Churn The Turf

"For a man with such great power you have to take responsibility." Robert De Niro in his end scene with James Woods, Once Upon A Time in America

On one level, Against All Odds (1984) is a predictable suspense thriller that doesn’t necessarily earn memorial status through television syndication. Even Phil Collins’ sound track, so deftly fitted in to the conclusion of the film, has the mundane delphinic sound which plagues popular music from the eighties, instantly forgettable. Jeff Bridges, in the sheep’s clothing of composite character Terry Brogan, purportedly wins the day, with his finer tarnished moral decency, against gaming corruption embodied in Woods’ Jake Wise, a club owner with a lucrative gambling operation dependent on sometimes fictive NFL teams. There is one extraneous and tacky scene toward the climax where Bridges asks Rachel Ward if Woods’ dick is bigger than his, then the audience is treated to a tortured kiss of revelation and decision. Certain incipient details challenge auditory comprehension in decline, but whether Brogan was a star quarterback or a wide receiver cut from the “Outlaws” is nearly irrelevant to the story line, which beneath the surface is an inexorable deconstruction of American innocence. Ward’s character is comparable to Dashiel Hammett’s Ruth Wonderly. But Wyler doesn’t shoot her pursuers over some fantastic pursuit of wealth, as she is a magnet’s daughter without the pecuniary interests of Hammett’s villains. She seems to engage in opportunistic murder out of misguided self-preservation.

Although it is too far a stretch to say that Against All Odds upgrades the Manichaean dualism that Hammett popularized for his fans, it has enough trace elements to suggest we’re all complicit. Jake Wise is vulnerable despite his will to power, but the knife wound inflicted on Wise by the young Jessie seeking her escape doesn’t take the club owner out of his milieu, unlike Bridges, whose injury sets him apart just enough that he can function like a classical noir detective who can right the scales, except that the issue of what, if anything, is vindicated is left up to the viewer. To the director’s credit, this film isn’t a sports movie, so much as a cynical confirmation that “deep state,” does exist, has a complex relationship to our vices, much like the taut masterpiece that is Jackie Brown. It may be only sheer coincidence that Robert Forester appears in both films, and in each, functions as a facilitator, in Odds, a foiled henchman. If you’d like confirmation bias, all the recall you need is Tom Brady’s deflated pigskin scandal. It was such a big deal because Americans have a bicameral relationship with its gladiator love affair. We want great sports and a fast buck, and this Reagan era conceit with a 70’s hangover sketches in the dirty laundry better than Oliver Stone’s attempt, this film that comforts the dowager as a product of her time. But things haven’t changed that much. In the latest tri-state scandal, McClure turned Bobbitt into a superlative Samaritan, only to exploit him for our collective appetite for material acquisition.

Fedora's Lurk, Like Reza Aslan

The prolonged Cold War—that Manichean drama of projections and counterprojections; the Vietnam War—not generally acknowledeged as the longest war in American history (1954-73); the protests against the Vietnam War, which forcibly divided the generations-- Joyce Carol Oates, ferocity shrew

Dashiell Hammett could teach those rushed kindle authors a few things about making light surface fiction interesting. I have studied him more than once under Jewish and Gentile liberal. James Joyce may rouse my hostility as an unforgiving fuck who smirks his way into the apologia of the dimmer dial, but Hammett doesn't thin his gruel for the sake of the puzzle, and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite commercial novels. My money is on Sam Spade teaching alien archaeologists more about civilization than the joke on Leopold Bloom. James Spader seems to embody a bit of each character, the Manichean detective, the corrupt and corrosively mocked Jew. It manifests itself in his early and quixotic role in Stargate, a breathtaking speculative cinematic otherworld. follows him in Wolf, manifests a wickedly promising menace in Boston Legal, only to fizz in The Practice. It is a menace of more complex nuance than that offered by Christopher Walken. Walken carries a bit of jingoism in his ruthless irony, but Spader leaves one unsure, as if he is a fervent convert to Satanic possibilities, or a Crusader who just discovered the potency of salvation. We're never sure which in his manipulative antipodes.

It is not enough for The Blacklist, which is patently ridiculous. No one man can manipulate die hard gum shoes and the ruthless hardened criminals and stay three moves ahead of either, not even America's unifying KGB statesman. With that qualification, the show may be of use, in its idiotic television way (Ukrainian ordinance guerrillas apparently inhabit the capital and spring to life for the convenience of the screen writer's guild, but hey, who is starving in corrupt government housing methodologies, not screen writers!). Good and bad each have debilitating costs and secrets, in the measure of how far brutality has come, gut stabbings are routine in gratuitous teleplay, a delight! If producers wanted to do it right, they'd anglicize a Persian and twist his balls in a confused identity matrix. The real Islamists can't be killed fast enough, but multicultural humanism on an American campus is a pasturized entry pass.