To Absent Friends - Sheldon Harnick and Peter Nero

Earlier this month, the Sunday paper contained the news obituaries for two musical giants of the mid-twentieth century, and their passings deserve to be noted.

Lyricist Sheldon Harnick's obituary in the Associated Press covers about 25 column inches and is filled with lists of the awards he's won, the musicals for which he was responsible, and the various songs that he wrote.  However, if he did nothing else but collaborated with composer Jerry Bock one particular show in 1964, his passing would be worth noting.  That show was "Fddler on the Roof".  Need I say more?

The show ran for over 3,000 performances, and won nine Tony Awards, including best Musical.  It has been revived at least five times on Broadway.  It has been produced and revived professionally all over the world, and the show is  licensed to be performed by amateur productions over 500 times every year.  If you have never seen it, chances are that you will be able to see it at some high school near you every single Spring.  (HERE IS WHAT I HAD TO SAY ABOUT IT when I saw it performed by the Pittsburgh CLO back in 2018).

Of course, as the AP obit tells you, this was far from Mr. Harnick's only accomplishment. What a legacy!

To leave you with a sample of his work, HERE IS THE OPENING NUMBER from that classic show from the most recent Broadway revival, wherein Tevya tells us of the importance of Tradition.

RIP Sheldon Harnick.

Peter Nero 

1934-2023

The New York Times  obituary for Peter Nero states that he was a "concert pianist who soared to popularity in the 1960's with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras." Throughout the sixties and seventies, Nero's instrumentals were staples on AM radio music stations, he appeared and accompanied such headliners as Frank Sinatra, Mel Torre, Andy Williams, and Johnny Mathis.  He released 72 albums (!!), and served as principal conductor of the Philly Pops Orchestra for thirty-four years.

In THIS CLIP from the Ed Sullivan Show, Nero performs what was perhaps his biggest selling hit record, the "Theme for Summer of '42."

RIP Peter Nero.

Doing the Barbenheimer

Within a twenty-four hour period over Sunday and Monday, I took in the two most hyped movies of 2023, Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" and Christopher Nolen's "Oppenheimer."  I didn't do it in one calendar day, but, yes, I did The Barbenheimer.

 Barbie

When I first heard that there was to be a movie based on Barbie, the Mattel baby doll, I had little interest in seeing it until I heard that the movie was to be directed (and written) by Greta Gerwig.  After her two previous films, "Lady Bird" and "Little Women", I figure that anything to which Gerwig attaches herself is worth seeing.  Okay, the fact that Margot Robbie would be playing Barbie might also have been a big selling point for this one.

As the movie opens, we see Barbie awaken in Barbie Land.  In Barbie Land, Barbies can be anything that they want to be - an astronaut, President, a Supreme Court Justice, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, absolutely anything.  Kens, on the other hand, are merely vapid creatures who want nothing more than to spend time on the beach, and, of course, serve the needs of the various Barbies, in an asexual way, of course.

Through some rip in the continuum between Barbie Land and the Real World, Robbie's Barbie finds herself thinking thoughts of death, having flat feet, and, worst of all, getting cellulite.  To fix this, Barbie needs to journey to the Real World and find the little girl who is playing with her. Yes, "Barbie" could be called another multi-verse movie.  Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, stows away for the trip.  In the Real World, of course, Barbie discovers that while it's possible that women can be anything that they want to be, it isn't all that easy to do so in what is still a man's world.  And Ken discovers that it's not so bad if men get the chance to run things, a concept that he brings back with him to Barbie Land with disastrous results.

Don't ask me to explain how all this worked in the movie, but do go see it and enjoy it.  The movie has a lot of laughs, is beautiful to look at in all of it's pink-ified splendor, and the acting is terrific with Robbie and Gosling and in significant supporting roles, Kate McKinnon, America Ferrera, Will Farrell, and Michael Cera.  

I did think that the movie's message got a bit tied up in knots towards the end, but that's a minor quibble on my part.  The movie also delivers a terrific final line.  It might not rank up there with "Nobody's perfect", "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn", or "Louis, I think that this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship", but it's a real zinger nonetheless.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

Oppenheimer

Without question, the most highly anticipated movie thus far in 2023 has been Christopher Nolen's "Oppenheimer", the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist tapped to lead the Manhattan Project during WW II and develop the atomic bomb before the Germans (and the Russians) can.

This movie has a three hour running time.  Too long for a movie?  In most cases, yes, but not here.  Every minute of this movie is integral to the story being told.  I never looked at my watch once while watching this one.   The movie is told from  couple of points of view, one part in black and white,  but most of the movie in color.  That took a bit to get used to in keeping track of the story, but you catch on fairly quickly.  Me, I love the use of black and white in this one.

All elements of mid-twentieth century America can be seen in Oppenheimer's story.   From the heroic war effort of the Americans working on the project to the Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era.    It is one terrific story, and Nolan's movie making skills are on full display in this fabulous movie.  Even one of the most cliched items in any movie - a countdown clock - is anything but a cliche in this one.  And when the test bomb is fired in the New Mexico desert?  Well, I won't give a spoiler here, but it's a Wow Moment.

A salute to all of the actors in this one, mainly Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, but also the always terrific Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty, Matt Damon as Army General Leslie Groves, and a hardly recognizable Robert Downey Jr as Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss.  There are a multitude of other actors in this one who you will recognize like Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, and Florence Pugh.   There is also a brief screen appearance by Gary Oldman as President Harry S Truman.  Oldman has now played, among other people, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Lee Harvey Oswald.  What a resume.

I predict that there will be a slew of Oscar animations for the one.  Best Picture, of course, and Nolan for both Director and Screenplay, and acting nominations for Murphy, Blunt, Downey, and, possibly, Damon.  I also hope that it gets some nomination or other for Costuming, if for no other reason that the very cool hat that Murphy/Oppenheimer wore (I want one!):

Shoutouts to Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr.

And Murphy and the real J. Robert Oppenheimer....

A Full and Enthusiastic Four Stars from The Grandstander.

And a final salute to the Hats....

To Absent Friends - Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett

1926-2022

The death earlier today of singer Tony Bennett at the age of 96 brought back a childhood memory that has been buried in the deep recesses of my consciousness for well over 65 years.

I was probably three or four years old.  Our neighbor and my Godmother was a young woman named Martha Cordic.  Is that name familiar to older generations of Pittsburgher's?  She was the sister of Pittsburgh radio legend and icon Rege Cordic, who is also my Godfather, and, as such, she had access to an unlimited supply of 45 RPM records (kids, ask you grandparents what those were), that she was always bringing over to 4224 Saline Street, mainly for my older sister to listen to.  I can remember watching those records spin on the record player, and saying a line that would always entertain the big people in the house:

"I hate Tony Bennett!"

I don't know why or who prompted me to say those words, or what they meant, but it made the big people in the house laugh, so I kept saying them.   

And this was something that I had completely forgotten until I heard the news today, oh boy.

Well, I grew up, and I quickly forgot my imagined aversion to Tony Bennett.  Like everyone, I enjoyed him whenever I had the chance to listen to him sing or see him on television, and I can even remember seeing him perform at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh with Lena Horne back in 1973 or 1974.

After reading THIS OBITUARY from Matt Schudel in the Washington Post, there is nothing that I can write that would top that in summarizing the amazing career of Tony Bennett.   I urge you to read it, and I will only state two facts that I learned from it.  One, that he had a long battle with drug use in the 1970's and overcame it only when his son intervened and took over managing his career, and two, he had best selling albums in eight consecutive decades, the 1950's through the 2020's

I will leave you with THIS PERFORMANCE of perhaps Bennett's best known song.

RIP Tony Bennett.

The 2023 MLB All-Star Game

Major League Baseball staged its annual All-Star Game last night.  The National League won 3-2, its first win in this game since 2012, but as the Mid-Summer Classic goes, this game was anything but a classic.   With each team bringing in a new pitcher every inning, and with each of them able to throw the ball a thousand miles an hour, the hitters couldn't hit.  One of baseball's hoariest cliches is that "good pitching stops good hitting."  If it wasn't John McGraw who said that, it was probably Connie Mack, or maybe even Al Spaulding.  It proved to be the case last night, and it produced one snooze fest of a baseball game.  It was somehow fitting the the most exciting thing in the first six innings, an apparent monster of a home run by Lourdes Gurriel, was ruled a foul ball when the umpires conferred for several minutes, went to replay and overturned the original home run call.  They got it right, but the effect was like the proverbial passing of gas during church services.

What the Hell, though, not all ball games are going to be exciting gems, and a good many of the fifty or so games played every week during the season can turn out to be duds, so I have no problem with that aspect of last night's game.  What I hated about it was the presentation of the game by MLB and Fox Television.  Let me count the ways in no particular order....

1.  The uniforms.  One of the charms of the All-Star Game to me has always been the fact that players wore their own team's uniforms while playing for their Leagues.  See how cool that picture at the top of this post looks?  Well, you don't get that any more.  Instead we get ugly, generic "American" and "National" League unis.  The caps do have their teams' insignias on them, but the caps are all the same color.  And batting helmets with NL and AL on them.  Ugly and, even worse than being ugly, they are boring.  Very, very boring.  Nike has to sell more shirts and feed that revenue stream to MLB, so screw what was always a fun and colorful tradition.
2. Ball players being mic'd up and interviewed by the announcers while play is in progress.  On the face of it, it is kind of cool, but I really have a concern when a pitcher is mic'd and interviewed while he is actually pitching in a game.  That is an accident and injury just waiting to happen, and I can't believe that the MLBPA allows it to take place.  Same goes for a first or third baseman, who on any given pitch could have hundred mile an hour line drive come right at their face in less than a millisecond.  It's an exhibition game, sure, and it is supposed to be fun for all concerned, but it is still a real baseball game being played out there, so if you have to talk to someone during the game, talk to an outfielder.
3. At some point last night, a buddy of mine posted on Facebook "Do the announcers even know that there is a game going on down there?"  Announcer Joe Davis was so wrapped up with his in game interviews, the dugout interviews by Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci, that insipid exchange late in the game with Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and Derek Jeter sitting the first row, and hoping for the game to end in a tie (more on that in a minute), that he never kept us up to date on changes in the line-ups during the game.  I had no idea that Mitch Keller was called in to pitch until he was one batter into his stint.  As a Pirates fan, I was aware if that faux pas, but how many other times did that take place during the game?  
4. What if the game was tied at the end of nine innings?  Apparently, in that event, the game was to be decided not  by extra innings, but by some sort of Home Run Derby.  A baseball version of a hockey shootout or soccer penalty kicks.   Hey, for the All-Star Game, I concede that that would have been a lot of fun, but play by play guy Davis, and even John Smoltz, A-Rod, Big Papi, and The Captain were all but praying the rosary in hopes that the game would end in a tie so that Fox could bring you this exciting HR Shootout.  When  a long fly ball hit by an American Leaguer in the bottom of the ninth was caught on the warning track, I though that Davis was going to cry that it wasn't a game tying home run.  Not very professional, if you ask me.  The lesson is that for all of you who wished that Joe Buck would go way from baseball telecasts, be careful what you wish for.

Hey, I get it.  Things evolve, and usually for the better, but the MLB All-Star Game, once the only all-star game that was played with the same intensity as its sport requires, seems to be going the way of the other such contests.  The NBA and the NHL give up all pretense of playing defense, and the NFL has virtually eliminated its version of an all-star game.  Major League Baseball seems to be going down that same path.

For your information and entertainment, I am concluding this post with a picture of me as I was typing this article.

Saturday Morning at the Movies

Before getting into my own opinions on a couple of movies, I'd like to provide an excerpt from the recent newsletter from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has become as great a writer and as keen a social observer as he was a basketball player.  He sometimes does his own movie write-ups, and earlier this week, he offered an opinion on something that the professional movie critics do.  

"Over the years, I’ve observed a consistent phenomenon in movie reviews. Reviewers like to champion a young filmmaker launching a film that eventually becomes a franchise. After its success, the critics act like they themselves gave birth to the movie, then breastfed and toilet-trained it. Then, when the franchise grows in success, they treat it like it’s an ungrateful teen who needs to be reminded who’s in charge. That’s when they start to express obvious biases against the movie franchise. When they think the filmmakers have learned their lesson, they will return to praise a later entry into the franchise. Their liking or disliking of the film rarely depends on the quality of the movie, but on the timing of how much the critic wants to remind people of their power. 

"And not just the critics. Social media has encouraged audiences to jump on the bandwagon and trash a movie just because it didn’t live up to the childhood fantasy they’ve been nurturing about the first movie or the original source material. These people think that when they body-slam a movie, it makes them sound knowledgeable and sophisticated. Instead, they just appear petulant and pretentious. 

"I disagree with movie critics that I respect all the time. But I appreciate that they provide criteria for their judgment and give examples as to why something didn’t work. They are thoughtful in their analysis rather than glib, smart rather than smirky."

Kareem was writing about various franchise movies, such as Indiana Jones and the various comic book films, but his comments can be applied to the backlash that we have seen, and upon which I have commented, concerning the third and final season of "Ted Lasso".

Okay.  On to my own attempts to sound "knowledgable and sophisticated" <wink, wink>

No Hard Feelings

As the headline implies, we decided to beat all the weekend crowds at the multi-plex and went to see this gem of a movie at 9:15 in the morning this past Saturday.  The trailers have been all over the place for this one, so you probably know that it is a non-traditional RomCom - it's rated R - that stars Jennifer Lawrence.  This is a different sort of role for Lawrence, and she's great in it.   She plays a bartender/Uber driver living in Long Island whose car has just been repossessed, and she's about to lose her modest family home because she can't pay the property taxes due.  Without a car, she can't take money to pay the taxes, so what's a girl to do?

She happens upon a classified ad placed by a wealthy pair of helicopter parents offering a free car to any young woman who will bring their painfully shy son into adulthood (only in the movies, right?), and that means exactly what you think it means, before he goes off to college at the end of the summer.  As dad Matthew Broderick (yes, Ferris Bueller is now playing Dad roles!) puts it in this great bit of dialog:

Lawrence:  Do you want me to date him, or do you want me to DATE him?

Broderick: Yes we want you to date him.  Date him hard!

The kid is played by Andrew Barth Feldman, who, in  bit of trivia, is the actor who replaced Ben Platt in the title role in "Dear Evan Hanson" on Broadway, and there is a bit of Evan Hanson in this character as well.  Broderick and Laura Benanti are great as the hovering, smothering parents, but the Star with a capital S in this one is Lawrence.  She is pretty, charming, and sexy, as you would expect...

....and she has a terrific comic touch in scenes where she attempts to seduce the clueless kid, where she mingles with some of the kid's contemporaries at a college mixer, and in an almost throwaway scene, where she climbs a set of stairs while wearing roller blades.  

Lucille Ball couldn't have done this any better!

As with most RomComs, you can pretty much see early on where this movie is going to go, but the story is sweet without being sappy, it's funny, and it's filled with great performances, including a terrific one from Jennifer Lawrence.  I keep a list of every movie that I see in the course of the year, and rate them as to my favorite after each time I see one.  "No Hard Feelings" now sits at Number One on my 2023 list.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

80 for Brady

It was Saturday night.  The Pirates game ended early, there were no other sporting events  on to watch, network television stinks these days, and it was too early to go to bed, so we said let's watch a movie that doesn't require any thinking.  We happened upon "80 for Brady".  This movie was released earlier this year to coincide with the Super Bowl, and it received zero critical acclaim.  The plot: four older ladies who all love Tom Brady decide to enter a contest to win four tickets to the Super Bowl.  Hijinks and hilarity (?) ensue.

It is a not so bad premise (supposedly based on a true story), but the plot is paper thin and totally ridiculous when you put the slightest thought into it.  What it does have going for it is the chance to see four old pros, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field, and Lily Tomlin, performing and outshining the material that they're given.  The story also revolves around the Super Bowl wherein the Patriots came back for a 3-28 deficit late in the third quarter to win the game, so you can re-live that particular bit of football history.

Oh, and one other funny bit that if you blink you'll miss it.  The contest to win the four Super Bowl tickets?  It was won by four guys who were also named "Tom Brady" and who are part of a "Persons Named Tom Brady" support group whose lives have been ruined because they cannot possibly live up to the expectations of them because they are named "Tom Brady".    That's funny.

One and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

Two Winners for Your Entertainment Pleasure

 "She Said"

"She Said" was a movie from last year, 2022, that was sadly ignored during the Awards Season.  Directed by Maria Schrader, it tells the story of New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, played by Carrie Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, who investigated the story and did the reporting on the sexual abuses perpetuated by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.  A story that led to Weinstein's imprisonment, and which was largely responsible for the sparking of the #MeToo movement.

Carrie Mulligan is a terrific actress.  She looks different in every movie she does, it seems (think 2020's "Promising Young Woman"), and she is always good.

In addition to this being a good story, it is also a great "newspaper movie" in the tradition of "All The President's Men" and "Spotlight".  Maybe not quite on the level of those two, but not far below them either.  Makes you realize just how important newspapers are in our world.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

"Righteous Prey" by John Sandford

Somehow I missed it when Sandford's thirty-second Lucas Davenport novel was published last Fall, but I finally caught up with it, and it was a great read.  I am happy to say this because the last couple of Davenport stories have been a bit disappointing to me.  Not so this one.

The story involves a group of highly organized, highly secret, and very wealthy folks who call themselves The Five are behind a string of serial killings that are happening all across the United States.  One of these murders takes place in Minnesota, and that brings about the involvement of Federal Marshall Lucas Davenport and his old sidekick from the Minnesota   Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Virgil Flowers.   The two of them working in concert with the FBI and local law enforcement agencies cover ground from Minnesota to San Diego to San Francisco and, finally, to Long Island in tracking down The Five and their organizer/leader,  Vivian Zhao.

It's a can't-put-it-down story.  I knocked it off in about three sittings.  It makes me look forward to the next one, due out later this year.  Among other reasons, I can't wait for it is to see what the next development will be in a seemingly new career for Virgil Flowers.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.