Anyway, as genres go, Sports Films have never exactly been a favorite of mine.
The stress and excitement of a real sporting event is much more dramatic
than a fictionalized version. No screenwriter can replicate the sheer joy I
had when the Broncos defense held Tom Brady twice at the goal line in
the 2016 AFC Championship. I've never felt worse in my life than back in 2004 when the
Yankees blew a 3-0 lead in a playoff series against the Red Sox. I was twelve
years old and until then, did not actually know what sadness was. A movie needs a structure, it needs arcs, it needs meaning. Real sports are random statistical noise upon which we add the arcs and meaning. That's what creates the excitement. You can't manufacture that.
So ultimately if you're going to make a great sports movie, it cannot actually be about
the sport. I know in the real world there is a selection of people who demand
athletes only play ball and then shut up. You can usually find those guys
calling in to ESPN radio to complain about Odell Beckham Jr. and they all
sound like your racist uncle. But it is really the stories behind the
ball-playing that make for good drama. The balls don't matter, the cultural weight we give to the balls matter. Winning and losing is interesting, but
not exactly proof of any justice or your worthiness as a person. Robert
Kraft owns the Patriots and is a billionaire. He wins every day, and he's a
piece of fucking shit.
Interesting humanity does not come from winning or
losing. Heroes lose, monsters win and that doesn't make for good fiction. I don't care about the home runs or the triple doubles as an abstract feat of strength. I care about the story behind the home runs and triple doubles. So never shut
up and play ball.
10. Goon (2012), dir. Michael Dowse
In 2011 three NHL players, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak, all
died tragically and young. All of them were "enforcers", the tough guys
who make sure their team is respected on the ice. Usually that respect is
maintained with fists and paid for with lost teeth. Fights are banned in most
sports, but there's usually a kind of unwritten code that maintains order
under the surface. Baseball is a calm unathletic sport until somebody breaks
that code. Then everything descends into bench-clearing brawls, which are precious gems of chaos in an otherwise boring afternoon. Football is
violent but you an always tell when the teams really want to kill each other.
(See: every game where the Steelers play the Bengals.) Hockey for some reason
made this kind of "enforcer" violence part of the culture. It was essential to
the game.. until this decade.
Goon came out at a very weird time for hockey. Those three players were not even cold in their graves when Goon came out in Canada. (Curiously this was not released in US theaters.) This is a comedy movie
explicitly celebrating part of hockey culture that the NHL would rather not
exist anymore. Those three guys all died right around the time CTE was
becoming a major scandal across sports. The NHL has done a lot to ban
fist-fighting on the ice, and probably could do a heck of a lot more. But in
general, Goon is in love with everything modern sports leagues have
tried not to be. The last twenty years have seen exorbitant ticket prices, much
harsher policing around the stands, and stadiums themselves as tools of gentrification. Just a generation ago, sports were rough and had a blue collar fan base of drunken assholes. There was a time where
Eagles fans tried to kill Santa Claus. Now there's way too much money in
expensive corporate box seats for that kind of gritty blue collar action. Goon, however, is standing up for the forgotten classless dipshits of this world.
Whether real fighting is good or bad for the sport is another matter.
Goon doesn't really care. This is a barely a hockey movie. There is a
scruffy team of misfits fighting to get into the playoffs, but the
climax of Goon does not care in the slightest. Instead it is all about
Doug Glatt (Stifler) having his big fight with Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber),
another hockey "goon". This is a dirty boxing comedy in the clothes of a
hockey movie. Goon is gross and lurid - Doug is Jewish and his brother
is gay for no reason other than the obvious jokes. There's two Russian players
who mutter nothing but jokes about fucking mothers. But I think it's a lot of
fun. There's some kind of dumbass caveman truth to all the brutality and gore.
Also, Alison Pill is really cute in this movie.
9. The Howling (1981), dir. Joe Dante
I've seen Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf (AKA:
Howling 2: Stirba Werewolf Bitch) about a dozen times over the years.
That movie is absolute trash. There's a dwarf whose eyes explode, Christopher
Lee goes to a punk rock concert, and Sybil Danning has big huge tits and the
movie is immature enough to replay her topless scene again and again. It is a
stupid pile of goddamn nonsense, all set to a score that is mostly one New
Wave song played over and over and over again. It is a movie that has been
rightfully mocked for decades as one of the worst sequels of all time. And... I might
like Howling 2 better than the original, which I only just saw the
other night.
There are basically two canonical "greatest of all time" werewolf horror
movies. Both came out in 1981. There's
An American Werewolf in London and there's The Howling 1. This was right during a revolution in special effects that allowed werewolves to look real in ways that filmmaking never could do before.
Before this transformations were mostly done through edits and by
adding more and more fur to the actor's face. These movies though could
actually show a human body turning into a wolf monster. And they were not shy
about that fact at all. They give close-up excruciating detail of the flesh
morphing and changing. The effects even hold up decades later. Forty years later and many will claim these are still the greatest werewolf
movies of all time. (I might be one of them.)
The Howling is a Joe Dante movie, but doesn't feel like a Joe Dante
movie until the second half. It opens right in the middle of a serial killer
story set in a sleazy boulevard full of porn shops. Our heroine, Karen White
(Dee Wallace), is nearly murdered by a rapist while reporting on the killing,
and then falls deep into PTSD. This is all more unpleasant and more serious
than most of Joe Dante's work. I kinda of pictured something more like
Gremlins but with wolves, especially considering the ridiculous
80s theme party that is Howling 2.
But eventually The Howling becomes the movie I wanted it to be. The
werewolf transformation is just as impressive and legitimately terrifying as
its reputation implies. This is one of the first movies to really commit to
how horny the werewolf mythos can be. You'd never have Twilight if not
for The Howling. And the last twenty minutes are pure Joe Dante gonzo
fun. It just takes longer to get there than I wanted it to.
8. Shaolin Soccer (2001), dir. Stephen Chow
Shaolin Soccer is a thoroughly great idea.
What if you took the ridiculous superpowers of kung-fu movies and applied them
everyday life? Sure, you can fight evil and injustice with super strength, but
maybe what you really want to do is kick a soccer ball harder than anybody
else? Maybe you can use your tai chi to make really great steamed buns?
And that is pretty much the entire movie. I actually have very little to talk
about with this one. Stephen Chow wanted to create the most absurd
Dragon Ball Z action scene possible in the guise of a soccer game. And
then he did. The final product is such a perfect movie as to leave me with
almost nothing to say. Do you want to see the craziest, most Looney Tunes
soccer movie ever made? It's Shaolin Soccer. Go see it. It is just one
amazing moment after another. Stephen Chow loves to make dirty lower class misfits as action stars, and there's plenty of that here. The soccer team is made up of an old guy, a massively fat kid, and for whatever reason, a clone of Bruce Lee.
The movie plays with a few tropes too in funny ways. Instead of the main love interest being this shy girl who was beautiful all along, she has a terrible skin condition. Her glow up sequence makes gives her whore make-up and giant early 90s shoulder pads. I think she still rocks the look. But Stephen Chow loves to dig in the dirt in a way I respect.
Shaolin Soccer was the movie that seemed to get Stephen Chow's name
recognized in the west. He managed to get his next movie,
Kung-Fu Hustle released to over 2,000 American theaters with a major
marketing push. Unfortunately, that seemed to have largely flopped, because
Americans are idiots. I guess regular audiences wanted to see
Fever Pitch instead. (I did not and will probably never see Fever Pitch, I have nothing to say about that movie for the opposite reason of it being too perfect.) That's a shame since Stephen Chow's later movies
like The Mermaid are a ton of fun. They don't seem to get the recognition they used to over here.
Speaking of foreign movies and Western media, Lagaan is one of the few Indian movies to get much notice outside the
typical Bollywood spaces. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in
2000, the last Indian film to do so. This is curious to me, since Hindi Masala
movies are massively popular around the world, and Bollywood is one of the biggest
film markets. And yet, the Western film media and the movie twitter
circles I'm in pay no attention at all to Bollywood. I don't understand that
huge blinder. Lagaan may only have gotten much attention outside India
and the Indian diaspora because it was a cricket movie. There are not many
movies about cricket.
Cricket, as far as I can tell, is basically baseball. But it's baseball's
sinister reflection after mutating in the Shimmer from Annihilation. So
it is this horrifying baseball-like thing with twisted rules that are pure
madness. I do not understand this sport. Even after seeing a whole movie about
cricket, I still mostly do not get the rules. I've talked to some Australians
about cricket to try to comprehend what in this freakish game is so
compelling. I'll never understand. It frightens me.
Lagaan is a Masala movie, so it is not just a sports drama. Bollywood
does not need its movies to be any one particular genre, it can be all the
genres at once. So while Lagaan is set during the British control of
the continent and thus is all about the racial and economic tensions of that
period, it also decides occasionally to interrupt the narrative entirely for
musical sections. Lagaan is also a bilingual movie, so has English
actors in it. Therefore you get the unique experience of seeing a British
woman sing along in English to the Hindi pop song. The struggle for economic
survival must also share time with a love triangle, of course. So between the
sniveling British imperialists, the night time love songs, and a 90 minute
epic of a sporting finale, Lagaan is a very long movie. It's almost four hours
long.
And I greatly enjoyed all 224 minutes of it. This is really compelling stuff.
Even if cricket's rules make no sense to any sane person, anything can be compelling with great characters, great filmmaking, and yet another opportunity to prove that imperialists suck ass.
There is a certain kind of human that will find an appeal in Josh Trank’s surreal picture of Al Capone. I guess I’m that certain kind of human. For the vast majority of people, this is will be an unpleasant, uncomfortable, and confusing movie. I loved Capone and then immediately got on the phone to warn everybody I knew not to watch it. When you hear that title, you think of a powerful gangster with a tommy gun in one hand, a blushing moll in the other, and a big cigar in his mouth. Josh Trank knows what image you have of the character and wants to destroy it, thoroughly. Capone has a recurring Greek Chorus of lurid radio reports of the gangster's bloody heyday. But then he juxtaposes all that glamour with the filth and guilt of Al's last days.
Tom Hardy’s performance as Capone is not exactly convincing on any level. It
is a performance that is both distracting and confounding. Hardy is acting
under several pounds of make-up. He squawks in a twisted accent of some kind,
coming off less like an Italian thug and more like Danny DeVito’s Penguin.
(I guess this is Tom Hardy's "thing" now. He put on an equally weird accent in
Venom.) Hardy's bizarre acting decisions create the most grotesque
version possible for this character. The movie is very clear about who we're
seeing here. It isn't "Al" or "Capone". He's known by his family pet name
"Fonz". Fonz is decaying both mentally and physically as syphilis takes its
toll on him. Capone even goes out of its way to make the character as absurd
and pitiful as possible. One scene he's shitting his own bed, the next he's
singing with the Cowardly Lion.
I don't think Tom Hardy deserves an Oscar for this performance. It is certainly not
"good" in a traditional sense. But maybe he deserves some credit for the sheer
boldness and novelty of what he's doing.
Capone is the kind of movie that very nearly has a plot only to
destroy the audience's expectations every time. Fonz repeatedly
mutters something about a hidden treasure of ten million dollars. Several side
characters seem to be hunting for it. If you're interested in a mystery movie
about Capone's secret stash, this is not your movie. This is instead a story
of somebody losing their mind. Josh Trank is fucking with you constantly.
Fonz, throughout the movie, flutters in and out of a vague grip on reality. Characters are not real, scenes are not real. Maybe nothing is real.
Capone is not a fun movie. It is not even a satisfying movie. It is a
sad picture of mortality. We have here a very bad man who, even in the
depths of dementia, comes to some kind of acceptance.
5. The Pride of the Yankees (1942), dir. Sam Wood
In 1942 the New York Yankees were already a monster franchise that had put
together some of the greatest teams in the history of the sport.
The Pride of the Yankees, though, is about one of the worst
tragedies in the team's history. That, of course, is the untimely death of
Lou Gehrig.
The Pride of the Yankees is a difficult movie because there is not
really much drama to be gained from the Yankees of the 20s and 30s. The team was so damned good in this period that they would
regularly sweep the World Series. (Hell, in 1939, the year the team
lost a major star like Lou Gehrig to his health problems, they
still swept the Reds.) So this is a sports drama that is mostly
without any sporting drama. The star, Gary Cooper, looks more uncomfortable
trying to play baseball than I look trying to sing. This is also 1942, so
there was not much in the way of budget or technology to recreate a whole
ball game. So what do you put in your baseball movie if you basically cannot show baseball?
Instead, The Pride of the Yankees is more of a domestic
comedy. It is a biographical film but totally uninterested in accuracy. It's
more about Gehrig's relationship with his adorable immigrant parents and a
cute romance with his wife Eleanor (Teresa Wright, who steals the movie). A
major plot point is an argument between Gehrig's wife and his mother about
the wallpaper. Babe Ruth shows up on camera, playing himself, and
never plays baseball. He instead cracks jokes, and is a surprisingly good
actor considering he's an athlete. He's better than Shaq at least. It is all
charming and pleasant. How much you like
The Pride of the Yankees depends how much you can stomach a movie
showing happy people who remain in love.
Then of course, there is the last act which is devastatingly sad. It is no
spoiler that Lou Gehrig gets Lou Gehrig's Disease. Gary Cooper
might not be a ball player, but he is a fantastic strong silent type. It may
be physically impossible not to cry during the finale.
Hugh Jackman and Alison Janey are the toast of their Long Island School District. They’re inspiring their students, charming their parents, and robbing the place fucking blind. The school board is all just a bit too credulous to the scam. That’s because they’re all making millions in the booming real estate market, and nothing sells big suburban homes quite so much as solid college acceptance rates. So maybe turn a blind eye when the good superintendent Dr. Tessone (Jackman) gets another face lift, or when his reliable assistant Pamela Glukin (Janey) can find some extra cash to buy a beach house. The money is rolling. There’s a cool new SkyWalk™ coming next school year. The ceilings are leaking but have you seen how great Dr. Tessone looks in that suit?
Bad Education is listed as a comedy but really does not have much in the way of gags or jokes. There is enough absurdity in the premise to make room for a few lazy punches here or there. Dr. Tessone is pocketing enough of the budget to have a husband living on Park Ave and a love affair with an ex-student (Rafael Casal) in Nevada. There’s plenty of rich moms with thick accents for a “Guido” joke here or there. But the movie has more self-restraint than probably I would. The humor is just matter-of-fact. It's more a light irony of "can you believe it?" Tessone buries himself when he inspires a student in the school paper, Rachael (Geraldine Viswanathan), to investigate deeper into the school finances. His tragic flaw was being too good of a teacher.
There’s just a hint of class issues in the film too, since there’s an implication that Rachael’s family is having trouble. However, they still live in the same gaudy high-ceiling home as everybody else. Director Cory Finley’s niche now seems to be subtle satires of the “lower-upper-middle-class” McMansion life, as also seen in first film, Thoroughbreds.
Bad Education is a solid film with good actors putting in solid work. (Hugh
Jackman really lets his sagging wrinkles show here, and I applaud him for that.)
But this movie is a pretty good example of that line between “really good”
movies and “great movies”. I don’t quite know exactly where it finally lands. A
merely good movie is the sum of all those well-made parts. A great movie though,
which Bad Education approaches, knocks it out of the park in the last few
minutes. I’d argue Bad Education gets there with the final destruction of Dr.
Tessone’s ego. There’s a late dancing scene between Jackman and Casal that is
incredible, just gorgeous. It has nothing to do with the A-plot in Long Island. But it is scenes like that can be make a movie cross the line into greatness.
3. The Vast of Night (2020), dir. Andrew Patterson
The Vast of Night is a really solid little SciFi movie. I'm always impressed when a smaller movie can manage to outshine, or even surpass its budget limitations. This film is so well-made you never really notice how much it can do with so few parts.
Somebody in this
production was enamored with old-timey analog technology, so most of the plot
involves tape reels, audio jacks, and broadcasts. That focus on sound makes
the film almost more of a radio play than a visual experience. At one point
the movie even turns the lights off and just lets a character speak over total
darkness. And that's not even all that big of a change considering The Vast of Night is very dimly lit. Almost every scene is encased in gloom and shadow. Mostly it works, but also it's so dark it made me check my TV's settings to make sure something wasn't broken. It needed just a bit more light, all I'm saying.
This is a classic alien story. The plot is so B-movie that
The Vast of Night even frames itself as an episode of a
Twilight Zone-esque show called "Paradox Theater", playing on an
ancient tube TV. Most of the plot involves two teenagers, Fay (Sierra
McCormick) and Everett (Jake Horowitz) finding a weird signal coming through
their late-night jobs. Fay is a telephone switchboard operator while Everett
is working the local radio station. While most of the town is distracted at
the big high school basketball game (back to the month's theme!), Fay and
Everett learn something has entered their town. The Vast of Night is a
slow burn mystery that gets of a ton of mileage out of quiet and isolation.
Nothing is ever quite as creepy as being alone at night, trying to catch up
with an unfolding horror all around you. It's the same kind of unsettling desert emptiness that movies like Close Encounters or Midnight Special use to great effect.
Andrew Patterson has apparently never made a movie before. But
The Vast of Night is so good it feels like he's already showing off.
Sierra McCormick, when her character discovers the alien signal, has to play out a
close-up long take for maybe fifteen straight minutes without a cut. The whole
time she's talking into her phones, connecting the audio jacks, and slowly
realizing how out of control the situation is getting. There's nothing on scene but her acting and the camera very slowly zooming in to increase the paranoia. Later on Patterson uses
another impressive long take in the middle of the basketball game just to
prove that he can. This is a director who might be going places.
The Vast of Night is a very simple movie with a lot more than the sum
of its parts. What can he do when he decides to really go for it?
Warner Bros. did The Way Back wrong. Nobody could have known when they scheduled this for early March that it was being sent out to die. But they also knew they were giving up on this movie on a certain level. The Way Back should have been out there in the awards season fight. It features Ben Affleck putting on a heck of a dramatic performance. It is the best work he’s done in several years now - years which have not been good to his career or his personal life. He seemed miserable as Batman, he’s fought with alcoholism, and generally people seem to just hate him for no particular reason. He’s the actor version of Alex Rodriguez, there’s just something about him that people love to see fail. I don't fully get it. The movie’s title could be seen as referring to Affleck's own flagging stardom. This should be a great Hollywood come back story. Instead it’s a great movie that the studio didn’t believe in that was then buried under a plague.
The Way Back is the story of Jack (Affleck), a middle-aged man in the Bay Area who always has a beer in his hand. This movie lays on the alcoholism really thick. There is not a single frame in the first half hour where Affleck is not drinking. This guy is guzzling down whole shelves of beer in his fridge in one night. He's given a chance to redeem his collapsing life when his high school offers him a gig as the basketball coach. In a less interesting movie, Jack would rediscover his humanity and be saved by his kids while he saves them. (Exactly the kind blandly inspirational movie I was looking to avoid this month.) The Way Back though recognizes that despite Jack’s charisma and talent as a coach, he’s probably a person who should be nowhere near children. It also is a movie that knows that decades of trauma are not solved by winning one big game at the end.
Ben Affleck is really putting down an award-worthy performance. He could conceivably win Best Actor if almost entirely by default. Yes, the alcoholism is so extreme as to be nearly absurd, but Affleck sells it. You can see something missing in him. There’s a kind of inhumanity to Ben Affleck. He’s handsome, he’s charming, but he’s never fully likable. You never really connect with him as a person in any of his movies. The Way Back is definitely playing to his strengths. You can see why Jack would still be a beloved figure in his high school, but also there is something deeply broken inside him. There is a horrifying personal tragedy in this character’s near past. However the movie also explains that Jack has been struggling with depression for years.
Grief is horrible, I’ve seen the worst of it. But it doesn’t need to break you.
1. The Hustler (1961), dir. Robert Rossen
We’ve all been in “the zone”. The hot streak. The gambler’s high. That feeling of invincibility that washes over you sometimes when you’re not just playing a game, you're ruling it. It’s that feeling when you’ve hit this zen-like state where you and the game are united as one being. You’re Neo at the end of The Matrix, you can see the code. I had a game of Overwatch once where I had seventy kills and nobody could hit me. That’s the zone. That’s the place Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) enters at the beginning of The Hustler, where he faces off against the legendary pool shark, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleeson). Tonight, he is the best pool player in the world. He’s a god on that table. Nothing can stop him. He’s going to go home with $10,000 dollars in his pocket.
Twenty minutes later, Eddie is living at a bus stop, broke. The hot streak ended, and Eddie was too proud to admit he was mortal again. People say “winning is everything”. So how come Fast Eddie won game after game and left the hall a loser? Because winning is not everything. How exactly the balls land in the pockets is irrelevant. The balls, the table, the points, the money, Tracer and Overwatch, they can all disappear. None of them are real. The game is just a stage for something else. The only thing that’s real is you and your pride. Everything else is a prop for the ritual we torture ourselves with when we created games and decided there had to be a winner and a loser.
Eddie beat himself. He now has two hours of a movie left to discover what went wrong.
The Hustler is an incredible movie. It may indeed be the single best movie I’ve seen this entire year. Young Paul Newman is a hot rod on a crash course. He’s leading this incredible cast with great actors like Piper Laurie and George C. Scott. This movie came out ten years before the “New Hollywood” revolution but feels as sleezy as anything from the 79s. It's gritty and uncompromising and ruthless with its cynical worldview. Fast Eddie does not have a romance so much as a find the one person in the world who feels shittier than him. The Hustler sees the world as one big con. Eddie is conning his girlfriend. Minnesota Fats was conning Eddie. Eddie is conning himself. Nobody is ever straight.
How can you ever win when winning itself is the ultimate con?
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Next month's theme: Best of the Worst Movies. It's going to be all B-movies, Z-movies, and So Bad They're Good trash, all featured on the RedLetterMedia series, Best of the Worst. I'm curious how many of those movies they mock are actually gems. We've been very classy around here these last few months. Let's have some real fucking sleaze.
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