The not-so-sudden sudden death of Chadwick Boseman

Damn.

This one hits hard.

In some kind of tragic coincidence that just screams #2020, Chadwick Boseman, the man who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42, died on the very same day that Major League Baseball was recognizing Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947.

That actually occurred on April 15th of 1947, not August 28th, but since there was no April 15th on the baseball calendar in 2020, August 28th was -- as far as I can tell -- randomly chosen as a substitute date.

It might have seemed logical just not to recognize the anniversary this year, except as it turned out, honoring Robinson was something that ended up feeling very important not only this year, but this week, as the country reels anew from another heinous police shooting of a Black American.

Instead, there's a kind of cruel irony in this day, as Boseman ended up passing from colon cancer on the same day. He didn't just play non-fictional heroes to the Black community -- like Robinson and Thurgood Marshall -- but he also played one of the Black community's greatest fictional heroes, T'Challa, otherwise known as Black Panther.

It didn't feel like Wakanda would last #forever on this particular day.

Boseman's death would have been painful anyway, but what made it especially painful was that I had no idea he was sick. None. And had been so for four years. I don't suppose most people knew. Last I heard, Black Panther 2 was all systems go and he would be front and center. He had been revived from Thanos' snap and could live to fight another day, many other days, on into Phases 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the MCU.

Now ... he's gone.

Just like that. In a snap.

I did a double take when I read the headline. I guess that's always the reaction when someone so young, so vigorous, so apparently overflowing with joie de vivre, is taken from us. I mean, he played an incomparably gifted athlete and a superhero so lithe, so quick and so agile that his character's name evoked the feline. There wasn't a thought in my head that we were about lose him.

You walk around with a number of names in your head of people whose obituary you could expect to see any old time. Like, when Olivia de Havilland finally died at 104, it was almost like a sigh of relief that someone else could finally occupy one of those spots. Someone like, say, Sean Connery, who just turned 90.

But Boseman? I didn't wake up Saturday morning (my time) thinking Chadwick Boseman could die today. And yet he did.

I was not as big a fan of Black Panther as most people were, but I was a huge fan of Boseman. Being the baseball fan that I am, I was more of a fan of 42 than most, I think. Those were some pretty big cleats to fill to play Robinson, one of the all-time baseball greats and baseball ambassadors, and yet he was the perfect choice. Quiet dignity, inner fire. That was Boseman to a T.

The Robinson biopic was where I first learned of Boseman, who got a late start on his movie career, only appearing in his first movie role after age 30. (He had been appearing on TV for five years before that, but not on shows I watched.) But he shot up quickly into other immediately interesting work. 42 was followed the next year by Draft Day and Get on Up, the latter a biopic of another hero of the Black community (though a bit more problematic than Robinson or Marshall), James Brown. I don't really remember him in Draft Day (though I liked that movie), though of course he's the central force in the highly effective Get on Up, a role that was expected to earn him awards consideration.

At this point his career became quite occupied playing T'Challa in four Marvel movies, though he did continue to make what I assume was interesting work, as I have not yet seen Marshall, Message from the King or 21 Bridges. The last movie released in his lifetime was Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, in which he plays a character seen only in flashback, because he died during the Vietnam War. Died young -- just like Boseman.

Because Boseman got a late start in movies, he seemed even younger than 43. And because he radiated star power, that contributed to the sense that he was just at the beginning of a long and rich career that would alternate between serious and crowd-pleasing work -- and in the best cases, work that would be both at once.

My heart aches. Rest in peace, Panther.

Harrison Ford really likes being in movies these days

And I for one am grateful, because he's back to being good at it.

Having spent the first decade of the 21st century making less than one movie per year, Ford was for all intents and purposes retired. His appearance in a movie would prompt an involuntary raised eyebrow. You'd wonder what set of circumstances had caused him to dignify the set of Hollywood Homicide or Firewall with his presence.

Not that we should take digs at Ford for not choosing the career path of Nicolas Cage, but in truth, we do sort of resent actors who feel like they don't need to act anymore. You're supposed to keep making movies until we, the audience, are done with you, not until you have enough money to buy a small island. Anything less is a failure to appreciate the people who got you there, the fans.

Well, Ford is a fan-appreciating muthafucka these days.

Having just completed 42 -- which I finally gave up trying to get from the Hoyts Kiosk and the video store, and rented from iTunes instead -- I have now seen two of Ford's four 2013 releases, after catching up with Ender's Game last week. I may see Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues on Monday, though his work in that may be of the surprise cameo variety (and if so, I'm sorry about spoiling the surprise). Paranoia is the only film that remains likely to elude me, given that I heard it wasn't all that.

If he was good in Ender's Game, he was great in 42.

See, there's a difference between returning to acting and returning to acting effectively. If you're a star of Ford's caliber, you can start being in movies again whenever you want. It's being good in them that's the trick.

Having just completed 42, not only did I think Ford was good, but I'm rooting for him to get that Oscar nomination I've heard discussed as a possibility. I might even be rooting for him to win it. 

The current state of affairs seemed highly unlikely back when Cowboys & Aliens came out in 2011. Boy was that a stinker. Not only was it a stinker, but Ford was one of the main reasons it stunk. He mumbled his way through that movie and frankly seemed lost. Old Man Ford seemed to have taken over the once vital young symbol of masculine virility. He was a septuagenarian dressing up like a movie star. You could imagine someone off set yelling his lines to him, and him still repeating them back incorrectly.

Not anymore. Harrison Ford has poured his heart and soul into the role of Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodger owner who made the trailblazing decision to offer a contract to Major League Baseball's first black player, Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman).

It's not just that Rickey has the choicest lines of dialogue, putting into words the anger and frustration over society's reaction to Robinson. It's that Ford delivers them with a quivering fervor that makes you want to get up out of your seat and cheer. But it's not just a performance of raging righteous indignation. Ford also does really subtle work with just small changes of expression upon hearing an ugly N-word come out of someone's mouth. He's a man with an optimistic view of society, one that is dying by a thousand cuts.

What's more impressive is that it's one of the actor's few performances that cannot be described as Ford playing Ford. Ford has been called a good actor, but he's rarely been called a versatile one. Here, he's adopting a gruffer voice, he's picking up mannerisms that may not belong to him. And when he points -- as Ford is wont to do -- he's pointing downward, with the crooked, arthritic hands of a man past his prime.

Turning into an old man has made Ford a good actor again. He spent years looking like he was uncomfortable in his skin, but now he looks quite comfortable.

This is not to say that it's smooth sailing for Ford from here on out. He is in the next Expendables movie, and he is unlikely to know the best way to play Han Solo again.

So maybe now is the time for that Oscar. It's one thing to start acting again, but it's quite another to keep doing award-worthy work.

At least Ford has given himself good odds by becoming a Hollywood regular again. Five years ago, it's not something I knew I would want to happen quite this much.

Life, the universe and Jackie Robinson

The number 42 has had a significance to me long before I knew much, or perhaps anything, about Jackie Robinson.

Just as it has for anyone who grew up reading Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

It's more involved than this, but here's a tidy summary from wikipedia:

"In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never actually knew what the Question was."

As is the case with anything brilliant and wonderful you read, it sticks with you a lot longer, and comes up in a lot more situations than you ever would think it should. Hence, I basically cannot hear the number 42 these days without thinking of Deep Thought and its perplexing calculation. When my wife turned 42 back in February, I even quoted The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in her birthday card. She appreciated that.

So what does this all have to do with baseball?

Well, Jackie Robinson, the first man to break Major League Baseball's color barrier back in 1947, wore #42. To honor this feat, baseball retired Robinson's number on all teams, not just the Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers, back in 1997, to mark 50 years since the landmark achievement.

It's doubtful that Douglas Adams, a young humorist living in England, had any sense of the American significance of this number (nor that Americans themselves had much of a sense of it at the time) when he launched Hitchhiker's as a BBC radio series back in 1978. (And can I just say that it's blowing my mind to learn that this brand originated as a radio series, not as a book. I thought it had been the other way around.) It probably just seemed to him like an absurdly random number somewhere between 1 and 100. He probably used similar logic to what you and I use when we are looking to exaggerate a number, but not too much. ("I've checked my email 42 times in the last five minutes," you might say.)

I guess you could say this number is almost equally important to me for the two different reasons. Baseball now means a lot more to me than The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Adams' book did come along to me first, and found me at a perfect time to play an essential role in molding my sense of humor and giving me a bottomless appreciation for the absurd. (Actually, they came along very close to the same time, as it turns out. I read at least some of those books in the summer of 1986 when my family was vacationing in England, and I became a baseball fan that fall when the Red Sox went to the World Series. I'd like to say that was the year I turned 14, which is a factor of 42, but alas, it was the year I turned 13.)

Still, I don't know if it's quite enough to get me out to the movies to see 42. Suddenly the films I want to see in the theater are starting to really conglomerate, and my genuine interest in seeing a Jackie Robinson biopic is still slightly less than my antipathy for sports movies in general. (I've discussed this irony before, that I love sports but don't love sports movies, so I won't get into it again right now.) But if I don't make it out to the theater to see this movie, I'll be first in line to rent it on DVD.

The other half of this irony on my perspective on sports movies vs. actual sports is that my wife is just the opposite. She doesn't care a lick for "sport" (as Australians call it) but she damn near loves sports movies. In fact, every time the ad for 42 comes on, she mentions that she wants to see it. It's especially funny because my wife hasn't see anything in the theater since before Christmas, when she took in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This could be the one to end her drought.

I suppose it could just be this: She's of the exact age to be seeking out the answers to life's great questions.