scott

Much has been said and written about our diminishing collective attention span. From what I hear, no one under 40 can be expected to follow a train of thought for longer than a 24 minute episode of television, and any movie that goes over two hours draws dire predictions – from studio-heads and film writers – of impending apathy from the general public.

Now, I want to be sure to stress that this idea is categorically untrue. Most of us are in the habit of bingeing more than 10, or even 20 hours of a show in a single weekend [for instance: the 360,000 households who watched all 9 episodes of Stranger Things 2 the day it was released]. And some of the best loved and most successful films of the last 20 years haven’t suffered from longer run times. I’m not talking about so-called high culture films like Scorsese’s The Irishman, the length of which was remarked on often. I’m talking about the fun films everyone went to see: The Dark Knight, Avatar, and Avengers: Infinity War all clocked in at 2.5 hours or longer. That’s also true of four of the Harry Potter films, with two more just missing that mark by less than ten minutes. All three Lord of the Rings movies were three hours long, the final installment hitting the 3:21 mark. Avengers: Endgame was three hours long, and loads of people went to see it multiple times! In other words, reports of the death of the American attention span are greatly exaggerated.

Still, true or not, the powers that be believe it to be so. So why haven’t book publishers worked harder to get people interested in short stories? The medium seems tailor-made for such a world as they believe to inhabit. I guess I’ll just need to make the attempt on their behalf.

Consider this my public service announcement: The short story is an amazing medium, and you should be reading more of them. Here are a few recommendations to get you started.

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The science fiction pick – Exhalation by Ted Chiang

“Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”

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If you’ve got any love for speculative fiction, you need to read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. Each of Chiang’s stories is built on the foundation of a great sci-fi question or idea. The curiosity at the core of his work leads to poignant moments of beauty, horror, wonder, warning, and possibility. Many sci-fi writers with the same M.O. are knocked for weak characters and plot, but Chiang’s exploration of interesting science fiction ideas is overflowing with empathy. There’s always a human heart beating at the center of his stories.

Also: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury,

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The fantasy pick – The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo

“Love speaks in flowers. Truth requires thorns.”

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The Language of Thorns is a book of fairy tales told within Bardugo’s Grishaverse, a fantasy world she has built and fleshed out to great effect in six other books [the Shadow and Bone Trilogy (aka The Grisha Trilogy), the Six of Crows Duology, and King of Scars. I wrote about the first book here.]

Her writing is imaginative and rich, and her wonderful style shifts perfectly to suit whatever particular story she’s telling. The Language of Thorns stands on its own just fine, but you should absolutely go back to the beginning and read Shadow and Bone.

Bonus quote from the book, because it’s my life – “Some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled – not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.”

Also: The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke, Unnatural Creatures, ed. by Neil Gaiman

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The horror pick – Full Throttle by Joe Hill

“The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.” 

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Son of the wildly prolific Stephen King, Joe Hill is great, and his short stories are especially terrific. [If you haven’t read Locke & Key, the graphic novels he wrote with Gabriel Rodriguez, you absolutely should – even if you’ve maybe already watched the Netflix adaptation.]

Similar to those in Exhalation, each story is powered by a fun conceit, and a very human soul. There’s a secret, magical, Narnia-style doorway, but instead of children, it’s used by rich white men to hunt magical creatures on the other side. There’s a man who falls asleep on the wrong train and wakes up next to a very civilized, very hungry werewolf. And in a particularly lovely story, a grieving, aimless man takes a job driving a decrepit library bookmobile, only to discover that not all of his patrons are among the living.

Even when the concepts are more straightforward genre tropes — i.e. murderous roadside attractions, or teenagers hunted down by supernatural comeuppance — they’re elevated by his style, and the empathy with which he writes his characters. It all works, because the people populating his stories feel three-dimensional.

Also: Strange Weather, Hill’s book of four short novels.

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Don’t forget creative non-fiction. John Hodgman’s Vacationland is absolutely wonderful. Or, even better, listen to him read it via the audiobook.

And you can always go with some all-time classics: The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Stories of John Cheever, or Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, just to name a few.

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Let’s face it, aside from the crippling anxiety, life under quarantine is pretty bland. Not particularly surprising, as things are bound to become monotonous when one isn’t allowed to leave home for months on end.

Lucky for you, I have a solution: add several heaping tablespoons of Elmore Leonard to the mix. The man was an uncommonly good writer whose books, stories, and screen adaptations can go a long way in adding some flavor to your daily media sustenance.

As is the case with so many wonderful genres, crime and/or western fiction are often dismissed out of hand as hackneyed, formulaic, and lazy — judged by the bad to worst examples instead of the good to best. It’s unfair, to be sure. You should give said genres a chance, and no one has ever written them better than Leonard. His work doesn’t transcend shitty genres, so much as reveal how amazing they can be when executed well.

Leonard’s writing is razor sharp, consistently funny, and smart as hell. The pacing is brisk and engaging but not rushed, lean without ever feeling sparse. His pages are populated with the sorts of characters literature’s other private investigators, crooks, cops, cowboys, gangsters, killers, detectives, dupes, femme fatales, and sundry aspire to be.

Their appeal owes quite a bit to amazing dialogue, of the quick, uber-clever variety. Many of his characters are adept at perfectly crafted repartee, always with the perfect phrasing [á la Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, Shane Black, His Girl Friday]. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m a sucker for it.

It’s entirely possible you’re already into Leonardesque dialogue without knowing it, as his writing makes up a sizable portion of the DNA for Tarantino’s. As a matter of fact, the underrated Jackie Brown is an adaptation of Leonard’s novel, Rum Punch.

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Where to start:

Leonard wrote celebrated fiction for nearly 60 years – with adaptations for days – so there’s a sizable catalogue to keep you rolling for quite some time. Here are a few good places to get your feet wet.

Out of Sight

If a movie is what you’re in the mood for, start here. [As of the time of this posting, it’s available on HBO Go.]

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One of the great things about Leonard, whose devotees stretch far and wide, is how many talented folks have lined up to adapt his material. For instance, we have Steven Soderbergh’s effortlessly cool adaptation of Out of Sight.

Everything about this movie works. It’s fun, smart, and with all that chemistry, you’ll want to watch Clooney and J.Lo circle each other from opposite sides of the law forever.

Before Olyphant came along as Raylan Givens on Justified, Leonard said Clooney came the closest to getting his dialogue exactly right – nailing the sound, rhythm and delivery. Jack Foley – the charming, non-violent, gentleman thief – is quite similar to Danny Ocean, who we’d meet a year later when Soderberg and Clooney reteamed for Ocean’s Eleven. To be honest, I think Out of Sight is the reason we got the Ocean’s movies in the first place, which are very Leonardesque films in their own right.

[Fun fact: Michael Keaton made an uncredited appearance in Out of Sight as Ray Nicollete, a character he played in Jackie Brown for Tarantino the year before. You see? Well before the MCU, there was a Leonardverse.]

Other notable film options: Get Shorty, and the aforementioned Jackie Brown.

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Justified

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If television is the route you want to take, go with the unexpectedly amazing neo-western, Justified — a show I’ve written about many times on this very blog. It gets my vote as the best entry point into Leonard’s work. It’s the platonic ideal of Leonard adaptations, and the neo-western genre in general. If you haven’t binged through it yet, you now have all the time in the world to remedy that. [As of the time of this writing, it’s available on Hulu.]

The writers revered Leonard so much, working so hard to live up to his work, that they created one of the best — and most criminally underseen — shows of all time. That’s all the more impressive in light of the fact that the entire show was born of a single short story, which was directly adapted for the pilot episode. Everything that came after the pilot was brand new, and yet the writers produced six seasons of brilliant television – and a show that Leonard praised unequivocally, until his death in 2013.

It’s the best entry point into the Leonardverse, largely because of the marriage between great writing and pitch-perfect performances. Leonard went as far as to say that Olyphant’s take on Raylan Givens was perfect. “When he delivered the lines, the ones that I wrote,” Leonard said, “they were just the way I heard them when I wrote them.”

And it’s not just Olyphant. Walton Goggins is equally great as the show’s big bad. He’s the sort of character you want to hear speak, even if he’s got nothing much to say. The show only gets better as season-specific characters start showing up, played by such luminaries as Mary Steenburgen, Sam Elliott, Margo Martindale, Garret Dillahunt, Patton Oswalt, Jonathan Tucker, and a young Kaitlyn Denver before she went on to star in the critically lauded comedy Booksmart. And that just scratches the surface.

I’ve recommended Justified again, and again, and again — it would seem to no avail, at least amongst my friends. I’m telling you though, just give it a few episodes and I think you’ll love it.

[Fun fact: Goggins’s Boyd Crowder is one of the very best things about Justified, which leads us to an interesting phenomenon in the Tarantino-Leonard ecosystem. Once an actor proves themself capable of nailing Leonardesque or Tarantino-style dialogue, they’ll begin jumping back-and-forth between the two. Goggins went on to appear in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight after his amazing performance on Justified. John Travolta played Chili Palmer in Get Shorty the year after appearing in Pulp Fiction. Clooney went on to star in From Dusk til Dawn after Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven. Olyphant was later cast in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. It takes a specific skill set as an actor to get it right, and when one does it well, they can’t seem to stop.]

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When the Women Come Out to Dance, aka, Fire in the Hole

And if you want to go straight to the source, why not read some of his actual work? If you do, a book of short stories is a good place to start. I’m actually surprised short stories aren’t a more popular medium [a topic I’ll revisit soon]. If nothing else, it can be a great introduction to a writer’s work. When the Women Come Out to Dance (aka, Fire in the Hole), is a one stop shop to show the range of Leonard’s stories, and give you a sense of his style in bite sized portions. A common, and well-deserved, knock against writers in the genre concerns the lack of strong, well-drawn, three-dimensional female characters given interesting things to do.When the Women Come Out to Dance turns that on its head, full of delightfully crooked, interesting women, up to (mostly) no good.

Once Justified became popular, the book’s original title was changed to Fire in the Hole, as that’s the story introducing Raylan Givens to the world — as I mentioned above, the pilot was a direct adaptation of that story, the only significant departure being Boyd Crowders’s fate.

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And there you have it. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to try a taste of considerable amount of content Leonard produced during his prolific career.

At this point, we all have different things helping us get through the day. This is one of my things.

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I dislike the people around you. They’re greedy and selfish… I wonder where you left behind your old self. All those headlines have rewritten your true character.

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My penultimate baseball film was a late edition to the list. It was a happy accident that I found it at all. I’d never heard of I Will Buy You, and it didn’t show up in any of the research I did. Then, by chance, I stumbled on it while randomly browsing the Criterion Collection. I’m so glad I did, because this movie is, without a close second, the best new film I watched for this series.

The story follows Diasuke Kishimoto, a scout trying to recruit the best young prospect in Japan, and his interactions with the various characters circling the soon-to-be mega rich superstar. Kishimoto struggles to decide how much of his soul he’s willing to give away to achieve his ultimate goal, as it becomes harder and harder to discern who’s using who, what ulterior motives are hidden beneath every surface, and if perhaps some characters are more (or less) sympathetic that he’d thought.

There is so much I love about this movie, and it would take a long-form essay to scratch the surface. Director Masaki Kobayashi is a legend (if you’ve never seen Samurai Rebellion, you should remedy that promptly). Keiji Sada is craaaaaaazy good in the lead role (he tragically died in a car crash at 37, robbing the world of the rest of his career). The script is rich, poignant, and timeless – it doesn’t lose a bit of relevance in the 64 years since its release.

Also, what is the deal with 40s and 50s Japanese directors and cinematographers being better at blocking than anyone else before or since?! You could follow the emotion of this film entirely through the positioning and movement of characters in each frame.

Fun fact: I subscribed to the Criterion Channel just to watch this movie. Now, it’s going to keep me warm on these cold Covid nights.

Next Up: Bull Durham, the greatest baseball movie of all time.

Everybody’d be nice to you if they knew you were dying.

Before 1973, no one had ever heard of Robert De Niro. By the end of the year, his performances in Bang the Drum Slowly and Scorsese’s Mean Streets announced the arrival of a singular talent. Throw in his 1974 role as a young Don Corleone in The Godfather: Part II, and you didn’t have to look too hard to see a legend in the making.

Bang the Drum Slowly is an adaptation of a 1956 novel by Mark Harris. [I’ve never heard of him either.] It’s the story of Henry Wiggin (Michael Moriarty), star pitcher for the New York Mammoths (a stand-in for the Yankees), and Bruce Pearson (De Niro). Pearson is a backup catcher secretly dying of Hodgkin’s disease, Wiggin is the only member of the team who knows, and the movie chronicles Wiggin’s attempts to care for an odd, none-too-bright, disliked member of the ball club as the season wears on, and Pearson’s illness worsens.

De Niro’s performance as the terminally ill Pearson is as advertised, but Moriarty’s turn as Henry Wiggin is beautiful and heartbreaking. I think his performance deserves more praise, overlooked as it is by De Niro’s first starring role.

If you’re like me, you’ll go through most of the runtime thinking, “I know what people say about this movie, but I there’s no way I’m going to cry.” But it sneaks up on you. When the final act rolled around, there was plenty of “I’m not crying, you’re crying!” on sofá de la Small.

The remaining thoughts are spoilery, so if you plan to watch the film eventually, you’ve been warned.

To me, much of this film is about the power of kindness. The kindness toward Pearson — first by Wiggin, and then the rest of the team — is exclusively due to his illness, and yet, it positively impacts everyone involved. Whether it’s Pearson becoming a better hitter once Wiggin takes the time to offer advice, or the team pulling together after they discover the truth of Pearson’s illness, transforming a once fractured clubhouse in the united juggernaut they should have been all along. The acts of kindness lift up both the giver and the receiver.

And can we talk about the end? The team, fighting to let Pearson finish the clinching game, even though at times he can barely stand. They will him to finish, and he has no idea they all know he’s dying. Wiggin, rolling up Pearson’s uniform in the hospital, knowing he will never wear it again. Or Pearson, promising to be ready for spring training on the airport tarmac. And as he walks to board the plane, they shoot the scene from behind Wiggin. He’s stuck on other side of the fence, separated from the friend he’s stayed beside every step of the way; he can’t follow Pearson where he goes next. T-E-A-R-S.

Up Next: I Will Buy You, a Japanese film I discovered by accident while exploring the Criterion site.

Jimmy: “Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up. You can’t deny that.”
Dottie: “It just got too hard.” 
Jimmy: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” 

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A League of Their Own is a classic. It’s synonymous with the genre, as evidenced by the fact that — and this surprised me — it is by far the film people mentioned most when they heard or read that I was doing this. It belongs on any list of the greatest baseball movies worth its salt.

Sure, just about every aspect of film’s production gets pretty cheesy at times, but the film has so much going for it.

The Rockford Peaches may be the most well-drawn team in the pantheon of baseball cinema. I’d say it’s definitely the best written team of adults, as the competition would come from The Bad News Bears and The Sandlot. The Rockford Peaches clubhouse is populated by people, not lazy clichés. I’m not saying they aren’t based on clichés, they definitely are, but the writing works well enough, and the performances add enough extra depth, that the women aren’t cookie cutter dialogue machines. It’s believable you could grab a drink with these players.

Jimmy Dugan is one of Hanks’s best and most loved performances, which is no small feat. He is the quintessential washed up baseball star whose vices have dragged down from his pedestal too soon. His arc, from drunk showing up for a paycheck to invested coach who loves his team, is satisfyingly believable. And let us not forget, “There’s no crying in baseball!” isn’t just one of the most best lines in any baseball movie, it’s genuinely iconic in all of film history.

Dugan is also the last of Hanks’s broad comedic roles. He still made comedies, but his over the top persona gave way to quieter, more nuanced characters. [Woody has some moments in the Toy Story films that come the closest to that old energy.]

Geena Davis breathes a badass energy into Dottie. Her greatness is believable. She’s tough, she’s got ice water in her veins, and she’s head and shoulders better than any other player in the league. [At 6′ tall, she’s also literally head and shoulders above any other player in the league.]

Dottie’s story has made me sad and angry — sangry? — ever since I saw the movie for the first time as a 10-year-old. [She dropped the ball on purpose to let her sister win!?!?!?!!] As much as A League of Their Own is a sweet, charming homage to the game, it’s impossible for me to feel that it isn’t also a tragedy. Dottie’s story has always broken my heart.

Dottie continually diminishes her own considerable strength and talent, ostensibly for two primary reasons.

In part, she is forced to do so because her sister, Kit, is too immature to be treated like an adult. Kit can’t even be relieved in a game without throwing a temper tantrum. Her arm was gassed, it would have been time for any pitcher to be pulled from the game. Yet she acted like her sister was guilty of profound betrayal, simply because Dottie did what any catcher should do in that situation. There are eight other Peaches on the field, and the league wasn’t created to cater to her feelings, but she can only see herself. [Blerg! Grow the fuck up, Kit!] Even my wife’s takeaway — and mind you, she is no passionate baseball devotee — was that Kit acted like a child who didn’t respect the game.

But Kit isn’t the only excuse Dottie hides behind. With her husband returned from the war, she quits the game to start a family. We’ve been given absolutely zero indication that her husband has asked her to quit, or disapproves of her playing; it is never confirmed that it would unfeasible to start a family and continue to play; but still, she walks away. She’s the best at what she does, she comes alive playing the game in a way that’s unique from any other facet of her life, but she’s always looking for a reason to quit. A story about a person who didn’t lean into such a singular talent, and who continually sabotaged her potential, is a sad story.

And then I realize that women have always been expected to hang up their cleats when the time comes to start and care for a family. When phenom hitter Marla Hooch falls in love, she quits the league and gets married. No questions asked. All must be sacrificed at the altar of “traditional family values,” as it would later come to be known.

Perhaps Dottie is continually trying to manufacture reasons to walk away, to never truly let her love of the game take over, because she knows it will all be taken away from her in the end. Her husband never asks her to quit, but maybe she can’t bring herself to ask, to hope that she might be able to hold onto a family and baseball. She’s trying to shield herself from heartbreak.

How could you not be sangry?

Up Next: Bang the Drum Slowly, the film that began the ascendancy of Robert De Niro (it came out just before Mean Streets).

Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order buy wins, you need to buys runs.

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To put it simply, Moneyball is a great movie. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are excellent, and Bennett Miller’s direction combines with a script by the legendary Aaron Sorkin to create a perfectly paced, engaging, eminently watchable film.

As for the facts, it’s hit-and-miss, with an emphasis on miss. Many of the changes make sense. It’s simpler to create a lone character — Hill’s Peter Brand — as an amalgam of the team of advisors at the heart of the A’s moneyball strategy. And it’s more satisfying to remove nuance and celebrate Billy Beane’s devil-may-care innovation that pioneered analytics in baseball, precipitating a dramatic shift as to how teams evaluate players.

Beane and the A’s were absolutely part of the inception of a new era, but it was a much smaller, far more mixed role than the book and movie imply. It depicts the A’s as a team betting on brand new strategies that the rest of the idiots running teams rejected out of hand until they saw the A’s success. In reality, sabermetrics (the general name for the sort of analysis seen in the film) was being utilized by teams to varying degrees by all of baseball since the 90s. Don’t get me wrong, Beane has done great work in his career. That’s clearly evidenced by the fact that he was the A’s general manager for 18 years, before becoming executive vice president of baseball operations in 2016. Being a general manager in baseball is often a thankless job, and 16 years is an impressive length of time to keep the job for the same team. In the current era, Beane’s tenure is surpassed only by Yankees GM Brian Cashman’s 22 years on the job. He’s a talented front office executive, he’s just not the unqualified genius pioneer the movie depicts.

A really great description of the exaggeration of Beane and the A’s role in the rise of sabermetrics, in far more detail, is Allan Barra’s writeup for the Atlantic back in 2011.

For my money, the most egregious omission in the film was leaving out the players who played the biggest role in the team’s success during that period. For one, the primary reason for that team’s success was the pitching of Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder. They were a fearsome, unrivaled 1-2-3 punch giving the team a favorable pitching matchup for 60% of their games. And then there’s Miguel Tejada, an MVP who was the heart of the A’s offense for the entire era of perennial playoff appearances.

Again, I love the movie. But it seems important to separate fact from fiction in the myth of Billy Beane.

Up next: A League of Their Own, one of the best loved baseball movies of all time.