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A-Rod, Ray Rice and the game of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’

February 18, 2015

Cue Connie Francis. In this “the winter of our discontent” – the season of 90-inch snowfalls, Southern ice, broken water pipes and equally shattered hearts – the lament of the woman with the catch in her voice and a torch-song life to match would seem most appropriate.

Really, it’s as if we’re all stuck in “Dr. Zhivago” – without Omar Sharif.

In this “region of ice” – thank you, Joyce Carol Oates – everyone is sorry. Ray Rice is sorry for cold-cocking his then wife-to-be, Janay Palmer, issuing an apology almost a year to the date of his Valentine’s Day (image) Massacre. (Could the holiday of hearts have been the inspiration?)

Hot on Ra-Ri’s Achilles heels comes A-Rod and his handwritten apology for steroid abuse and – the thing that always does you in more than the transgression itself – lying about it.

And speaking of lying, opprobrium and ridicule continue to snow down on disgraced anchorman Brian Williams for aggrandizing his role in the Iraq War – although Jerry Seinfeld’s line on the SNL 40th anniversary show about Williams being part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast was one of the subtler digs. The irony is that the talk show-minded Williams probably counted as friends many of the people now making fun at his expense. Ouch.

Let’s just say Williams should be glad that he’s not A-Rod. The disdain heaped on him by The New York Times’ columnist Tyler Kepner is typical of the way in which the once and apparently future New York Yankee is now viewed. There are two schools of thought on this. One says that justice is justice and compassion, like patience, has its limits, particularly as said limited patience is often accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the contrite are not all that contrite but actually seeking something less noble than the epic redemption found in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” say like a return to the Yanks or the NFL. (It reminds you of the moment in “Gone With the Wind” in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that she’s like the thief who isn’t sorry for what he’s done but is awfully sorry he got caught.) ...

Sports as spice

January 7, 2015

I had to laugh when I saw the title of Richard Sandomir’s essay in the Jan. 4 edition of The New York Times: “The Best Sports Films Often Are Not.”

One of the things people ask about my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – once they absorb that it’s about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, acceptance, success and love amid the brutal beauty of the NFL – is, How much football is there? Trust me, they’re not hoping that the answer is “a whole lot.”

And that’s as it should be. For a sports story to succeed, sports have to secondary to the story. There’s a practical reason for this. No specialty tale – which is what any sports story is – can rely on sports fans alone. It must also engage those who are mildly intrigued, those who’d enjoy any good story but don’t necessarily know a lot about sports. And to do that the story can’t be too much inside baseball. Sports are the spice. The narrative is the meat. ...

An ‘Interview’ you can skip

December 26, 2014

On Christmas Day, some Americans did what they felt was their civic duty and went to see the controversial new film “The Interview,” which Sony decided to release in select independent theaters and online after being chastised by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans – led by President Barack Obama – for initially caving to North Korea and pulling the plug on the Seth Rogin-James Franco starrer, which makes copious fun of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

You’ll recall that Sony even had embarrassing emails hacked by cyber-terrorists, and North Korea, professing shock – shock, I tell you – that the U.S. would accuse it of such a crime, offered to conduct a joint investigation of the incident.

Which is a bit like O.J. Simpson saying he was going to search for ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman’s killer.

Uh-huh. Moving on, I was among those Americans who spent part of Christmas Day watching the movie with my family at home – thanks to the technical wizardry of my nephew James, take a bow – and may I say that it was two hours of my life that I will never have back.

It’s not that “The Interview” is a terrible movie. It’s just that it’s a terribly mediocre movie that belongs to a long line of turkeys about bumbling Americans mixed up in international intrigue. (“Ishtar,” anyone?) It’s also a road picture and a bro picture, which means there’s lots of 12-year-old-boy humor about urinating, defecating, anal sex, private parts, hot girls, gays, homophobia, drugs, vomiting, breaking wind, margaritas and Katy Perry. I think Kim Jong-un, American pop culture junkie, should screen it, because really he has nothing to worry about. It’s the Columbia J School that should be offended.

At its heart, “The Interview” is the story of the twisted, symbiotic relationship that exists between the celebrated and those who chase them, the so-called journalists. Franco, playing with type, is Dave Skylark, the airheaded host of a magazine show like “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood.” It’s a measure of the filmmakers’ real fears that while Rogin and co-director Evan Goldberg apparently never worried enough about Kim Jong-un’s response to change his name or his country, they were quick to fictionalize Franco’s character and show so as not to offend the very programs they’d be using to hawk their pix.

‘The Inteview’ and our obsession with ‘authenticity’

December 19, 2014

So Sony has put the kibosh on “Interview,” the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg comedy about bungling American journos attempting to assassinate Kim Jong-un – which, let’s face it, is a lose, lose, lose situation for everyone.

“The bad guys won,” inveterate tweeter Mia Farrow pronounced. But whom is she kidding? No movie theater is going to show a flick that audience members sit through looking over their shoulders – as The Christian Science Monitor shrewdly observes.

Trust me, I know. I went to see “The Dark Knight Rises” with my pal novelist Barbara Nachman shortly after a gunman opened fire at a screening of the movie in a Colorado theater. We spent most of the movie watching every young man who came in or, especially, left and came back. That’s not entertainment.

As with any complex story involving hacking, terrorist threats in a post-9/11 world, freedom of speech and corporate profits, there’s another side to “The Interview” debacle.

What if Rogan and company had simply made the North Korean dictator a fictional character?

Charlie Chaplin did it in “The Great Dictator” (1940), playing both a Jewish everyman through which we see the disastrous circumstances that plunged Europe into two world wars and a certain dictator, one Adenoid Hynkel of Tomainia. Of course, it was Hitler right down to his little moustache. (How any woman ever found him attractive is beyond me.) Of course, it stirred up antifascist sentiments at the time America was not yet in the fight – which was just what Chaplin wanted to do. Still, Chaplin could say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” etc. ...

Alan Turing, gay sex and the real ‘Imitation Game’

November 11, 2014

Thanks to Marshall Fine, critic-in-residence at The Picture House in Pelham, I had the opportunity recently to preview “The Imitation Game,” which has “Oscar nods” written all over it, deservedly so. It’s a superbly crafted film about a story that resonates in our own time, acted with the kind of understated emotion that is the hallmark of British performance by a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Keira Knightley.

The film, which opens Nov. 28, tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II by creating a machine that was the forerunner of the computer, saving millions of lives in the process (although that, we shall see, was complicated).

Turing was a man ahead of his time in many ways. Today he’d be a gay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Instead he was a closeted social misfit – taunted mercilessly at prep school in the savage way that belongs exclusively to children and later prosecuted when his homosexuality was uncovered after the war. Forced to choose chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence, he committed suicide in 1954 at age 41 – one of 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts in England between 1885 and 1967. In 2013, Turing was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II – which still implies he did something wrong to begin with. ...

Why football won’t go up in smoke

November 10, 2014

The cover story for the Nov. 9 New York Times Magazine asks the provocative question: Is football the next tobacco?

The answer is “No,” and the key to that answer lies not in football or tobacco but in something else – influenza.

Like the flu, tobacco is airborne. If you were to smoke in let’s say an NFL arena, you would be subjecting not only yourself but the people all around you to carcinogens. Tobacco lost its household brand identity, because enough people came to understand that it wasn’t just about other people smoking themselves to death. It was also about how secondhand smoke could kill you.

But when you go to that same NFL arena to watch a game, you’re not risking a brain injury; someone else is. And for many people, that is, selfish or not, an acceptable risk.

President Barack Obama, a Chicago Bears fan, may have voiced the sentiment of a nation when he said that if he had a son, he would not let him play football. And yet, he says, he will remain a fan.

“At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” Michael Sokolove quotes him as saying in The Times Magazine piece. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

The president is a rational, compassionate man. So are we all – rational, compassionate people who are comfortable with other people bashing their brains in for our amusement, because, hey, they know what they’re getting into, much like a prostitute or a stripper or a porn star. It’s just another meat market. ...

The return of Lestat

October 29, 2014

With Halloween-y coming up on Friday, I thought it a good moment to touch on the new Anne Rice, which brings her back to her greatest creation, the Vampire Lestat.

Or at least to his world. He seems to be the absent sun around which the other characters revolve in “Prince Lestat” (Knopf, $28.95, 451 pages). But then he often is in the later “Vampire Chronicles” novels.

It’s easy to make fun of Rice’s purple prose and bizarr-o plotting. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Terrence Rafferty writes:

Lestat’s vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: “Interview With the Vampire” reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That’s what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In “Prince Lestat,” the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice’s queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony.

But back in the 1970s when the gay rights movement was young and AIDS was lurking in the wings, Rice’s homoerotic bloodsuckers tapped into the zeitgeist – something that Rafferty himself alludes to. It’s what all great pop novelists do, be they John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. ...