Something Wicked this Way Comes (Retro)

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983) PG 95 Minutes Director: Jack Clayton Writer: Ray Bradbury Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd CAST Jason Robards...Charles Halloway Jonathan Pryce...Mr. Dark Diane Ladd...Mrs. Nightshade Vidal Peterson...Will Halloway Shawn Carson...Jim Nightshade Royal Dano...Tom Fury Pam Grier...Dust Witch Mary Grace Canfield...Miss Foley Bruce M. Fischer...Mr. Cooger Richard Davalos...Mr. Crosetti Jake Dengel...Mr. Tetley James Stacy...Ed the Bartender Ellen Geer...Mrs. Halloway Jack Dodson...Dr. Douglas Brendan Klinger...Young Mr. Cooger Arthur Hill...Adult Will Halloway (Narrator)

The freaks come out at night.

— Whodini, "Freaks Come Out at Night" (1984)

A few months ago, while reviewing LITTLE BIG LEAGUE, I remember thinking it was a pretty good movie, though one that made the regrettable decision to kill off Jason Robards far too early. He plays the owner of the Minnesota Twins, then dies before we have much chance to get attached to him. With Halloween approaching, I happened upon SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, a movie in which Robards has the good sense to stick around. And is it any good? Well, you'll have to stick around for the rest of the review to find out. For now, I'll just say it isn't terrible.

Charles Halloway is convinced he's a failure as a father, and the first sixteen minutes establish it. Doc tells him at the bar to remember his heart, one drink and one cigar. At home, he tells his wife that Will makes him feel so darn old, that a man should be able to play baseball with his son. She answers, "Baseball is not necessary, not with a heart like yours." The real confession comes the next evening, when he finally tells Will about a picnic on the Indigo River. A current swept four-year-old Will into the middle of the water, and Charles stood on the bank, helpless, because his own father never thought it was right to teach boys to swim. The man who dove in without taking his boots off was Jim's father. Robards plays all of it weary and apologetic, and he never asks us to feel sorry for him. In the novel, Halloway is the library's janitor. The movie promotes him to librarian, making Dark's jab about "living only through other men's lives" more literal. Then the boys explain why they've been hiding, and Charles says he believes them. Jim objects that they aren't grownups. "That's why I believe you," Charles says. It reminded me of THE SIMPSONS episode "Lisa the Iconoclast," where Homer is the only person in Springfield who takes his daughter's side. Homer's way of backing her up involves digging up a corpse. Charles reads the boys an entry from his father's diary. He's a better dad than he thinks, and the movie has the proof ready. When Dark traps him in front of a mirror and tells him his son hates him, Will answers by shouting that he loves him. Charles shatters the glass.

The carnival works like THE MONKEY'S PAW, except nobody has to find it in a drawer. Every wish gets granted, and the bill comes with it. The movie makes sure we like Ed the bartender before it takes him. He has one arm and one leg, he swings the hammer anyway, and when the bell dings, Will and Jim hug him. It's a short, sweet moment, and then his prize arrives, a free pass to the mirror maze. Ed walks in, sees a reflection with both legs, and we hear him wishing he could run, throw, and tackle again. The next time we see his bar, it's empty. "First time in 20 years," Doc says. Miss Foley, who folks say was once the most beautiful woman in town, comes out of the same maze dazed, talking about how bright and beautiful it was. Dark later calls her a "blind girl." The diary entry Charles reads in the library supplies the rule. A lame servant girl asked the fortuneteller how she might run. "Her leg mended, and then she ran mad." "It seems they destroy people by granting their dearest wishes." Dark never has to invent anyone's unhappiness. He describes his diet in that same library, "funerals, bad marriages, lost loves, lonely beds," and Green Town had plenty of all four. The carnival offers to fix it as a favor, free of charge, and supplies the mirror.

This is where I part ways with the story. Dark's pitch to Charles is a countdown that starts at 30 and gives up at 52 with a "Your loss!" The movie takes place in the 1930s, when a man in his fifties might have felt older than he would today, but I still have trouble accepting fifty-four as an age worth mourning. If I woke up tomorrow twenty years old, I don't think my friends and family would stop caring about me. I'd still be the same person inside, with a couple of extra decades to get to the things I haven't. Dating would be trickier, since I'd have little in common with people my age, but old souls already deal with that. The people who really need this story's warning are Uncle Rico in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and Al Bundy in MARRIED... WITH CHILDREN, men who would get their youth back and spend it reliving the fourth quarter coach never let one of them play and the four touchdowns the other scored once. No carousel fixes that. Dark's offer to Charles is smarter than that, though. He counts up through "You might still learn to swim" and "a year when you could run up the stairs without panting for breath," which are Charles's own regrets, not a generic wish for youth. Wanting more time to live and being unable to enjoy the life you're in are two different problems. Dark pretends he can solve the first because he knows Charles suffers from the second.

Jim Nightshade is the boy with the most to lose, and the movie shows us why before the carnival arrives. He tells anyone who will listen that his father is in Africa and coming home with a parrot and a shrunken head, and Will points out that Jim's father never writes. Things aren't much better at home. Mrs. Nightshade tells him to find something in the icebox because "Mother's just all tired out." Later he asks her whether he looks like his father. "Too like," she says, and adds that the day he leaves home, her Harry will be dead forever. A mother who can't look at her son without seeing her husband gives him one more reason to want out, and Jim wants out. He's the one who keeps threatening to remember things "when I'm older, darn it," and the one Will accuses of planning to ride the carousel the other way. Compare Will's mother, who marches him upstairs for sneaking out and calls Jim a bad influence. It isn't kind to Jim, but it's the sound of someone paying attention. Dark hears the difference. Calling to the boys in the library, he asks Jim how he'd like to be grown up, not looked down at, not told to run away and play. Then he says, "I'm the father you've been waiting for." Jim has spent the movie waiting on a letter from Africa. Dark shows up in person, which is more than his real father has managed.

The 1980s were good at movies that were creepy without being scary, the kind that ruin one night's sleep and then get watched again the following October. SILVER BULLET is another example, and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES belongs in the same company. A lot of the charm is in the casting. Jonathan Pryce plays Mr. Dark like a courteous showman, introducing himself with "My name is Mr. Dark. I advise you to respect it," and later explaining that his people butter "plain bread with delicious pain." Pam Grier, who made her name in COFFY and FOXY BROWN, says little as the Dust Witch and is still the most frightening person in any scene she enters. Royal Dano gets some of Bradbury's most colorful dialogue as Tom Fury, the lightning-rod salesman, a man who wants to know what color lightning is and where the thunder goes when it dies. "Did I take the name? No, sir. The name took me." When I read the novel, I figured this would be tough to pull off today, even with modern CGI and expert practical effects. The movie doesn't pull it off entirely. Green Town was built on the Disney Studios backlot, and it looks like exactly that, a storybook street constructed for the occasion. The supernatural events have the handmade look of something put together with a lot of fog and whatever tricks the filmmakers could devise. That's part of why it works. A carnival that arrives in the middle of the night on a train nobody is sure they heard doesn't need to look real. It needs to look like a story somebody told you.

The movie's rough edges make more sense once you know how it got made. Bradbury first wrote a screenplay in 1958 for Gene Kelly, and it took until 1981 and Disney to get it shot. Bradbury and director Jack Clayton eventually fell out over an uncredited rewrite by John Mortimer. The draft I read is dated August 1981 and still has pages revised on September 30, two days after cameras started rolling. Then the test screenings went badly. Disney effectively took the film out of Clayton's hands, reportedly spent another $5 million overhauling it, and brought Bradbury back for a new opening narration and a new ending. Georges Delerue's score was dropped for being too sinister, and James Horner wrote a replacement on short notice. The film planned for Christmas 1982 finally opened on April 29, 1983, which is a strange time of year for a movie about October. The reshoots came long enough after the original shoot that the boys had visibly grown. In a couple of scenes, Will seems about a foot taller. It's almost the MADTV FULL HOUSE reunion sketch, where the Olsen twins, who split the role of Michelle, can no longer pass for the same girl because Nicole Sullivan plays a considerably heavier Mary-Kate. This is a movie about a carousel that rewinds people's ages, and it can't keep its own boys the same age from one scene to the next.

From Will shouting "I love you" at the mirror to the final "Tie!," my subtitle file clocks about six minutes, and a lot happens in them. Jim climbs onto the carousel beside Dark, lightning hits, Dark withers into a husk, the carnival tears itself apart, and a man with a bad heart saves a boy by acting like an idiot. That last part is the best of it, and it's faithful. Charles snaps Will out of his tears, tells him the night people love them, and dances around announcing that he's the great whooping crane, which is nearly line for line what the novel does. Fighting evil with laughter and love is a nice idea, and the movie sells it. What it skips is the novel's other half. In the book, Dark isn't killed by lightning. He has ridden the carousel backward into a lost nine-year-old boy, and Charles recognizes him, holds him close, and starves him with kindness, on the theory that evil has only the power we give it. Afterward, Will asks whether they'll ever come back. "No. And yes," Charles says. "Maybe they're already here." The boys look around and see nobody but themselves. Then all three, including Charles, briefly consider taking another ride on the carousel. The movie replaces that conversation with a narrator telling us that "being old was all right now" for his father, and a footrace that ends in a tie. It's sweet, but the novel leaves all three characters vulnerable to temptation, and the movie lets us go home reassured. The carnival is gone, and everything it fed on is still in town. The movie doesn't need a longer climax so much as a couple more minutes to consider what happens after it.

So, is it any good? I said at the start that it isn't terrible, and I'm willing to go a little further than that. It's uneven, the ending is rushed, and you can see the effects of Disney's attempts to make it more accessible. But Robards is the real thing, the atmosphere holds up, and the ideas under the carnival are better than the film has time to develop. Dark makes his living on dissatisfaction. He finds what someone is missing and sells it back as a favor, always in the politest terms: "Excuse me, gentlemen, I am a stranger in this town." He merely wishes, he says, to give the boys "the valuable rewards that they so richly deserve." Charles has no such manners. He sings badly, dances worse, and gives up his dignity to save a boy who isn't even his. What Dark sells has a price, and what Charles gives away doesn't. Bradbury called the finished film "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one," and I like that he reached for the word nice. Dark has the better manners. Charles has the better heart, bad as it is.

Final Verdict: 77 out of 100

Sidenote: What's Halloween without a little Salem Saberhagen?

Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald

NORM: THE TALE OF NORM MACDONALD (2026) R 126 Minutes Director: Judd Apatow Norm Macdonald, Larry King, Andy Dick

You think you know... but you have no idea.

— MTV's DIARY

I don't like many Canadians. Just John Candy, Jason Priestley, and Norm Macdonald.

Back in 2013 and 2014, I had something to look forward to on my Monday evening Domino's shifts: a new episode of NORM MACDONALD LIVE. The show wasn't particularly reliable. Some Mondays there would be a new episode waiting for me, and others there would be nothing, a disappointment that could put me in a lousy mood for the rest of the week. When an episode did appear, I did the impossible, some might even describe it as completely reckless. I watched a video podcast, with my phone in my lap, while delivering pizza.

I had a one-sided relationship with a stand-up comic. I consumed every scrap of Norm content I could find. I thought I knew everything about him. But how well do you really know someone who jokingly lies about the basic facts of his own life?

Within the first minute of NORM: THE TALE OF NORM MACDONALD, a caller from Harrison, Arkansas gets on the air with Norm and admits that a couple nights ago, at 5:30 in the morning, he was laughing at Norm clips on YouTube. Comedian Matt McCusker describes the hole you can fall into, and Judd Apatow drops us straight into it. For most of the runtime we're sitting at a desktop computer while clips, articles, and social media posts pile up, a keyboard clacking between them. Apatow put out a call for fans' photos and videos while making the film, so the frame isn't only a conceit. It's also close to how I consumed Norm myself, and I'm still not sure what to make of that. Scrolling doesn't ask much of the person doing it, and for long stretches Apatow seems content to let the clips do the work.

About eight minutes in, Larry King asks Norm whether BASED ON A TRUE STORY, which the cover calls a memoir, is really a novel. "This is a novel, yeah, not a memoir," Norm says. Asked whether to believe any of it, he answers, "It's not facts, but it's truth." The copyright page is no more reassuring. It says the stories begin with the author's recollection of events, which is — by his own admission — spotty, and that several names and identifying details have been changed. Apatow keeps that exchange in, then cuts straight to Norm narrating his childhood from the book. Further on there's the story of sleeping beside the polar bears in the Central Park Zoo. Maybe Apatow is taking a page from Norm himself, trusting that even an invented story can tell us something true about the man.

About eleven minutes in, the film lays out the problem in a montage. Norm is a strict vegetarian who eats "chicken and beef." He asks a crowd, "Do you ever just lie for no reason at all?" He is Scottish, then Polish, then three quarters gypsy. He says he doesn't drink or smoke, and a friend of 15 years, asked about that, says, "I think he did. I'm almost certain, but I have no idea." He left school at 15, never had any schooling, and at one point mentions when he was in college. The film returns to the bit later, cutting together talk show clips in which his son is 3, then 6, then 18, and a 2020 set where Norm, around 60, calls himself "68 years young." Apatow gets his laughs from the pile-up, but the friend's answer is the only one that sounds honest.

Not long after, the film turns to Norm's jobs before fame. In an interview he lists a logging camp and a garbage truck, and I can't say he didn't make some of them up, especially with Apatow cutting in a scene from DIRTY WORK where two workers admit they lied on their resume. Then comes the narration, again from the book. "I specialized in unskilled labor, and I was good at it," Norm says, and if his job was to shovel until eight hours had passed, his body worked on its own. "It had no use for my mind, so my mind would take off to a world of imagination. And that's where stand-up comedy started." That one I believe, because I worked greens maintenance at a golf course, and a lot of my best ideas came from that job.

The film gives the sitcoms little time, and Norm does most of the dismissing himself. As he recalls it, his whole pitch was "I think I can act as good as Jerry Seinfeld." Asked about the acting, he says, "I don't like to act," and he explains that stand-ups make bad actors because the job is "you not relating to anyone." Late in the film, Norm says he's only proud of one thing, and that everything else was "an accident that came from stand-up." Apatow lets that stand as the verdict, without much consideration of whether the shows themselves were any good. I'll answer. I watched every episode of THE NORM SHOW, because how could you go wrong with Norm and a dachshund? And yet, it was at best a C+ show. I couldn't finish a single episode of A MINUTE WITH STAN HOOPER.

I hadn't realized how much of Norm's childhood was spent around old men. His father's friends came over in the evenings for "company," and Norm sat cross-legged in the corner while they told jokes. Later, as the film turns to mortality, Norm says he comes from "a long line of death." Then the narration takes over: "Death is a funny thing." In the book, that passage comes from a scene where Norm visits a dying boy in the hospital, but here it plays as his own philosophy. He says people are in "deep denial of death," and "I'm not." The film cuts straight to a man saying "not a lot of people knew" that Norm "had stomach cancer" early in his career, then fades him out mid-sentence. A 1991 Montreal Gazette article shown on screen reports that his illness began after his 1986 Just for Laughs appearance.

Norm isn't as comfortable with death as that boast suggests. In a radio interview not included in the documentary, he talks himself through an argument: when you're dead you're not alive, and when you're alive you're not dead, so "you and death will never actually cross paths." Asked whether it works, he says, "I'm not successful," and admits the fear returns "in the deep of night," when he gets up late, turns on the bathroom light and looks himself in the eye. I didn't know about the cancer, and as far as I can tell the film never returns to that first diagnosis. I wonder if a brush with mortality that early in his career affected his work afterward.

Earlier, the film includes Norm's Richard Farnsworth story, the one that led me to THE STRAIGHT STORY, about an actor who kept his cancer out of the public eye. At a 2020 show late in the film, Norm jokes that "if I die it won't be as much of a tragedy." A couple of minutes later, the film plays people reacting to the news of his death. His final illness had lasted nine years, and one of them says, "I had no idea." Jeff Ross explains, "Anything that undercuts the comedy, you don't want the audience to know." As a matter of comedy, I think Norm was right to keep it from his audience.

Then there's the special. According to a woman in the film, Norm taped it the night before a long procedure because he didn't want to leave anything on the table "in case things went south." I've watched it, the one where he sits at a laptop, and it's hard to laugh when you know how close he was to death. I'm not sure the material was great, either. Because of Covid, he never got the chance to refine the material in front of an audience, and I think it shows. It reminds me of the albums released after Tupac died. He was in the studio constantly because he thought he might die young, but with all the music he left behind, I doubt he would have considered every recording a finished song.

I think I know why I spent so much time watching Norm. John Candy died when I was a kid, and Chris Farley and Phil Hartman followed while I was in middle school. I learned early that the people I admired weren't necessarily going to be around for long. Philip Seymour Hoffman came later. I didn't grow up watching him, but as an adult I started seeing everything he made the moment it came out, and then he died on the day the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. With Norm, the habit took the form of watching whatever clips and episodes I could find online. I watched while he was still around to make more.

Near the end, Norm tells a crowd that he feels love when he does stand-up, and that "here is better than out there." What I felt watching Norm was different. I was watching alone, and he never knew I was there. He had a room full of strangers laughing with him. Apatow closes with one last ridiculous gag and The Highwaymen singing "Live Forever." It feels right for Norm. But what stays with me comes right before it. He says he'll try to say it "as unironically as possible, okay?" and then says, "I love you."

Final Verdict: 84 out of 100

Sidenote: Here's the link where you can watch the old NORM MACDONALD LIVE episodes. https://archive.org/details/Norm_Macdonald_Live

But don't watch these while driving, unless you have one of those fancy cell phone holders. Safety first.

The Truman Show (Retro)

THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998) PG 103 Minutes Director: Peter Weir Writer: Andrew Niccol Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich CAST Jim Carrey...Truman Burbank Laura Linney...Meryl Burbank Noah Emmerich...Marlon Natascha McElhone...Sylvia Ed Harris...Christof Holland Taylor...Truman's Mother Brian Delate...Truman's Father Paul Giamatti...Control Room Director Philip Baker Hall...Network Executive Harry Shearer...Mike Michaelson

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

— William Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT

Imagine growing up with a best friend, only to discover that your parents had secretly been paying him to spend time with you. Would that make your entire friendship a lie, or could something genuine have developed along the way? For Truman Burbank, the situation is several thousand times worse. Adopted as an infant by a corporation, Truman has spent his entire life surrounded by people paid to be his friends, his family, and even his wife.

The movie seems to anticipate that reaction, and its first few minutes push back against it. Before we see a single morning in Seahaven, the people around Truman are on camera describing their jobs. Christof acknowledges that Truman's world may be counterfeit, but insists there's nothing fake about Truman himself. There are no scripts or cue cards, and if it isn't always Shakespeare, it's a life. Meryl says there's no difference between her private life and her public one. The show is a lifestyle, a noble one, a truly blessed life. It's a sales pitch, obviously, and I still caught myself half-believing it. Part of the reason is that I'm not convinced a paycheck necessarily spoils a relationship. There's a crude saying that you can always learn to love a rich woman, and plenty of marriages have started on less romantic terms than that. Friendships begin at work all the time, too, and nobody asks whether the friend would have shown up without the salary. For all I know, the relationships on Truman's show were less transactional than a lot of the ones people have in real life. The difference is that everybody else on the show got to read the terms.

If any relationship in the movie can answer that question, it's Marlon's. Truman, convinced the whole world revolves around him, sits down with his oldest friend and asks whether he's losing his mind. Marlon's answer is the warmest scene in the film. He has been Truman's best friend since they were seven. They got through school cheating off each other's test papers, which he remembers as a comfort, since they were right or wrong together. He stayed up all night in Truman's tent so Truman could play North Pole, and he got pneumonia for it. Truman remembers that Marlon was out of school for a month. Truman is the closest thing he ever had to a brother, and he would gladly step in front of traffic for him. Meanwhile Christof is in his ear, feeding him the words. Christof says "walk," and Marlon, repeating the line, slightly flubs it into "step." The line about never lying to Truman goes through the same relay: Christof says it first, and Marlon echoes it with a hesitation. Seconds later he assures Truman that he isn't in on anything, because there is no "it." After two minutes of sounding sincere, he delivers the most dishonest sentence in the movie. What I can't get past is the tent. If Marlon has been in Truman's life since they were seven, someone decided that for him as a child, and he still sat up all night and got sick for his friend. The circumstances were manufactured, but the hours weren't. I made a version of this argument about Henry, the chauffeur in BLANK CHECK, who is on the payroll and is still one of the few people who seems to care what happens to Preston. The difference is that Preston knows what he's paying for. The question with Marlon isn't whether he's lying to Truman. It's whether he's lying about everything.

Meryl is where my argument runs into trouble. With Marlon, you can wonder whether the person is leaking through the job. With Meryl, it's the job leaking through the person. One of the first things we see her do is show Truman a Chef's Pal she got free at the checkout, which she pitches like an infomercial: dicer, grater, peeler, all in one. Later, when Truman studies their wedding album with a magnifying glass, he finds his bride with her fingers crossed behind her back. By the time he's cornered her, he's asking why she wants a baby with a man she can't stand, and she answers by offering him Mococoa, natural cocoa beans from Mt. Nicaragua, no artificial sweeteners. When he asks if she's part of this, she tells him he's scaring her. Soon Truman is threatening her with a kitchen utensil, asking, "Dice me, slice me or peel me?" Then she begs someone off camera to do something, and when help arrives she complains, "How can anyone expect me to carry on under these conditions? It's unprofessional!" Her fear is real, but it's difficult to find much genuine affection underneath it. The possibility of a baby makes the arrangement even uglier. Christof announces his determination to stage "TV's first on-air conception," as though bringing another human being into this world were simply a programming decision. Sylvia offers the other side of the arrangement. Christof refers to her as a former member of the cast, and when Truman first speaks to her, she says she isn't allowed to talk to him. Then she goes out with him anyway, tells him everybody is pretending, and gets written out with a story about schizophrenia and a move to Fiji. Both women were cast. One risked her job to reach him, and the other hid behind hers.

Marlon and Meryl at least get speeches. Most of Seahaven has to make do with a greeting. Christof says it takes the population of an entire country to keep the show running, and the question I kept asking is why anyone would stay for thirty years. If I were an actor who hated Truman, I don't think I could swallow it for a paycheck. Surely some of the people who've spent decades on that set have grown fond of him, even if others are simply earning a living. The town plays like a 1950s sitcom, cheerful and conformist, with neighbors so pleasant that you don't notice they're a perimeter until Truman steps out of line. A businessman and a woman with a dog force his supposedly dead father onto a bus. Traffic blocks every turn he tries. When he disappears, the townspeople organize a search, and even the Dalmatian joins in, snarling as they look for him. The commitment has a skill ceiling, though. When Truman sails off, the production wants another boat out there and discovers that its ferry crew can't sail. They're actors. Kirk, the man who played Truman's father, raises another question. Christof says Kirk was disappointed when he read the synopsis, and after he broke back onto the set, the production decided to write him into the show again, with amnesia to explain twenty-two missing years. Whether Kirk missed Truman or merely missed his job, the result was the same. The control room applauded the reunion.

Truman is the only person in the cast who doesn't know he has an audience, and Weir builds Carrey's performance around that. The rubber-faced bits survive, but they've become Truman's habits: a finger to his pulse for "Vital signs are good," a spacesuit drawn on the bathroom mirror to proclaim the planet Trumania, a panicked "Somebody help me! I'm being spontaneous!" He's a natural entertainer who doesn't know he's entertaining anyone. When the comedy stops, so does he. His last exchange with Christof, "Then who am I?", is nearly motionless. His later dramatic turns in MAN ON THE MOON and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND are hard to imagine without this one. Everyone around him has the opposite job, playing a person and an employee at the same time. Noah Emmerich has the hardest assignment, since Marlon must convince Truman he's a friend while leaving us uncertain how much of the affection is sincere. Ed Harris makes Christof frightening by making him gentle. The man who says "Cue the sun" also comforts Truman like a child. Philip Baker Hall, my favorite of the bunch, plays the studio executive who finally demands that Christof cease transmission. Even his objection is a broadcast problem: "He can't die on television!" Christof's answer is "He was born on television."

Asked why Truman never came close to discovering the true nature of his world, Christof gives what amounts to the thesis of the movie: "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." That goes for the audience, too. The film asks us to buy into two fictional worlds. One is Seahaven, with its painted sky, its 5,000 cameras, and a studio large enough to be seen from space. The other is the society that made Seahaven possible, where a corporation can adopt a child and 1.7 billion people watch his birth. The logistics make my head spin if I think about them, so I try not to, and the movie counts on that. What interests me more is how the premise differs from THE MATRIX, which arrived less than a year later and took a similar idea somewhere colder. In THE MATRIX, the world its inhabitants experience doesn't physically exist as they perceive it. In Seahaven, everything is real, even the fake parts. The sea is real water, the sky is a real wall, and the people are real people. Truman's surroundings and relationships all exist. It's his understanding of them that has been manipulated. That puts him closer to the rest of us than any simulation story does, because most of us were handed an account of the world early on, and nobody ever walked us out to the edges to check.

The early draft shows how differently this could have gone. Andrew Niccol's Truman is thirty-four, thinning on top and soft around the middle, and the first time we see him as an adult, he's crying in his car in Queens. A few minutes later he empties a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels into his coffee. The ending is equally bleak. Truman confronts Christof on the roof of the enormous studio, screaming, "Something was real! Something had to be real!" He escapes, finds Sylvia, and has a daughter, but the show goes on without him as ZOE: "Total Record of a Human Life," with Marlon playing the new baby's father. Truman turns off the television. Weir keeps the desperation but gives us a man his own viewers call kind, maybe too kind. I think that's the right trade. A film asking whether the people around Truman could love him is more persuasive when we can understand why they might.

Surveillance gets most of the credit for this film's prescience, but the viewers are the better prediction. They aren't villains. Christof says many of them leave Truman on all night for comfort, and the movie shows them in bars and on sofas, tuning in for his first step and that stolen kiss, attached to a man who has never met them. BIG BROTHER premiered in the Netherlands the next year, and a whole economy now runs on strangers who feel they know someone they have never spoken to. Someone in the control room points out that Truman has the world's most recognizable face, and he walks into a life where everyone knows far more about him than he knows about them. I think of Britney Spears, whose fame brought extraordinary scrutiny while other people exercised control over her life. Escaping the studio won't mean escaping his audience. In the early draft, Truman gets to switch the television off himself. In the finished film, the last word goes to two security guards: "You want another slice?" "No. Let's see what else is on."

The film's last argument is about who gets to claim they know Truman. Christof asks Sylvia, on the air, whether batting her eyes at him once means she knows him. Then he tells Truman himself, "I know you better than you do," and lists the evidence: the birth, the first step, the first day of school, the lost tooth. Truman's reply is "You never had a camera in my head," and it holds up. Christof has nearly thirty years of footage and still can't predict what Truman will do when he's offered a door. The farewell that follows is the one Truman gives his neighbors on the first morning we see him: "In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night." Except this time it's an actual goodbye. My answer to the question I opened with is that the people around him could care about him and still not have earned his trust, because he never agreed to any of it. Thirty years is a long time to know someone. It might not be long enough to know them completely.

Final Verdict: 91 out of 100

Equilibrium (Retro)

EQUILIBRIUM (2002) R 107 Minutes Director: Kurt Wimmer Writer: Kurt Wimmer Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs CAST Christian Bale...John Preston Emily Watson...Mary O'Brien Taye Diggs...Brandt Angus Macfadyen...DuPont Sean Bean...Partridge William Fichtner...Jurgen

Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.

— W. B. Yeats, "Easter, 1916"

I had been an adult for less than six months when I first saw EQUILIBRIUM, and apparently one of the first things I wanted to do with my newfound independence was skip community college and drive several towns away to see a movie. I had spotted an ad for it in the Seattle Weekly, but its limited release meant the nearest showing was at the Parkway Plaza theater in Tukwila. I didn't bother with MapQuest — just a crude map from the paper, the theater's address, and the freeway signs. It poured rain the entire way, and getting there and back turned into considerably more of an ordeal than I had anticipated. But there was something thrilling about it too. I was eighteen, nobody needed to give me permission, and if I wanted to spend an afternoon hunting down some strange dystopian Christian Bale movie in Tukwila, I could.

Even at eighteen, I could tell where EQUILIBRIUM had been shopping. Prozium is the soma of BRAVE NEW WORLD by another name, Father is Big Brother with a bigger screen, and the Clerics burn paintings and records the way the firemen of FAHRENHEIT 451 burn books, right down to the enforcer who gets undone by the thing he's paid to destroy. It even drifts into PLEASANTVILLE territory, another immaculate world where feeling has been flattened out and the first glimpse of what's been drained away hits like a revelation. Aside from the special effects, this is almost a movie that teleported in from the 1970s. The film doesn't hide any of it. Wimmer's own production notes name Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury as inspirations. Taye Diggs even says he read two of them to prepare for Brandt. That candor is rare. Most art is built from earlier art, and most artists work hard to hide the receipts. It didn't bother me then, because the ideas were still worth exploring, and it doesn't bother me now. Besides, none of its ancestors ever got around to a martial art built around two pistols.

Libria also has a staffing problem that anyone who has watched a cop show could have predicted. The Clerics spend their days around exactly what the state wants gone, which is the kind of setup that can turn vice cops into users. Partridge is the proof. When Preston asks why he didn't leave a book for the evidentiary team, he says they miss things sometimes and he'd rather get it done properly himself, with Yeats in his pocket. Later Brandt asks Preston the same question about a Beethoven record and gets nearly the same answer. Even Brandt, the loyal one, has a version of the problem. If they keep burning all this contraband, he muses, eventually there won't be anything left to burn, and what will there be for men like them? That's a man with a stake in the crime he exists to eliminate. It makes sense that a revolution would begin with one of these guys rather than an ordinary citizen. They're the only people in the city who get to handle the forbidden material. You would think the architect of such a society would compartmentalize things a bit more. Partridge walks through the gate into the nether every night for two weeks and the guard assumes it's enforcement-related. His evidence log goes empty for weeks and nobody notices until Preston asks. A regime that bans mirror frames leaves its most dangerous employees on the honor system.

The deeper flaw is that Prozium never works the way the speeches say it does. The film keeps showing a society that seems to have removed tenderness, empathy, grief, and aesthetic pleasure while leaving plenty of other feelings intact. Brandt is proud and ambitious and laughs out loud when his trap closes. DuPont is vain, short-tempered, and visibly rattled once Preston starts winning. When Brandt tells Preston that obedience to Father is a matter of faith, he's describing a feeling with better PR. Father himself is the biggest tell. He died years ago, and the Council keeps his face on the screens because obedience needs someone to obey. Even the Prestons are leaking. Robbie snaps at Lisa for playing with her cereal, which reads as a stray bit of behavior until he hands his father the dose and says he and his sister quit taking it after their mother died. That makes the title more interesting than I first gave it credit for. Libria's idea of equilibrium is a flatline. Jurgen comes closer to a definition: emotion has a price, and without restraint it's chaos, but the answer is control, not removal. Partridge says the price of feeling is one he'd pay gladly, and near the end, when DuPont asks Preston whether it's worth it, Preston says the same thing back. This time it sounds like a man who has found his balance.

Preston's abilities are the film's other contradiction. According to the production notes, Bale took an eight-week Judo course and trained with stunt coordinator Jim Vickers in Japanese fighting arts and the handling of multiple guns, and Wimmer says almost all of the fight scenes were shot in a single take. It shows. The choreography is clear and fast, and some of it wouldn't look out of place in JOHN WICK (2014). DuPont's explanation of Gun Kata is another matter. He throws out a 120% gain in firing efficiency and a 63% gain in lethal proficiency, numbers that sound precise and explain nothing. The better question is why a government that blames violence on emotion would build its deadliest man. It's the old Rambo problem: institutions are comfortable manufacturing violence until it stops obeying orders. The film's answer is to give Preston something he can't shoot. When the Clerics raid a kennel in the nether, he rescues one dog with a thin excuse about disease testing, and later the dog is why he ends up killing a patrol of his own side. That scene is where the two halves of Preston finally meet: the machine's efficiency gets spent on something small and helpless, with no speech about feeling required. Apparently I've stumbled into another movie where a dog matters. This one appears in a handful of scenes, which is the right ratio for a film that isn't about the dog, and it returns at the end with Lisa.

The cast has to do a lot with very little face, and most of them manage it. Bale's job is to change visibly while looking like he hasn't, and the production notes say he and Wimmer worked to avoid winking at the audience. Some of his best work is in his hands. Preston peels off a glove to feel a handrail, then again to find a hidden cache, and both read louder than most shouting. Emily Watson, who had already appeared opposite Bale in METROLAND, plays Mary with her usual seriousness, plus an edge of something eerie. It keeps her from being only the woman who teaches him to feel. Taye Diggs and Angus Macfadyen have the opposite assignment, playing men who are supposed to feel nothing and visibly feel plenty. The press kit says Wimmer cast Diggs for his smile, a smart choice in a world where smiling is suspect. Macfadyen's DuPont is a showman, and when it's time to threaten Preston he borrows Partridge's Yeats. Sean Bean and William Fichtner each get the scene where someone explains what Libria costs, and each delivers it as if the bill has already come due. Most of these characters are more functional than developed, but the cast sells the function.

The premise has aged in odd directions. Wimmer has said he wanted a parallel world, not a gadget future, and the technology is modest enough now to be charming. The one thing the movie got exactly right about the future is the bad video-conference background. That modesty also leaves the regime looking fragile. A society built around one drug stores it in glass ampoules, and Preston's awakening begins when one shatters at his sink. The resistance's plan is fragile in the same way: bomb the clinics and factories, and if the supply stops for even a day, human nature will handle the rest. That's a plan without a day after. Robbie asking whether he should report another boy for crying lands differently in an age when everyone carries a report button, and Preston's flat "Unquestionably" is the right answer for the world he lives in. Dystopias are easier to enjoy when the future they describe is far away, and this one has moved closer.

The early draft shows what Wimmer changed his mind about. In it, Preston reaches Mary before the incinerator, and they get a goodbye: she makes him promise her death won't be for nothing, steps into the chamber, and is gone in a flash. Then, near the end, she turns up alive in a hidden room behind a mirror, and the script closes on the two of them kissing as the drug factories explode. The finished film is harsher. Preston arrives too late, watches the doors close on her, and ends with her ribbon instead of her. That gives the victory a cost the draft never charged. The film also makes better use of Brandt. In the draft he's dragged off to be burned and never comes back, and the line about asking a Cleric for his gun comes from an unseen voice. In the film he returns, smiling, as the trap whose job was to make Preston feel safe. Both changes follow the same instinct. A movie that keeps talking about the price of feeling should make someone pay it.

EQUILIBRIUM has never been easy to find. Dimension Films opened it in 301 theaters, and it took in about $1.2 million at the American box office against a $20 million budget. Wimmer later said the studio didn't know how to market a film with both action and ideas. The DVD was the next hurdle, since the Blockbuster copy was always gone. This time it was streaming: it turned up on Paramount+ long enough for me to watch it once, then disappeared, and I had to rent it elsewhere. Watching at home, on a television, I was seeing a smaller movie. Part of what had stuck with me was the trip itself: the rain, the freeway signs and the paper map. The rest was scale. The production notes say Libria's architecture was designed to make the individual feel small. On a theater screen, it did. On my television, it looked like a pretty good screensaver. I remembered EQUILIBRIUM as a bigger movie than it really is, but the first time I saw it, I was eighteen and it literally was.

Final Verdict: 74 out of 100

Sidenote: Dimension Films was a Miramax label at the time (yes, that Miramax), and Miramax itself was owned by Disney.

Heart of the Beast

HEART OF THE BEAST (2026) PG-13 101 Minutes Director: David Ayer Writer: Cameron Alexander Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons, Anna Lambe CAST Brad Pitt...James Belmont J.K. Simmons...Watkins Anna Lambe...Amber Uber...Odin

Life's just better with a dog.

— Brad Pitt

After watching ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, one lesson can be gleaned: we need more movies with Brad Pitt and a dog. He clearly has chemistry with animals. Maybe we had to wait until he was secure enough in his career to spend most of a movie wandering through the wilderness with a German shepherd. And it's good to know he's not faking the funk — Pitt has been a dog owner for decades, and by all accounts, the affection on screen isn't an act.

The ordinary bond between a man and a dog is profound enough on its own. But James and Odin are old war buddies, and that's a connection that's harder to fathom. I think of a 1999 Discovery Channel documentary, WAR DOGS: AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN HEROES, about Vietnam-era handlers forced to leave their dogs behind at the end of deployment, when military dogs were still treated as equipment and many never came home. The men interviewed were gruff and weathered, and one after another they cried on camera over dogs they'd lost. HEART OF THE BEAST is built on that same grief: two creatures who went to war together and came home changed, with only each other left to prove any of it happened.

Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Special Forces soldier whose plane goes down in the Alaskan backcountry with his combat dog, Odin, aboard. There's little dialogue, so the story is told through what you see, and almost anything I describe would ruin it. That makes this review more about my reaction than the plot. Every review is about feelings, but this one admits it. One spoiler, and the first scene beats me to it: the dog lives. I knew that. I had a pretty good idea what trials were coming. None of that protected me from the movie. The interesting question isn't really what happens next. It's why something this simple, and this easy to anticipate, hit me the way it did.

For a movie about two war veterans, one of them a dog, it barely explains the war. What backstory there is arrives over a beer with Watkins, a former gold miner played by J.K. Simmons. He pitches his tent next to James's and hopes that's all right, then takes a second beer from the cooler and hopes that's all right too. Simmons has a type I'm starting to notice: confident characters with a bit of hesitancy underneath. It works here. When Watkins asks about the titanium in Odin's mouth, James gives a flat, matter-of-fact explanation, then drops the darkest part like it's nothing. The flashbacks do the opposite. They're so chaotic that you never find your bearings or follow the fighting. All you really understand is that James and his dog went through hell together, which turns out to be plenty.

When James talks, it's mostly to Odin. He introduces Odin like a prizefighter, the king of all three-legged creatures, and puts double portions to a vote. When a nightmare rattles Odin, the reassurance is in the plural: "We're not there anymore." Odin holds up his end, and the two of them keep saving each other. Pitt's ease with the dog has preparation behind it: David Ayer says Pitt arrived in New Zealand early, worked with the dogs, learned some of the handling himself, and got to know Uber, his primary canine co-star. I remember watching MEGAN LEAVEY (2017), about a Marine and her bomb-sniffing dog, and thinking there wasn't enough dog. Nobody will have that complaint here.

What got me was a blanket. At one point the movie gives Odin a nylon Army camo blanket. I once laid the same kind over my own dog while she slept, sick with an illness we couldn't identify and weren't sure she'd get over. She did, and she slept with that blanket every day afterward. The movie knew nothing about that, and it didn't need to. It only had to put the blanket in the frame and let me do the rest.

Knowing the dog lives only protects you from the plot. The blanket carried the part where I didn't know if my own dog would pull through, and no opening scene can spoil that. Ayer has said his biggest battle was embracing how simple the story is. I'm glad he won it. I went in expecting a mom movie, and I probably would have been perfectly satisfied with one. They didn't have to make it this good. The dog lives, and I'm still not over it.

Final Verdict: 92 out of 100

Sidenote:

Only the Lonely (Retro)

ONLY THE LONELY (1991) PG-13 104 Minutes Director: Chris Columbus Writer: Chris Columbus John Candy, Maureen O'Hara, Ally Sheedy CAST John Candy...Danny Muldoon Maureen O'Hara...Rose Muldoon Ally Sheedy...Theresa Luna Kevin Dunn...Patrick Muldoon Milo O'Shea...Doyle Bert Remsen...Spats Anthony Quinn...Nick Acropolis James Belushi...Sal Buonarte

The future's uncertain and the end is always near

— The Doors, "Roadhouse Blues"

Watching and rewatching John Candy movies as a child, there was a lot I simply wasn't equipped to pick up on. I saw ONLY THE LONELY more times than I can count, and yet it remained my least favorite of the Candy films I considered at least passable. I kept coming back to it anyway, figuring that if I watched it enough times, eventually I'd catch whatever I had missed. I suppose I finally have, though repetition wasn't really the answer. Like THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, ONLY THE LONELY is something that takes a little age and wisdom to appreciate.

ONLY THE LONELY undersold itself on the way out the door. Marketed on Candy's name, it walked into an audience already primed for a comedy, and delivered a drama with comedy folded into it instead. Approached as a Candy vehicle, Rose can read as an obstacle keeping Danny from whatever plot he's supposedly in; approached on its own terms, she is the plot. Not every laugh here earns its place the same way — a few carry the faint whiff of contractual obligation, as if a certain number of jokes per reel came bundled with the casting — but the ones that land hardest belong specifically to Danny rather than generically to Candy. The cutaways where guilt sends him spiraling into some worst-case vision of what's happened to his mother the moment he's out of the house are funny precisely because they're symptoms: a joke built out of one particular man's particular damage reads differently than a pratfall would, and that's the difference between a bit and a character trait.

That distinction was deliberate. Columbus has said casting Candy meant reaching past the persona: "We got the 'real' John Candy, beyond the facade." Hughes described the same choice in blunter terms, admiring the nerve it took for Candy to say, in effect, "The things I do best, I'm gonna set them aside and try something else." And Belushi — cast as Sal, the one member of the ensemble whose whole job is comic relief — supplies the best evidence the gamble paid off: recalling a scene where his character is scripted to laugh at something Danny says, he admitted flatly, "That was me really laughing, not my character." A film that gets an actual, unplanned laugh out of its designated comic relief has found a funnier register than asking him to be funny ever could.

Danny and Theresa like each other almost on contact, and the film doesn't dress that up as some slow thaw. A cop who spends his shifts around whatever trouble the public generates and a mortuary cosmetician who spends hers making up the dead to look presentable for viewing turn out to have more in common than either would probably admit, both drawing a paycheck in regular proximity to death, only at different stages of the process. The film gets specific comic mileage out of that overlap rather than treating it as incidental set dressing: Danny asks her out mid-shift, with an actual body in front of him, and the scene plays the mismatch for exactly what it is instead of cutting away from the discomfort. He leaves on the kind of high only a successful ask produces, grinning at nobody in particular, and walks straight into a clutch of pallbearers arriving for a different service entirely — Candy doesn't have to do anything but let Danny's face catch up to the space he's wandered into, and it's the funniest beat in the sequence for being the least engineered.

None of that chemistry would matter much if the film then spent its second half correcting Theresa, the way THE BREAKFAST CLUB — Sheedy, six years earlier — eventually does to Allison: introverted and strange until a makeover scene reintroduces her as conventionally pretty and, not coincidentally, more legible to Emilio Estevez. ONLY THE LONELY doesn't run that play. Theresa stays quiet, stays a little odd, and the film lets the oddness stay hers rather than something to be talked out of her: she styles her corpses to resemble movie stars, a private flourish that isn't being performed for Danny, evidence of an interior life running at full strength whether anyone appreciates it or not. Danny's interest in her arrives without an asterisk requiring she eventually stop being that person.

Why the performance works as well as it does gets easier to understand once the line "Ever since my dad died I've been in charge" is set next to the man delivering it, not just the character saying it. Candy lost his own father at five, decades before anyone thought to build him a part around that kind of premature responsibility, and Columbus didn't back into the resemblance by accident — he wrote ONLY THE LONELY with Candy specifically in mind, and Candy knew it: "Nobody thinks of me in this kind of role," he told Columbus once he understood what had been done for him. "Thanks so much." None of that amounts to Candy simply playing himself. Danny is a fictional Chicago cop with a fictional dead father, and nothing in his file matches Candy's own biography point for point. What the record does explain is the specific muscle the role asked him to use, and how rarely audiences had been allowed to watch him use it for this long.

Candy turned forty about a month into the shoot, a milestone his own father never reached — dead at thirty-five, meaning by his own reckoning Candy had already outlived him. Months later, taping a Tonight Show spot built around the finished film, he was reportedly more rattled than his friend Robert Crane Jr. had ever seen him, pulling back his jacket backstage to show off sweat rings and asking if there was any way out of going on at all; Crane's answer, as he remembers it, was that Maureen O'Hara and Johnny Carson had made that impossible. Candy had spent years being funny in front of millions. Now he was promoting a film built around the part of himself audiences weren't accustomed to seeing, and backstage he was sweating through his shirt.

Go. Marry that girl. Have lots of Irish-dago mutts.

— Rose Muldoon

Rose's whole contradiction sits in two lines spoken minutes apart. "I don't hurt people," she says at one point, flat, a statement of fact about herself. Then, not long after, walking back something she's done: "I don't mean to hurt people. Really." The second version concedes what the first one denies, and the gap between them is close to her entire arc in miniature — not a woman who doesn't hurt people, but one who's spent a long time believing the denial hard enough to keep functioning, sabotaging Danny's chances and her own peace with roughly equal enthusiasm and calling neither one intentional.

She's a cartoon only if you don't look closely. Played broadly, an overbearing widowed mother running interference on her adult son's love life reads like a type assembled from other movies' spare parts; played as specifically as O'Hara plays her, she reads like somebody's actual mother — the kind of figure who turns up often enough in large Irish-Catholic families that the surprise isn't that she exists, it's how rarely she gets written this precisely. The film gives her prejudice a specific shape rather than a generic one, too: Theresa's family is Sicilian and Polish, not Irish, and Rose's objections keep circling back to that fact in ways that have nothing to do with whether Theresa is good for Danny. None of that earns her tactics a pass for being recognizable — the crack about Theresa's figure and the insinuation about her drinking aren't secondhand prejudice relayed from somewhere else, they're things Rose says to Theresa's face at dinner, with Danny sitting right there to hear it. The large-Irish-family defense explains where Rose comes from. It doesn't extend to where she's willing to take it.

The screenplay's small mechanics do more work than the film's reputation as pleasant-but-slight generally credits them for. It opens on a death and very nearly turns on another: the corpse two men carry into the bar early on isn't an atmospheric flourish, it's the reason Danny meets Theresa and her father at all — remove that corpse from the scene and there's no movie. Near the end, a different death does the opposite kind of work: Doyle, an old man with no family and few friends left to notice he's gone, dies right as Danny is packing to leave for Florida with Rose. Doyle is the future Danny suddenly realizes he might be building for himself. What lets him reach her at all is a smaller, neater piece of plotting: Theresa is the one who has to prepare Doyle's body, and by the time Danny works up the nerve to go after her, her train has already left the station. He doesn't beat the clock — he uses what he has instead, a police connection with enough pull to get a departed train stopped so he can still get to her. One death opens the picture by putting Theresa in Danny's path; a second one closes it, not with good timing but with Danny using what his job gives him.

Spats gets there first, structurally speaking. His "don't spend your life full of regrets" lands early enough that it's easy to file away as a barroom platitude, the kind of thing regulars say to each other without either one really listening — right up until it turns out to be the exact instruction Danny eventually follows. There are smaller pleasures around the edges, too, like Columbus finding room for John Davis Chandler, his wonderfully unsettling Bleak from ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, in a cameo that lasts barely long enough to register. Recognizing him doesn't change anything, but that's part of the pleasure: even the margins have faces in them.

The reconciliation at the train station gets everything right and still feels rushed getting there. Danny's apology, his confession, Theresa's admission that she loves him too, his promise that she comes first now — the content of the scene is exactly what the rest of the film has patiently earned, and it still plays like the movie is in more of a hurry to close than its characters ever were to open up. What surrounds that scene does more of the real work than the scene itself. Rose gets her own small ending on a plane instead of a train, holding Nick's hand because her son finally gave up a seat instead of a duty. Danny's whole arc has been one of accommodation — his brother, his mother, his own fear of what happens if he stops managing everyone — and the last real choice he makes in the film is the culmination of all the smaller choices he's begun making for himself. Theresa's version of the same idea is quieter and arguably braver: having already walked away once, cleanly, she's the one who has to decide whether to risk being disappointed by the same man twice. And Danny's final vision — Rose and Nick fending off hijackers together mid-flight — was surely meant as pure comic relief, an overprotective son's fantasy played for a laugh. It lands differently now, carrying a weight the joke couldn't possibly have anticipated.

What the film is really about, underneath the plot mechanics, is easier to see if you set the romantic resolution aside and look at how crowded it is with lonely people. Danny, Theresa, Rose, Nick, even Doyle at the end — each represents a different response to the possibility of being left alone, and the closest thing the film has to a moral is that the risk of connection is worth taking over the certainty of not being hurt by it. It's a modest, well-worn point for a film to make, and ONLY THE LONELY earns it anyway, mostly by refusing to let anyone get there easily.

There's a detail from the shoot itself worth sitting with rather than explaining. The train station scene, the one this review has already flagged as too brief, was filmed on location in Niles, Michigan, dressed with Christmas lights for the occasion. During that same stretch of location work, Candy was known to sit up in his hotel room unable to sleep alone, holding court in a bathrobe with an ice bucket of drinks, pulling people in to talk rather than let the room go quiet. None of that explains the performance he gives in that station. It doesn't need to — the two are simply true at the same time, in the same town.

Final Verdict: 86 out of 100

Sidenote: Jim Belushi isn't exactly being asked to stretch much here — sleazy cop is comfortably inside his wheelhouse — but I like him in the part. Sal shows up in short bursts, gets his laughs, and never hangs around long enough to wear out his welcome.

Ace in the Hole (Retro)

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951) Passed 111 Minutes Director: Billy Wilder Writers: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur CAST Kirk Douglas...Chuck Tatum Jan Sterling...Lorraine Minosa Robert Arthur...Herbie Cook Porter Hall...Jacob Q. Boot Richard Benedict...Leo Minosa Ray Teal...Sheriff Gus Kretzer Frank Cady...Al Federber John Berkes...Papa Minosa Frances Dominguez...Mama Minosa

The street is a sideshow from the peddler to the corner girl

— The Band, "Life Is a Carnival"

Most of what I know about journalism is from episodes of LOIS & CLARK. There's a lot of flirting between you and a co-reporter, you pretend to not be Superman, and you don't do much typing or journalism of any kind. But it's okay, this was the 90s, nothing real was going on. On a bad day, you may get some sort of Elvis anecdote from your boss. But there's more to journalism than perky tits, or nice dimples…so I've been told. You have backstabbing, career climbing, and inventing stories out of whole cloth. That's where Chuck Tatum comes in.

Tatum doesn't roll into Albuquerque looking for redemption. He arrives broke, on bad tires, fired from eleven papers with a combined circulation of seven million for reasons he'd rather not list. He talks his way into a sixty-dollar-a-week job at the Sun-Bulletin with a pitch that's half résumé and half threat, promising Jacob Q. Boot the best newspaperman he's ever had. He believes it, too, or at least believes he's wasted on a "sun-baked Siberia" with nothing to write about but soapbox derbies and a chicken thief named Schimmelmacher who briefly claimed to be Jesse James. A year into that sentence, bored enough to fantasize out loud about fifty rattlesnakes loose downtown, he gets handed a rattlesnake hunt instead, about as close as this town gets to news. He's not hoping to do good. He's hoping to get out, and that's the question the movie starts circling almost immediately: if somebody does good for bad reasons, what exactly are we supposed to make of the good?

Chuck and Herbie aren't even looking for a story when they find one. They're driving out to cover that rattlesnake hunt, stop for gas, and follow a hunch about an old cliff dwelling up the road, which turns out to have a man buried alive underneath it. The sheriff is tied up at the same rattlesnake hunt, and Tatum figures the doctor probably is too, which leaves nobody at Escudero with any real standing to run things. What's there instead is a deputy sheriff, stalling. "I'm thinking. Don't rush me," he says, to nobody's satisfaction, while Leo sits six hours into a cave-in, his wife running the trading post down the highway and his father answering for him, both stuck right along with him. Tatum takes the flashlight from the deputy's pocket, tells him he's the one going in, and climbs into the mountain himself. It works, immediately, on everyone watching. Papa Minosa starts treating Tatum's word as fact from almost that first afternoon, and he's still doing it later, telling a stranger who asks after Leo, without hesitation, "Not yet. Mr Tatum's down there now with the doctor." It's Tatum's first real demonstration of a pattern the whole movie keeps running: confidence reads as competence, and nobody at Escudero is in any position to ask whether the two have anything to do with each other. The man who steps into the power vacuum first isn't the most qualified person at the scene. He's the one least burdened by doubting himself, which turns out to be close enough.

Tatum makes the same kind of conversion the instant he hears the mountain's real name, and he doesn't even have to be standing there to do it. He's still in the car when he catches the tail end of an argument outside: Papa Minosa pleading for somebody, anybody, to go in after his son, the deputy suggesting the Native guide standing nearby, the guide refusing over what he calls bad spirits, and the deputy waving that off as a shakedown for cash — "What are you holding out for, a couple of bucks?" Then somebody explains what the guide meant: this is the mountain of the seven vultures, sacred ground to the people who buried their dead there four hundred years ago. "It's got a sound to it," Tatum says, and tells Herbie to get a few shots. Something that means grief and reverence to somebody else has, in the space of one overheard sentence, become a headline. Within days the mountain has a tent city growing at its base, license plates rolling in from four states, a family on their way to go fishing deciding this is worth a detour. Vendors sell hot dogs and souvenirs within sight of the drilling, on the same ground as a man who might be dying. Reporters pay a toll to get near him. Put headphones on for this stretch and the sound mix is making its own version of the same argument without a line of dialogue: concession-stand chatter and crowd noise sit right under scenes that are supposed to be about Leo, and his tragedy ends up audibly dissolving into commerce even when the camera isn't pointed at the vendors. THE SIMPSONS runs almost this exact plot as comedy in "Radio Bart": a boy stuck in a well becomes the center of a carnival and a celebrity charity single before the town discovers he's a hoax. ACE IN THE HOLE doesn't get the relief of a punchline, because Leo was never a hoax. Tatum didn't have to invent a trapped man. He only had to notice one.

Zoom back in from the crowd and all that appetite condenses into one man. Before he's ever heard of Leo Minosa, driving out to cover a rattlesnake hunt he resents being assigned to, Tatum spins an entire fantasy out loud: fifty rattlesnakes loose in Albuquerque, the last one caught and hidden in his own desk drawer so nobody else knows the story isn't over, released to the papers only "when I'm good and ready." He's narrating a story that doesn't exist yet, complete with a plan for pacing its release, purely for his own entertainment. Not long after, he's standing at a gas station outside a mountain with a real man buried inside it, and the instinct is already sitting there waiting to be used. Douglas plays the moment it clicks into place with something close to hunger: right before his first climb into the cave, he tells Herbie this is Floyd Collins all over again, the 1925 case where a young Louisville reporter crawled down to interview a trapped man and came out with a Pulitzer. That's the closest thing this film has to Al Pacino's John Milton in THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, minus the literal contract. Pacino gets to literally be the Devil; the film hands him the reveal and the résumé. Douglas has to generate the same charge out of a man who is, on paper, nothing supernatural: a broke newspaperman with bad tires and a list of firings he doesn't want you asking about. Chuck Tatum becomes appetite with a press card. Leo just happens to be the man waiting inside.

Kretzer doesn't need much convincing. He shows up late, pulled away from a campaign barbecue that had turned into a poker game, clearly annoyed about it, and Tatum's pitch is blunt: cooperate, and the coverage delivers reelection; don't, and Tatum ruins him instead. Kretzer barely blinks. Needled about the hand he walked away from, he waves it off: "This is better. Here we've got an ace in the hole." From there he's not just letting the story happen, he's actively protecting it, keeping every other reporter out of the cave while Tatum comes and goes as he pleases. Ray Teal plays him with exactly the kind of weathered, unhurried authority that reads as trustworthy on sight, which is the whole trick of the performance. Teal spent much of his career playing sheriffs, and he's best remembered as the fundamentally decent Roy Coffee on BONANZA. Kretzer is what that same face looks like when the badge is for sale. He even goes on local television to tell viewers, straight-faced, "I don't want what I'm doing here to influence your vote one little bit," insisting the whole time that he's only there doing his duty as sheriff. Tatum found the power vacuum and climbed into it. Kretzer is the reason it stayed open long enough to kill somebody.

Leave the crowd behind and go all the way back into the cave, and the performance changes register completely. Tatum tells Leo that once he's out, they'll go to New York together, that Leo can stay with him for as long as he wants, that they'll "live it up a little" — specific, generous, entirely unnecessary if the only goal were good copy. Leo asks, "Then I won't be seeing you any more?" — the kind of question a person only asks once they've started counting on an answer. Douglas doesn't play any of this like a con. He plays it like a man planning a real trip. Leo, for his part, has his own version of the same future already worked out: he wants to be free by Friday, their fifth anniversary, so he and Lorraine can start over and maybe even bring her along to New York. Tatum, astonishingly, tries to make part of that come true. Leo has already bought Lorraine a fur stole for their anniversary, and Tatum delivers it for him, then physically forces her to keep it on, staging the marriage Leo still believes he's going to get to save. None of this squares with a man who is, at the same moment, stalling the rescue for more coverage. That's the uncomfortable thing this stretch of the film insists on: lying to somebody and lying to yourself aren't opposites, they're the same skill pointed in two directions, and Tatum seems to want Leo out of that cave alive exactly as much as he wants the story that requires him to stay in it.

Pull back out of the cave and Lorraine is running the opposite calculation. She was trying to leave on the early bus the morning after Leo got trapped, eleven dollars in her pocket, the same plan she'd tried once before, only to have Leo catch up with her outside Dodge City. Tatum talks her out of leaving this time, not with an appeal to loyalty but with arithmetic: crowds mean customers, customers mean money, and walking away now means walking away from a payday. She does the math herself soon enough. Seventy dollars already, a hundred and fifty projected by nightfall, times seven days: more cash than she's ever had at once. When Tatum asks her to be photographed at church with a rosary for the sympathy angle, she refuses on exactly one ground: "Kneeling bags my nylons." It's one of the coldest lines in the film, aimed at her own husband while he's dying underground. Set that next to what Tatum gives Leo, a total stranger with no leverage over him at all: company, cigars, news from outside, and, on one of the worst nights, an old pop song. He gets Leo singing along with him, recalling an Army landing in Italy when one frightened soldier started singing and the rest eventually joined in. It works. Leo calms down enough to laugh. None of this makes Tatum better than Lorraine, exactly, and that isn't really the point. Her selfishness is colder to look at because it's pointed at somebody who's supposed to have her love. His is doing far more damage, and he's the one in the room being kind about it.

This is where the question the movie opened with stops being interesting to ask the old way. Once Smollett's crew assesses the cave-in, he lays out the numbers plainly: shore up the passage they've already got, and Leo could be out in twelve to sixteen hours. Tatum, who has never engineered anything in his life, proposes drilling straight down through solid rock instead. Smollett tells him flatly it isn't necessary. Six or seven days, Tatum is told, maybe more. Kretzer overrules his own contractor to make it happen anyway, reminding Smollett who decides whether he stays a contractor or goes back to driving a truck. There's no ambiguity left in this decision the way there was at the mountain, when Tatum could at least claim he was reacting to a name and an opportunity that were already there. This time the faster option is sitting on the table, explained by an expert, and Tatum argues it away because a twelve-hour rescue doesn't give him a six-day story. The bill for that choice comes due days later, once Leo's fever turns to pneumonia and Tatum finally wants to switch back to the original route. He's told it's gone: the drilling has run too long, the old passage walls are too unstable to shore now, and sending men in to try would bury them along with Leo. The delay didn't just cost time. It sealed off the only other way out. Once a consequence is foreseeable, spelled out by the man whose job it is to know, and chosen anyway, doing good for bad reasons stops covering what's happening. What's happening now is doing harm on purpose, on a schedule, for a byline.

Leo senses the end before anyone tells him. Struggling to breathe through an oxygen line late in the film, he asks for a priest, and Tatum tells him he doesn't need one while the doctor offers a softer version of the same reassurance, insisting he's still got plenty of time. Leo isn't convinced, and neither, privately, is the doctor: stepping outside, he tells Tatum pneumonia will kill Leo within about twelve hours unless he reaches a hospital by morning. Tatum carries that same number straight back into the cave and hands it to Leo as a rescue promise instead of a deadline: you'll be out in twelve hours, hang on. Leo believes him, because Leo has believed him about everything. He doesn't get his twelve hours. That same stretch of night, back at the trading post, is when Lorraine finally stops complying: Tatum forces the fur stole around her shoulders, starts choking her with it when she fights him, and she drives a pair of scissors into his side to make him stop. He doesn't call for help or sit down. He drives straight to the church, gets the priest, and brings Father Diego to Leo for what it was always going to be for: a confession, not a reassurance. Leo goes out still asking whether Lorraine liked her present. Tatum's reaction to the death itself isn't a scramble to protect the story. He walks out, orders the drilling stopped, and announces it to the whole crowd in person, already bleeding from a wound nobody watching him knows about yet, ending on a line that reads as an admission as much as an announcement: "The circus is over." Within minutes the same reporters he'd locked out all week are turning on him, and Nagel fires him outright once rival papers scoop the story he sat on. None of it seems to register the way it would have a week earlier. Stumbling back to his room, Tatum keeps working the phones, trying to sell his editor on the true version of the story he thinks might redeem him: the story behind the story, the reporter who kept a man buried for six days. Nagel assumes he's drunk or crazy and hangs up before Chuck can make him understand. By the time Tatum makes his way back to the Sun-Bulletin, he's walking around with a wound he never once paused for. It plays less like toughness than like a man who has already absorbed the worse injury and doesn't have much attention left over for the smaller one.

By the time Tatum makes it back to the Sun-Bulletin, he's back in the same office he first talked his way into, under the same embroidered sign he once complained "gets in my way" on his way out the door to go make real money with Nagel. It reads TELL THE TRUTH, and it's visible over his shoulder from the moment he stumbles in asking for the one man in this story who seemed to know exactly what he was from the beginning. He puts Herbie at a desk first and tells him to get to work, a small, oddly tender gesture from someone who spent the whole film treating the kid's ambitions as material. Then he finds Boot. What comes out isn't a pitch so much as a final settling of accounts: a thousand dollars a day, the exact rate Nagel was paying for exclusive rights to Leo Minosa, is the number Tatum now takes as proof of what he's worth, no longer a boast made to a skeptical small-town editor over a sixty-dollar-a-week job. And Boot can have all of it for nothing. Set against a whole film of constant sales pitches, this isn't Tatum losing his talent for negotiating. It's the one time he means the number and doesn't want anything back for it, which is either the closest this movie lets him get to redemption or the exact moment a man who spent the film selling himself finally runs out of anything left to sell. Wilder doesn't settle which one it is before Tatum hits the floor.

"Ace in the hole" is poker slang for a hidden advantage, the card nobody else knows you have until you're ready to use it, and Tatum says the phrase himself, describing his arrangement with Kretzer as exactly that kind of advantage. But the metaphor runs deeper than the one line where he says it out loud: Leo is the actual ace, the story nobody else has, rationed out over days instead of revealed all at once because it's worth more the longer Tatum can keep it face-down. The advantage only matters if you eventually cash it in, and by the time Tatum does, holding it too long has turned a story that could have made his career into one that ends it. He overplays his hand in the oldest sense of the phrase: the card that could have gotten him everything is exactly what the wanting cost him. Paramount later retitled and reissued the film as THE BIG CARNIVAL after it started losing money, hoping a friendlier name might turn things around. It didn't work, and there's something almost too perfect about a studio trying to repackage a story about repackaging tragedy into something more palatable, and having that fail for the same reason the story itself predicts. The original title came back eventually; so did the film's reputation, all the way to the National Film Registry in 2017. What hasn't come back is any sense that Tatum was an aberration. In 1951 he could still register as a specific kind of monster, a violation of what journalism was supposed to be. Recognizing his methods now takes less imagination than it used to, not because every reporter is Chuck Tatum, but because turning someone's worst day into everyone else's content, paced to how long the audience keeps watching, no longer needs a movie to invent it. The mountain of the seven vultures was never just a name Tatum found useful. It's what shows up whenever word gets out, and it hasn't needed an invitation in a long time.

Final Verdict: 90 out of 100

The Ox-Bow Incident (Retro)

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943) Passed 75 minutes Director: William A. Wellman Writer: Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes

CAST Henry Fonda...Gil Carter Dana Andrews...Donald Martin Mary Beth Hughes...Rose Mapen Anthony Quinn...Juan Martínez William Eythe...Gerald Tetley Harry Morgan...Art Croft Jane Darwell...Jenny "Ma" Grier Harry Davenport...Arthur Davies Frank Conroy...Major Tetley Marc Lawrence...Jeff Farnley Willard Robertson...Sheriff Risle

My dad once told me about a strange little incident from elementary school. Some field-trip money went missing, the teacher didn't know who had taken it (my bet is the teacher), and rather than wait for evidence, somehow the matter was put to a vote. Every kid in the class voted for my dad. He got in trouble. He was also completely innocent.

The consequences were considerably smaller than those in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, but the logic isn't all that different. A group of people can become remarkably certain of something simply because everyone around them seems certain too. Once suspicion becomes consensus, consensus has an uncomfortable habit of disguising itself as proof.

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT sounds like it could be a fifties sitcom, the kind where somebody's prize hog wanders into the wrong yard. The real subject is Bridger's Wells, Nevada, 1885, a town so short on things to do that its own bartender sums up the options as eating, sleeping, drinking, playing poker, or fighting. Gil Carter and Art Croft ride in off the winter range and get one of those five almost immediately: Gil ends up trading punches with a local rancher named Farnley, one of four men drinking at the bar, after someone suggests the two outsiders might have something to do with the cattle rustling. Then a rider comes pounding into town with word that Larry Kinkaid's been shot and his herd run off, and the fight stops mattering because everyone finally has somewhere better to put the energy. Arthur Davies, the storekeeper who spends the whole film trying to slow everyone down, tries to buy time with free drinks and an offer of beds for the night. It almost works — until Farnley, still on his horse and now furious over the supposed murder of his friend, announces he knows exactly who's going to handle this. Himself. The men who were thirty seconds from climbing down for a drink ride out after him instead.

Ox-Bow Valley turns up three men, and the screenplay gives each one a completely different reason to be doubted. Donald Martin has a paperwork problem: new to the territory, he bought fifty head from Kinkaid himself only days earlier and never got a bill of sale, which makes him either an unlucky rancher or a very convenient murderer depending on how generous you're feeling. Juan Martinez can't escape being treated as foreign: he's carrying Kinkaid's gun, he won't talk, and when he finally does, it turns out he's understood every word of English the whole time, which the mob reads as one more count against him instead of a man protecting himself from people who've already decided what he is. Alva Hardwicke's problem is his own head: an old man who won't talk, then talks too much, then starts inventing things, so that his unreliability becomes the last piece of evidence, doing double duty as confession and as an excuse to disregard anything he says in his own defense. None of these are the same accusation. A missing receipt, a stranger's gun, and a confused old man's contradictions have nothing to do with each other, and evidence against one man somehow becomes evidence against all three. The mob does the opposite math. Three different kinds of suspicion add up, in their heads, to one certainty, and nobody in the posse seems to notice they've convicted three men for three unrelated reasons and called it the same crime.

Sparks comes along as this posse's unofficial preacher, a role he's mocked into accepting — one that fits him better than the men mocking him intended. He's the one who says it outright: "It's man taking on himself the vengeance of the Lord." When someone in the crowd sneers back that the Lord probably isn't watching this stretch of Nevada, Sparks doesn't flinch. "He marks the sparrow's fall," he answers, meaning God notices even what nobody else bothers to. Then he goes further than argument. He tells Gil Carter he watched his own brother lynched when he was a boy, and that he still dreams about it. Early in PULP FICTION, Jules Winnfield will stand over men about to die and claim precisely the opposite: that a man can be the vengeance of the Lord, that killing someone can itself be the righteous act. OX-BOW doesn't let its own audience feel superior to any of this. The year the film came out, the Tuskegee Institute recorded three lynchings of Black Americans in the United States. Not zero.

Firing squads have traditionally sometimes loaded one rifle with a blank, so every man pulling a trigger can tell himself afterward that his shot might not have been the one that killed anyone. The fiction exists for a reason. The vote Major Tetley calls at Ox-Bow Valley offers no equivalent comfort: every man raising his hand knows exactly what he's voting for, and knows everyone else in the group saw him raise it. Seven don't raise theirs — Davies, Gil, Art, Sparks, Gerald Tetley, and two others — seven people choosing the exposed position over the easy one. It doesn't save the three men. Riding back to town, the posse runs into the sheriff, who tells them Kinkaid is alive, shot but not killed, and that the real thieves are already in custody. Asked how many were in on the hanging, the answer comes back flat: all but seven.

Then Gerald turns on his father. He tells him he saw "the face of a depraved, murderous beast," a man who knew the three men were innocent and forced his son to watch them die anyway. Voting no turns out to be one kind of courage. Picking up a gun and stopping it before it happened would have been another, and Gerald says, to his father's locked door, that he never had it. He calls himself a coward and demands to see his father's face. He doesn't get an answer.

OX-BOW was filmed in the summer of 1942, while Hollywood was working under a War Production Board limit of $5,000 per picture for new set-construction materials, and it shows: the interiors have a hollow, reverb-y quality, and Eastwood would later joke about the film's "plastic rocks." Discussing OX-BOW at an AFI tribute, he argued none of this hurt it, and he's not wrong. Cheap sets don't distance you from a story the way an obviously fake modern effect can; you adjust and keep watching. The fight choreography works on the same principle. Nothing in OX-BOW looks like a western brawl is supposed to look. Punches land as mob scrums, brief and ugly and over before you can admire the staging, which is closer to how an actual fight goes than anything with a stunt coordinator's fingerprints on it. Wellman saves his cleverest trick for the very end, when Gil reads Martin's letter aloud and Art Croft's hat brim blocks Gil's eyes through most of the reading — the only face doing visible work is Croft's, listening. It's characteristic of Wellman, and the effect is specific: a scene that could tip into pure sentimentality, delivered instead through the face of someone reacting to it rather than performing it, which is the harder, better choice.

At thirteen, Eastwood saw Fonda and Andrews in cowboy hats on the marquee and expected a shoot-'em-up. What he got, by his own account, was a downer that had somehow found room for racism, mob violence, and a father who breaks his own son, and it never left him. He wasn't alone in being unprepared for it. OX-BOW was a box-office disappointment on release, and Harry Morgan reportedly worried at the premiere that audiences hadn't enjoyed themselves; Orson Welles supposedly told him they didn't yet realize what they'd seen. In 1968, Eastwood's first Malpaso production took up a version of the question the film leaves open: what happens to the man on the other end of the rope if he survives? HANG 'EM HIGH gives its wrongly lynched hero a badge and sends him after the men who strung him up, on the condition that he bring them back alive, which is OX-BOW's whole argument turned into a job description. HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, which Eastwood directed himself in 1973, has no interest in that kind of restraint. Its town let its own marshal be whipped to death and did nothing, and the stranger who shows up to settle the account doesn't ask for seven honest men. He has the whole place painted red, renames it Hell, and leaves. OX-BOW leaves a town to reckon with what happens when almost nobody does the right thing. Eastwood's Western answers: fine, here's what it costs when nobody does.

My dad's class never had a rope. That's the whole difference, and it isn't a small one, but the machinery underneath is the same: a room decides it's already sure, and going along costs less than speaking up. OX-BOW won't give you the comfortable version of that story either, where somebody eventually says something and disaster gets averted in time. Seven people voted no. Three men died anyway. The film's harder argument is that dissent isn't enough on its own — the men who survive it don't get off clean either. Gerald doesn't get hanged. He gets a locked door and the knowledge of exactly how much he let happen. Bridger's Wells never changes its name to Hell. It doesn't have to.

Final Verdict: 85 out of 100