Pyrrhic defeat

The Curious Case of Curt Flood

(2011)

The best big league center fielder of my youth played for the team I rooted for when the Mets no longer had a realistic chance of competing for a pennant--which in those days was usually mid-April--but when that team traded him to another, he said no, in thunder, and his reward for most of the rest of his life (he died of throat cancer at my age now) was the exacerbation of all the problems that already existed, for him and for many ballplayers: a tenuous homelife, a precarious handle on financial matters, and a deep and abiding taste for alcohol.

Curt Flood was the right man at not quite the right time, and his rebellion set the stage for the crippling of the reserve clause barely half a decade later, but though he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court (where by all accounts former Justice Arthur Goldberg presented one of the most inept oral arguments in the institution's history), his crusade was, technically, at least, a failure.

I try to remember what my baseball-crazy teenage self felt about Flood's principled stance, but that was a long time ago. I'm reasonably sure I didn't simply adopt baseball's stance that Flood's success would destroy baseball--if I had, he would have been anathema, and I'd remember that. But as good a civil rights game as I talked for a 15-year-old in a little town with no African-Americans, I'm pretty sure I lacked the vision to see the issue in those terms. In short, like most of his colleagues (even, heartbreakingly, as we see in the film, his best friend on the Cardinals, Bob Gibson), I probably just lay low and waited for the storm to pass.

Letheal attraction

Trance

Crit

The story is completely implausible, the motivations absurd, but Danny Boyle does atmosphere about as well as anybody in the biz--and you have to tip your hat to anyone who can come up with an art-historical excuse for showing us Rosario Dawson naked (and even for teasing us with several naked-but-no-naughty-bits bits).

Trailer

• The Way, Way Back--Great cast, looks like a lot of other successful teen angst pics, may be a little too charming for its own good.

Centrifugal, centripetal

The Place Beyond the Pines

Crit

The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons. The sins of the mothers, and mothers in general? Not really all that important.

This is a film in desperate motion to be more gripping, more emotionally true, and more interesting than it actually is.

The roar of the greasepaint

Twentieth Century

(1934)

I'll stipulate that John Barrymore and Carole Lombard are great actors, and it's fun to watch them chew the scenery. For a while. Not necessarily for two hours. This is one of those films that I don't get why people find it great.

Pop licks now

The Sapphires

Crit

Time for another installment of Dr. Blab's Advice to the Marginally Talented Filmmaker: look, you give me a few appealing characters, some of whom sing good renditions of Motown classics, and I'm gonna cut you a lot of slack. Even if your plot is nothing but cliché and predictability--even if you use Vietnam as a place to pretend to kill off a love interest when it's perfectly obvious that you will do no such thing--I'm gonna click 3 stars ("Liked It") in Netflix. But the moment you show us Bobby Kennedy telling a crowd that he has very sad news to report . . . NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is not a prop for your little jerry-built narrative. It's not a piece of stagecraft you slot in to allow the singers to hear an inspiring speech about how African-American soldiers need to be given something to hold onto or they might start wondering what they're doing in Southeast Asia. ("Should we go on?" one of them asks. Gee, I wonder whether they will?)

Fortunately, a few minutes later everyone's smiling again, and we don't even remember that Dr. King was shot. I'm sure I've seen in some point in the 5+ decades of going to movies a more cynical exploitation of one of the epochal tragic moments of my life and my country's, but I'll have to think about it for a few days and get back to you on when. Shameless. Unforgivable.

Trailers

• Unfinished Song--Ugh. Looks grotesquely sentimental, and anyway, we've seen a good nonfiction version of the old-folks-singing-young-songs bit, though I don't remember the title.
• Kon-Tiki--Spoiler alert: they make it across the Pacific!

Serpent's tooth

Make Way for Tomorrow

(1937)

Wow! I had read about this--Anthony Lane's book, maybe?--some time ago, but it was a colleague's recent recommendation that got it to the top of my queue, and thanks to her. This is, in my experience, a unique film, and a quietly great one.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play Mr. and Mrs. Lear, essentially, and while none of their five children is quite Regan-or-Gonerilesque, neither is any of them remotely Cordelia-like. The septuagenarian parents are rendered homeless by the Depression, and while most of the kids have reasonably good intentions, they also all have their own lives and their own families, and screenwriter Viña Delmar and director Leo McCarey are honest enough to depict the old folks as . . . well, as difficult to be around as even old folks we love can be.

Not sure how I'd have reacted to this had I seen it when I was in my 30s or 40s, but, barely a decade from my own 70s, I found it sobering. During the couple's final evening in Manhattan before Bart has to board a train to California to stay with the child who is perhaps least willing (though it's a tight race) to house one parent and is--like all her siblings--adamant that she can't handle both, strangers are more hospitable to them than are their own children, and the sequence defines "bittersweet." And the ending would have been a slap in the face to any audience, but I can barely imagine how it would have been greeted during the same era when Fred and Ginger were kicking up their feet--always in unison at the fadeout.

I'm not naïve enough not to realize that there are many great films I still haven't seen, but it's always gratifying to discover one. If you're unfamiliar with this, familiarize yourself.

Items in the mirror . . .

Jurassic Park (1993; 3D Imax rerelease)

Post

Yes! That is the way that film ought to be seen, with a 3-dimensional, 3-story-tall HFST rex! I don't have any particular affection for the film, but it seemed like a spectacle worth taking a long bus ride on the Post Road for, and oh, yes, it was. The retrofitted 3D is about as good as it can be, and the Imax is BIG.

Trailers

• After Earth--The Smith father-son bit isn't enough, and it seems to be all there is.
• Star Trek into Darkness--Yeah, whatever.
• Oblivion--Apparently this was made for the Imax screen, and the same trailer I've seen before looks lots better there. Which is not to say I'm apt to see the film.
• Iron Man 3--First time I've seen a full trailer for this, and in Imax 3D it looks as if they're desperately trying to make it look worthy of Imax 3D.
• Man of Steel--Geez, looks so dark: what is this, a Batman movie?