Cold

 

Cold

The hordes of Indianians have returned to their state of Hoosierism, taking with them the college football national title and leaving behind one of the coldest Miami winters in memory.

The contest itself… #1 Indiana vs #10 Miami, was played at the Hurricane’s home stadium. It was a great game that left the locals bereft and the visitors (a majority by thousands in Miami’s home stadium) ecstatic. It is, I am sure, fair to posit that most of these Hoosiers had never breathed a moment when they had even fantasized about a national championship that did not involve a round ball.

On January 19, the HOO became the what… and watched, along with thousands of their neighbors, the Indiana FOOTBALL team… and their Heisman Trophy winning Quarterback… win it all. No longer would Gene Hackman be the only star of record in Indiana. The Hoosiers now had Fernando Mendoza!

16 straight games without a defeat, leaving in their path not only the Hurricanes, but cutting a wide swath through a lifetime of grievance, pain, and humiliation imposed for generations by the Ohio State Buckeyes and the reviled Nittany Lions of Penn State. Did I mention Fernando Mendoza seemed to fly into the end zone, defying gravity, to score the winning touchdown that January night at Florida’s Hard Rock Stadium?

The atmosphere was electric, if not warm. There is, they say, something about revenge being best served cold. Exciting as it was, I would have given it all up for another 10-15 degrees on the upside. If you have been anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States this January you know what I am talking about.

Of course, much worse things were going on just west of the home of the Hoosiers … for while the ghosts of failed football teams of the past were being put to rest on that Indiana campus… 600 miles from Bloomington… in Minneapolis… Liberty’s poem, highlighted by the phrase, “Give me your tired, your poor…” rang as hollow as ice in an empty glass.

It was all it took to get me to look for escape in the form of filmed entertainment. Landman with Billy Bob Thorton and a fabulous ensemble cast… now enhanced by the always good Sam Elliott... has ended its second season on Paramount Plus. When comes such another? Not soon enough.

I lurched toward some Oscar nominated motion pictures and was disappointed in Marty Supreme. Good as Timothee Chalamet is as table tennis champion Marty Mauser, and as well directed as one could ask of Josh Safdie… 150 frenetic minutes in the company of a sociopathic anti-hero was more than I had bargained for. There is some real good stuff in the movie, but I suspect little of it (if any) will make the memorable list when that great documentary in the sky, composed of Hollywood’s best film clips, is finalized.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) was next. It is a Brazilian film set in the time of that country’s military dictatorship (mid 1970s). It is winning a lot of international awards but I am betting American audiences will find it too long and its narrative too unstructured. It is well made and probably appropriate that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences find a way to honor it with a nomination… if not an endorsement that the viewing public should actually go out and pay money to see this film. Something I do not have to go out very far on a limb to predict they will not do.

My biggest disappointment of this film trio was Bugonia, but only because ever since Poor Things I so looked forward to this next film by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is back with the director for this one and she is excellent (and nominated). So is her co-star, Jesse Plemons. Poor Things, which pretty much won everything a couple of seasons ago, simply had me expecting too much of filmmaker Lanthimos. The Bugonia film is a very good one, it just isn’t the great one I had anticipated. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons just could win it all, but I doubt it… not in the year of One Battle After Another.

But then…. I am the guy who went out on a limb for Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Go know.

 

Barney Rosenzweig