by John Walters

Tweet Me Right

Harry S. Truman: The buck stops here.
Donald J. Trump: The dollar menu begins here.

— Medium Happy (@jdubs88) January 15, 2019

Starting Five

1.Mayor McCheesy*

*The judges will also accept “The Dollar Menu Starts Here” and “The Fast Supper”

As someone who in the past may have exhibited a slight disinclination to take the side of Donald J. Trump, I want to make one thing clear: I am not FURIOUS over last night’s White House reception for the Clemson football team, where the best of McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King et al was served. I’m not TRIGGERED. But I do feel it necessary to expound on how what might have been a kitschy idea became a major fail (even Clemson players going through the buffet line were snickering, “I thought this was a joke.”).

1.) If you’re going to serve fast food and make it casual, get a note out to a team official that the players and coaches should dress casual. That Clemson players and staff were all in suits as they snarfed down Whoppers and Big Macs was just plain wrong. If the food is casual, so too should be the dress.

2) For a guy who spends as much time on Twitter as President Trump does, it’s amazing how oblivious he is to fast food trends. Trump basically ordered what Seventies Dad considered cool fast food because Trump’s mind has never really evolved, culturally or intellectually, from the Mid-Eighties. If you’re gonna go fast food for college football players in 2019, you go Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, Popeye’s and Shake Shack (In-n-Out not being on the East Coast).

3) You know what McDonald’s does as soon as it cooks and wraps a burger? It places it under a heating lamp until it is served. I’ve been both part of sports teams who placed massive orders and of a serving staff that’s filled them, and so I appreciate how hard it is to both FILL a big order AND keep the food warm. This never occurred to Donald J. Trump.

Figure how long it took to make all that food for any one restaurant. Some of the burgers were already sitting and waiting as other burgers were being cooked. Then you drive it over to the White House. Then it sits on trays until the team enters. That’s a minimum, MINIMUM, of 20 minutes. Go to your local McD’s or BK today, order a burger, then sit and wait 20 minutes before you take your first bite. Tell me how it tastes. WHY WEREN’T THERE FOOD-WARMER TRAYS, the kind you’d find at any halfway-decent Marriott or Sheraton hosting a buffet lunch for the local State Farm office managers’ meeting?

So what, with the government furlough and all, was Donald Trump supposed to do, you ask? Lots of things. First, you might have delayed Clemson’s visit. Smart, and wait for spring when you can do a Rose Garden reception outside. Second, you could have appreciated that you don’t have any expertise/experience in personally hosting large groups of people, and you might have called someone from the hospitality staff at the nearby Trump Hotel in D.C. and put them in charge of this.

I’ll only mention as an aside that Fox News would have destroyed President Obama for disgracing the White House this way and there would’ve been a snide remark or two dozen about how “this is what black people like to eat.” I’m not going there. Like I said, this could have been a cute idea and also highlighted great American companies. But Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of thinking about others and he’s not very good at accepting that he doesn’t know everything. So he just thought, What do I like to eat? and then figured out the simplest way to make that happen times 100 and voila!, this is what you get.

It’s not that the fast food idea sucked. It’s that its execution was one more revelatory incident into how Trump’s mind functions. He doesn’t follow through well. He slots everything into his worldview, which includes an incapability of appreciation that it’s no longer 1985 (he probably thinks everyone on that team knows who Madonna is). And, well, he’s a buffoon.

The denouement of this moment would be the Clemson team managers handing out Chick-fil-A meals to the players as they boarded the plane back to campus. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that.

2. Taking Their Cuse

Syracuse entered Cameron Indoor and 11-5 and unranked. Duke entered 14-1 and the number one team in the nation. The Blue Devils’ top three players—Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett and Cam Reddish—are all freshmen and are the top three names you’ll find in many a 2019 NBA mock draft. Also, the Blue Devils were 104-0 at home as the number-one team in the nation against every school except North Carolina.

So what happened? Reddish was sick, point guard Tre Jones separated his shoulder in the first half (he’s out indefinitely; and no one is shedding tears for Coach K) and Duke could not hit from beyond the arc against the Orange’s 2-3 zone. Williamson did pour in a freshman-record 35 points for the Blue Devils, but the Battle-ing Boeheims win in OT, 95-91.

3. SportsBall

So we had this idea two days ago and we were going to post it on Twitter, but we’re doing our best to tweet less in 2019 (New Year’s resolutions and all) and besides, we’d rather share it just with you. So, here’s our idea for a refreshingly different sports show that might appear on the ESPN or the FS1: SportsBall.

What would it be about? Well, it would be more about the actual games themselves and less about the personalities and the personality-driven drama that you see on most of the ESPN and FS1 daytime programming.

Examples of what we would have: 1) An examination of how Pete Maravich was able to average at least 43.8 points per game for three straight seasons at LSU without benefit of a shot clock or the three-point stripe 2) A “Meet the Sacramento Kings” segment 3) Debate on whether the NBA would work better as a “4-on-4” game (more shifts as players would be gassed sooner), 4) A piece on how college football players put in time beyond their 20-hour mandated weeks, 5) A question as to why no one else has copied the successful Green Bay Packers model (I’m still feeling you, Billings Bighorns).

Examples of what we would not have: 1) Any GOAT conversations, 2) Almost all of the LeBron drama 3) Speculations on what coaches should be fired, 4) Anything remotely related to Lavar Ball.

A segment such as Scott Van Pelt’s “Bad Beats” would be welcome on SportsBall. A debate as to whether or not Russell Westbrook is selfish would be unwelcome.

Whaddaya think? Who wants to throw money at us?

4. Superhero

Yesterday afternoon I read a pice in The Ringer by Sean Fennessey about how “This is the most wide-open Best Picture race in years” and that it may be because “we don’t even know what Best Picture means.”

I know what it means, Sean. It means that film that makes the hairs on your forearms stand at attention as you watch it, at least in certain parts. That movie that may bring you to the brink of tears but if not that, brings out your strongest GENUINE feelings (I ALL CAPS genuine because Three Billboards was outstanding at manipulating its audience with faux feelings and issues, etc.; it was horribly disingenuous and I hated it hated it hated it and I think enough voters felt the same way I did last year, but were afraid to say so, which is why it got all that buzz but then a compromise candidate such as The Shape Of Water, a film no one cares to see again, won).

Enter Free Solo, a documentary about climber Alex Honnold, who in June of 2017 became the first human being to climb 3,200-foot rock face El Capitan (in Yosemite Park) without any equipment except the limbs and appendages God gave him, a good pair of rubberized soles and a chalk bag.

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first: This is a shoo-in for Best Documentary and it should also win Best Cinematography and Best Score (I haven’t been moved by a score that fit its moment this much since James Franco’s “escape” scene in 127 Hours). Is this the Best Picture of 2018, overall? I’ve seen every “worthy” film except Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody and for me, excepting those two, it is. Without question.

I saw Free Solo at an IMAX where I sat through four consecutive super hero film previews (Shazam, Alita, Captain Marvel and Hellboy) and increasingly became more and more depressed about what this says about Fascism, authoritarianism (“Save the world!” is a popular tagline), Hollywood’s sensibility about how dumb its audiences are and how desperately in need they are of someone with superhuman power to escape them (cue: hopeless economic and societal times). You can write an entire Phd thesis about what the epidemic of these films (and their box-office-boffo success) says about society at large.

Then Free Solo began. No CGI. No extraordinary powers, excepting will. There was even superhero backstory (a dysfunctional family where our hero never heard the word “love” and never learned to hug), a supportive but distracting and pretty girlfriend and our hero finding a rare moment of self-doubt.

Then comes the climb. It lasts, in film time, about 15 or so minutes (the entire climb took 3 hours and 56 minutes). I looked around at my fellow patrons and if you go I encourage you to do the same at this juncture in the movie. Look at where people put their hands. You’ll see people with a hand over their mouth, or as a visor at their forehead, or near their throat or even heart.

It’s suspense. It’s terror. Deep down we know he’s going to make it (we’d have read about it if he hadn’t) but watching a human being do what Honnold does here, playing with death at every new hold or reach, evokes something so visceral and real. For me, hands down, it’s the Best Picture of the year.

It’s also the Best Documentary I’ve seen since Grizzly Man and who’s to say, between Timothy Treadwell and Alex Honnold, who was more unable and unwilling to cope i modern society or even who had more of a death wish? The difference is that, for now, Honnold has eluded the Grim Reaper.

Stay tuned.

5. Closs Call

It’s only been a few days since Jayme Closs escaped her kidnapper, so we were not quite expecting to read a story that was so incredibly detailed in terms of her parents’ murder, her abduction, her captivity and, ultimately, her escape. But this is what happens when the murderer/kidnapper talks to police—his first words to them were, “I did it”—and when your victim emerges, thankfully, alive.

Read this story. It’s harrowing and horrible. A couple thoughts: there was no way the police were ever going to be able to prevent her parents’ murder, but it’s almost unconscionable that they let him get away in the beginning. As you’ll read, the killer had put Closs in the trunk of his car and was only 20 seconds from pulling out from their driveway when three screeching patrol cars passed him on the way to her house. Three! Racing toward a potential crime scene on a rural highway at 3 a.m., and not one of them thinks to stop the car that is on that road at that hour (a car being driven by a lone white male).

I’m not sure if any reporter asked that question at the press conference, but that should’ve been the first question asked.

Music 101

Walk Like A Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF4KQbiBrKU

Finally watched Jersey Boys the other night (as an Italian-American Jersey boy myself, I felt it was my duty). Don’t know whose idea it was to hand Clint Eastwood the director’s megaphone, but this was less of a musical and more of a “Behind The Music.” That tall, dark and handsome dude on the right is Bob Gaudio, the genius songwriter behind the The Four Seasons’ plethora of hits. As the movie explains, he was introduced to the group by a mutual friend, another young Jersey Eye-talian named Joe Pesci. Of course, who knows how far they ever would’ve gotten without Frankie Valli’s inimitable vocals.

This was the band’s third No. 1 single (March, 1963) in a seven-month span after never having charted before. Also, if you see the film, though it does not explicitly spell it out, you finally know who and what “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)” is all about.

Remote Patrol

Anchors Aweigh

10:15 p.m. TCM

Dig: We realize there’s a lot of TCM in this space and that may skew older viewer (it definitely skews older viewer), but damn, girl, they don’t make ’em like they used to. Triple-threat Gene Kelly (dancer-singer-leading man) and Frank Sinatra doing his very, very best to keep up in this 1945 Best Picture nominee about two sailors on shore leave in Los Angeles.

Four years later, this duo would team up to make a similar film (sailors on shore leave in New York City), On The Town.

Historical perspective: This film was released on July 19, 1945. It was still in theaters when the Japanese (or “Japs”) surrendered less than one month later. It was like American Sniper with tap dancing.