Pacho vs. Piero

Happy birthday to Mary.

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Some old-ish news:

For the second straight year, an Ecuadorian will win the UEFA Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain (the holders) and Arsenal will contest the final. Willian Pacho plays for PSG, and Piero Hincapié plays for Arsenal.

Both play for the national team, and they used to be teammates at Independiente del Valle.

I don’t care which club wins the Champions League. Arsenal once were purists; now they’re pragmatists. PSG are delightful to watch, but one can muster only so much enthusiasm for a propaganda arm of the Qatari state.

What about the players? Should I cheer more for Pacho or for Piero? Pacho won last year, and Piero hasn’t won. (Advantage: Piero.) But Pacho is likelier to play more minutes. (Advantage: Pacho.)

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Recent news:

CR7’s club failed to clinch the Saudi league title because of this very late “own” goal:

Meritocracy isn’t a realistic aspiration

How are penalty takers selected? Conversion rate can’t be the whole story. Messi and Cristiano, who miss often enough, will always be their teams’ first-choice shooters.

We Ecuadorians are no wiser. We keep sending Enner to the spot. Sheer sentimentality, I suspect. It’s been years since he dispatched cleanly.

Mbappé and Salah missed penalty kicks this afternoon for Madrid and Liverpool. The commentators pretended to be surprised. Why? I’ve seen other horrendous misses by both players; everyone has.

Liverpool’s best taker by far, Mac Allister, was playing brilliantly and had already scored. He wasn’t considered for the penalty.

Salah is a good shooter, but Mac Allister is near-automatic.

I’d’ve assigned Madrid’s kick to Lucas Vázquez, another inspired player (he’d won the foul). He routinely delivers in the clutch. The weedy fellow has won five Champions Leagues, for goodness’s sake.

It’s his utter professionalism – in addition, perhaps, to his seniority and nationality – that earns Vázquez the captaincy when he comes off the bench. (Carvajal is injured.)

Anyway, I wouldn’t let Mbappé, that bundle of nerves, near the spot – not with the game on the line.

Ancelotti is no fool. His specialty is “team chemistry.” Stock me with talent, no matter how egotistical, he says, and I’ll combine the elements so they don’t clash. But his wizardry has limits. Madrid’s vaunted strikers can’t all function at once – not yet, anyway. Mbappé, the newcomer, is dead weight. His confidence has plummeted.

I believe that it was for this reason – or, perhaps, to prevent a tantrum or sulk – that Ancelotti allowed Mbappé to take the penalty. Not to maximize the likelihood of immediate success, but to promote the squad’s long-term success.

Even so, what I saw today, and have seen in many other games, shows that pro sport, so often celebrated for meritocratic purity, is in fact far from pure. If cutthroat Madrid and stats-savvy Liverpool defer to their Big Cheeses in big games, what are the prospects for meritocracy in a nation as a whole?

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 65: Mission: Impossible

Brian De Palma likes to begin with a “movie within a movie”; see, for example, Sisters, Blow Out, and Body Double. (Well, Sisters begins with a game show broadcast, but same diff.)

He’s signalling that the movie is going to be about other movies. Hitchcock movies, usually.

Indeed, this is how Mission: Impossible begins, with a spy watching other spies on a monitor as they perform a macabre deception upon another spy.

One of the performers is Emmanuelle Béart. She looks glamorously bloody and dead. Another is Tom Cruise, in a grotesque old-man disguise. If we didn’t already know this was a spy​/​gadget /​action flick, we’d think it was about vampires. Thematically, it is a vampire movie, kind of.

De Palma isn’t alluding so much to old Mission: Impossible TV episodes as to other De Palma, and, by extension, to classic cinema of the darkly comical, foreboding sort. That’s how you’re supposed to watch this.

There are six other Mission: Impossibles after this one. A seventh is forthcoming. All are Tom Cruise “vehicles.” De Palma’s, the series opener, is the oddball, the parody of the whole series. Talk about prescience.

I suppose, if you take the vampire suggestion seriously, you could interpret the whole series as a vampire story: Tom Cruise is a decent young guy who catches the vampire disease in the first movie and then must avoid transmitting it as he ages. But that’s hardly a necessary interpretation.

Most theatergoers probably went to see the helicopter in the Chunnel. That sort of thing is fine. It’s done better in the later Mission: Impossibles. I love it when Cruise climbs the Burj Khalifa in a sandstorm (movie no. 4) and when he skydives onto Paris in a lightning storm (movie no. 6). I have near-zero desire to see either of this summer’s dueling blockbusters, Oppenheimer and Barbie, but I’ll be sure not to miss Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

I have inordinate affection for Cruise. I expect him to’ve further perfected action-movie-elder-statesmanship, just as late-career Cristiano Ronaldo refined the tap-in goal.

That’s why it’s so funny to see Cruise in 1996 shuffling about in old man’s wrinkles and a prosthetic nose and mustache in the series’s first scene. People talk about Cruise’s self-mocking mask in Vanilla Sky, but Mission: Impossible did that gag first.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 5: Happy Gilmore

Let’s begin with Roger Ebert’s review (he graded the movie just 1.5 stars out of 4):

Happy Gilmore tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it’s about golf, that makes it a comedy. …

The Happy Gilmore character is strange. I guess we are supposed to like him. … Yet, as played by [Adam] Sandler, he doesn’t have a pleasing personality: He seems angry even when he’s not supposed to be, and his habit of pounding everyone he dislikes is tiring in a PG-13 movie.

All true. Even so, millions of viewers have found themselves rooting for Happy. They’ve enjoyed his profanity, his violence, his relentless petulance.

Why?

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It isn’t that Happy has a good excuse for his behavior. (The opening monolog, which informs us of a childhood tragedy, is too glib to make us sympathetic.)

Rather, it’s that in the dark recesses of our brains, many of us also feel like using swear words and breaking things. And hurting people: especially, authority figures and rich jerks who look down on everybody else.

Happy Gilmore is a fantasy about acting on these desires and getting away with it.

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In an early sequence, the coach of the local ice hockey team cuts Happy after a tryout.

“Gilmore … Gilmore … I called your number, didn’t I? … Well, better luck next year,” he jeers.

“That wasn’t very nice,” complains Happy, and he punches the coach in the stomach. Arguably, this is an even less nice thing to do, but it manages to be funny because of how Sandler delivers the line. Happy may be violent, but he’s also a whiner, a bit of an Eeyore. As many of us are.

Here’s a screenshot that shows Happy berating a golf ball because it won’t go into the hole.

This is absurd, of course.

So is Luis Suárez’s behavior on the soccer field when he bites rival players. (Suárez even looks a bit like Adam Sandler.)

And yet, at least for me, Suárez’s behavior isn’t so offputting. There’s something universal about his urge to bite people. What’s more, I’m not as put off by Suárez as I am by, e.g., Neymar or Cristiano Ronaldo. Suárez may be petulant, but he lacks the others’ sense of entitlement. This makes him more interesting than the typical spoilt brat.

The same is true of Happy Gilmore.

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Happy finds unlikely success – not in the uncouth world of hockey, but in the snooty one of golf. Alas, his abhorrent personality remains unchanged. He still wants to damage things. He still feels unduly sorry for himself.

His susceptibility to these temptations is aggravated because the culture of golfing is so hateful.

If anyone deserves to have his ass whupped, it’s Happy’s nemesis, Shooter McGavin, the leading golfer on the pro tour. Shooter is just as morally stunted as Happy is. Only, he considers himself entitled to his success, and so he’s more loathsome. Shooter is the Cristiano Ronaldo of the story.

One reason why we root for Happy is that we want him to defeat Shooter. But Shooter is just one antagonist; indeed, Happy has been laughed at his whole life.

The downtrodden – the “unwashed” – consider Happy to be one of their own. They begin to spectate his golfing events. The golfing authorities regard this as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they’re glad for the rise in TV ratings. On the other, they detest the new fan base. They fear that one day the “unwashed” will exert too much power over the sport.

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In 1996, it might have seemed to viewers that Tonya Harding, the figure skater, was the movie’s real-life inspiration. (Perhaps the movie nods to Harding when it stages the early part of Happy’s athletic career upon the ice.)

Like Happy, Harding came up from oblivion to excel in a snob sport, and she drew a cult following along with the contempt of the “establishment.” In her case, also, violence was at the center of her notoriety.

Nowadays, there’s another intriguing real-life parallel to Happy Gilmore: Donald Trump. Trump’s behavior, like Happy’s, is well beyond the pale. Trump also has ascended because of the media’s willingness to promote a spectacle, and his followers include many who despise the “established” classes (as well they might).

Now that Trump looms larger than anyone else in the country, Happy Gilmore seems prescient. This is an amazing development. I wonder what Ebert would have made of it.

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Recall the sequence that I linked to earlier, in which Happy pummels his hockey coach. After the tryout, Happy goes home and discovers his girlfriend walking out on him. He pleads with her, then insults her, then pleads with her, then insults her. She leaves. Later, Happy tells people that she’s been killed in an accident.

This suggests that Happy is worse than petulant. He’s downright chilling.

Again, I’m reminded of Trump: not because he’s wished a violent death upon an ex-partner (I have no reason to believe that he has) but because of the menace that underlies so many of his actions and words.

And yet Trump is so, so fascinating to watch; and the loathsome career politicians who despise him now must go along with him. I’ve enjoyed seeing them stew.

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In the end, I think Ebert is right: Happy isn’t very likable. And yet many of us root for him. This says something interesting about us, whether or not the movie intends it.

The game

One team came to play.

Liverpool “stormed” for about thirty minutes, stealing the ball, creating good scoring chances, looking much sharper than Real Madrid.

Madrid’s thuggish captain, Sergio Ramos, ended this by yanking Mohamed Salah to the ground by his arm and falling with full force upon him. He injured Salah’s shoulder. Thus, Liverpool’s best player was made to leave the game.

Liverpool unraveled after Ramos’s brutal act.

Shortly after halftime, Madrid scored a flukey goal. Loris Karius, Liverpool’s goalkeeper, threw the ball off the foot of Karim Benzema, and it rolled into the net.

Liverpool rallied well enough to tie the score after a few minutes.

But, characteristically, Madrid resolved the matter by calling upon a substitute from its well-funded bench. Isco, who’d been struggling, was brought off for Gareth Bale (once, the world’s highest-priced signing).

Bale, the super-sub, scored with a bicycle kick.

Then he scored with a shot that swerved off Karius’s palms. It was a bad night for Karius.

The final score, 3 to 1, was as I’d predicted.

It could have been 4 to 1, but Cristiano Ronaldo, who’d been tepid all night, had his last scoring chance derailed by a spectator who invaded the field. The referee ended the game a few seconds later.

None of Madrid’s goals involved much constructive effort. All depended on isolated moments of individual brilliance (or good fortune) …

… made possible by a prior act of deliberate, ruthless thuggery.

See, this is why neutral spectators such as I cheer against Real Madrid. Madrid has great players, yes. But these players cheat. They don’t win by playing constructively (even Luka Modrić, who gave one of the best performances, did nothing but defend).

What’s the point of having these stars, if this is how they win?

The point, their supporters will say, is simply to win.

Then let them have their victory. This was a game that would have made Franco proud.

Little Man Tate

Casemiro is the world’s MVP of soccer. Let me explain.

When I was in high school, our team gave out two awards: Best-All-Around Player and Most Valuable Player. Following that model, Lionel Messi is the world’s Best-All-Around Player. Casemiro, the workhorse midfielder at Real Madrid, is the world’s Most Valuable Player – the one who contributes the most to his teams’ successes. (Cristiano Ronaldo, who recently won UEFA’s Best Player in Europe award, is Real Madrid’s seventh-most valuable player, after Casemiro, Toni Kroos, Sergio Ramos, Luka Modric, Keylor Navas, and Marcelo.)

But back to Casemiro. On Thursday, along with arch-twerp Neymar, he’ll lead the already-qualified Brazilians against Ecuador. I expect the Ecuadorians to continue their sad tailspin. But I hope and pray for their resurgence.

This article details the Ecuador/Brazil rivalry.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch this game. Sheer dread.

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For the first time in well over a decade, I watched one of my favorite movies: Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate. I remembered every line. This time, I especially noticed its echoes of Woody Allen – its jazz soundtrack and its casting of Dianne Wiest.

Of course, the movie is winsome because of little Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). To win viewers over to his side, and to show his genius, the movie employs something like a reverse caricature. It allows Fred to speak with disarming naturalness. Usually, he speaks just one simple sentence at a time; and when he gives longer speeches, his sentences, to borrow a line from Malcolm Gladwell, “come marching out one after another, polished and crisp like soldiers on a parade ground.” Meanwhile, the movie has its other “geniuses” strain their language ever so slightly.

The result is that Fred, by comparison, seems utterly pure – Fred and his good mother, who also uses artless language.

Quarterfinals

In the quarterfinals of the Champions League, a rather poor FC Barcelona team was ousted by Juventus, and Cristiano Ronaldo scored two offside goals to nudge Real Madrid past Bayern Munich. Real’s patsy, Atlético, also made it through, defending fiercely against Leicester.

Of the victors, only the Monacans don’t seem stale. They’ve scored, what, three goals in each of their last four knockout games? (They dispatched Dortmund in their quarterfinal.) They played in the final as recently as 2004, but in 2011–2013 they languished in Ligue 2. An influx of Russian cash restored their loftier standing.

I didn’t watch any of these games.

The fall holidays

Three immanent fall breaks:

• the high school’s (Fri. of next week, and then Sat., Sun., and Mon.);
• IUSB’s (Mon. and Tues. of next week);
• Bethel’s (tomorrow).

Yesterday’s Spanish session wasn’t very well attended, and so it went much better than usual. It may’ve been the best session I ever taught. (Afterward, the student in front of whom I tore my pants stayed awhile to tell me that my lecture was crystal-clear. She’s a very kind, encouraging student.)

I began the session by showing soccer replays. “Look at how rapidly the ball travels in the high altitude,” I said. I taught about the elevation of La Paz. Then I showed photos of that city. The students gasped. Then I told them about El Alto, La Paz’s suburb, which is even higher and more populous.

I continued lecturing about the soccer replays. “Here is Ecuador’s first goal. See Antonio Valencia’s perfect first touch. The player who ends up scoring the goal is Énner Valencia, who almost got arrested during the previous game for not paying his child support.

“Here is our tying goal, scored, near the end of the game, by the same player.”

“One question,” interjected an athlete in the back row. “Ronaldo or Messi?”

“Messi plays better,” I replied (to his disgust).

“Can we watch replays of the Cubs?” asked a skinny young man in the back row.

“No.”

Then I taught about the impersonal se (as in: se habla español en Bolivia) and about the se which disavows responsibility (se me olvidó la tarea). This was the most crystal-clear part of the lecture. I was very pleased with how well I taught that day.

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The previous day, little Ziva’s uterus was removed. The surgery was completed by mid-afternoon, but Ziva was groggy all evening: her jumps were too low for their intended surfaces, and her head kept on bobbing sleepily.

Now her belly has a large, shaved patch where the surgery was performed.

Despite these ignominies, she recovers more of her strength every day.

Portugal … ?

Well, who’d’ve thought it? Portugal!

• A team that didn’t win so much as not lose.
• A team whose goalscoring hero wasn’t CR7, but an obscurer striker, Éder. (Not even the most distinguished Éder in the tourney. That striker was Éder the Brazilian; he dressed for Italy.)
• A team whose coach had been employed by Greece during the World Cup, and who brought over the grinding tactics of the Greek team. (Without him, the Greeks finished last in their Euro qualifying group, twice losing to the Faroe Islanders.)

I am glad for my cousins, Annie & Vickie, who grew up in Portugal and are loyal to CR7. After the final they walked around their housing co-op waving the Portuguese flag. I am not glad for CR7, who didn’t play especially well in these Euros; nor for Pepe, who did. I am glad that modest Éder got the winning goal. I am sorry for Moussa Sissoko, the Frenchman who played best against the Portuguese.

Casualties

Some footballing casualties:

Spain, KO’d by Italy;
Croatia, KO’d by tepid Portugal;
England, KO’d by Iceland (and by Brexit);
Ulster, KO’d vs. Wales by an own-goal;
Eire, KO’d by Antoine Griezmann.

Only the Welsh remain to carry the British torch. Due to their (rare) advancement, and to that of the Icelanders, there is a feeling of newness about this tourney.

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Not so with the Copa América. The final was a repetition of last year’s, nearly to a T.

In the first half, both sides defended hard, high up the field. The Argentinians were doing slightly better than the Chileans. Lionel Messi drew enough fouls to provoke the expulsion of Marcelo Díaz.

Then the referee decided to “even” things out, expelling the Argentinians’ left-back, Marcos Rojo, ruining the team’s shape and handing the advantage over to the Chileans.

The ninety minutes ended scoreless. Extra-time was scoreless.

In the shootout, Messi missed his penalty kick and was absolutely devastated. Afterward he announced his retirement from the national team. He and his country (and, let’s face it, the whole world) were the most grievous casualties of the last few days.

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Here is a good column by Jorge Barraza on “The Better and the Worse of the Copa.” My favorite paragraph:

THE SHAME. That this Copa, which in the end was very attractive, should not have been born to unite the Americas or to improve fútbol, but exclusively as a means of paying out bribes. Just as many governments perform yet another needless public work, robbing those who already are over-billed, here a tourney was conceived. The sole consolation is that now all who signed the contracts are in prison in their respective countries or in the United States, and their successors must proceed with care. …

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I wish to close by praising the Icelanders. Some games ago, Cristiano Ronaldo complained that their play was too defensive. But yesterday I saw ingenuity and nerve in how they brought the ball out after recovering it – passing it short, short, short, then long into just-opened spaces, creating more danger than the English did. In particular I was delighted by their fine No. 8, whom I may never see again after this tournament.