by John Walters

James and the Giant Peach. The BFG. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roahl Dahl wrote them all, while also writing the scripts for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and a James Bond film (You Only Live Twice). Dahl was a humorist, a mischief-maker, a twisted soul (he wrote extensively for Playboy including one story in which the narrator morphs into a seven-foot penis), a prolific and idiosyncratic writer. A complete and utter original. A genius. Happy 100th!

p.s. If you’re looking for a Dahl book that is not written for kids, and you wanna get a sense of how twisted and darkly funny he could be, read My Uncle Oswald.

Starting Five

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JssKqYoy5p4

1. Kevin Harlan Saves Monday Night Football

Punt. Punt. Punt. Interception. Punt. Punt. Punt. Punt. Punt. Punt. Interception. Punt. Turn over on downs. Game over. Niners 28, Rams 0. The only thing that will and should be remembered from this contest is Kevin Harlan’s epic call on Westwood One Radio of a drunk idiot sprinting onto the field in the fourth quarter. The call itself belongs in the Smithsonian, or the National Archives, or the Museum of Broadcasting, or all of the above. No one on TV (besides Brent or Verne or perhaps Tess) has sounded like they are having that much fun calling a football game in years.

2. Ill-Defined Malady, M’Lady*

*The judges will also accept “Is Hillary Illary?” 

Maybe Aaron Sorkin foresaw all of this 15 or so years ago.

Leo: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jed: “Because I wanted to be the president.”

Pneumonia? Dehydration? If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Hillary and Bill, it’s that we’re not always going to get the whole truth. But tell me you can’t see that above dialogue taking place between Tim Kaine or Jen Chisholm and Hillary. Of course you can. Although, as Bill Maher tweeted yesterday,

 

Pneumonia? I’d vote for Dead Hillary in this race. She could be Patient Zero for Bubonic Plague, still better than #TangerineNightmare

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 13, 2016

And I find it hard to disagree. All is forgiven, Mitt Romney. Come back! You, too, John McCain. Al Gore, come on down! Ross Perot, why not? (Sarah, stay up in Wasilla). This presidential election is beginning to feel like the Rams quarterback job hunt.

By the way, this is a TERRIFIC scene. Toby was such a royal pain in the ass, but he was usually right.

3. Dancing With the Star-Crossed

So there was Ryan Lochte on Dancing With The Stars, because you can’t be hosting pool parties in Las Vegas every day of your life. And then some protester rushes the stage to interrupt it, and it’s not as if Tom Bergeron is going to get n the middle of that scene, no sirree. Anyway, the real tragedy here is that Kevin Harlan was not on hand to commentate the moment.

And so the question becomes, Was all of this staged to garner some attention? Who knows?

4. Welcome Back, Chumley’s!

New York’s favorite old speakeasy, Chumley’s, is making a return later this month after a nearly decade-long hiatus. The West Village haunt, which never had a sign out front (go to the corner of Bedford and Barrow and look for a big wooden door that people are occasionally entering or exiting). It’s not going to be exactly the same spot that it was, but in the past few years, when so many iconic and favorite New York eateries have been closing down (Union Square Cafe, The Emerald Inn [moved, but no longer the same], CBGB, etc), it’s nice to see one return.

The apocryphal story is that Chumley’s is the speakeasy that gave us the term, “Eighty-Six it.” Not sure if that’s true or not, but it adds to the lore.

Personal note: My last time inside Chumley’s was on my birthday, on 9/10/01. I recall walking out well after midnight and staring up at the World Trade Center as our cab pulled onto 7th Avenue. The buildings would be gone in less than eight hours.

5. The Film Room with Chris Corbellini!

Sully

***1/2

by Chris Corbellini

There’s just something so preposterous about challenging the right decision by a good man. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia and barely reached skyscraper altitude before a flock of birds turned that jet into a glider, forcing Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to pull off the ballsiest move in aviation history by landing the aircraft on the Hudson River and saving all aboard.

And in Clint Eastwood’s latest film, SULLY, federal investigators had the nerve to second-guess him. You can almost hear Eastwood growling “Those f-ckers” in every frame.

The captain in question had over 40 years of flight time, first as a teenager over the farmlands of Denison, Texas, then at the Air Force Academy (where he learned to fly gliders) followed by military service (where he learned to land fighter jets with engine trouble), and finally, decades of experience as a commercial airline pilot. He had logged 20,000 hours in the air and was ideally suited to try such an unprecedented landing. And while the passengers didn’t know that at that time, as they cried and prayed and heard the flight attendants repeat crash instructions to chilling affect, they certainly know it today. The best landing is the one where everyone walks away. Or climbs onto a boat.

The movie could have been a step-by-step guide down to the water, from A to Z, showcasing the pilots and some passengers to root for. That story still would have gotten made. Real life heroism is easy to market. But Eastwood and his screenwriter tried for something more – showcasing the National Transportation Safety Board as they throw major shade the Captain’s way, second-guessing his every move and jeopardizing his career.  It’s an interesting structure – beginning with the happy ending all of us know, and then dumping all over how that happy ending came to be.

So give SULLY points for degree of difficulty (Ed. Note: Not unlike the pilot’s maneuver itself; coincidence?). Even from the trailers, when the NTSB plot is revealed and the credibility of a national treasure — played by Tom Hanks, another national treasure — is threatened, my first thought was “No way this angle will work.” It also makes real-life investigators the villains, whether deserved or not. But the movie does a commendable job in the first half establishing at least some doubt Sully made all the right moves. The computer simulations, over and over, prove the aircraft could have landed at LaGuardia, or at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The pilot himself, tortured by PTSD and nightmares, begins to wonder if his decision-making was sound, despite the protests of his confidants (His co-pilot: “Bullshit. They should put a ribbon on you and get you back in the air.”) Sully is the coolest customer in the room, sure, but he is also a flesh-and-blood, middle-aged man who just went through a deeply traumatic experience. The nation wants to hug him. But what if the country just as quickly turns on him? What happens to his family? What happens to his new business as a safety consultant?

The script shows the emergency landing from two perspectives – that of the pilots, and the passengers. The passenger portion establishes characters quickly – the bros who just make the flight to go golfing with their pop, an elderly mother and her doting daughter, etc. The one that really hooked me was the young woman who passed her baby to a stranger moments before impact. Unthinkable in any other scenario … but this man was kind to them before takeoff, and she decides he’s physically stronger so there’s a better chance he’ll be able to hold on.

Finally, in Act 3, we see it all from Sully’s view. By then, there’s no doubt what really happened. His decision to switch on auxiliary power, out of sequence according to the manual, bought them time, and the co-pilot (played with a touch of understandable nervousness by Aaron Eckhart) quickly and quietly followed along. They zipped past the George Washington Bridge practically at eye level. The flight crew, one of whom was injured, then directed almost all the folks safely onto the wings and rafts in front of a stunned New York City. And you know who was the last one off the aircraft, still shouting into the fuselage for anyone left behind.

Just like in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, Hanks does his best work in the film after disaster has been averted. In a hospital room he finally lets his stoicism slip off his shoulders for a moment when the boss says the word “155,” and it might be his Oscar clip from the movie.

Hanks, of course, won back-to-back Oscars for PHILADELPHIA and FORREST GUMP, changing the trajectory of his career in Hollywood. Cameron Crowe even called him “The Pope of the Oscars,” and it fits. But he won the respect of casual moviegoers with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. After RYAN, there was no leadership role he couldn’t play in the mind of the public, and for a generation of men, if Hanks were playing you in a movie, or someone that crouched in the trenches of life beside you … then you’ve done something special. So Eastwood has his Jimmy Stewart here, or his TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD-era Gregory Peck. The two movie icons found each other in the nick of time — the 60-ish leading man that an audience instinctively trusts to do the right thing, and an old-school director in his 80s who doesn’t see enough of that anymore (there’s a vague reference to the stock market crisis of that time).

Is SULLY perfectly constructed? It’s definitely well-made. The acting top to bottom isn’t showy, there’s a nice, crispy edit from a fighter jet from Sully’s past to a fighter jet perched on the Intrepid Museum, and a shot taken from over Hanks’ shoulders looking at the floating aircraft is movie magic. But it’s not a masterpiece.

 In Eastwood’s last two films, AMERICAN SNIPER and this one, the leading ladies are wasted as the token worried wives on the other end of the phone. Laura Linney, playing the captain’s wife, could have gone yard with this role – a woman watching her husband’s trying circumstances play out on national television.  The finish of SULLY ends with a joke to let us all exhale a bit, but it also feels like a warm ending when the director could have pushed for a great one. When Sully gives his final summation, crediting the flight crew, the first-responders and the passengers for helping them all get out of the Hudson alive, perhaps the director could have added quick cutaways of all those characters to punch those words home.  Or that single cutaway we know so well — all those people on the wings of that plane, barely and miraculously above water.

Still, during the final dip to black I was reminded of an Esquire Magazine essay published over 15 years ago about a bartender dispensing life wisdom. What has stayed with me all this time is a single line: “success is a point on a graph, where faith and purpose meet.” I believe it, and this movie’s real-life events reinforced that belief. Right pilot, right time. Ask the other 154 souls who landed on the river with him. No doubt Hanks and Eastwood were both inspired by that, maybe even incredulous about the fallout, and it produced some of their best work to date.

One last personal thingy: I was at the Super Bowl days after that fateful water landing, and Captain Sullenberger and his crew were ushered onto the field to be celebrated. The crowd absolutely lost it. You just know heroes when you see them.  The real-life Sully looked somewhat sheepish as he waved to the crowd.  You know the type – the one who insists he was just doing his job, and really means it.