Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's Mary Sue

I recently watched the first two seasons of Jack Ryan.

Sorry, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.”

One of the most obnoxious and useless aspects of critical discourse in the 21st Century is how often female characters are accused of being a “Mary Sue”, which is to say, an idealized character without flaws. A statement that is intended to render the character worthless, without merit, and beneath contempt. The term comes from fan fiction, where a lot of people wrote stories where a character who was essentially them would meet whatever characters. Men did this, too, of course. Moreso than women arguably. But men are of course never accused of this. Or when men do this, it doesn’t render their work as inherently worthless.

I thought of this watching Jack Ryan because it’s hard to think of anyone who wrote a protagonist who was an idealized version of themselves more than Tom Clancy did.

Why am I saying this?

Jack Ryan was an Irish-Catholic from Baltimore. His father was a police officer. He attended Boston College and has a PhD. He was a marine before getting injured. He became a broker and a self-made millionaire before he began working for the CIA

Tom Clancy was an Irish-Catholic from Baltimore. His father was a postal worker. He attended Loyola College and has a bachelor’s degree. He was ineligible to serve in the military. He worked as an insurance agent at his wife’s family’s firm before he began writing about the CIA.

Jack Ryan is a nothing character. By which I mean there’s nothing there. He rows. That’s the closest thing he has to a character trait. Which makes sense because he’s just Clancy if Clancy were smarter, tougher, stronger, richer, and more successful.

As a sidenote, there are plenty of complaints people have made over the years about the conservative and reactionary politics and the racism in the novels (and there’s a lot), but I remember reading a few of the books back in the nineties and was puzzled by how Clancy had Ryan engage in insider trading. And it wasn’t a bad thing. He did it a few times and made a lot of money.

Of course when terrorists try and manipulate the market to make money, that’s bad and offensive and they need to be stopped. The books make that clear. But when patriotic Americans do it, well…

I wasn’t a big fan of the Chris Pine movie that Kenneth Branagh directed, but it managed to tie these biographical details in a way that worked and made sense instead of just being some middle aged man’s wish fulfillment character. And even if I don’t think the movie fully came together, Pine and the script really turned Ryan into a character more fully than any other actor managed to before or since.

In the world of the TV show, in the fashion of these stories, there are no systemic problems. There are just a few bad individuals. One man who runs a private military security firm. One senator. One lawyer in Caracas. One military official. One politician. Kill them or prosecute them and suddenly things are fine.

The first season is well made but…predictable. Boring at times, despite all the action. There’s the mastermind, who unites Sunni and Shia and multiple groups. He was radicalized in the West. His wife wants none of this and escapes with her children.

The show wants to be well-meaning and nuanced. Her journey out of Syria and Turkey is the path that a lot of refugees have taken since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. By showing how people can be radicalized in the West it’s making a point about how we treat Muslims and people of color. Though of course in this show, as in many shows, the terrorists were in Europe and it’s always emphasized that assimilation and integration are near impossibilities in Europe unlike in the United States.

In other words, just as the problems are caused by individuals, the problems are also about…people not in the United States. There are no systemic problems – at least not in the US. The US doesn’t have bad policies that have their roots over decades or even centuries. It’s all the fault of a few bad apples and people from somewhere else.

On the other hand I’m sure there were viewers who hated the show for not being completely xenophobic and going out of their way to degrade Islam and belittle the humanity of Arab characters.

The second season suffers from the problem that a lot of second seasons do. Quality wise, it’s about the same. The show is fairly dumb and unrealistic in a lot of ways. They have some good actors and sometimes let them shine. It fails because it has nothing to add, nothing interesting to say, and a non existent character at the center.

But the show’s biggest problem is one that it shares with a lot of shows, where the first season is a story about entering a new world. Ryan goes from sitting in a cubicle (and played by Krasinski! Ha!) to being dragged to Yemen and France and Turkey and then finally to chasing suspects down a subway tunnel and shooting him. It’s about a character who has a specific skillset and in a certain set of circumstances and he gets pulled into things.

Of course in the manner of a Hollywood movie, this character is good at seventeen different things and is superman. But that idea, that someone sees something in us and nurtures it. Encourages us. We all want that in our lives. I think we want that when we’re young and that does’t change as we get older.

But the first season tells that story, has the hero enter a new world. And what comes next? Now it’s just ordinary and commonplace? He does it again so it feels like a sequel and a hits a lot of the same beats, doing the same thing? I struggle to think of a TV show that’s done a good job of doing this.

In the second season we shift from Yemen and Middle East terrorism to Venezuela. Because why not? Throw him into any crisis and he’ll know what to do. It’s not like people have specific skills and learn languages and that this particular knowledge is valuable. No, this is the age of the consultant, who knows better than anyone. And that’s what Jack Ryan is, ultimately. A consultant. With a gun, yes, but a consultant nonetheless.

Of course now people are continuing writing more Clancy novels. With Clancy’s name much bigger than the title. And now there are “Jack Ryan Jr.” novels. Which just makes me thinks about the old cartoon “James Bond Jr.” The novels are, I’m sure, bad and cliched in different ways than that kids cartoon was. But in the end, I’m guessing that they’re not any better.

But what did I think of the show? Krasinski is fine. There are a lot of supporting actors who have moments, ranging from Naomi Rapace and Michael Kelly, Jordi Moll, to great talents they waste like Abbie Cornish and Marie-Josee Crosee. And why even hire Arnold Vosloo and Allan Hawco and Susan Misner and not give them anything to do?

The star of the show is Wendell Pierce. Who has been an incredible actor for years, even before The Wire and Treme, but here he shines. He takes this material and he turns it into something more. More interesting. More thoughtful. More intelligent. More nuanced. A real complex human being dealing with complicated issues. If the other characters were half as real, this could have been a good show.

Thoughts About Peter Falk

In watching the entire run of Columbo in recent months, I was also thinking about Peter Falk. I knew the actor when I was young because he had a cameo in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, a cameo that in retrospect, is much funnier for adults and if you actually know Falk and his work and his persona than if you’re say, six, and that’s your only reference. Later I saw The Princess Bride, and for the longest time, that was Falk for me. Somewhat weird older guy. But of course he was much more than that.

Falk was born in 1927 and he didn’t start working as an actor until he was in his thirties. First in New York where he did Moliere and Shaw and O’Neil on stage. Working in film was difficult because Falk had a glass eye, which made a lot of people dismiss him. Falk didn’t seem to care much, maybe because he never let it slow him down in life. He has his eye removed at the age of three, was an athlete in school, and so when he encountered a situation where it would be an issue - his physical exam to join the military, for example - Falk found a way around it. In that case by trying to fool the person giving the eye exam. It didn’t work, but Falk joined the merchant marines, where he joked that no one cared if he was blind.

In 1961 and 1962, Falk was nominated for an Emmy and an Oscar two years running. He won one Emmy. And so while the studio chiefs rejected him, despite one scout calling him the next John Garfield, Falk made his way West and worked on a few films including Pocketful of Miracles, which is perhaps only notable for being the final film directed by Frank Capra. In fact Capra loathed the final film, but he talked Falk up to people around town, and praised Falk in his memoirs.

Falk became a great character actor with roles in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Great Race, Luv and Robin and the 7 Hoods, Anzio and Too Many Thieves. (I do enjoy him in The Great Race). The next John Garfield might be a good description of Falk, a colorful actor with a physical presence. He was a great comic actor and had dramatic chops that are honestly stunning. To watch him in the Cassavetes films or Mickey and Nicky is to see a depth and talent that I honestly didn’t know Falk was capable of in a lot of his work.

He made it big and Falk always kept working. A lot. Maybe some of that is because he started out acting later than some people, because he knew he had to work a little harder because of his eye, because of his background, but he was going to do what he wanted.

Much has been written about how much of the character of Columbo was Falk. The raincoat, the shoes, the cigars, all Falk’s. Those great scenes in the early seasons – less so and fewer as time went on – where Columbo would be going through his pockets while questioning a suspect searching for a note and launching into a story about the grocery list and his wife, or asking for a pencil after checking every pocket. Those scenes were improvised as Falk kept the actors off guard just as the characters would be. And no doubt a few showed up not expecting that and so the annoyance was real. The character of Columbo was this ordinary man who was brilliant and curious and observant, but also a bit of an outsider and an oddball. Never quite fitting in, always a bit out of place.

In the 1970s, Falk worked nonstop. First, Columbo ran from 1971 to 1978. Falk won three Emmys for the role. (He had already won another Emmy earlier and picked up a fifth years later)

In 1971-1972, he also starred with Lee Grant on Broadway in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, a new play from Neil Simon that was directed by Mike Nichols. At a time when a new play written by Neil Simon and directed by Mike Nichols was a very big deal.

And in that decade Falk also starred in eleven movies.

Two of the films were written and directed by Falk’s friend John Cassavetes - Husbands (1970) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - the latter of which is arguably Cassavetes’ masterpiece. But both feature some of Falk’s finest moments as an actor. Two great films.

Falk and Cassavetes also starred in the movie Mickey and Nicky (1976) as the titular duo, which was written and directed by the legendary Elaine May. Sadly the movie didn’t do well, but there’s a film length drama around the making of it, unfortunately, but it is brilliant, with some of the best acting the two ever did.

There was a TV movie with Jill Clayburgh, Griffin and Phoenix (1976). There were two Neil Simon parodies, Murder by Death (1976) and The Cheap Detective (1978), neither of which is as funny as they think they are, really, but both were hits. And admittedly Falk does a good Bogart impression. To close out the decade after his show finished, Falk starred in The Brink’s Job (1978), which was a solid William Friedkin movie that just didn’t quite come together, and in 1979 there was the classic film, The In-Laws, where he starred with Alan Arkin. One of those strange movies that manages to endure and remains bizarre and hilarious today and it did back then.

So much of The Muppets were made for adults. I think only after watching The In-Laws does Falk’s cameo in The Great Muppet Caper really make sense.

He made a number of other films, but in 1987, three Peter Falk movies came out. One was The Princess Bride, which is a classic. And even having read the book, it’s hard not to think of the voice of the book, the voice of the narrator, as Falk. The movie needed someone like him to be the grandfather and be able to start the story off and then make it clear, this story is not going in the direction you thought.

One of the other movies is Happy New Year, which almost no one remembers but Falk starred as a thief who with Charles Durning tries to take down a jewelry store, and features of Falk’s best comedic performances. Sadly, it wasn’t in a better movie.

The third is another classic film, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. In which Falk played himself. To say more than that would spoil the movie, but it remains a truly original film and I think probably captures Falk and what made his so enduring and popular an actor better than I can describe.

Not long after that, Falk returned to Columbo in 1989, and he was good and the shows were good, but it was never great. Never hit those highs that it once had. And of course Falk was older by this time. He turned 60 in 1987, but in his sixties and seventies he still had some good roles, was in some good movies. There were plenty of cliched roles in which he turned in a performance that he could have done in his sleep, but then he also made a TV version of The Sunshine Boys or had small roles in a movie like Lakeboat, where he was a key figure in a great ensemble. There was In the Spirit and Roommates, A Storm in Summer and The Thing About My Folks. Faraway, So Close! and Three Days of Rain. He returned to the stage. He wrote a memoir. He was an artist and never stopped. Until, of course, he had to stop.

One of these days, I will go to Budapest. For many reasons. (I’ve never been) But while I’m there, I’ll stop at Falk Miksa Street, where there is a bronze statue of Falk as Columbo. With a statue of a basset hound nearby. I may have to buy a cigar and pose mid-thought next to him. Just because.

And maybe that’s one of the things about Peter Falk. There’s a statue of him in Budapest, which doesn’t make sense, but also, why not. There’s something familiar about him. But also, putting up a statue in another country doesn’t seem completely insane.

Review: Columbo Returns

When I think about my utter and complete disdain for the endless retreads and remakes and reboots going on in TV and film right now, I think about how there was a period where old shows were being revived as movies of the week and I try to comfort myself with the belief that it’s cyclical and this too shall pass.

(For the record I don’t entirely believe that, but also, we all believe some things we think might be false)

Anyway, in 1989 after 11 years, Columbo was revived with Peter Falk returning with his trench coat. And a few other people came along for the ride as well. Many of the early episodes were directed by people who worked on the original series (James Frawley, Leo Penn) and even some of the writers came back to pen episodes including Peter S. Fischer.

"Columbo Goes to the Guillotine". The first episode back and it’s directed by Leo Penn, who directed the final episode of the regular series. It’s written by William Read Woodfield, who was an acclaimed photographer and one of the big writer-producers of the Mission: Impossible TV series. It features Anthony Andrews as the murderer (who I kept trying to remember where I knew him from, and it he starred in Brideshead Revisited, among other things). Andrews plays a fake psychic with a colorful past and he comes up against a James Randi-like magician and debunker of psychic phenomenon. Clever on many fronts with some nice humorous moments. Not great but a welcome return.

"Murder, Smoke and Shadows". James Frawley returns after directing a batch of episodes in the final seasons in an episode that’s set on the Universal Studios Lot. Fisher Stevens plays a young director who kills an old college friend played by Jeff Perry. Molly Hagan has a small but memorable role. Stevens character is annoying but that was intentional. I feel like for the people involved, they were commenting on a type of director and it would be more entertaining for them than for most viewers. There are a few long digressions about the nature of film and filmmaking which were good. And Frawley is the man behind The Muppet Movie (one of the great movies about “the dream factory”) and the director of most of the tv show The Monkees (where producers cast people to play fake musicians on a tv show who then formed a real band - which says something about myth and illusion and Hollywood, but I don’t know what it is). Overall entertaining.

"Sex and the Married Detective". A thoroughly meh episode. Lindsay Crouse plays a sex therapist whose partner is cheating and she kills him in a pretty impressive way. Of course then the episode goes off the rails. I expected her to try and implicate her assistant, who was also sleeping with him, There were some amusing moments, and Peter Jurasik had a small role. It was also nice to see the Music Center and watch Falk play the tuba, but overall, too long and bland.

"Grand Deceptions". Robert Foxworth plays an ex-colonel working at a think tank that’s running guns to different countries and also training militia members. He kills someone to cover up all the things he’s doing while hiding behind his mentor, a former General who’s the ceremonial head off the think tank. It’s fine. In retrospect it’s very creepy. It’s about an ex soldier who works for a right wing foundation which helps to destroy the world by overthrowing governments and supporting the militia movement, undermining democracy at home and abroad. It’s that occasional episode where you have go, this is not a Columbo episode.

"Murder: A Self Portrait". I think this may have been my favorite of the recent ones. Patrick Bachau plays a wealthy artist living in Malibu with his wife and a young model - and his ex-wife lives next door. He ends up killing his ex to cover up an old murder. It’s mostly entertaining because Bachau plays such an entertaining and pompous character and watching him and Columbo go back and forth is fun. Especially as they’re doing it while he paints Columbo. Also, the final episode directed by James Frawley.

"Columbo Cries Wolf". I’ll admit that I forgot the title, which makes sense partway through the episode with a very impressive twist. And the ending and how he catches the murderer, so good. Essentially a Hugh Hefner sequence publisher fighting his co-owner who wants to sell her 51% of the company. The actors are just okay. I keep thinking about how some of my love for the old series was the guest stars and how the show used them and in the revival, a lot of the actors are all pretty forgettable.

"Agenda for Murder". Patrick McGoohan returns as star and director of this episode in the world of politics. McGoohan is great, managing to be overbearing, on top of everything as one would expect of a lawyer and politico, but the episode falls a little flat. Maybe because it’s reminiscent of other older episodes. It’s well done and I can’t fault any aspect of the episode – some of it’s quite dramatic, it has some funny lines, overall it’s very well done. But I can’t help think this was a sign that the show had overstayed its welcome. There’s so many moving parts that go into a show, capturing that magic is hard, and there’s something depressing about saying about a show that used to be: it’s fine. Better than most of what’s on the air, but a shadow of what it once was.

"Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo". Peter S. Fischer returns to Columbo (in the interim he was busy co-creating and writing and producing this little show called Murder, She Wrote) writing this episode starring Helen Shaver (Desert Hearts) as the murderer. On the one hand, she doesn’t cover her tracks well and makes little attempt to hide that she’s the killer. Columbo tells his sergeant pretty early on that she’s guilty. The episode also feels a little padded as there are multiple scenes establishing that she’s not quite there mentally. But Roscoe Lee Browne has a great cameo and he and Falk have a good scene together, and it’s a good ending.

"Uneasy Lies the Crown". When I saw Steven Bochco’s name in the credits, I was excited. The backstory turns out to be a bit more complicated as he originally wrote this back in the 70s, and it never got filmed and apparently it was pulled out of a drawer for the revival. Even still, it’s pretty good. The villain is a bit dull, and overall it’s just meh. Though I did enjoy how for the first 15 minutes or so, we’re completely unsure what’s going on and how it all connects. And then suddenly it does. Maybe if they had gotten some fabulous actors to guest star, it would have been more enjoyable. Not necessarily a better episode, but a more enjoyable one, but overall, just meh. The title, though - this is an episode about a dentist - just perfect!

"Murder in Malibu". Not a great episode. Jackson Gillis wrote some very good episodes of the series, but this was not one. Clearly they don’t think much of romance writers - or romance readers. The cast wasn’t that great. Falk is good and there are some nice touches. I mean, the dune buggy arriving to take Columbo from a suspect’s house to where the found a gun buried on the beach made me smile as did scenes with the medical examiner and various other moments. It ends on an amusing note from Falk but overall, meh.

"Columbo Goes to College". Two college students kill their professor. And do it in a clever way. But honestly both are so loathsome, you can’t wait for them to be caught. (Or for one to kill off the other so they’ll only be half as annoying and loathsome). Robert Culp appears as the father of one of them. You can see Falk leaning into the slow old man routine to try and catch them. Honestly both were so loathsome, you really want them caught. Overall just okay.

“Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.” George Hamilton hosts an America’s Most Wanted type tv show and kills a rival newscaster who’s uncovered dirt about Hamilton’s past. Would his sordid past be an issue today? Hard to say. The result was fine.

“Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star.” Dabney Coleman plays a high profile lawyer who kills his long time partner, a former rock star, after learning that she’s having an affair. He uses his assistant to help him with his alibi, which she figures out, and blackmails him, with a contingency plan so she can’t be killed. Not a great twist tbh.

“Death Hits the Jackpot.” Rip Torn is a jeweler whose nephew has a winning lotto ticket. The man is also going through a divorce so Torn graciously claims the reward so that the ex-wife won’t get anything. And then he kills the nephew so he can keep it all. There’s also a chimpanzee. Despite Rip Torn chewing scenery and a chimp, it’s just okay.

“No Time To Die.” Horrible episode as Columbo is at his nephew’s wedding and the bride gets kidnapped by a psychopath. Poorly plotted, tonally different from the rest of the series, with multiple moments that don’t make sense. Adapted from an Ed McBain novel – though he doesn’t get credited. Even the bad episodes have good moments, whether it’s Falk having a good time, some banter, a good villain. This has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

“A Bird in the Hand…” A disappointingly flat episode from longtime Columbo writer Jackson Gillis. It features a number of little moments that are entertaining. It has as guest stars Tyne Daly and Greg Evigan, but it all just feels flat. In the way that made for TV movies are derided for being. The writing is good but not great. The acting is fine, but not too engaging. Maybe because it was rushed? But while I liked it, it’s hard not to watch it and feel throughout that it’s not as good as it could have been.

“It’s All in the Game.” Faye Dunaway and Claudia Christian plan a murder and while the episode is not a great one, it’s enjoyable to watch everyone work, and especially to watch Dunaway charm Falk. Also the only episode that Falk ever wrote - and it’s one of the only episodes where he lets a murderer go unpunished.

“Butterfly in Shades of Grey.” William Shatner plays a radio host with an uncomfortable relationship with his adopted daughter/producer (played by Molly Hagan). It’s not great but it has its moments. I do expect better from Peter S. Fischer.

“Undercover.” On the one hand this case opens with two men killing each other and an insurance investigator (played by Ed Begley) says that the two were ex-bank robbers involved in a famous heist where the money was never recovered. The result is an episode - scripted by the legendary Gerry Day (seriously, look her up) - that shifts from the usual Columbo format. To learn more Columbo goes undercover as two different characters, and on the one hand, it’s amusing to see Falk do this, but also it’s very half-assed. With like one scene for each character and Columbo learns one piece of information and then we move on.

The joy of Falk is watching him as an actor, which we don’t always see in the revival. And it’s fun to watch him here, because I grew up with him as that guy with the weird extended cameo in The Great Muppet Caper before seeing him in Cassavetes movies and Wings of Desire and all these other random roles and there’s a way in which he was both a character actor and a star. He so often played a very similar role, and yet, was able to do so many things that were comedic and dramatic, where he kept the audience and other characters in the scene off balance in a way that was exciting. He gets a few good lines or scenes in the revival of the show, but overall, he’s playing a fixed character and it becomes dull. I don’t know if that’s inevitable when playing the same character for so long. I don’t think it is. The strange rhythms of the show early on are lost. And the oddball detective is now more a serious of quirks than a character. And so there are moments where you can see Falk and the people behind the scenes actively trying to recapture that magic they had in the seventies. And they can’t.

“Strange Bedfellows.” George Wendt plays a race horse owner with a ne’er do well brother he bumps off. “Norm” does a good job playing a heavy in the episode, which also features Rod Stieger as a mob boss. The problem is the end, where Columbo and the mob boss set it up and threaten Wendt that either he confesses so Columbo can arrest him, or the mobster will have him killed. It’s distasteful. Especially for a cop. Well, maybe a typical for a lot of cops, but for Columbo, it’s a betrayal. He couldn’t outsmart the criminal, so he threatened to have him killed. It very much feels like the antithesis of Columbo.

Also maybe worth noting that while previously the movies would show up a few times a year, this episode aired a year after the previous one. After two airing in 1994, this aired in May 1995, and then the last four aired in 1997, 1998, 2001. and 2003.

“A Trace of Murder.” I like Barry Corbin and David Rasche, who have some fun, and the episode is reasonably clever, as a wife and her lover decide to kill her husband’s business rival and frame her husband. And the lover happens to be the head of the LAPD crime lab. And yet out doesn’t quite come together. Maybe because when done right, these episodes show how the murder happened and was covered up, and then we see how it gets solved by piecing elements and clues together. This is one episode that felt very had a hunch and didn’t really have any evidence.

“Ashes to Ashes.” Patrick McGoohan returns again for an episode he directs and stars in as a funeral director and murders Rue McClanahan, a gossip columnist, to cover up his tawdry past. It was solid, but not exceptional. It is notable for being written by Jeffrey Hatcher, who since then has written films like Stage Beauty, Casanova, The Duchess, Mr. Holmes, The Good Liar.

“Murder with Too Many Notes.” Billy Connolly is a composer who kills his proteges, who has been doing much of the work in recent years. I love Connolly, but very lukewarm on the whole production.

“Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” Matthew Rhys plays the murderer, who I don’t think was alive when the show first started, along with Jennifer Sky, Carmine Giovinazzo. And it’s fine. But the last couple episodes make it clear that the character and the show has run its course.

It’s sad that Falk and Columbo couldn’t find some way to conclude things. To let the character retire and go out with, well, a better episode than those last few were. To just remind people and mark the fact that this was a good show and a good character. Show those elbows and weird rhythms and strange moments that made the original series such a strange and entertaining and unique work. Or maybe the problem is me. Because I don’t want the end to be some mediocre episodes after which Falk gets dementia and spends his final years not knowing who he is or recognizing the people and places around him. Maybe the problem is that I prefer fiction to the reality of getting older. But can you blame me?

Columbo wasn’t deeply realistic. In the 70s when the show first aired and was at its peak, you had all these films about police work and crime that sought to portray the reality of it all. This was a different kind of show and I think one of the great pleasures of good crime fiction - and Columbo could be - was how they manage to craft something familiar and comforting, but when it comes right down it, either because of the murder or the murderer getting caught, it hurts. The personal private stakes of life and love and power. Reminding you that it’s not all comforting.

Go watch the originals. Set in the seventies in Los Angeles when life, well, it wasn’t simpler. Not at all simpler. But a little different. But then, we always like to remember people at their best. And Peter Falk in the seventies was at the top of his game.

Review: The Bubble (2022 Film)

I like Judd Apatow. I mean, he occasionally annoys me, but he occasionally annoys everyone. He’s very good at working with actors and comedians, with finding a space for people with different backgrounds and approaches to work together and emerge from the scene with something more than the sum of its parts. Although like a lot of comedians, plot isn’t his strongest suit. And all of these skills and shortcomings are evident in The Bubble, which was entertaining and enjoyable, but not that great.

The film itself is based on how Jurassic World had to go into production during the pandemic because…reasons. And so Cliff Beasts 6 sounds absurd and insane, but is it really?

Leading the film is Karen Gillan, who is great, and who deserves more. She really does. Her character skipped the last film in the franchise to make a horrible, offensive film that bombed - and got horrible reviews - so she’s back for this one. With her are Iris Apatow, Fred Armisen, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, Gus Khan, Leslie Mann, Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowicz, and more.

Apatow is a young tiktoker acting for the first time. Duchony and Mann were married and broke up publicly and horribly and are now reconciling – while Duchovny tries to rewrite the film’s script. Pascal is doing drugs and going crazy. Key wrote a boom and started something that is totally not a cult.

Khan, it should be noted, has some of the best scenes in the film.

There are also a number of cameos from different actors ranging from John Cena as the very bad stunt coordinator working via zoom to Daisy Ridley as a peloton instructor/drug hallucination to Kate McKinnon as a studio exec, which range from funny to narratively necessary to nice try. (which is to say, like all cameos)

There was one point in the film, I forget where exactly, where I remember thinking, they have no idea how to end the film. Although the ending was pretty good, but the film did seem to flail briefly, trying to find a way to reach that end point.

I suppose part of the problem and why despite enjoying myself, I’m not overly enthusiastic about it is just that I kept thinking up more extreme and crazy scenarios. Armisen plays the director who won Sundance with a movie filmed on an iPhone and now that he’s making a franchise big budget film, will not go back to that life no matter what the cost, and that was just not as funny or given as much time as I would have guessed. The filming itself should have been crazier. I’m imagining acting styles and preferences and approaches becoming unhinged as time goes on due to the shoot being drawn out and the rigors of isolation. The pretentiousness and self importance of trying to entertain the world in a difficult time and suffering for their art should have been more at the forefront.

I guess what I’m saying is that as a behind the scenes saga of an insane film shoot, it had its moments, but it needed to be crazier. For those of us who have seen Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams and Lost in La Mancha (which for those who haven’t seen them are “making of” films about Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, and Terry Gilliam’s initial failed attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), The Bubble just doesn’t come off as insane enough.

At the same time, I laughed. There’s an especially good moment where Gillan has a moment of revelation and she says after, that was real, that wasn’t me acting. And David Duchovny deadpanned, we know, it felt real. And there are these great little moments throughout the film. It just needed more of them.

Review: The Gambler (2014 film)

I wasn’t a big fan.

My biggest problem: I just don’t buy Wahlberg as a college professor. The classroom scenes feel like the classroom scene in a movie. They’re showy scenes that bear little relationship to what classrooms are like. Having such a big scene like that early in the film establishes that this isn’t reality, this is a movie. Which is not necessarily a problem. There are plenty of movies that operate well in a heightened not quite real world with heightened, stylized language. This isn’t such a movie, though.

While I may dislike Wahlberg’s character, the cast is one of the best things about the film. To watch Jessica Lange in the movie though is to watch a great actor playing a hard flinty character. I mean Lange is always fabulous and she sinks her teeth into a character, does not want sympathy from the audience, but by the end you can’t help but like her.

The flaw in the 1974 film – though admittedly it has been a number of years since I watched it – was that the central character played by James Caan had his problems and his underlying psychology was hinted at more than explained. This remake could have sought to explain and detail the causes behind his nature and the psychology of it. In a way that would be ultimately eye rolling and exhausting to watch. But that does seem to be the approach that so many films, and especially so many remakes, take to characters.

Instead the film took a different angle. Wahlberg plays a character who doesn’t exactly come together and make sense. Although one could say that about many of his characters - most of characters? - who tend to be more a collection of behaviors and some attitude than coherent human beings. (His characters aren’t even bags of bones, as the old saying about fictional character goes, but a few bones). In this film Wahlberg alternates between being a wordy drama queen and being silent and scowling.

And the fact that the character - and the film - go from one kind of scene to the other means that it’s even more important that the main character be a coherent character. To find a way to explain and show us how he is a character vibrating between extremes. And Wahlberg can’t do that.

It’s like the scenes between Wahlberg and Lange. She is the better actor. I mean, that’s not even a question. People who love Wahlberg should be able to go, obviously. What’s frustrating is that when watching the scenes between the two of them, my reaction shouldn’t be, Lange is such a great actor. My second thought, sure, but my first thought should be to see how the two of them interact. How we can see how they’re related, how he lives and acts in relation to her

The same could be said of Brie Larson who has a fairly thankless role as “the girl”. Sorry, “the student” that Wahlberg gets involved with. Because he’s playing a professor so of course he has to hook up with a female student. It’s predictable and exhausting. And I’m a big fan of Larson, have been for years, and she does a good job conveying the character’s introversion. She plays a lot of introverts, in a way that suggests that she is one as well. But as with so much, she’s able to nail certain scenes so well, but as written, the character doesn’t quite work. She’s able to add depth to the character, but in the end, you know what her character is going to do. Again, we’re not in real life, we’re in a movie. She sleeps with him, she sighs over his behavior, and the fact that there’s any more to the character is because Larson is talented.

I mentioned before about how Wahlberg’s performance and the writing of his character is so off. I do enjoy William Monahan’s writing (here and in other films). And watching John Goodman and Michael K. Williams’ characters and what they’re able to do with the language is fun. Again, the whole film could have consisted of heightened language that actors have to wrap their mouths around, but it doesn’t. And so this jerky tone of the language feels odd.

The film is good, but it can’t pull together. It is not a film about life, that finds that deep sting of existential despair. That pain of not measuring up. This male rage and anger that lacks direction or focus. The way that even an intellectual living in comfort who comes from money is not immune to such concerns.

Instead it just flounders around, playing with ideas and speeches, but it doesn’t believe any of them. It’s not committed to these ideas or a point of view. Because Wahlberg manages to pay off everyone, get off with his life intact, and then he runs across town to Larson’s character. And if I wasn’t already shaking my head and done with this movie, that ending made it clear.

Early in the film, in the “class” that Wahlberg “teaches”, he lectures the students about unhappiness, one of the students remarks how he drives a BMW and how can he be unhappy. And the people who made the movie and its lead actor seem to feel that way. He can’t really be unhappy in that state. People in that state can’t be really unhappy unless they make themselves unhappy, and they can make themselves happy as well. Which is such a bland and anondyne statement, but that’s all the movie has to offer, really.

A Guide to the Guest Stars in Call My Agent! (Dix pour cent)

On twitter a while back, Erin Biba commented about how it would be nice if someone had a list of who the guest stars in Call My Agent are and what films we should watch. Erin is a great science journalist and spent college studying and learning useful valuable things, while I was watching a lot of movies and reading novels, so it’s that rare moment where I can actually offer something.

Well, I made a few suggestions for Cecile de France, who goes starred in the very first episode, and as it’s good idea and it gives me the chance to show off and tell people what foreign movies they should watch, I decided to give it a try.

Before we begin. Ground rules: there are none. I didn’t watch any movies in order to make this list and sound smart (I don’t have that kind of time). Also, if you take me up and decide to watch one of these films and hate it, I’m not responsible.

Season One

Episode 1: Cecile de France.

I love Cecile de France. She starred in the great character ensemble Avenue Montaigne, which is a delight. (writer-director Daniele Thompson is an underrated talent, in my book). She’s been in some great dramatic films like A Secret and Mesrine. She was also part of Cedric Klapisch’s great ensemble cast (with Audrey Tatou, Romain Duris, Kelly Reilly, Judith Godréche and others) in a series of films that began with L’Auberge Espagnole and continued in Russian Dolls and Chinese Puzzle, which starts in college and follows them afterwards as they grow and change in different and surprising ways.

Episode 2: Line Renaud and Françoise Fabian.

Renaud has acted, but to my knowledge she’s primarily been a singer. Fabian has been in some classic French films including Belle de Jour and the Eric Rohmer film My Night at Maud’s (she played Maud). More recently she was in François Ozon’s 5x2, and she played the mother in Daniele Thompson’s great dysfunctional family Christmas movie La Bûche. (I enjoy dysfunctional family holiday movies and that is imho one of the best).

Also worth mentioning that Renaud has been an AIDS activist for nearly four decades and Fabian was one of the 343!

Episode 3: Nathalie Baye, Laura Smet, Gilles Lellouche, Zinedine Soualem.

Baye is a cinematic icon. She was in The Return of Martin Guerre (which I would argue is one of the all time great films, and one of the iconic French films). If you haven’t seen it, well, you’ll see that it’s been ripped off a lot over the years, but I think it still holds up. She was also in the Truffaut classic Day for Night, and Tell No One, which is a great thriller I highly recommend to everyone. (For people who don’t know, the French love thrillers, have made some truly great ones, and I’ll put Tell No One on a list of notable recent ones)

Smet is Baye’s real life daughter (with Johnny Hallyday, who is kinda the French Elvis, which makes Smet European royalty in my book - I mean, really, what have the Hapsburgs done for anyone this century?). She’s been in a few very good films including The Bridesmaid (directed by Claude Chabrol based on the Ruth Rendell thriller), and 2014’s Eden by Mia Hansen-Løve, which I especially love.

Lellouche starred in My Piece of the Pie from director Cédric Klapisch, and he was a supporting character in a lot of great films including Tell No One, Paris, Mesrine, Little White Lies.

Soualem looked familiar but didn’t ring any bells, so I looked up his filmography, which is impressive. He’s a regular collaborator of Cedric Klapisch and has worked with Raoul Peck and Julian Schnabel, Costa-Gavras and Michel Gondry. So I feel a little bad for not recognizing him, though he seems like a character actor.

Episode 4: Audrey Fleurot.

Likely best known for the film The Intouchables, which was a massive sensation, and I’ll admit I’m lukewarm towards the film, but the actors make it a must see. Fleurot also starred in two good French TV series, Spiral, about lawyers and cops where she plays a cynical but brilliant lawyer, and Un village français (A French Village) about a town under German occupation during the Second World War.

Episode 5: Julie Gayet, Joeystarr, Zinedine Soualem.

The only film I know Gayet for is My Best Friend, which is a fine 2006 Patrice Leconte film.

Joeystarr I don’t know at all. Soualem, I mentioned in Episode 3.

Episode 6: François Berléand.

People might recognize him from his roles in The Transporter films, but he’s worked with a lot of great filmmakers including Louis Malle (May Fools, Au revoir les enfants), Claude Chabrol (Comedy of Power), and Catherine Breillat (Romance). He was in 2004’s The Chorus, which was fabulous, Tell No One, which I mentioned before. I don’t know if he can swim or not, which is what the episode hinges on, but he can do just about anything else.

Season Two

Episode 1: Virginie Efira, Ramzy Bedia

Efria is best known to me (and everyone, I think) for her role in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film Elle and for her collaborations with the talented French filmmaker Justine Triet (Sibyl, In Bed with Victoria).

Bedia I don’t know.

Episode 2: Fabrice Luchini and Christophe Lambert

Because I am a guy of a certain age, it is impossible for me not to think of Lambert as Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. (Yes, I can talk about the film and his performance for an embarrassingly long length of time…though I like to think I would be able to restrain myself if I ever met him in person). But besides Highlander and a vast number of other English language productions he’s also been in some great French films like Claire Denis’ White Material (with Isabelle Huppert) and Luc Besson’s Subway.

Luchini has been in films like Paris, a great ensemble film I loved, Moliere, a fictional film about the playwright. He also played Julius Caesar in one of the Asterix and Obelix films.

Episode 3: Julien Doré, Norman Thavaud, Aymeline Valade

Doré is mostly a musician. Thavaud is mostly a YouTuber. Valade is a model. I don’t know much of anything about any of them.

Episode 4: Isabelle Adjani and Julien Doré.

Isabelle Adjani has been in movies like Possession, Camille Claudel, The Story of Adele H, Quartet, Nosferatu. She was also in Queen Margot, a 1994 film based on the Dumas novel about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which was highly acclaimed (and won her the Cesar Award for Best Actress), but I found boring. She was also in Ishtar, which is in English I know, and it was loathed by many, but which I liked. (Though admittedly if I was casting a North African revolutionary in a film, she wouldn’t be on the list) So, no accounting for taste.

Episode 5: Guy Marchand

I know Marchand for his role in Diane Kurys’ film Entre Nous. I know that he also played Nestor Burma in a long running series adapting the detective novels of Leo Malet. I’ve never seen the show, but I like Burma, so it’s on my list if I can find it somewhere.

Episode 6: Juliette Binoche

Binoche is one of the world’s greatest living actors. She’s been in some iconic English language films (The English Patient, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). There are many French films that jump to mind. Summer Hours, which I think is genius and this small intimate and perfect movie about a family that is not a tragedy but just emotional and thoughtful. Paris, which is a great ensemble film. Flight of the Red Balloon. Camille Claudel 1915. Clouds of Sils Maria. Let the Sunshine In. Three Colors: Blue. The Horseman on the Roof. High Life. I know I’m forgetting so many films and so many good ones, but that’s a start.

Binoche also starred in the French comedy Telle mére, telle fills (Baby Bumps), with Call Your Agent star Camille Cottin. But I have not seen it.

Season Three

Episode 1: Jean Dujardin

People love The Artist. Well, people not me, at least. I do recommend his two OSS 117 films, which are entertaining spoofs of sixties spy movies. (Though if you hate old spy movies…)

Episode 2: Monica Bellucci

People know her for her English language films like The Matrix sequels and Spectre, and well, one of the most beautiful people in the world. But as far as foreign language films, there’s Malena, which is technically Italian, but it’s a Romance language. (You need subtitles to watch it! What do you care!) There’s Brotherhood of the Wolf if you want a crazy 17th century action adventure film. She played Cleopatra in one of the Asterix and Obelix films. There was Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, which was honestly one of the most painfully depressing and bleak movies I’ve ever seen. So no shame if you never watch it. Le deuxiéme soufflé and A Burning Hot Summer is good, too.

Episode 3: Gérard Lanvin and Guy Marchand

Lanvin is best known for his award-winning performance in The Taste of Others.

Marchand I wrote about earlier in Season 2.

Episode 4: Isabelle Huppert

Huppert is one of the great living actors and one of those performers who can do almost anything. I still regret that I wasn’t able to see her on stage a few years ago. But in her film career she’s done a lot of intense powerful projects like Entre Nous, La Ceremonie, The Piano Teacher, Ma Mere, White Material, Things To Come, Elle. She’s just one of those actors who is always great but there isn’t a typical performance or style or approach that she seems to have. Just a wonder to watch her.

Episode 5: Béatrice Dalle

She’s been in films like Night on Earth, but as far as her French films, best start with Clean by Olivier Assayas. (Every Assayas film is worth watching). She’s collaborated with the great director Calire Denis a few times (I Can’t Sleep, Trouble Every Day, The Intruder). Also, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf.

Episode 6: Claude Lelouch

There’s a an all star cast of guest stars in this episode, but except for one, they’ve been in previous episodes. Lelouch is a director, and I’ll admit that I’m not that familiar with him and didn’t know he was still alive (but he is! And he’s still working in his 80s!). But his 1966 film A Man and A Woman I remember making an impression on me years ago, as did his film Les Miserables, which is not an adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel. But it does start with the novel and someone reading it and, well it’s hard to explain, but I do recommend it.

Season Four

Episode 1: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Mimie Mathy

I mentioned earlier that I consider Laura Smet to be European royalty? I believe the same of actor and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is the daughter of the late musician Serge Gainsbourg and actor/director/ handbag designer/all around icon Jane Birkin. A lot of people may know her for her English language films including the titular Jane Eyre in the 1996 Zeffrelli film opposite William Hurt as Rochester, 21 Grams, The Science of Sleep, I’m Not There, The City of Your Final Destination, and a series of collaborations with director Lars von Trier (Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac). In France she’s been in films like La Buche (dysfunctional family Christmas movie). She’s worked with her partner Yvan Attal in films like My Wife is an Actress, Happily Ever After, Do Not Disturb, and The Jews.

Mathy, I’m forced to admit, I don’t know at all other than her appearance here.

Episode 2: Franck Dubosc

I don’t know Dubosc at all, I’m sorry to say.

Episode 3: José Garcia

He’s primarily a comedian and I can see that he does a lot of voice acting, but I don’t know any of his French films.

Episode 4: Sandrine Kiberlain

I know that Kiberlain has acted in many films but the only performance I know is that she played Simone de Beauvoir in the film Violette.

Episode 5: Sigourney Weaver

She’s an American who appeared on the British tv show Doc Martin. Has she done anything else? (I’m kidding)

Episode 6: Jean Reno

A regular collaborator with director Luc Besson, Reno starred in The Big Blue (my personal favorite Besson film) about a pair of free divers which is beautiful and poetic. The Crimson Rivers is a strange creepy thriller that is just great. I know there’s a sequel, but I have not seen it. I also recommend The Corsican File, which isn’t great but it’s entertaining and Reno and his presence are the star of the film.

Review: Archie Goes Home by Robert Goldsborough

I read this novel as I have read all of Robert Goldsborough’s Nero Wolfe novels. What’s interesting about Goldsborough is that his Wolfe books can be grouped into two distinct categories. First there are the seven earlier novels, which he wrote between 1986 and 1994. In those he picked up where Rex Stout left off. Stout always kept his characters contemporary. They never aged but in ways large and small, time pased in the novels. Goldsborough continued this, picking up a few years after Stout’s final novel and marching on.

Then he stopped, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was his day job as a journalist that got in the way, but after retiring in 2004, he began writing another mystery series beginning with Three Strikes You’re Dead and continuing for four more books. And then in 2012, he returned to Nero Wolfe.

There was a difference, though. These books were set firmly in the past. In fact Goldsborough makes a book of locating them very precisely in the past. And I can’t blame him since the 50s and 60s when he’s set most of his books are the era where a lot of us love the books. And really the era where I think of the novels as being set. I know of course that Fer-de-Lance, the first of the series, was published in 1934. The duo worked for the government during the war and then in the late forties took on Arnold Zeck in a trilogy of novels, but after that, the series settled into a rhythm.

Goldsborough wants to play with our positive memories of and associations with the era and the books. But in that first book for his return, he took a different tact. Telling the story of how Archie Goodwin met Nero Wolfe. And that really explicits ties the characters to a time and setting.

I thought about this fact reading the new book, which I should note is fine. I read it in the course of a single lazy Saturday and enjoyed myself. I certainly don’t regret spending the time reading it. But I have to ask why.

Like Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, this is a story that no one was clamoring for. (I shouldn’t say that. Maybe someone was. I have no idea what fans want). But my point is that it’s a story that’s not especially necessary. The mystery isn’t very good. It smacks of fan service. The filling in of characters’ backgrounds, telling stories no one was demanding be told, answering questions no one was asking. In this case, we follow Archie back to his hometown in Ohio and spend time with his mother and aunt and the small town he grew up in as he solves a case of what seems like a suicide.

It’s a trend right now, unfortunately. Moreso now that we’re being overrun with remakes and retreads and re-imaginings. This is the answer to what so many writers do, to over explain the characters and their backgrounds. Somehow these characters existed before and we’re known and understood, but now we have to explain them in more detail, dig into their past even more, and not even in especially interesting ways.

I’m not about the spoil anything, and as I wrote above, the mystery isn’t very good, but I can’t help but think that this says that Goldsborough’s time with the characters is coming to a close. Because he doesn’t have much to say. There’s very little the we learn about Archie, his hometown, his mother or anyone else the warrants a book length manuscript. For any new book, but especially for one that is explicitly playing with the formula, trying something different (and as is explained in the afterward, Stout had a few different answers for Archie’s background in different books) there has to be a reason. It can’t just be. Why are we breaking the formula? And the book never answers that question. It doesn’t have much to say about the characters. Archie stops by different places in town and notes that some are the same and others have changed an that’s really about it. It’s a small town, but he doesn’t interact with many people he knew.

Honestly, the more I think about the book, the more disappointed I am by it. My initial reaction being the result of being catered to than of actually being presented with work that I could sit with. The book was fine for an afternoon where I didn’t want to think, but nothing more. If it were a novella or short story as opposed to a novel, I would have been much kinder in my assessment. Because it doesn’t have enough story to be a novel and is padded out.

I’m not a fan in general of series that continue after the original writer’s death. I don’t think the world needs more Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy or Robert B. Parker novels. (Honestly, I think the world had too many written by them when alive…). There are pleasant surprises, of course. I’ve enjoyed a few Holmes novels over the years. Anthony Hororwitz’s Bond novels are good (though Hororwitz can write far better). Joe Gores wrote Hammett and Spade & Archer. Sophie Hannah writes a great Agatha Christie pastiche in her Poirot novels. And Ace Atkins is continuing the Spenser series, but he’s made changes to the series and doesn’t want them to feel like the wet novels Parker wrote at the end of his life.

I can’t lie, if I were asked if I wanted to write a Nero Wolfe novel, I would almost certainly say yes, if only to see if I could pull it off and to play with those characters in that world. But I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason.

The Ship of Theseus thought experiment questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains the same object. I think about this when it comes to series. Because there is a point where what is cool and cutting edge becomes static and dull and cliched. Even though sometimes they predated the cliche or were the cause of the cliche. Still, that’s just how culture works. That’s how time moves on. And after so many years and decades, as a series changes hands, it is even the same series? Are they the same characters? Can they be?

I would argue that Goldsborough changed the series when he returned to writing them in 2012. And some will question how much that was necessary and how true he remained to the characters. But even without those major changes, they wouldn’t be the same. They couldn’t be. Should we simply let the characters and series die with the creators? Because it feels depressing to leave it to capitalism, which is the state of things now. How many impressive works and careers falter due to low sales and how many mediocre series continued by other people limp along?

So many unnecessary books. So many pointless films. The movie Solo was good, it just didn’t serve much purpose except expanding the franchise and serving IP.

I loved Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books. The banter between Wolfe and Archie. Or Archie and other characters. That voice of Archie’s which made it so much fun. The character of Wolfe, who remains such a colorful puzzle. There’s such joy to the novels and the setting. Wolfe is an aesthete and the books are full of pleasure. (though the readers’ pleasure is different from Wolfe’s to be fair). Goldsborough writing stories with the characters, but he fails to capture what made them such a joy. But I suppose it was a mistake to think that anyone could.

And it’s unfair to place all of my annoyances about the glut of these stories onto a slender novel like Archie Goes Home. But to be fair, the novel can’t even justify its own premise, or length. I’d like to think that Goldsborough could write another good novel, a good summation of his work and his feeling towards Wolfe and these novels, but he doesn’t seem to have anything to say.

Review: Caddyshack

I understand why Caddyshack was popular, and as someone who loves things from his youth which I admit are objectively bad, I understand why people still like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. I’m not such a snob that I think that popularity and quality never coincide, but here they do not. And part of me wants to sigh and shake my head at what was popular and considered funny in the long ago time of 1980, but it’s not as though much has changed.

Part of the problem is that Caddyshack is really two movies. One is centered around Danny, a young caddy from a large family who wants to go to college and get a caddy scholarship to do that. He’s sort of seeing an Irish girl with a very strong accent who also works at the club and in the course of the film also manages to hook up with Lacey, who is, well, the movie sex symbol. Our hero has a rival in another caddy and the teens who caddy operate on their own. And the film starts out seemingly about them, but then they quickly falls by the wayside.

Because there’s also another film happening at the same time, because the stars of the film - Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight - take over. And it’s sort of about a loutish new money member (Dangerfield) and the old school WASP judge (Knight). And then off to the side is Chase who’s playing an old money member but who’s a guy who does his own thing. And Murray plays Carl, a possibly insane groundkeeper.

One of the early scenes features Murray seeming to jerk off to a group of female golfers, but of course he’s not. His behavior and his comments are creepy rather than funny. And it distracts because Murray is in excellent form in a role that he mostly improvised. His fairly bizarre conversation with Chase’s character. Murray’s narration to himself as he tees off knocking the heads of a row of flowers. His story of caddying for the Dalai Lama. It’s a bizarre performance and except for that initial scene it’s brilliant. But to watch it today, after that opening my heart just sank. The film may have recovered, but it took awhile because all I could think was, this is disgusting misogynist nonsense.

The movie alternates between these two films I mentioned, but it mostly focuses on the adults. To the point where I often found myself forgetting about the kids and how he wants to get a caddy scholarship. And his Irish girlfriend thinks she might be pregnant, but then turns out not to be. Of course her Irish accent is, well, let’s just say not great. And Danny is also sleeping with someone else. Which in a movie that focused a little more on him might have worked? It doesn’t really.

Meanwhile this is essentially Rodney Dangerfield’s movie as he completely dominates the scenes he’s in and the scenes he’s in essentially as the film. And I can take issue with some aspects of the performance, but through force of personality and just being funny, he takes over the movie. The movie clearly wasn’t supposed to be about him the way the final cut worked out to be, but it’s his movie.

And I’m not his biggest fan, but he’s funny. I do keep thinking that he was much funnier when he did his act in a suit than when he dressed like a slob. I was reminded of that when watching the film.

Then there’s the gopher. Which in truth is all I remember of the movie from seeing it on cable when I was young. The gopher is causing havoc to the golf course and Murray’s Carl is supposed to be taking care of it. And of course doing a poor job of it. And so out of other options, Carl preps a massive amount of explosives. Stranger is the gopher crawling through tunnels and making funny sounds. The gopher is almost a third movie on top of the other two I already mentioned.

The strangest thing about this movie, though, is the ending. Carl sets off the explosives, which means that a large portion of the golf course explodes. Danny’s ball, which was perched on the very edge of the cup, drops in, giving them the win in the big golf game. And then we cut to Dangerfield looking at the camera yelling “we’re all going to get laid!”

And that’s the end of the movie.

Well, then the gopher dances to a Kenny Loggins’ song over the credits. But it’s just a bizarre ending and I have no idea what they were thinking. This wasn’t a movie that requires a lot to wrap top, but it just ended so abruptly.

I kept thinking that the film suffered from being made by people who could write scenes but couldn’t write films. They could build characters but they couldn’t build plots. This was early in the career of a lot of the people and the first movie that Harold Ramis directed. It’s amusing. They’re funny people. There are a few great moments in it. But overall it just falls flat. Just a series of sketches and scenes strung together that are mostly set at a golf club. I know some people talk about it as one of the best films about golf, one of the best sports, one of the funniest films. I just don’t get it.

R.I.P. Charles Grodin

Charles Gordon died a few weeks ago. It’s always strange how children learn about movie stars, which is often strange accidents of what our parents let us watch and what we encounter, but for me, no matter how many of his other works I’ve seen, Charles Gordon will always be Nicky Holiday from The Great Muppet Caper.

It’s not because I think of him primarily as a jewel thief romancing Miss Piggy (while wearing flowered socks and being Diana Rigg’s brother) that I was so unaware of much of his career. To read his obituaries I discovered that he was an award-winning writer and director working in theater and television. An old episode of Saturday Night Live he hosted where the conceit was that he had skipped rehearsals and he didn’t know that the show was live has to be one of the funniest in the history of the show. There were talk show appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman which are online which are hilarious. The best ones are honestly when he doesn’t have anything to plug (or just doesn’t care) and he’s just being entertaining and making the host and the audience laugh.

As an actor, Grodin had an impressive career. Over the past fifty years he was in The Heartbreak Kid, Catch-22, Heaven Can Wait, Real Life, Ishtar, Midnight Run. I keep thinking how his performance in The Heartbreak Kid really made the film work. His performance and Elaine May’s direction were so critical because it’s such a delicate dance. In Midnight Run, Grodin was hilarious as the mob accountant. There’s a reason why the film has been called the great buddy film of all time. Those scenes between Grodin and co-star Robert De Niro, which were often improvised, were the highlight of the film. The famous scene of the two in the box car talking about the good looking chickens is a highlight.

I always think of Grodin as working in the same vein as Elaine May and not because he was in two films she directed (The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar) but because they shared a comedic sensibility that was character driven and character focused. It was affectionate and probing humor, but it also wasn’t afraid to get dark. Grodin was one of the actors who came up in the wake of what Nichols and May and others had been doing. He was a great talker, a skilled improviser, but he could also say more with a silent look than most actors could manage.

Of course Grodin was also restless. Or maybe he wouldn’t have been so restless if he’d had better material to work with and was offered funnier and smarter movies. But he had a talk show for years and wrote books and recorded radio commentaries.

It’s two of the roles he took towards the end of his life that really stick with me. In part because they are recent, but also because I think in both cases the writer/directors understood Grodein’s sent eof humor and his style and his work and were able to craft roles that managed to be great roles and be great roles for him.

One is Louie, and Louie CK is, well, the less said about his behaviors the better, but Grodin’s role is simply some of the best writing CK did on the series. It’s the perfect pairing of actor and material, and the way that Grodin is so disinterested in his patient’s back pain. And then he explains how the spine evolved, how walking vertically changed how the spine works and in another 20,000 years it should be done evolving. Or a later monologue that Grodin delivers about love and loss which is so sad and beautiful, and whether one believes that is what love is or not, it says so much in such a short time.

The other great role he had was in Noah Baumbach’s film While We’re Young which starred Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. He plays Watts’ father, a legendary documentary filmmaker and there’s one exchange with his daughter before going to a celebration that has stayed in my mind:

“You know, looking back on my career, I wonder, how did I accomplish so much? If I'm honest with myself, it sometimes took being a selfish prick at the expense of you and your mother. Of course, I don't say that. I say talent, work, luck. Your husband doesn't realize what it takes, he... He still believes the speeches.”

Yes, they’re Baumbach’s words, but I like to think that with those two roles, one of the reasons that Grodin said yes to doing them, was because they had something to say. Old men who have come to an age where they understand the world better in some ways than they ever have, but few have much interest in their insights. But there is a sad weariness with which they look back. They did a lot and they haven’t had a bad life. They don’t regret what they did. But they realize what it cost and what they’ve lost and they feel that very acutely.

So many of Grodin’s characters seemed self aware, almost too self aware. they were looking out for all the angles, they were manipulating people, and in some of his final roles, he was still playing those characters. But older and less interested in trying to play all the angles. Instead they’re trying to get by. They have work, which they still care about, and little else, but they’re okay with that. There’s work. Even if work becomes annoying (like having to deal with people complaining about back pain, because that’s just an engineering problem). They may be louts. They may be jerks. Worse, they may be right. To find a darkness and pathos to his characters and life, but he sees life as being light and not heavy in the philosophical sense, and operates from that principle. Which is why when he was funny, when he found honesty in a character or a scene, it hit so deep and rang so true. It takes a special kind of performer to embody all of this – and make us like them. Hell, make us love them. Charles Grodin was that kind of talent.

Review: Debris

I waited until the first season of Debris finished before writing about the series. In part because I wanted to get a better sense of what they had set up. The first episode drops us into the world of the show, throwing around terminology and making references to events that are only later explained. (Or not, but when they start talking about Laghari reading, and other terms, there’s a reason the term “technobabble” was coined, but honestly, it works better here than in most shows. Particularly after a few episodes, the best way to deal with it is simply like being in a foreign country, and not being fluent, but you can follow the conversation and understand the context, but the nuance is sometimes lacking).

Of course quickly after the final episode aired, the show was canceled.

But I’m going to write about it anyway, because I really liked the show. Among other reasons, Debris was a great example of how to dramatize what’s happening, but not necessarily explain what’s happening. (For one excellent breakdown of this difference, refer to David Mamet’s famous - among many writers, at least - memo to the staff of the TV show The Unit where he lays out how the goal is not to convey information but to depict drama).

J.H. Wyman who created the show also created the short lived show Almost Human (which lasted one season in 2013-14) and was the show runner for Fringe, which was a show I loved. I still remember that first season finale of Fringe, which was shocking but also really helped to explain the world in fundamental ways. It was a reveal. Almost Human lasted one season and there were lots of things happening on the edges of the show. References to the wall are one that sticks in my mind to this day, and I remember it was deeply unsatisfying to finish the first season and get few answers or explanation of the show or its world. For all the show did well, I wanted answers. 

Maybe that comes from years of watching The X-Files and other shows, where the mysteries were excited, where we as fans wanted more, but there was no answer, and it was ultimately disappointing. As fans we want to know that there is a plan, that there are answers, that there is a logic to answering questions. As opposed to simply dragging things out indefinitely.

After one season, I can’t say that Debris answered many questions, but I definitely want more.

The first episode opens with text on the screen explaining that three years ago an alien spaceship was discovered drifting through the solar system and six months ago, debris from the ship started falling to earth. Which besides explaining the title, it also sets things up as we meet the Orbital team, or one of them anyway, a joint US-UK task force, with MI6 agent Fiona Jones and CIA agent Bryan Beneventi overseeing a team of scientists and technicians flying around tracking debris, recovering it, and coming up with a cover story for what’s happening.

I don’t know Riann Steele’s work, but Jonathan Tucker is to my mind one of the best actors of our generation. That’s a career that stretches from Sleepers and The Virgin Suicides, to The Deep End to more recent work like the shows Kingdom and City on a Hill. Debris is one of his least showy roles that he’s had in recent years, but it’s the kind of role that requires an immensely talented, disciplined actor who can slowly peel back the layers to who he is through how he works.

In the final scene of the first episode we also follow Bryan’s boss Maddox, played by two time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz. As the government is collecting the debris, they’re trying to reassemble the ship. Of course having Butz in the opening credits is odd as he seems peripheral to the action at best. Even stranger is Scroobius Pip in the credits, who plays a recurring character Anson Ash, working for Influx, which may be a terrorist group, and is collecting debris as well. 

Now there are a few aspects of the show which stuck in my craw. Bryan’s time in Afghanistan bothered me as it falls into cliches about the American war in Afghanistan, which is a larger issue for a larger essay. Another is the enlightened Native American with a special relationship to all this and hopefully the show will find a way to make the character more than a cliche. The reveal that Sebastian Roche’s character is more central to this plot than we even thought (even if that plot is…in some ways less clear than ever before). The reveal of the final seconds, which I won’t spoil and I’m still unsure what to make of it.

And all of this was so much that one of the episode’s other reveals - that George is being stalked by a smoke figure. And that it’s coming for him - is easy to be lost in the mix. I kept thinking of Bombie the Zombie from Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics. A figure that stalks Scrooge for decades. In Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, it’s explained the character is stalking Scrooge as revenge for his destruction and cheating, a cost that he never quite escape. I have a feeling based on George’s expression that this might be something similar.

If there is a theme or an idea unlaying the show, I keep thinking that it’s about wonder. In the opening episodes, each character is traumatized and exhausted in their own way. Fiona is still recovering from her father’s death and is numb, anhedonic, but she sees this ship and its debris, and the possibilities of it as something that helps to pull her out of that state, at least temporarily. She sees possibility in this wreckage. That it is something that can change us and offer new possibilities. And even the trauma of finding her father alive, having to disobey orders, she still finds wonder and is overwhelmed by the appearance of the ball of light along with everyone else in the penultimate episode. It is her refusal to accept people’s deaths, to see sacrifice as inevitable, and to see those decisions as choices and taking the easy way out that are some of the show’s great moments. This passion is the heart of the show. And it affects Bryan, as we see, but I think it affects more people than just him. Her father’s betrayal in the final episode, though, suggests that she is left in a more broken and traumatized place than at the beginning of the season. And I’m interested in how the show would have shown that, because one of the great things that the show has been interested in doing is not telling us who the characters are, but in showing us who they are, even as they are in difficult moments of their lives as they try to do their job, and I wanted to see Fiona as she deals with this and tries to work her way through it all. Fiona is the heart of the show, and what happens when she is wounded and adrift. Has she changed more people than just Bryan and how will they be there to pull her out of her despair?

Bryan on the other hand initially seems like a cynical wiseass American and over the course of the season we see that he’s dealing with not just PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, but he was seriously injured in an early incident involving the debris. In the early episodes as he reaches out to Fiona in small ways, like the episode where he teaches her about peeps, he’s doing it in a jokey manner, in a way that makes it clear that he’s trying to make her smile and he sees she’s struggling, but he never lets her in, the way that she lets him in and is open about her feelings. As the season continues, we see him opening up to Fiona, disobeying orders to tell her about her father, which is clearly so difficult for him to do. When Fiona commandeers pieces of debris to try to save people, he pushes against it, but then is clearly in awe of not just of how she could think of it, but of the feeling that was required to do it. And so at the end of "Do You Know Icarus?” when he says that he’s trying to get back to her, all that work has been laid down, but it took an extreme moment to make him say it aloud. I think ti took an extreme moment like that to get him to admit it to himself. And as traumatic as it was having to relive events in Afghanistan, when he and Fiona talk at the end about how the debris is studying them just as they are studying the debris, that’s not a conversation he could have had with her or with anyone before. He is in so many ways the soldier in that story that George referenced, and over the season, we see him in small ways open up. Which requires a lot from Tucker, who is more than up to the challenge. He doesn’t show his hand early on, and keeps his cards hidden, tightly wound and very controlled. He remains a soldier, firmly in a chain of command, and even if just with Fiona and George, he begins to open up. George’s betrayal means less to him, but what it will mean for him and Fiona, for their relationship, and how his experiences with the debris have changed him, will be key going forward. What will he do as he opens up, as he allows himself to feel more. As we begin to see who Bryan really is.

Maddox on the hand is simply the CIA head of this project, an operator, but the show also follows him home, to show his difficult relationship with his wife, and his son, who was injured in a car accident caused by his wife. And in the final episode we see that one of the threads happening throughout the season, as he’s trading with a Russian agent, and trying to get his hands on one piece of debris, isn’t about work. It’s about his son. And it’s startling.

It’s strange to say (in part because he’s a CIA official, and when was the last time anyone could say anything nice about them, fictional or otherwise) but Maddow has a line which is the key to the show. He mentioned offering Bryan a hand in Afghanistan, which he took (though not in one of the parallel worlds), and Bryan said something similar when asked about their relationship, which is clearly much closer than the one that Fiona has with her boss. 

There are a lot of things to explore in a new season. I want to see more about what Influx has planned and how and what they know about the debris, because George makes it clear that he knows much more Fiona. What and how will governments respond to Influx, which positions itself as a group designed to give the technology to people instead of hoarding it. Related to that the ways that they use the technology. Think about the governments storing the debris and trying to reassemble the ship when they’re not trying to reverse engineer it and build weapons to the ways that Influx utilizes the technology, how that relates to trans humanism.

And I want them to explore that. But that central notion, of offering a hand. Which the characters do for each other. Which is how they’re able to grow. The ways how after trauma it’s easier to shut down, from other people, from wonder, from possibility. Bryan clearly has a complicated relationship with his father figure, Maddox. Fiona’s complicated relationship with her biological father has become even more. 

The show is about technology and aliens reawakening possibility and hope. But it’s also about something much simpler. How as people we can save each other.

The final words of the final episode - spoken by a minor recurring character thus far - are “let’s begin” and in some ways it does feel as though what we’ve seen in this season is the prologue setting things up. Especially as they’ve now introduced Otto, played by the great John Noble, who is the show’s big bad. Or one of them, at least.

There are a lot of questions that remain to be answered. How the debris has reshaped geopolitics, there must be groups besides Influx trying to collect debris, exactly what universe re we in, which seems a vital question after the two parter. How much of this is public and how do they sell this to the public as things are getting really crazy? I could go on, but the season has left a lot of threads and stories to explore.

The truth is that I’ve been exhausted and anhedonic since before the pandemic. And watching this in the final months of the pandemic, as I daily tracked vaccination numbers as opposed to the death toll, was in some ways just what I needed. I am the sort of person who would honestly watch a weird science fiction procedural, but Debris was more than I had hoped for. I have no idea what Season 2 of Debris would bring or where it would have gone, but I feel a great loss that we’ll never be able to see it.

Review: Columbo, Seasons 4-7

In which I continue to make my way through the original run of Columbo. (The first three seasons discussed HERE). And even when the show falters, there’s Peter Falk. After this many episodes, there’s plenty of meh episodes as with any show, and by the end it’s clear that everyone is running out of steam, but I think that the second half of the show’s original run contains some of the best episodes they made.

"An Exercise in Fatality". Robert Conrad plays a fitness guru who commits murder and it’s amusing (and the fact that Conrad was working out, about to work out, finishing working out in pretty much every scene is amusing) and it’s well done, but overall just okay.

"Negative Reaction". Always nice to see Dick Van Dyke and especially nice to see him play against type, as he does beautifully here. The episode also has some emotional weight. There are episodes where you empathize with the murderer and there are episodes where you empathize with the murdered and he does a great job of setting a guy up for the murder of his wife.

"By Dawn's Early Light". Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner himself!) runs a military academy in this episode filmed at South Carolina’s The Citadel who murders the President of the Board to prevent the school going co-ed. Seeing Columbo spend a couple days sleeping in the dorm and bonding with the kids is fun. It doesn’t come together, in part because how he solves it isn’t great, but the individual elements are great.

"Troubled Waters". Ben Gazzara returns to direct an episode set on a cruise ship where Columbo and his wife are on vacation. We never see her, though we do see him shouting and chasing after her a few times. It guest stars Robert Vaughan, Dean Stockwell, Patrick Macnee. The story is fine, but overall the episode is enjoyable with great acting and lots of little moments, these small scenes of Falk walking around talking with people onboard that make it work.

"Playback". Not the first and not the last episode where it was all about the high tech gadgets used to provide an alibi. And it works and is well done but overall, just an okay episode. Though it does star Gena Rowlands (like Falk, part of the Cassavetes crew doing amazing film work during this same period) and Oskar Werner (Jules himself! Guy Montag! Ship of Fools!) as her murderous husband.

"A Deadly State of Mind". The last episode of the season and like the first one, it’s fine, it works, I liked it, but the biggest problem is how the murderer played by George Hamilton commits two murders. The second one is especially goulish, but it almost becomes an immediate afterthought as they’re trying to nail him for the first murder. And I get it, but emotionally, it doesn’t quite work and left me unsatisfied.

"Forgotten Lady". One word: Wow. Season five kicks off with an episode starring Janet Leigh, who we all know from Psycho, and here she plays an aging actor. It also features clips from an old musical of hers, Walking My Baby Back Home. Leigh is just perfect. And though i’ve seen her in many films over the years, the ones that stick out, the big films, she wasn’t the main focus, but here she shows that she had dramatic chops, that she could dance, that she could do so much more than we remember from watching Psycho and Touch of Evil. The story is great. The ending and the twist at the end are perfect, which is shocking but also makes perfect sense given everything we know. Honestly, one of the very best episodes of the series.

"A Case of Immunity". Sigh. It’s the 70s and it’s about an Arab diplomat murdering people. Also, none of the Arabs are played by Arabs. It was bad. I mean, it could have been worse. It’s no worse than a lot of shows have done in the 21st century, but still. Ugh.

"Identity Crisis". Patrick McGoohan returns - in an episode he directed - with he and Leslie Nielsen playing spies. AOf course there are a few good references to The Prisoner. I won’t claim that it was a great episode, but I loved it. Again, one of those episodes where Falk and the guest stars make it enjoyable and worth watching and more than the sum of its parts.

"A Matter of Honor". Not a great episode, but it’s saved by having a great murderer, in this case played by Ricardo Montalban, who is always amazing. But other than him, the episode is just okay.

"Now You See Him...". Jack Cassidy returns to the show, this turn playing a murderous magician. And it is a good episode and it’s well done in so many ways, but there’s one big problem. When the magician was a young man, he was a nazi prison guard, lied on his immigration forms, and he’s trying to keep this a secret. The problem is simply that there is an element of play in the series. In most mystery series, really. There are some characters you love and some you hate, but it’s a game, and making one of them a nazi who has no problem killing to cover this up, it’s impossible to have some distance and see it as a game. And honestly that ruins what would be a very good episode because quite simply, he’s not a man covering up his past and trying to get away with it, he’s a murderous nazi.

"Last Salute to the Commodore". This episode, written by Jackson Gillis and directed by Patrick McGoohan, is apparently one of the series’ most controversial episodes. And I can see why it’s hated, because it breaks from the formula. Personally that didn’t bother me. It wasn’t a great episode, which I think was part of the problem. (If you break the formula and deliver something great, that’s one thing, if it’s not great, well…). But honestly I enjoyed that we didn’t see the murder, we saw someone covering up the murder. That was the first clue that all was not as it seemed. And then that person ends up dead. So I didn’t hate it, and I appreciate them trying something different. It just didn’t come together. I mean honestly I had to pause and think about who was the murderer when typing this.

"Fade in to Murder". Season 6 opens with William Shatner playing an actor playing a colorful TV detective - who is being blackmailed by his producer/former lover over the fact that he was a deserter during the Korean War (which makes me think that he and Don Draper, sorry, Dick Whitman, were hanging out together and…well, anyway). It’s amusing, enjoyable. It involves what was then cutting edge technology. Walter Koenig makes a cameo as a cop. Not great, but I loved every minute. And what a closing line.

"Old Fashioned Murder". So I’m a little in love with Joyce van Patten. I’m struggling to remember what else I’ve seen her in, or maybe I just have a thing for brilliant hard working spinsters who suffer in silence. But as the person keeping the family museum going and insistent that it continue, she hires a no account ex con security guard and then sets him up, murdering him and her brother, so that she can take control of things. Her niece, who might be her daughter (long story) played by Jeannie Berlin (I also love Jeannie Berlin, but I knew that going into the episode) is caught in the crossfire. Just incredible writing and incredible acting and perfectly put together. Really affecting and I’ll make the argument for it being one of the series’ best.

"The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case". An entertaining episode with a murderer who is both loathsome but whom by the end, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for. And it’s episodes like these where the writing is just so perfect, those lines that are so sharp and has those little moments that made the show what it was. Also, just three episodes, what a short season.

"Try and Catch Me". Ruth Gordon essentially plays Agatha Christie and murders her late niece’s former husband, whom she blames for her niece’s death. (A death btw that is essentially how Natalie Wood died four years after the episode aired….just sayin’….). Anyway, I love Ruth Gordon. For so many reasons. I mean, her work as a writer is incredible (Adam’s Rib, A Double Life, etc.) but her performances, especially Maude in Harold and Maude, not to mention Rosemary’s Baby. This is one of those episodes where you can see that Columbo knows almost immediately that she’s the murderer, but he’s also taken by her as well. You can’t not like her, you can’t not feel for her, but she found an especially brutal way to kill him. And how the no account nephew managed to finger his murderer while trapped in a dark safe was impressive. And if that’s not enough, this was the first Columbo episode directed by James Frawley, best known for directing The Muppet Movie and The Monkees TV show.

"Murder Under Glass". An episode set in the restaurant world directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Louis Jourdan as a murderous critic. Also it’s nice to see Falk do things that aren’t strictly related to his job and watching him cook was entertaining. Even if it took him too long to figure out the murderer.

"Make Me a Perfect Murder". The episode has moments but overall, not great, and too long! There were a few points where I left the room and came back because it was moving slowly and I could still hear it and wasn’t missing anything. It felt padded. Also, the episode gets points taken off for the clue centering around changing film reels. I’ve lost track of just how many episodes where that was a clue.

"How to Dial a Murder". Honestly chilling. I mean there are unrepentant killers on the show, but the guy trained his dogs to kill a man and then was willing to let the dogs be killed. Cold blooded. But a solid and very clever episode featuring small appearances by Kim Cattrall and Ed Begley, Jr. Every aspect is well done and the tense brutality gives the show a slightly different feel than the average episode, without ever veering off to make anyone feel like they’re watching something else.

"The Conspirators". An IRA gun smuggling plot involving a poet that fails for me because I never understood the killer’s motive. I mean we know what he says to the guy before killing him, we know what he says to others afterwards, and while he says the guy is a traitor, he seems to be the only know who knows this and has seen proof of it. Then he’s struggling to find the guy’s supplier, because he didn’t plan ahead or tell anyone else he was going to do it. Overall an odd episode in many ways. Not bad, but also a sign that the show was starting to run its course.

And thus ends the series. As with most series, it ended with a whimper. Which is how most shows end, to be fair. Even in the final season there were still good episodes, still enough there to remind viewers of what made the series so good.

Review: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I love Anthony Horowitz’s work. I’ll get that out of the way at the outset. I’ve been reading and watching his work for years. He’s written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and that’s on top of all the TV he’s written. Including creating and writing most of the episodes of what I consider to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, Foyle’s War.

Having said all that, when I read Horowitz’s novel Magpie Murders in 2017, I thought it was his greatest work. Because it is a greta murder mystery, which kept me guessing and has twists and turns. Structurally speaking the book is genius level plotting as we’re dealing with the murder of an author and the manuscript of his final book, which is missing the last chapter and the identity of the murderer. The writer’s longtime editor tries to sift through the man’s life and uncover who he was and what happened, and in the process manages to capture a lot about how writers write and think and – like magpies – pull names and details and stories from the people and places we encounter and turn them into something else. It captures some of what it means to be caught in the wake of all that and see parts of yourself in fiction. The book manages to convey why it is so many of us love mystery fiction. And also, why so many people hate it.

To be a good mystery and to simultaneously take apart the genre, its writers and its readers is not an easy task. And it is stunning to behold, even on rereading when I’m prepared for what’s coming I’m still impressed with what Hororwitz is able to do.

So this is all prologue to say that when I heard Horowitz had written a sequel to Magpie Murders, I was hesitant. Because I don’t think that books need sequels. And I think almost every crime and mystery series has gone on too long and been diminished in the end by repetition and volume.

I am happy to say that Moonflower Murders is a great mystery novel.

I almost feel like I’m damning it with faint praise. Because I think I enjoyed the book more than I’ve enjoyed almost any book over the past year. I think it’s funny and inventive. It’s smart. And it can be hard to make a good crime novel without people acting dumb or doing stupid a lot of things.

The problem of course is that the first book was genius, I think, and not simply a great mystery novel but so much more than that. By comparison saying that the sequel is a very good mystery novel feels almost insulting, or a bit of a let down.

But in the heart of the novel is also something that I think every writer and maybe a lot of readers see as possible. And that’s the obsessive eye for details. To craft these small shoutouts and references and place them throughout the text, maliciously or otherwise. To spend time obsessively looking for them, because like anything, once you know that they exist, you can’t help but look for them. Again, one of those things that makes a good mystery writer and a good mystery reader. An eye for detail, a look for clues, reading into things. And like anything, when taken to an extreme, it’s bad for one’s health.

Whether there will be another Susan Ryeland book, I don’t know, but Moonflower Murders is another great Anthony Horowitz novel.

Review: Columbo, Seasons 1-3

Over the pandemic, stuck at home, I began watching the 1970s mystery series Columbo. It’s funny because I’m unsure if I ever watched it before. I know Peter Falk, of course, from a variety of roles ranging from The Princess Bride to Wings of Desire to The Great Race to his cameo in The Great Muppet Caper. I knew he was Columbo, but I didn’t know who that was or what that meant.

Admittedly I’ve found it hard to watch a lot of crime fiction and cop stories recently, but there was something relaxing about Falk’s performance, about the show’s rhythms, about watching a lot of smarmy rich people be taken down. Anyway, a few thoughts on the first few seasons, episode by episode.

"Prescription: Murder". It’s inventive, Gene Barry as the murderer is fabulous, Peter Falk has a killer entrance. I also have to say, I get why they made a second pilot because it’s good, but I’m not entirely buying this concept and Columbo as a series. It’s a good plot but the character and the setup doesn’t scream, I definitely want to see more.

"Ransom for a Dead Man". I’m in. Lee Grant as the murderer was brilliantly cold blooded. The way Columbo took her down. And that final scene in the airport as he arrests her is just perfect. Columbo tells her that she has no conscience and that’s her fatal flaw, because she cannot imagine anyone acting any differently. But most people wouldn’t walk away from a murder

"Murder by the Book". The story is excellent, with a script by Steven Bochco, and the direction by a young Steve Spielberg stands out. The acting is a bit hammy and you can tell the show is finding its legs. This is part of the problem of making a regular series. A good idea but nailing the exception, you get good actors but finding the right tone. Making the episodes on a breakneck schedule, sometimes the balance is a little off.

"Death Lends a Hand". Robert Culp and Ray Milland guest star and the result is solid story and a great ending, but overall just okay.

"Dead Weight". I liked how Columbo caught the murderer - that is honestly my favorite part in most episodes, and I would argue the best part of them - but overall it was meh. Characters behaving dumb always pulls me out of the story.

"Suitable for Framing". This is one of my favorites of the season. Fun, inventive, clever on all fronts. Also the first episode written by Jackson Gillis and directed by Hy Averback (I Love You, Alice B. Toklas).

"Lady in Waiting". It was a good episode, plus it featured Leslie Nielsen and Jessie Royce Landis, but overall, kinda forgettable. Not bad, just meh.

"Short Fuse". The episode has a fabulous cast (Roddy McDowell, Ida Lupino, Anne Francis) but it never quite comes together. And the ending on the cable car is well done, but by that point, I mostly shrugged.

"Blueprint for Murder". Good elements, and a very funny scene at Columbo is in city hall and stymied by bureaucracy, but overall it’s just off. Maybe because Falk directed it, his performance was off? Which is a shame because it takes place partially on a massive construction site and was the season finale. They went big but it never quite came together.

"Étude in Black". I loved this episode. In no small part because of John Cassavetes (a good friend and collaborator of Falk) who stars as the murderer and manages to be charming and smarmy, though even if you didn’t watch him do it, you know he’s the murderer. The show also features Blythe Danner, the great Myrna Loy, and in a laugh out loud cameo, Pat Morita as a butler. Also, Columbo gets a dog. Honestly, one of the best single episodes.

"The Greenhouse Jungle". Ray Milland makes this episode. The writing is fine, but Milland brings it all together and even though I could see a lot of the plot twists coming, the entire casts is great and sells it, but Milland is a standout.

"The Most Crucial Game". The episode guest stars Robert Culp and Dean Stockwell and the result is an episode that’s not great but enjoyable. No complaints but after two very good episodes, this one is just fine.

"Dagger of the Mind". Columbo goes to London! And it guest stars the late Honor Blackman. Not a great episode, but it’s a lot fun. Also, the first episode directed by Richard Quine, the director behind films like My Sister Eileen, Bell Book and Candle, and Sex and the Single Girl.

"Requiem for a Falling Star". Not a great episode, though it does feature a cameo by the legendary Edith Head. Honestly I was so amused that the episode stars Anne Baxter as an actor who kills her assistant that that simple fact made me like the episode more than I probably should. (Among Baxter’s many roles, she co-starred in All About Eve opposite Bette Davis). So not a great one, but very watchable.

"A Stitch in Crime". Leonard Nimoy as an obnoxious surgeon. Anne Francis plays a nurse who gets murdered. It’s a great chase, which is hard to do and manages to be thrilling. Great work all around.

"The Most Dangerous Match". Solid episode with Laurence Harvey as a chess grandmaster.

"Double Shock". Martin Landau plays identical twins, one a TV chef who drags Columbo on set during a live broadcast and gives Falk a chance to have some fun. It’s a brilliantly structured piece that’s both thrilling and funny. Also features Julie Newmar. The season ends with a great episode.

"Lovely But Lethal". On the one hand, it stars Vera Miles, Martin Sheen, Vincent Price. On the other hand, it’s just okay with Columbo catching Miles but in a way that felt like a reach.

"Any Old Port in a Storm". Donald Pleasance is great here as the winery owner who murders his brother and stages a scuba diving accident. It also features Julie Harris as his secretary. The character is one who Columbo seems to like, who under other circumstances would be happy to spend time with. How Columbo catches him at the end feels a bit off, though.

"Candidate for Crime". A politician killing his campaign manager made me laugh, but overall, the structure and the case was just fabulous.

"Double Exposure". Robert Culp guest stars yet again and it’s his best so far. Also, clever how Columbo manages to catch him, which definitely is a Hail Mary pass, but he manages to pull it off. Also the episode is written by Stephen J. Cannell!

"Publish or Perish". I really loved this one for a few reasons. One, the murderer is played by Jack Cassidy (who also played the murderer in the publishing themed first episode “Murder by the Book”). The murderer is played by real life mystery writer Mickey Spillane (yes, that Mickey Spillane) here playing a crime writer named Mallory (and I’m guessing that this is where Max Allan Collins got the name for his series about a writer named Mallory). It’s also the first Columbo episode written by Peter S. Fischer, who would go on to create Murder, She Wrote with Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link.

"Mind Over Mayhem". This is another episode where the cast wins me over even if the episode is overall pretty meh. In this case it features Lew Ayres, José Ferrer, Jessica Walter. It also features a boy genius and a robot (played by Robby the Robot from the classic Forbidden Planet). It has clever twists but overall, it’s just not that great.

"Swan Song". I love Johnny Cash so him playing a musician – and performing "Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” throughout - makes this a winner for me. That his wife is played by Ida Lupino, the murder being a plane crash, just make it irresistible. Also I think it definitely benefits from having a murderer who is struggling to live with what he did. Not having a breakdown or being angry he’s caught, but honestly bothered my murder in a wya that a lot of the killers on the show never do.

"A Friend in Deed". Well, the season ends with a bang as a man kills his wife and calls his neighbor for help – except the Deputy LAPD Commissioner helps him cover it up, and then demands the man helps murder his wife. And Richard Kiley is just one of those killers you love to hate.

R.I.P. Larry McMurtry

To my mind, Larry McMurtry was one of great writers of America in the postwar era. Part of a group of writers who sought to examine and lay bare what they saw as the hypocrisy of American values, the history we ignored, the concerns we repressed. Of course the New York Times in his obituary wrote that McMurtry was “a Novelist of the American West” but the Times has often argued that a writer not living in the trial-state area is a “regional” figure, but that’s a separate issue. And misses the point of what the West - in fact and in myth - has meant to this country.

Perhaps it took a man born and raised in rural Texas to see so sharply the distinction between the myth of the West and its reality. The myth of the cowboy and the West was so central to his work which were often about people who lived in the shadows of those myths. Or sometimes as in the case of Pretty Boy Floyd, they were about a real person whose myth was something else entirely. The characters of Brokeback Mountain, which McMurtry adapted with Diana Ossana from the short story by E. Annie Proulx, want to be cowboys like they’ve seen onscreen green and read about, but of course there are no cowboys. They’re ranch hands, and they discover a loathing for the work.

Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize and will be the book he’s best remembered for, has all the elements of the Western mythology. The story of two former Texas rangers on an epic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana. The TV miniseries did as well – mores, really, since the miniseries had those sweeping vistas. But it wasn’t a story about that. McMurtry wrote the book to go after the myth of the cowboy from people like Louis L’Amour and John Ford and others.

Lonesome Dove also stands out because it has more plot than most of his books. And I say that loosely because it’s about a cattle drive, but it’s not really about a cattle drive. It’s an armature that McMurtry used. So many of his books - look at Last Picture Show or Terms of Endearment - are character driven stories. The books could be comic and melancholy, small and epic, stoic and epicurean, in ways that made ordinary characters sometimes seem bigger than life.

I think that’s one reason Hollywood fell for his work, and one reason why they were able to make the transition to the screen so well. Film and TV served McMurtry as well as it has any writer. Movies like Hud and The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and miniseries like Lonesome Dove are classics. And not because of their great plots but for the indelible characters. And you could see actors loving those roles, which were so rich and complicated and alive.

I’ll admit to a love for McMurtry’s nonfiction, about Texas and Hollywood, books and travel, and especially his 1999 book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. But I struggle to think of anyone else I know who’s read it.

McMurtry was perhaps his own harshest critic. Perhaps because he had such high ambitions for his own work. To take aim at the myths of the Unites States, and yet, instead of chipping away at the bullshit, the myth remained. And instead of denting that myth, his work only bolstered it in the eyes of so many. I don’t quite know what to make of that. I think McMurtry spent decades trying to understand that. I’m not sure he ever did. As he said more than once that “Lonesome Dove is the Gone with the Wind of the West” which he knew was good and bad.

One reason I’ve admired McMurtry was simply the life he led. Born the son of rancher, he eventually left Texas to study at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship where his classmates included Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, only to return and teach for years. He ran an antiquarian book store for decades. He lived in Washington DC. He was the President of PEN America, where he led the group’s efforts to defend Salman Rushdie. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. When he won his Oscar, he thanked booksellers, and famously wore cowboy boots on stage. He also had something of a colorful life as a ladies man. But he was also a man who was always writing. And he was upfront about hating his own work, about the shifts in what he wrote and wanted to write, about his illnesses and depression.

He was a writer who worked in many forms, and in the end, I felt like I understood him a little bit as a person. Not abstractly but simply because he wrote about his life and his passions, he wrote travelogues and about books. He was a hard working and thoughtful lover of writing and reading. He wrote a lot of books and I won’t claim they were all good, but we never judge a writer for their worst work, only their best. And there’s a handful of his that I think stand up as well as any of his contemporaries.

As McMurtry once said about something else “it’s not simple, but it’s practical.” One could say that about his life. A child born in a house without books who became a man of letters, who traveled the world, dined with Presidents and Princes, and kept returning to Archer City, Texas.

R.I.P. Jessica Walter

The actor Jessica Walter died at the age of 80 this week. She’s had a long and colorful career. And it’s strange because I can name multiple films she was in at the start of her career, and I can name work she did in the last two decades of her career, but much of it – and I don’t think I’m alone in this regard – is unknown to me.

She started her career in theater before appearing in film and TV in roles in The Group and Bye Bye Braverman, both directed by Sidney Lumet, and Grand Prix, directed by John Frankenheimer. And in one of her biggest early roles, Play Misty for Me in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut.

Oddly enough in the past month I watched Grand Prix – impressive but had a weak script – and the episode of Columbo from 1974 where she guest starred. And it takes a moment, because of course she’s younger and her voice isn’t quite the same, but it is unmistakably her.

She kept busy and kept working, which I think is often a great compliment for an actor. She won an Emmy along the way. She was a voice actor, did all kinds of parts, but there is something about the fact that she got one of her very best roles in her sixties. Arrested Development has one of the great casts of any TV show that I can think of, and Walter was brilliant.

And of course Archer, where she did some of her best voice work. Plenty of people have referenced what Arrested Development and Archer have in common - Walter’s characters especially - but both shows knew how to write for her in ways that were really exciting to see.

Walter died in her sleep at the age of 80. Which is something I think most of us wish for and wish for the people we know. But I can imagine Walter’s voice calling out about how boring that is and she isn’t going to settle for dying in her sleep and being upstaged by someone else dying slowly and making a big show of people shuffling in to say their goodbyes…

It’s also nice to hear from people that she was as nice and generous as one might hope.

R.I.P. Adam Zagajewski

One of the world’s great contemporary poets, Adam Zagajewski, died this week at the age of 75.

I’ve been reading his poetry, his essays, for decades. There’s a weight to his work, a heaviness. In his obituary in The New York Times, the paper called him “Poet of the Past’s Presence” which is quite a lovely and very apt way to describe so much of his work.

Born in Love, which at the time was part of Poland, and after World War II when the borders of Europe were redrawn, the city became a part of Ukraine, and the family moved to Poland. He was a dissident poet and with another poet wrote a manifesto, a cal to arms in which they encouraged their contemporaries to avoid allegory and embrace realism and “speak the truth you serve.” His work was banned in the 1970s by the government, and he eventually went into exile in Paris. As Zagajewski would later say “I lost two homelands, but I sought a third: a space for the imagination.”

I’ve always been moved by what Robert Pinsky wrote about Zagajewski years ago, and I’m not always a fan of Pinsky but in this case I can find no fault with his words when he described the poems as “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”

His poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World was written in early 2001 but was published in The New Yorker afterwards (translated by the great Clare Cavanagh) and the reason was that he was able to do what poetry can do so well. What great poets are capable of doing.

I still remember some of his lines from Reading Milosz, Mysticism for Beginners, and especially To Go to Lvov, which is a poem that struck me just now as powerfully moving as it did years ago.

I will also admit to being sad that he never received the Nobel Prize. Not simply because his work stands alongside the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, two other Novel laureates whose work I think Zagajewski can stand alongside. Of course he had a long list of awards and prizes ranging from the Neustadt International Prize to the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, recognition by Poland and Germany and France. In the end, no one will remember what we won or didn’t. Those lines, though, I believe will echo forward and be read by many who are not yet born.

R.I.P. George Segal

George Segal died the other day at the age of 87

For people my age, he was a sitcom actor in two long running series, Just Shoot Me! and The Goldbergs, where he could often be the funniest part of the show. But he was also playing an elder role in an ensemble cast and he did so with ease.

Of course his career was a lot longer and more colorful than those roles would suggest. He studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen. After being an understudy in the legendary 1956 production of The Iceman Cometh that starred Jason Robards and was directed by Jose Quintero, Segal worked under Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre, was a member of the legendary improv troupe The Premise, and appeared on Broadway before he went to Hollywood in the early 1960’s.

Segal spent years working in TV and film, in ensemble casts (The Longest Day) and leading roles (King Rat) before his biggest role, the 1966 adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where he starred with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Sandy Dennis. The Mike Nichols production is essential viewing, one of the key texts in understanding and thinking about how to translate theater to the screen, about Albee’s language, and these four characters and indelible performances.

For the next fifteen years or so, Segal had a great run as an actor. There were flops, of course, but he worked with some of the best American directors on comedies, dramas, and a lot of work that straddled the genres and were a part of that era’s efforts to craft a new language and style of film.

California Split (Robert Altman). The Terminal Man (Mike Hodges). Bye Bye Braverman (Sidney Lumet). Blume in Love (Paul Mazursky). Where’s Poppa? (Carl Reiner). That doesn’t even mention films like A Touch of Class, Loving, The Hot Rock, The Owl and the Pussycat, Fun with Dick and Jane, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

For more than a decade Segal had the enviable career of being a leading man and a character actor. Which I suppose must have made the fall even worse. Apparently there was bad behavior, there were drugs, but Segal turned things around and by the nineties was a character actor again in film, he returned to Broadway. And then found success in television. Along the way he was also a noted banjo player and recorded a few albums,

Segal had that quality that so many successful actors. There was charm, there was intelligence, and maybe it’s just me but he always felt deeply familiar in so many ways. He lived a full life and there’s nothing sad in an old man dying after a long, full life. But it’s worth raising a glass over such a life.

Review: Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist. Season One.

I really liked Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and I did so for reasons that I’m unsure translate to other people and that I can explain without giving away a lot of the show. But I think it’s because the show is an effort to be an emotional story and to lean into those emotions.

Jane Levy stars as the titular Zoey and she is amazing. I’ve watched her in different things over the years and interviewed her and she has never been better than she is here. The rest of the cast is uniformly good, from Lauren Graham as the hard edged boss who has a soft spot for Zoey and tries to mentor her in terms of work and in terms of dealing with the death of a parent, to Peter Gallagher as her father to Mary Steenburgen as her mother. Alex Newell as Mo and John Clarence Stewart as Simon are the heart of the show and in a uniformly excellent cast, are exceptional.

The pilot, which was expertly directed by Richard Shepard, bounces between a lot of tones and types of stories and has to find a way to balance them. Which is likely one reason they sought out a director like Separd, whose greatest skill is finding a way to thread the needle as far as tone. Think of his films like The Matador or The Perfection or the pilot to Ugly Betty. Also he manages to pull off the musical numbers and these masterful set pieces in exciting ways.

On the one hand, the show promises something light with lots of singing and dancing, but the entire conceit of the show is that these are “heart songs” as Zoey comes to call them, and are expressing something that the person cannot express in words. Which means that no matter how toe tappingly fun the song might be, it tends to mean that something deep and painful and repressed is behind it.

And that could describe the show in a lot of ways, as well. Because while on the one hand it is a show that is bright and full of color. Zoey and some other cast members work at a dot com company, which means it’s a strange looking set that you know is both a strange office space and yet, so far from a parody of how dot com offices are. But at the heart of the show is pain.

Because the illness of Zoey’s father is always there. And there are episodes where she’s able to hear him sing and she and Peter Gallagher dance around the room, and Jane Levy as Zoey manages to convey the joy of being able to connect with her father in this small way. That grasping at those moments of happiness.

And then when the doctor tells them that the end is near, she falls apart. And she begins to break out in song uncontrollably. In a way that threatens to throw off the balance of the show. But it doesn’t because it leans into the emotional nature of the show and that she is expressing what she can’t say. That she can’t face the news about her father and it’s thrown everything off. Her ability to function normally is off, which is something that people who have dealt with the loss of a loved one can relate to. How everything becomes raw and the struggle to think and filter and process what’s happening.

The way that the show manages to tie that episode and that feeling into the entirety of the show. Zoey is a show about trauma and grieving. And I don’t say that to discourage anyone from watching it, because I think it’s a very fun and enjoyable show. But it’s about how we struggle to deal with these issues as we go through our day to day, finding ways to deal with things that are almost overwhelming.

That episode and the one that follow really showcased the show’s strengths. The following one concerns a deaf character who with the helps of backup dancers performs to Fight Song, which is played without lyrics as the characters aren’t simply dancing, but signing the song lyrics as they dance. It was breathtaking to watch.

Through it all the show also made the point that even though Zoey had this insight into people’s inner lives, that didn’t mean she suddenly understood them or their lives. She’s a coder and has her own issues and biases and she doesn’t always understand what people are doing or what things mean or how best to deal with it. But she finds ways to work through it.

The final episode, which was a bit out of character compared to the rest, was brilliant. And devastating. The sad truth is that before the pilot was over, I knew what was coming. Zoey’s father wasn’t going to stick around for years, it wasn’t going to continue indefinitely. If it did, the show would have ended up being twee. And the show leaned into the feeling. Peter Gallagher and his son and daughter in law sang Lullaby, the Billy Joel song, which was heartbreaking and beautiful. There was a lovely goodbye as Zoey and her father danced, which ended as I expected, and yet that diminish the emotional impact of it.

The final scene of the final episode consisted of a single shot of a single song. The extended cast sang Don McLean’s American Pie. The camera weaved through the house as the cast walked around each talking a line or a few lines at a time, and quickly we see that as the camera moves around the house that time is passing, the song taking place over the wake as a few hours pass and people arrive and leave, as food is eaten and people circulate. Ending with the family together and as Zoey closes the door, she speaks the final line.

The final episode was clearly made by someone who’s lost people, who’s dealt with grief, and it threads that line of being sad and leaning into the pain and the loss without being overwhelmingly tragic or other other side, sappy and maudlin. And perhaps it’s because the show aired during a year where we’ve been surrounded by death. Surrounded by so many deaths at a time when we’re also mourning the loss of our lives and mourning so many things, and we never had a chance to grieve. Not really. I’m not sure that I would call Zoey the best show off the year (though it was one of them) but it was a show about 2020 in a strange way. A show about grief and pain and laughter and joy and finding a way to work through it. The show was not just good, it came out at just the right moment.

Review: Hawaii

Not the 50th state, but the 1966 film, based on a James Michener novel.

George Roy Hill directed the story of a missionary (Max Von Sydow) and his wife (Julie Andrews) who move to Hawaii from New England in 1819. Admittedly as someone from New England, with deep roots in the region, young Puritan ministers who just graduated from Yale may possibly be the worst people to send to the far side of the world as missionaries. But that’s me.

In short, Von Sydow is an uptight Puritan, Andrews is a slightly less uptight Puriatn. I love both of them as actors, but they don’t make an especially believable couple. Having said that, I have met couples where the only sign of affection between them is that they have biological children.

The film is not without its charms. It was filmed in Hawaii and the scenery is spectacular. The supporting cast includes Gene Hackman and John Cullum. But the actors I was most impressed by were the Hawaiian and Polynesian actors like Jocelyn LaGarde and Manu Tupou, who really stole the film.

I will say that the film, which covers about two decades, does manage to portray what happened with some accuracy. This isn’t whitewashed. Sailors take advantage of women. Whites bring disease and we witness a large part of the community including characters we know die in a horrific scene. Von Sydow and others oppose the plans of most missionaries and the white community to buy property and build plantations in the island, which one missionary justifies as their payment for their decades of good work.

And for all that, the film remains distant and aloof from what’s happening. And the final scene which is supposed to be this moving emotional moment has some meaning, but it doesn’t hit like it should. I’m a fan of the director George Roy Hill, who remains best known for The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The World According to Garp. And when he was good - in those and in other films - it was because he was masterful at capturing a certain tone. He had this light touch. Bemused, maybe? His films tend to feature unusual characters in unusual scenarios and trying to muddle their way through. Hawaii has interesting characters, but it has very little humor. Maybe because it’s a historical epic and we have to be serious about such things? Hill’s films tend to be much smaller and maybe he got lost trying to make something this big.

So, Hawaii is not that good. It’s not good and on top of that, the film is nearly three hours long. If it were two hours long, I don’t think that it would have been a better movie, but I would have liked it better.

What Happened to Sara Foster?

Watching The Big Bounce, I was reminded of Sara Foster, an actor I admittedly have not thought about in a while. There’s a reason for that. But in 2004, when The Big Bounce was released, Foster made a splash as the star of Angela Robinson’s film D.E.B.S. It’s not as though she hasn’t done anything since 2004 but that year and those films were her big shot and neither film did especially well. The Big Bounce failed and was, as I wrote, not great. And D.E.B.S. is a cult hit and beloved by many but unfortunately it wasn’t a huge hit.

The fact that she played two different characters - and managed to romance Owen Wilson and Jordana Brewster between the two films - is interesting enough. In The Big Bounce, Foster plays a femme fatale, essentially, though that’s not initially what she seems to be. That reveal and her complexity is built into the structure of the film. And she’s good. But then there are also these moments in the film between her and Wilson where one can see the texture of a different kind of film and a different kind of acting. The kind of casual charm and improvised feel that was so key to the relationship between her and Brewster in D.E.B.S.

Who knows how good she really is as an actor. But it’s the not knowing, the never getting the chance that must really drive actors crazy. I mean, we all want at shot at whatever we do. We want to get in the room. We want to have a real opportunity and if we fail, we’re going to spend our lives reliving it and it’s going to hang over everything else we do like the sword of Damocles. But at least you had a chance. Being an actor, that rarely happens. Auditioning is hard. And if you actually get a part, so many people will judge you on one role. They’ll say, I hate that character and find the character so grating and so therefore I hate the actor. (Or worse, getting typecast as an annoying grating character and then everyone only thinks of you as that character…which if it meant you were laughing all the way to the bank is one thing, but often that’s not how it works out). How many actors can say that they had a shot? That they had a good role in a good project, and no matter how it turned out, they had a legitimate shot. It’s not that we only get one shot in life. But you never know what’s your last shot. That chance to prove to yourself and others what you can do and what you’re capable of.

In other words, it sucks being an actor. It’s hard. I think about the most talented people I’ve known and how few chances they had and the work it took.

And so the title of this post is obvious. What happened to Sara Foster is what’s happened to so many young actors. If she were a man, she probably would have gotten a few more chances. (Which is a whole other topic) One can’t help but think about the number of actors who get a few roles and then disappear. Or the ones who never got those roles, never even got in the room for one reason or another that had nothing to do with talent.

But also, I’d watch a movie with Sara Foster as a forty year old bisexual mom who’s also a criminal mastermind.

Maybe one of these years…