First Cow, last Cow, and all the Cows in between

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow has truly spanned the pandemic.

Thirteen months ago, it became the poster boy for sacrificial lambs -- to mix metaphors -- among movies caught betwixt and between by the shutting down of the world economy due to COVID. Its March 6th U.S. release date left barely anyone to see it before people stopped going to the movies. Barely anyone also saw it, of course, because it was only released in four U.S. theaters on that date, part of a staggered release not unusual with independent films, but a release that ultimately became more hobbled than staggered. 

That theatrical run was of course shot, though there was talk of trying to release it theatrically again later in the year. Of course, it's still "later in the year" as many cinemas in the U.S. are only just now trying to return to regular operations.

Here in Australia, it played at MIFF in August -- which was, of course, also a virtual experience. That's where I watched it, or rather, when I watched it. The MIFF screening, which was an opening night screening, was "sold out" -- yeah, they limit availability even with streaming, in order to create urgency I guess. So instead we just rented it from U.S. iTunes, which was possible starting July 21st, 11 days after it premiered on VOD. 

At this point, First Cow seems like ancient history. Although critics fell all over themselves lauding it -- I was more mixed -- it didn't get any Oscar nominations and seems to have been kind of relegated to an unfortunate footnote in pandemic-era cinematic history. (I don't think Oscar nominations would have necessarily been expected, but several of my movie podcasts thought it could be a frontrunner for best picture if the Oscars limited themselves only to what was released theatrically.)

So you can imagine my surprise when I got an email to my ReelGood account this week with the subject "Master filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is back."

My first thought was "Wait, Kelly Reichardt has a new movie already?"

Well, no. I click into the email to find the following: 

"First Cow is in cinemas tomorrow."

Yeah we get movies late in Australia sometimes -- I've blogged about some especially egregious examples -- but this seemed ridiculous. Not because 13 months -- actually, closer to 14 months -- after the U.S. release date would be the longest delay I've ever witnessed between a U.S. and an Australian release, but because it seems impossible that they are still trying to make First Cow happen.

And yet because First Cow did never have that Australian theatrical release, it also isn't available for rental yet here -- something I tend not to pay much attention to because I do most of my renting through the aforementioned U.S. iTunes.

I mean, it's great that people get to see this on the big screen. Reichardt composes her shots thoughtfully and even is fond of using a square aspect ratio, as she's done here. The movie should be seen on a big screen even if she does not use the full rectangular capacity of that screen.

It just seems weird that after all this has been through, it's only still just trying to claw its way into existence here in the Australian film market.

And presumably it will get a fair number of eyeballs in local arthouse cinemas. After a brief boom at the start of March when a handful of high-profile releases came out, things have dried up again, such that it's been two weeks now since I've been to a movie theater. That's extremely rare for me in times when my access to movie theaters is not being limited by a pandemic. In fact, I don't know how far back I'd have to go to find an occurrence of this in "normal" times.

It may not be a cash cow -- ha ha -- but perhaps it will at last find an adoring audience that can actually watch it in a cinema. 

I don't even know where to start

As much as I would like to read everyone else's savage takedown of the Oscars, I have to write my own first so I am not stealing everybody else's thoughts. And even though it's after midnight on a day when I drove three hours and woke up at 4:15 a.m., I have to write this shit now.

What a terrible Oscars.

I really don't know where to start, but let's start with this stupid crap where Frances McDormand was howling like a wolf.

I didn't like Nomadland very much -- I gave it three stars, but I now think that's generous. In the four months since I watched it I have liked it less and less, and watching Frances McDormand win her third Oscar -- actually fourth since she was a producer on Nomadland -- put the cherry on top of this rapidly curdling sundae. 

The main reason I started with it, though, was to explain the picture. Come to think of it, you don't need the picture explained. You saw the show just like I did.

The real place to start is with Chadwick Boseman not winning the posthumous Oscar everyone on the planet knew he was going to win -- if not because he died, then because he deserved it. He acted the shit out of that role. So did Anthony Hopkins, mind you, and he also deserves an Oscar. But not this year. 

So then also: They didn't give out best picture last.

Wot?

That would seem to be the one sacrosanct element of the show. But I guess they really wanted to blow things up. If it's sort of broke, break it a lot worse. 

Presumably Steven Soderbergh and the other producers thought that Boseman was going to win best actor, so they finished with best actor. When Boseman didn't win best actor, and Hopkins didn't give a damn about the award so did not even appear on camera on his couch in England or wherever he might be, the show just ended with an abrupt thud. Joaquin Phoenix seemed to have gotten wind of this, so instead of lauding the other nominees as all the other presenters had been doing all night, he just rushed through the names as quickly as possible.

The whole night was about rushing through, in a sense -- except when they paused at the precipice of completion to give Lil Rel Howery the latitude for an ill-conceived bit that was designed to end with Glenn Close shaking her rump. It was a bit that Questlove signed off on, where he'd play a bit of a song and Howery asked someone in the audience whether it was a nominee, a winner, or neither. The apparent purpose of this, other than the Close rump shaking, was to give Andra Day the chance to show her withering disdain at the racist past of the Oscars for not nominating "Purple Rain" for an Oscar. Good thing Close was game, as she couldn't have been in a great mood after yet again not winning an Oscar. (We won't argue the merits of Hillbilly Elegy, but I think we can agree this was a good opportunity to give a career achievement award to her, instead of honoring an admittedly great performance from Minari by an actress most people have never heard of, even though she's a national treasure in South Korea.)

Moving around as fluidly as I can at 12:20 a.m., marking 20 straight hours of being awake, Youn Yuh-jung's acceptance speech was easily one of my favorite parts of the evening, as she was disarming and self-deprecating and incredibly charming in her quite good attempt at speaking a language she has never had to speak professionally. But the highlights of this evening were few.

Before there were about a dozen terrible shocks in the show's final 15 minutes, I was all set to lead this piece talking about the horrible set. Horrible. Maybe not a bad idea to set the Oscars in Union Station -- I suppose an attempt to be a great equalizer between famous actors and the common man -- but boy did it look ugly. The dark blue curtain behind the stage clashed with just about every outfit, and the blinding sun coming through the windows lent the whole thing the bleary air of a still-drunk partyer on a walk of shame. My wife pointed out that they couldn't even get anyone to shoot the thing with even a small eye toward making it look nice.

The whole evening was disjointed and flat, but maybe the saddest moment was the In Memoriam section. One of the most hallowed Oscars traditions went by at breakneck speed, as most names had less than a second on screen for you to come to grips with who they were before the next name replaced it. It was like the way they used to run the credits really fast when a movie played on TV in order to cram them in before the next show started at the top of the hour. It was an absolute disgrace.

Just because it's tradition I will conclude with some isolated thoughts:

- I didn't mind that they did an opening credits listing the "stars" of this telecast -- a.k.a. the presenters -- at least in concept. But one of the joys of watching an Oscars show is to be surprised by who might come on stage next. This completed ruined that.

- I noticed early on that Questlove was not going to play anyone off stage like the orchestra always does. Some of those people needed to be played off.

- I loved Florian Zeller's wife coming in to kiss his shoulder after he thanked her upon winning best adapted screenplay, in the middle of the night in France. I needed a lot more moments like that.

- The Oscars voiceover person introduced herself. I thought that was sort of funny.

- I noticed I was pouring a glass of wine during Thomas Vinterberg's acceptance speech for Another Round. Very appropriate. That was a win I was happy with. I didn't know his daughter had died while he was making the movie. Sad.

- Lakeith Stanfield looks good with blonde hair.

- I have never before heard Daniel Kaluuya's real speaking voice. Has he ever played a character who is not American? Or Wakandan?

- Chloe Zhao's win for best director represented one of the only times in my history watching the Oscars where I've had an award spoiled before I started watching. I forgot I was avoiding spoilers today at work and happened across that one. I liked her speech and I was surprised to learn that she is basically western, having grown up in England. I thought part of her outsider appeal was that she was living in China until recently. Anyway, I could get behind that win even if I don't care for the movie. The Rider was amazing.

- Pete Docter stepped in it a little, I thought, when he referenced the "cultural consultants" that had helped them make Soul. I wouldn't say it sounded defensive but it seemed like a response to some of the criticism that film has received on its handling of racial issues.

- Marlee Matlin looks way younger than 55.

- I may not love all his movies but I love Tyler Perry. I liked that he said that change comes in the middle. That was actually a really daring thing to say. He was basically suggesting compromise, which is not what most people might have thought he should have said. But he said it with conviction.

- I liked seeing two of "my guys" accepting an award together. You know Trent Reznor is my guy because I've written about him about a half dozen times on this blog. You may not know that Jon Batiste is my guy because I haven't written about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert being one of the things my wife and I watched most consistently in the lead-up to the election. Batiste is Colbert's band leader and he is a constant ray of sunshine. I thought Trent could have at least said "Thanks" but it was certainly the right choice to let Batiste take the lead there. Trent already has an Oscar anyway. (Sorry, Atticus Ross, but I can't quite call you "my guy," even though you've collaborated with Trent for 20 years or more.)

Just because I liked a couple moments does not mean that this show wasn't awful. It was awful.

I guess a lot of people will laud the Academy for being on point with its best picture winner for a second year in a row after Parasite, but not me. Nomadland is overdetermined, has way too many moments overtly saturated with significance, and has a really manipulative score, and I'm tired of Frances McDormand howling like a wolf, figuratively and literally. She now has as many acting Oscars as Daniel Day-Lewis.

On to the next one. 

I was wrong about the first Purge

Not The First Purge. I quite liked that, and I like to think liking it was not wrong.

No, the first Purge that got this all started back in 2013, called The Purge.

Warning: The Purge spoilers to follow. 

I did not like this film. In fact, "hated" may not have been too strong a word. I deemed 1.5 stars to be its appropriate star rating on Letterboxd. That's pretty close to hate.

But then I continued watching these movies, out of sequence, first Election Year, then The First Purge, then Anarchy just six months ago, which is 1-3-4-2 if you are keeping track of the overall sequence. I liked all of them to varying degrees and the first two quite a lot, with Election Year even landing in my top ten of 2016. But I'm going over a lot of the same territory as this post so I should move on to the observation du jour.

Given how I've felt about the subsequent films, I thought it was time to go back to consider the first again ... a little 1-3-4-2-1, if you will. 

You know what? It's pretty good. Maybe even better than that. 

If I had to go back and analyze why I didn't like it the first time, I'd say it's because the first movie should have been the second movie. We were introduced to a world that would bear a lot of fruit over the next decade, including an Amazon Prime TV show that I probably would be a good candidate to watch, where all crimes are legal for a 12-hour overnight period once a year. But we didn't really delve into that world in The Purge. We saw it only through the eyes of one family in what is essentially a home invasion movie.

It's a good home invasion movie, I've decided after my Saturday night revisit, but it still doesn't provide quite the breadth of social commentary that the later films would provide. We do get more than I remembered about the New Founding Fathers, the right-wing group that now dominates the government and created the purge, but we see them only in terms of their effect on brainwashed disciples. Maybe that wasn't the wrong way to approach it, but it obviously didn't land with me back in 2013. I remember clearly thinking "We've got this great concept, and then we see almost none of it."

Maybe it would have been more effective with me if the first movie had been a broader survey of individual groups of characters trying to survive the night, an approach taken by later movies in the series, especially since good home invasion movies were not in short supply at the time The Purge was released. It feels a bit like a "bottle episode" of a TV show, that term describing an intimate episode involving only a few characters in a single location after the larger themes and backdrops of the show have already been established. But who knows, maybe with another approach The Purge would have been one-and-done, instead of creating essentially its own cinematic universe.

Actually director and series auteur James DeMonaco does provide us this broader survey over the opening credits, in a sequence I'd forgotten, which chillingly gives us a whole movie's worth of bone crunching in the streets. It's essentially a montage of security camera footage of people shooting and stomping each other in close quarters. That actually felt like a generous amount of the blood and guts that has come to comprise the series in our minds.

Another thing I'd forgotten is that the film's central family, with Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey as the parents, houses a Black man being hunted by those New Founding Fathers disciples. I didn't think that the series' haves vs. have nots political agenda got going until the later films, but it was there from the start. Without race being explicitly referenced, The Purge makes clear that from its very origins, this night of violence was conceived as a way of exterminating minorities -- an idea that gets explored more fully in The First Purge. The family goes through a believable series of emotional deliberations about whether to deliver this man to the people who are seeking him, in order to save their own skins, or to fight the would-be invaders who are using heavy artillery and battering rams to destroy their security system.

The things that still give me pause about this movie:

1) The motivations of the daughter's boyfriend. The Purge does a really nice job establishing what seems to be a real connection between the teenage daughter, played by Adelaide Kane, and her boyfriend, played by Tony Oller. They even have a little inside joke about how instead of saying "I love you" to each other, they will make a cute little growl, as a way of avoiding cliche. We have no reason to doubt he's a good boyfriend and that he really cares for her, though we know her father, played by Hawke, does not approve. That could just be because he's a conservative dickhead who sells high-end security systems. 

But then when the purge starts, the boyfriend has snuck back into her house and gotten himself locked in behind the security doors. He tells her this is so he'll have time to plead his case that he's a worthy boyfriend to her father, without said father being able to kick him out. Sounds reasonable if a bit bold. But then, instead of talking to Ethan Hawke, he just pulls out a gun and tries to assassinate him. 

The reason you don't kill your girlfriend's father is not because you're worried you'll get arrested and prosecuted for the crime. The reason you don't kill your girlfriend's father is that you supposedly love her, and she supposedly loves him. She won't love you much once you've killed her dad. 

The movie's point could be that she has been dating a psychopath all this time, but if so, this doesn't contribute in any way to the movie's themes. We're not trying to explore the bad relationship choices of the daughter. And since her boyfriend is trying to kill her father at the exact same time as her brother is letting the injured Black man into their house, it doesn't function as its own distinct set piece, its own obstacle to be overcome within the narrative. Because the boyfriend receives a fatal gunshot wound when he and Hawke exchange fire and Hawke is barely grazed, this subplot is basically over before it begins, with little to no long-term effect on the narrative. Meaning it probably should never have been there in the first place. In theory, it functions as an emotional obstacle to be overcome between the father and the daughter, but she can't really blame him for shooting her boyfriend, as it was merely an act of self-defense. 

2) The excessively casual attitude of the home invaders. I think one of the reasons this film felt like a bit of a retread is that it bears many similarities to Bryan Bertino's 2008 home invasion film The Strangers, in which demented mask-wearing psychopaths also try to break into a house. Maybe you have to have a bit of a screw loose when you are purging, but they have an entirely non-tactical approach to invading the home and killing its occupants. There's a lot more laughing and dancing through the hallways -- there's even a scene where a woman rides on a man's back, making them both pretty incapable of defending themselves against unseen combatants with guns. 

They kick into action and show genuine fighting skills when they do confront Hawke or one of his family, but they've already squandered a large portion of their advantage at this point. And then when they do get chances to kill a member of the family -- each member at least once, I think -- they draw it out sadistically, giving another previously unseen member of the family a chance to shoot them. In fact, this same scene plays out about four times, where a masked maniac is about to bring down a machete on somebody's head before someone else pops up and shoots them. 

So yeah, there's some dumb horror movie logic informing this movie, which is what I took away from it the first time I saw it. But it doesn't override the things the movie does well, including some really imaginative and feral fight sequences.

If we're really going to examine why I have a renewed appreciation of The Purge, we should look at a very different series of movies that no one would ever compare to this series.

When I first saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Christmastime in 2001, I didn't like it very much. I was about the only one who held this opinion, but I could not be swayed from it. There were certain things about it that impressed me a lot, but I was annoyed by all the crying and hand wringing over the death of a man who had been a traitor, Sean Bean's Boromir (oops, spoiler alert for Fellowship), and I felt at loose ends because the movie hasn't much of a definitive ending. At the time, we were unaccustomed to movie's being made with the absolute certainty that their sequels would be made, and that led to an unsatisfying ending that lingered as my primary takeaway.

A year later, I absolutely loved The Two Towers, and today it is still one of my top 50 movies of all time according to Flickchart. I felt similarly, though not as strongly, about the third in the series. Hence, when I eventually went back and watched Fellowship again, I had a whole new ability to appreciate it, embracing it as the first chapter in a story whose second and third chapters I dearly loved.

Now that I have the full context of the Purge series at my disposal, The Purge makes more sense to me. It isn't the failure to dramatize a terrific concept that I believed it to be the first time, or if it is, it's a choice that was redeemed by the fact that DeMonaco got to make more movies and to continue to explore this concept elsewhere. Eight years later, maybe it doesn't matter whether The Purge was the first or the fourth movie in the series. They're all part of a collection whose themes have spoken to me, and in some cases, even moved me.

Now about that TV series ... 

Excessive translation

I've written at least one, and more like a half dozen, posts over the years in which I touch on the issue of which foreign film titles get translated to English and which don't. Other bloggers will know that although you never write the exact same post twice, you tend to return to familiar concerns, and sometimes forget you've written about them before. 

Y Tu Mama Tambien has been my go-to example of a film title you would never translate because the English version of it, And Your Mother Too!, is just so much less elegant looking and so much more silly sounding than the Spanish original.

Well, so much for that.

I happened upon the page for this movie on IMDB today, and, well, you can see the results for yourself above.

I'm quite sure this would have changed on IMDB only recently. I suspect it would have something to do with displaying all titles in the language in which you are viewing the page, and an inability to set exceptions for particular film titles. (Inability/unwillingness -- data maintenance on IMDB is certainly tedious enough as it is.)

But there do continue to be exceptions. Just as one example from the same language, I went to the page for El Mariachi and it does not read The Mariachi. (To quote Chris Farley on SNL, "For those who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish for ... The Nino.")

I also thought to check L'Avventura to see if they had changed it to the far more pedestrian The Adventure, and thank goodness, no they had not. Pierrot le Fou is not Crazy Pete, though I have actually seen it listed that way on one streaming service, if you can believe it. 

So maybe the logic is, once you approach a sentence in length, it's just too ungainly for someone who doesn't speak the language, even when most of the words in that title are pretty easy to say.

Anyway, I don't like it. But I am reminded that I need to watch this movie again. Only a single viewing in 20 years of what was one of my top ten movies of 2001. Need to rectify that. 

Ask me if I care that the Oscars are this weekend

Spoiler alert: No, I do not care.

That's a big change for me. Granted, my enthusiasm for the actual show has waned in recent years -- maybe even recent decades -- as the nominations themselves hold more interest than who actually wins.

But it still gets my hackles up when cinephiles tell me they don't care about the Oscars. Even if you think dog and pony shows are bullshit, you should care about this particular dog and pony show. I mean, it's the Oscars.

This year? I'm one of those people.

My usual higher level of enthusiasm has been steadily eroded by the issues facing our world, including COVID, racism and the election -- only one of which is actually now in our rearview mirror. But what really killed it was the whole "Oscar hopefuls can be released until the end of February" thing. I've griped about it before. You don't need me to rehash that now.

And yet ... and yet.

And yet I've studiously gone to the theater to see the three best picture nominees I hadn't seen. Minari came first back on March 16th, followed by Judas and the Black Messiah eight days later. Rounding out the trio was The Father just last week, and it's almost given me a new favorite film in the best picture race -- almost. I think I still give the edge to Sound of Metal, but The Father is now my #2.

To illustrate what has put me off about the Academy's extended deadline, though, The Father is currently my #1 movie ... of 2021. 

And yet ... and yet.

And yet I will probably watch on Monday my time just as I always do. In fact, it occurred to me that since I'm working from home, I might be able to watch it in real time. Oh wait, I'm actually going into the office for the first time in about 400 days on Monday. Go figure. Not the office, but an office -- a new office actually. Long story I won't get into now. (I didn't get a new job, but my job moved, and is requiring partial attendance as of Monday.)

And because I'm a creature of habit, I'm sure I will write my usual Oscar wrap-up post like I always do. I hate myself sometimes.

So I don't really care, but I will still go through the motions. 

Because hey, it's the Oscars.

Some dog and pony shows just demand your respect. 

All's Well That Ends Welles: Macbeth

I'm spending 2021 going through the Orson Welles-directed films I haven't seen, on a bi-monthly basis.

There were a couple reasons I wasn't looking forward to the next film Orson Welles had directed that I hadn't seen. One is that I've been sleeping a bit poorly and any kind of Shakespeare can be taxing if you're perceiving things at diminished capacity. Another is that this particular Shakespeare play is one I simply do not like.

Never been a fan of Macbeth.

What a depressing story, but that's not what I don't like about it. What I don't like is that it's not a "tragedy" in the purest definition of that word.

For a character's story to be "tragic," it should represent a downfall from a previous period of grace and moral uprightness. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth never have that period. Watching Welles' 1948 cinematic staging of the play, I was again reminded how quickly they turn into monsters. Yes, the phrase "turn into" suggests they started out not being monsters. But so little time is spent meeting them and learning of any potential noble aspects to their character -- almost none with Lady Macbeth -- that we have a hard time feeling like these were good characters breaking bad. They're just Heisenberg right from the start.

I know Macbeth is supposed to be a heroic man twisted by the prophecies of a trio of witches -- sorry, "weird sisters" -- but it isn't more than a soliloquy or two before he descends into outright murderous ambition. What's worse is that the lion's share of the play is spent on him -- both of them -- descending into a sort of regret-induced madness, talking in their sleep and talking to ghosts, bemoaning their wretchedness, wallowing in misery. I believe it when it comes to Macbeth, as I feel like he's a weak man who was manipulated. But I don't believe it when it comes to Lady Macbeth, who never seems to have any qualms about murdering their way to the top. Maybe in my sleep-deprived state I am just not reading between the verses to find those qualms.

But I don't fault Welles for making Macbeth. That play has some of Shakespeare's most enduring lines, and has contributed household phrases to our lexicon. For example, I believe "the be all and the end all" and "what's done is done" both originate here. That's in addition to the more commonly recognized lines like "Out, out damned spot!" and life "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." I just wish the content of the play was easier to like.

But back to Welles. This was not his first time with Macbeth, though it was his first time filming it. As I was reminded in Mank, Welles directed a stage version of the play in 1936 -- as I only just learned by looking it up now, the cast was all African American. Twelve years later, Welles got to appear in the play himself as its main character.

This was not my first time seeing Welles make Shakespeare. I went out of order as I saw his 1951 version of Othello a couple years ago. That's a tragedy I really love -- in fact, it's the consummate tragedy as I would like to define it, featuring a character undone by a fatal flaw. I suppose Macbeth's fatal flaw is ambition, but I find Othello's insecurity to be a more interesting fatal flaw. Besides, to be "undone" you have to be "done" in the first place, and Shakespeare gets that right in Othello, where our opening interactions with the main character are pleasant verging on joyous. Can't say the same thing with Macbeth.

Until watching this and recognizing that Welles was drawn to both plays, I didn't consciously realize how much they have in common. Both feature a main character unwittingly driven to horrible acts by the urgings of a sinister character whispering in his ear. Again, though, I find Iago to be the more interesting puppet-master, dramatically, than I find Lady Macbeth.

Welles' cinematic staging of these two plays is similar, too, having the same rough-hewn quality to them. I was struck by the roughness of Othello when I saw it, thinking of Citizen Kane as a very clean and controlled sort of film, but I can see that the aesthetic roots of Othello were present in Macbeth. Although Macbeth takes place on a set that was constructed for the film and Othello in existing buildings, both locales have a desolate quality to them that approximates the characters' emotional isolation. It's effective.

I also appreciated seeing some signature Welles touches. From Citizen Kane and from February's The Lady from Shanghai, we know that Welles is big into mirrors. He uses a reflected image in a particularly compelling way here. When Macbeth first fits on his crown after killing Duncan -- an ugly, spiky, square sort of thing -- his image is radically distorted in the mirror, making Macbeth look almost like a drawing whose ink had been smudged into something blurry and unrecognizable. We also get a good dose of Welles' interest in shrouding characters in shadow, as there are a couple shots lit in such a way as to fully obscure Macbeth into silhouette while other characters are in the light. 

I suppose I should spend a paragraph here on performance. The secondary characters in Macbeth blend into one another for me, and that was the case with the performances as well -- with the exception of a 19-year-old Roddy McDowell as Malcolm, who was fun to see. But both the leads do acquit themselves admirably here. Welles is big in certain spots, but we're talking about Shakespeare here -- subtlety is rarely rewarded in a performer. I continue to be impressed by his acting ability, as we think of his work behind the camera as the thing that defines his legacy. The revelation for me was Jeanette Nolan, someone I'd never heard of, as Lady Macbeth. Now that it's been a couple nights since I watched this, I can't remember exactly what the technique was, but there was something Welles did to her voice to make it sound a bit distant and distorted. 

As much as Othello and other Welles works came to mind while watching Macbeth, the film I found myself thinking about most was another Shakespeare adaptation that came out in 1948. And Macbeth really suffers in comparison to that. The Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet, which he also directed, came out in 1948, and won best picture that year. Except for a sort of flat denouement, I absolutely loved that version of Hamlet, which is more traditionally staged in some senses, but also more emotionally satisfying overall. Then again, Hamlet is my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies -- followed closely by Othello. So I guess this version of Macbeth had a couple tough acts to follow.

After devoting the first two installments of this series to only one film apiece, we'll have to increase the pace for the next two if we want to get where we need to go by December. So in June I will watch the next two Welles features I haven't seen, Mr. Arkadin and The Trial, followed by Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story in August -- pending availability of course.

The benefits of knowing the source material

If you're watching an adaptation of a famous text, it can be better not to have consumed the text in question, as it can create more opportunities for surprise in the filmgoing experience. That's not to say you should not watch the adaptation if you've already read the book -- there are plenty of ways that can be a satisfying experience, and I'm usually eager to do it -- but there can be benefits to coming in fresh. 

If you're watching a parody of a famous text, though, it's usually a good idea to have the frame of reference going in.

And that's why I was really eager to get back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after finally reading Jane Austen's seminal novel last year. On Friday night, I did just that. 

Back in 2016, when I first watched the movie, I wrote a whole post about not being qualified to judge the film's success, because I'd never read -- or seen any filmed version of -- Pride and Prejudice. It's probably good that the finer details of the plot went in one ear and out the other during that viewing, as it didn't impact my eventual reading of the novel. (I knew that there was a happy ending for all the characters you care about, but I think I knew that anyway just from random references to Mr. D'arcy in the culture.)

After finishing the novel last June, I was eager to get back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies pretty quickly, so the details of the novel would still be fresh when I watched it. At that time it had temporarily disappeared from streaming, though, and I was not quite so keen as to pay for a rental. In recent months, I noticed it appearing on Netflix again, setting up Friday night's viewing.

Now that I know the book, I can recognize this as a pretty faithful adaptation of it -- and a pretty credible one at that. I still wouldn't say this is a great movie, but it's probably at least a half-star better than the 2.5 stars I gave it upon first viewing. 

I was worried that it wouldn't seem very faithful when the film opens with a prologue involving D'Arcy -- a zombie hunter, in addition to being a wealthy gentleman -- arriving at an afternoon of cards among the social elite, and proceeding to decapitate the one who's been hiding a festering zombie bite that has not yet fully transformed him. (In a clever bit, he can identify the man through a vial of flies he carries with him, who are attracted to dead flesh.) This scene obviously has no corollary in the novel, and I feared similar liberties would be taken throughout.

But no, actually, once the proper plot gets going, it hews pretty closely to the details of Austen's novel. Sure, there are some characters excised or at least underrepresented, some moments in the plot that are transformed a little to accommodate the zombie skin, as it were, that the film wears. But a lot of what happens is basically what happens in the book, and since I knew that book now, I found this a lot more engrossing than the periodic moments of zombie mayhem.

When I originally watched the film, I was curious about the blunt disconnect between the two genres represented, without much care for the finer details of the story. Intricate character dynamics can be lost on a film viewer, to the point that you even stop trying to sort them out, whereas the reader of a novel has more time to live with the characters and go back over paragraphs that they may have read too quickly if their mind was on other things. Now that I'd had this experience, I found the character dynamics more rich this time around, such that it was the zombie stuff I was brushing off as kind of inessential to my viewing experience.

A lot of the zombie stuff does seem sort of shoehorned in, as is an obvious component of this type of project to begin with. But one thing I appreciated about the film this time is how conflicts between characters in the novel, which obvious remain genteel and non-physical, are here played out as action set pieces. When two characters clash in the book, here they clash with actual swords and fisticuffs in keeping with the desire to please those who have come to this movie for its action/zombie trappings. It works as a metaphorical exploration of the novel's linguistic clashes, and allows for some humorous moments.

Overall I still find it to be a trifle, a novelty act at a core level. I'm not suddenly interested in reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 parody novel. I don't think I'd get anything out of it that I wouldn't get in a lot more satisfying fashion with a re-read of Austen's novel. 

But I'm glad for its existence and find it interesting as a dedicated realization of a genre mashup containing two genres that are diametrically opposed. The Austen stuff is better than it had any right to be, and the zombie stuff ain't half bad either. 

The Arclight goes out

I don't live in Los Angeles anymore. Haven't for nearly eight years now.

But that doesn't mean it's not a sad, sad day for me.

Arclight Cinemas -- the chain that brought arthouse films to the masses with high-end auditoriums, comfortable seats and taking your beer into the movies with you -- has declared it is going under.

The actual wording in their statement is "not reopening" and "handing the keys back to the landlord." This last suggests maybe the announcement is a negotiating tactic, to bring attention to the company's financial plight in the hopes that someone will swoop in either to save it, or to put pressure on the landlords.

So there's some hope. But we can't really bank on the continued existence of one of the most prestigious and well-liked chains if you liked good cinema.

I was a regular Arclight customer. The flagship location in Hollywood was only a special occasion visit, since it wasn't particularly near anywhere I lived. But its world-famous Cineramadome, which had the world's largest contoured screen, was a great place to take in an epic spectacle (I saw Peter Jackson's King Kong there, among others). One suspects that will continue to operate as a cinema, even if under new ownership.

But Arclights kept on popping up near where I lived, most recently the one in Sherman Oaks, which was only a couple miles from where I lived in Van Nuys at the end of my time in L.A. The locations were known for their dramatic appearances, with lobbies that had 60-foot ceilings, opulent bars and eating areas, and a beautiful shade of mahogany wood paneling throughout. The Arclight screamed refinement. 

They were also one of the first places I can remember having stadium seating, comfortable reclining chairs, and a minimum of pre-show ads. It was the perfect place for a movie date night, even in if your date was a sophisticate you would not normally take to the movies.

Arclight started out primarily as a purveyor of arthouse films, but that model was not sustainable with the number of screens each location had. Pretty soon they were just as likely to have Star Wars on five screens as the next place, by necessity. However, even in its later years, you could always find a new buzzed about Oscar hopeful that had not gotten a wide release yet, or an indie darling people were only just starting to discover. It was the kind of place where you knew you'd love the experience, even if you didn't love the movie.

The timing of this announcement is particularly sad, as L.A. is finally reopening its cinemas and aiming toward full capacity in June. After a year of not going to the movies, Angelenos were certainly ready to fill the seats at their local Arclight. In fact, the Hollywood Arclight was, I've just read, the most profitable single theatrical location in the whole country.

But like so many things that have faded, steadily or abruptly, from the landscape during COVID, now so too does the Arclight go down that path.

I really hope that this is something, collectively, we can't afford to lose from the cinematic landscape. Which means that indeed, we may reasonably expect some swooping, and hopefully, some saving of the Arclight.

If they brought back Twinkies from the edge of extermination, maybe they can bring this back as well. 

Knowing Noir: D.O.A.

This is the fourth in my 2021 series watching film noir I have not yet seen.

In an attempt to return to a more "typical noir" territory in April after two months watching movies that adhered less to the standard noir components, I ended up with D.O.A., the Rudolph Mate film released in either 1949 or 1950, depending on where you look. (It had a December 1949 Los Angeles premiere, so I've decided to go with 1949 for my own records.)

D.O.A. doesn't feature a private dick or an obvious femme fatale, but it deals with a notary who becomes kind of an amateur private dick as he tries to solve his own murder. As you would know from the 1988 Dennis Quaid remake -- if you are about my age, though I haven't seen it -- the lead character is fatally poisoned, and has only days if not hours to discover who put the lethal mickey in his drink. 

Unfortunately, being back into similar territory to where I started -- not liking the Humphrey Bogart vehicle In a Lonely Place -- I quickly grew weary of the fast-paced pileup of dialogue in D.O.A. Making me wonder if it's not Bogart himself I object to, but any performance that imitates the rapid-fire rhythms of a Bogie performance. And that's the type of performance Edmond O'Brien -- who even looks a little like Bogart -- gives here.

I won't get too much into a plot description. Sorting out the serpentine plot is never one of the things I like most about any movie, and the fact that many noirs feature serpentine plots has been a barrier to entry for me in the past. I barely have time to absorb the misdirection the plot wants to give me before it's revealed as a misdirection, minimizing the amount my mind might be blown by such a reveal.

But I did have a basic issue with the way the action is structured in this film, which may be a consequence of its tight 83-minute runtime. After learning he's been poisoned -- his whiskey didn't taste very good the night before -- O'Brien's Frank Bigelow proceeds to make the rounds visiting suspects or people who may have other information about what happened to him. Rather improbably, this also includes a plane flight to Los Angeles, when he's currently vacationing in San Francisco. Given the short remainder of his lifespan that has been diagnosed by not one, but two doctors, it seems hard to believe that he'd lose four hours on the logistics related to getting to Los Angeles, especially if he's expecting to return to San Francisco in the same day. It felt like one of the many less believable moments in the TV show 24.

The real problem with all of Bigelow's scurrying around, though, is it's only possible as a result of disinterested parties providing him the exact information he needs with almost no prompting. In what would seem to be a direct violation of basic customer services, such as privacy, hotel employees and others who don't know him from a hole in the ground are receptive to his every inquiry, and provide answers without even really figuring out who he is. If his busy schedule only allows him to be in a particular place for a couple minutes, you better bet he'll extract the information he needs in that limited time, because the script requires it in order to maintain momentum. 

It becomes increasingly ridiculous as the film goes on. Even people who would stand to be compromised by giving up this information give it up freely. Included in this group are the brother and widow of a man who committed suicide the day before, who receive him without question despite their fragile emotional state. Not only is this not believable, but it reduces Bigelow's agency as a character. Instead of having to be clever and sleuth out the answers he needs based on available clues, all he has to do is physically go to the location where these people are and they will cough up the information with little or no incident. As a result, the movie is really just a series of scenes of talking heads in rooms. (There's a little bit of action near the end, but it felt too little, too late.)

The reason Bigelow was poisoned also disappointed me. I thought a good noir cause would be responsible, like a jealous husband knocking off his competition. But no, it's Bigelow's work as a notary that does him in. His signature was on a shipment of iridium that turns out to have been stolen. I guess killing Bigelow is considered an essential part of covering their tracks, even if he was just performing his professional duties and ignorant to the actual content of the shipment. I'd hoped his murder would stem from a tragic flaw, but it's more just a matter of being caught in the crossfire.

That's not to say Bigelow does not have a tragic flaw. He leaves his girlfriend/secretary (Pamela Britton) behind at home on the trip to San Francisco, as it's heavily suggested he wants to chase tail while he's out of town. This despite the fact that she is sweet and beautiful and obviously loves him very much. 

The way his wandering eye is depicted, though, is silly and intentionally comedic, which is wildly out of of sync with the rest of the tone. As he first checks into his hotel and attends a party, and his head is turned by every curvaceous figure that passes him, the soundtrack actually employs a slide whistle to approximate his level of stimulation. It seems hard to believe I'm not joking when I say this. The slide whistle goes through its range of notes from low to high, suggesting in the most goofy way possible that he's becoming aroused. I could see this in a comedy, but not in a noir whose tragic ending is already known to us. 

I suppose this whole sequence is necessary for the Hays Code, which was big on punishing characters with sketchy morals. In a way, Bigelow's downfall is the result of a tragic flaw, as his prospective philandering is what puts him in that bar that night, flirting with women. Of course, the criminal conspiracy dates back several months, so you'd figure he would have been targeted no matter where he spent that particular evening. But I think one of the reasons he's portrayed as such a horndog is to make us accept it a little more easily when he's unable to miraculously find the cure for what ails him. If he dies, he deserves it on some level. We're meant to appreciate the film's twists and turns purely on a narrative level without having any problematic feelings toward the protagonist that complicate our enjoyment. 

On a purely technical level, there's not a lot that reminded me of noir tropes here. Much of the action seems to take place during the day, the brighter the sunlight the better. The most interesting technical innovation is a long tracking shot that opens the movie, following Bigelow from behind as he makes his way through a police station to the homicide division, where he famously reports his own murder. But it didn't feel like it owed anything to the film's status as a noir. 

Even though I'm 0-2 on movies that "feel" like noir and 2-2 with those adhering to a broader definition, I think the former is where I need concentrate, as that will really allow me to continue interrogating the premise on which this series was founded. With that in mind, on to May. 

The great comedy career Barbara Harris didn't have

It's a four-day weekend and my younger son wanted to watch Freaky Friday. In part because it was a Friday. I thought that was clever, for a seven-year-old. 

The movie was on his radar because it lost out in a choice of two Disney+ viewing options for family movie night last September. We ended up watching the 1995 comedy Heavyweights, about a camp for overweight children, which featured Ben Stiller as the evil owner of the camp. That was pretty good, and won out because my older son apparently thought it was 19 years less ancient looking than its 1976 competitor.

There was no controversy about it this time, fortunately. That could be because both kids are fresh off a recent viewing of The Court Jester, 21 years older than Freaky Friday, and at least the older one loved it. Maybe being "ancient" is not a death sentence for a movie after all.

I'd never seen Freaky Friday or its 2003 remake, which was the one the younger one first fired up on Disney+, probably because he only remembered the title. My wife, the one who originally suggested it, wasn't having any of that. She was looking for a little childhood nostalgia here.

Because that remake features Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, who were both prominent and I'm sure excellent choices for their roles, I figured I would similarly know both stars of the original, even though I was only two at the time it came out. I've consumed enough cinema since then that I thought I'd be well familiar with not only Jodie Foster, but with whoever played her mother.

Nope. I had never even heard of Barbara Harris.

In fact, when she first came on screen, I thought "That can't actually be Foster's mother. She's not a big star, and she doesn't seem very nimble." Maybe I was expecting someone like Barbara Eden, who would have been 45 at the time, and who had the kind of presence I was expecting in that role. (Or it could just be I'm thinking of Eden because my wife confused Harris for her, asking afterward if Harris had been in I Dream of Jeannie.) 

It's true, Harris does not reveal her comedic gifts right from the start of the movie. I mean, she starts out playing the mother, a "regular" 1970s homemaker who is on the prim and proper side. 

But once she starts playing her daughter, Annabelle, as part of the film's central conceit, watch out.

Simply put, this is one of the funniest physical comedy performances I have ever seen by an actress. She has a 13-year-old's loosey goosey mannerisms down perfectly. As I've got a child in my house who will soon be 11, I'm well aware of the erratic, convulsive way pre-teens move their bodies. So was Harris. 

She spends half the movie running around, but she scampers more than runs. And when she takes corners, it's clear she hasn't compensated for them by shifting her weight, so she's forever on the verge of falling over. She dances to popular music and blows bubbles, both at the same time. She climbs on top of a washing machine that she has overstuffed with rugs and shoes and enough laundry powder to drown a cat. She pinwheels her legs on her back. She smears makeup on her face. The best way to summarize her whole performance is that it's kind of like she's drunk, but not quite, because 13-year-old Annabelle doesn't know what it's like to be drunk. It's a kind of freedom of movement that would come from a 13-year-old pretending to be drunk. 

The big tour-de-force moment, though, is the one we see come to an end in the picture I've included above. In the climax of Freaky Friday, the two characters simultaneously wish to return to their original bodies, and the apparent simultaneity of the wish allows it to occur. Only, instead of returning the minds to the correct bodies, it returns the bodies to the correct minds, as it were. So a 13-year-old Annabelle is still driving a car carrying her younger brother and her neighbor, only now it's an actual 13-year-old body rather than a 38-year-old with a 13-year-old mind. That leaves Harris on a pair of water skis, both in mind and body now, and hopelessly out of her depth. The cross-cutting of these two scenes -- a zany car chase with police and the climax of a complicated water ski show -- left us absolutely in stitches, a place I never could have imagined from the film's more modest beginnings.

Although it is certainly a stuntwoman actually on the water skis, flailing around in a hilarious way, it was the close-ups of Harris that really had me rolling. Harris appears drunk again, but in a different way this time -- she's a woman so thrown by the events of the day that she's basically disconnected from her every instinct toward fear or panic. She's got this kind of sedated "come what may" quality to her as she improbably executes jumps and slaloms through the obstacles ahead of her.

The funniest moment for me was when she meets up with a hang glider that's going to comprise a short aerial climax, and already has a red-headed young boy affixed to it. As he looks on in horror as there is suddenly a woman his mother's age competing for the cross bar he's grasping, she asks in a very straight-faced way: "Could you help me, young man?" Like she needed him to carry a bag of groceries, not save them both from a potential aquatic disaster.

We scurried to IMDB after the movie, my wife wondering how she knew Barbara Harris, me wondering if I knew her at all. And her credits were dispiritingly scant, at least in terms of anything we both would have known, or both would have remembered her from. Yeah, I'd seen her in movies like Nashville, Peggy Sue Got Married, Grosse Pointe Blank and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but I certainly don't remember her from them. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is the only one of those I've seen more than once, and I don't remember her role.

What a shame.

From what I saw in Freaky Friday, I feel like Harris could have, should have had a career like Lucille Ball, becoming famous for her ability to execute physical comedy and for her great timing. Ball was primarily a television star, of course, and I momentarily hoped Harris might have been a mainstay on some sitcom. Nope. She only had guest spots on TV.

This is not to say Harris did not have an acclaimed career. She was actually nominated for an Oscar, three Golden Globes and three Tonys, one of which she won. And comedy does appear to be the mode in which she was most recognized for these honors, having started out in the Second City comedy troupe.

But Freaky Friday, instead of being a launching pad to greater successes, was actually her last such nomination. She was only appearing in movies for ten more years, with an isolated return performance ten years after that in Grosse Pointe Blank. 

Sadly, that is not a huge surprise for an actress who was 41 when Freaky Friday came out, especially 45 years ago, when actresses had an even harder time extending their careers than they do today. But I feel like even if Freaky Friday didn't propel her to a ton more work, it should have been the culmination of a great body of film work that we'd still know today. Who's responsible for not properly harnessing what Harris had to offer?

The Wikipedia entry on Harris is very generous, giving both an indication of some of the other roles in the vein of Freaky Friday, and her thoughts on her own career in general. So I know the Freaky Friday performance didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, Harris was considered such an ascendent talent that not one, but at least two Broadway musicals were written for her. She had comedy roles in a couple movies with really long names that I now need to seek out: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad, and Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? The latter earned her her Oscar nod.

Whatever comic gems I find in her earlier filmography -- not to mention the movies I've seen, which I'm now eager to revisit -- it's not going to change the fact that Barbara Harris did not become the household name she deserved to become. But maybe that was by her own choice.

See, that generous Wikipedia entry also reveals the following quotations from Harris:

"Who wants to be up on the stage all the time? It isn't easy. You have to be awfully invested in the fame aspect, and I never really was."

And:

"I haven't worked in a long time as an actor. I don't miss it. I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with."

In fact, Barbara Harris became a teacher late in her career. A weird time to start teaching, in your fifties or maybe even sixties, but Harris was full of surprises. She surprised the hell out of me after I didn't anticipate much from her first moments on screen in Freaky Friday.

Barbara Harris died three years ago of lung cancer. It seems she had the career she wanted to have, nothing less, nothing more. And that feels good. 

And lucky me, I have plenty of her Barbara Harris performances I can still seek out. (She was also in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, which I will certainly one day see.) 

It's only out of greed, and a mistaken notion of how we define a "successful" career, that I wish there were three times more. 

A 47-year-old really can play baseball

My annual baseball Opening Day Eve movie, The Natural, was a personal first-time viewing of the classic baseball movie, and boy do I have some thoughts.

But I ought to start out with the thought that I referenced in the subject of this post. 

When I started watching the movie, not knowing what the scope of the narrative would entail, I found it laughable that Robert Redford plays his character, the immortal Roy Hobbs, at age 19. Hearing other characters refer to him as "kid" made me laugh. When The Natural was filmed in 1983, Redford was a 47-year-old "kid." Redford makes more sense in the role when the action shifts ahead 16 years, but he's still ten years older than the elder statesman version of Hobbs is supposed to be. It reminded me a bit of John C. Reilly playing his character as a 12-year-old in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, though in that case the laughs were intentional.

I went almost immediately from laughing at this to feeling really poignant about it. 

You see, I am also a 47-year-old trying to play baseball.

I'm not sure how much I've told you about this on here, but not only am I a huge baseball fan, I'm also a player. Yeah, I played in high school, very badly, for a season-and-a-half. But I mean I'm a player now. At age 47. Living in a country where people don't even know the sport's basic terminology, generally speaking.

What happened was, seven years ago I met a guy I worked with who has now become one of my closest friends in Australia. He'd had baseball love in his family, something uncommon in this country, but had not totally taken to it himself. I got him involved in fantasy baseball, and from there, his baseball love took off. Having played cricket growing up, he already had some of the skills necessary for baseball, and began playing it on a club team that has both a summer and a winter season. Playing, and eventually even managing. 

After a season or two of being tempted to join him, I took the plunge in 2019. I figured, if not now, when? And because I had not been a success when I played in high school, I decided to go for a position switch. Instead of outfield, I would now play third base, and then I wouldn't have the opportunity of misjudging fly balls and having too much time to think about my defense. It turns out I could make the throw accurately, and I was an asset on defense, even if my offense left something to be desired.

In the third or fourth game, my offense caught up. I had a couple of hits and a couple of runs knocked in in that game, with my son watching from the sideline. The future looked bright.

In the very next game, the third Saturday of May, I injured my left shoulder. I was making a dive for a ball through the hole between third and short, and I heard something snap. It turns out there was a small break -- my life's first ever broken bone -- and also a dislocation of the shoulder. Those might not have taken a long time to heal themselves, but I got a frozen shoulder, which plagued me for the rest of the calendar year. Needless to say, I was done for the season.

I was fully healed last year and was all set to play, but you probably know what happened there. Season cancelled by COVID.

So now we are preparing for the 2021 winter season -- it's autumn here, remember -- and I'm trying to prove to everyone else, but mostly to myself, that a 47-year-old really can play baseball.

My situation and the one in which Hobbs finds himself are pretty similar, if you remove the huge gulf in our talents and skill sets. Hobbs misses out on a surefire big league career after he's nearly killed by a crazy woman who shoots him, and tries to give his major league career a go in his late 30s. I never had a baseball future, but I did have a long layoff, just returning to action after nearly 30 years on the sidelines. Like Hobbs, I'm significantly older than most of the other players on my team, the majority of whom are in their late 20s or early 30s, like real baseball players. And my own "comeback" was short-circuited by an injury, just as Hobbs' old shooting injury endangers his comeback due to unspecified medical threats to his life of the bullet having been lodged his stomach for 16 years. (There's a lot of very vague statements you just have to take for granted in this movie.)  

But if Hobbs can come back and hit bombs and make catches in the twilight of his playing days, maybe I can make a few throws over to first and knock the occasional single through the infield. 

So yeah, I didn't like The Natural all that much. It's totally cornball and has a huge number of ridiculous occurrences, such as:

- The woman (Barbara Hershey) shooting Hobbs. There is no explanation for this. I guess she's just crazy, but she shoots Hobbs upon confirming he thinks he will become one of the best players of all time. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy going on, and maybe this woman was hired by a prospective rival of Hobbs, but no. Nothing of the sort, apparently. 

- The fact that he was shot is so "embarrassing" to Hobbs that he refuses to tell anyone his own back story. In fact, he's so reluctant to go into any details that when people ask him where he's from, he says things like "Does it matter?" and "All over the place." It's a decidedly artificial level of disconnection. I almost considered him the baseball movie equivalent of The Man With No Name.

- A player dies by running through an outfield wall. This may be the only scene I had seen of The Natural, other than the climax, as I remembered it from when it was on cable when I was a kid. Even though I'd forgotten I'd seen this scene when I first started watching the movie, when it arrives in the narrative, I remembered that it had had something of an impact on me as a kid. It felt very ominous that a baseball player could die in the outfield. Today, it just feels ridiculous. No, the safety levels were not there back in the 1920s/1930s -- they didn't even wear helmets when they batted -- but I still don't believe a player would a) be able to crash through an outfield wall, or if he did, b) die from his injuries. 

- A gun makes an appearace in the movie a second time. How many baseball movies have a single scene with a gun, let alone two? Kim Basinger fires a gun at the floor in a climactic scene. Again, another ridiculous moment.

- The movie doesn't care to explain why Hobbs never tried to play baseball seriously again after his shooting injury. It's one of many background details it feels like we should be filled in on, especially when Hobbs seems like he can hit a home run at will. How could you leave that kind of talent dormant? 

- You'd think that Hobbs' home run exploding the light tower at the end would be enough of that kind of moment for one movie. But no, earlier in the movie, one of his home runs also explodes a clock. 

- Hobbs' bat is called "Wonder Boy." He made it himself from the wood of a tree split by lighting. It has existed unscathed, not even a nick, for 20 years, then it breaks in his last at-bat of his career. This is the type of movie this is.

It occurred to me that this also has a lot of parallels with another baseball movie -- actually two baseball movies, if you count the sequel -- that I've watched in the past week. Major League would seem to have based some of its core plot structure on The Natural, as both films feature the vicissitudes in a season of a loser team that becomes a contender, and both have a high-stakes climax involving the owner betting against his/her own team. Maybe if I'd seen The Natural first, I would have considered Major League to be a ripoff of it, but since it was the other way around, I cherish Major League while finding The Natural highly square.

But at least now I know that a 47-year-old baseball player is not such a crazy idea. Until Bartolo Colon finally officially retires, there's still one active baseball player in pro ball who is older than I am. And there's still one active 47-year-old playing third base for the University of Melbourne E team, just hoping to get through this season without injury or plague, and maybe have my own little equivalent of a Roy Hobbs light tower moment, even if it's just hitting a ground ball single between third and short.