In the Shadow of Giants: Elway to Marino

The 1983 NFL Draft produced more great quarterbacks than any other before or since. And that was just the first round. Six quarterbacks were taken in the first 27 picks that year, including two who would become among the top five (or so) ever to play the position, one who would play in four Super Bowls, two who would be fairly average and, not to be forgotten, a guy named Ken O'Brien who would flash enough brilliance to be named to two Pro Bowls but remain forever overshadowed by guys in his draft class named John Elway, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly. Elway to Marino, the latest entry in the ESPN Films "30 for 30" series, is fixated, no surprise, on the guys at the top. But in a documentary collection that has produced great films like June 17, 1994, The Two Escobars and Catching Hell, Elway to Marino is nothing more than a Ken O'Brien.

That's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's not much to cling to either. Director Ken Rodgers retells the events of the draft clearly and evocatively through talking-head interviews and archival footage, even going as far as to recreate the banquet room where then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the picks under a gaudy chandelier. But drafts are only so interesting, particularly in retrospect — even drafts in which the consensus best talent available, Elway, used a potential Major League Baseball career as leverage to avoid signing with the Baltimore Colts, which had the top pick that year. And for all the ways Elway's draft experience was unusual, Marino's is actually typical. Sure, his eventual professional output suggests he should have been selected a lot sooner than 27th. But it wasn't all that long ago that NFL MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers fell to the 25th pick in 2005, suffering all the while in the green room. And all-time legends Joe Montana and Tom Brady didn't get picked until the third and sixth rounds, respectively. So this stuff happens.

Ken Rodgers does his best to make the 1983 draft seem extraordinary, but it isn't really. That year, like any year, some guys were picked where they should have been, and other guys weren't. Some guys began productive NFL careers, and other guys got one step closer to unemployment. Some picks generated applause, and Jets picks inspired boos. So it was, and so it always will be. Which means that if you've seen any NFL draft, you'll feel like you've seen this one — and reliving Rozelle's introductions doesn't create quite the same nostalgic electricity as an actual classic game. Making matters worse, the "30 for 30" series has already produced a pair of films covering the same general time frame and even some of the same tangential stories, The Band That Wouldn't Die and Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?, which leaves the perfectly capable Elway to Marino unfairly covered in the stink of been there, done that.

Thus the pleasures of this documentary aren't provided by its narrative but by its trappings. The 1983 draft room, for example, is, in retrospect, awesomely modest. No players taking the stage to pose with the jersey of their new team — in fact not much of a stage to take; just a podium on a small, slightly elevated platform where Rozelle announced each pick. No glitzy ESPN production with Chris Berman's voice booming off the slick-back hairdo of Mel Kiper Jr.; just three guys sitting in typical banquet room chairs at a table with typical banquet room skirting looking like something out of a Ron Burgundy movie. No huge Radio City Music Hall crowd to react to each pick; just a hundred or so fans looking on from the balcony of the New York Sheraton ballroom.

One of those fans looks like a mini-Andy Reid, with a bright red mustache and ample chest hair protruding from the open neckline of his striped ketchup-and-mustard colored shirt, presumably from the Ronald McDonald Collection. The first time we glimpse this super-fan, he's standing with his buddies, dutifully scribbling notes like a Trekkie trying to transcribe William Shatner's keynote address at an annual Star Trek convention. It's an image that's simultaneously sweet and hilarious, and it's enough to make you reach for the pause button. Thankfully, Rodgers knows it. Because soon enough the super-fan is back, being interviewed on his own, looking appropriately puzzled by the Jets' selection of O'Brien from far off U.C. Davis, and getting no help from the interviewer who mistakenly refers to the new New York quarterback as "Ken Davis." That moment alone makes Elway to Marino worth watching.

Too much of the rest, like most NFL drafts, feels like much ado about nothing. Elway to Marino closes with the suggestion that the 1983 draft, which provided days of curiosity about how the Colts would handle Elway's preemptive holdout, sparked what is now an annual ritual of hype and excess. And that might be true, and certainly that would have been a more appropriate entryway to this story. But instead Elway to Marino, which is sorely lacking the directorial fascination of so many other entries in the "30 for 30" series, tries to position the events of April 26, 1983, as one of those "you never forget where you were when ..." sorts of historic moments, and, like so many draft picks, it fails to live up to those unfairly lofty expectations.

If every draft disappointment has a retroactive tell, a detail that in hindsight makes one wonder how the erring team didn't see it coming, Elway to Marino's tell is its fascination with the journals of Marvin Demoff, the agent of both titular quarterbacks. "Demoff had a plan, and he would record each step of it in a diary that until now has never been made public," narrates Tom Selleck early in the film, sounding more like John Facenda than any Magnum P.I. watcher could have imagined in 1983. Yes, Demoff's detailed notes provide a specific timeline that lends the documentary an air of authenticity. But on closer inspection, the diary doesn't do anything more than corroborate what Rodgers uncovers in archival footage and interviews. It's a reminder that if the worst phrase in nonfiction reporting is "We don't want to speculate, but ..." the second worst might be anything along the lines of "never before seen." Tantalizing as those words sound, more often than not they indicate someone is trying to convince us that what doesn't seem interesting actually is, purely by virtue of its uncovering. What's uncovered in Elway to Marino produces a solid, professional achievement worthy of pride. Of course, you might use the same words to describe the less than unforgettable career of Ken Davis. I mean, O'Brien.

Elway to Marino premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler hopes to review each new film in the "30 for 30" series upon its release. See the Volume 1 and Volume 2 archive.

Read More

Penrose Stairs: To the Wonder

Exteriors at magic hour. Interiors before the movers come. Curtains blowing in the wind, often with someone hiding on the other side. Trees. Sky. Churning, trickling and spraying waters. Hands caressing wheat and tall grasses. Women scampering away from the camera with sprightly verve. Lost, anguished men scanning the horizon for answers. Swings. Empty chairs. Livestock. Birds. Necks and necking. Classical music. Elliptical voiceover narration. Constant searching. These are the fundamental, incontrovertible elements of Terrence Malick's cinema — those things that both his most ardent fans and his befuddled detractors agree make a Malick film distinct.

Thus, any debate about Malick's cinema typically comes down to whether those elements combine to exude the two qualities Malick most consistently explores: grace and awe. Malick's latest film, To the Wonder, might have more of those basic signature elements than any of its predecessors, despite being Malick's shortest film in more than three decades, but it's almost entirely lacking in grace and awe. It's all fundamentals with almost no feeling — save for emptiness. The gestures are familiar, but this time there's no soul behind them. The auteur's trademark flourishes feel less designed for this film than leftover from previous ones. To the Wonder is Terrence Malick via Overstock.com.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Six features into Malick's 40-year career, maybe this is where the shine rubs off and what once felt so exotic starts to look overused. It's not that Malick's five previous features were wholly original; indeed, one of the most beautiful things about Malick's oeuvre is its visual and thematic consistency. But Malick's first five films were infused with a sense of exploration, discovery and birth. (Heck, his two most recent pictures chronicle the creation of Jamestown and the entire universe.) And that's sorely lacking here. To the Wonder isn't filled with characters looking for inspiration so much as actors desperately in search of their motivation. Malick might be emotionally connected to this material, but like Javier Bardem's lonely priest all I could see were stained-glass windows; I didn't see The Light.

Almost everything here comes off like a pose. Ben Affleck's performance as Neil is notable not for its scarcity of on-screen dialogue (hardly unusual in Malickland) but for the overwhelming effort he seems to put forth not-talking. (His character doesn't come off as terse or inward, despite attempts to describe him that way; more like a guy with fragile vocal cords whose doctor has ordered him to keep quiet.) Meanwhile, Olga Kurylenko, as Neil's love interest, is less a woman than a house cat, rubbing up against whatever man or structure happens to be nearby. Bardem's priest, as mentioned, indeed looks lost, but it's the kind of lost that suggests a drunk who can't remember where he parked his car the night before, or even if he has a car in the first place, no matter how often his inner monologues suggest otherwise. And then there's Rachel McAdams, as Neil's quasi-mistress, who appears so disoriented that at one point she turns toward the camera with an expression that seems to say: "Wait, you're rolling?"

It's tempting to attribute the film's lack of emotional heft to the slightness of the plot, as if To the Wonder is Malick at his most narratively ambiguous. But any sense that To the Wonder is "about" less than its predecessors is evidence of its blandness as a final product, not an architectural deviation from the norm. Malick's movies have always been more concerned with connecting us on an emotional level than with connecting plot points — that's what allows Malick to "find" his films in the editing room, excising footage that was once thought essential. Alas, here the characters are vapid and unknowable — as empty as the rooms they so frequently occupy, as thin as shadows of Malick's previous films that blanket this picture in scene after scene.

For someone new to Malick, To the Wonder might be an effective gateway: if you've never seen Malick, you've never seen anything quite like this. But I suspect that many of us who have Malick's movies printed on our heart will find it difficult to watch Kurylenko's Marina raising her hands to salute a storm without thinking about Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas doing the same in The New World, just like it's almost impossible to watch Affleck's Neil playing by lamplight without remembering Brad Pitt's character doing the same in The Tree of Life. What once felt specific, organic and true now feels random and offhand, which threatens to retroactively suffocate the charms of To the Wonder's predecessors. (All these years I thought I was connecting with Kilcher's Pocahontas in that beautiful follow-shot at the end of The New World; but then I saw Kurylenko's Marina mimic the same routine at least twice in this movie and realized I was merely connecting with Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's choreography.) It's like having your heart race when the pretty girl in school calls you "sweetie," only to later learn she calls everyone "sweetie."

Those still fully enthralled by Malick's magic spells — and I say that with envy, not condescension — will see no fault in any of this, I'm sure. For them, pointing out the sameness of Malick's images is like pointing out the sameness of Woody Allen's dialogue, and noting that these characters seem to have nothing to say to one another is like noting the way characters in musicals only express themselves in song. This is what Malick cinema is, they might rightly insist, as if nothing has changed. But it has changed. Malick's previous films remarkably yet routinely achieve transcendence, in parts and in sum. To the Wonder struggles to even achieve presence.

All that said, the timing of To the Wonder's release makes it something of an interesting case study: In recent years an increasing number of critics (including me) have attempted to get beyond hype, celebrity, legend and cinematic stereotypes by dismantling movies like mechanics — sometimes going so far as to assign specific (as if inflexible) values or definitions to various compositions, cuts, color palettes, camera movements, etc. According to that analytical approach, To the Wonder is the equal of Malick's previous pictures because it's built from the same auteuristic materials. And yet while To the Wonder is released into an evolving critical universe that sometimes seems uncomfortable with feeling first and deconstructing later, it's also released in the aftermath of the death of Roger Ebert, who never appeared to let the "math" of a movie talk him into a reaction he didn't first feel in his heart. None of this is to imply that those who adore To the Wonder do so insincerely, or that this movie is impossible to love on a gut level (Ebert, in one of his final reviews, was enchanted by it). But for me To the Wonder is another welcome reminder that the greatness of art is often intangible. In simplest terms, we feel it or we don't.

With a few fleeting exceptions, To the Wonder left me untouched. No movie in Malick's filmography better expresses the isolation of the individual (even when we are with someone, we are trapped inside ourselves). But at the same time, no other Malick movie treats its human characters like their bovine counterparts. Here, there is no depth of mind: women crawl on the ground in passion, crawl on the ground in apology and crawl on the ground in rage (who knew crawling was so versatile?), and at one point Kurylenko's character actually licks a tree. The latter might be a sign that eventually one of Malick's characters will literally fuck nature, as if living down to the wisecracks of his naysayers. But I fear it might be proof that at this point Malick isn't straining to realize a vision so much as getting lost in the image itself.

Read More

Remembering Roger Ebert

"Funny, thoughtful, opinionated, brilliant. An inspiration to anyone who ever wanted to write from a certain point of view." - Joe Posnanski

"To be able to have done exactly what he wanted to do for a living until the very end is an inspiration to anyone." - Jake Cole

"To be a good critic, you have to know your art-form. To be a great one, you have to love it." - Peter Sagal

"When I was a kid, no person turned me on to more movies and filmmakers than Roger Ebert. He changed my life." - Michael Bonfiglio

"Roger Ebert. Everything else you say is superfluous." - Ray Ratto


Up the stairs, past the scattered toys and piles of cardboard boxes that lined the walls of my grandparents' mostly unfinished attic, was the childhood bedroom of my mother's brothers. They'd been out of the house for more than 10 years. Their double beds were still there, neatly made as if waiting for them to return from school, but now this mostly forgotten space in the rafters belonged to my grandfather, who'd lined one wall with more fishing rods than anyone who went fishing only a few times a year could possibly hope to use in a lifetime and whose hoard of fishing magazines, lures and spools of line covered almost every available surface space except for the two square feet or so of table on which sat a small black-and-white television.

It was on that television, on an otherwise unmemorable day during a summer I can't quite pinpoint, that I distinctly remember watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert debating on the show that made thumbs famous. Or, more to the point, I remember trying to watch them. The TV in the attic provided me a bit of privacy and a respite from my grandfather's steady diet of local news, but it also gave me rabbit-ear antennae to adjust and a serrated tuning knob to manipulate ever so slightly in the hopes of generating a clear picture. Of course, no matter how much time you spent getting the image to come into focus, as soon as you stepped away from the TV whatever progress you'd made was sure to come undone.

Whether that was the first time I saw Siskel and Ebert on TV, I don't recall. It's possible. But what I've never forgotten is the amount of effort I put forth to watch them that day. They were almost certainly talking about movies I hadn't seen — in fact most of the time they probably discussed movies I was too young to see. But that didn't matter, because I loved movies and it was obvious that these guys did, too.

Siskel and Ebert were never appointment television for me. I couldn't remember what day their show aired, or at what time, or on which channel. But I managed to watch them a lot anyway over the years, through middle school, high school and into college, until Siskel's death in 1999.

I would have loved movies without them, but I loved movies a lot more because of them. They had passionate opinions, which inspired me to generate my own, and they were willing to fight for those opinions, which made me and my movie-loving friends want to do the same.

Most of the years I watched them, the introduction to their show emphatically underlined that these famous TV personalities were in fact print guys first: Siskel grinned as he tapped away at his computer keyboard, Ebert smiled as he hammered away at his typewriter, and then both men clutched their freshly printed columns as they argued on their way into the theater. Yet even though I went to college to major in journalism, and even though my father was a career newspaperman, and even though the idea of being a full-time critic appealed to me (at the time), I never thought of either of them as a writer until I was about 20.

That was the year I bought my mom the 1997 edition of Roger Ebert's Video Companion — a gift that was the result of her desire to have something to help her pick out movies to rent, now that her son was no longer around to provide in-house counsel. It was a sincere gift, truly meant for her, but the next time I was home from school I was the one who kept pulling the book off the shelf and losing myself in the reviews. (Years later, it now sits on my shelf.)

Unlike Ebert's subsequent Movie Yearbooks, the films chronicled in that almost 1,000-page volume spanned decades. I started by reading about the movies I'd seen, but it wasn't long before I was reading about the many more I hadn't. It was a hard book to put down. Some of the movies sounded dreadful, but the reviews were consistently compelling: the writing was accessible but also astute, and the length, whatever it was, always seemed just right.

Of course, you knew that already.

It's daunting to write about Roger Ebert in the aftermath of his death. There are so many reasons not to try: I'm ill-equipped to summarize his profound influence on criticism and cinema (although, to be clear, he was a profound influence on each of those individually, not just collectively). I'm not an expert on his body of work (I don't even have a favorite review). I never met the man (my only direct interaction with him was his brief e-mailed response to a question I submitted to his Movie Answer Man column many years ago). And the web is full of better writers who are so equipped, who have that expertise and who spent time with him — writers whose memories of Ebert's influence on them are sure sound a lot like mine.

But I'm writing about him anyway, because to avoid doing so would be to avoid this truth: as "sad" and "tragic" as I have found other "celebrity" deaths, only two have made me struggle to breathe: Jim Henson in 1990, and now Roger Ebert.

I feel a tinge of guilt about that, I have to admit. Who am I to be so heartbroken? I didn't even know the man.

But that's the thing: I did. I did know him. I knew him well enough to know that he considered himself a recovering alcoholic, that he didn't believe in God and that he died believing that there would be no sequel after the lights went out. I've got family I don't know that well.

I know those things because Ebert wrote about them explicitly at one time or another. But even without that I would have felt like I knew him, simply because that's the way that Ebert wrote, even when that wasn't what he was writing about.

His criticism is full of sincerity and heart. He could be narrow-minded. He could be stubborn. He could be unrelenting. But reading Ebert I never got the sense — not once — that he was posturing. For all the critics who write with an attitude that suggests that they don't give a damn what anyone else thinks about them, Ebert might be the only one whose criticism truly suggests he never gave a second thought as to how he would be perceived as a result of what he wrote.

You could call Ebert brave for a lot of reasons, like for the way he faced death, the loss of his (physical) voice and his collapsing jaw, or for the way he boldly invited young (and sometimes unproven) writers to contribute to the website that bears his name. But the bravery I'll always cherish most was his willingness to honestly articulate what he saw and felt when watching a movie. Much like "just being yourself," it can be harder than it sounds.

Harder, even, than saying goodbye.

It was only two days ago that Ebert said he was taking a "leave of presence" and scaling down his writing to focus on his health. No one could have been surprised by that: Ebert had already knocked on death's door several times, only to turn back and stay with us a little longer. Nevertheless, despite all those previous scares, despite his slowly deteriorating health, despite that hint that his life was becoming a struggle, the end proved as overwhelming as if it had come out of the blue. Like the ending of a heartbreaking movie you've seen a dozen times before, knowing it's coming doesn't eliminate the power of the response.

Admittedly, I haven't read as many of Ebert's reviews in recent years as I once did. But it wasn't all that long ago — less than eight years or so — that several days a week I'd spend my lunch hour reading new or classic Ebert essays along with the latest from a new blog that had come along, The House Next Door, which at the time was frequented by young writers who had grown up on Ebert and seemed to want to emulate his sincerity (several of whom, fittingly, went on to become contributors for Ebert's site). I've never loved an era of film criticism more.

Since then I've started this blog, contributed to The House Next Door (among other sites) and even had a link to one of my pieces listed on the homepage of Ebert's site (via a post featured by Jim Emerson at Scanners). It's been a thrill.

That I've posted infrequently here of late has to do with my own sort of leave of presence as I try to figure out how to fit my movie criticism into growing demands in other areas of my life. I didn't need a sign of how much movie criticism means to me, but Ebert's death provided one just the same.

Roger Ebert wasn't the guy who made me love movies. He wasn't even the guy who inspired me to write about movies. But he was one of the guys on the black-and-white TV screen that day, all those summers ago, who confirmed to me that movies were as exciting as I'd thought. And he was the writer who first made me appreciate the power of the internet, when suddenly in the late '90s I could read this Chicago-based critic as if he were my own. And he was the critic whose work I studied when I was trying to figure out how to write criticism myself.

Movies aren't my life, but for virtually all of my life movies have been a huge part of me.

Roger Ebert shaped my love of movies, and deepened it.

He shaped me, too.

Read More