Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Writer John Updike published more than fifty books, and won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He also wrote for The New Yorker for more than fifty years, often about baseball. One of his best known essays described the last game in the career of Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams. It was intended as a rebuke to a Boston columnist who noted the occasion by saying, essentially, that Williams was overrated. Updike countered that argument, not with statistical analysis but with an examination of the love that New Englanders had for their hero. He wrote:

"The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories."

In that final game, in his final time at the plate, Williams capped his 22-year career by hitting a home run. Updike described the scene:

"Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters."

Updike died in 2009. His Williams essay was just republished in book form.

Catch-22

Although Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is considered a classic, critics panned the 1970 film adaptation. The film has always been one of my favorites, and over time has become a cult classic. Heres one of my favorite scenes, where Nately, a young American soldier played by Art Garfunkel, engages in a fascinating debate with an Italian patriarch.



The film is available for streaming from Netflix.

The Andy Griffith Show

It's the fiftieth anniversary of The Andy Griffith Show, which made its debut on CBS this week in 1960. The show ranked in the top-10 each year it was on the air, finishing as the highest-rated show in its final season. Sixteen episodes have fallen into the public domain and are available through outlets such as YouTube, but the show has been a staple of syndicated television for as long as I can remember.

Children of Men

Today is the birthday of English actor Clive Owen. Among his films is the 2006 classic Children of Men, based on the dystopian novel by P.D. James. It imagines a grim world in which two decades of global human infertility have left humanity with less than a century to survive. The United Kingdom has the last functioning government and is overrun with refugees.

It's one of the most visually striking films I've ever seen. In particular, it features several lengthy single-shot sequences, including a six minute scene of Owen running through a raging battlefield.

The shot that is mentioned most often takes place earlier in the film. Owen and his estranged wife (played by Julianne Moore) lead an effort to help a young refugee escape when their car is ambushed.

Click the picture to see a clip of the scene. It doesn't do the shot justice, but Universal has removed longer clips from the web. Here's how David Dylan Thomas of Filmcritic.com described it:

Using a revolutionary camera rig that rides both atop and within a speeding car, [director Alfonso] Cuaron captures an attack on our heroes, only cutting (without looking like it) once they exit the car. The elaborate camerawork, rather than diluting the shocking violence of the sequence, augments it because the real-time nature of the scene and the proximity of the camera to the characters only makes it more intimate.

Like Thomas, critic Alan Bachus calls it one of the greatest tracking shots in film history:

The shot spins around to show all the characters fighting off the assailants as they drive backwards, avoid bullets and spears etc. No effects were used to create the shot other than a specially rigged car which allowed the camera to hang suspended from the roof and spin and move to capture everyone's reactions. This shot is one of a series of long extended takes in the film

I Can't Get Behind That

William Shatner, Henry Rollins and Adrian Bellew from the 2004 album Has Been.

Henry Rollins tells an amazing story about how producer Ben Folds brought the three performers together in a studio one afternoon to create this remarkable track.

If all you know of Shatner is his self-caricature, you'll be surprised by the depth and quality of this album. The New York Times praised it, writing: "Has Been is likely to turn expectations of Mr. Shatner on their head. For one thing, it is a highly autobiographical and sometimes moving effort. The subject matter shifts comfortably from the profound to the ridiculous. ... Remarkably, the album coheres."

Houdini

Tony Curtis, who died yesterday, made over 100 films in his career. One of my favorites is this film about Harry Houdini, made in 1953. Available from Netflix.