-eye glare. And what's not to like about cranky, chain-smoking, Twinkie-eating Jim Leyland, whose contract negotiations prompted this Onion article that made me both laugh and cringe:

Tigers sign Leyland through his death in 2012

Yes, the 2011 version of the Detroit Tigers move me more than any of the clubs in recent memory, including the 2006 pennant winners. Sure, it's exciting to root for a winner, but this winner, well, I don't know--it's different. There's been so much loss, both personally and as a Tigers fan, that this year seems almost cathartic. '06 marked the first time the Tigers went to the playoffs since my Grandmother Schilling had died, and she was the one who really nurtured my love of this damn sport. But since '06, I've seen my Dad pass away, and Tigers fans no longer have Mark Fidrych or Ernie Harwell in their lives.

But it's important, I think, to move on. I could moan and cry about Fidrych, Harwell, hell, about Tiger Stadium and the new petri dish that lacks much, or any, character. But there's batches and batches of kids out there who only know Harwell Park (fuck if that bank's getting any free advertising on my site) and who go crazy over Cabrera and Verlander like I did about Gibson and Fidrych (and Verlander seems like a hell of nice guy to boot.)

So I'm doing my best. As you can see I've fully capitulated to my lunacy by constructing a Shrine of the Tiger as seen above. Yes, that is a genuine seat from Tiger Stadium, flanked by a pair of white bricks from same. Pictures of Harwell, Grandma at an '84 game, and six cards from the current crop--Verlander, Leyland, Inge, Jackson, Scherzer and Porcello, all standing in front of a long line of palm trees (it's a throwback series meant to look like cards from the 60s.) Denny McLain's awful album of Hammond Organ music on Capitol, Iffy's Book of Tiger Tales (celebrating the '34 pennant), and cards from the World's champions from my lifetime--'68 and '84. Of course, there's plenty of other Fidrych in there, cards and his Sports Illustrated cover (with Sesame Street's Big Bird), and a loony tunes Shazam comic from 1977 with Fidrych who inexplicably tries to get out a fat tiger named Mr. Tawny who seeks a tryout with his namesake team, which somehow correlates with his attempts at taking over the world. Captain Marvel stops him, as he would.

Yes, this godless fool has become someone who might just take you up on your offer to take me to a palm-reader in the hopes at predicting the Tigers' fate, who will light a candle every day when his Shrine is built (it's true), and whose little amulets and well-worn t-shirts will get a bit more well-worn over the next month or so. I'm not saying it's smart, it just is what it is. I don't really believe it, of course.

Unless the Tigers win.

STALKING THE ELUSIVE BIRD

2011-08-15T15:21:00-00:00

Yesterday would have been the 57th birthday of my favorite baseball player of all-time, Mark Fidrych. It was declared by fellow writer, friend, and Fidrych follower . Sports Illustrated photographer Joe McNally about the Bird--Fidrych's nickname, so given because of his resemblance to Sesame Street's Big Bird--which brought tears to my eyes. I wish thinking about my favorite ballplayer didn't do that as often as it does, but so it goes.

Unfortunately, I haven't written much of anything about Fidrych after he died a tragic and terrifying death at the hands of his beloved truck, back in 2009. As Dan said about writing about the Bird, "it should have been as easy as falling off a dugout bench." But it's not. Maybe it's because, despite his easy going ways, despite all that you could write about--like Mark's talking to the ball, his meteoric rise and equally stunning fall--Mark Fidrych turns out to be a more complex character than most, or any, baseball player I've ever followed in my 35 years of following this maddening sport. Fidrych, like most birds, is hard to catch.

For a kid still reeling from the effects of my parents' divorce in 1975, and being a scrawny, unathletic doofus, Mark Fidrych was a revelation. Baseball was a revelation. I came from a family that didn't follow sports, so it must've seemed bizarre to my folks that I suddenly went crazy for the nation's pastime.

What I was crazy for was Mark Fidrych. Truly, he looked like my favorite character/stuffed animal, Sesame Street's Big Bird (it helped that he posed with Big Bird often.) We all know how he spoke to the ball, leapt over the chalk lines, waved at his fellow players whenever they made a great play. This was liberating--it was human kindness and child-like joy on the baseball diamond, and it made me feel as if people who acted like Fidrych were embraced by society.

Look at him here, yakking away after the June 28, 1976 game that turned me into a baseball fan:

He's totally honest: "Everything's new to me!" Well, everything was new to me as well. Mark and I are making this journey into baseball together it seemed.

This is what Fidrych did for this eight-year-old in 1976: he made me realize that the inevitable move toward adulthood, that the world upended, of parents separating, of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and Jaws and Taxi Driver (neither of which I saw, but which loomed like shadows over my cinematic consciousness) could be fun and joyous and even silly, just as it required hard work. I felt like I was growing up fast that summer, trying to understand my mother's profound depression and my Dad's hippie existence (which included not standing at the "Star-Spangled Banner"), which was so radically different than the other fathers in conservative Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. So when Fidrych revealed that even in professional baseball you could talk to inanimate objects, as I did with my Big Bird doll and he did with his baseballs, that blew my mind. It made me feel alive, that I could be myself and there was a place in the world for me. Sometimes, people like Mark Fidrych can accomplish those things that your parents cannot.

I've always bristled at the notion that baseball is a child's game. Baseball is not a child's game. It is a game that adults play, but that children learn in their quest to understand the mysteries of adulthood. Tag, hide and seek, cops and robbers or cowboys and indians--those are children's games, bereft of all but the most simple rules. When we play baseball as children, we are trying to learn to become teammates, to understand the complexities of a sport whose rulebook runs into the hundreds of pages. We begin to embrace tools, play within boundaries, and begin a relationship with complex numbers. Children's games are abandoned to childhood. Baseball carries us into adulthood.

As I look back, I realize that I never thought of Fidrych as a pied piper, or dream of him as a playground buddy. I thought of him as an adult. Mark Fidrych showed me the promise of adulthood, that being giddy and happy and, yes, goofy as all hell could in fact be rewarded with success. Burly, manly men celebrated Mark just as I did, treated him with respect. Baseball and manhood didn't have so fucking rigid and macho, didn't have to be so Pete Rose and George Brett. Being an adult could mean being like Mark Fidrych. To this day, I thank him for this gift.

Yesterday, feeding my blues, I read the old Rolling Stone with Fidrych on the cover and skimmed No Big Deal, the rushed biography/Altmanesque interview by noted poet and Paris Review editor Tom Clark. I recalled as a kid being really disappointed by the book, in part because it's so weird and loosey-goosey and it didn't really satisfy this kid's longing for a meaty story of his favorite player. Honestly, I think there was some significant disappointment that he did not, in fact, live on Sesame Street.

But the stories also freaked me out a bit. Both show Fidrych as a humble dude, a kid who loved to drink canned beer, play baseball, and, according to Rolling Stone, have sex with cute girls, once on the pitcher's mound. You can imagine Fidrych as a great guy to go out partying with, but who wouldn't have been called a party animal, wouldn't be in the Wade Boggs/Steve Garvey sex-addict camp. He was just having fun.

But like most heroes, I wanted him to be exactly as I imagined him, and that didn't include fucking on the pitcher's mound. It didn't include the hazy, bizarre way the interview in No Big Deal was constructed, almost without direction, haphazard, all over the place. Was the guy stoned? Plus, he got mad in spots, said some stupid shit, and worst of all, claimed that he never talked to his baseball, but was only giving himself a pep talk. Damn.

Despite this, I still adored the Bird, and eagerly awaited 1977. Sadly, the fun wouldn't last. Disappointment, as it turns out, was also going to be the theme of the career of Mark Fidrych, in many profound ways.

I couldn't know this at the time, but if there were stats heads back then, they knew that there could be virtually no repeat of Fidrych's 1976 season. The statistics are there, many of them memorized by this crazed fan: 19-9 won-loss record, 2.34 ERA, 97 K, 24 complete games. Rookie of the Year, runner-up to the Cy Young Award.

Now, those numbers might have been approached if fate hadn't intervened. Set aside the fact that pitchers with such a low-strikeout rate rarely, if ever, become superstars, Fidrych could've had a brilliant career: middle relief, innings eater, hell, maybe a closer, I don't know. Instead, he twisted his ankle leaping over a fence, and then blew out his arm later. And with that, he was done. Finished. Yes, it took five seasons (in which he played but few games.) I didn't get to see him pitch at Tiger Stadium until 1980, his last year, in the second contest (I think) of a double-header when the Tigers retired Al Kaline's number.

Totally devastating. The Bird got beaten soundly, and the magic was gone. This added another layer to my hardening exoskeleton: divorce, school, politics, the malaise of high school--disappointment would season many of the years that followed Fidrych's defeat.

As time went on, I would glance at the memorabilia, pausing to read at that old Rolling Stone or to roll my eyes at his biography. I'd heard the stories of his retirement to rural Massachusetts, his being a rock or pig farmer, something you could make a light joke of, but something that seemed strangely right, too. Fidrych a gentleman farmer, living a zen-like life out in the sticks. Perfect.

Obviously, it's more complex than that. I remember reading how pissy he could get because no one hired him to be in advertisements. He married, had a kid, and worked his ass off. He was still a good guy, but still kind of a mystery.

In 2008, on my book tour, I was in Cooperstown at a friendly baseball card shop, and found Fidrych's rookie card. I had one already, in a little frame on a shelf of icons back home. I bought this one for fifty cents I think, and stuck it in my wallet for good luck on the trip. Maybe I kept it there because I needed something to keep my spirits afloat as my Dad was slowly succumbing to lung cancer many hundreds of miles away in Raleigh, North Carolina. A few weeks later my brother and I would be living with Dad, caring for him until he finally died. Again, there was Fidrych, unknowingly helping me out during a crisis.

Here is a strange and mystical moment that I cannot explain: driving through the mountainous cloud-country of West Virginia, in a U-haul truck with my Dad's ashes next to me, despondent beyond belief, I was listening to an AM station playing rock classics. The DJ had a guy on the line, making a request. "How you doing?" the DJ asked. "Last time you were in rough shape." It was true. This caller had lost his job and his wife, and said he had "his big toe on the trigger" last time he called, but now he was in AA, working, and feeling good. "No woman yet, but I've got prospects." And he wanted to hear the song that brought him back from the dead. The DJ said, "you got it."

"Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces. That song really hit me, especially the lines "it's all too beautiful" because I was driving through the clouds, through the driving rain, my poor brother wrestling with Dad's old Nissan truck on the wet roads behind me, and myself doing the same with a U-Haul truck and sort-of not caring at the moment if I drove it off the side of the mountain. But I was filled momentarily with a feeling of, well, of overwhelming love. For Dad, for the song, for the mountains and the fog and the slippery roads, for everything. For the first time since he'd died, only a few days earlier, I thought life was beautiful in spite of all this fucking hell.

Now we cut to a few months later, eight months later, and I'm online and there's the news: Mark Fidrych is dead. Mark Fidrych? I had to stare at the tiny link on the New York Time's electronic front page. Dead. Later I would discover the awful, awful truth of his death, that he had been working on his giant truck, supposedly the monster he bought with his bonus or something from his magical season. It was a reflection of both his New England sensibility and his goofball nature: he used his money to buy a truck that would help keep him employed, but Jesus, Mark, a truck? Yep. Well, he was under the truck, the engine was on, his shirt got tangled up in a shaft, and he was choked to death.

And now Mark Fidrych was dead. And I was so sick of good people dying. My Dad, a good friend Mike (who passed away suddenly the November before), and now the Bird. What the fuck? I just wanted to drive and not think, drive and listen to music, drive, drive, drive.

Now here's the mystical-shit: as I hopped in the car to run an errand (so I told my wife) and take my mind off the news (which, I'm squeamish to admit, caused me to break down in near-hysterical tears), you know what happened: the Small Faces "Itchycoo Park" came on the radio.

I listened and was calmed. I don't know exactly what the Small Faces taught me at that moment, except that the lines "it's all too beautiful" swirled around in my head and left me in peace. I ran my errand, came home, and sat with all my Fidrych memorabilia, sad and, later, drunk. Of course, I collected all the obituaries--oddly enough, the next day I had a flight to Virginia with a layover in Detroit, and access to all the papers.

I've written a number of obituaries for ballplayers and others--from to my to (the Tryon's favorite customer) to . I sometimes think I have a talent for that melancholy trade. So why was Fidrych so hard?

Perhaps I am confused as to his meaning. Perhaps he is too close, while being so very far away. We can look at him as a product of the time, while at the same time he was a product of no time, but totally unique. I know he was someone I elevated, a man who would, had I met him, surely disappointed me, because I made him into so much. Ted Williams, Alan Trammell, Kirk Gibson--I don't have any illusions about these guys, other than the illusion that every time they came to bat I wanted them to smack the ball, and smack it hard. But they didn't inform my life outside the game (at least not much.)

Like a book, or a movie, or a song that reveals itself in strange and trying moments in the course of your life, Mark Fidrych was present. Fidrych gave me a love for a sport that has lasted almost forty years, connected me with people I love, and he is the engine of my often obsessive nostalgia for that time period. At times I think of how he played his game and wish that I could be that joyous. He could not know that he helped out a child of divorce, or an adult whose parent is dying. He couldn't know that he would teach me lessons in failure and redemption. Obviously, he could not know that his own death would come so soon after my Dad's, and teach me to endure pain. But like a book, or poem, or painting that you love but cannot quite understand, the complexities of Mark Fidrych, the Mark Fidrych of my life, are profound.

Mark Fidrych was not my Dad, he was not my best friend. The reality is that I did not know him, not at all. What I know is this: Mark "The Bird" Fidrych is a man who has made me more happy and more sad than any baseball player or celebrity, hell, more than anyone outside my friends and family, the people I actually know and care about. He remains a great mystery in this messy world, and a gift from the same. And I miss him, even as he was a stranger. Do we ever completely understand the people that we love?

But why the tears there?
I'll tell you why
It's all too beautiful...

DOWN AND OUT IN NEW YORK (AND MINNEAPOLIS)

2011-08-02T21:35:02-00:00

In a summer of endless clashes between spandex covered men and alien invaders, of comedies involving endless sex jokes and great buckets of shit, of children's films in which the whiny echoes of spoiled brats reverberate off the walls of giant mansions, my favorite movies from this year come from the distant past.

In this past, the cameras were aimed squarely at the poor and downtrodden. No one flew. There was no CGI. Budgets were in the hundreds of dollars to low thousands, and the actors, well, they weren't acting. And they certainly weren't paid.

The movies in question are Skid Row and On the Bowery. Witness five minutes of either, and you will see a vast expanse of human emotion: of love and affection, of hate and violence, of laughter and joy, of tears and tremendous, profound, profane, and seemingly endless despair. You can tell me to stare dumbstruck at the empty majesty of Avatar or Harry Potter, but for my money and time I will take this: life, rich and beautiful life, warts, scars, missing teeth, and all.

I had the great, once-in-a-lifetime privilege to project Skid Row and On the Bowery this weekend at the . It's once-in-a-lifetime because Skid Row is rarely seen in this form: projected off of 16mm, its rich colors and delightful narration (by director and self-proclaimed "King of Skid Row" Johnny Bacich) usually drained of life on public television or YouTube.

At least that's what I'm led to believe, as a number of nameless individuals scoffed at our showing, since Skid Row has apparently been shown on the local PBS station numerous times. I've never seen that version, content to rest on the memories of seeing the 16mm version a few years earlier at another rare-as-hen's-teeth-screening. To my surprise and delight, these grumps emerged from the Trylon stunned, totally stunned, and said it wasn't the same at all, but better.

Another volunteer echoed my feelings exactly. "God, I could watch Skid Row all day."

But I digress: Skid Row is a color picture, shot by Mr. Bacich around the 'skid row' section of Minneapolis, specifically Washington and Nicollet Avenues, in the mid-1950s. If my information is correct, Bacich, known as Johnny Rex, owned a bar, the Sourdough, and a liquor store and a flophouse.

Bacich loved the bums who peopled his establishments. I've never met him, never read an interview with him, but on the basis of multiple viewings of Skid Row you are witness to a man who cares deeply about the people in his community. The movie is short, around thirty minutes, and consists of Johnny narrating, unrehearsed, to his beautiful shots of the men and women of Skid Row.

And it is a happy accident that Johnny Rex seemed to take to camerawork like . The shots are, simply put, incredible. As in, their composition, the vibrant color, and the often startling images of these troubled drunks strains credibility--it amazes me after six showings in three days that a guy can shoot some home movies over a few years that a perfect stranger such as myself would watch in a heartbeat over Citizen Kane. And if you know me you know that's no small claim.

Bacich is also a humble storyteller of the finest vintage. That he manages to find some truly incredible characters is a testament to the storyteller's greatest asset: his ability to listen and observe. For in Skid Row's too brief thirty minutes, you meet some crazy characters.

Skid Row opens in the flophouse, dark and dreary, with cheap walls that certainly don't keep sound out, walls that don't even rise to the ceiling. To keep people from stealing, chicken-wire covers each room, which gives Johnny the muckraking urge to climb a wall and shoot down on a guy making a bed, on their collections of, well, junk and detritus, collected in a cheap cardboard case. Like before him, but with the warm affection of a man who actually knows his subjects, Bacich takes us square into these guys' bedrooms, and so close we can almost smell the alcohol hanging on their every breath.

But Johnny Rex was not content to stick a camera in the faces of Washington Avenue bums and let us crying liberals choke on our urges to make the world a better place. These are his friends, his colleagues, and in no time we become privvy to the fact that Bacich actually admires and respects all the denizens of Skid Row, and makes this movie into a party--in fact, one gets the feeling he might have had a blast showing the picture off at various times to everyone involved.

I'm having a difficult time remember names, but I can describe the moments: the two old boys, one of whom is named Emil, who delight in violently yanking on each other's nose, rain or shine, summer or winter. One of the two has a terrible gash across his face, and you wonder how he survived the cut. These two guys loved each other and fought, physically, every day--in fact, there's a shot with the pair locked in a nose-crunching grip in the snow, their coats billowing in the harsh winter wind, until the hat of one blows off with such panache and comic timing it'd make Buster Keaton proud.

You have the guy who had to climb and climb and climb the fire escapes to stand on the top of Bacich's flophouse, just "for kicks". The determined old fellow who, summer or winter, bolted from his flop in his boxer shorts for something... and I'm guessing it was a drink. (Though I wish I walked with such determinism.) The piano player, "like Liberace", who came in from the farms to play piano and get crazy drunk for a month before crawling back to the grain.

Most of the boys on Skid Row worked the railroads, many of them fought, and they often look beat up and worn. At one point Bacich says most didn't survive their forties. An older gent who attended the first screening (and who knows Bacich--God, the man is still alive!), claimed defiantly that Skid Row reflects the evils of capitalism, since the fat cats bragged that the bums of Minneapolis were the cheapest labor in the nation. That I met a guy who told me this at the screening speaks volumes as to who was attracted to this movie--passionate people, who love to talk, and who love life (there was a great conversation or two after every screening.)

There's a lot of trouble, too, as you can imagine. There's the guy who got in a fight on the sidewalk, sitting cross-legged on the curb, his face is absolutely drenched in his own blood, dejected, waiting for the police. When he looks at Johnny's camera, you have the very real sense he's looking right into your eyes, begging you to end his misery. The poor "Indian boy" who got beat to hell and then fell asleep on warm asphalt, his cuts now caked with tar. Or the dead body found on Nicollet Island, and they take it away, the cops do a totally half-assed investigation. As he tells the tale, Johnny pans his camera to the sky, and he tells us he's making this shot in the hopes of showing us his soul, ascended to heaven.

"That was Nicollet Island," Johnny said, right after that shot, his voice breaking. And then, silence.

Bam! Now he's right back to another brilliant little story. That's Skid Row, whose closing narration, with Mr. Bacich thanking you not once, but twice, for watching his little movie, the perfect close to a perfect film.

Perfect? Perfect like Welles, Bergman, the fucking king of pretense Terrence Malick, Spielberg, Coppola, fuck, you name a director, name one, perfect like them? Maybe not. And I love many--most--of those auteurs. But as I projected Skid Row, and listened to the talk afterwards, I knew I loved Skid Row more. More, because he loved his little world, made a little movie, and by God, it survived and I was given a gift in showing the thing. So now I love it like I love the perfect days in my life. Sometimes the movies are brilliant, sometimes they are accidental gifts. In a year that has fueled the fire of my deepest cynicism, made me wonder if the movies are dying, Skid Row is a welcome surprise.

Thank you, Johnny Bacich, wherever you are...

REMEMBERING THE MOVIEGOER

2011-02-17T13:44:06-00:00

For the Twin Cities film community, Terry Blue was a fixture at theaters around town. You couldn't miss him: red haired, moving at clip that suggested he had important places to go (he would probably say that your theater was the most important place at the moment), he would come in, pay for his seat, head into the theater to save said seat (which was always the same), and then return to the lobby where he would proceed hold court over the crowds of people heading in, or his small group of friends. Terry usually bought a Coke; always had a maroon briefcase stuffed with papers of some sort (probably including notes for his Cobalt Blue List, his top 30 movies of the year); and he could be counted on to have opinions--strong, strong opinions--on any and all movies currently playing, movies from the past, movies you'd seen, movies you hadn't seen, movies you hadn't heard of. Terry Blue lived to see movies, but more importantly, he lived to see them in the movie theaters around town, to see them with other people. He was the quintessential moviegoer.

Terry Blue died this past Tuesday morning. For the Twin Cities movie community, for those of us who work at the movie theaters, and who see movies at the theaters, he is going to be sorely missed, probably far more than he would ever have guessed.

Terry made the rounds of all the independent theaters in town, and also the Landmark chain and St. Anthony Main. I met him when I started volunteering at the Trylon. He'd hit our microcinema on Saturdays. Terry once asked Barry Kryshka to save him a seat on Saturdays, since he didn't have a credit card to buy advanced tickets online. "Which Saturday?" Barry asked. "All of them," Terry said, and his claim proved true--I can't recall a single weekend Terry didn't come to the theater, and that includes when we screened The Ninth Gate (Terry could, at times, be a glutton for punishment.)

He was a creature of habit: the 7:00 show was his gig, unless we had two movies, then he'd see both, and he always sat in the last row, aisle seat. He was a fixture at the Heights, the Riverview, and I discovered last year that Tuesdays were his day to see shows at the Edina. If he hadn't seen any of the current crop, well, then he'd see four movies that day. In a row.

One Tuesday, I was going to see Sweetgrass at the Edina, when I ran into him in the lobby. As usual, he waved and said hello, and asked, "What are you seeing?" When I told him, he said that he'd seen it that afternoon, and then, as he was racing to get to his next picture, he turned and said, "Oh, and be sure to look for the scene that's similar to Kick-Ass." Before I could stammer out a "what?!?" he was gone. I sat through the whole of the quiet, subtle Sweetgrass utterly baffled, trying desperately to see a connection to Kick-Ass. (It had to do with foul-mouthed cowboys, as it turned out.)

Unlike most patrons, Terry Blue was a presence, and it was this desire to make moviegoing a social act that sets him apart from the crowd. This is not to knock those of us who like to buy our tickets and then head in, quietly and anonymously, to watch a film. But Terry, I believe, had multiple homes: there was the place he slept and for which he paid rent or a mortgage, and then there was the Trylon, Heights, Riverview, Edina, Lagoon, St. Anthony Main, and all the other picture shows he called his own. He was a good host. We knew Terry Blue, because he made it a point to get to know us. He would engage other filmgoers, too, before and after each movie.

At the Trylon, the difference was palpable: Fridays, no matter how crowded, were usually the same--people talking amongst themselves, buying tickets and concessions, heading in, watching the movie, and then leaving. Maybe a mumbled "thanks" on the way out. Nothing wrong with that. But Saturdays! Saturdays, we'd open the doors, and there was Terry. After dropping his briefcase in his special seat, he'd pace around the lobby or sit on one of our uncomfortable little maroon chairs and ask what we'd seen lately, and go from there. If he overheard someone talking about a movie, he'd chime in with some appreciative comment, or an impossible trivia question. After the movie, it was more of the same, except usually he had a friend or two who'd made it to the same screening because Terry was there. Then he'd leave and it was back to the quiet. Without Terry, a movie went from a lively social event to group solitude that is often so much a part of moviegoing.

Truth be told, there were moments when I didn't have the time or the inclination to listen to Terry, and I'd try to hide up in the booth. And there were occasions when I'd run into him at another theater, and I'd wave and be curt so that I wouldn't have to spend the time talking to him--he loved to talk, weaving tales about this actor or that, this film or that, with politics folded in for good measure. He liked to argue, and, even better, he liked to win those arguments. But something about Terry always made me emerge from the booth or not shy away and ask him what he thought about a movie--which was a mistake if you wanted a brief conversation. He did have fascinating insights, not the least of which was that, for the most part, he loved nearly every film and could point out something great in almost every one.

The thing I know I'll miss the most from Terry is his laugh. Especially at the Trylon, his laughter would fill the house. That first month we had a Buster Keaton series, and I was thrilled because he's one of my two favorite filmmakers of all-time. My wife and I would go on Fridays, and I'd be working my volunteer shift on Saturdays. Right away, I wished it were the other way around--with Terry in the crowd, that whole theater would erupt in laughter throughout the whole movie. It was the same for every comedy. Terry was a writer's dream, a man who just busted a gut at every funny line. I'd usually sit near him at the Heights, where his booming laugh was a bit muted by the size of the place. And yet, there was that little bubble he commanded, in the rear of the theater, on the left hand aisle, where his guffawing would reverberate and make the rest of us join in. It was amazing.

That was Terry Blue: moviegoer extraordinaire. I think that if you asked most people, they'd say that someone who goes to the movies as often as Terry did is essentially a lonely person. It's a solitary act, right? Terry belied that claim. I honestly have no idea if ever watched a movie at home--I assume he had to, since his knowledge was so great, he certainly couldn't have seen every film at the theaters in town. But even if he did have a DVD player or sat at home to watch Turner Classics now and again, it was his goal and his obvious pleasure to go to the movies, to engage with the people who also went, to make the movie theater his home and by extension to make all of us a part of his moviegoing family.

I don't think it makes sense to say that Terry Blue is a more important figure in the local film scene than the filmmakers and their films. We all know and love Bogart, Kubrick, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth, the great directors and the great stars of cinema's universe. We see the movies and the movies go on, but we'll all eventually disappear, while the movies will continue. That's how it should be, really. But it was people like Terry Blue who make seeing the movies in the theaters a warm and human experience, not a solitary act but an act of community. He helped make me realize that sometimes what is on the screen simply isn't as important as who's sitting next to you in the theater--wouldn't you rather see The Ninth Gate with Terry and your friends than The Big Sleep by yourself? I would. Terry Blue made the shows memorable, the way a dinner among good friends is memorable. For me, Terry and the people who love, love, love the movies are the reason I try to make sure we get the best movies at the Trylon, the reason I get so damn frustrated when I screw up projecting, or so profoundly happy when we fill the theater during The Navigator and I could hear that booming laugh, and the rest of the crowd following suit.

All I can say is, thank you, Terry Blue, for making the movies that much better. We're really going to miss you on Saturdays.

Terry Blue has a brief part in Toby Jones' short film, Detective Murphly and the Case of the Bloody Boy Body. He's been given a great line: "You're like a terrible beehive filled with bones and blood... instead of bees." Here it is:

Detective Murphly and the Case of the Bloody Boy Body from Toby Jones on Vimeo.

CONVERSATIONS REAL & IMAGINED: THE WRECK OF ALVIN FITZSIMMONS

2010-11-17T15:50:14-00:00

Marty, 1953 (an episode of the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse). Directed by Delbert Mann, written by Paddy Chayefsky. Starring Rod Steiger, Joe Mantell, Nancy Marchand, and Esther Minciotti.

Available as part of boxed set.

From the files of .

Did I ever tell you about my pal Alvin Fitzsimmons? A short, mealy little guy, nice guy, one of those squirts who does one thing really well and bumbles about in everything else. Actually, I take that back: Alvin did quite a few things well, really well. First of all, from a young age he showed a pretty God damn amazing talent at flower arranging. Seriously. Dude got himself a job at Roethke Flowers, well after the poet clan left it behind, and he was good. That's all he did in short order--kid went from deliveries and pushing a broom to making bouquets for brides in just a few months. Too bad he thought it was "girly". I'll grant him that it didn't pay anything, but he went and became an actuary.

So you see that Alv's good at math, too. The man had these talents as well: he could accurately predict the Detroit Lions won-loss record in any given season; make a mean ham and bean soup; and if they ever made a trivia game about Princess Di, well, Alv would get every question right. Fuck, that son of a bitch beat Brits at Di Triv. Crazy.

But most of all Alv was lonely. And he didn't know what to do about it. Let me add that old Alvy was born, for Christ's sake, on Valentine's Day. You know who talks about this little irony the most? God damn Alvin Fitzsimmons, that's who. "Born on Valentine's Day," he'd moan after some lousy date. He once offered a ten thousand dollar reward for anyone who set him up with a bride.

Well, Alv's problem wasn't that he was the frog side of Prince Charming, it was that he was a dope. You ask him if he's thought about joining some damn dating service, place an ad in a sex weekly, anything to meet a girl, and he'd grumble that he was at a hockey game the other night. Jesus Fucking Christ, a hockey game. Plus, there's that list. He has a list of "Attributes". Can't be divorced. Gotta be Catholic, like he is. Can't be taller than his towering five foot seven. And so on and so on.

That's a recipe for loneliness, Alvin Fitzsimmons. I've told him that many a time.

Well, you know me, I got a house full of movies, and even though I hadn't seen this wing-nut for a million years it seemed (the life of an Actuary and Red Wing/Lions/Tigers/Pistons season-ticket holder is one of limited free time), I managed to catch Alv nursing a beer and some hard feelings at the Jones Bar and Grill near the Prudential offices.

Girl had broken his heart again. "First date in six months," he complained, and I was stunned it had only been six months ago. She was a fellow actuary, loved sports, good fit. But she bristled at his complaints about her divorce, and as we drank and he told me this story I couldn't help but wonder if this guy wasn't a loony. Who berates a girl for leaving a husband, and on a second date? "First date," he corrected me. "I just asked her if she really tried to save her marriage. I just want someone of character."

"Tell me you didn't say, 'Someone of character'."

His silence was probably due to his foot being jammed deep into his own throat. I asked him then if he'd ever seen Marty, and he claimed that he had, that he loved Ernest Borgnine.

My pals tell me you can almost hear me rolling my eyes when I get my dander up, and I guess that was the case. Well, I wasn't talking Marty with Borgnine, that happy Marty with that insipid song. No, I'm talking the Rod Steiger Marty, the one that cuts you right across the heart. The TV version. Paddy Chayefsky's little drama about that fat little man who may--or may not--have found love with a "dog".

Now, I was really hoping Alv would get some life's lessons from Marty. Like: look at people for who they are, look for that fucking beauty that you find in everything that's a little bit ugly. Because Alv's a bit ugly, just like I'm a bit ugly. Yeah, I know I'm not exactly the type who's got a good relationship, but then I'm a mean bastard and I hate living with people especially since they usually try to reorganize my videos and books and music and shit. I know they gotta make room for their stuff, too, but I hate moving, and well, anyway this is about Alv.

Stop being unkind, man, is what I was trying to tell him. Start doing what Marty does: learns to love a girl no matter what her baggage or her damages.

Didn't work. Alv was drunk enough to watch the damn thing that night (I ran home and got the tape--I knew he still had his old VCR because he's as cheap as I am). I guess he didn't show up for work the next day, and when he finally did come in, three days later, his eyes were bloodshot.

Marty was too much for him. That's what it's like, man. It's utterly killing. Most of that is Rod Steiger, playing Marty as if he's been trampled by love his whole life. Look at that scene a the start, where he calls some dame he met at a movie theater weeks earlier. Marty didn't even want to do it, but his pal kept insisting, and so he puts a dime in the phone and calls, even though he knew he was going to get murdered. Sure enough, it's hell. All we see is Steiger's side of the conversation, and when it ends, he stares at the receiver as if it were a gun he could use to finally blow his brains out.

In the television version, Marty is in pain, real pain. The music is somber, the dialogue charged. Men are warped by their longing, and turn sullen, and mean. It's amazing, then, that Marty emerges with his soul intact. Unlike the movie, however, we don't have a fucking clue whether the guy will find happiness.

You tell me when the movies toned down a TV show? You can't, that's all there is to it. Marty's about loneliness, not the self-pitying loneliness, but the kind that destroys lives. Well, I think it destroyed Alv's life.

When I saw him later, back at the James Bar, he was in terrible shape. "I'm all devastated inside," he said. He was never going to find a woman, and he knew that from watching Marty.

"You're missing the point," I told him. "Marty'll teach you how to find a girl. Be a good guy. Go to places with girls. You know, 'There's lot's a tomatoes.'" That's a line from the movie. "Seems to me like you go to the Pistons games, Red Wings, and you're running away, man. And stop being mean. Treat a girl right, man."

But that wouldn't work. Alv seemed to see himself as the other guy, Marty's pal and fellow lonelyheart, Angie, played by Joe Mantell, who was later the guy who pulled Jack Nicholson away from the carnage and says "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." Well, Alv should have seen himself as Marty, as Rod Steiger, even if old Rod's a bigger guy than Alv. But he never did. He paid for my beer, said thanks, and walked out.

Alv didn't commit suicide, didn't quit his job and end up a drunk. Worse: Alv didn't change. He kept going to work, kept going to those damn sporting events where you don't really meet anyone, kept hanging out with the guys and not doing a God damn thing about his heart. He turned sour. One of those cranks who rages at the newspaper, complains about the food in the commissary, never has anything good to say about people. Too much news, too much sports, too little poetry. The few times I visited the man in his little townhouse, though, I kept noticing that he never put Marty away--it was right there, in easy reach. Sometimes I noticed the tape inside the box was gone, probably in the machine. After awhile, I stopped seeing him. Once I saw him walking, a shrunken man. He used to wear a boutonni�re, a habit from his days as a florist, but now his lapels are as free of color as his life.

Alvin Fitzsimmons, born on Valentine's Day, sits at home, sad, lonely. He walks the streets, eats his meals, engages in conversation, and those are sad and lonely, too. Every night he dies a little. The lessons were right in front of him, but he ignored them. Unlike Marty, but very much like Marty's pals, he's doomed.

WHO'S CRAZY HERE?

2010-08-31T17:38:46-00:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975. Directed by Milos Forman, written by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben. Starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Vincent Schiavelli, Dean R. Brooks, Sydney Lassick, William Redfield, Dwight Marfield, and a score of other notable character actors.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a classic. There's no question about this right? With my Dad, I had seen it in high school and by myself in college, and loved it. This story of R. P. McMurphy's rage against the machine is meant to fill one not only with righteous indignation, but with a sense of hope. It succeeds. Cuckoo's Nest is funny and touching. Everyone's got a favorite scene: mine is, of course, McMurphy's longing to watch the World Series. It helps that director Milos Forman and producer Michael Douglas assembled one of the greatest ensemble casts of the 1970s, and Jack Nicholson's performance as McMurphy is legendary. Oscar-wise, it's one of the few times Hollywood really got it, handing out awards for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay to this film that dared to take on the establishment. The tagline summed it up: "If he's crazy, what does that make you?"

Sadly, watching it again all these years later, I have to admit that what it makes me feel like is that I'm a sane man who didn't rape a child and try to kill a woman, as McMurphy does in the film. Because for whatever reason, now I see that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is brilliantly acted, brilliantly directed, brilliantly written.. and one hell of a mean and nasty movie.

I'm serious about this. And I say that I'm serious about this because I'm guessing a lot of my friends and family shared my love of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, probably love it now. Perhaps that what makes it so scary to me. Cuckoo's Nest is a picture about rebellion, and I have to say that I love that theme. But this is a "safe" film about rebellion, a movie with a hero who is really nothing but fun. Rebels, as we should know in real life, are often assholes. McMurphy's a fun-loving guy with a heart of gold. But he's not genuine and neither is the movie as a whole.

First, consider the subject. We're in a mental home. Despite its ugly surroundings, it's a place we don't mind visiting. That's part of Cuckoo's Nest's enduring appeal. With its amazing ensemble cast (Lloyd, DeVito, Dourif, Schiavelli, Samson--all wonderful), Nicholson's bluster (never better), and Forman's sure hand (honestly, I love the direction), you get pulled in to the asylum and it quickly begins to seem like a clubhouse. Every one of the characters is crazy, but it's a very safe sort of crazy--no one here is a threat.

This is most notable in our hero. Who doesn't love Randle Patrick McMurphy? I sure did. Nicholson's outfit, that cap and jeans and leather jacket--so cool. As is his trying to engage everyone in a game of poker, basketball, the World Series... this is a good friend, a guy who's a bit of a party animal, but he looks out for everyone. When he steals away to fish, he takes everyone along. When he tries to get mad at Nurse Ratched, it's not just for his sake, but everyone's. When he can finally break free, he doesn't, because he wants to make sure poor Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) loses his virginity. Now imagine if McMurphy kept trying to break out by himself, if he were a mumbler, or had a real violent streak--he wouldn't be as likeable. McMurphy here is almost a better friend than the people we know in real life.

That likeability is what disturbs me today. Step back for a moment and consider this character. He is, truly, a lovable rapist. Now if you were to advertise or describe this character in such a way, most of us, I think, would be shocked or repulsed. Though I'm trying to avoid setting up straw men here, I think it's accurate to say that most people would regard McMurphy as someone who is not a rapist. It was, after all, statutory. All grown men have cast a wandering eye at girls too young for them. Most of us don't fuck them, though. McMurphy, in his 30s (Nicholson was 37 when this was filmed), has sex with a thirteen year-old-girl. (I'll do us all a favor by avoiding comparisons to a certain famous director... and friend of Nicholson's.)

The first time we see McMurphy talking with Dr. Spivey, in Spivey's office at the hospital, is significant because it communicates that the machine McMurphy is raging against is not one run by men. Dr. Spivey is a patient, empathetic man. Spivey is played Dr. Brooks who, in real life, was the head of an Oregon mental hospital. That fact, and that scene, speak volumes--Dr. Brooks wouldn't agree to this role if he was as one-dimensional as the forthcoming Nurse Ratched. We see his office, see that he fishes (remember the fishing scene later?), smiles patiently as McMurphy talks about that sweet little girl. Dr. Spivey's a square, but he's not evil. No, we'll get to the evil soon enough.

There are four real women in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and two ghosts: the evil Nurse Ratched, her underling Nurse Pillbow (Mimi Sarkisian), Rose and Candy, the two oversexed women pals of McMurphy (Louisa Moritz and Mews Small, respecitvely), and, never seen, Billy Bibbits mother who is linked to Ratched, and Harding's (William Redfield) wife, the one who we hear he has "sex problems" with. These are, if you think about it closely, six of the worst portrayals of women in a successful motion picture.

Let's start with the girls, Rose and Candy. Candy seems to be McMurphy's girlfriend. Rose is Candy's friend, and only seen in the last act, when McMurphy figures out a way to escape and that involves these two women--idiots both--to come to the window of the asylum, bearing booze, and take off. Of course, McMurphy has a heart of gold, so he's got this pair to bring tons of booze, not just to bribe Turkle (Scatman Crothers), but so that all his pals in the asylum will have a wonderful send-off.

These two poor women are merely sex objects, in the purest and worst sense of that term. Do they have any dignity whatsoever? McMurphy basically promises Turkle that he can screw Rose for allowing him (McMurphy) to make his escape. Really? As we all know, McMurphy also convinces (through no effort on his part) Rose to fuck stuttering Billy Bibbit. Stop for a moment to think about these scenes: McMurphy leaves the girls in the company of men confined to a mental institution. Ladies, I don't about you, but that would make me feel a bit, well, uncomfortable, to say the least.

At least they're not the nurses. Nurse Ratched and Nurse Pillbow are the ball-busting bitch and her sycophant. It's worth noting that a number of notable actresses (Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Page, among many others) declined to play Ratched because they thought the character was demeaning. They're right. Ratched has no redeeming qualities, unless you find someone who belittles men and destroys masculinity redeemable.

If this seems harsh, or my calling Ratched a "ball-busting bitch", consider the fact that we are, without question, meant to cheer McMurphy when he tries to strangle her late in the film. This only works if we've been given multiple scenes establishing her as cold hearted and excessively cruel. McMurphy, who raped a 13-year-old (which we forgive), tries to choke Ratched to death after she "kills" Billy... and we're OK with that. Honestly, Cuckoo's Nest could be one of the few movies I know that still, in 2010, gets away with the notion that some women deserve a good whipping, or worse.

Without Ratched's extended torture of McMurphy and the others, we would not be able to endure her being choked nearly to death. But instead of horror for this woman, we secretly cheer. Maybe we openly cheer. We're not meant to look upon this as a group of cruel men lusting after this woman's throat (and Forman cuts to the circle of inmates nodding fiercely and cheering McMurphy on), but the poor soul, McMurphy, finally striking back, cheered on by the meek, who have found their savior.

As I saw the movie the other night, projecting it from HD at the , I simply couldn't believe I ever felt elation at that scene. Maybe I'm the only one who did. Maybe we're meant to find horror in Ratched's near-strangulation. But if horror was intended, it is quickly diminished: McMurphy is next seen as a zombie, having been given a lobotomy for his deed.

(A side note, and one on which I'll tread carefully: I have to question the role of blacks in this movie. Forman and Co. are outstanding filmmakers, so I can't imagine this was a simple coincidence. But why is it that none of McMurphy's inmate pals were black? Or that the only guards in Cuckoo's Nest with speaking roles are black? Consider the contrast: a bunch of kind, misunderstood white guys who just want to have fun, the two cold, evil women in charge, and wandering about in their bow ties, casting sideways glances and eager to punch McMurphy, are three black guys. Oh, and Turkle, who's easily bribed with a twenty, booze, and a good lay.)

I'm honestly at a loss about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Never in my life have I made such a 180 degree turn about a picture. Silly movies I loved as a kid I've come to see as dumb, or less-than-complex (Star Wars, Ghostbusters and The Blues Brothers all come to mind.) But it isn't dumb. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is, in many ways, brilliant: the direction, the writing, and Christ, all those great actors. Outside of the thumping of the Native drums at the end, Jack Nietzsche's singing saw theme is wonderful, and daring I think.

And that what makes it so damn troubling. I've written about , and let me tell you, this is one of them. He owned it on DVD, used to mumble "Mmm, Juicy Fruit," because he loved that scene so much. I've loved it, too. The basketball scene, the baseball scene, McMurphy trying to lift that marble sink, the Chief doing it later... everything. The movie has magic.

But what kind of magic? I honestly don't know, and I wonder what Dad would have thought about my concerns. He was one of those people I love and respect who admire this film and watch it again and again. Is something wrong with me? Did I change somehow, become some kind of Establishment conservative? I don't know. But watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest all I could think of is this: if R. P. McMurphy's sane, what does that make us?

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

2010-07-25T15:50:39-00:00

Inception and The Builder

Inception, 2010. Directed and written by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas, and armies of gun toting men.

The Builder, 2010. Directed by R. Alverson. Written by Alverson and Colm O'Leary. Starring O'Leary.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of... --Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, 169-170

Does Christopher Nolan dream? One must assume that the Brit sleeps, and when he does his waking life warps and darkens as it does for the rest of us. But maybe I'm being presumptuous--maybe he cannot sleep, maybe he cannot dream. Maybe Mr. Nolan has to read about dreams, and maybe he thinks that movies are dreams. There has to be something to explain the utter lack of imagination on display in his lauded Inception. For Inception is a film about dreaming... that hasn't a single dreamlike frame in its 148 minutes.

Inception boasts a story that could be catnip for even the most thudding of talents. A band of agents led by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to have had chronic indigestion in his last few movies--I've never seen anyone wear a grimace for so long) fall to sleep and enter into a victim's dreams in order to "extract", or steal, information. Hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese energy magnate, Cobb must go into the slumber of English energy rival Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), but this time to implant an idea that will wreck the company. This process, the planting, is called, you guessed it, "inception". And, as the dialogue repeats again and again, it is difficult or impossible or deadly, depending on where we are in the story.

Cobb assembles a crack team of well-dressed souls almost totally devoid of personality or motivation. There's the manager Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is supposedly in charge of assembling information about the subject so there are no surprises--of course, he fails miserably, because we're going to need surprise. Ariadne (Ellen Page)--whose name references the woman who helped Theseus out of the maze with her crimson thread, and yet another of Nolan's dipshit attempts at increasing the depth of this shallow, shallow film--is the one who designs the layout of the dreams. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) creates potions that help put everyone to sleep effectively, and I guess he goes into the dreams because he's a good driver (that's the only reason I could come up with.) Eames (Tom Hardy, the only decent performer in the movie), can change shapes at will in the dream. Why others can't do the tasks of each dreamer is never explained, but then, there's a lot of stuff left out.

To make the dream heists even more treacherous--though being in someone else's dream ought to be enough--Nolan ratchets up the tension (I'm kidding) by making Cobb a troubled soul. He may or may not have killed his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) years ago, spending years and years in a dream state and turning her into a loony by doing an inception on her. She shows up in various dreams, pissed off, and screws up a number of heists and threatens the lives of all the characters in scenes without a lick of real suspense.

Frankly, I'm baffled at all the talk about how "confusing" Inception is, for the one thing I'll give Nolan is that he manages to make each level different enough visually to make very clear sense of where the characters are in each level. The problem is that each level is almost identical to the last in terms of its themes, each one so utterly dull and redundant as to make one lose interest almost immediately. For every level in Fischer's mind is simply a new landscape watched over by guys with weapons. Whoop-de-do.

Perhaps most troubling is that there's no motivation for any of the characters. In even the most routine heist films (and Inception is most assuredly a heist movie), we know why each character wants to bust open that safe. And it's more than just money. The money is needed for this surgery, or for that failing business, something that the character lives for, or the character is an edgy dude who loves the risk, etc. The men and women of Inception are committing a crime, and it's got a moral curveball that should make at least Ariadne pause. "It's not strictly legal," Cobb tells her, and even a shrug on Ariadne's part would have been welcome. Nope, she just jumps right in, as does everyone.

Each dream sequence tries to outdo the last in terms of incredible special effects, but in each instance the effect is merely showing off, not a necessity. In The Matrix, a film I found unoffensive and silly, at least the effects helped to create a very effective sense of the world as a computer, and when Neo could finally manipulate this world, it was mind-blowing--to him and to us. Here, when Cobb's got Ariadne in Paris to show off what dreams can do, the city folds over onto itself , or begins to explode as someone's waking up. Why? Why not have smoke dissolve the city, or any number of different ways of making a place vanish? Or when Cobb is woken out of one deep sleep, by being shoved into a tub, water shoots out the sides of a building--because as we all know whatever wakes you in the present always appears in a dream. This will be a theme throughout the movie--if they're sleeping in a car and the car twists and turns, they do so in the dream. When music plays by an ear, it plays in the dream. Apparently, the sound of plane engines and air-pressure changes don't effect dreamers, but there you go.

The dreams in Nolan's world are astounding... in their literalness. Frankly, filling dreams with nothing at all but incredible special effects is dull. Watch just five minutes of Eraserhead and you'll have a more dreamlike, weird, menacing, and unnerving moment.

In the dream world of Inception secrets are literally locked in a safe, each and every time. As our heroes drop into new levels of dreaming, the secrets are, again and again, protected by guys with guns, who can't hit the side of a barn. Why can't they be protected by squirrels? By duplicates of Cobb, Ariadne, Eames, etc.? Christ, you name it--anything is more imaginative than the same battalions of men with submachine guns. And never in my life have I seen dreams that were not only chaste but without embarrassment--Cobb never dreams of his wife in the nude, never has a sexual encounter with the only female, never sneezes, drools, is never without pants, is never nervous, never menaced by something strange. Strangeness is sorely lacking here.

The McGuffin in Fischer's mind is his relationship with his pop. Fischer is so utterly torn by this that our heroes (and why we root for Saito to get Fischer's secrets is beyond me--it'd be like rooting for Shell Oil to whip BPs ass) use it as a fulcrum upon which their whole strategy lies. Down and down they go, trying to get Fischer to unearth a secret so they can plant info, using the dead Father to pry open the many safes in his mind. Again, this is so straightforward as to be finally laughable. Why wouldn't Fischer have dreams about his father as a young man, and he a boy? Why wouldn't information be protected by... hell, a butterfly? Or stored in a lunchbox that had meaning for him ages ago (fill in a million blanks here.) Dreams can do anything--anything--and here they do virtually nothing, and seem unconnected to life in any way. (And by the way, if you want a great example of what dreams can do, pick up Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled.)

As usual, Nolan is not very good with his actors, instructing the crew here to furrow their brows and look deadly serious throughout (references to his being the new Kubrick seem off to me--I'm beginning to wonder if he's not soon to be a new Shyamalan...) And the dialogue! "I hear rumors that his relationship with his father is complicated," Saito asks in reference to Fischer. "We have to have more than rumors!" Cobb responds, squinting. Wow, he's got a complicated relationship with his dad--how unique is that? And how thudding is that dialogue--when you can hear it over the oppressive score. Later, when Arthur is shooting at the many, many ineffective guards, and misses, Eames laughs and pulls out of nowhere a larger gun, "You should dream bigger!"

This sense of pulling something out of nowhere because it's a dream doesn't exist outside this small scene, and really doesn't make sense because it's someone else's dream (Eames isn't the dreamer, so how can he dream bigger?) So let's say it does make sense, since after all its unreality. OK, then why doesn't anyone else dream bigger and pull out larger weapons? This underscores the sense, that I got right away, that no character is truly threatened--they'll all survive, and we know this right away, and I'll add that Inception is a strangely bloodless, and pain-free film.

In the end, Inception does not get any points for originality, borrowing from Blade Runner and The Matrix, but failing to put any twist into the homage (though I doubt Nolan would admit this) to make it fascinating, as, say, Tarantino did in Inglourious Basterds, which borrowed mercilessly and yet was totally unpredictable and original. Despite being called "thought-provoking", Inception is, like Nolan's other movies, a puzzle. Difficult perhaps, but a puzzle nonetheless. As difficult as a Rubik's cube may be, and whether or not I may solve one, at the end of two hours of twisting that cube I don't emerge with my thoughts provoked--I emerge with time killed and nothing more. Inception's closing shot, culminating in composer Hans Zimmer's loudest brass moments, beating home the sense that you should be feeling something, is, again, a borrowed moment, nothing we haven't seen in Blade Runner or a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone. What is reality and what isn't? A good question, and if you give me an hour I'll come up with twenty other movies and books that address this with more intelligence, mystery, humor, and plain old storytelling expertise than Inception.

Inception opened throughout the country on nearly four thousand screens. R. Alverson's has played, I think, on one screen in the U.S., at the . It's now available on DVD. Like Inception, The Builder is about dreams. Failed dreams, but dreams nonetheless. Try to plumb the mysteries in its 94 minutes... you will leave debating its meaning, instead of trying to fit the pieces together to a puzzle without a picture. If you ever get a chance to see the thing.

Colm O'Leary plays the Builder of the title, a middle-aged man with a girlfriend, a brother, a nephew, and a sense that his life is going... well, not even nowhere. Would that he had that crisis--certainly there is a sense of existential angst, but crisis is not what I'd call his experiences. We see him bathing, making coffee, preparing to leave his house. "I might be gone awhile," he tells his girlfriend, a line that neatly sums up this amazing little picture.

The Builder has some property, or hopes to acquire some property, where he can put together a home. He is a man of good taste, hardworking, and with an almost zen-like sense of what is good in woodworking. The plan is to build a beautiful replica of a Cape Cod style home, his perfect home, and a thing that will challenge his abilities. But things don't go according to plan. His finances don't come together. Hell, life doesn't quite come together, but again, neither is anything so dramatically wrong that he is given the drama of trying to fight metaphorical fires. No, this is life, slow, grinding, and my God, so painfully beautiful.

The builder drifts, living in a trailer on the property, making a fire, staring into the fire, being moved by the wildflowers surrounding him. He visits friends and argues, tries to get the property in shape, finally works in a restaurant, and almost falls into an affair with the wife of the friend who's putting him up. He falls in with some young men, but this is nothing sordid--again, this is not meant to be rip-roaring drama, but a rather Ozuian struggle to make sense of this world. When we see him riding his bike with these young men, the result is moving and strange, like the best dreams. The simple act of riding a bike reveals in its simplicity the notions that life is hard, life is beautiful, and life is complex and multitudinous.

Watch The Builder and marvel. See a man's dream not die, but go into statis--this house might still be a possibility, but it is elusive. That's dreaming, isn't it? Dreams rarely come true, but even when they do, the route and the result are like nothing you imagine. Director R. Alverson will never be lauded like Christopher Nolan, nor will he take on such giant projects or have whole armies of special effects crews at his disposal, and he may not have such movie stars on his sets. But he lives in the world of dream and reality, and he understands that, like the magic of water draining through your hands, both are linked and unpredictable. Dreams in The Builder are messy, complicated, and, eventually, unresolved. The closing shot is as odd as Inception, but you will be left pondering this one for a very long time.

THIS MOVIE SHOULD HAVE BROKEN MY HEART

2010-06-18T15:22:33-00:00

Toy Story 3, 2010. Directed by Lee Unkrich, written by Michael Arndt. With the vocal talents of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, Teddy Newton, Bud Luckey (incredible), Javier Fernandez Pena, and Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schall, both utterly wasted in miniscule roles.

Is it fair to criticize a very good movie because it fails to live up to nearly impossible standards? Case in point: Toy Story 3. Look at Pixar's last six years. The Incredibles. Cars. Ratatouille. Wall*E. Up. Excepting Cars, you've got four of the best movies a studio has put out probably since Paramount hit the jackpot with Robert Evans in the mid 70s. I would argue it exceeds anything Disney has ever done in a six year stretch of time, and would go so far as to say that those four are better than any four of Walt's films ever. So with this in mind, I ask again: is it fair to say that Toy Story 3, unquestionably the finest film this summer, and exciting and at times touching movie, pales in comparison? That I expect more from Pixar? Or is this critic spoiled?

Let me put it to you straight that I'm no great fan of the first Toy Story. It was fun, but a bit maudlin at times, and being Pixar's first effort, they still hadn't mastered humans quite yet. Having committed to making Andy and his family look like real humans instead of the Mad Magazine-style look of Brad Bird's people in The Incredibles and Ratatouille, they slipped into the . Simply put, the humans are creepy in Toy Story. (A problem they momentarily fixed with the goofy looking, and paradoxically more realistic, corpulent toy collector in Toy Story 2.)

Toy Story 2 is a masterpiece, a lot of fun, and it took pains to understand that they might be running into trouble with a teenager who still likes to play with his Buzz Lightyear doll. The premise of a collector who freaks out over the price of a vintage Woody on eBay (and pardon me for the inherent double entendre in that sentence) was genius. That's a great film.

But Toy Story 2 was great in part because they didn't hover over the same emotions present in the overly sentimental first movie. Since this inaugural effort, Pixar has gone to great lengths to make their pictures earn their teardrops, and Ratatouille and Up in particular are deeply emotional films that don't need sappy Randy Newman songs to telegraph when to build a lump in one's throat.

Toy Story 3 opens with Newman's "You've Got a Friend in Me" (I think part 2 did as well), but it matters not--the film begins with a scene of ridiculous excitement: a train robbery by the Potato Heads (Rickles and Harris), the day saved by Woody (Hanks) and Jessie (Cusack--and who would have thought that it would be Joan Cusack who'd be making all the right choices amongst her siblings) and Buzz (Tim Allen, who should set up an altar of thanks to whatever God saved his career with these movies.) This scene takes place in John Ford's Monument Valley, and includes flying pigs, exploding train trestles, and a bomb filled with red monkeys. It's wonderful.

The plot rears its head when we go back to creepy Andy, who is going off to college. What, pray, is he going to do with his box of toys? Of course, we are expected to set aside the fact that a young man even through high school would still keep a box of his grade-school toys under the bed with his clandestine Playboys and expired Trojans. Did you keep your box of toys in your Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years? That having been said, I'm willing to set that aside, for the sake of the story. So what becomes of the toys?

Well, scriptwriter Michael Arndt, who wrote the terribly overpraised Little Miss Sunshine, again can't settle for pure human drama, because he fills Toy Story 3 with an excess of roller coaster rides. Andy has to pack up his room, and he tries to put the toys in an attic, but they almost get thrown out instead. OK, it's exciting and fun to see them escape the clutches of a garbage man too tuned into his mp3 to notice toys walking away in the recycling bin; it's a bit much when these escapes return to take over the whole second half.

But I get ahead of myself. The toys escape, they think Andy was going to throw them away, when really he was going to shove them into a plastic garbage bag and stick them in the attic. This is an important thing to note, because it plays a significant role in a plot that quickly ceases to make sense.

For the toys go to Sunnyside Daycare. Woody, who was going to be taken along to college (imagine that plot--the toys in a dorm full of oversexed, boozing college kids). He has instead followed the toys to Sunnyside. Woody wants them to stay loyal, to go back to Andy, who, he claims, misses them.

Well, the toys will have none of this. They believe that Andy was going to throw them away, not put them in the attic, and besides, the daycare looks like a dream come true. Sunnyside's toys are lorded over by a strawberry-scented teddy bear named Lotso Hugs (Ned Beatty--awesome) and Ken (Michael Keaton), of Ken and Barbie fame, and Baby, a realistic baby doll with a lazy eye. Lotso points out that there are children galore, that they're never left behind because new kids come in regularly. There's spas to help the get the kinks out of the toys' backs, fresh batteries all the time, it's wonderful. After all, there's no growing up in daycare--new kids come in every year.

That sounds like a great plot to me, and an opportunity to explore love of a very different kind--Andy's love for his toys is a sort of familial love, the breakup akin to children going off to college. Whereas a daycare situation can explore the love we feel as adults, moving through our life, the friendships and affairs we face in school, work, the military, any place people are thrown together. That's a great idea.

But it goes off track quickly. There's a sinister side to the daycare, as there should be, I guess. Lotso is a maniac, who begins to sound like in Cool Hand Luke, from which this film borrows shamelessly (it's meant as a joke, but it comes off like its from a Dreamworks' movie). The toys have been put in with the very young children, who bite and throw and beat our heroes mercilessly, and they're locked up at night. They want to go into the room with the big kids, who'll treat them with love and caring, and where the toys get to roam free. Only Lotso doesn't want that--it's a privilege to be in the Rainbow Room (I think that's the older kids' room) and we begin to see Sunnyside is more a prison camp than anything else.

So the toys seek escape from the hell of Sunnyside to... what? Well, to go by Toy Story 3 at this point, it is to get away from these tiny hellions (and this must be the most undisciplined day care in history) to, well, to a plastic bag in Andy's attic. This is apparently a better situation than daycare.

Toy Story 3, then, has one of the most bizarre premises I've ever seen in a movie. I understand the need to concoct a crazy plot--these are talking toys, after all--but really, screenwriter Arndt is saying that young, young children are terrible and a life of inertness in the darkness of an attic is preferable to the sun-drenched room of Sunnyside. That's lunacy. And it's sad, suggesting that loyalty to Andy, who really should be moving on, is the greatest thing of all (even at the expense of entertaining young children.) Sunnyside did seem, to me, to be the perfect end for a toy. But since Arndt had to stick with his Great Escape/Cool Hand Luke scenario, he had to run with it, even if it got out of hand.

And Toy Story 3 really, really gets out of hand. The toys escape, have a very nasty fight with Lotso (who is a rich character, and whose betrayal by an innocent child could have been mirrored in Andy, and would make for an infinitely more complex film), and end up in a horrifying garbage incinerator sequence that tries to blast home its point with the subtlety of a car crusher. Along the way they also spend too much time with children (both the original and number 2 knew well enough to leave the humans alone and spend most of the time in the toys' world.) We see too many of the too-realistic humans, too much Andy, and quite a few too many sequences showing us how the world of children is a magical place, which we know already, and which slo-mo doesn't improve.

This is a great shame, because Toy Story 3 does have moments of considerable, if not episodic, charm. Woody does escape to try and figure out a way to help his pals, and ends up in the arms of a little girl, Bonnie, the daughter of one of the day care workers. She's very nice, and plays tea with her toys, who all seem to believe they're in an eternal community theater production. Timothy Dalton and the great comedian Kristin Schaal play a teddy bear in lederhosen and a plastic triceratops, respectively, and they're just wonderful. But they're in for maybe five minutes, and don't anything to the plot. Of course, being a Pixar film, the lovely, rich details flood every frame, and the daycare in particular is a joy, as are the smudged fingerprints on Lotsos fur, among many other delights.

And we do love these characters. I think people tend to forget or overlook the fact that Pixar is also one of the great places that actors get to shine, which is how we come to love Woody and Buzz and all the rest. Hanks, Allen, Cusack, Beatty--these guys haven't made a great film in a long time, and they're perfect here (just as many of the actors in the other Pixar works are pitch-perfect, too.)

So Toy Story 3, then, is a very good adventure, with a weird, conflicting plot, too much action, too much sentiment (including a goofy sequence at the end where Andy sums up what all the toys have meant to him over the years--thank you, I think I've got it after three movies.) And yet it is still the best film of the summer, at the very least the best film from a major studio. It is a good hour of an amazing motion picture, its lily gilded by a writer who doesn't seem to trust the material, or who can't leave a bad idea alone.

Pixar has become so great, then, that I can't help but feel sad and frustrated when they fail to reach their lofty standards. I came to Toy Story 3 to be amazed (I was), to be thrilled (check), to laugh (definitely), but I have to say that I also came to get my heart broken, and that just didn't happen. I was looking to relive those melancholy times when we all have given up a toy that meant the whole world to us, feelings I honestly get even into adulthood when I discover old toys long forgotten. But those feelings were never aroused, because for once Pixar didn't quite trust us to get the subtlety of their earlier films. Which, in my mind, could be the saddest thing about Toy Story 3.

GOOD MEN, GONE RUNNING

2010-06-08T15:09:55-00:00

Bad Company, 1972. Directed by Robert Benton, written by Benton and David Newman. Starring Barry Brown, Jeff Bridges, John Savage, Jerry Houser, Damon Cofer, Joshua Hill, and the great character actors David Huddleston, Jim Davis, Ed Lauter, John Quade, Raymond Guth, and Charles Tyner.

Last summer, when The Hurt Locker was garnering all sorts of praise and little box office, some film critic, whose name I don't recall, noted that the current slate of war films was unique in history. This fellow noted that until this war, films critical of war, or deathly realistic, simply didn't come out while the war was still being fought. The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and their ilk were all released after the Vietnam War, and of course there were few, if any, movies critical of World War II or Korea. Perhaps this is attributable to the fact that we were, as a nation, very much in support of WWII and Korea, and at the start of Vietnam, while the "police action" raged and had moderate support, crap like John Wayne's The Green Berets did stellar box office. This war's films, however, have yet to find an audience. Why, I wonder? Could it be... because we don't have a draft?

Consider the past... and Robert Benton's Bad Company.

Bad Company is a Western, an , according to film critics (a term barely used when it was coined fifteen years ago and never used in the 70s), which means that it has the usual tropes, mixed in with some of Sergio Leone's spaghetti sauce, and usually deeply critical of America. Despite being a Western, Bad Company is really a Vietnam war movie, taking place during the Civil War. It was a flop, for reasons probably having less to do with its message or acting or plot, and having more to do with the fact that Americans pretty much loathed Westerns in the 70s. I don't think there was a single successful one that decade.

The plot: with the support of his sweet, devout Methodist parents, young Drew Dixon (the ) flees the Union Army, who are out rounding up draft dodgers, including many young men dressed as women (to avoid detection.) With a hundred bucks in his pocket, Dixon heads into the nearest town to take a stagecoach west, beyond the jurisdiction of the United States Armed Forces, and where he hopes to earn a fortune in silver mining. He is resolved to live a good, honest life, and we're privvy to his naive thoughts as his diary serves as narration.

While waiting for the stagecoach, he is robbed by Jeff Bridges' Jake Rumsey, a kid on the lam himself. Well, Dixon catches up with Jake, and falls in with a rag-tag band of misfits: a pair of brothers who themselves are fleeing from the Army, Loney and Jim Bob (John Savage and Damon Cofer); Simms (Jerry Houser), a young coward running from his father; and, Boog, an almost feral child whose Dad was lynched for rustling (Joshua Hill Lewis). After pooling that day's thefts, the crew sets out West and the good life. As Jake says, "That's our racket for you, livin' off the land."

Of course, nothing goes right. But in this case, not only does nothing go right, it seems there's a vast, almost existential nothingness meeting them on the prairie, as if the good old American promise of "Go West, young man" has become nothing more than a lie. Here, the west is bereft of food, water, or any means by which one can make a living. Quickly we see the humor that opened the movie drain away, like blood into sand, and with equal swiftness we see how vulnerable these young men are, and that they're hardly men, children, really. Robert Benton and David Newman were famous for writing Bonnie & Clyde, and here they've trained their cynical eye on the Western, and in doing so wrote a crack metaphor for Vietnam.

We see the boys riding against a dull horizon, with nothing to offer them. Along the way they kill a rabbit (having to waste dozens of bullets as the line of young men fires at the poor beast, failing to kill it until they've emptied half their chambers), but are so disgusted by dressing the animal they refuse to eat it. (That was one nitpick: young men--hell, children--knew how to slaughter chickens and rabbits a'plenty back then. Pretty much everyone, even city dwellers, dressed their own game.) When they come upon a farmer and his wife, the couple explains that they're leaving the West--there's simply no opportunity. Then the farmer gleefully offers his wife to them as a prostitute--"Eight dollars for the bunch of you!"--and she is equally happy to get the money. It's hardly sexy, and stealing, the fucking, the living, is hellishly banal. There's little excitement in Bad Company, little robbery, but a lot of begging and stealing and eating things like skunks. In fact, it's the robbery of a hot pie that results in tragedy.

The film does suffer a bit in terms of its overall narrative. Clearly wholesome Drew Dixon is our catalyst, whose story serves as and arc. He avoids sleeping with the prostitute, claiming he's from "good stock", keeps his folks' money hidden even when he's starving, and refuses to participate in robbery. His eventual spiritual and moral collapse should move the story forward more, but it's leavened with too much humor, which is appropriate, say, in the broad Little Big Man, but comes off half-assed here. Benton and Newman don't really know what to do with Dixon, nor do they take his piety far enough, and close with what really amounts to a joke, when tragedy is required (as in the gun battle that closes Bonnie and Clyde.) For once I would have loved to have seen a Christian pushed to the limits by an unjust war and bleak conditions, and not some square whose greed brings him around.

No matter, because Jeff Bridges' Jake and the rest of the boys (especially Boog) are compelling people who we will follow clear across the continent. And it is their story, and Drew's (for Barry Brown is very effective), that makes us understand the tragedy of war, even on the home front.

Bad Company speaks to a lost time. It speaks about the Civil War specifically, and the Vietnam war metaphorically, and in the years since war in general. And how bad wars and the draft that fuels that engine can turn good men into criminals. Every one of these young boys, rough though most of them are, would have probably been farmers had the draft not forced them to flee. Fleeing, in turn, forces them to become criminals. Only one, the very young Boog, is the product of a thief. And when these starving young men face a band of true thieves, well, the result is not surprising, but exciting nonetheless. We'll just say that necessity is the mother of invention.

But it also makes me wonder if we weren't better served with that horrible draft. There is no question that the draft is awful, and it's a bit remiss for a man such as myself who avoided the first Iraq war, to urge a draft to haul young men across the world to Baghdad or Kabul. However, what the draft did was to make it so that young men, all young men and not just the poor, disenfranchised, and voluntarily gung-ho, had to either be a part of the war or run to the hills (the hills, of course, being Canada). You couldn't stand by on the sidelines during Vietnam, because if you hadn't been there, you knew and cared for someone who had.

Bad Company is about this time period, one that must seem as distant and alien to young men today as the Civil War did in 1972. The youth of today don't have to protest, and aren't drawn to war stories, or tales people like themselves fleeing the Army in the rough West. And that's because in today's America a war can rage thousands of miles away and it affects them about as much as the World Cup.

So watch Bad Company and think of the war. This war, the one we have stopped reading about for the most part. Think of the young men and women joining and re-upping again and again because of a deep and profound sense of needing to be there, when others will not fight. And wonder to yourself: can there ever be another Bad Company? Will we ever make Westerns that speak to the present day as urgently as they did then?