Seahawks 29, Patriots 13

A Super Bowl for connoisseurs of defensive football. I’m not one. I understand what’s happening when a DB breaks up a pass or a lineman beats his blocker and troubles the QB. But os and xs, zonal coverage, disguised coverage … I know these things exist, but I can’t perceive them – not in real time.

I like Kenneth Walker’s running. Dude calmly glides toward his blockers, awaits the defenders’ removal, scoots past them. Elegant. Not unlike slow-roll penalty taking (in soccer).

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My Facebook friends signal their politics by praising or condemning Bad Bunny’s halftime show. What a stupid time to be alive.

I’ve not previously listened to Bad Bunny.

The sugarcane is good décor. The dancing is efficiently uncouth.

So are the lyrics. I know them only by reading them online. (I can’t understand them sung; I have trouble with Puerto Rican Spanish.)

The apagón song stands out to me because I know what it’s like to endure frequent apagones (power outages). One extended passage in that song is reminiscent of, if not quite ideologically aligned with, The Vagina Monologues. Is it included in this Super Bowl performance? I’m not sure. I can’t make out enough words, and I’m distracted by utility-pole dancers.

Melania

The title of this post will have raised some eyebrows. Did he watch the documentary? Is he going to review it? And so I must immediately temper expectations. No, I didn’t watch it. Perhaps I shall, some day. I’m in no hurry.

I just want to note what strikes me as an extraordinary response by the public and the critics.

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Melania has an aggregate rating of 1.3 from 10 at the IMDb. Some 49 thousand votes have been submitted.

Surely it isn’t that bad? Even Caligula (1979) manages a rating of 5.3.

Ah, here we go. “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,” the website disclaims.

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“Trump Film is a Gilded Trash Remake of
The Zone of Interest”

… The Guardian opines. Quite a good dig, that.

(The Zone of Interest, if you didn’t know, depicts the opulence of an Auschwitz commandant’s household.)

Again, the vitriol is excessive. Or not? Time will tell.

No, it really is excessive, no matter how things turn out. Melania evidently is no Triumph of the Will. It doesn’t show a nation’s diabolic fervor. It’s just a vanity project. This sort of thing has been done before and will be done again. Sometimes, a despot commisions it (cf. Turkmenistan); sometimes, it’s just the excrescence of some rich dude, as when Charles Foster Kane pays for his wife to be an opera lead. I expect Melania is in between.

Here’s a more sympathetic Guardian review.

Timothy Dexter

Ecuador is mentioned in the first sentence of the main body of the Harper’s Weekly Review.

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The Facebook bots kindly shared a mini-bio, in Spanish, of Timothy Dexter (1747–1806), history’s hombre más suertudo (luckiest man). It was intriguing enough that I went on to read Dexter’s Wikipedia bio. Then I read that bio aloud to Karin.

Certain commonalities with our President suggested themselves. Dexter, however, made money instead of losing it. And he didn’t start out with money from his father; he extracted it from his rich wife, whom he abused.

In business, he seems to have been lucky and devilishly intuitive, e.g. he turned a profit literally “shipping coal to Newcastle” (the proverbial expression for exporting to a saturated market).

I don’t intend to read any full-length biographies of Timothy Dexter. But I went looking anyway. The major ones are from the 1800s. The last notable book, the most recent edition of which is 65 years old, is by John P. Marquand – like Dexter, of Newburyport, Mass. – the author of the “Mr. Moto” fictions and of the Pulitzer-winning, satirical Late George Apley. I wonder how serious his treatment of Dexter is.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 95: The ice storm

In A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese, a midlife-crisis sufferer, paces nervously in his underwear. He’s in a strange house, waiting for his lover. …

Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).

Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)

Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.

Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.

Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).

Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).

(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)

Mr. Hood’s affair is as stale as his marriage. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.

Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.

Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)

He blows up toys in the back yard.

Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.

Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.

He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.

The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.

The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!

(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)

One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.

One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.

Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.

The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.

I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.

The snub

So, Belichick, who won eight Super Bowls (six as a head coach) and got to three others, wasn’t voted into the Hall of Fame.

“What does a guy have to do?” he asked, reasonably.

Brady: “Welcome to the world of voting.”

Amen to that. I mean, if Belichick – as qualified a candidate as there is – can’t get elected by so-called experts, what chance does electoral democracy have?

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I finished Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the group. Taken page by page, it’s quite a good read. Taken all together, it has problems, not least that it’s a replotting and therefore a rebuke of the Cain and Abel story. My objection isn’t so much, How dare Steinbeck?; it’s that the Cain and Abel story really can’t be improved or even riffed on. Change it in any way, and its power is diminished.