Kwickie Kapsule Kritical Kommentaries

Our friend Barbara recommended this documentary to me a few months ago, and I caught up with it earlier in the week.  "Hosted" by Jakob Dylan (who appears to be as laconic in demeanor as his father, Bob), the doc takes you on a terrific ride exploring the pop/folk/rock music scene that centered in the Laural Canyon area of Los Angeles circa 1965-67.  It features interviews with such people as Brian Wilson, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and Michelle Phillips.  If you are of that era and/or just love that music, I highly recommend it.  Two things that stood out to me: One, the absolute reverence that all of these artists had and continue to have for Brian Wilson, and, two, the scene of a 70-something Stephen Stills laying down a guitar solo track in an LA recording studio.

Three solid Stars from The Grandstander.

O'Connor, Colman, and Menzies

We finished watching Season Three of Netflix' "The Crown", and I think that of all the people that I've spoken to who have watched this, my bride included, I am the only one who has liked it.  The focus of their criticism seems to be "Olivia Colman isn't as likable as Queen Elizabeth as Claire Foy was in the first two seasons."  My response is that Colman is playing a different woman - older, more experienced, perhaps more jaded - in the time period covered (1964-77).   I liked her in it.  I also thought that Tobias Menzies was a better Prince Phillip.  Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles plays a prominent part of this season, a season that portrays Charles as a total boob.

Also of note is Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret.  Fun Fact:  In the 2010 movie "The King's Speech" (which I just re-watched and is a terrific movie, btw), Miss Carter plays Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King George VI and the mother of the the current Queen and the late Princess Margaret.  All she needs to do now is find a vehicle where she would play the current Queen Elizabeth and she will have achieved a Windsor Family Trifecta.

Season Three of "The Crown" gets Three Stars from The Grandstander.

Kracinski and Rapace

We so much enjoyed last year's first season of "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan", and we were anxiously awaiting this new season.  How much did we like this one?  Not so much.  This one was so implausible that I found myself getting totally PO'd with the total ridiculousness of it.   

WARNING:  The next paragraph contains possible spoilers.  Feel free to skip over it if you haven't watched the entire series as yet.

Have one American special forces soldier fight off a couple of platoons of Venezuelan soldiers?  Sure why not.  And how many times is John Kracinski's Ryan going to disobey orders and go it alone against first, a camp full of vicious mercenaries, and then, even more ridiculous, the entire Venezuelan army, or so it seemed, after every American in the entire country was ordered by the US State Department to evacuate the country.  Screw you all, says Jack, I'm gonna do this MY way.

Okay.  You can go back to reading this post now.

The whole series made me realize why I quit reading Tom Clancy novels after about the third one of these flights of fancy.

One cool aspect of this series was the appearance of Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress who appeared in all those Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies.  She's an asset to anything that she's in, but she isn't in this one nearly enough to get "Jack Ryan" any more than Two Stars from The Grandstander.


On a brighter note, an email from Amazon arrived this morning informing us that Season Three of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is now available for viewing.  Can't wait to get into that one soon.

The Week 13 GPR , plus Pirates and Pitt Thoughts

As you have all no doubt been on the edge of your seats awaiting this, here are the Grandstander Power Rankings for the NFL after Week #13:

1. Ravens
2. Seahawks
3. Saints
4. 49'ers

Knocking at the door....Bills, Chiefs, Packers, Patriots, Vikings.

No change in the Top Four teams from last week, but the Saints and 49'ers swapped places.  I wanted to put the Steelers as a team "knocking at the door", but I'm just not ready to do that quite yet.  If I was going on defense alone, they might be in the Top Four.

My pal John Frissora has his FGE top four as follows:

1. Saints
2. Ravens
3. Seahawks
4. Patriots

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The Pittsburgh Pirates were in the news last week with the announcement that Derek Shelton will be their new manager.

In a manner that was so typically Pirates-like, they made this announcement on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving when most people, if they were thinking about sports at all, they were thinking about football, and they did it via a press release, and Shelton wasn't even here in town for the announcement.  

Way to get the maximum publicity bang for the buck, Bucs.  Why didn't they just wait until Christmas morning to make the announcement?

Shelton will be formally introduced to the media and to Pittsburgh at a presser on Wednesday (tomorrow) of this week.

Shelton spent the last two years as bench coach of the Twins and, prior to that, was the hitting coach of the Rays for several years.  He combines, according to the press release, both old school baseball knowledge and familiarity with new age analytics/metrics 21st century baseball acumen.  Personally, I am glad the the Pirates went outside of the box and brought in a new face and not some retread who has been hired-and-fired by several teams (Jeff Bannister, e.g.).  Is he the right guy for the Pirates?  Who knows?  

The former Best Management Team In Baseball has now been overhauled and replaced and the BMTIB 2.0 (Williams, Cherington, Shelton) is now on board, but Bob Nutting is still the guy steering the ship and controlling the purse strings.  One thing that the Nutting Administration has done is make me a complete and total cynic when it comes to the performance of the Pirates.  I hate that this is what they have turned me into, but there you are.  I hope, I really, really hope for good things ahead for the Pirates, but I am no longer accepting anything from 115 Federal Street on blind faith.  They've got to show it to me.

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Pitt ended it's 2019 football season by laying two colossal eggs, a 28-0 did-they-even-show-up? loss at Virginia Tech (when a chance for the division title was still there) and a 26-19 loss to Boston College at home on Senior Day. They finish the season at 7-5 with some nondescript to-be-announced bowl game ahead of them.

This is the year-by-year W-L record for Pitt in the Pat Narduzzi Era...8-5, 8-5, 5-7, 7-7, 7-5 = 35-29 (.555).  In ACC play, they have fared slightly better under HCPN...6-2, 5-3, 3-5, 6-3, 4-4 = 24-17 (.585).  

They have won more games than they have lost, they have more often than not put an entertaining product on the field, and there was that ACC Championship game appearance last year, but... Yes, there is always a "but", and it was posed by Joe Starkey and Ron Cook on The Fan yesterday, and that is..."Has the Pitt program improved or moved forward under the HCPN regime?"

I guess it all comes down to what you want your University and its athletic teams to be.   I wonder if even the staunchest Panthers Fanatic out there would like his or her University to surrender its soul to the likes of Nick Saben or Urban Meyer and all that that entails just to have a string of double digit wins seasons.  Be careful what you wish for.

And bring on the Mienecke Car Care Pizza Pizza Weedeater Bowl!

Steelers 20 - Browns 13

In professional sports, all wins and losses count the same in the standings, statistically speaking.  Emotionally, however, it's a different story, and some wins are way, way sweeter than others.  The Steelers 20-13 win over the Browns yesterday was one of those, and we all know the reasons why.  To wit....

• It was the Browns, and it's always great to beat the heated rival from Cleveland.
• Those same Browns acted unbelievable chesty after their 21-7 win against the Steelers two weeks ago, so how great was it to see them humbled by the guy who, when training camp began, was the Steelers undrafted, free agent, training-camp-arm fourth string quarterback?
• The manner in which the Browns owners (Dee Haslam wearing that Myles Garrett stocking cap at last week's game), head coach (Freddie "The Buffoon" Kitchens wearing a "Pittsburgh Started It" t-shirt out in public, and at the Mr. Rogers movie with his family, no less), players (Garrett deciding eight days after the fact that, yeah, Mason Rudolph used a racial slur against him), and fans (the Mason Rudolph pinata in the parking lot last week), it all added up to making the Steelers comeback from a 0-10 deficit and sticking it to that team and all of those folks just so, so sweet
• (Browns owner Jimmy Haslam - Dee is his wife - was at one time a minority owner of the Steelers.  He obviously never learned anything about how to act graciously or how to effectively run a football team in those years that he was hanging around the Steelers' offices on the South Side.)

So the Steelers now sit at 7-5 and hold the sixth and final AFC Playoff spot "if the season ended today."  This is an almost unbelievable state of affairs given all of the circumstances that have surrounded the team this year, first and foremost being the loss of their bound-for-the-HOF quarterback at halftime of the second game of the season.  The Tomlin Haters, inexplicably, are still out there, but he has as strong a case to make for Coach of the Year as any other HC in the NFL this season.

And that fourth string quarterback?  

 Duck Hodges

Devlin "Duck" Hodges has now started two games and won them both.  He also came in relief in another one and pulled victory from the jaws of defeat last week in Cincinnati.  He has now developed a full scale cult following here amongst Steelers fans.  A colorful nickname and an underdog back story can do the for you.  I admit that I had no expectations for neither the team nor Hodges going into that one yesterday, which made the results all the more satisfying.

Of course, the season does not end today, so, what lies ahead for Rooney U?

•  @ Cardinals.  The Steelers should be favored in this one and should come away with a Win.
• Bills @ home.  The Bills are now 9-3 and had a coming out party on national TV against the Cowboys on Thursday.  When the schedule was released in April, this looked like a sure W, but now so much now.  Two terrific defenses going against each other.  Either team could win this one, but the final score might be 10-7 or 9-6.  Bet the "Under" on this one.
• @ Jets.  The Jets stink.  They lost to the Bengals yesterday, for God's sake.  This should be a W.
• @ Ravens.  Unless John Harbaugh decides to rest all his starters for the playoffs, the Steelers aren't going to beat Baltimore.  In fact, the Ravens could very well run the table right up to the Super Bowl in Miami in February.

The Steelers could, conceivably come out of this season at 9-7 or 10-6 and be playing in the Post-Season.  Would you have bet on that when they were at 1-4 with Big Ben out for the season?

"The Irishman"

So Mrs. Grandstander and I decided upon a Saturday Night at the Movies date night this weekend, and settled in to watch perhaps the most anticipated movie of 2019, Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman", and what can I tell you, it did not disappoint.

This is an epic of a movie.  Three and one-half hours long and and all-star "mob movie" cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.  It is the story of the rise of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), the Irishman of the title, within both the Mob in Philadelphia and the Teamsters Union of the 1960's, and how he became a favorite of both mob leader Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and teamsters head man Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino).  It has all the trademarks of Scorsese - the long single take that takes us through the halls of a nursing home (and a few other such takes elsewhere in the film), the sound track featuring period music, the voice over narration of the main protagonist, and the freeze frame shots of characters that tell us "whatever became of" them.  "The Irishman" is reminiscent of all great Scorsese movies, and it is just as good, and perhaps better, than all of them.

The main thrust of the movie is the story of "what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa, anyway?"  Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zallian posit their theory on how Hoffa came to his end, and I won't spoil it for you.  There are so many great scenes in this movie.  One of my favorites involved a meeting between Hoffa and mobster Tony Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham, who played Al Capone in "Boardwalk Empire") wherein Tony Pro is late for his meeting - an unforgivable sin with Hoffa - and most of the meeting is the back-and-forth between the two of them as to why you should never be late for a meeting, per Hoffa, and who-gives-a-shit-I'm-here-now, per Tony Pro.  Fantastic.

The three stars are great. No surprise with De Niro, who's always great. Pesci plays a very different type of mobster, not the bombastic, fly off the handle type you are used to seeing him as, but quiet and perhaps even more chilling.  And Al Pacino will probably get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa.  

I really, really liked the movie, but I wish that I could have seen it in a movie theater.  As I wrote about earlier in the month, this is a Netflix production that was released to a few theaters in selected cities for a three week period so as to qualify for the Academy Awards and then pulled and sent straight to the streaming service.  I would like to have had the experience of seeing it on a big screen with a crowd of people in a theater, but this is the wave of the future, so I guess that there is no point shouting at the clouds about it.  And with its three and one-half hour length, I was able to hit PAUSE for both a bathroom break and a break to get myself a dish of ice cream, so there is that.

About that length.  At first, I was put off at the thought of it.  Hey, a good movie should be no more than two ours, tops, amiright?  After watching "The Irishman", though, I can't think of any part or parts of it that were superfluous or that could have been done away with to tighten it up.

One final thing.  The movie is based on a book by  Charles Brandt called "I Heard You Paint Houses".  You can guess what "painting houses" is a euphemism for.  Anyway, both the opening title and the closing credits did not say "The Irishman", rather they said "I Heard You Paint Houses".  Wonder what was up with that? 

"The Irishman" gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Movie Review - "The Highwaymen"

In the ever-changing paradigm of how movies are delivered to the movie going public these days, at least in  the world that includes Netflix, "The Highwaymen" was released to selected theaters last March (I don't believe it ever reached a movie theater in Pittsburgh), then withdrawn two weeks later and made available only to subscribers of Netflix.  I can recall hearing some positive reviews of the movie at the time, so last night, this new Netflix subscriber decided to watch it.

The movie is billed, as you can see in the picture above, as "the untold true story" of "the legends who took down Bonnie & Clyde."  The two legends in question are a couple of aging put-out-to-pasture Texas Rangers named Frank Hamer and Maney Gualt, played by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, who are called upon by Texas Governor Miriam "Ma" Henderson, the governor who disbanded the Rangers and replaced it with more modern police and investigators who used more up-to-date methods in tracking down criminals and preserving the peace.  Well, these modern guys were having no luck back in 1934 halting the murderous reign off terror being brought about by the infamous Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, so Henderson (Kathy Bates)  reluctantly agrees to authorize Hamer and Gualt as "highwaymen" to capture and, hopefully, kill Bonnie and Clyde, and makes it clear that she is not all that concerned with pesky little details like due process of law.  So old-timers Costner and Harrelson are off and running using methods that will make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Callahan look like some bleeding-heart sissy pinko.  The New York Times review of the movie called is "Grumpy Old Men meet Bonnie & Clyde."

This is a movie that sounded like it could be a lot of fun, but I found it slow moving and at times almost ponderous.  It was kind of fun watching Costner and Harrelson playing the old guys who, if they are now unable trying to chase down a teen-aged kid on foot anymore, they can still kick the asses of bad guys when the need arises.  

Bonnie and Clyde (Emily Brobst and Edward Bossert) are more like MacGuffins in this one rather than full blown characters and are seen full face on in only the climactic scene of the movie.  Unlike 1967's classic "Bonnie and Clyde" with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, this movie is told strictly from the lawmen's point of view.  In both movies, the criminals are seen as Robin Hood-type heroes by the downtrodden folks of Depression Era America ("Did Robin Hood ever murder someone in cold blood for four dollars and a tank of gas?"), and - spoiler alert! - Bonnie and Clyde come to a similar end in this one as they did back in 1967.

As another review I read stated, the story of "The Highwaymen" may tell a story closer to the truth than did "Bonnie and Clyde", but that doesn't mean that it's a better movie.  The Grandstander agrees and gives this one only Two Stars.

A couple of historical footnotes: 

• Not sure if this is true or not, but it is said that at one point, Hollywood kicked around the idea of telling the story of Hamer and Gualt with Paul Newman and Robert Redford playing the parts.
• The "Bonnie and Clyde" 1967 version is not available on Netflix.  If you want to know the story of the demise of the Barrow Gang, Netflix will only give you their version.
• Not long after the events portrayed in this movie, the Texas Rangers were reconstituted and still exist today.
• In the interest of historical accuracy, here is a picture of the real Bonnie and Clyde.  Beatty and Dunaway, they ain't!

Old Movie - "The Anderson Tapes" (1971)

Through the magic of TCM and the DVR, I watched this 1971 movie the other night. "The Anderson Tapes" revolves around an ex-con, Sean Connery, planning and executing a major heist of a NYC townhouse apartment building. The twist to the movie is that all of his moves have been recorded, either audio or video, by various parties, and no one can put together what is about to take place.  

The movie and the Lawrence Saunders novel upon which it is based attempts to make a statement about "big brother" and how we are always being watched and how our privacy is being invaded and on and on. However, I look at it as just an exciting and thrilling caper flick that holds up great forty-eight years after its release.

Sidney Lumet directed the movie, one of five that he did with Connery, and it also stars Dyan Cannon (was any actress of the time period prettier or sexier than she?), Martin Balsam, Alan King, and, in his first motion picture role, a very young Christopher Walken. In a bit character role, you will also notice Margaret "Wicked Witch of the West" Hamilton.

It's a really good movie, and if you've never seen it, you should make a point to seek it out and watch.

"A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood"

We saw the long awaited "A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood" earlier this week, and we were not disappointed.  As no doubt everyone knows by now, the movie stars Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, and Hanks is, as he usually is, terrific in the role.  What people may not realize is that this is not a biopic about Fred Rogers.  Nor is it, as my friend Maryellen has pointed out on a Facebook post, a movie to which you would bring your little children in hopes of  them becoming avid viewers of "Mister Rogers Neighborhood".   

It does, rather, tell a very specific story about about writer Tom Junod (identified as "Lloyd Vogel" in the movie, and wonderfully played by Matthew Rhys), who is assigned to interview Fred Rogers by Esquire Magazine for a piece on Heroes.  The hard-bitten and jaded writer, who is experiencing some familial relationship problems of his own, falls under the spell of Rogers' universal lessons of kindness and the unique person-ness (a world that I just made up) that resides in each and everyone of us.  In seeing the effect that Fred Rodgers has had on this one specific person, we also see how he as affected every single person with whom he came in contact, either in person or through "Mister Rogers Neighborhood".  

In a country and a world where kindness seems to be in short, very short, supply, "A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood" gives us a  lesson on what it is to be kind.  That alone makes seeing this movie important and worth seeing.

Director Marielle Heller has made a movie that will no doubt garner multiple Oscar nominations.  She made a decision to shrink the screen to a 4-by-3 aspect ratio whenever the movie depicts the Rogers television show, which is really cool, and the use of miniatures to depict not only Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but the cities of Pittsburgh and New York, are wonderfully whimsical.  This should get Oscar noms for both Heller and for the production designers.  Rhys and Hanks should pull down nominations as well, although Hanks' nomination might very well come in the Supporting Actor category.

This movie gets Three and one-half Stars from The Grandstander.

One comment about Tom Hanks, and it is not an original thought from me.  Have you noticed how Hanks seems to now be portraying only real people in his films these days?  Fred Rogers, Ben Bradlee, Sully Sullenberger, the guy who  negotiated for the spies in "Bridge of Spies"?  Not sure what this means, but it just seems interesting.  Whatever the role, Tom Hanks is no doubt the Actor of Our Times, much like James Stewart and Spencer Tracy were in another time.