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

Coyote vs. Acme

COYOTE VS. ACME (2026) PG 101 Minutes Director: Dave Green Writer: Samy Burch Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor

CAST Will Forte...Kevin Avery John Cena...Buddy Crane Lana Condor...Paige Avery Tone Bell...Sal Maltese P. J. Byrne...Bill Pellicano Martha Kelly...Dottie Jones Luis Guzmán...Judge Eric Bauza...Bugs Bunny / Daffy Duck / Foghorn Leghorn / Porky Pig / Elmer Fudd / Tweety / Road Runner

It's spring of 1998, and I'm on a band field trip to the Bugs Bunny Film Festival at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle. This wasn't a normal field trip. We left school early in a convoy of parents' minivans and didn't get back until well after the final bell. How much of a Looney Tunes geek do you have to be to organize something like that? The answer, apparently, is Mr. Luthans, the band teacher at Gateway Middle School.

At lunch we stop at the Wallingford Dick's Drive-In, where I decide it's an opportune time for a prank. When nobody is paying attention, I walk over to a pay phone, dial 911, and say something ridiculous along the lines of, "Help, there are a hundred fires on 43rd Street." Then I hang up and don't think much of it.

Until a fire truck and several police cars arrive.

I was right about one thing: nobody had seen me make the call. But while the police are investigating, I make the considerably less intelligent decision to tell a couple of friends what I'd done. One says, "That sounds pretty serious." The other says, "I don't know. I think we should say something."

They're messing with me, but I don't know that. "C'mon, guys. You can't say anything."

They don't. So I get away with a crime, climb back into a minivan, and head off to watch Looney Tunes.

At thirteen, I wasn't particularly grateful. I liked Looney Tunes, but sitting through hours of cartoons I'd already seen didn't exactly feel like the opportunity of a lifetime. I was much more interested in getting out of school, hanging around with my friends, and discovering how many times the theater would refill a large popcorn and soda. Nearly thirty years later, I have a little more appreciation for the fact that Mr. Luthans somehow convinced everyone involved that taking the Gateway Middle School band to Seattle to watch Bugs Bunny constituted a field trip.

Walking into COYOTE VS. ACME, I couldn't tell whether I was getting consequence-free slapstick or a movie using Acme as a stand-in for every defense contractor and pharma giant currently in the news. What showed up instead split the difference in a way I didn't expect: charming more than hilarious, and considerably more philosophically load-bearing than a movie built around exploding rocket skates has any obligation to be.

Acme's hidden initiative is called Project Sisyphus. So, in its own way, is Wile E.'s pursuit of the Road Runner — and the film treats the two as opposites rather than synonyms. For Acme, endless suffering is something to exploit: cartoon characters can survive punishment that would kill a human, so their misery becomes another stage of product development. For Wile E., the same endless striving is identity — failure doesn't drain the chase of meaning, because the chase is the only thing he does. He's also the one with the better claim on the myth. Sisyphus got eternity as a punishment; Wile E., a cartoon who's been falling off the same mesa since 1949 and always turns up for the next one, was most of the way there already.

The film seems to know exactly what it's protecting. Jeremy Slater has said that he and James Gunn deliberately kept the character silent and off the fourth wall, wanting the audience to feel him the way you feel a dog rather than laugh at him as a gag machine. A Wile E. who's in on the joke collapses into Bugs Bunny with worse aim. A Wile E. who isn't gets to be Sisyphus.

Kevin's version of the same loop has no myth attached to it, only a business model. Avery, Jones & Maltese doesn't try cases, it settles them — fast, for whatever keeps the lights on — and Kevin has built an entire professional identity around never finding out what happens if he pushes. He admits as much to Wile E. directly, in one of the film's few scenes where the joke stops: he used to have a clear goal too. He used to chase something, until he got burnt out on trying.

Wile E. never has to make that confession. He doesn't carry the memory of having once been a hungrier version of himself. Kevin does, which is worse. Harvard Law put him in the same room as Buddy Crane once; only one of them kept climbing. By the time Kevin is standing in front of Congress explaining why Wile E. deserves anyone's attention, he's really describing the man he stopped being: someone who picks himself back up no matter what happens, unafraid of the very failure Kevin, by his own account, got too scared to risk.

Wile E. pushes the rock without knowing there's a myth attached to it. Kevin has to notice the rock he put down years ago and decide to pick it back up. Both of them end up Sisyphus. Only one of them had to choose it again.

Pull back far enough, and the whole movie is already sitting inside Frazier's original piece, waiting to be inflated. His 1990 New Yorker column is an invented legal filing from an attorney named Harold Schoff in a Tempe, Arizona courtroom, cataloging eighty-five separate Acme purchases gone wrong in legal diction that never winks at how silly its contents are. There's no trial, no firm, no rival lawyer, no Congress, and no Project Sisyphus. But there is this: Schoff argues that Acme holds "a virtual monopoly" over the goods Coyote's work requires, and wonders how a company gets away with victimizing a captive consumer this badly, over and over, with no alternative supplier in sight.

The movie gives Kevin nearly the same argument in front of Congress: Acme has a monopoly over every tool Wile E.'s work requires. So even in Frazier's original joke, this isn't merely a story about a hapless predator buying bad gadgets. It's a story about a captive customer. The movie didn't have to invent that idea. It only had to build a plot large enough to hold it.

None of this works without a cast willing to play it straight. Forte's Kevin runs on a kind of practiced defeat that keeps edging toward Droopy Dog — fitting, since Droopy is also a Tex Avery character, and Forte's flattest line readings land closest to the film's biggest laughs. Cena, playing against his own body for once, turns Buddy Crane's charm into something closer to a weapon: every reassurance he offers sounds like a threat wearing a good suit. Condor's Paige has the most old-fashioned job in the movie, playing the one person onscreen who hasn't given up on any of this yet, and the film needs her to sell that earnestness or the third act collapses. Eric Bauza voices nearly everyone else — Bugs, Daffy, Foghorn, Porky, Elmer, Tweety, the Road Runner — which makes Wile E. the one character even his own voice actor isn't allowed to touch. The silence holds all the way into the sound booth. The one performance that doesn't fully land is Foghorn himself: Bauza gets the cadence, not the burr, and it's specific enough to be worth naming. Foghorn was built off Senator Claghorn, a blowhard radio-politician caricature from the 1940s, which makes it almost too neat that this Foghorn ends up in front of Congress running the exact playbook Claghorn was invented to mock — nothing illegal happened, progress requires sacrifice. Nobody had to invent that irony. Senator Claghorn wrote it eighty years early.

The performances aren't even the deepest cut. The law firm itself, Avery, Jones & Maltese, is a tribute built into the plot rather than dropped in the background: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese, three foundational figures in the Warner cartoon tradition — Jones and Maltese being the pair who created Wile E. and the Road Runner — now running Wile E.'s law firm decades later. Dr. Lorre is a caricature of Peter Lorre, a favorite target of the original shorts' sense of humor. And Wile E.'s business card, Have Brain, Will Travel, is running the same joke Paladin's did on Have Gun – Will Travel, with the weapon swapped for the thing the character was supposed to have all along. A cheaper version of this movie skips all three. This one built its own law firm out of trivia and dared you to notice.

None of this needed a metaphor. In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved a finished film that had tested well, the product of years of work from hundreds of people, preferring a roughly $30 million tax write-off to releasing it. It was the third nearly or fully completed movie the studio had killed this way — and this one was already finished when the decision came down. The calculation was never that the film wasn't good. The calculation was that it could be worth more on a different ledger if nobody saw it. That's Project Sisyphus's whole philosophy with the serial numbers filed off: something with real, felt value gets converted into a line on a different kind of ledger, and the conversion is completely legal. Foghorn's own defense to Congress — "nothing we've done today or any other day is illegal" — is available to Warner Bros. Discovery too, word for word.

So which is it, cathartic or subversive? The shelving saga argues both sides at once. It's subversive because the joke was already sitting in the finished film when the studio that financed it went and became the joke's real-world punchline. Project Sisyphus stopped being a premise and started looking like corporate procedure. It's cathartic, though, in a way that should make you a little uneasy. Warner eventually sold the worldwide rights to Ketchup Entertainment for a reported $50 million, and Ketchup turned the whole ugly history into part of the pitch: "The Movie Acme Doesn't Want You to See." The system even found a way to sell us the story of beating the system.

Even the plot won't pick a side. Congress declines to pursue federal charges, an institutional shrug that rhymes uncomfortably with the real studio's calculation, and the movie only gets its ending because someone leaks the evidence and forces a correction nobody official was going to volunteer. Off-screen, the film survived only after public outrage and somebody else finally decided it was worth buying. That's not exactly a hopeful ending. It's a description of how much it can cost to make one of these stories turn out right, on-screen and off.

Nothing about the way the movie looks is chasing this particular year. The desert is the same mesa-and-butte Southwest Chuck Jones was drawing in 1949, unchanged because it never needed updating in the first place. Paige mentions, almost as an aside, that Acme makes her phone too, but the film doesn't linger on a screen long enough to date itself the way most contemporary comedies manage within a year of release. Even the animation was built the old way first: poses sketched by hand before anything got rendered, the CG following the drawing rather than replacing it. None of that guarantees the movie holds up twenty years from now. But it's the kind of choice that ages on its own terms instead of the calendar's, and that's the real difference between a movie that looks dated and one that only looks like it was made a while ago.

The jokes are the one place the movie's ambition doesn't fully follow through. Kevin telling a court stenographer "please don't write that down," three times in a row until the joke is the repetition itself — that's a bit legal comedies have been running since long before this one. So is the ironic flash-cut: someone asks whether Kevin's really taking on the biggest corporation in the world, cut to Kevin, on the news, having done exactly that. These aren't bad jokes. They're jokes any workplace comedy already owns, dropped into a movie that also came up with Project Sisyphus and leaves enough room for a fairly surprising reading of Camus.

The film's thematic imagination and its comedic imagination are operating at two different registers, and only one of them is bespoke. I laughed, reliably, about once every ten minutes — enough that the movie never feels humorless, but not nearly what I expected from Looney Tunes. What you get instead is a movie that thinks harder than it makes you laugh, and that's a real trade, not a wash.

I went into COYOTE VS. ACME the same way I went into that Neptune Theatre field trip at thirteen: mildly obligated, expecting the cartoons I already knew, not much more. What I got instead was a movie that kept turning out to be about the thing right in front of it and something else underneath: a $300 rocket-skate case and a monopoly complaint, a product line and a research program, a cartoon's oldest joke and a myth he'd already been living inside the whole time. None of that stopped it from being a Looney Tunes movie as well, competently silly in exactly the ways the marketing promised, with a Road Runner who still says nothing but beep and still wins every time. It doesn't need the Sisyphus reading to work as a movie. It works better with it, which isn't the same thing as needing it, and that difference is the whole trick.

Somewhere around the fifth rocket sled, I thought about a thirteen-year-old who couldn't have cared less whether Wile E. Coyote ever caught anything, and who definitely wasn't thinking about Camus. I'm not sure he would now, either. But he'd have recognized this ending anyway: the guy who keeps getting back up, for no reason anybody in the audience needs explained to them, because that's the only version of the character anyone would recognize. Warner Bros. tried to bury this movie and failed. Acme keeps selling Wile E. products that fail and keeps getting away with it. He keeps buying them anyway. The people worth rooting for keep losing on schedule and showing up again the next morning. I don't know what that says about the people who keep showing up to watch them. I know I did.

Final Verdict: 89 out of 100

A Simple Plan (Retro)

A SIMPLE PLAN (1998) R 121 Minutes Director: Sam Raimi Writer: Scott B. Smith, based on his novel Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda, Billy Bob Thornton

CAST Bill Paxton...Hank Mitchell Bridget Fonda...Sarah Mitchell Billy Bob Thornton...Jacob Mitchell Brent Briscoe...Lou Chambers Chelcie Ross...Sheriff Carl Jenkins Becky Ann Baker...Nancy Chambers Gary Cole...Neil Baxter / Vernon Bokovsky

Well, talk about false advertising. I thought this was going to be a movie about my favorite band, SIMPLE PLAN. Sure, the band didn't technically form until after the movie was released, but I figured we'd at least get the early years, when they were still going by Reset. Nope. A SIMPLE PLAN is about two brothers and a guy named Lou who find several million dollars in the woods and proceed to make increasingly terrible decisions about it. Before long, they're on the edge of breaking down, and no one's there to save them.

Three people can't keep a secret — one of the oldest rules in crime fiction — and A SIMPLE PLAN spends its opening minutes establishing that these three were particularly ill-equipped to share one. The film opens on the Mitchell brothers' annual New Year's Eve visit to their parents' grave, and even that ritual isn't as settled as Hank assumes. He finds a flower already planted in the snow and has no idea who left it. Jacob did, on a visit of his own that Hank never knew about, and when Hank asks when he came, Jacob turns defensive fast: "This is the only day we can come here? What the hell's wrong with you?" Lou wasn't even invited to any of this — Jacob only picked him up because he needed a ride home — and the film introduces him mid-urination a few yards from the headstones: "Hey, Jacob! Look! I'm writing my name!" Jacob joins him a moment later. Hank's patience with both of them is visibly running out before they've even left the cemetery. Nobody has found the plane yet. Hank already knows less about his brother than he assumes. The money doesn't put those cracks there. It only finds them.

The debate over what to do with the money doesn't last long. Hank's first instinct is procedural — "Whatever it is, it's a police matter now" — and it survives almost no time against Lou's argument that the dead man in the plane won't mind being robbed and nobody but the three of them will ever know: "Nobody knows about this... but us." It's the exact premise the cemetery scene already spent disproving, and the film knows it even if nobody in the truck does yet. What tips Hank has less to do with greed than the deal he negotiates around it. He'll hold the money through the winter; if the plane turns up in spring with no mention of missing cash, they split it three ways and leave town; if anyone comes looking before then, he burns it. It's a plan built entirely around a hypothetical they've all already decided won't happen. Then they count it. $4,400,000, called out in stacks of ten thousand while Lou pictures a Trans Am and Jacob's ambitions stop at a truck, and by the last stack the money has stopped being a moral problem and started being a number they can each divide by three. They haven't spent a dollar yet, but they've already begun spending it in their heads. Giving the money back was never going to be as hard as giving up what they've already decided it's for.

Sarah's first answer, when Hank poses it as a hypothetical over dinner, is immediate and principled: "Of course not... I wouldn't take it. That's just me." Then he tells her it's real, and principle has to compete with $4.4 million sitting within reach. By the next scene she's already directing what gets returned, what gets hidden, and what Jacob doesn't get to know. The clearest measure of how completely this becomes her default mode comes weeks later, in the hospital, holding their newborn. Handed the baby and told "she's hungry," Sarah starts nursing and, in the same breath, lays out a plan to get Lou drunk enough to talk about Stephanson's death on tape, dressed up as a game — Hank and Jacob taking turns joking about how they'd have done it, Lou going last, the recorder running the whole time. It's the coldest scene in the movie, and it's staged as an act of maternal tenderness. But it's worth granting her something before writing this off as pure calculation: when Hank later threatens to give the money back, her answer is a full accounting of what "normal" would cost them — his dead-end job at the feed mill, her own at the library, Amanda in hand-me-down clothes and someone else's old toys, Jacob alone with his dog in a filthy apartment: "How long do you give him, Hank?" She isn't wrong about any of it. She's only the one willing to turn the arithmetic into a plan instead of a complaint.

Jacob's dog, Mary Beth, is some kind of shepherd mix, scruffy and unglamorous — which suits Jacob fine. For all the ways Hank treats him as someone who needs looking after, Jacob keeps being the one who looks after Hank when it matters. At Lou's house, when Sarah's tape-recording scheme collapses and Lou pulls a gun, Jacob retrieves his rifle from the truck and shoots him before he can kill Hank. It's a terrible act, but the impulse behind it isn't hard to read. It matters more once you know what Jacob wants out of life. Earlier, drunk and happy for one of the only stretches in the whole movie, he lays it out unprompted: buy back the family farm, meet a nice woman, have kids, Sunday dinners with Hank and Sarah and Amanda, drinking on the porch the way their dad used to. It's a plain, specific, entirely reachable version of contentment, and Jacob is the only one of the three men who says out loud that he wants it. By the end, he's also the one who understands that they've made that future impossible. He talks Hank into killing him: "If you love me, Hank, you'll do it." The last thing on his mind isn't the money or the murders. It's making sure Amanda gets the stuffed bear he gave her, the one that used to be his: "You just tell the little girl that... that bear is from me." And he explicitly gives up the whole future he described earlier — "I don't wanna sit around the rest of my life thinking about this shit. I can't do it... Sit on the porch and drink. I can't do it." It's Steinbeck's Lennie and George, except Lennie never got to choose and never understood what was coming. Jacob understands completely and chooses it himself. Hank never even has to ask.

Sarah works out from the bill denominations that this was never an armored-car robbery before Hank does, then connects the ransom story to "Baxter" and places him as Vernon Bokovsky, brother of the man they found in the plane. She calls the sheriff's office to pull Hank out before he ever reaches the woods. Hank doesn't doubt her. He's already weighing different numbers: Jacob's excused with a fake hangover, he's standing next to Carl when the call comes in, and backing out now, as he'd argued to Sarah the night before, would "look suspicious as hell." Even after she tells him flatly that Baxter is going to shoot him, Hank goes anyway — "they're waiting for me, baby, I gotta go" — because leaving looks worse to him than the real risk of staying. It's the same instinct that's driven every decision since the plane: assess whatever's directly in front of him, solve that one problem, and let the next crisis be a future problem. In the woods, Baxter shoots Carl, and it's Hank himself, not Jacob, who ends up killing Baxter. He walks in trying to solve a suspicion problem and walks out with two more bodies to explain — proof that his read on danger was never the issue. He can see a threat coming from a mile off. He's never once been able to see past it to what handling it will cost.

The recorded bill numbers are what finally get the money burned, and it's worth noticing what a relief that must be. An FBI agent lays it out for Hank: they never risked marking the ransom cash outright, not with a kidnapped girl still in play, but a task force recorded roughly one bill in ten before the drop. Spend enough of those hundreds for long enough and eventually one gets noticed. The reasoning is practical, not moral. It's the first practical argument Hank's had in months for doing the thing he probably already needs to do. Sarah begs him not to — they could run, leave the country, go anywhere — and he burns it anyway. By then the sunk cost was never really about the money. What he'd spent to keep it was Jacob, killed by Hank's own hand; Carl, shot by Baxter in the woods Hank walked into against his wife's warning; Lou, shot by Jacob at his own house; and whatever version of the three of them might have existed if Hank had done what he wanted to do at the start and called it in. Burning $4.4 million doesn't buy any of that back. It only proves he can still keep the one promise he made at the start: "If somebody comes searching for the money, I'll burn it." What's left afterward isn't relief. Hank opens the film telling us he was a happy man: a wife, a decent job, neighbors who liked and respected him. He closes it admitting he can go a few days at a time without thinking about the money, the murders, or Jacob — pretending, as he puts it, that "we're just like everyone else." A few days is the best he gets. How could this happen to him?

Final Verdict: 91 out of 100

The Witches (Retro)

THE WITCHES (1990) PG 91 Minutes Director: Nicolas Roeg Writer: Allan Scott Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher

CAST Anjelica Huston...Miss Ernst / Grand High Witch Mai Zetterling...Helga Jasen Fisher...Luke Rowan Atkinson...Mr. Stringer Bill Paterson...Mr. Jenkins Brenda Blethyn...Mrs. Jenkins Charlie Potter...Bruno Jenkins Jane Horrocks...Miss Irvine Jim Carter...Head Chef

I'm not a big fan of witches unless they help the Mariners win baseball games, or there's a talking cat hell-bent on world domination. But the spooky witches, the ones who kidnap children and make them disappear? As far as I'm concerned, they can stay in SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK.

I was six years old when THE WITCHES came out, and at that age, what I saw in a theater was entirely up to my parents. With three siblings in the mix, we were lucky to make two trips to the movies a year, and 1990 had already spent one on NINJA TURTLES at the now-defunct Snohomish theater — how a place with wooden seats that comfortable went out of business, I still don't understand — and was saving the other for HOME ALONE. THE WITCHES never had a shot. Which was probably for the best, since the imagery would've frightened me. My little sister, I mean.

Luke doesn't get an inciting incident so much as an inciting absence. His parents' deaths are handled almost entirely offhand — dialogue calls it only "an accident," full stop, and the movie moves on. It's restraint you don't expect from a film this eager to show you a woman's face peeling off later, and it works because grief isn't really the scene's subject. The subject is Helga, who becomes parent and mentor in the same motion, arming her newly orphaned grandson with the specialized knowledge he's going to need. There's a Grand High Witch ruling over all the world's witches, and nobody has ever actually seen her. Witches give themselves away through smell, not appearance: clean children smell to a witch like fresh dog's droppings, Helga explains, so the dirtier you are, the safer you are. There's no cauldron anywhere in this mythology, Dahl's or the movie's. Luke's hero training amounts to learning that personal hygiene may get him killed.

By the time Luke and Helga check into the hotel, Rowan Atkinson has already shown up as Mr. Stringer, the manager, and even the witches find him insufferable — one calls him "that ridiculous manager" on her way to drinks. Atkinson plays him exactly the way you'd expect from the guy who'd spend the mid-90s as an easily-flustered police inspector on THE THIN BLUE LINE, years before that show existed to compare him to: pompous, procedural, no match for a grandmother willing to invent a health code violation on the spot. It's a smaller, stiffer performance than Mr. Bean, and that's the point — Stringer's comedy comes from thinking he's in charge of something. Jim Carter runs the kitchen as the Head Chef, two decades before he'd spend six seasons keeping Downton Abbey's below-stairs staff in line as Mr. Carson, and it's funny watching him lose his composure over a mouse in his trousers with the same fussy dignity he'd later bring to Downton's table settings. The animatronic mice came from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the same workshop that would also give 1990 moviegoers Splinter in NINJA TURTLES. Henson died that May, with THE WITCHES opening in the UK nine days later. Both rodents emerged from the same workshop in the same brief, strange stretch of time — one of them in the movie my family actually went to see.

Nobody at the hotel blinks at the RSPCC either. Mr. Jenkins, working the room, brings up "this RSPCC," only for Miss Ernst herself to start asking what the letters stand for before Miss Irvine quietly feeds her the answer: "Cruelty to Children." Miss Ernst recovers with an "Oh, of course," and everybody goes straight back to networking. Dahl invented the RSPCC himself, incidentally — it's on the door in the book too, not something the movie added — and there's something wonderfully brazen about a society devoted to cruelty to children hiding behind the Royal Society for the Prevention of it. Nobody needs decades of institutional distrust to be suspicious of an organization whose name is that perfectly respectable. It has the same overcompensating quality as Fat Tony's Legitimate Businessman's Social Club: the harder the name insists there's nothing to worry about, the more I start wondering what's happening behind the door. SOUTH PARK pushes the banquet-room version even further: in "Ginger Kids," Cartman's cult books the Sunset Room at the Airport Hilton for sacrifice cages, a lava pit, and a full refreshment buffet, and nobody at the hotel seems particularly interested in the agenda.

By the time Luke gets his shot at the soup, the witches have already told him exactly what they think should happen to him. When they smell him out earlier, the order comes fast: "Search out this small lump of dung! Find it! It must be exterminated immediately!" This isn't a one-scene flourish, either — the Grand High Witch's actual policy for England's children is that they "shall be rubbed out. Destroyed." Regardless of how much Dahl means this as fairy-tale wickedness, "exterminated" is a loaded word to put in your antagonists' mouths for a plan to eliminate every child in a country, and the rhetoric of eradication doesn't stop there. Luke's answer is to turn their own weapon back on them. He empties the stolen bottle of Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker into the witches' own soup, and the Grand High Witch spends her last scene as a person becoming exactly what she planned for every child in England.

Dahl hated where the movie ends up, and it's not hard to see why. His own ending doesn't have anyone turning back into a boy. Luke asks Grandmamma how long a mouse-person lives, and she lands on nine years — three times an ordinary mouse's span. That's close enough to what she might have left at eighty-six that Luke realizes they'll grow old together and, not long afterward, die together. "That would be perfect," Grandmamma says, and the book means it as peace, not tragedy. The actual ending isn't the soup or the transformation at all. It's the two of them plotting to raid the Grand High Witch's castle — Formula 86 for her successor and assistants, cats to finish the job — before taking her money-making machine and worldwide records and spending whatever years they have left wiping out witches everywhere. That's the same shared mortality that makes their conversation land so hard, turned into a life's mission. Dahl gives Luke and his grandmother a shared deadline and calls it a happy ending.

The movie can't quite let go of that ending either, even as it works to get away from it. Luke gets almost the same bedside scene: "How long do mice live, grandma?" ... "I really am happy to be a mouse, you know." "I know, my darling." Helga even wonders aloud whether some good witch might change him back, the way Dahl's grandmother never does. Then, inside about two minutes of screen time, one does — off-handedly, with barely a line of dialogue to explain it, cutting straight to a chaotic transformation scene that plays more like a fire alarm than a miracle. Bruno never gets his own version of the scene at all; the last line of dialogue before the credits is Luke calling after Miss Irvine, "Don't forget Bruno!" The address book survives the rewrite too, scaled down to fit the new ending — Dahl's worldwide records become "the name and address of every witch in America," and Luke and Helga are already talking about taking the campaign to New York. It's the same device doing the opposite job in each version: in the book, the list gives two people with limited time left a life's work. In the movie, it feels more like a sequel pitch left over from an ending the film has otherwise decided it doesn't want.

THE WITCHES is an efficient adaptation. Ninety-one minutes covers Helga's backstory, the full hotel plot, two transformations, and a climax without ever feeling like a book being sprinted through — right up until that last stretch, where it suddenly has to solve a problem Dahl never considered a problem in the first place. The camera has its own version of that same overreach. Roeg spent the seventies making DON'T LOOK NOW and THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, movies where making you visually uncomfortable was part of the point, and he can't fully set that instinct aside here. Half the time it works — a low angle on the Grand High Witch turns an ordinary hallway into something worth flinching from. The other half, the same instinct gets pointed at a kid opening a hotel room door, and the effect is less unsettling than exhausting: style reaching for a reaction the scene hasn't earned. Still, that's a smaller miscalculation than the one the movie saves for its ending. It's a film confident enough to trust Dahl with a woman's face peeling off, and not confident enough to trust him with a boy who stays a mouse.

Final Verdict: 74 out of 100

Sidenote: Yes, I know — the talking cat I was referring to, Salem Saberhagen, is technically a warlock, not a witch. But he was sentenced by the Witches' Council, so I'm counting it.