When I visited Wrigley Field back in 2013, the Cubs were just one year into rebuilding the team under the management of Theo Epstein, and the big acquisition at the time was Anthony Rizzo – he wasn’t doing so hot. I remember having to watch the Cubs play on TV at a bar called Lucky’s Sandwich Co. because my cousin was too cheap to buy tickets and watching the Cubs lose to the Cardinals in Cubs’ fashion. Back then, the Cubs were not a competitive team and that was the Cubs way. But there was a charm in that, and I didn’t sense there was any urgency for that to change.
Fast forward just three years later to 2016 and the Cubs have managed to build a team that can call themselves World Series Champions after a 108-year championship drought – the longest in American sports history. What happened in those three years? How did they change? The Cubs Way does an excellent job to fill in those questions and provides insight that you can’t find anywhere else – okay fine maybe a comprehensive Google search could give you those answers.
Even though you could get the answers to all your Cubs questions via Google, I’m glad a book like this exists. The author, Tom Verducci, had unprecedented access to the team and does a fantastic job weaving key highlights of the Cubs’ rebuilding process in-between the seven-game World Series. It reads like a movie and I’m almost certain a 30-for-30 documentary or movie will use this framework in the future.
The book is obviously about baseball, but at its core, it’s really more about affecting change. For over a hundred years, the Cubs functioned in a state that wasn’t good enough to win a championship. Even though the desire for winning persisted, the pieces never really came together to create a winning combination. Why? Well, the book touches on a number of things from curses to poor management and culture. But you can’t help feeling there’s a sense of something greater, like destiny, at work here – the timing just seems to work time and time again.
All these good things aside, you have to really be interested in the significance of what the Cubs did to appreciate this book. To attempt this book without that curiosity to will lead to a 108-year journey to finish the book. In addition, you should have a rudimentary knowledge of baseball terminology or you will get lost at “ERA.” Tom Verducci wastes no time throwing you into the world of professional baseball without a life jacket, so you should be prepared to swim with basic baseball knowledge.
Benjamin Shibata really liked reading The Cubs Way but wants to know when the Angels will find their way. You can follow him on Twitter.
The warning signs were everywhere on the internet. A basic Google search would have revealed that Brett Favre is currently endorsing crappy razor blades and useless compression sleeves. One honest look at the reviews would have been enough to spare me the knife’s edge – at least I’ll avoid cheaply made compression sleeves. But somehow I couldn’t be reached. Somehow a late night TV ad featuring Brett Favre’s virile endorsement of “a year’s worth of shaving for only $19.99” combined with the As Seen on TV aisle in Target sealed my fate. Thankfully Target accepted the return of my blood-drenched razor blades – bless their return policy.
As the MicroTouch3 Tough Blade sliced into my neck with “made in Germany” ferocity, angry questions ran through my head. Why would you lie to me, Brett Favre? Why would you sell razor blades made from German jail shanks? Why do you suck so much? As the anger subsided, I realized Brett Favre could not be fully blamed. It was I who bought into his ploy, and it was with my own hands that I purchased the blades that sliced my own throat.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I allowed myself to get sucked into a game of hocus-pocus marketing, also referred to as “alternative facts” by some. The statements made in the commercial disarmed the critical thinking part of my brain and convinced me to just believe Brett Favre instead of doing my due diligence: “look at the reviews online,” “don’t let the price fool you,” “they don’t seem to get dull,” “German engineered,” “now the #1 selling blade in drug stores.” The statements completely removed any doubt in my mind. I mean honestly, if they’re telling me to look at the reviews, why should I have any doubt that they are bad reviews? Nobody tells you to do something that would negatively impact them right? Wrong! Had I fact-checked and done everything the commercial asked me to do, I would have been spared the sting of my own stupidity.
Before this experience, I had some faith in the power of free markets to combat any evil in a capitalist market. It just made sense that consumers would reject products that weren’t benefiting them and that the producers of those horrible products would eventually go out of business. This experience is a clear example of why I’m dead wrong.
Imagine a game where all you have to do is get people to try your product because once they do, they become a well-defined set of statistics that will most likely keep the horrible product you just convinced them to buy. By the time a significant number of consumers realize they bought a horrible product and write reviews to warn others about their suffering, the market has already absorbed the useless product and the makers have profited. Now all peddlers have to us is lie low until the consumers forget what they did to them and just repackage their endorsements into another set of useless products. At least that’s what this experience and some brief research into the history of Brett Favre endorsements indicates to me.
In my case, Brett Favre and his amazingly drafted sales pitch got my attention and planted the seed for my future purchase. I didn’t make the purchase right away because I didn’t want to give my credit card number away on the phone. Also, I knew the shipping and handling costs would add to my bill. But rest assured, my attention was given and I was smitten.
What followed was manufactured serendipity in the form of a Target aisle full of As Seen on TV products. As I foolishly walked through the Cave of Wonders, the shiny blades with Brett Favre’s face on it caught my attention. I walked up to it, I saw all the visual cues of a good product in demand: it was well packaged, had consistent messaging, and it was the last one available. Wow, I thought, if Brett Favre says it’s good and people are buying this product, it must be good! So, I threw it in my cart and took it home.
The one thing I will give the MicroTouch 3 credit for it is that the packaging is child proof, but not idiot proof because I was able to open the packaging. God help us all if a child got into these blades – death would surely follow. As I got past the packaging, the actual product felt pretty good my hands. It has weight and there’s no signs that you’ll be slicing open your neck very soon. I applied shaving gel and then proceeded to have a meet-and-greet with the blood that sustains my life all over the bathroom.
The sad thing about this whole affair is that my testimony is not going to save anyone. I know people are buying this blade and proceeding to chop through their necks unexpectedly. Sometimes you have to feel the blood dripping from your face before you heed the warning of those who have suffered before you. I wish you all my sincerest and deepest sympathies as you partake in the pain of hocus-pocus marketing. Hopefully you don’t die and get a full refund.
Benjamin Shibata is no longer on speaking terms with Brett Favre. You should follow him on Twitter.
You are a lifelong baseball fan. Maybe you played softball or baseball at some serious level. Perhaps you have always just enjoyed watching the game and following your favorite team. In any case, let’s just say that baseball was and is important to you in some way.
Now let’s take a step back in time. Back about 10 to 12 years or so. You remember looking down at your newborn son in the maternity ward and thinking what a great smile he had for a baseball card. And those hands were made to swing for the fences. Or maybe it was your daughter stretching her arms out that made you think you could have the next Jennie Finch right there in front of you. You have a quick vision of free tuition and a spot on the Olympic Softball team. Having a child that becomes a good athlete can ease the way through college if nothing else and one can always dream bigger things, right?
Move ahead a little in time and you see your child growing up as you went through the excruciating afternoons of t-ball with all the other neighborhood parents. You all watched as the kids moved up to have coaches and then other players pitch to them. In many cases, the children show measurable improvement in their ability to play the game. Although never vocalized there was perhaps an underlying sense of competition between parents regarding whose child was better at this game. And you were subtly drawn into it.
Fast forward to the present. Despite sitting your child in front of the TV since they were 3 years old to watch every game with you as you painstakingly explained every nuance of the game situation there is a disconnect. Little Johnny doesn’t understand the concept of waiting for a good pitch to hit. He continues to swing at pitches that bounce five feet in front of the plate and has a consecutive strikeout streak going that must be approaching world record proportions. After countless hours playing catch in your yard, Suzy still can’t catch a simple ground ball, letting them all go through her legs as she looks both pained and amused. And then she turns and SKIPS after the ball to retrieve it! You just want to scream.
Though its very hard to do you have to admit it. Go ahead. Say it. My Kid Sucks At Baseball. There, that wasn’t so hard, was it. Let me say it for you. Yes, the cold hard truth. Your kid sucks at baseball. Now how do you deal with it?
If you were simply dealing with this from the perspective of a coach or manager who had a player that was not living up to expectations you could make a swift and decisive move. If there was a team in your league that had not noticed how really bad your player was you could attempt to trade with them. You always could just cut the player from the team and send them on their way and never give it another thought.
Late in the Game…Anything To Turn It Around
Unfortunately, in this case, the so-called player was born into your family. That narrows down your options considerably. Cutting them from the team, while it may be financially advantageous, will probably cause issues with your spouse. Even if they side with you and agree on the move there are still all the other relatives to consider, so that avenue is closed to you. A trade is probably out of the question as well. Suzy is very good at math and science but the Williams family three doors down don’t think that is a good enough package to switch for their daughter who is currently the star pitcher for the middle school team. No one will be duped as to your child’s ability so no trade is going to happen in this neighborhood.
Maybe the problem is that your child does not pay enough attention to the game and gets distracted. This is a common characteristic of children and one that can be hard to defeat. You could try to overcome this deficiency with some stuff. Kids love stuff. Nice, new and maybe even colorful stuff. A brand new, top of the line composite bat might be just what Johnny needs to pay more attention and actually try to hit the ball. So what if it costs more than your monthly car payment, this is important! Get Suzy a new glove and then get out there and throw her a hundred ground balls. Hey, she caught seventeen of them. We have improvement!
You can try to give your child more of your own time to help them work on their game. This implies that they want to work on their game and that there is potential for improvement in their game. If neither of these is true then this could just be a waste time for the both of you.
At this point, it is advisable to remove yourself from the intra-team, competitive parental banter that you have engaged in since your child got into organized sports. Next time Harry from down the road shakes his head after Suzy makes an error and starts telling you how his daughter would make that play every time just listen. And then instead of making excuses for Suzy’s performance remind Harry that your daughter was taking advanced placement math in preparation for her career as a nuclear physicist. Then walk away and get a soda.
Probably the best way to deal with the fact that your kid sucks in baseball for both you and your child is to accept it and move on. I bet if you think about it there are some things in life that you suck at too. And that has not prevented you from getting where you are in life with a fine, healthy child who can play sports and have fun with their peers. Celebrate that fact with them and let them play for fun if that’s all they want from it. As a parent, you can’t do any better than backing your child in what they want out of life.
David is the editor/co-founder of The Planet Of Baseball. He’s a software engineer by day and a baseball blogger by night.
It takes a certain kind of temperament to search “LLWS gambling” and “LLWS prop bets” on a casual Saturday afternoon, but (un)fortunately for you, reader, I have that temperament in spades. What I saw shocked me:
Never great when the first two results are Reddit.
You know, I don’t ask for much. But when it’s the middle of August and I’m getting killed wagering on U.S. Open Series tennis, I need a chance to climb out of the red. Obviously, I’m not going to bet preseason football: That’s for suckers. Really, the only option for degenerate gambling is the Little League World Series, and apparently—for whatever reason—that’s just not a thing.
The hypocrisy appalls me. It’s glaringly apparent after one glance at the Little League Pledge, the second line of which is, I kid you not, “I love my country.” I guess I missed the executive order where Trump just said to hell with Vegas and Atlantic City for the second time. Really, gambling is an essential part of the baseball experience, like rampant steroid use or feeling economically anxious about Yasiel Puig not playing the game the right way. The fiscally responsible, myself among them, say it’s best to teach these kids proper gambling technique early on so they don’t find themselves with shattered kneecaps by the eighth grade.
But more to the point: I have no idea how to bet the series this year but I am sure that it will be at the wizard slots casino. And while I’m tempted to keep all this research to myself, I also have to publish this article in order to have money to gamble, so I’m kind of in a catch-22. Which means…well, here’s what you should and shouldn’t do during this year’s LLWS.
DO: Bet where the sun shines. Think of it as Malcolm Gladwell’s Spring Training Principle: If the state you’re betting on can support baseball in February, the kids will be that much closer to whatever arbitrary number of hours of practice you decide they need in order to master the sport. So that means go big on California and, well, just California: Arizona and Florida aren’t in the tourney this year, and placing money on Texas to be able to focus now that “King of the Hill” is potentially returning seems ill-advised. No, California is your bet, having won twice in the past decade, the only U.S. state to manage as much.
California’s manager, C.J. Ankrum is also a hardass, getting suspended in the regionals for using profanity. The particular word wasn’t disclosed, however, so it’s unclear whether or not it falls under the legal umbrella of “locker room talk.”
DON’T: Fall into the east coast bias. Both New Jersey and Connecticut have teams in the field this year, but while New York won last year, the lesser two thirds of the tri-state area—the Emily and Anne to New York’s Charlotte Brontë—haven’t won since 1998. The struggles of the New Jersey team in particular have reportedly caused Ridgewood native Tom Emanski to make back-to-back-to-back trips to the nearby liquor store.
Yes, that joke was an excuse to link to Tom Emanski’s Wikipedia page, the last sentence of which is fantastically specific:
If you or a loved one have ever received a participation trophy from Tom Emanski, please contact the CSB tips line.
On that note, DO: Complain loudly about participation trophy America. If a team loses its first two games, its tournament should be over. However, while they’re eliminated, the team still gets to play a “crossover consolation game” with a team from the other half of their bracket. The existence of these games (a whopping four in all) is an abomination, and I petition we get rid off this shameful waste of taxpayer money.
DO: Build a better TPP for betting purposes. Of the eight international teams in the tournament, four are from nations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Canada. Smart money is on Japan—winners of four of the past seven tournaments, and trying to bounce back from a disappointing winless effort last year—and one Pacific nation outside the actual TPP agreement, South Korea. The team from Seoul won in 2014 and was runner-up last year.
DON’T: Worry about the working-class whites. No one will bet on North Carolina or South Dakota—they’re the only two U.S. states in the tournament this year to have never won the whole thing. (They also play each other in the first round.) Similarly, Michigan hasn’t won since the Eisenhower administration. Unless the umpires are David Brooks and J.D. Vance, I doubt they’ll have much more success this year.
Speaking of which, DON’T: Expect great umpiring, but also, don’t get too upset about it. They’re all volunteers, and even if the volunteers are of the highest-caliber, they’re only able to umpire one LLWS in their careers. The result? Persistent turnover, and a high degree of inconsistency.
However, I suggest you’re better to direct your criticism to the announcing, which is somehow never serious enough nor fun enough. I think the best solution, as always, is to let Norm MacDonald announce all the games with as little preparation as possible.
DO: Win bar bets with Taiwan baseball trivia. The East Asian state has won the LLWS more than any other entrant, but not without some controversy. Starting in the 70s, Taiwan was dominant, winning—in separate streaks—and five consecutive LLWS championships. The streak was only broken due to a brief ban in the competition against international teams, implemented by organized in hopes of preventing year-round practices (even during school hours) and the use of out-of-district players. Yet they haven’t won since 1996. They left Little League from 1997 to 2003, unable to abide by the stricter residency requirements for the tournament. The assumption is that they were pulling talent from too large an area and essentially building a superteam, which would explain, for example, how they no-hit the entire competition in 1973.
DON’T: Get confused by the format. Two losses and you’re out, but once you’re in a championship game, it’s winner-take-all. Lead by ten after four (or more) complete innings, and the game’s over. The shortened game holds particular importance, as it enables the winning team to save their best arms.
For the 71st straight year, Dusty Baker won’t be involved, which is good as pitch counts are crucial: the magic numbers to keep in mind are 20, 50, and 85. Pitchers can’t throw more than 85 in a game; once they reach that threshold, they can finish the current at-bat but must be replaced immediately after. A pitcher can throw up to 20 pitches and still throw the next day, but anything more requires some rest. (85 pitches, for example, necessitates four days rest.) The interesting middle ground is 50 pitches—the most a player can throw while only requiring two days rest. Given the tournament’s layout, an efficient Mark Buehrle-type for a team in the top half of the bracket—which begins play on August 17th, rather than the 18th—could pitch every game if his team keeps winning. (Does such a player exist? Probably not, because pitching to contact in Little League is a horrendous idea.)
And finally, DON’T: Hesitate to click this link, showing all of our current president’s tweets defending noted baseball player and gambling man Pete Rose. As far as I can tell, Trump hasn’t yet complained that we can’t gamble on LLWS. But between you and me, the over/under on that starts at 2.5 days.
A simpler time.
Lucas Hubbard is a writer and aspiring gambler in Durham, North Carolina, whose baseball career peaked at age nine.
When HBO announced its greenlighting of Confederate, a new series from the show-runners of Game of Thrones, the news was met with a barrage of outrage thanks to its provocative premise: It’s set in an alternate America where the Civil War ended in a stalemate, the North and South exist as separate enemy territories, and slavery has evolved into a modern-day institution. Critics have charged that such a premise exploits the history of slavery and racism in America for pure entertainment value, while defenders have noted that Confederate is merely an example of “Alternate History,” a time-tested genre which includes the similarly premised series The Man in the High Castle (in which Hitler won World War II).
This genre contextualization has done little to sway Confederate’s detractors. Roxane Gay, writing about the series in an article for The New York Times entitled “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction,” asks why seemingly all the examples of alternate history in film and television revolve around the continued subjugation of historically oppressed communities:
“These creators can imagine a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War and black people are still enslaved, but they can’t or aren’t interested in imagining a world where, say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved…It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed.”
Gay’s argument brings to mind a film that has been conspicuously absent from this and other recent debates: White Man’s Burden. The 1995 film portrays exactly the premise that Gay cites as missing from mainstream examples of alternative history: one that sees blacks as the ruling class within modern America, and whites as the oppressed minority.
White Man’s Burden stars John Travolta as Louis Pinnock, a diligent factory worker angling for a promotion so as to better provide for his family (which includes a son on the cusp of adolescence and a new-born daughter), until a misunderstanding with his rich, casually bigoted boss, Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte), leads to his sudden termination and quick fall into poverty. Pushed to the limit of his sanity by his inability to secure anything but minimum-wage work, eviction from his home, and unprovoked harassment by the police (including a beating that is clearly meant to invoke the Rodney King assault from three years earlier), Pinnock snaps and kidnaps Thad at gunpoint, holding him hostage in order to extract a particular sum of money that he feels adequately covers his recent losses. Unfortunately for both men, the kidnapping takes place on a Saturday evening. With the ransom being too large to withdraw from an ATM, they must wait until the banks open for business the coming Monday. What follows is a long weekend in which the two men traverse the urban landscape beset by poverty and gang violence, Pinnock trying to remain free, Thad struggling to remain alive.
With the exception of an opening credits sequence that includes a heavy-handed visual metaphor (the factory where Pinnock is employed makes candy bars, and we watch as the white confections are covered in chocolate during processing) and a cheesy piece of ’90s blues-rock, the film is surprisingly undated, while still serving as a decent snapshot of its era. If White Man’s Burden doesn’t have the bravura filmmaking of Spike Lee’s films from the same period (to which it is clearly indebted, especially in its use of a crescendoing jazz score), or the same sense of narrative propulsion or re-watchability factor of the similarly themed “one bad day” current-issue thriller Falling Down, it still mostly works as a tightly made, pseudo-noir-cum-social-drama in its own right.
This is not to say that it’s an overlooked classic by any means. The narrative never achieves its full potential in terms of tension, partly because the stakes are kept murky until the final 10 minutes (for a movie that revolves around a kidnapping, there are almost none of the requisite scenes where the kidnapper’s plot risks being discovered), and partly because the main characters never truly challenge or believably change one another. Neither is the chemistry between Travolta and Belafonte, in what is essentially a two-man show, anything special. Aside from a questionable choice of accent, Travolta turns in a good performance, though nowhere near the best of his ’90s career renaissance period. Belafonte, meanwhile, brings to the role the gravitas of his legacy as both an actor and an activist, but his performance is too awkwardly stilted to make good on either. (Belafonte starred in a darker — and better — noir that examined the irreconcilable differences between blacks and whites 34 years earlier in Odds Against Tomorrow, a film that Burden can’t help but bring to mind, to its own detriment.)
One of the film’s other shortcomings is its refusal to exploit its stark “what if…” premise. With the exception of a few lines of dialogue, nothing about the story need be changed for it to work as is. As presented, the plot revolves more around the conflicts of class than race, and though the two are inextricably linked, the film never takes the time to make that point or examine why or how.
And yet, by taking for granted that we all recognize that race, class, poverty, bigotry, and oppression are tied together, the film works on a base level. Despite what the reviews of the time said, there is not much ham-fistedness on display. In fact, race is explicitly mentioned only a handful of times.
Still, the uncanniness of watching white people suffer the indignities, large and small, that are reserved for people of color (especially black Americans), is enough to make the world of the film seem almost like a full-on dystopia (at least to non-black viewers).
White Man’s Burden makes no concessions to false dichotomies, nor does it attempt to carve out any middle ground in regard to the reality it presents: The police in America act as an antagonistic, occupying force within communities of color; wealthy liberal elites use members of that community as props to suit their own purpose and assuage their shame; and black people (or, in the film, white people) are immediately presumed guilty of criminal transgression whenever and wherever they go. This unrelenting recognition of reality creates an undercurrent of danger that remains constant throughout the film, and what the mechanics of the plot lack in tension, the atmosphere makes up for, capturing a feeling of everyday dread that Jordan Peele would sharpen and perfect 22 years later in Get Out.
In attempting to provoke audiences with its premise while simultaneously underplaying it, White Man’s Burden highlights the potential pitfalls of alternate history narratives. Perhaps some level of exploitation in the name of entertainment value is necessary, lest they come off as undercooked, and thus suffer the same fate of White Man’s Burden: dismissed upon release, all but forgotten decades later.
Despite its failings, White Man’s Burden deserved better. It is both a worthwhile experiment and an entertaining film, and its commitment to verisimilitude over cheap sentimentality, as well as its ultimate refusal to present a happy ending or overwrought catharsis, places it far above other middle-brow racial dramas of the same time period, such as A Time To Kill or Higher Learning.
The man behind the film is also deserving of re-evaluation. White Man’s Burden owes its unique perspective on white-black relations to its writer-director Desmond Nakano, who is neither white nor black, but rather a third-generation Japanese American. Nakano has had an interesting, if sparse, career, in that of the three other movies that he’s been attached to — his sole other directorial effort is 2007’s internment camp/baseball drama American Pastime, and he’s a credited screenwriter on Edward J. Olmos’s Chicano crime saga American Me, as well as the adaptation of Hubert Selby’s cult novel Last Exit to Brooklyn — are all dramas that examine America’s castigation of its underclass.
As critical voices continue to call for better representation both in front of and behind the camera, as well as more diverse narratives from historically oppressed and/or invisible voices, Nakano and his directorial debut should serve as a flawed but worthy example. Neither he nor his film deserve to be consigned to the bargain bin of history, alternate or otherwise.
Zach Vasquez lives in Los Angeles, where all history is alternate.
Detroit is about one of the more unpleasant things to have happened in a city where so many unpleasant things have happened that you can elicit a feeling of despair just by naming your movie after it. (“Wanna go see Detroit?” “No, that sounds depressing.”) Directed with well-placed outrage by Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay by her Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty scribe Mark Boal, the overlong film bristles with anger but is undermined by a meandering, repetitive story that doesn’t come together well enough to make the arduous experience worthwhile.
It’s set a half-century ago, in 1967, when the black neighborhoods of Detroit (and other American cities) felt oppressed by the heavy-handed tactics of the mostly white police force, and long-simmering racial tension came to a boil. (Hard to imagine anything like that happening today, right?) The result was a five-day riot that left more than 40 people dead. Onscreen titles summarize how the city came to be such a tinderbox, but the movie isn’t about the history of Detroit, or even the 1967 riot. It’s about a specific ugly incident that happened during the riot, involving racist cops and black civilians at the Algiers Motel. Since the film presumes unfamiliarity with it (a safe bet), and since the incident doesn’t occur until the second half of the movie, I won’t spoil it.
Before we get there, the film introduces us to numerous unrelated people and lets us follow them around without a sense of where it’s all headed. The Detroit cops include blatantly racist Krauss (Will Poulter, with sinister eyebrows) and his complicit cohorts Demens (Jack Reynor) and Flynn (Ben O’Toole). Early on, Krauss is reprimanded for over-aggressive policing (to put it mildly). “We’re not supposed to shoot the looters,” a colleague tells him. “Then how the hell are we supposed to stop them?” asks Krauss, putting his finger on the problem without realizing it.
Among the civilians, there’s Larry (Algee Smith), who’s part of a quintet of black singers on the verge of being discovered by Motown, and Fred (Jacob Latimore), the younger brother of one of the other group members. There’s also Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), straddling the line between law enforcement and civilian as an armed security guard who’s disrespected by cops for not being white and by black men for being a sellout.
Riot scenes are interspersed with real news footage, giving the docudrama an air of authenticity while underscoring Bigelow’s skill at making the recreations match the originals. All of this is fitfully engaging, but the narrative feels like it’s wandering. Bigelow’s tactics change when we finally get to the Algiers Motel, a seedy flophouse where Krauss & co., looking for a sniper, subject every innocent guest — mostly black men (including those already named plus Anthony Mackie, Nathan Davis Jr., and Jason Mitchell), plus two white girls (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) — to manhandling, abuse, and worse. Now the real news footage goes away and we’re trapped for what feels like an eternity in this frustrating nightmare scenario. At last it becomes clear that this was what the movie was all about, and we’re left to wonder why all that exposition wasn’t abbreviated.
The Algiers sequence occupies a significant chunk of the film. It’s tense and often terrifying, the Detroit cops joined by National Guard and State Police while chaos reigns outside, but those returns diminish the longer it drags on. After a while the movie becomes more of a grueling punishment than an artistic experience, an “eat this, it’s good for you” film that might not even be that good for you. The commentary on police brutality, while duly enraging, is reduced to platitudes and on-the-nose declarations (“What kind of animal would do this?” says a good cop upon finding a victim). But even if it were eloquent and nuanced, at what point does this display of misery and injustice stop being nutritional — something to spur us to action — and start discouraging us? We know there is mud. How much must we wallow in it?
The performances are good, even with Poulter’s racist cop being written so one-dimensionally. Algee Smith’s young crooner is an emotional anchor, and the way the experience affects him is an interesting thread that should have gotten more attention. But as noble as Bigelow and Boal’s intentions must have been, the film generates more heat than light, stirring up anger without channeling it into something productive.
Grade: C+
Eric D. Snider lives in Portland, which has no racial problems whatsoever, no sir.
A personal sacrifice, when done right, can be an incredibly moving and effective part of a story. When done wrong, it can deflate the entire narrative. Often, the difference is between a true sacrifice and an unearned gimmick. For the sake of relevance, we’ll look at the sacrifices in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s latest film, and show how even a subtle depiction of true sacrifice can be more moving than a sweeping depiction of a false one.
Nolan’s films have never really been subtle. For the most part his films have catered to that first theater viewing — that initial experience is what counts. This leads to some heavily expository dialogue designed to keep the viewer oriented at every turn: who’s who, what timeline we’re in, what the various characters’ motivations are. On that initial viewing, the exposition is nice to have and it’s effective in drawing your attention where Nolan wishes it to be, while that same exposition can make repeat viewings a bit burdensome.
Whether Dunkirk is a response to this much-addressed criticism or not, it’s certainly a departure from the usual. We’re given next to no expository dialogue, with the few orientations we need delivered via title cards and through overheard strategic plans. We don’t know who these people are, we don’t know what they’ve seen, but we’re clued into their recent pasts by their reaction — or lack of reaction — to seeing their friends gunned down left and right.
This choice is risky. The narrative advice writers are usually given is to make sure their characters have a story — a history, a background that defines their choices. But in Dunkirk, our characters are proxies, seemingly meant to stand as any one of the thousands who shared those experiences, or to stand as representatives of Britain as a whole; any character background is almost entirely generic. So why is this effective? Why dowe care about Tom Hardy’s character even though his face and his voice are shrouded for nearly the entire film? Why do the unnamed citizens coming to rescue their countrymen invoke such emotion? We’ve been told that this shouldn’t work.
Stakes are important in filmmaking. Conflict is essential for strong narrative storytelling. And sacrifice must mean something. In so many franchise films, this concept has largely flown out the window. Take, for instance, The Avengers (2012). There’s conflict, there’s escalation, and the stakes are clear (though, per the genre, extreme). All of America’s supposedly favorite superheroes battling evil together, including Iron Man, who we all apparently love. So the setup is strong. But the problem comes at the end of the battle. Tony Stark, in a moment of apparent character growth, retrieves the nuclear warhead that’s about to blow up Manhattan and flies through a wormhole into space in a moment of self-sacrifice. It’s a one-way trip, his computer tells him, and we’re to believe this is Very Serious and that Iron Man is going to die, except for the dozen sequels already announced at this point.
While this had the potential to be a definitive moment, they of course couldn’t actually kill Iron Man. Nobody really thinks he’s going to die — and he should have. We cut from somber face to somber face showing us it’s a somber moment, and then of course Iron Man’s sacrifice is undercut. He magically falls back through the wormhole just in time and is perfectly fine, unharmed by his close proximity to a nuclear bomb, his exposure to empty space, and his free-fall being interrupted by the Hulk slamming him into a building.
Of course, I’m not debating the physics of a superhero movie. The film refusing to let his personal sacrifice be a real sacrifice makes the whole thing seem to blow over with no real consequences. The city is left in ruins but apparently nobody was seriously hurt. But even worse, Tony Stark isn’t changed by his brush with death. And then the viewers are practically mocked for ever caring in a post-credits sequence that shows there weren’t any emotional stakes, either.
Nolan falls victim to this himself in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). How much more poignant would that film have been if Bruce Wayne had actually sacrificed himself to save the city instead of just tricking the viewer into thinking he had?
This doesn’t mean that an intended sacrifice must be fatal to be meaningful. But if not, it should at least signal a change in the character. Gandalf sacrifices himself for his friends in The Fellowship of the Ring, only to return, but when he returns he has changed. He’s fought with death itself and emerged a wiser being. This is the crux of narrative structure in general: the journey must lead to change, or the journey wasn’t worth taking.
So Dunkirk’s heroes have changed. In fact, they’ve done much of the changing before we see them. Whether it’s a pilot continuing the aerial dogfight despite knowing the fuel is running out, or civilians sailing the boats that represent their livelihoods into enemy waters to rescue their countrymen, they realize that their sacrifice could be the ultimate one. They choose to do it anyway because the cause demands it, even if it’s a difficult decision. They know they’re just a tiny cog in an enormous war machine, and the war has changed them, stripped their sense of self. Tom Hardy’s final scenes are powerful because we know as well as he does that there is no tidy end to this story. Five years remain in the war and he’s in the hands of the enemy.
Not every story calls for a character to lay down their life for their friends. But if they do, there’d damn well better be a reason.
Daxson Hale lives in Provo, Utah, where being named “Daxson” is not a sacrifice.
“Hooray for Hollywood” will never sound right to me without the tin-can hiss of a VHS tape many times rewound. Growing up in the bleak hinterlands of northeast Ohio, I longed for what a 5-year-old considers Shangri-La – Central Florida. We made an almost-annual pilgrimage to Postcardland, to wave at Goofy, scream at Jaws and, as soon as I was old enough to understand the free market, gasp at prices. But that’s one week in 52 spent in the Vacation Capital of the World. I may not have been good enough with percentages yet to realize that not even 2% of my adolescent year was being spent in paradise, but I knew my itch was hardly scratched.
That’s where the tapes came in. Scotch brand T120s, with a cover I could draw in my sleep – a spherical sunset floating over a gray tower of thinning stripes. Dad, our steadfast documentarian and sarcastic narrator, swore by the T120s and the family camcorder, mercilessly heavy machine that looked more suited to destroying enemy helicopters than capturing vacation memories. Whenever I needed to be whisked away, I turned to that library of T120s, each with a white sticker down the side and a hand-scrawled note hinting at the exotic contents within, and chose my destination for the next two hours. Every tape was different, of course. There was the one where infant-me drank pool water to the on-screen protests of mom and off-screen protests of dad. The one where my brother approached the Ghostbusters at Universal Studios with a cautious reverence usually reserved for holy figures and heads of state. But there were a few things that showed up again and again, things that dad couldn’t help but shoot every time, like employees explaining that video recording was strictly prohibited and the joyous opening scene of The Great Movie Ride.
Under the dreamy painted flats of Hollywoodland by moonlight, in cars like rolling theaters, we press on toward a marquee alive in candy-colored neon, promising “A SWEEPING SPECTACLE OF THRILLS! CHILLS! ROMANCE!” Now Playing, “A SPECTACULAR JOURNEY INTO THE MOVIES!” As we leave the real world behind, the big band plays us off. “Hooray for Hollywood, where you’re terrific if you’re even good.”From the plywood sets of reality into movieland, the Hollywood that never was and always will be.
I stole that last part from Michael Eisner, who used it to dedicated the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park on May 1, 1989. Twenty-eight years and a name change later, The Great Movie Ride is the last opening day attraction left in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. As announced at the D23 Expo, that streak will come to an end on August 13. The lonely survivor of The Hollywood That Never Was and The Hollywood That Never Would Be.
Mayor Bill Frederick promised voters that someday they’d be calling Hollywood “Orlando West.” It might’ve been a joke, but only just. At the tail end of the 1980s, Central Florida was anxiously on the edge of a new era. Between Disney’s long-awaited third gate and Universal Studios’s first-ever scratch-built theme park, over a billion dollars were betting on Orlando’s future as a filmmaking nexus. And not just for production, but inspiration. These new theme parks would celebrate both movie magic and its conjuring. Learn how miniatures were used to fake an earthquake and then live one. Wander elaborate backlot sets until you stumble into an actual shoot. See the set of Ernest Saves Christmas.
After a bitter, occasionally toxic race to the finish, Disney-MGM Studios beat Universal Studios Florida by a year. It would be a hollow victory, however, since neither park was prepared for the public, in very different ways. Universal’s fatal flaw was ambition — each of its technologically ground-breaking attractions required Swiss-watch timing to work and it was their first time building clocks. Disney’s fatal flaw was almost the exact opposite. The Disney-MGM Studios opened its doors with a grand total of two rides. As in more than one and less than three. There were a handful of shows (three, and that’s including a combination walking tour), but only two actual rides. The first and most famous was The Backstage Studio Tour, a two-hour(!) odyssey, by foot and tram, across soundstages and the park’s sprawling backlot, home to the house from The Golden Girls. The ride was reconfigured and whittled away until its last incarnation, running a mere fifteen minutes, closed last year.
The other was The Great Movie Ride.
Following Epcot’s lead, The Great Movie Ride would not only serve as the park’s centerpiece attraction, but also rest inside its centerpiece landmark, a near-flawless replica of the iconicGrauman’s Chinese Theatre. Or at least the park’s first centerpiece landmark. It was quickly usurped by the Earffel Tower, a water tower with ears, in advertising for the Studios. In 2001, a 122-foot statue of the Sorcerer’s Hat from Fantasia was dumped directly in front of the Chinese Theater. It served as a combination gift shop and eyesore for 14 years. But even now with the original view restored and the Earffel Tower toppled, the Theater hasn’t reclaimed the spotlight. T-shirts commemorating the whole resort use The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror instead, a ride perpetually on-loan from CBS about a haunted hotel with negligent maintenance. By no means an undeserving attraction, but hardly the best representative of a park called Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Then again, the Chinese Theatre never quite fit with its iconic neighbors. Cinderella Castle. The Tree of Life. The golf ball at Epcot. Staggering architectural mission statements of fantasy, nature, and the harmonious future on the other side of tomorrow. The Chinese Theatre doesn’t even break 100 feet. Its tapered, horned crown cuts an imposing profile at the end of the park’s Hollywood Boulevard, but it never overtakes the gift shops and has only shrunk in the leaning shadows of palm trees with 28 years of growth. Up close, it’s a fortress. Carved dragons snarl over stone lions. Its courtyard keeps out the polite riot of theme park ambiance, leaving it calm and empty save for the handprints of famous visitors and scattered bonsai. Since the destruction of the park’s backlot, it’s one of the last remaining quiet corners of the Studios. Approaching The Great Movie Ride inspires reflection, wonder, and more than a little foreboding.
It’s a fitting first impression for a 20-minute crash course on the scope, scale, and history of film. The Great Movie Ride belongs to a gilded class of Disney attraction that only lasted about seven years: the animatronic essay. If that sounds too academic, the shoe fits. When Epcot opened in 1982 as EPCOT Center, its future-focused front-nine was occupied (and further expanded) by dark rides that didn’t have plots so much as subjects. Instead of flying with Peter Pan, guests would glide through the history of transportation (World of Motion). Instead of earning a reckless driving charge with Mr. Toad, guests would learn how cave paintings led to the telephone (Spaceship Earth). Ambitious, enlightening whirlwinds through topics as far removed as energy and imagination, populated with dozens of audio-animatronic figures and inflected with a romantic optimism for what tomorrow might bring. Fittingly, The Great Movie Ride began life as a potential pavilion for Epcot. The idea, “Great Moments at the Movies,” excited the CEO enough to promote it to crown jewel of a whole new theme park.
There’s no set-up for the ride, only an appropriate tease — trailers for the coming attractions, rolling on an endless loop for the folks in line. As soon as you’re under that glittering marquee, you’re on the other side of the screen. The ride-along montage opens in musicals — Footlight Parade, Singin’ in the Rain, Mary Poppins. From soot-stained London to the seediest of underbellies, 1930s Chicago. The gangster scene is one of the most detailed in any theme park attraction. Yellowed newspapers sprout from overfilled trash cans. Crates of bathtub gin provide volatile cover for the crooks brewing it. James Cagney glowers from a poster for The Public Enemy at his animatronic counterpart across the street. Then the movies fight back. The typewriter roar of tommy guns deafens as a pinstriped hood hijacks the ride and leaves our tour guide behind. On only the busiest days, the hijacking duties are split with the next scene, the Western, where an outlaw sets fire to the bank and makes off with the entire tram. Either way, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood wave us along the trail and onto the Spaceship Nostromo. For a brief moment in the land that Mickey built, we’re menaced by the xenomorph in the sweaty, mechanical hell of Ridley Scott’s Alien. And so it goes, seamlessly progressing through Raiders of Lost Ark, Tarzan the Ape Man, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and so on, ending appropriately enough with a movie. In about three minutes, they cover everything else. Saturday Night Fever and the Airplane! scene that skewers it. Freddy Krueger. Marlon Brando. Tootsie and the parting of the Red Sea.
Then it’s over. Make sure you have all your children and enjoy the rest of your day here at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Against all odds, there isn’t even a gift shop at the end.
But that’s the beauty of the Great Movie Ride; it’s a perfect translation and poetic elaboration on what so often seems an ordinary experience — going to the movies. That mystery and trepidation on approach — what are you going to see inside? Will it underwhelm, inspire, or terrify? Waiting patiently through the purgatory of trailers, only here they’re exclusively for some of the greatest films ever made. Settling into a field of seats with complete strangers all rolling the same dice you are, all wanting to be moved. The best movies double as emotional transportation, inviting you in for just a short while to a world both recognizable and unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The Great Movie Ride makes that transportation literal, too. The hundred-strong hiss of snakes in the Well of Souls. The Wicked Witch of the West threatening you and your little dog personally. Tarzan screaming overhead. And then come the credits. All the famous faces that made it possible. Not a movie. The movies. Lights up. Onto the parking lot with nothing to show for it but a ticket stub and the feeling in your gut. When the movies move you.
The Great Movie Ride would be the last animatronic essay attempted by Disney. Even now, it’s never been as highly regarded as its more scientifically minded forebears. Like everything that ends, a vocal faction of the internet has seen fit to eulogize it as boring, overrated and outdated. To the Imagineers’ credit, the movies they included still pass pop-culture scrutiny for the most part, even if the ride’s opening genres — musicals, gangsters and Westerns — are mostly novelties today, not unlike the ride itself.
The foolhardy dream of “Hollywood East” barely lasted a decade. While Universal Studios Florida still hosts productions from time to time, Disney-MGM Studios went very quiet, very fast. In 2004, the in-park animation studio, responsible for Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, shut down. The related tour, with long walks past empty desks behind glass, closed in 2015. It was replaced by a Chewbacca meet-and-greet. The Streets of America, blocks of sets painstakingly recreating New York City and San Francisco, were bulldozed last year to make room for immersive new lands dedicated to Star Wars and Toy Story.
Even though The Great Movie Ride still sits in the center of a theme park dedicated to the movies, it doesn’t fit like it used to. A love letter to cinema so sincere, Disney had to negotiate with MGM and 20th Century Fox for the rights to certain scenes, and negotiated with everyone else (except Universal) for the closing montage clips, all to be replaced by synergy.
Dad’s gone now. The Scotch T120s get fuzzier by the viewing. On August 13, The Great Movie Ride will have its final showing. Fortunately, it survived into an age where everyone keeps an HD camera in their pocket. It won’t go unremembered or undocumented. But I’ll always need that tin-can hiss to take me back, to another time and place, when the silver screen was a complete, romantic mystery and not yet a passion. And that’s what the movies are all about.
Hooray for Hollywood. Roll credits.
Jeremy Herbert lives in Cleveland, the Orlando of the north.
Growing up in Maine, I rooted for teams well outside the standard TV coverage map for the area. In the summer, when NESN would broadcast Brian Daubach’s strikeouts as the Red Sox limped to an impotent second-place AL East finish year after year, I’d cut away at the :28 and :58 mark of each hour to ESPN, where I could check the not-yet permanent ticker to see how my favorite Toronto Blue Jays were doing.
But this detached, static experience didn’t satisfy me. As I got a bit older, a bit more innovative and Internet-savvy, I discovered a better alternative. I discovered MLB Gameday.
The peak of my MLB Gameday era was 2002-2003, which, at my house, meant we were just beyond the days of dial-up internet. And the Blue Jays, surely, were on the upswing, having found their third baseman of at least the decade to come—Eric Hinske.
I had known for a while that the internet contained information. After my own Little League season was through, my summer afternoons—out in the fan-cooled back room, where our good, hulking Windows XP was—were perpetually vacant. I would be too tired from morning sports to be active, too young and pale to entertain just hanging out outside. Steadily, I became (in the least sordid way imaginable, you guys) more familiar with the web. I learned the Blue Jays had their own website that contained news, notes, and, crucially, up-to-date scores. During games, on the right side of the screen above the box score, they also offered tracking options:
Russ Adams, much like Eric Hinske, failed to be the Blue Jays’ savior. In five years, his slash line was .247/.313/.372. (Bluejays.com via Wayback Machine)
I don’t remember my initial reluctance to listen to the game’s audio. Perhaps that connection was flaky with our internet, or I didn’t like the announcer’s voice. (That was the case with tracking my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers: Myron Cope was a legend, but goddamn was his voice rough to the uninitiated.) More likely, I knew there was something unhealthy about the behavior of following these games every day, and since we didn’t have a pair of headphones at the computer, playing audio would ruin my secrecy. My only option, then, was “Gameday.”
Gameday brewed baseball down to its essential components. The version today has been spruced up by someone fluent in UX, but its pioneering form was meager. An outline of the field, with the position players sprinkled about. To the right, a gray silhouette profile of a hitter at the plate, sized identically whether he was David Eckstein or Vladimir Guerrero. (It did flip to the left side, when someone like Hinske or Carlos Delgado stepped to bat.) And above the plate itself, a box—not a grid like on today’s broadcasts, just a box—denoting the strike zone.
When a pitch came in, three circles could show up. Green circles were balls. One of my favorite anachronisms of Gameday was when a green circle would show up right on the batter’s lumbar, typically due to an intentional walk to a switch-hitter silhouette, occasionally something else. (When a massive delay followed this green ball, you knew that the closure of his local Bass Pro Shops had triggered Josh Beckett—and that he was taking his frustrations out on the hitter.)
Red circles were strikes, and the text summary below the image showed if it were swinging, looking, or fouled off. But the best circle—bar none—was the blue circle. That meant the ball had been put in play. From there, for a brief moment, you—unlike anyone watching in-person or on TV, who was constrained by the pitch and the swing and the literal result—knew that anything could happen.
I can’t find Gameday itself, but I found a link from 2007 calling Gameday on MLB.com “the premiere destination for following live baseball on the Internet.” (Wayback Machine)
Really, the arrival of the blue circle primed the dopamine receptors. The coding system when a ball went into play required two steps: first the circle’s arrival, then the play’s outcome. This interval was crucial to enjoying the Gameday experience. For a long time, the blue circle told you nothing about the play’s outcome. It was perfect. You’d sit at the screen, waiting for the result while, in your mind’s eye, you saw web gems and upper deck shots or maybe a drive to the gap that the always-over-ambitious Raul Mondesi would try to stretch for a triple. When the Blue Jays were hitting, blue circles were a delight; when Esteban Loaiza or a young Roy Halladay toed the rubber, they harbored anxiety. There’s the old statement about the forward pass in football, about how three things can happen and two of them are bad. When a blue circle showed up with the Blue Jays in the field, the ratio seemed even worse.
Quickly, I realized that the best way to use Gameday was as an intermittent tracking tool. Much like it’s no fun to stare at your phone and perpetually wait for some cool person’s text to appear, I hated observing, through Gameday, Roy Halladay work four-pitch at-bat after four-pitch at-bat before an inevitable grounder to the left side of the infield. For the vast majority of the game, I found it better to take the information in via chunks, checking in every couple of minutes to see how things had progressed.
Everything seems inevitable when you know what’s directly preceding it: A strikeout makes sense from an 1-2 count. You may even expect it. But when you tap over to Ebaumsworld to watch the “Badger, Badger” video for the ninth time with the count at 1-0, upon returning, a strikeout is a pleasant surprise.
I became addicted, opening the Gameday window and closing it and opening it again. I was, essentially, clicking a button to receive a random reward: An advantageous 3-1 count, maybe a leadoff double. By virtue of having this ritual every batter, game after game, I could convince myself that I could manufacture success for my teams. These tricks, I realize now (and almost certainly realized then), were wholly rooted in superstition and the too-human fallacy of trying to find patterns in large numbers. Nevertheless, I’d try meaningless things like only clicking over after I had completed a good run in my solitaire game in the adjacent window or read a whole article on ESPN’s Page 2, minimizing the Gameday screen and then reopening after an appropriate amount of time to put together a rally for the team. (For whatever reason, I believed looking too long at the tracker would inevitably augur a string of bad luck for the Jays. Perhaps doing so meant I was ceding too much control to the program, that the game was playing me.)
I knew, of course, that this was a rather pathetic way to digest a game. But soon, I had decoded each system inside and out, and I was getting more information than the program had been designed to transmit. During any Jays game, I knew that when there was a massive delay when a blue circle had gone on the screen, this was generally good news for the hitting team: There were more outcomes to code—a new runner was on base, the man on first had scored, maybe even, Christ, there had been a throwing error and the new runner had advanced a base—and the flustered intern who had been tasked with monitoring the afternoon’s Gameday duties was now hyperventilating. Sometimes, though, the long pause brought surprises: An outfield assist to end the inning, a throwing error that caused the zealous runner to then commit fielders’ interference. One time, when I was tracking my ill-fated fantasy baseball team, Marlins closer Todd Jones and third baseman Mike Lowell combined on a perfectly-executed hidden ball trick, and I swear the screen merely vaporized the runner on third without any explanation.
One year, Gameday’s pitch tracking received an update: The circles, forever naked, had become detailed. All of them now carried speed and pitch type data, but most importantly, the blue circle’s mystery was gone. Besides just denoting a ball “in play,” the blue circle told you in advance if the outcome resulted in “out(s) recorded,” “no out recorded,” or “run(s) scored.” Gameday, while improving in an informational sense, had steadily encroached on its imaginative elements. Before, you could be ignorant; now you’d know, with the appearance of each circle, at the minimum a broad range of what to expect.
The tracker still had some nuance: A fielder’s choice where a runner scored from third still got marked as a “run(s) scored” play, but a run-scoring double play fell under the umbrella of “out(s) recorded.” But mostly, the insane uncertainty of the system—the setup and the payoff, the fun of the whole thing—had been neutered. A few surprises remained (would one run score, or three?), but you would never again be waiting on a coder’s frantic fingers to tell you if there had been a grand slam or a double play. No longer could every blue circle maybe, potentially, translate into a moonshot to center.
And as technology further improved, the lag time between the initial scent of the outcome and the actual outcome declined. The payoffs couldn’t built up as much. And the bugs happened with less frequency. Gameday, today, provides a valid, informative tracker, an awful development. By becoming more modern, the archaic system actually lost much of its kitschy appeal.
The 2016 version of Gameday looks snazzy, even incorporating elements of the home ballpark in each window. (mlb.com/gameday via Wayback Machine)
Through high school and college, I increasingly lacked the time and interest to sit by a computer and track my teams; I required a more active viewing experience. I found friends with the NFL Red Zone package, and eventually bars with TVs and cheap beer. (I also grew increasingly comfortable with frequenting, um, alternative websites—whose URLs almost never ended with “dot com”—that would generously provide streams of games.) I stopped watching baseball altogether, as the Blue Jays ensconced themselves in the lower tiers of the league and viewing 162 games became an ordeal more than a joy. I started writing about sports, too, finding the synthesized form of every game insufficient for any sort of reporting purposes. I assumed that, having moved beyond my nascent days of fandom, Gameday and its ilk would become blips in my rearview.
But I can’t escape game trackers entirely. Once I entered the working world, they popped right back into my life. It’s no secret they’re perfect for the cubicle, able to be tucked away in a corner tab, easily accessible once the boss dips out for the day.
A few weeks ago, I had the Wimbledon Slamtracker up on my screen. It’s not nearly as great as Gameday. Your best “predictor”—equivalent to the blue circles of Gameday—is merely the serve speed. You can deduce whether it’s a first or second serve, but the tracker doesn’t clarify if the serve was a fault, so it’s a fairly useless indicator. But still, there comes value from bopping in and out of the window, seeing, say, Gilles Muller earn a break point against Rafael Nadal, clicking away, and then returning, burdened with hope, thirty-five or so seconds later. The tracker serves as the dumbest rewards game there is; every time I click back on the tab, I’ll have bad news or a pleasant surprise. But like a rat in a lab, I’ve found I’ll apparently play the game as long as necessary. When you’re at work, I figure, that’s not a bad deal.
Yet the other appeal of these trackers is almost ethereal. A comeback from down love-40 no longer arises from a natural succession of a couple winners and a string of double faults. It’s a sign of divine intervention. Gameday abstracts the sport, curbing its limitations, putting the probable and improbable on level footing. Occasionally, it delivers the impossible.
In October 2015, I studied Gameday in utter confusion as the Blue Jays, tied with the Rangers in the seventh inning of a win-or-go-home Divisional Playoff, fell behind due to one of the strangest plays in baseball history.
The summary text for the event—“Odor scored on throwing error by catcher Martin.”—is grossly inadequate. A routine toss back from the catcher to the pitcher, one that happens hundreds of times each game without incident—a play that doesn’t warrant any circle, let alone a blue one—went awry when a bat that never falls in the path of the ball fell in the path of the ball. Were circumstances slightly different (the ball dead, the act intentional) nothing would’ve counted. But it stood. The play had tangible impact; without some nervy Texas fielding and Jose Bautista’s heroics, the fluke could’ve altered baseball history. And while I was quite pissed at the time, stewing at my monitor with the window veiled by spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I realized, begrudgingly, that such a situation was the optimal Gameday experience: the kind of play that could only happen when you let your imagination run wild.
Lucas Hubbard is a writer in Durham, North Carolina, who no longer has computer privileges at his day job.
War for the Planet of the Apes opens with scenes that are familiar to American viewers: soldiers silently work their way through the jungle, looking for the enemy. The camera angle switches and they pull up short: three Kong have been spotted on the hill. The soldiers’ helmets are scrawled with slogans for morale, and we already get the sense we’ll hear a Jimi Hendrix song.
But this is Northern California, not North Vietnam, and that’s Kong with a K, as in King. And once these opening scenes are over, it won’t be the journey of the soldiers that we follow, but the revolutionary apes. In this parable, the apes are righteous rebels, and familiar iconography is re-envisioned, recasting humanity as the morally bankrupt hegemonic losers as the audience sympathizes with the outsider, populist primates instead. That is to say, humanity is the United States, and in War for the Planet of the Apes, we are not the good guys.
Apes pushes the viewer to interrogate the false dichotomy between the “primitive” and the “civilized,” a narrative used to great effect during the Vietnam War. Right or wrong, guerrilla warfare was then cast as horrific, ignoring America’s history with it, and the fact that we would never have gained independence without it. But viewing these same tropes from the side of the transgressor, we see a robust culture and well-drawn characters. The question of mercy — another way of considering what it means to be civilized — is central to this movie. Caesar fears he has become consumed with his angry quest for vengeance, like his old friend Koba, and the Colonel accuses him of coming to kill him and therefore having no mercy. But Caesar reminds the Colonel that he offered peace and was rebuffed. In the end, Caesar chooses mercy. It is the supposedly evolved Colonel who couldn’t contemplate a life as a “lower functioning” creature, something made all the more tragic considering how we see the girl Nova thrive with her new friends the apes. What to the Colonel is a death sentence, is to Caesar and Nova merely a different type of human being.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the movie is how the human soldiers dehumanize (deprimatize?) their collaborators. All primates on the human side, by choice or otherwise, are branded, spray-painted, and conscripted into servitude wherein they are known only by the slur “donkey.” This, the second Kong-related pop culture reference, could have been funny in a different film. But in Apes, the word is spat out, like the derogatory term that it is. The apes are roughly manhandled by the soldiers, and they seem unable to sign or speak English properly, an indication that though they are cut off from their kind, they are not accepted or cared for by the humans, either. All of this behavior from the humans shows their true nature: For all their talk of being civilized, they have done whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to let themselves off the hook for horribly mistreating the apes. They follow in a long tradition of militaries before them, and America’s is no exception. Calling Vietnamese people “Charlie,” short for Victor Charlie, for Viet Cong, is a clear comparison, but our military has been giving its enemies off-putting nicknames throughout history, from Jerry or Kraut for Germans to Hajji for the recent Middle East wars.
Apes has a cinematic kindred spirit in Dances with Wolves, calling to mind our genocide of the indigenous people of this continent. In a pretty clear parallel, the human soldiers, led by Woody Harrelson’s Colonel, want to exterminate the apes at any cost. Importantly, Apes improves on Wolves (and its many imitators, from Ferngully to Avatar) by having Caesar as the unequivocal leader of both his clan and the film, rather than using a colonial savior. While Caesar’s name comes from the original movies, it’s also a nice reference to more than one political revolutionary, who can be viewed as either populist heroes or violent insurrectionists, depending on your point of view, just like Andy Serkis’s masterfully acted lead. As Woody Harrelson points out, Caesar’s eyes are incredibly expressive, and in fact his entire physical performance is so impressive here that it would be noteworthy even if motion capture were not involved.
Apes clearly looks and feels like Wolves, with the beautiful vistas of a struggling civilization looking for a new home, backed by a score that is at turns sweeping, playful, and downright dire. But the clear comparison came through for me in the opening scenes, when the cavalry arrives to defend the trench from the humans. Covered in body paint and making war cries, the apes are so clearly a different culture from humankind. Just like the Sioux in Dances with Wolves, they simply want to be left alone to live their lives, and attempt to broker peace. This time, however, history is re-written: The plague that humans bring harms themselves, and technology is not a match for the superior strength of the apes.
Many critics have rightfully pointed out the parallels between Apes and World War II. While they are certainly present, they are not the only influence. We have a tendency as Americans to focus on WWII and the Greatest Generation, since it is often viewed with a sense of nostalgia. That war is considered the last just war, a time when America was the celebrated rescuer. Of course, this is a selective reading of history, one that ignores our isolationist policies, or the many refugees we turned away, opting instead to cherry-pick those we saved, including some, like Wernher von Braun, who had cooperated with the Third Reich but who nevertheless could offer something useful to our government.
Science fiction is at its best when it’s used as a prism through which we can view our own reality. Apes flips the script and shows us the other side of our own real conflicts by maintaining much of the imagery but placing the sympathetic characters on the other side, proverbially “over there.” After spending the first two movies of the trilogy investing in the primates and their conflict with humankind, the creative team earned the right to have the dissident apes take center stage as the true protagonists of the Planet of the Apes series.
