Remembering Chuck Norris via his memes

Chuck Norris isn't the type of person I usually memorialize on my blog.

Although he was certainly an action movie icon in the 1980s, the difference between him and guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis was that I didn't see almost any of his movies. Or rather, I probably saw lots of individual bits of them on cable in my friend's basement, but they were so interchangeable, with such forgettable plots, that I never bothered to make note of the names of the movies we were watching. 

In fact, the only movie I'm sure I watched from that period was Missing in Action, and this one sticks with me because of one particular scene. Norris' character is held captive by the Viet Cong, and at one point they hang him upside down and put an angry/hungry/rabid rat in a burlap bag that's just bigger than his head, then put it around his head and draw the strings tight. We hear lots of sounds of struggle and angry conflict and we can only imagine what this angry/hungry/rabid rat is doing to poor Chuck's face. But then the big reveal is that he managed to grab the rat in his teeth and crush it to death in his jaws.

That is sort of the perfect Chuck Norris moment, even though it does not involve any roundhouse kicks, and it leads perfectly into what I want to talk about today.

Although I did enjoy watching snippets of forbidden Norris on cable, I'd say the moment I dug Norris the most came some 15 years after that. (Missing in Action came out in 1985.) And in this case it doesn't have anything to do with any actual accomplishment by the actor, but only hypothetical, hyperbolic accomplishments that made him one of my very first experiences with the concept of the meme.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003 -- I remember it was around then because I remember the office I worked in at the time -- I became aware of a list of things Chuck Norris has supposedly done, which are so epic that they have to do with punching God in the fact and everything you can possible imagine at about that same level of impossible. You are probably also aware of this list, depending on what age person you are.

I really wish I could find the original list that was going around at the time. I can find a lot of the same jokes on the internet as part of other lists, but my list, the one I got in an email on my old AOL or Hotmail account, was definitely the best list. (I should pause to say that I can't be 100% sure that this was when I first encountered this list, or whether it might have been when the list came back on my radar for some reason. In any case, it was a good quarter century ago and possibly longer.)

Somewhere along the way it was decided that Chuck Norris was so badass that he could defy the laws of physics, travel through time, be recognized as himself during his own birth, punch God in the face, what have you.

So instead of trying to describe what these "Chuck Norris facts" were like, I've gone through what I can find online and included a dozen of my favorites from that time -- ones that I specifically remember as being part of my original list. Some of the other ones are good, but they aren't my Chuck Norris jokes. 

I think the old man, who died this weekend at age 86, would appreciate them:

1) Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. 

2) Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Chuck Norris.

3) Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked somebody so hard that his foot broke the speed of light. 

4) Since 1940, the year Chuck Norris was born, roundhouse kick related deaths have increased 13,000 percent.

5) Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. 

6) There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist. 

7) Chuck Norris has never blinked in his entire life. Never. 

8) Chuck Norris counted to infinity ... twice.

9) Chuck Norris once punched a man in the soul. 

10) When Chuck Norris goes swimming, he doesn't get wet -- the water gets Chuck Norris.

11) Chuck Norris can divide by zero. 

12) There is no such thing as evolution, only a list of species Chuck Norris has allowed to live. 

There was another one I can't find though I can sort of remember, so hopefully I'll do it justice. It's sort of my favorite because of the notion that Chuck Norris was famous before he was even born:

"When Chuck Norris was born, the nurse said 'Holy shit, that's Chuck Norris!' And then he had sex with her."

Wikipedia suggests that Norris was bemused by these "Chuck Norris facts" but had weirdly earnest responses to some of them. Like apparently the one about evolution caused him to clarify that he's a creationist.

Norris was not simpatico to me politically, and he was not much of an actor. But we need our larger than life icons, and the phrase "larger than life" is the very sort of phrase that was designed for someone like Chuck Norris, that prompted him to be lovingly memed. You might say "Life is big, but Chuck Norris is even bigger."

Was. Rest in peace. 

R.I.P. Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall was a rock, imperturable. 

You could blow up artillery right next to him and he wouldn't flinch (Apocalypse Now). But watch out if you did perturb him, you might get the wrong end of a baseball bat (The Apostle). 

But not all of Duvall's movies started with the letters "Apo." He was just a constant throughout the movies of the past 50 years, only quitting four years ago when he was 91. 

If mentioning his work in The Apostle seems like a strange way to start a eulogy to the man, who we lost this week at age 95, try telling that to IMDB, who lists him as "Actor, The Apostle (1997)" when you type in his name. 

That film does serve as an exact mid-point between the time that a lot of people might have first become aware of him, in The Godfather (1972), and his last film in 2022, The Pale Blue Eye, which I haven't yet seen.

Of course, The Godfather wasn't nearly the start of Duvall's career. He was on TV starting from 1960, which means he got a relatively late start around age 29 and still had a career that spanned 65 years, if you consider the career to have been effectively ongoing until his death. We wouldn't have really been surprised to see this stalwart still turn up again, even at age 95, would we? His traits played at any age.

And it was iconic performances basically from the start, as he played Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird in 1962. Most of his 1960s stayed on TV, but by the end of the decade, he transferred to film and never looked back, appearing in such films as Bullitt, True Grit, MASH and THX 1138 before Francis Ford Coppola presumably got advice from his good friend George Lucas and cast him as the consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather. 

I didn't come to any of this work until I was an adult, and I still haven't see the original version of True Grit. But he was a constant in films I did see when I was younger as well. 

Oddly, the titles from Duvall's career don't read as quite so iconic after the 1970s, which also included films like The Conversation, Network and The Godfather Part II. (He had the wisdom to skip The Godfather Part III, though I can't remember what the story logic was for why he wasn't there.) 

But he was always around, turning up here and there, and always contributing an intensity you didn't soon forget. He also had a way of laughing that made you think it might be a prelude to killing you. 

Duvall may not have been a personal favorite, but there was never any doubt that I needed to write a remembrance of him here, which I have done quickly now as I prepare for work and another busy day. That was the purest indication of his impact on cinema during the entirety of my lifespan. 

Rest in peace. 

R.I.P. to one of the funniest comedic actresses of her generation

What? Catherine O'Hara?

No.

Never would it have occurred to me that the 71-year-old actress, most recently seen by me in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the TV show The Studio, would be at death's door. But here I am, having to memorialize a wonderful presence in our comedy lives gone way before her time. 

I guess she wasn't at death's door, really, as she succumbed to what Wikipedia is calling a brief illness. Those kinds of illness are worrisome as they can get any of us, even those who looked like they were still going to keep making us laugh for years into the future.

It's another blow to the Christopher Guest mockumentary cinematic universe after the loss of Rob Reiner. After Reiner stopped making movies like that but Guest continued, Guest cast O'Hara in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and (unfortunately in this last case) For Your Consideration. She was great in all but one of those, and along with collaborators like Eugene Levy -- later her collaborator on the wonderful series Schitt's Creek -- and Fred Willard, she became synonymous with Guest's engaging brand of improvisational comedy.

Of course, to more mainstream comedy fans, she took the scene by storm with her roles in Beetlejuice and Home Alone. Neither of those are personal favorites, though I do like both quite a bit. O'Hara was adept at pleasing both comedy nerds and a broader audience, always making particular choices with her character work, and always being very, very funny. 

I always associated O'Hara in my mind with Madeline Kahn, as if a baton had been handed off by Kahn and O'Hara picked it up and ran with it. There are a dearth of actresses whose primary mode is comedy who get to have such long careers, which is a shame. (Just looking it up now, I realize we lost Kahn at only age 57, to cancer.)

In looking back at a career that goes all the way back to 1980 -- yes that's a 45-year career, unheard of for most actresses -- I'm seeing I've already listed the films and TV shows that I think are the major touchpoints for most of us. But O'Hara made anything she was in better, often showing up in key supporting roles as comic relief rather than needing to operate as the lead. Maybe that was a key to her longevity, that she needn't be the thing the movie was selling you on. She was the thing that always put a big smile on your face when she appeared.

And certainly she wasn't limited to this sort of role, but she was so good at playing a character with a quick wit and perhaps slightly questionable priorities, but someone you always ended up rooting for, even if it was only because it was O'Hara playing her. 

It's a huge loss at a time when we've had too many of them. 

Rest in peace.

Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton never seemed to get any older.

She may have aged, but she didn't get any older. Even in recent performances, she showed the same sort of plucky youthfulness she showed when we first met her. She was a bit like Sally Field in that way. 

I didn't first meet her in The Godfather, as some people would have, or in Annie Hall, as some other people would have. I wasn't born when The Godfather came out and was only four when Annie Hall came out.

No, my first Keaton was likely Father of the Bride in 1991, considering that a quick scan of her 1980s output shows only movies I would have caught up with later as well. And though I don't remember Father of the Bride very well -- and I certainly don't remember loving it -- I can tell you that Diane Keaton likely played scenes of high comedy very well in it. She was a gifted physical comedian, one who could instantly show her exasperation with an outrageous situation in only a few gestures. The same charming loopiness that I now know was really perfected in Annie Hall was something she kept giving us throughout her career, as she became the best thing about Nancy Meyers movies and their ilk. 

There were times I didn't think it was particularly appropriate, but that wasn't due to Keaton's abilities in that mode fading in the slightest. I remember feeling frustrated, on behalf of the character, that in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, she had to act klutzy and discombobulated over a man (Jack Nicholson) who was not treating her very nicely. (Again, not another movie I remember particularly well. I just remember this feeling.) But that Keaton could still do this so convincingly, at age 57, was beyond question -- I just wish her character didn't have to do it because I always thought a Keaton character deserved better. Keaton characters won our sympathy, always, effortlessly.

Of course, I now know, 22 years later, that 57 is not "old." I'll turn 57 myself in five years.

But maybe Keaton seemed older than 57 only because of how long she'd been around, how regular a presence she was in the lives of cinephiles. She was also old in Hollywood years, because she was able to keep doing what she was doing, cast in roles where she was the romantic lead, for far longer than the industry suggests she should have been able to. Sure, maybe the audience for Something's Gotta Give wasn't the same as for some of her earlier films -- I'm talking in terms of demographics -- but it was still a high-profile release playing on all the screens. And don't tell me Keaton's ability to knock over a lamp while fumbling through some bit of chatty nervous dialogue wasn't key to why they thought they could sell it to us.

I didn't know I was seeing Keaton's last role at the time I watched the movie Summer Camp on the plane earlier this year. Not a great movie to end on, but what actor really does go out on a high? But I would have had no reason to think I was seeing her last at the time, because she looked as youthful and spry as ever in it, and won us over just as easily. 

But Keaton's health took a turn recently, and she passed this weekend at age 79.

I'll close my thoughts on Diane Keaton with a movie she made 20 years ago, that I think not a lot of people appreciate, but more should. The movie is called The Family Stone, and it showcases kind of an ideal Keaton that seems like an amalgam of what I liked best about her.

Keaton plays the matriarch of a fiercely liberal Connecticut family, and the cast is an all-star one: Craig T. Nelson, Rachel McAdams, Luke Wilson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney. Although the movie certainly has some fun with her eccentricities and moments of big personality -- it wouldn't be a Keaton role if it didn't -- Keaton's Sybil Stone is a true bohemian wonder, tirelessly supportive of the marginalized, and eager to wrap everyone in a clumsy hug of her acceptance, even when it's the uptight conservative (Parker) who's dating her son. In fact, she's so accepting that she says about her one gay son that she wishes she had more gay children. From someone else, this line might read as overcompensating for decidedly mixed feelings about having a gay son. From Sybil Stone, you do really believe she wishes all her children were gay. 

We wish we had more Diane Keatons, because the one we had has left us now.

Rest in peace. 

R.I.P. Robert Redford

As we continue our trip through Europe -- I'm currently on a train between an Italian town in Tuscany called Arezzo and Rome -- I don't really feel equipped to memoralize Robert Redford.

However, I also don't feel I can call myself a movie blog if I don't stop for a moment to acknowledge the passing of one of the greats.

It wasn't just what Redford brought to the screen as a matinee idol and acting icon. It was what he fostered as a champion of independent cinema through his long association with the Sundance Film Festival, named after his most iconic character. The fact that he was also a strong proponent of my cherished progressive causes is also really resonating for me, especially this month.

But because I'm not currently in a position to do a deep dive into IMDB and give a granular consideration of a career that started in 1960 with a role on the TV show Maverick, I'm just going to pay my respects to Redford with a little free associating today.

The first thing I thought when I heard Redford had died in his sleep at age 89 was "Robert Redford was 89?" Even though it would make sense that he would be, Redford always projected boyish good looks that belied his age, even when he was in his announced final role in The Old Man and the Gun in 2018. (Which, incidentally, was the second to last film I saw with my mother, and the last while she was compos mentis.) Given how there Redford clearly still was for this film -- maybe not looking a day over 68 -- it seemed strange that this would be his final film. (He did have a few bits of voiceover work after this, as well as one Marvel cameo.)

Because he did add a youthful vigor to whatever he did, the fact that he lived nearly nine decades does seem strange. But when you go back and look at the titles, well, you remember what a part of the cinematic landscape he was for six of those nine decades.

If we are talking about his role in my own personal viewing history, consider also that Redford was in the first movie I ever saw on video with my wife. That may seem like a strange milestone to honor -- our first movie together was in the theater, The Aviator, which played at the bar after our wedding per our request -- but I do remember that we watched Redford's The Clearing in her apartment in our first month of dating. Redford would have been something special to me even if I weren't a cinephile. 

The listing of his classic titles is not something I'm going to do here. The internet is filled to the brim with Redford appreciations right now. You know the titles. Me proving I can also list them does not do anything for you.

To illustrate these two personal examples, however, gives you a little something different. It suggests Redford's cinematic everpresence, even in films from the twlight of his career. He was solid, he was reliable, he was charming as hell, and he made many a person swoon with his beauty. It's all we want and need from a movie star. 

Yet Redford also had a career as a producer, director and film festival impresario, cementing his status as one of the more titanic cinematic figures of the second half of the 20th century, and even the first quarter of the 21st century. He poured his all into his love of cinema, and we were the beneficiaries.

Rest in peace, Sundance. 

R.I.P. to the funniest Lex Luthor

Because I was always a much bigger Superman II fan than Superman fan, having only seen the latter
one time until maybe ten years ago, I always thought of Lex Luthor as comic relief. I guess he was a little bit that in the original Superman, but I don't really care for that movie and I already don't remember the details from my last viewing.

But in Superman II, Luthor is more of a sniveling opportunist than a villain, doing his best to kiss the boots of the three humorless Kryptonians who can level whole cities if they wish. He's more to them what Ned Beatty's Otis was to him, before he abandoned Otis in their prison break at the start of the movie, carrying off in a hot air balloon with Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine). 

And so, whatever not insignificant amount of comedy there was in Superman II belonged to Luthor, and no one could have done it like Gene Hackman. 

Hackman died in late February -- I'm not sure if they know the exact date yet -- at age 95, as a result of what might have been a murder-suicide with his much younger wife, carbon monoxide poisoning, or some third cause not yet determined. Their dog died, too, so that just complicates the possible explanations. 

The circumstances of his death are not a concern of the current memorial piece, since at age 95, something was going to get Hackman within a year or two anyway, even if he had not died under these suspicious circumstances. No, today we are appreciating the career of a man who was one of the great cinematic icons of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. 

Hackman was funny, as I've already indicated. You can excerpt any number of scenes from Superman II if you want to see that, including possibly my favorite, where he is strolling around the overthrown White House, starting to puff a cigar, and working his way up to telling the Kryptonians the price of his cooperation: "Australia!" 

But the intensity of the man was what caused him to stick in our memories. There was the quiet intensity, which you saw in a movie like The Conversation. There was the not-so-quiet intensity, featured in Crimson Tide. And there was every kind of intensity in between. His performances were always alive with edge. 

Hackman was so present in the formative years of my film fandom that I sometimes forget the films he was in -- I mean, that he was in them. My last viewing of Bonnie & Clyde, for example, elevated it into my top 100 movies on Flickchart, but I didn't remember until checking his IMDB just now that he played Buck Barrow alongside Clyde Darrow. (I don't think I remembered that those characters' names rhymed either.) 

I was never a huge fan of The French Connection, but I'll get a chance to grapple with that again later this year -- and a chance to appreciate Hackman again -- as it's one of the films on the schedule for my Understanding Editing monthly series. In fact, there's still a lot of Hackman appreciation on the horizon for me, as there are a number of his prominent films that I haven't seen, including Reds, No Way Out, Postcards from the Edge and The Firm.

But why talk about the Hackman movies I haven't seen? There were plenty that I did, though they were not, in all cases, great movies. In all cases, though, Hackman was great in them.

If I'm thinking about another seminal role, I'd probably have to go with Unforgiven. His work as Little Bill Daggett showcased the menace of which he was capable, the psychopathy that was more frightening for being underplayed. The scene that leads up to him kicking the shit out of Richard Harris' self-important "The Duke" is the perfect example of this, as he utterly pierces the man's sense of his own legend through three simple words that preview where this little tete-a-tete is going to go. When The Duke tries to tell Bill that he has pronounced his name incorrectly, Hackman looks him down with a sort of half smile and doubles down: "Duck I says."

Hackman stopped acting long before he needed to. It may have been a surprise to everyone but Gene Hackman when the last movie he made was 2004's Welcome to Mooseport opposite Ray Romano. That was maybe not a fitting farewell for a man of his talents and his importance to Generation X and the Boomers before them, but Hackman always seemed like the kind of guy who would go out on his own terms. He was only 74 when that movie was released, and did not appear to be losing a step -- especially since he'd just made two films with signature roles, The Royal Tenenbaums and Heartbreakers, in the five-year period that preceded it. And if you don't think of Heartbreakers as a signature role, well ... maybe I just like Gene Hackman in comedic mode more than you do.

One of the defining traits of Lex Luthor, canonically, is that he's bald. But not my Lex Luthor. My Lex Luthor has a full head of hair and is trying to ingratiate himself to three superhumans capable of squashing him like a bug, like he's selling them a used car. 

And I will miss him.

R.I.P. Darth Vader

I missed memorializing Donald Sutherland when he passed, so I'm certainly not going to lie down on the job when it comes to noting the departure from this world of James Earl Jones.

Unfortunately, I would not say I have any truly unique words in reflecting on the legacy of one of our most beloved cultural icons and recognizable voices. 

However, as a child who saw Star Wars in the movie theater when he was not yet four, I do have a perspective on him shared by only those within a couple years of my age.

For many of us, Jones' voicing of Darth Vader was the first time we heard the blood-chilling sounds of evil. When we heard Darth Vader, we suddenly had a perfect encapsulation of an unimaginable threat to our safety. Our parents had kept us safe from harm, but somehow, some way, this villain could still get us, if we weren't careful.

I was first in line for the next two releases -- to the extent that my parents cooperated with that agenda, though I can't really remember for sure. As much as I dreamed myself away into the exploits of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, the pull of Darth Vader's menace -- not phantom, but very tactile and real -- was an equivalent part of the adventure, the same sort of glimpse into the pit of darkness that would later make me and others into horror fans.

And though Darth Vader was obviously Jones' most iconic role, when we think of him, we don't think of a cruel and twisted man.

We think of the wonderful grandfatherly figure in Field of Dreams, who helps Ray Kinsella on his journey to build a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield. I may not love that movie the way I once did, but I cherish the portrayal Jones gives us.

We think of the stern but ultimately loving father in Coming to America, whose underlying gentleness was passed down to his son, Prince Akeem.

We think of The Lion King's Mufasa, another paternal figure, whose warmth and light were extinguished by the vicious Scar.

I was leading up there to a point that the on-screen and voice-only Joneses were very different types, but Mufasa, of course, was also a voice-only role, and there he is the ultimate good rather than the ultimate evil.

Few actors have had such careers where they thrived equally as heroes and villains, and that may be the ultimate compliment to an actor's range. 

We had no reason to expect James Earl Jones to live very much longer than the 93 years he lived. But the fact that he was still supplying the voice of Darth Vader as recently as 2022 in the Disney series Obi-Wan Kenobi, 45 years after he originally gave life to the character, indicates that we didn't feel like we were even done yet with Jones as a working actor, let alone as a person living in this world. 

Now any future attempts to create Darth Vader's voice on screen will likely be the product of AI, and don't think we won't get them. In fact, they might even sound as good, almost, as Jones himself, though that's as much of a twisted fate involving the blending of human and machine as Darth Vader himself.

But those of us who first heard the booming voice of darkness, and the labored breathing that went with it, in a movie theater in 1977 as three-year-olds, we'll know the difference.

We'll know. 

So long, Apollo

The entire new Creed series, starring Michael B. Jordan, has been inspired in some way by the loss of the character's father, Apollo Creed, before the boy was even born. 

Now, we've lost the man who played Apollo Creed, Carl Weathers.

In another one of those cases of "he looked so fine when I last saw him," Weathers has died at 76 even though he seemed in quite good shape during the run of The Mandalorian, which was the last time I'd seen him in action. He passed in his sleep on Thursday.

Things I had forgotten about Weathers, or didn't know, but just learned based on a quick look at Wikipedia:

1) He was a one-time linebacker, actually having a couple of professional seasons with the Oakland Raiders in the early 1970s.

2) The woman he was married to at the time he made Rocky was named Mary Ann, which is also the name of Apollo Creed's wife.

The interesting trick Weathers pulled off as Apollo Creed was to go from a villain in the first two Rocky films to a beloved hero in the third and fourth -- for his brief appearance in the fourth before the demise that inspired the Jordan movies. This was at a time when heroes were heroes and villains were villains, none of this "let's look at the back story and see why this person we thought was bad was actually good." 

For me, Rocky III was the first Rocky movie I ever saw, where Creed trains his former rival and is alongside him when he finally beats Clubber Lang, the boxer played by Mr. T who had already beaten Rocky once and whose rough behavior with Mickey might have contributed to Mickey's death. Creed also filled that coaching vacancy in Rocky's life when Mickey died.

I had this movie on VHS when I was a kid and have probably watched it ten times. So for me, even knowing they had a history, Apollo was always a hero. When I finally did see Rocky and Rocky II (only just last year for that last one), there was no real sense of Apollo's villainy because I knew where the story went. 

Weathers didn't necessarily have a prolific career in terms of beloved characters beyond Apollo. The attempt to launch him as a true leading man, Action Jackson in 1988, largely fell flat, and it became clear Weathers was really more of a character actor. He had capably supported Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator the year before, he would capably support Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore a few years later, in another coaching role like the one he'd played in Rocky III. Sandler used him a few more times, but Weathers only had three more movie roles after 2007.

So it was really nice to see him rediscovered in The Mandalorian, where his fundamental geniality really showed through. Greef Karga may have mixed it up with the likes of bounty hunters and other scum, but there was no one with more of a moral center in that show, and that made the one-time villain turned beloved beacon of kindness, Carl Weathers, the best suited to play him.

And off to that big boxing ring in the sky, Mr. Weathers. Happy trails. 

Rest in police, Captain Holt

My wife and I are slowly making our way through the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix. Our gradual pace is so we can draw out the inevitable arrival of Andre Braugher's final, hilarious utterance as Captain Raymond Holt.

Little did I know it would be Andre Braugher's final utterance himself. Braugher died this week at 61 after a short illness.

I'm devastated. 

This assessment of my feelings naturally occurred to me to type in a Facebook chat with some friends after I found out of his passing in that chat. One of them came back with a gif of Holt saying "I'm devastated." I hadn't realized this was an actual line of his dialogue, spoken in a total deadpan, as consistent with the apparently narrow emotional range of this dedicated career police officer. Of course, we all knew Holt for the softie he really was.

Like most people, I became aware of Braugher through his great work in Homicide: Life on the Street. But it was another TV show that ingratiated me to a different version of Braugher, one with a little more levity, which paved the way for his Brooklyn Nine-Nine work. That show was the sadly short-lived Men of a Certain Age with Ray Romano and Scott Bakula. My wife and I loved it. No one else seemed to have heard of it.

Because this is a movie blog, of course I should talk about Braugher's movie work, of which there was less, but still, some important and good examples.

Most recently he appeared in She Said, my #11 movie of 2022, where he played the uncompromising newspaper editor Dean Baquet, who went toe-to-toe on phone calls with Harvey Weinstein, and didn't blink even in the presence of implied and actual threats from the powerful Hollywood mogul. That movie belongs to its two female newspaper reporters, of course, but the extra support provided by Baquet is invaluable, and Braugher's performance of it steady and true.

It's surprising how few others there were. One I hated, which was Stephen King's The Mist. One I loved but haven't seen in ages, that being Edward Zwick's Glory. I'm due for a rewatch, and Braugher's presence in the cast might make me prioritize that early in the new year.

When it comes to the death of a beloved favorite like Braugher, though, I don't need to sit here and justify to you why I'm writing a memoriam piece about a TV star on a movie blog. Braugher was a lovely presence on my screen, no matter what form of viewing entertainment it was. He was intense on Homicide, establishing himself as an incendiary dramatic actor. He steadily took the path toward becoming an even better comic actor, the most compelling presence on an enduring sitcom that was characterized by the strength of its ensemble. Everyone probably had a non-Holt favorite character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but I can't imagine anyone wouldn't have selected Holt as their favorite overall.

And consider the character he played. A Black precinct captain who worked his way up through the ranks due to his impeccable demeanor and policing skills, but who met roadblocks at every step of the way due to his race. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did not shy away from discussing matters of race, and in fact, it was the real-world race-related police brutality in 2020 that caused the whole show to consider whether it was still funny to make a show about police officers. Eventually they decided it wasn't, and are so far going out gracefully, while also being topical about the reality of a show about police officers.

But oh wait. Holt was also gay. For the entire series, through some ups and downs, he was in a loving relationship with Kevin, played by Marc Evan Jackson, who put a photo of them posing in a loving embrace on Instagram as a tribute. Holt was Black and gay and still a police captain with aspirations for even more senior positions within the NYPD. Every part of that was in Braugher's performance, but it never defined his performance. His performance was defined by incredible comedic timing and an even-keeled delivery that prompted jokes about him being a robot. That only made his occasionally bouts of succumbing to one emotion or another all the more hilarious.

I would have missed Andre Braugher at the end of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which we will get to in another four episodes or so. But I would have assumed he'd rise again, and in fact had heard he had already been cast in a new Netflix show, though not a comedy in this case.

Now he'll only rise again in content I haven't seen, but should probably seek out, because if Braugher was in it, it was probably great.

Rest in peace. 

Rest in peace, Toni Erdmann

It's useful for a cinephile to periodically go through the Wikipedia page "[current year] in film," not only to check the release schedule and see what you might have missed, but also to see who died without you noticing. 

I did that just now. The random prompt was the death of an actor I didn't recognize named Peter Spellos, who actually was in one of my favorite movies of all time, Bound. This is not an in memoriam piece for Peter Spellos.

My eyebrows raised over a few I hadn't noticed as they occurred, but my face drooped when I read that a different Peter S., Peter Simonischek, had died. This happened back in May.

You may not recognize that name, but you probably recognize the face in the photo I've included here.

Indeed he played Toni Erdmann in the film of the same name, my #1 of 2016.

I had only seen Simonischek in one other film, as the attention he garnered from Toni Erdmann earned him a small role in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. As such, that would not meet my ordinary threshold for eulogizing him here. So maybe more than anything I am writing this post to suggest the value of reviewing Wikipedia's film-related deaths in any given year.  

But I am also more saddened by this than I would be by the death of most other actors I had seen in only two films. And it has something to do with the perfect mixture of whimsy and melancholy that Simonischek poured into the titular trickster, who's actually a softie who just wants to connect better with his daughter. Although Simonischek was 76 when he died, which is not exactly young, I didn't feel like the man I saw in that movie just seven years ago was this close to death's door.

Also I suppose I have had Toni Erdmann on the brain a bit lately as I know that the movie's other co-star, Sandra Huller, appears in one of this year's most acclaimed films, Anatomy of a Fall. Which had me thinking how I wanted to make sure I saw that film, even beyond the fact that it is acclaimed, just because Huller is in it.

And that got me thinking how we come to feel as though the people in our favorite movies are sort of "our own," especially if they are a favorite not widely shared. I think anyone who saw Toni Erdmann thought it was excellent, but I think a lot of people didn't see it, and even many of those who did would not have named it their #1 of that year. I did, so both Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller "belong" to me in a way that others of you out there may understand, even if it is not about these two in particular.

Maybe when I see Anatomy of a Fall, I will raise a toast to the woman on screen and the man who played her father in one of the more moving portraits of a complicated father-daughter relationship I've ever seen on film.

R.I.P. to a great TV star, not a great movie star

There was really only one successful breakout star from Friends: Jennifer Aniston. Even though she's made more bad movies than good ones, there's no doubt that she became a viable movie star, not to mention a worldwide brand and gossip column/tabloid staple.

One could argue that Matthew Perry was the next most promising, though it didn't work out that way.

They kept on trying to make Perry happen during the first half of his Friends run. But movies like Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes, Three to Tango and The Whole Nine Yards just didn't register, although they did make a sequel to The Whole Nine Yards and Perry appeared in that as well. 

More than not registering, some of them were just really awful. I ranked Almost Heroes last of all the movies I saw in 1998, and lest you forget, Christopher Guest was actually the director there. I don't recall Perry being specifically bad, but he certainly didn't save it. The very next year, Three to Tango was sixth from the bottom, though my memory has been even less kind to it. It's ranked even lower than Heroes on my Flickchart, the latter coming in at 6372 while Heroes pulls up at a comparatively respectable 6304. There are only 6397 films on my Flickchart so these rankings are both awful. I probably owe Three to Tango another viewing just to see how it managed to get so low on my chart. I think there was a scene involving vomiting that I hated.

Matthew Perry's movie career doesn't say a single thing about who he was as a performer and what he brought into our lives.

There's a very real argument that Chandler Bing ushered in a whole ironic sensibility that wouldn't be a fraction of what it is today in our culture without him. Perry was a maestro of sarcasm. He owns a whole sentence construction to himself -- you know, the one where the word "be" is emphasized. Best not to quote him, but to quote the homage to him delivered by Chandler bestie Joey Tribbiani, played by Matt LeBlanc, when the two friends are embroiled in an epic argument. Joey goes and puts on every piece of clothing in Chandler's closet and zings him "I'm Chandler Bing, could I *be* wearing any more clothes?"

There's no doubt Perry was gifted at line deliveries and had impeccable comedic timing. But don't forget how much he made you believe in the soul underneath all that sarcasm. We shipped his relationship with Courtney Cox's Monica Geller through the series, because in that chronic sub plot Perry sold the depth of Chandler Bing. I think also about an earlier TV performance, in Growing Pains, when his Sandy character appeared in a memorable guest plot as a character suffering from drug addiction. (That was all too close to home for the future version of Perry, alas.)

The end of Friends was the end of the good times for Perry, career-wise, in that nothing he did after that really stuck. However, he almost became a mini version of Ted Danson in that new TV shows kept betting on the star power and specific comedic persona he brought to the screen. Alas, none of those series lasted like Danson's did.

It's hard to say what role Perry's struggles with addiction may have played in what is being described as a drowning death in a hot tub on Saturday. Pickleball was also involved. We don't know if drugs were involved (if it was an accident), or if depression was involved (if it were intentional). The details are still being investigated. And I suspect we haven't heard the last of the reporting on the topic.

What we do know is when we lost Perry at 54, we lost a comic actor who shone brightly, not for long enough, and not with the perfect showcases we would have hoped for his talent.

RIP.

Oh God, Cliff. No.

I didn't like Alan Arkin the first time I saw him on screen, or at least the first time I remember seeing him.

The Rocketeer (1991) was not my first Arkin movie, since he was in Edward Scissorhands the year before in 1990, and I loved that. But I don't remember him in it. Given the quality of the majority of performances he's given, I'm sure he was good.

But he wasn't good in The Rocketeer. In fact, he was so not good that my friends and I took to quoting a particularly awkward line of his dialogue from the movie, which I still think about almost every time I think about Arkin. 

I haven't seen that movie in the 32 years since, so I couldn't tell you what was actually happening in the plot. But some bit of bad luck, some sort of tragedy, had befallen lead character Cliff, played by Billy Campbell. 

The response of Arkin's character, who was named -- this is true, I just looked it up -- Peevy?

"Oh God, Cliff. No."

Doesn't sound that funny in isolation, but the delivery was botched so completely that the whole room burst out laughing. When five or six 17-year-olds find the exact same line of dialogue so poorly executed that their instant and simultaneous response is to devolve into guffaws, it has to be bad.

I never had that feeling about Alan Arkin again. 

If I had with any sort of regularity, I wouldn't be writing a remembrance piece like this one. But I didn't have it even once.

The next year I saw him in Glengarry Glen Ross, and the rest is history.

Now, sadly, so is Arkin. He died at age 89 on Thursday after years of heart problems -- heart problems which, in retrospect, make it seem unlikely he'd have appeared in both of the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, and fully explain his absence from the third and final one.

In all I've ended up seeing 26 films in Arkin's illustrious career, which dates all the way back to 1957 -- though only three that were released before Edward Scissorhands (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Wait Until Dark and The Last Unicorn, in which he provides a voice). The good news is, that means I have a lot more yet to enjoy.

When thinking of Arkin, I naturally think of Glengarry Glen Ross, as it is my favorite film he appeared in, ranked 54th on my Flickchart. (And used to be a lot higher.) But he added a generous helping of the loveable curmudgeon in every film he touched. It won him an Oscar in Little Miss Sunshine. 

But that was not the only version of Arkin we got. It seems hard to imagine that he was considered the right person to play one of the menacing intruders who means Audrey Hepburn harm in Wait Until Dark. And yet I remember him being menacing indeed.

He was the rare actor to really become a household name in his later years. If Glengarry Glen Ross was 31 years ago and we can think of that as a useful jumping off point for when his career started to really take off -- which may be a flawed way of viewing a career I am largely unfamiliar with prior to 1990 -- then he was already 58 in that movie. He had 56 more credits after this.

I have particularly appreciated him in the last decade of his career, when he's played characters whose primary defining feature is that they are old and cantankerous. But they are also simultaneously acerbic and warm, a tricky balance that only someone of Arkin's unique skill set could pull off. I'm thinking of movies like Stand Up Guys and Going In Style -- not great movies by any of stretch of the imagination, but infinitely better than they would have been without him. I feel like he should have been in Last Vegas, but that was his Kominsky Method co-star, Michael Douglas, who is actually 11 years younger. (As are the others in that film, Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman. Actually, Freeman is 86, so I might be writing one of these for him sooner rather than later.)

No one expects an actor to be in only great movies -- I'm sure The Jerky Boys is terrible, and he was in the infamous Rob Reiner flop North. Then of course there was The Rocketeer, which many people like but I think is actively bad.

With the possible exception of that last, though, Alan Arkin made every movie he was in better -- and that is the mark of an actor with true staying power, who was working essentially up until the end.

Which, even at 89 years old, came too soon. 

Last night I watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time in 12 years as an appreciation. That acting master class is really the Al Pacino-Jack Lemmon show, with the greatest individual scene belonging to Alec Baldwin.

But guess who plays the only character -- or at least the only salesman -- you actually like?

Rest in peace. 

R.I.P. Lance Reddick

Lance Reddick was not primarily a movie star. I remember him a lot more vividly from TV shows like The Wire and Fringe.

But I happened to have just seen him in a movie last Saturday night: Don't Say a Word, which I already wrote about here. And I remember at that time appreciating him again, like I always do -- I mean, specifically thinking about how good he is, how much he commands the screen, even in a small role, rather than just noting him and moving on.

Six days later, I learned he had had passed at age 60 from what was listed as natural causes, but natural causes that were also described as sudden.

And then when I went to check out his IMDB to see exactly what the breakdown between TV and movies was, I was reminded of how many times he did appear in the movies -- which is why it feels like Reddick has been in my life even though I haven't seen an episode of Fringe or The Wire in a good decade.

He's been in all three John Wick movies, and we'll see him in the fourth (though sadly, not the inevitable fifth). 

He was in the 2018 film Little Woods, which I just saw and really liked last year.

He was in Riley Stearns' Faults, which I really liked, and Spike Lee's Oldboy, which I liked more than most people did.

A point of reference I wouldn't have had was the "Down" movies, none of which I've seen, such as White House Down. They probably didn't burnish his resume but they do provide further evidence that Reddick was a regular presence in the movies.

Twenty-five years ago, near the very start of his career (he got a late start), Reddick even worked with Alfonso Cuaron on his adaptation of Great Expectations.

But I don't really need to spend all this time justifying why I am writing about Lance Reddick on a movie blog. I should really be spending my time on praising the man.

Reddick had an intensity that outshone anyone else on the screen. This does not mean he was always turned up to 11, and in fact, that's not what his intensity was about. It was more often a calm intensity, anchored by a cool look in his eyes that nonetheless pierced you and held yours until you had to drop them. 

This made him work well as an authority figure, which he frequently played. It could also be harnessed for villainy, which I'm sure he also played on occasion, though no examples are immediately coming to mind.

Maybe the reason I can't think of any examples of Reddick playing villains was that you wanted to like him. He was such a likeable presence. He could stare you down and dress you down with quiet efficiency, but when he cracked a smile, it was just the reward you were looking for. Reddick was the authority figure we all wanted in our lives -- a man who does things by the book, but will twist the rules if it's in the interest of the greater good. And he was like the stern parent whose hard-won smile we craved.

I'll miss seeing Lance Reddick on my screens, be they big or small. 

The end of a long, long era

As soon as I learned about the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, I knew I would write something about it here -- but I didn't really know what.

All the ideas seemed obvious and like something another film blogger would do better than I would, given their greater interest in research. 

Top five references to the queen in the movies? Top five portrayals of the queen by actresses? I thought of things like The Naked Gun for the former and The Queen for the latter. There's that part where Kevin Kline's character says "Oh look the queen!" before knocking out an airline passenger for his tickets in A Fish Called Wanda.

Not the makings for a particularly insightful post, you will agree.

So I decided just to ditch a real movie tie-in and talk about the extraordinary presence Elizabeth has been lo these 70 years she reigned prior to her death on Thursday.

It went beyond movie references and song references (The Sex Pistols) and TV references (The Crown) and literary references (plenty, I'm sure). It went beyond her being a person to being an institution entirely. 

The first thing that occurred to me -- that has occurred to me for some time, knowing she would not live forever -- is how weird it would be, how wrong it would be, to refer to "the king." England is a patriarchy, of course, but it has not felt like one for my entire lifetime, and the lifetimes of 80% of the people currently alive. This may be sort of sexist in its own way, but it has felt to me there's something maternal about the "protection" the queen had provided to her commonwealth -- like there was a sort of benevolence in the mere fact of her gender, one that a king could never manage.

Of course, Elizabeth was not perfect. I know that from watching The Crown. She had the wrong opinions on things sometimes. She neglected her own children sometimes. Some of that neglect may have turned them into monsters. One in particular, who fortunately is not the one who has just become king. 

But if The Crown is in any way a fair representation of who she was, she also seems like a person who tried her best to be the person she was expected to be, having assumed the crown at a very young age, reluctantly, after her father's early death, when her sister might have been more naturally suited to the responsibility and wanted it more. She became an iconic representation of a famous sort of British stiff-lipped stoicism, and we could not imagine any other person being the monarch.

Now we will have to. Charles is king. After a ten-day period of mourning, he will be officially coronated, though he has already assumed the title. The thing his mother had sought to delay as long as she could -- another case of neglect of one of her offspring, one might argue -- has now happened, and England has a king again.

It was nice to believe that Elizabeth might just live forever. One hundred certainly seemed attainable. Her husband almost got there. She fell a lot shorter, but still lived a very impressive 96 years.

To quote the Sex Pistols, who certainly didn't mean this sincerely:

God save her. 

R.I.P. James Caan

I have always cherished James Caan even though there are relatively few movies of his that I really love. In fact, I've probably seen him on screen fewer times than most others I've memorialized on this blog.

Plus, The Godfather isn't even one of the reasons I've cherished him.

How few James Caan movies have I watched?

Okay not that few. The actual number is 20.

However, probably 15 of those were movies where I had to remind myself after the fact that Caan was in them. Not because Caan was forgettable in them, but because the movies themselves never rose to a particular level of prominence in my own affections.

The two movies I do really love are Elf (#46 on my Flickchart) and Misery (#137 on my Flickchart). The next highest, Bottle Rocket at #277, is one of those where I wouldn't have been able to tell you that Caan was in it. No idea, which obviously means it's been too long since I've seen it. The Godfather does pop up next on my chart at #515 -- sorry, I'm not a huge Godfather lover -- and The Godfather II is one of those I'm counting among the 20, even though he only has a brief uncredited role (and therefore isn't popping up in my filtered list of Caan movies on Flickchart). But after that you have to go all the way outside the top 1,000 to find the next movie -- Middle Men at #1293, which I do like a lot more than its reputation.

I guess it's hard to square, then, why I was so quick to come write this post, only a few hours after hearing about his passing at age 82. 

It would have to come down to Elf and Misery, and I suppose it's the character he plays in both films that spoke to me in a way I'll try now to express. 

Caan plays a character we end up liking in both films, but he isn't easy to like. As the author Paul Sheldon in Misery, he's an eccentric S.O.B. who has his various rituals -- which include making only a single typewritten copy of his manuscripts and a single smoke and Dom Perignon after completing his work, but which don't include any more than the minimal amount of politeness required of him. He can put on an insincere smile to placate a psycho like Annie Wilkes -- he's quick to calculate the necessity of such a facade -- but genuine kindness and tolerance of tedium are foreign to him. We root for Paul not because we love him, but because the conditions of his unjust imprisonment are so expertly established that we quickly and easily root against his captor. Effectively, we empathize with him -- but there would be something about Caan's performance that invites us to do so.

Neither can Walter Hobbs in Elf suffer fools. He's not imprisoned, and by having all the power, he's quick to dismiss anyone who's wasting his time -- particularly some loony dressed up like an elf who claims he's Walter's son. He gets this priceless "What now?" expression in his eyes that we can all relate to. If we were approached by Buddy the elf, our reaction would probably be to roll our eyes and reveal our consternation as well.

Because he starts out so disagreeable, the fulfilment of our journey with Walter Hobbs is all the more satisfying. Whatever else I love about Elf, I may find nothing more gratifying than the steady thawing of Walter from a man for whom business was more important than anything else, to a father capable of showing his love to both of his sons -- not because he has to, but because he wants to.

As a thriller, Misery requires less of an arc for Paul Sheldon, but by the end, we know Paul has learned not to take his fans for granted. Annie's love was too tough to be an effective delivery method for this lesson, but Paul got something out of it anyway.

I'll miss seeing the guy who always felt like he had to grin and bear whatever was coming to him, even if that grin looked a lot more like he had just sucked a lemon, and in the end ultimately emerged a better person for suffering these fools -- a person we might even start to love. 

And oh yeah, he was also Sonny Corleone.

Rest in peace Mr. Caan. 

Why did you do that, Ray?

Ray Liotta was the rare actor who peaked early and also peaked late.

The Goodfellas era Liotta was of course a treasure for people in my age bracket, who were just barely old enough to watch a movie like Goodfellas in 1990. That's the first time I was aware of him, though it was his fifth film and he'd had a television career dating back ten years before that. (If we're going for maximum accuracy here, I would have seen him the year before that in Field of Dreams, but since that was a small role that only came in at the end of the movie, it wouldn't have yet been enough to register him in my consciousness as a name I should know.)

Liotta worked steadily after that, making about one film a year, but Goodfellas is a hard place to start out if you are trying to top yourself, as every actor should. But Liotta wasn't really a leading man, even though he is certainly the lead in Goodfellas. He was a character actor sought out largely for sinister roles, even though he is arguably the least sinister character in Goodfellas. His role in Something Wild -- which preceded Goodfellas by four years but which I didn't see until about ten years ago -- is a better measure of how he was seen by casting directors.

But just when Liotta had entered "Remember Ray Liotta?" territory, he started doing some of the best work of his career. The last ten years featured memorable performances like Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines, Marriage Story and The Many Saints of Newark. Granted, those films were still playing on the Liotta persona we knew, but they had a lot more depth and nuance than some of the roles he was saddled with right after he became famous. In fact, this post is not the first time I'm tagging Ray Liotta on my blog. I was inspired by his performance in Marriage Story to write this post, which says a lot of things about Liotta that I would want to say today -- so maybe I will let it do some of the work I would otherwise do here. And that performance was not like the typical Liotta performance, as he played a divorce lawyer rather than a mobster.

Liotta died in his sleep while filming a movie in the Dominican Republic. He was 67. He had a lot more to give, seeing as how he had three movies filming and two in post-production. One of those last two was Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear, which is about how it sounds -- it's based on that story of the bear who ate the cocaine. That also gives you an idea how Liotta liked to play off of that persona for comedic purposes, as he did in films like Muppets Most Wanted, Wanderlust, Date Night and a film I probably shouldn't like but do: Wild Hogs. (And I also wrote about him in relation to Wild Hogs, making this actually the third time I've tagged him on my blog.)

He will certainly live on in our minds and in our memes. "Why did you do that, Karen?" is a line I still say quite a bit, alluding to that moment in Goodfellas after his wife, played by Lorraine Bracco, hastily dumps all their cocaine (speaking of cocaine) down the toilet upon baseless fears of discovery. "They would have never found it!"

Why did you do that, Ray? Why did you go and die on us when you still had more peaks yet to come?

Rest in peace. 

R.I.P. to the first adult actor I knew

It probably goes without saying that I've been watching movies starring adults since I started watching movies back in the 1970s. But no actor personified an adult like William Hurt, who died of natural causes at age 71 on Sunday.

How does one "personify" an adult? 

I suppose what I really mean is that Hurt kind of ushered me into the concept of adult movies, those that were not intended for me but whose merits I could begin to understand.

There were a number of these "gateway movies" that I saw all or part of in the mid- to late-1980s, when I was just beginning my teenage years. And Hurt seemed to be in all of them.

The one I think of most is Broadcast News, one of the earliest movies I saw that I knew was not for me, but I loved anyway. It's a title I've been meaning to watch again for ages, and now that Hurt has died, it should finally find its way onto the schedule. I think part of my affection for this was the crush I had on Holly Hunter, but I remember specifically being taken with Hurt's performance.

The Accidental Tourist was another, though unfortunately, my rewatch of that one didn't go so well when I saw it again back in 2010. 

Then there were films I saw parts of, if not all of, like The Big Chill, Children of a Lesser God and Kiss of the Spider Woman, though I did eventually properly watch all of them. 

So unlike most actors who only appear in adult-oriented films -- I don't think Hurt ever appeared in something primarily intended for children -- I've been watching his movies for going on 35 years now. 

You could argue that Hurt's recent run in the MCU -- a run that was expected to continue, I imagine -- could be described as that sort of shift. But Hurt didn't get involved until other Oscar-winning actors (Hurt won his Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman*) had already been guinea pigs. (I will leave this paragraph even though I was subsequently reminded that his MCU character, Thaddeus Ross, first appeared in The Incredible Hulk -- in other words, the second MCU movie.)

I think the thing that drew me to Hurt was his dignity. He was like a British actor in American skin. He had a kind of proper quality to him that some might call stiff, but Hurt was never stiff. He was prim and proper and almost always played an intelligent character, but he had that mischievous little smile that belied inner dimensions to which he also treated us.

It certainly came as a surprise to learn that he had passed. He never struck me as someone in his 70s, though he was indeed a week short of his 72nd birthday. I also contested the idea that "natural causes" could take someone as young as 71. 

But having watched Hurt on screen for half of his own life, I suppose he was, in the end, an old man, if you define 70 as that line of demarcation. An old man who gave us many wonderful moments on screen over those 35 years since I first discovered this beguiling adult who was not Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford or Christopher Reeve or Roger Moore or Michael J. Fox.

I'll miss him. 

Correction: I wrote that he had won his Oscar for Children of a Lesser God when I originally posted this, due to a mental error caused by the similar title structures. 

R.I.P. to the Reit man for the job

It's unforgivable to start out a tribute to someone's life with a pun about their name. 

But I suspect that as a lifelong humorist, Ivan Reitman would approve.

I used to always confuse which movies Ivan Reitman had directed with which movies Harold Ramis had directed. They had much of the same on-screen talent and many of the same sensibilities. Turns out, Reitman directed most of them and Ramis, not all that many but some really big ones (Vacation, Groundhog Day). 

Now they're both gone.

Reitman lived just long enough to see his son Jason direct a proper sequel to the two Ghostbusters films he himself directed, and then a few months later, he passed away in his sleep at age 75.

I made a pun in the subject of this post, but I think it was apt. Reitman really was the right man for the job with the comedies he made. That may seem like an obvious statement, but when I say that, I am thinking of his role as director in the same way you think of a manager of a major league baseball team, if you ever think of such a person. 

Recently there has been a theory that a baseball manager doesn't actually do that much. The general manager brings in the players the manager must use, and lately the notion has even been put forth that in-game decisions often come down from the owner's box during games, since those decisions could affect such things as how much a player makes in arbitration etc. The manager is left being a personality who can gather everybody together and inspire them by being affable but strong, and projecting a sort of leadership other people want to follow.

I wonder if that's kind of what Reitman did. He gathered together people who were already really funny and did not require specific guidance from him how to be so. Because his movies didn't usually feature technique that called attention to itself, it seems more like he got behind the camera and called "Action!" rather than trying to execute some grand vision for the film. That sort of grand vision is not usually needed in a comedy, of course, and Reitman instinctively knew that.

Of course, some of his visions were grand. Ghostbusters was a sort of unprecedented melding of comedy and special effects, and though we laugh at some of those effects in 2022, we all remember them being amazing in 1985. He tried to marry effects with comedy again in 2001's Evolution, with significantly lesser returns, but the effort is what I'm talking about here. Even though I've characterized Reitman as a good production leader more than a creative visionary, neither was he content just to get funny people together to do funny things.

Then there was also the Frank Capra side of him. Dave is one of the best imitations I've ever seen of a modern-day Capra, perhaps even with more heart than a Capra film -- and it's also really funny. 

He also had an ability to turn something that shouldn't have worked into something that did work. When we think about his collaborations with the likes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ramis, we tend to forget that the most regular star of his movies was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Kindergarten Cop looked like a gross misfire when we first saw it advertised -- Schwarzenegger doing warmth and comedy? -- but I still cherish that film and am realizing that a rewatch of that would probably be an excellent tribute to Reitman. Maybe this weekend. Their other collaborations were not as big a success -- I didn't even see Junior -- but Twins rightly has a fond place in people's hearts as well. (Wikipedia says Arnold was also in Dave, but I don't remember that.) And if I said earlier that Reitman didn't need to direct his comedic actors, Schwarzenegger flies in the face of that. Arnold surely wouldn't have realized he had the ability to be funny if Reitman hadn't seen something in him and brought it out of him.

If I'm considering revisiting stuff, it might be wise to go back to two of his early efforts I saw ages ago but don't remember at all: Meatballs and Stripes. Yep, if any one person launched Bill Murray, it was probably Reitman.

As seems to happen with talents like Reitman, eventually the good ideas dry up. The 21st was not a good century for the director, as he followed up Evolution with My Super Ex-Girlfriend (bad) and No Strings Attached (almost as bad). However, I can genuinely say I liked his final film as director, 2014's Draft Day, which was a pleasant surprise that called up some of the Reitman of old.

I won't get into his producing credits, but there were some great ones there too.

The deaths of Ramis and now Reitman are a reminder that we're going to start losing more of these guys who either started out in SCTV or had some affiliation with it. It probably won't be that long from now -- hopefully at least a decade -- before I have to write one of these for Murray. So we should enjoy these guys now while we still can.

And if you want to look at Reitman's lasting influence, the examples are everywhere in comedy. I needn't name them. But one big example is his own son, now a successful director in his own right, who has made some good comedies, some not-so-good comedies, some interesting dramas, and a fascinating little body of work in and of itself.

Reitman was definitely the right man to make the comedies of my childhood, whether I remember them all perfectly today or not. I might have to make a little run through some of his work in the next couple months. And maybe I'll even watch Junior.

Rest in peace.

R.I.P Sidney Poitier

At a time of year when I'm inclined to write a lot about film, and the posts are already backing up for future publication, I haven't paused to acknowledge the passing of some recent greats, including Betty White and Peter Bogdanovich. I was going to write a post about David Gulpilil, the indigenous Australian actor, and even watched a documentary about him, but it got lost in the ether of moving and other end-of-year activities.

The passing of Sidney Poitier has finally forced me to pause from whatever else I was doing, in among however many posts are starting to back up, to acknowledge a great, even though as I'm typing this I don't know exactly what I'm going to say about him.

As an indication of the ways my head is still in the clouds a bit, I didn't hear about Poitier's passing through the normal channels of news or social media. It was actually going on to my old website, AllMovie, that exposed me to an article devoted to him on the landing page. That was only 15 minutes ago. Now I'm writing this.

Poitier was not "my guy," as such, in that I didn't see that many of his performances all told (only eight out of more than 50). But there was something about his presence that just seared into you, even when he was not playing a man of extreme intensity. I fondly remember his performance in Lillies of the Field, for example, where he plays a very affable character, one not burdened by the responsibility of trying to explode the prejudices of white society.

This last was indeed the form in which Poitier made his greatest mark. In the year 1967 alone, Poitier appeared in two of his most iconic roles, each of which was conceived as a way of directly addressing the racial divide between Blacks and whites in America. Those were Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night, the former of which found him as the boyfriend of a white girl trying to be excessively polite to win over her parents, the latter of which featured his Detective Tibbs working to pierce the racial preconceptions of a southern police force during a murder investigation. Both films were at the forefront of the discussions of social justice in 1967, flawed though they may have been in some respects, especially as viewed through a modern lens.

As the face of the attempt to truly integrate popular cinema, Poitier was, in many ways, the perfect candidate for this role, for better or worse. He could, in fact, be extremely "polite" -- and I use that word knowing it carries an insidious implication that "politeness" was something that did not occur naturally to Black people and had to be specifically striven for. However, "politeness" was a necessary first step with a white audience, when anything more radical would have been rejected out of hand.

To the credit of Poitier and the writers and directors who provided the content for him at that time, though, he rarely was forced -- in the roles I've seen anyway -- to just purely subjugate himself to the needs of this integrating venture. That's particularly the case in In the Heat of the Night, where he'd shrewdly toe the line in order to keep the peace, but only to a point -- and then he would stand up for himself in no uncertain terms, and by extension, anyone else who looked like him.

The usage of Poitier throughout his career was likely not perfect. Having seen only eight of his films, I can't really speak to that with authority. With any guinea pig, there would be teething issues, if that's not a mixing of metaphors.

But given the task he was saddled with, he accomplished it admirably, becoming a beloved figure both in the Black community and well beyond it. I know that every time I saw someone call his name at an awards ceremony, as he received some richly deserved career achievement award, I felt inclined to join the standing ovation along with the people who were actually there in the room with him.

At age 94, Poitier could not have been expected to live much longer. He's kind of like Betty White in that way. He lived a good long life that no one can reasonably say was too short. I hope he was happy for much of that life, even though I know it was not always easy for him.

That doesn't mean I'm not still a bit sad this morning as I contemplate the man's departure from this world. Great artists leave a mark, and even though we were never going to get another performance from Poitier, I'll miss seeing him stand at an awards ceremony, smile a smile of exquisite gratitude, and wave at his adoring fans, of which I was one.