From the Rental Vault: Red Notice (2021)

Caper movies walk a fine line. The centerpiece is usually a skillful and daring heist performed against impossible odds and armies of guards. Something has to be stolen, but a caper movie is supposed to carry itself lightly, so the theft may be committed against an evil opponent, a faceless corporate museum or a private hoarder unwilling to share his or her treasures with the world. Otherwise an audience may disconnect once it realizes it's cheering for criminals and some poor person is going to suffer the loss of a treasured and perhaps irreplaceable heirloom or beloved personal item.

Second, the thieves must be basically good people. Yes, they're breaking the law, but they're not really hurting anyone. Hapless guards may succumb to knockout gas or find themselves locked in a now-empty vault after being outwitted by our clever protagonists, but no one is seriously or permanently injured. They're just having fun and using their great skills to get rich quickly and proceed to their life of ease that precedes the closing credits.

And most of all, there must be some surprising twist that no one saw coming -- in fact, no one even saw that no one saw it coming and this unanticipated twist can send the audience home happy if it's pulled off and rolling their eyes if it isn't.

The Netflix offering Red Notice, featuring what should be a power trio of Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, overlooks several of these important points and thus winds up with an audience that may ask itself, "Why did I watch that?" Johnson is John Hartley, a by-the-book FBI profiler who helps Interpol nab the skilled thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) until skilled thief Sarah Blake (Gadot) plants evidence for Interpol that Hartley is not an FBI agent at all and gets him thrown into the same Russian prison as Booth. They escape, and Hartley realizes that in order to clear his name, he's going to have to help Booth steal the second of three golden eggs made as presents for Cleopatra so he can turn it over to Interpol. Blake keeps complicating things and eventually the trio must find the third, long lost egg, in order to achieve their individual goals.

The three leads have good chemistry. Johnson and Reynolds are essentially playing themselves and Gadot shows she can pitch in with the quips as well as either of them. But fun dialogue and likable leads only go so far, and Red Notice winds up frequently funny without being at all fun -- the cast is having a heck of a time, but it all stays onscreen and doesn't make the move to the viewer. The set pieces are all predictable -- Johnson will win his with brute strength, Reynolds with slick patter and misdirection and Gadot with smoking hottery diverting the opponent before kicking his butt. And there's too many of them; Red Notice is a nearly two-hour movie that should have been a half-hour to 40 minutes less.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber, a co-producer along with Johnson, has said that sequels are possible -- but Red Notice in some ways already feels like a sequel. If you're a fan of '80s movies, imagine watching Jewel on the Nile before Romancing the Stone and you'll have a pretty good sense of what it's like seeing Red Notice.

Tip of the Cap

As a Kansas City Chiefs fan, I of course despise the Raiders -- wherever they're from these days -- and all of their works. But anyone who's followed football knows about the coaching abilities of their former head man John Madden and respects his work.

And in a world where watching a football game means choosing between Joe Buck, Cris Collinsworth or Tony Romo, Madden's work in the booth can't be valued highly enough. So a moment of silence and tip of the cap indeed to Madden, who passed away today at 85.

Humbug Indeed

Writing at The New Republic, Natalie Shure explores what condition may have actually ailed A Christmas Carol's Tiny Tim Cratchit, the young boy whose envisioned death is one of the pieces of the puzzle that changes Ebenezer Scrooge from a wealthy miser into a wealthy philanthropist. After muddling around with several choices, she settles on a form of non-pulmonary tuberculosis usually called Pott’s disease. It attacks the spine and like its cousins that affect lung tissue, is often made worse by polluted air, crowded conditions and poor nutrition -- all situations in which Ms. Shure believes young Tim would have found himself.

After getting paid for a summary of A Christmas Carol and for some quick literary analysis of same, Ms. Shure then strengthens her paycheck by reporting other guesses about the youngest Cratchit's illness and including a sentence suggesting she will set right what 19th-century Londoner Charles Dickens misunderstands about 19th-century London. 

Ms. Shure suggests that Dickens' primary motivation was to advocate a restoration of specifically Christian charity among the wealth of the day. Dickens himself, corresponding with a government official who had helped research and publish a Parliamentary report on the devastating state of poor children in industrializing England, had already made plans for a pamphlet on the matter but later withdrew from that plan after Carol's success. One of his goals was to make the broader public aware of the plight of poor children who, denied adequate nutrition, health care and education, could slip away as easily as did Tiny Tim. Though the youngest and least well of the Cratchit brood, both his presence and absence affected them greatly.

Anyway, back to Ms. Shure, who after several paragraphs confronts the obvious reality she has avoided to that point: Tiny Tim suffered from nothing, because Tiny Tim wasn't real. You'd think that would be a good endpoint for a silly article, but Ms. Shure then points out that the thousands of real Tiny Tims throughout the factories and mines of England's growing industrialization did suffer and their modern incarnations do as well. Only "robust social welfare programs funded by progressive taxation and a strong public sector capable of delivering crucial health care resources to the entire population" can save them and they can't rely on the hope that the world's plutocrats will be suddenly and spectrally moved to share the wealth that will make a difference in the lives of the world's poor.

In the last paragraph, we finally learn that this whole misreading of Dickens and misunderstanding of his efforts to help the people at the bottom of his society has had the purpose of advocating that the government take under threat of law what Christianity would ask be given out of sacrificial love.

Ms. Shure redeems herself slightly by noting that in her favorite version of A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit is played by Kermit the Frog and his wife by Miss Piggy. But she throws it out the window by closing with an aphorism from the stupidist Marx of all, Karl, that makes clear she's not much better with the New Testament than she is with Charles Dickens: "God bless us, everyone—to each according to his need, from each according to his ability."  

Teacher Teacher

An interesting article at Liberties Journal opens by quoting some college students lamenting the quality of instruction they were receiving. Professors were disengaged, they meandered during their lectures and frequently explained material poorly in response to student questions.

The hook is that this discussion happened almost a hundred years ago, in a meeting of delegates from 20 colleges held at Wesleyan University in 1925. To the extent today's students care about learning anything in between bacchanals and indignant protests, they could probably say similar things. A few do, says article author Jonathan Zimmerman, but those "paying customers" are widely outnumbered by the ones who want a memorable experience (much of which they will render themselves unable to remember) and a credential for a job that will put them comfortably in the upper middle class.

Zimmerman, a former professor at New York University and now at the University of Pennsylvania, names the usual suspects: A research-dominated faculty culture, little or no training in actual pedagogy, grade inflation, etc. To this he adds a feature from our modern age, in which professors are afraid to present challenging ideas in certain areas of discussion for fear of stirring up a mob against them for their clearly fascist bigotry -- even in fields that discuss nothing that could honestly be described as fascist or bigoted.

My own time as an undergraduate is some 35 years ago and while some of these trends had started to curve upward, I proudly possess a transcript that proves grade inflation had not been adopted by several professors. Most of my time in campus ministry has been in smaller regional universities, where students are far more likely to encounter instructors more interested in teaching than in advancing in their field through research. 

The irony seems to be that the value of the college as a credential for where one starts in the world seems to vary inversely with the likelihood that one might actually be taught something. Professor Zimmerman would like to see a world where more colleges offered that likelihood -- and maybe things at prestige universities or large state research schools will one day break down so much that such a world will return. It happened in response to student critique and dissatisfaction a hundred years ago, at least for awhile, and maybe it will happen again.

This Is my Sad I've-Been-to-Space Face

The Federal Aviation Administration has decided to get out of the business of deciding which people are astronauts. The number of people launched into near-space by various billionaires is rising too fast and since none of them do anything but sit there -- except for the three minutes or so they float around in zero G -- they don't really fit our classical picture of an astronaut who actually does something while in space. They are what test pilots in the 1960s called the Mercury astronauts: "Spam in a can."

On the one hand, it's kind of neat that we now have so many people going on these space-border rides that we have to narrow our definition of being an astronaut. And we can all marvel that a government agency quits doing something, while whatever part of us that is libertarian can be minutely cheered that a function which the government doesn't really have any business doing will no longer be done by the government. It will be a very small and quiet cheer, of course.

Should I ever be lucky enough to get a ride on one of these existing or in-the-works projects, it will be after January 1 and because that is after the Federal Aviation Administration stops designating people as commercial astronauts, I will not get wings.

But since I would have been able to get up to the very border of space (or even beyond it, depending on what future flights in this area may hold), I most certainly will not care one dadgum bit even if I have to draw my wings on a piece of paper and safety-pin them to my lapel. Because I will have been to space.

Ouch

Peter Jackson's recent documentary The Beatles: Get Back shows hours of footage shot as the band prepared its final album, Let It Be. The film was shot at the time and only a very truncated version appeared, but Jackson took the many hours available and created a far more complete picture in his eight-hour documentary.

Contrary to the widely-held opinion that John Lennon's second wife, Yoko Ono, broke up the band because of her intrusive presence, Jackson suggests that she didn't have that much impact at all. Although she's frequently around during recording, writing and the rest of the process, she's not pushing her ideas or whatnot into the discussion. 

At least one article I read shows that the band broke up not because of anyone's significant other, but because as the four members grew older they found that they had less and less to say together. Their respective muses no longer pulled in the same direction and in order to follow them, "The Beatles" had to become John, Paul, George and Ringo once again, separated from their common milieu. Given the leeway to exercise their own creativity with, say, solo albums or working with other bands, perhaps they could have stayed together when the ideas or the mood struck. That option, for whatever reason, wasn't explored or maybe wasn't even considered possible.

Other reviews have said different things. Amanda Hess, writing at the New York Times, suggests that Ono is actually engaged in her own work of creativity as a performance artist. By being ever-present but always silent, she was offering commentary on how women were marginalized by the rock music culture. Hess thinks this is of a piece with Ono's public comments on that matter and the dedication she puts on her song "Potbelly Rocker."

Folks, can, of course, think what they want about Ono's artistic ability. The idea that she broke up the Beatles overlooks the robust ability of all four men, especially Lennon, to be arrogant elitist asses all on their own. For her 1971 "show" at the Museum of Modern Art, Ono had released flies on the museum grounds which the public was invited to track as they dispersed across the city. I think that says most of what needs to be said about her work (The flies were also sprayed with her perfume to carry her scent, but in reality liquid sprayed on insects often suffocates them).

But the article subhead says that in Jackson's documentary, "Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers." That's just mean.

Give It Up for Buck O'Neil

It should have happened while he was alive, but at least it has happened. John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

All Things JWST

If you want to know about the developmental history of the about-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), then Natalie Wolchover's lead story at Quanta will tell you everything and then some. Wolchover digs deep into the origins of the multi-billion dollar project, its cutting-edge designs and the new technology necessary to make them work, and so on. She touches a little on the controversy regarding the telescope's name and she does refer to the extensive delays and cost overruns that have dogged the project.

But this is an article about a potentially amazing new scientific tool and the discoveries that could come from it appearing in a science magazine. Wolchover isn't cheerleading for the JSWT, but she leaves the exposés for other outlets.

The Right Thing -- Again!

The Womens Tennis Association continues to do the right thing in its ongoing standoff with the Chinese Communist Party in regards to the latter's silencing and censorship of its own star athlete, Peng Shuai.

After WTA president Steve Simons said last month that Chinese officials needed to investigate Peng's claims of coerced sex and sexual harassment by a top Chinese government official, instead of disappearing her and staging videos that showed she was completely OK and had "changed her mind," he backed it up by saying the WTA wouldn't stand for it if China didn't act.

China didn't act, and Simons announced today that the WTA would cancel all tournaments scheduled for the country indefinitely. Regardless, by the way, of the cost.

The WTA continues to demonstrate to sports leagues and companies how they should respond to a regime that tries to control and dictate the terms under which it will work with them. And, by the way, it's a good quick refresher for women's gymnastics groups about how one handles things when one's athletes claim to have been harassed or assaulted by one's own officials.

I'd suggest the International Olympic Committee take note as well, but I have trouble typing when I snicker.