It’s no surprise that the book can be contradictory given the figure at its center. That’s not Tom Junod, regarded as perhaps the finest magazine writer of his generation. It’s his father, Lou, one of those larger-than-life presences who dominates every room he enters, routinely gets mistaken for a celebrity, is treated like one by those in his orbit, and can’t help leaving damage in his wake. Big Lou Junod is a sun worshipper, a Sinatra disciple, and a chronic womanizer. Above all, he’s a man with ideas on how men should be and how life is meant to be lived. And Tom Junod will be shaped by them, in ways he’s still trying to fathom.

The book’s lengthy first section chronicles Tom’s youth and adolescence, when he’s being forged in the crucible of Lou’s influence. At that age, the adult world is remote and mysterious, ruled by codes you’re still struggling to comprehend. Big Lou was not the best guide to its rituals. As Junod writes:

I always suspected that he was something of a rogue, but the glamour he cultivated made me think he was a rogue like David Niven was a rogue, like Richard Burton was a rogue, like Cary Grant was a rogue, a charming thief who stole only from other dishonest men.

Cracks slowly appear in his father’s façade. Tom starts to revile “how he talks about his supposed friends behind their backs, ranking them against the punishing standard of his own exalted masculinity.” He and his family—including Lou’s wife and Tom’s mother, Fran—come to the realization that “we belong to him. That he doesn’t belong to us.”

The second section, by comparison too short, covers the years when both are adults and Tom puts Lou’s life lessons, good and bad, into practice. Tom even devotes a GQ article to his father’s approach to style—“The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”—and living. It’s also during this period that Tom writes “Can You Say … Hero?” the 1998 Esquire profile of Mr. Rogers that is Junod’s best-known piece. Fred Rogers and Tom Junod became friends after its publication, Rogers offering him a contrasting model of masculinity not defined by surfaces. Tellingly, Lou didn’t understand their bond, telling Tom he found Mr. Rogers “effeminate.” The article provided the basis for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), with Junod’s fictionalized stand-in portrayed by Matthew Rhys. That character is estranged from his flamboyant father, a figure even further removed from Lou. Still, Lou would accept it as his due that the old man of his thinly-veiled son is played by an Academy Award winner, although he’d undoubtedly have wardrobe notes for Chris Cooper.

The book’s closing section is the most confounding. Following Lou’s death in 2006, Tom begins investigating his father’s life in a way he couldn’t while Lou was alive; as Tom explains, “My family has stories but no history.” He unearths a family scandal never discussed but big enough to appear on the front pages of newspapers and tracks down women with whom had Lou had long-term relationships during his marriage to Fran. He discovers that his father had a type:

Did he try to save them from what awaited them or did he ensure that what awaited them devoured them? Did he fail in his attempts to rescue them or did he succeed all too well in bringing about their ruin?

Some of the skeletons that tumble out of Lou’s closet are rumors, reports of deeply disturbing behavior that are impossible to confirm (which you want Tom, the reporter, to do) and difficult to ignore, an option Tom, the son, will never have. What carries the reader past this uneasy position is Tom Junod’s supple writing, in which he lays himself bare, and the all-too-understandable impulse behind it. Everyone wonders how far the apple fell from the tree. At times, you may require exact measurements. Tom Junod continues to admire his father’s “conviction … no, certainty” and what he bequeathed him: “He taught me how to live, man—and he gave me permission to enjoy life. He might not have been a good man but he was an elemental one.” I couldn’t even tell you if I’d want to spend time in Lou Junod’s company. But I relished the opportunity to meet him here.

I assumed it was a sign of Tom Junod’s reputation that his publisher let him get away with such a baroque title. Only after reading a review did I realize, “Shit, that’s a Led Zeppelin lyric?”

We’ve all got pantheon-level artists with whom we fail to connect. Zeppelin is one of mine. For a variety of reasons, I never got into their music. I didn’t hate it; it just failed to speak to me. I’m still not sure if I’ve made it through all eight minutes of “Stairway to Heaven.”

Annoyed that I’d missed the reference, I set out to school myself. Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025) is as thorough a music documentary as you’ll find. Directed by Bernard MacMahon, it was made with the band’s cooperation and features lots of uninterrupted musical performances. I’m not yet won over, though I came away with a deep respect for the band’s place in music history.

Still, when I saw footage of the clean-cut, besuited Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones as wunderkind session musicians—and learned that they’d backed up Shirley Bassey on the recording of the James Bond theme “Goldfinger” (1964)—I thought, “You had the world by the tail, lads. Was all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll really worth it?” Which is maybe the best explanation of why I never became a Led Zeppelin fan.

I can think of another reason. Zeppelin still had fans when I was in high school even though the band had long since stopped recording. The enthusiasm struck the pretentious, teenaged me as secondhand, inherited from older siblings and inauthentic. (I listened to Sinatra as well as The Police at the time, so I was one to talk.) Plus most of the Zeppelin faithful were stoners, a tribe I didn’t run with, which placed the music under a literal cloud of smoke.

Paths would occasionally cross. Erik (not his real name) wore a Zeppelin shirt almost every day. I imagined him organizing them the way Albert Einstein arranged his minimalist wardrobe, making sure he donned his Physical Graffiti T only on Thursdays. Erik was a lanky kid with an incongruously deep FM-radio voice, the kind meant to trip seismographs when saying things like “We’ve got a block of Pink Floyd coming up as we celebrate the month of Rocktober,” and he used it to torment me in the one class we had together.

In Stephen King novels, bullying is always a physical thing. Kids are forever getting chased, beaten up, stuffed into lockers. But by high school, it evolves into a more cunning psychological practice. And often a public one. I’d get to the classroom to find Erik holding forth on matters either sexual or scatological, and without fail he’d rope me into the conversation. “Vince knows about this. Right, Vince?” Or he’d invite me to tell the class about my wild weekend—“Crazy shit, man, everybody’s talking about it”—before Mr. Berger (also not his real name and counting the days until retirement) arrived to halfheartedly restore order. You could either try going toe to toe with Erik or sit in humiliated silence, with option #2 being my default choice.

I have no idea why he zeroed in on me. Maybe he sensed my unease at being in Algebra 2 again. I was retaking the class, having gotten a C in it the year before. I’d generally done well in school, but once higher mathematics was introduced it was as if I’d awoken in a world where everyone spoke Esperanto. I recognized many of the words but couldn’t follow the conversations. I’d struggled to my first-ever B-minus in Algebra 1 only to do worse in the follow-up. I was sensing the limits of my capabilities and was quietly freaking out about it.1 Not wanting to fall behind academically or socially, I retook Algebra 2 while continuing with the even harder math classes my friends were in, doubling down on the very subject that was vexing me. I thought this was how grownups responded to adversity. I’d tried the gambit before, when I started having doubts about my Catholic faith and decided, “I know what I’ll do! I’ll become an assistant CCD teacher and instruct people even younger than me about religion!” By the end of that year, I’d abandoned the church and sent a group of students into their confirmation ceremony woefully unprepared.

So there I was, flailing amidst quadratic equations while Erik insisted on vocally consulting me about a real-life medical phenomenon he called “gastric blood farts,” dreading every second I’m in that room. I eked out a B-minus and still didn’t understand algebra. I got a simultaneous C-minus in analytic geometry then flunked trig, a grade I managed to conceal from my parents.2 On the bright side, my high school was large enough that I never had to deal with Erik again.

Flash forward: I’ve graduated from college and am back in South Florida. I’m living with my parents but I’ve landed a magazine job. More importantly, I’ve met Rosemarie and we’re making plans to move west. I’m at the local mall when someone calls my name.

Erik’s voice still rumbles. He’s smiling, genuinely happy to see me. He asks how I’m doing. What I want to say is:

“Dude, are you fucking serious? You and I have never had a real conversation. I may hate your favorite band because of you. You made my life a living hell for fifty minutes every weekday for a solid year. And now you expect me to stand in front of Schnickel Fritz Deli and reminisce?”

But I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. Trouble is, I don’t know what to say instead. My old standby of awkward silence doesn’t seem like the move.

I’m surprised, then, when I cock my head and hear myself say: “Dunedin High, right? I’m sorry, but … I can’t remember your name.”

He looks crestfallen as he tells me what I already know, adding that we were in Berger’s class together. I tell him I still hate algebra, then say I’m running late to meet my girlfriend but it was good seeing him.

Was that the most mature response? Probably not. But decades later, I’m still glad I went with it.

After watching the Zeppelin documentary, I looked Erik up. He teaches martial arts in Southern California. So now I do want to talk to him.

What I’m Watching

The newsletter’s called Cocktails and Crime. I suppose I should provide one or the other.

The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) should not work. A historical epic that’s also a series of impossible crime stories? It’s like Throne of Blood (1957) as told by Nero Wolfe, only the armchair detective is manacled in a dungeon. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for horror films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001), adapts the novel by Honobu Yonezawa. The ingenious structure builds to a shattering late speech. Definitely worth seeing in the theater, so you can surrender fully to its spell.

July’s milestone may seem the most trivial. Do not be deceived. I take inordinate pride in frequenting the same bar—in this case, Seattle’s Zig Zag Café—for twenty years. Becoming a regular anywhere is a noteworthy accomplishment. Here, it actually changed my life.

We’d been in Seattle for over a decade in 2006 yet felt as if we hadn’t put down roots. Rosemarie had built a career, one that’s still going strong. But we hadn’t forged any lasting bonds locally. The primary topic of conversation on our rambling weekend walks was whether we should move back to the East Coast, where all of our connections were. We kept inching closer to making that leap.

Our primary solace, then and now, was going to the movies. That’s what we did on July 1, attending an opening weekend matinee of The Devil Wears Prada. We were downtown early on a Saturday. We’d heard about the Zig Zag and decided to stop in for a drink. We didn’t leave until hours later. We returned the following Saturday, and every Saturday after for over six months. Seattle had just banned smoking in bars, and the Zig Zag’s owner Ben Dougherty told us we helped keep the place’s doors open.

The same advice tends to come up when the subject is making connections as an adult. You’ve gotta get out there. Join a club. Start a hobby. Valid points, but difficult to put into practice consistently. I stumbled onto a simpler solution. I found a place that felt like home when I didn’t want to be at home, an extension of my living room with more flattering lighting. I was at ease there, so much so that I relaxed into a better version of myself. One comfortable talking to strangers, willing to linger over an interesting, unexpected conversation.

My Zig Zag attendance awakened an interest in cocktails I didn’t know I had, which became a sideline unto itself. (The introduction to my first book Down the Hatch recounts the tale of our first night at the bar in full.) More importantly, having a place to go put me in contact with a broad range of people. I made friends there, on both sides of the bar. Over the past two decades, those friendships have created opportunities large and small, expanding my world.

One of those friends was the late, legendary Zig Zag bartender Murray Stenson. He viewed regular customers as an essential element of hospitality, both creators and caretakers of a bar’s atmosphere. Establish yourself as a fixture someplace—bar, coffee shop, restaurant, laundromat, anywhere—and you become a steward of that environment. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that committing to something larger often delivers the very thing that you personally need. And what the hell, it gets you out of the house.

We’re not at the Zig Zag as often as we once were despite living closer to it, partly because we’re regulars at several other places now. But it’s a part of our story, and we’ll always pay our respects. We stopped in after seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2 for the symmetry and were back to mark our 20^th anniversary, pushing it a day because Seattle hosted a World Cup match on July 1. We were, of course, well taken care of. I’ve got a birthday coming up, one I don’t want to make a fuss over. Odds are I’ll celebrate it there. Where else would I go when I want to feel special and ordinary at the same time?

What I’m Reading

Related to the above, I hung out a shingle on the internet over twenty years ago. I wanted a hangout online, a place people could find me in the unlikely event they were looking. Everything I wrote is still there. Some of it embarrasses me, much of it is forgettable, most of it I’ve forgotten myself. I could take it all down, but you never know when a message in a bottle will wash up somewhere. Or what will happen when it does.

A few months ago, I received an email from Vince Passaro. He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, but more to the point he’s the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (2002), a novel I loved and which I posted about in 2008. Vince1 had discovered my write-up of his book almost eighteen years after it appeared. He kindly offered to send me a copy of his follow-up, which I had somehow missed. Naturally, I said yes.

Crazy Sorrow (2021) opens with two Columbia University students meeting on the night of July 4, 1976, so I vowed to read the book by the fiftieth anniversary of that date. Better to dwell in a meticulous recreation of that optimistic time than marvel at how we ignored this year’s half-hearted semiquincentennial festivities, America now seeming collectively middle-aged and not in the mood to be reminded of its birthdays anymore.

Fireworks shine over the World Trade Center as George and Anna get to know each other. It’s their first encounter, and it won’t be their last. They fall in love then break apart, going their separate ways, their erratic paths occasionally bringing them back into each other’s orbits. They can’t help but wonder, as they sleep with some people, marry others, chase stability and happiness and purpose, if they were meant to be together.

Vince (not me, him) plays with pace to beautiful effect in a book that spans over four decades. The early days move almost languidly, befitting that youthful sense that your entire life can be contained in an afternoon. Time speeds up as George and Anna age, favorite places disappearing, friends and lovers drifting away, children growing up and moving on. The culture shifts around them as the eighties yield to the onrushing new millennium, Anna in particular finding that what once was sufficient now feels like poverty, leaving her determined to catch up before she’s left behind.

There’s also a lot of fucking in this book, of all varieties, as there fucking should be. Desire and the need to be desired are constants for much of life, the memory of both persisting when they wane. Sex is described in terms beautiful and blunt, the act at times proving revelatory as it does for Anna, angrily bedding a needy beau whom she knows voted for Reagan.

She pushed down roughly on him and she thought: So this is what it’s about, this is what it is to feel powerful, this is what it is to feel like a man: what one needed, to experience power, was to find an advantage and use it, to abandon the idea of equality, or justice, or love.

Like its predecessor, Crazy Sorrow is wildly ambitious, finely wrought, and deeply enamored of the promise and the punishment of life in New York City. I emailed Vince to thank him and tell him so. (He’s also on Substack now.) It’s a novel that I would have continued to miss had I not written about Violence, Nudity, Adult Content nearly two decades ago. So instead of beating myself up about the irregularity of these posts, I’ll keep getting to them as I get to them. Bottles wash up onshore all the time.

Since 2019, Pushkin Vertigo has been publishing translations of the works of Seishi Yokomizo, one of Japan’s most popular crime novelists. His enduring creation is vagabond private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, whose unkempt appearance leads to him being routinely underestimated Columbo-style. Yokomizo himself turns up, a humble mystery writer who recounts Kindaichi’s most baffling cases as his “official biographer.”

Kindaichi made his debut in The Honjin Murders (1946), a classic locked-room mystery. In Murder at the Black Cat Café (1947, US 2025, translated by Bryan Karetnyk), he tackles another genre staple: the “faceless corpse” murder, in which the victim cannot be identified. Such stories follow a standard formula, but Yokomizo—both novelist and character—opens with a bold meta framing that declares this time will be different. After the owners of the title establishment in Tokyo’s red-light district sell up and disappear, a body is unearthed on the property. Kindaichi investigates, and the solution is indeed suitably devious. “Black Cat” is a novella, short enough to be paired with a second in the same volume. Kindaichi takes a minor role in “Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?” (1949)—it appears Yokomizo revised it in 1955 to add his beloved protagonist—but it’s smartly paired with “Black Cat” for thematic reasons. Relayed through letters and newspaper stories, it’s set in a remote village where the long-standing feud between two families plays out in tragic fashion after World War II. It’s the stronger story in a book that isn’t the ideal introduction to Kindaichi but is a worthy entry in the series.

A Golden Age or Golden Age-style novel will include a certain amount of acceptable artifice. Then there’s the notion that the essays of a literary critic analyzing whodunits can result in “a warm and fluffy feeling each time” a character reads them, that simply whispering that critic’s name can make her “heart flutter.” Such is the world of Masateru Konishi’s My Grandfather, The Master Detective (2023, US 2026, translated by Louise Heal Kawai). A smash hit in Japan, this odd, engaging collection of six linked short stories combines the traditional mystery with the subgenre known as healing fiction. Kaede, she of the fluttering heart, is an introverted twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher who has a close relationship with the title paterfamilias, a retired educator. But her sole remaining relative faces a long decline after a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia. Kaede hopes that their shared love of classic mysteries—along with her asking her grandfather to unravel a few local crimes armchair-detective-style—will keep his faculties sharp. There are locked rooms and other impossible crimes, but the book’s not-so-secret focus is Kaede’s personal life as she finds herself torn between two potential suitors. Several solutions are preposterous, the final tale involves a shocking crime from the family’s past that could have been developed throughout the book as opposed to being sprung on the reader, and Kaede’s romantic future is (spoiler!) not resolved. But the many nods, both explicit and subtle, to the likes of Carr and Chesterton pay off, and the tone is beguiling, even—here’s a word I never use—heartwarming.

The book includes an incongruous shoutout to The Big Blue (1988), a Luc Besson movie I thought had been justly forgotten. The film lives in my memory because it cropped up in William Goldman’s Hype & Glory (1990), in which the Oscar-winning scribe of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), All the President’s Men (1976), and The Princess Bride (1987) chronicles his stint as a Cannes Film Festival juror. The Big Blue screened out of competition but Goldman still had to sit through it, saying among other things:

Sheer embarrassment. Agony.

It’s about—no, I’m not going to detail what it’s about, because there’s no reason for your brains to be burdened with such minutiae, and besides, the jerks and clowns who made the thing never goddamn decided what it was about.

The movie has to do with deep-sea diving tournaments … in this turkey, you weren’t sure for half the picture whether the object of the tournament was to go deeper underwater or hold your breath longest underwater.2

Arturo Pérez-Reverte swiftly establishes a luxe atmosphere worthy of Agatha Christie in The Final Problem (2026, translated by Frances Riddle). In 1960, British actor Ormond Basil, carefully attending to what remains of his fame and his bank account, accepts an invitation to tag along on a cruise with a boisterous Cinecittà producer and his opera diva paramour. A storm strands the trio on a Greek island, where one of the other monied guests at their boutique hotel is found dead in a cabana in yet another impossible crime. The weather keeping the authorities at bay, the isolated jetsetters turn to Basil—because he starred as Sherlock Holmes in a popular series of films. Having internalized the canon of Conan Doyle and with a Spanish pulp writer as his Watson, Basil assumes the role of sleuth in real life. The trouble is that the killer, also realizing that the game is afoot, is determined to deliver an equally worthy performance.

I’m a sucker for a show business mystery—I can recommend five of them—so I should have adored this book. But when the trip started to meander, I began wishing the itinerary were shorter. Pérez-Reverte is so besotted with his conceit (“An actor who played detective playing detective!”) that he continually marvels at it, creating a false and repetitive sense that Basil may abandon his efforts. The mystery is thin, too many suspects eliminated from suspicion too quickly. And for all its glorification of fair play, the book doesn’t adhere to these rules, introducing evidence in the last chapter to which we were not privy. Still, the solution, with acknowledged shades of Patricia Highsmith as much as Conan Doyle, satisfies. The decadent demimonde is a delight, as is Basil’s barbed voice; all too aware of his fading fortunes, he relishes the opportunity to reprise his signature turn, and he tosses off juicy tidbits about the likes of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and David Niven throughout.

The Clock House Murders (1991, US 2026, translated by Ho-Ling Wong) is the fourth of Yukito Ayatsuji’s Bizarre House Mysteries, a series that raises the question of why anyone would move into a home designed by architect Nakamura Seiji; given that every book is about the tortured history of a structure bearing his name, mayhem is guaranteed to be an amenity. The Clock House was a commission for a now-dead collector of timepieces and is reputed to be haunted. A group of students from a university mystery club, an alleged medium, and staffers from a magazine agree to be locked into the oldest part of the building for three days in order to divine the truth. In a parallel plotline, Ayatsuji’s sleuth Shimoda Kiyoshi and a student who was meant to be in the original party investigate the house’s origins from the outside.

The book is the slowest of slow burns, Ayatsuji’s workmanlike prose not exactly conjuring up an aura of dread. For a band of mystery enthusiasts, the students inside the Clock House seem woefully unaware of many classic tropes; you might find yourself, like me, screaming at the page, “Haven’t you kids heard of secret passages?”

I stayed with the book, and I’m glad I did. Amidst the flurry of classic mystery references, a few mention Philo Vance. S.S. Van Dine’s insufferable sleuth habitually gassed on about the diabolical plots of his adversaries. The reveal here truly warrants such praise; it is authentically fiendish yet was staring me in the face the entire time. Every irksome move Ayatsuji made was essential to its execution, culminating in a bravura final sequence for the ages. I’m not going to forget the wrap-up to this mystery anytime soon.

What I’m Drinking

A recent score of fresh basil reminded me of the Gin Basil Smash. I first encountered bartender Jörg Meyer’s refreshing beverage in a class taught by Paul Clarke based on his book The Cocktail Chronicles (2015). High time I reacquainted myself. Light and herbaceous, it makes for perfect summertime drinking.

The Gin Basil Smash, by Jörg Meyer

• 2 ounces gin

• ¾ ounce lemon juice

• ¾ ounce simple syrup

• 3-4 sprigs of fresh basil

Muddle the basil in a shaker. Add the remaining ingredients. Shake. Strain over ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a fresh basil leaf.

Like all good dorks, I was active in student government back then. It was largely an exercise in résumé padding; we weren’t negotiating trade agreements with rival schools or quelling insurrections among the freshmen. We were there to add another line to our college applications. One of our only real responsibilities was to find a speaker for our commencement ceremony. The standard suggestions were bandied about: the mayor or some city hall functionary, maybe one of the local ministers.

Screw that, I said. We only graduate from this dump once. We need star power. We need a name.

I had one in mind. John Wilson was the area’s most popular news anchor, swiftly acquiring a reputation as “the Walter Cronkite of Tampa Bay.” Understand that cable TV was still relatively new and it was the tail end of the Ron Burgundy era. Seeing a local media personality in the flesh was akin to glimpsing a demigod. You’d talk about it for weeks. You’d call people on your landline phone to let them know the encounter had happened.

We have to get Wilson, I insisted, swatting away all other potential candidates like gnats. I’ll bet no other school has even thought of asking him. Our student government advisor finally tossed up his hands, which was pretty much all he ever did. Knock yourself out, he told me. Just leave time to arrange a back-up once he says no.

Why was I hellbent on being an adolescent Flo Ziegfeld? Maybe because I was a teenager in 1980s Florida who knew who Flo Ziegfeld was. Maybe because I’d scraped together enough financial aid and decent grades to go to college in Boston and I thought playing the impresario before I blew town would be a dazzling preview of my future big-city existence.

I remember how I felt when I received an envelope bearing the local TV station’s logo in response to my impassioned pitch letter, hammered out on the new typewriter I’d use to write every college paper. I remember the look on our student government advisor’s face when I deposited the letter on his desk and told him, “Wilson would be honored to do it.”

There was a buzz in the stands the sweltering night of the ceremony. Word was out about who’d be delivering the commencement address. School officials surrounded Wilson as he walked toward the stage in a phalanx, as if he were a mafia don or a foreign dignitary. After the interminable preliminaries, Wilson finally approached the microphone.

And coughed before apologizing for the terrible condition of his voice. He had come down with laryngitis at the worst possible time.

Out in the sea of soon-to-be graduates, I died a little.

Wilson soldiered on. He listed the many challenges we would face as we entered the wider world, noting that as he considered them, his own problems … didn’t seem so bad.

A sentiment delivered in full, booming, “And now, sports!” voice, all pretense of a throat ailment gone.

Was it hokum? Unquestionably. Expertly delivered hokum, because the stadium erupted in the loudest applause outside of the two consecutive 5A state football championship games it hosted. (We lost both times. Go Falcons.) Wilson went on to kill with the rest of his speech.

After the ceremony, which ended us with us tossing our graduation caps into the air even though we’d been expressly told not to, the principal gave me a double-barreled handshake and thanked me for getting Wilson to come to the school. I made the rounds with my friends that night, all the parents we encountered saying how impressive Wilson was. I didn’t see my own parents until the following morning, when my mother said, “That might have been the best speech I ever heard.”

A review of one of the Renee Patrick Golden Age Hollywood novels I wrote with Rosemarie referred to us as “cheerfully shameless name-droppers.” Guilty as charged. My closest friends have called me a starfucker. I’ll cop to that as well.

But there’s a reason for that behavior, which I’d started to figure out in high school. The world you inhabit is as big as you make it. Not every door will be slammed in your face. You might as well knock on the ones that interest you. (The story of how I lined up a commencement speaker will be the closest I ever come to delivering a commencement address. Don’t boo me.)

I signed on at the college newspaper and became the film critic and correspondent, interviewing artists who’d made an impact on me like Clive Barker and Terry Gilliam. My first adult job was at a trade magazine dedicated to a lucrative but dull industry. Whenever I found a boldfaced name even peripherally attached to the business—for instance, Jim Bouton, baseball pitcher, Yankees World Series hero, author of the greatest sports tell-all book Ball Four (1970), and co-star of the Philip Marlowe film The Long Goodbye (1973)—I sought them out for an interview to add pizzazz to our coverage. I kept it up when I edited Noir City, approaching any luminary who expressed a love for film noir to ask if they’d be open to contributing something. A surprising number said yes, their perspectives illuminating the subject in unexpected ways and drawing more readers to the magazine.

And I’m still at it. The week of my graduation anniversary, Chris Elford and I wrapped up a pivotal stage in A Hell of a Drink, the upcoming collection of Chris’ original horror-movie-inspired cocktails. It’s a bonus that I think will elevate the book, making it something truly special. Because the world of the book is as big as we make it.

John Wilson recently wrote a book about his career as a news anchor; I’d wager his commencement address doesn’t warrant a mention. A fun fact tying this story into A Hell of a Drink again: John is the father of actor Patrick Wilson, the Tony-nominated star of the Insidious and Conjuring movies who’s currently appearing in the TV reboot of Cape Fear, although for my money his best work is in Little Children (2006).

I mentioned to my mother that it had been forty years since I graduated high school. She immediately said, “Do you remember your man’s speech? It was so good.” I went into the archives of the St. Petersburg Times to find their coverage of 1986’s graduation season. I learned that our rich-kid foes at Countryside High landed our congressman for their ceremony. He cancelled and sent an aide to read his speech. I’m sure many remember that evening fondly.

As stated, I loathe Facebook, but it’s perfect for hosting, say, a group dedicated to your high school class. I posted the Times article about our graduation there. It generated dozens of responses. Multiple people mentioned John Wilson’s “laryngitis” gambit. One former classmate wrote, “I still talk about his speech to this day.”

It’s nice when your first production garners good reviews.

Erich von Stroheim was hired by Gloria Swanson and her producer/paramour Joseph P. Kennedy to write and direct Queen Kelly (1929). There’s every chance the venture, a sweeping silent epic at a time when sound was already upending the picture business, was doomed from the outset. Compounding that, Stroheim’s well-known meticulousness led to a ballooning budget and the sexually-charged script became steadily more salacious to Swanson’s dismay. Stroheim was fired, the production shut down. A new ending directed by Richard Boleslawski was grafted onto Stroheim’s footage. This truncated version screened theatrically in a clutch of countries but not the United States. Decades later, Stroheim was cast opposite Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as the devoted butler to her faded star Norma Desmond. Billy Wilder wanted Desmond to watch one of her own films, captivated. According to legend, it was Stroheim himself who suggested using an excerpt from the failure that torpedoed his directorial career.

For years, that tantalizing glimpse was the only way to see any of Kelly. A 1985 restoration hinted at Stroheim’s original design. The updated “reimagining” using newly-discovered material that debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival was my one SIFF must-see.

Kelly is set in a fictional Middle European country where the primary export is decadence. “Wild” Prince Wolfram’s (Walter Byron) initial encounter with Swanson’s chaste convent girl Kitty involves her losing her bloomers as if she’s carrying a grocery bag that includes celery in an illustration by Art Frahm. So smitten is Wolfram by this alleged meet-cute that he fakes a fire at the convent and kidnaps Kitty. He commits this ostensibly lighthearted crime the night before his wedding to the country’s batshit crazy queen (Seena Owen, slaying). Wildly jealous and given to padding around barefoot carrying a cat, her majesty flings the feline away to horsewhip Kitty out of her betrothed’s arms. Wolfram is imprisoned for his indiscretion while Kitty voyages to Dar es Salaam in German East Africa to sit at her dying aunt’s bedside, where wealthy reprobate Jan (Tully Marshall in a proto-John Carradine performance) waits to marry her. Jan has bankrolled Kitty’s education and clearly wants some return on investment; given Swanson’s age, he’s been doling out dough for decades. One amazing sequence features women including a tattooed tubercular maiden known as Coughdrops cobbling together Kitty’s trousseau from common items like mosquito netting. In the reconstructed scenes, Kitty spurns Jan and under the title nickname reigns over a “dance hall” that is clearly a brothel. (These are the scenes that raised Swanson’s ire, but c’mon, Gloria: “dance hall” is almost always code for brothel in movies.) Stroheim intended the film to be more than five hours long, and I’d wager much of that running time would have been dedicated to seediness and degradation before the lush happy ending. This latest and likely last iteration of Queen Kelly looks spectacular, but for all the opulence in the “courtship” section Swanson’s virginal character is one-note. What works in the film a century later is the very extravagance and earthiness that cost Stroheim his job. Perversity is evergreen.

Among the well-intentioned, middling thrillers I saw at this year’s fest was one genuine surprise. No coy hinting at decadence for Body Blow. Nope, this Australian neo-noir takes a glorious swan dive into the gutter. It’s maybe the most oversexed movie I’ve ever seen, considering the protagonist spends much of the action wearing a male chastity cage. Also, poorly charged anal beads are a plot point. Visually, it’s a ‘90s erotic thriller, smoldering sax solos included, with a Gregg Araki gloss. The premise is straight out of a vintage Gold Medal paperback: good-looking lunkhead under the thumb of a crime lord falls for the kingpin’s eye candy, who suggests ripping off the big man together. Writer/director Dean Francis gleefully subverts every one of these tropes. Lunkhead Aiden (Tim Pocock) is a cop losing his battle with—and almost his badge to—sex addiction, mainlining NoFap podcasts. Kingpin Fat Frankie (a fantastic Paul Capsis) headlines at his own drag club and has the Sydney PD’s balls in his pocket. Tempting Aiden is Cody (Tom Rodgers), Twink on his vanity plate, larceny and possibly nothing else in his heart. Featuring Sacha Horler, hilarious as Aiden’s no-bullshit new boss; a memorable murder that Brian De Palma would be proud of; and gun and cock metaphors galore. Ludicrous and overheated, with Francis and his game cast absolutely committed to all of it.

On the documentary front, I’ll have more to say about Boorman and the Devil, David Kittridge’s deep dive into the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977); this and Queen Kelly provided a Hollywood catastrophes fest within the fest. Boorman was picked up for theatrical release soon after SIFF ended. So was The Big Cheese, Sara Joe Wolansky’s film about the underdog effort to field an American squad of cheesemongers at the Mondial du Fromage in France, where the feats of strength include a blind tasting and a cut-to-weight challenge where you have to eyeball a quarter-pound of some unfamiliar variety. I enjoyed it, but I’m a sucker for movies about competitions between practitioners of arcane disciplines; see last year’s SIFF entry BAR, about craft bartenders. Maybe that’s because of the deep sense of community that grows up around such contests.

What I’m Reading

You never know how you’ll discover a book, or when. For A Hell of a Drink research, I recently read Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World by Daniel Kraus. It was my introduction to Kraus, even though his acclaimed novel Whalefall (2023) is coming to the big screen later this year and his latest, Angel Down, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025. I liked Partially Devoured so much I picked up Angel Down. I consumed the first few chapters in a single gulp and, still marveling at what I’d read, looked at my phone to discover that the damn thing had just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

An impromptu platoon of misfits is assembled during the Great War and dispatched into No Man’s Land to silence the shrieks of a wounded man. Only what they find isn’t a fellow soldier but a celestial being, who comes to represent something different to each of them. Their nominal leader is Cyril Bagger, a conniver who has conspired to stay as far from battle as he can, even if it means planting so many fallen comrades in the ground that he’s earned the moniker Private Gravedigger. He narrates the tale in a single sentence spanning the length of the book, a gambit that beautifully captures the immediacy, chaos, and sheer destructive wastefulness of war.

I occasionally wished a paragraph would begin with but or yet just for degree of difficulty points. Still, Kraus pulls off a staggering achievement full of moments that burn into the memory.

I didn’t think a book about Night of the Living Dead would bring me to the latest Pulitzer Prize winner. But you get there how you get there.

Paying attention is the gateway drug to giving a shit.

I went to my first game of 2026 last week, a rare Monday afternoon matchup between the Seattle Mariners and the Houston Astros, with the Mariners completing a sweep of their division rivals. It was the kind of run they needed. The M’s came within five outs of their first World Series appearance last season, and were the consensus pick to take the AL pennant this year. Naturally, they’re off to a sluggish start and are below .500.

As for the New York Mets, the squad I will always root for despite my doctor’s advice, they were also tipped as contenders despite a disappointing 2025. I saw several predictions of the Mariners/Mets World Series I have long awaited which would, of course, augur the end of civilization.

For once, I didn’t share the blind spring optimism. I couldn’t fathom why the Mets were so highly regarded considering the front office had blown up the team’s core in the offseason along with remaking the entire coaching staff. They went into 2026 with a slew of new, older players not fielding their usual positions and were somehow going to be better? True, since entering the Steve Cohen era in 2020, when the club was purchased by the wealthiest owner in professional sports, the Mets haven’t won a championship or even the NL East. But they notched over 100 wins in 2022, made it to the LCS in 2024, and for all their 2025 woes, which according to reports included a combative locker room, they weren’t eliminated from contention until the final day of the season. Now I was supposed to cheer for a roster apparently assembled by McKinsey consultants, full of players who probably should have been wearing nametags in addition to their NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital patches. I felt no connection to a team that had no identity. The joke by Jerry Seinfeld, another Mets fan of long standing, about rooting for laundry never felt more apt.

What hath April wrought for the new and allegedly improved Metropolitans? A double-digit losing streak and the league’s worst record. It hasn’t fazed me, because for the first time in years I haven’t been paying attention, skipping multiple games. I don’t know these guys. They’re just wearing the uniform.

Even after a thrilling 2025 World Series, I needed something to rekindle my love of baseball. Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It (2025) fit the bill perfectly. Leavy is the game’s foremost biographer, with acclaimed books on Ruth, Mantle, and Koufax to her credit. Here, she roams the sport from the minors to the pros, checking in with players, managers, executives, and experts of all stripes in hope of answering a single question: What the hell happened to this sport? A number of culprits are named, among them owners who won’t spend, owners who spend too much (that’d be you, Steve Cohen), an overreliance on analytics, an ill-advised embrace of gambling. But ultimately what’s tarnishing the diamond is the same thing that’s diminishing so much of modern life.

Forget the Oriole way or Cardinals baseball. There’s only one way. The uniformity in baseball exists for the same reason pop songs sound alike and SUVs look the same: an algorithm has determined what works best rhythmically and aerodynamically.

A whole damn industry of data scientists, and baseball operations guys, and layers of management had conspired to remake baseball into a world where the improbable has been rendered moot or not worth the trouble.

Or, as one of the tech advisors Leavy consults says: “We’re losing the forest because we’re only tending a few trees—the ones we can measure.”

Baseball has adjusted the rules to stay relevant, but the lifers she talks to don’t care for the result. Ex-manager Buck Showalter, who led the Mets to those 101 wins in 2022, says of the game, “It’s just boring faster,” while fellow veteran Ron Washington adds, “I don’t think I’d leave my house to go see it.” Leavy follows Wash’s comment with, “You forget how much horseshit there is in the game until you meet an honest man.”

Leavy’s as honest as anyone, her voice singular. What other sportswriter would observe “It was one thing to use data to look for bargains like my mother pawing through the return rack at Loehmann’s,” or call the distinctive scissor swing of Cleveland Guardians rookie Chase DeLauter an example of “nontraditional beauty like, say, Lauren Bacall.” There’s an outer borough familiarity to Leavy’s firecracker prose that made reading this book feel like slipping out to the back stoop to listen to your favorite aunt, puffing Tareytons while she delivers the unvarnished truth.

Pitching is an unnatural act, one of the few missing from the Bible.

Today the strike zone is a rectangle like a wall mirror hanging in a ladies’ dressing room at Bloomingdale’s. It’s hard for an ump to see both ends, especially with catchers having abandoned the traditional hamstring-aching squat in favor of a lowered tuchus and an extended chorus girl leg aimed at stealing low strikes.

Nobody would invent baseball today. It’s far too elegant for our brutalist age. They’d invent pickleball, sine qua non of the multitasking generation, an intoxicating opportunity to maximize steps taken and calories spent with camaraderie and road rage.

Leavy knows there’s no easy solution, but every remedy she suggests puts the fan experience at the center, narrowing the gap between those in the stands and the multimillionaires on the field. I don’t know that salvation lies in MLB emulating the barnstorming antics of the Savannah Bananas, but her argument made me check when the Bananas would next be in my neck of the woods. (My own first edict as commissioner: at least one afternoon game every single day. Baseball is the sport of the summer, people are on vacation, the league should embrace it.) Amp up the emotion and make it matter to us. Or, as Leavy writes in a mantra I’d put on a T-shirt:

Paying attention is the gateway drug to giving a shit.

I’d imagine Leavy enjoyed March’s World Baseball Classic. The tournament was a surprising ratings success, likely because of the joy and individuality on display. Team Italy, which made an unexpectedly deep run, downing espresso shots in the dugout following home runs, Dominican players dancing throughout the game, Team Puerto Rico exhorting the crowds. The exception, of course, was Team USA, whose nods to national pride included jingoistic military cosplay and a dimwitted refusal to shake hands with teammates on other squads. There was no fun in their play, a situation exacerbated by restrictions being placed on their availability which meant you were never going to see these stonefaces at their best anyway. Plus you had Team USA skipper Mark DeRosa, an ex-player turned TV host with no coaching or managerial experience, blithely stating that they’d punched their ticket to the semifinals when they had done no such thing. That night they lost to Italy and needed help to secure the #2 seed in their group. Still, they made it to the championship, facing off against Venezuela.

During the last WBC, I’d bought a Team Venezuela cap because it was colorful and had a huge V on the front. On the day of the last game, I put it on, hoping to troll somebody, anybody. I was genuinely rooting for Team USA to lose. I always pull for the underdog, I was fed up with the Americans’ grim style, and let’s face it, for the US to be beaten by Venezuela right now at what is still billed as our national pastime is too good a story.

I was waiting at a corner with a bag of groceries, thinking nobody had noticed my petty sartorial provocation, when a car horn blasted. The driver slowed down, pointed at me, and shouted “Venezuela! Venezuela!” as he continued leaning on the horn. After recovering my wits, I started yelling “Venezuela!” back, to the consternation of everyone standing around me. He drove off pumping his fist in the air.

Venezuela won 3-2, claiming their first WBC crown.

What I’m Watching

Miroirs No. 3 (2026 US). I’ve never regretted a second spent with a Christian Petzold movie and that includes his latest, which received the briefest of theatrical runs. The German filmmaker again riffs on Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as he did in his best-known work, Phoenix (2014). Petzold’s current muse Paula Beer plays a young woman who seems lost even before she survives a car accident that kills her boyfriend. She requests to stay in the home of the woman who found her (Barbara Auer) rather than the hospital, and the woman, a complete stranger, surprisingly agrees. The question then becomes who is getting what out of this impromptu relationship. A quiet film in every sense, as are all of Petzold’s movies, but the impact lingered. He calls Barbara (2012), Phoenix, and Transit (2018) his “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy, which makes him the bard of the moment.

The Christophers (2026). Steven Soderbergh had a brilliant 2025 with Presence and Black Bag, and he continues to throw heat. What starts as an offbeat caper—an artist (Michaela Coel) takes a job as assistant to an old lion (Ian McKellen) so she can secretly finish a series of his paintings for his duplicitous children—deepens into something thornier and richer in Ed Solomon’s screenplay. I’d watch 100 minutes of Michaela Coel reaction shots.

Our Tin Anniversary

April 19 marked the 10^th anniversary of Design for Dying. The debut Lillian Frost and Edith Head mystery was the first novel Rosemarie and I wrote under our pen name Renee Patrick. Renee commemorated the occasion in her usual upbeat fashion; Rosemarie and I regard Renee as a real person, warm but formidable in the Martha Stewart mold, and we try not to cross her.

I drafted a companion post offering a decade’s worth of hard-won wisdom, but then remembered when I joined Substack I swore a blood oath never to write about writing. That’s what props this place up; take away all the tips, tricks, and analysis about publishing and the entire enterprise would implode. Still, I put in the time, so here are a few bullet points.

Your wildest promotional dreams can come true—but if the timing is wrong, it won’t make a goddamned bit of difference.

Stubbornness can pay off, but not in the ways you expect.

The money will never make sense.

That last lesson stems from Renee’s revelation that the books were optioned for TV by some big names and I worked on the project. We made more from a TV show that didn’t happen than all five books combined. That’s show business.

Fischer widens the iris out to include other foundational figures in their cohort like filmmakers John Korty, John Milius, and Walter Murch. Their East Coast contemporaries Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma are heard from, the latter providing candid eyewitness testimony. But Fischer’s most effective move is to shine a spotlight on the women in their lives, whose contributions have frequently been diminished or ignored. At a moment of generational shift in Hollywood, the new voices being welcomed belonged almost exclusively to young white men; as Fischer points out, Stephanie Rothman’s films for Roger Corman like The Student Nurses (1970) ranked among his most successful, but she was never able to break out of exploitation fare and eventually left the industry, while Nancy Dowd—whose script for Slap Shot (1977) is an all-timer—wrote without credit or under male pseudonyms to stay employed. Fischer devotes considerable space to Marcia Lucas, an accomplished editor who cut films for her husband (winning an Oscar for Star Wars) and Scorsese; Eleanor Coppola, an essential contributor to and chronicler of her spouse’s work; and producer Kathleen Kennedy. The most haunting presence is Melissa Mathison, who went from babysitting Coppola’s children to becoming his assistant/paramour before writing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) for Spielberg.

Coppola comes across as a figure consistently undone by his appetites personally, artistically, and financially. Much of the material on his failed American Zoetrope experiment—a bid to create a utopian arts collective—was covered in Sam Wasson’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023). That book, written with Coppola’s full cooperation, presented Zoetrope as a quixotic, open-minded endeavor; Fischer appraises the same narrative from a clinical, even skeptical remove and reaches different conclusions. For all of Coppola’s professed love of the group tradition of the theater where he began, it’s telling that his vision of the future of cinema turns the process into a one-person band, with even actors digitally replaced. A future we’re pretty much barreling toward right now.

Lucas, meanwhile, loathes the filmmaking process and ends up establishing the kind of bottom-line-driven enterprise he railed against in his youth; American Graffiti (1973) feels like a miracle in more ways than one in this telling. His story does provide the best gossip: Lucas could have directed Tommy (1975), which almost certainly would have deprived us of Ann-Margret writhing in baked beans, and among the finalists to play Princess Leia were Koo Stark, a name I hadn’t heard in a while, and 14-year-old Terri Nunn, later the lead singer of the band Berlin.

Of the three, Spielberg has of course had the most storied run, finding a way to blend the commercial and the idiosyncratic, making films as daring as Munich (2005) and as personal as The Fabelmans (2022) late in his career. In his 79^th year, he was nominated for an Oscar for producing Hamnet (2025) and has one of this summer’s biggest titles on the way in Disclosure Day (2026). Ironically, a project he and Lucas dreamed up as a consolation prize for Spielberg not getting to direct a James Bond movie would mark the balance of power shifting back to executives. As Fischer writes, “Paramount wanted the money unicorn filmmakers generated without ceding the control most of them demanded,” and the studio, then led by Michael Eisner, Don Simpson, and other disciples of the church of “high concept,” made Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) a cornerstone of the faith. Fischer’s book is a rigorously researched, compassionate account of a moment that feels like a thousand years ago, when artists were in charge and often proved their own worst enemies. Yet the films this trio made at the peak of their powers remain among the definitive American artworks.

Sometimes a book finds you exactly when you need it.

Work proceeds apace on A Hell of a Drink, the compendium of horror-movie-inspired cocktails I’m writing with Chris Elford that will be out next year. One of the films featured is Night of the Living Dead (1968). I decided to delay working on that chapter until I’d read Daniel Kraus’ Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World (2026).

Kraus is the author of Whalefall (2023) and his last novel, Angel Down, was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2025. He has also, by his estimate, seen Night of the Living Dead over 300 times. He has visited the locations, gone to conventions, purchased any and all ancillary products, and watched every remake, sequel, and spinoff, to the extent that I, a total stranger, am concerned for his well-being.

There is a close reading of a film, there is a love letter to one, and then there’s what Kraus achieves here, which is an exploration of a work of art so intimate that it borders on invasive. The book doesn’t have chapter headings but timecodes, because he goes through the movie a frame at a time. Night deserves this level of obsessive attention, even love:

If one defines ‘country’ by Hollywood standards (i.e., not L.A. or New York), Night is our most famous country blockbuster. It wasn’t made by a ‘system.’ It was made by flesh-and-blood outsiders, an unmitigated piece of Americana. The film is America. For better and for worse.

In this granular approach, nothing escapes Kraus’ eye. He dutifully records every mistake in the threadbare production. A typo in the credits turning Judith O’Dea’s Barbara into Barbra, a la Streisand, for eternity. A pair of miraculously reappearing driving gloves. The jerk of a poorly calibrated tripod: “Of all the tech glitches in Night, this is my favorite. I know this stutter by heart.” For Kraus, those stumbles and miscues only intensify the film’s impact.

The importance of art like this grows by the day. In a world where AI and CGI create seamless visual media, seeing those seams right where fallible human hands put them is everything—it’s proof of intent, of passion, of life itself.

One catastrophic blunder—the absence of a copyright notice under the film’s title—put Night in the public domain almost instantly, with shoddy prints forever airing on TV and circulating on home video. Director/cowriter George A. Romero and his colleagues were unable to profit from this ubiquity, but Kraus argues that Night might never have reached landmark status without it. He considers each member of the creative team in turn, lamenting that lead actor Duane Jones, who died too young, never got to participate in Night’s success because of the distance he maintained from the film.

He also fervently defends O’Dea, whose catatonic performance can be divisive. Kraus compares her turn to that of Candace Hilligoss in another independent horror classic, Carnival of Souls (1962), saying of Barbra: “Her shell shock is every bit as likely as any other response … A strong female lead is one who doesn’t operate in clichés. That’s it.” O’Dea nearly wasn’t cast. Romero routinely worked on the Pittsburgh-shot Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—Kraus does the math and realizes Romero continued to do so after Night’s release, which is astonishing—and asked the show’s Betty Aberlin to play Barbra, but then Mr. Rogers politely requested that he not use Daniel Stripèd Tiger’s confidante in his flesh-eating ghouls movie.

The sheer amount of information in Kraus’ book is mindboggling, but whenever it threatens to overwhelm, his passion for the movie reasserts itself. And he’s completely capable of bringing you up short, as when he explores what Romero’s zombies truly mean.

One day, your young eyes see multiple paths to what you want; the next, you can’t keep your prescriptions straight and every few months someone you know dies.

I devoured Partially Devoured, and when I was done I saw Night of the Living Dead through Kraus’ eyes, appreciating it anew for the masterwork it is. (Do yourself a favor and watch the best print, the MOMA restoration available on the Criterion Channel.) I think Chris and I do it justice in A Hell of a Drink. As for the cocktail, it’s an update of Donn the Beachcomber’s classic Zombie—what else?—with ingredients acknowledging the Pennsylvania setting and Romero’s background. And it packs just as big a wallop.

Researching The Exorcist (1973) for the book, I read an article in the New York Times from January 27, 1974 on the then-new phenomenon of people waiting in line for hours to see the movie. There I stumbled onto this tiny gem.

I can’t say it’s him with legal certainty, but William Hurt was a 23-year-old Julliard student in January 1974, and God knows he always talked like a sociologist. I liked seeing this glimpse of him, his first professional credit still years off, wondering what the future held while he waited to see the movie everyone was talking about.

Oh, and the Exorcist cocktail is a banger, too.

Fortunately, I had an expert to pester. My thanks to Ethan Iverson for his primer on the Kansas City sound in advance of the Altman screening, and for steering me to Kevin Whitehead’s Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film (2020). This erudite, breezily readable book provided a valuable framework for talking about movies as varied as the Jack Webb-directed Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) and the festival finale, Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986), inspired in part by the relationship between expat pianist Bud Powell and his fan-turned-friend-turned-caretaker Francis Paudras.

This year’s fest saw the best double-bill that Noir City maestro Eddie Muller has ever entrusted to me. Fully half the audience had never seen Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and knowing that their first experience of this scathing masterpiece would be on the big screen is why I turn my schedule upside down for a week. To introduce Elvis Presley’s Noir City debut with King Creole (1958), I dressed in a manner that did justice to the occasion. I saved my blue suede shoes for the following night, when I recounted the saga of how Elvis was almost cast as Robert Mitchum’s baby brother in Thunder Road (1958). I maintain that if Elvis had made those two films back-to-back, he wouldn’t have ended up in Las Vegas. And I got the crowd to boo Colonel Tom Parker on consecutive evenings, so my work was done.

It was also a treat to revisit Webb’s goofy Blues with an appreciative audience. The movie, set in 1927 Kansas City, is basically a musical episode of Dragnet in period costume—same voiceover, same flat cinematography, same deadpan sense of humor—and if that doesn’t sound like a good time then I can’t help you. I’m an unapologetic fan of Webb and his two-feet-firmly-planted style of storytelling. Peggy Lee deserved her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod as a dipsomaniacal singer pressed into a comeback, Andy Devine plays a surprisingly competent lawman, and backing everybody up on clarinet is Lee Marvin as the man least likely to take up the instrument.

Two days after Noir City ended, I was back at the theater for a meeting of SIFF members followed by a screening of one of my favorite musicals, The Band Wagon (1953), which we could have screened at this year’s festival given the climactic Mickey Spillane-inspired “Girl Hunt Ballet.” SIFF announced plans to “lean into” film projection in 2026, including bringing 35mm and 70mm back to the SIFF Cinema Downtown. There’s no timetable yet but doing so would mean that the kind of curios that didn’t make the Seattle fest could be in the cards for 2027.

What (Else) I’m Watching

Keeping the musical theme aloft, Sirāt (2025) is set amidst the subculture of ravers who orchestrate massive, days-long parties in the deserts of North Africa, erecting temporary walls of speakers alongside bluffs carved out over millennia. Luis arrives with son Esteban in tow, searching for his daughter, who has gone missing. As the global political situation collapses, Luis learns from some sympathetic misfit souls that another rave is happening deeper in the desert. Maybe his daughter is there.

And that’s all I’ll say. Even the trailer gives away too much. Sirāt is a shattering, transformative movie, one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve had in a theater. When it ended, the audience sat in dumbstruck silence. Rosemarie and I wandered home and didn’t speak for a good ten minutes. What appears to be a thriller in the most exotic of locales is something deeper and more existential. Sergi López, often cast as a heavy in films like With a Friend Like Harry … (2000), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), is extraordinarily effective as Luis, a father focused on the one thing he thinks he can control as the world burns.

Directed and cowritten by Óliver Laxe and produced by Pedro Almodóvar, Sirāt won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and has received Oscar nominations for Best International Feature and Best Sound. See it in as big a theater as you can knowing as little as possible beforehand. Pencil in some time to process it afterward.

And then there are movies that have no music to them at all. Sure, there’s a soundtrack, but what you’re watching has no melody, no lyricism, no rhythm. Just noise.

Please understand that this is not always a bad thing.

When Kino Lorber reissued Night of the Juggler (1980) last year, I took note of several reviews placing it in the company of gritty movies about the New York City of my childhood like Taxi Driver (1976), The Warriors (1979), and—be still my heart—The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Compounding my interest was that this neglected film is based on a novel by William P. McGivern, who specialized in bad cop yarns frequently adapted into noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).

I finally caught up with it. Juggler is no diamond in the rough. It’s Stupid High and Low (guy kidnaps the wrong kid) meets Dumb Death Wish (the city is a hellscape).

Again, please understand that this is not always a bad thing.

Cliff Gorman plays a demented sad sack who decides to abduct the daughter of the real estate developer he blames for the demise of his South Bronx neighborhood. Trouble is there are not one but two moppets in the park that day sporting matching overalls and Jiffy-Pop perms that make them look like androgynous fugitives from a Sid & Marty Krofft Production. Hey, mistakes happen.

The girl Gorman grabs is the daughter of ex-cop James Brolin, whose Serpico-style history with the force complicates the case. I didn’t believe Brolin as a former member of the NYPD for one second. Not because of his performance, but because the California vibes he radiates are so intense he constantly comes off as a tourist. I kept waiting for him to stop mid-chase and ask how to get to the Statue of Liberty.

Speaking of chases, there’s a marathon one after the kidnapping that takes place on foot, in the subway, and in multiple commandeered vehicles including a taxi driven by Mandy Patinkin, who rants about “perverts” in an outrageous Latin accent with the confidence of an actor who knows he’ll nail the voice in The Princess Bride (1987) and be beloved forever. Brolin’s brat runs hand in hand with Gorman instead of going limp or yelling that she’s being abducted; for a cop’s daughter who insists that she doesn’t want to live with Mom in Connecticut, she’s the least streetwise kid in the history of New York movies.

Juggler truly jumps the rails when Dan Hedaya turns up as a detective whose life was torpedoed by Brolin’s testimony; one wild-eyed look from him and you instantly know he’s more of a threat than Gorman, who only becomes more pathetic as the film goes on. That said, I still didn’t think Hedaya’s character would empty a fucking shotgun at Brolin on a crowded daytime street in Manhattan. Also, what New York cop worth his salt bagel would dispatch units to “the 42^nd Street porno district,” as Hedaya does?

Also in this film:

• A peep show interrogation in the heart of the aforementioned 42^nd Street porno district so bonkers that I alerted my friend Christa Faust to its existence at once;

• Industrial-strength servings of casual racism and homophobia;

• The Godfather’s Richard Castellano delivering the best performance as a hotheaded lieutenant, which is almost undermined by a “humanizing” detail—he’s always on the phone with his wife planning their son’s wedding!—beaten into the cold, cold ground.

What Juggler has going for it is gonzo energy and tremendous location shooting in the shithole New York I remember. It’s not the last ‘70s movie, as some partisans have claimed. It’s more like the first ‘80s movie, a crude precursor of the shoot-‘em-ups that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and others would be cranking out at decade’s end.

Anyway, it’s on Kanopy, and I’d definitely watch it again.

Naturally, they’re among the films not piling into the bus and making the drive up for the next gig at SIFF Cinema, where yours truly will be serving as weeknight emcee. Tracking them down was part of my limbering up process for hosting duties. It’s a pity they won’t be screening here in Seattle, because both B movies tie into the festival’s theme nicely.

Face the Music (1954, known as The Black Glove in the US) comes from UK’s Hammer Films, best known for its horror fare, and its jazz-loving kingpin Michael Carreras. Terence Fisher, who directed Hammer’s late 1950s relaunches of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy, is behind the camera here; he’d already made his share of noirish fare like So Long at the Fair (1950) and Stolen Face (1952).

American trumpeter James “Brad” Bradley (Alex Nicol) ducks out on the opening night bash of his headlining gig in London in favor of some shuteye when he hears the dulcet tones of nightingale Maxine Halbard (Ann Hanslip). Brad jumps in on the jam session as a slick meet-cute. Maxine takes him home for a spaghetti dinner and they coyly court each other in verse. But Brad’s jetlagged and Maxine has a beau, so maybe they’ll just be pals and professional colleagues. He heads to his hotel, but—whoops!—leaves his trumpet behind.

That itinerant instrument is why Scotland Yard comes calling when Maxine is found dead. The notion that Brad needs to clear his own name is a reed so slender you couldn’t use it in a clarinet, but I’m not complaining. He skips his publicity engagements to play amateur sleuth, probing the seedier depths of London’s jazz demimonde. Among the suspects are a record studio magnate (Geoffrey Keen, who would become a mainstay in Roger Moore-era James Bond films), and Maxine’s jealous sister, also a thrush, played by Eleanor Summerfield. She’s the best thing in the movie; the same year she’d appear in Blackout, aka Murder by Proxy, another Hammer noir directed by Fisher with a Yank for a lead (in this case Dane Clark), and she’s the best thing in that picture, too.

The plot hinges on one of Maxine’s demo recordings and whether someone faked a name pianist’s signature style on it; music providing a crucial clue is one of several reasons why I wish this curiosity was screening in Seattle next week.

Face the Music isn’t noir. It’s practically a jazz-infused vicarage mystery, with Brad the outsider dropped into an incestuous cabal of characters and having to ferret out their grudges and secret connections. Ernest Borneman’s script, from his novel, doesn’t play fair, with Brad glimpsing evidence withheld from the audience. But it’s fun. Fisher keeps the enterprise tooling along briskly, and Nicol tackles a rare lead role with a light charm reminiscent of Dennis O’Keefe.

Universal’s The Crimson Canary (1945) is allotted just over one hour compared to Face the Music’s leisurely 84 minutes, so it dispenses its exposition in a fashion so telegraphic it can seem like a few messages went astray. More than once during the set-up, I said “Wait, what?” aloud. A jazz quintet that apparently formed on the fly after two members muster out of a navy hospital (wait, what?) plays their last date in Los Angeles before heading to San Francisco. The vocalist sitting in is hellbent on going north with them and threatens to make trouble if she doesn’t. During a rendition of “China Boy,” troupe leader Danny (Jim Rockford’s dad Noah Beery Jr.) wanders off the bandstand while drummer Johnny (Danny Morton) guzzles booze (wait, what?). Post-set, the group finds the titular slain songbird backstage, and Danny suggests they light out before anyone else discovers the body (wait, what?). Helping this ill-advised plan along is the fact that no one else knows the names of the combo’s players (wait, what?), so all jazz-loving detective Quinn (John Litel) has to go on is the sweet sound of Danny’s horn.

We’re primed to think one of the five musicians is guilty, but three of them, including noir stalwart Steve Brodie and Jimmie Dodd from the original Mickey Mouse Club, fuck off immediately, so there goes that premise. That leaves us with Danny and his pal Johnny, who hasn’t fully recovered from his wartime injuries, the character prefiguring one played by William Bendix in The Blue Dahlia (1946). Did Danny slay the singer because she threatened to torpedo his engagement to schoolteacher Lois Collier? Or does he suspect lovestruck Johnny did the deed and is determined to protect him? Or—hear me out—could it be someone else? Noir aficionados will clap eyes on another cast member and know the answer at once.

Once again, a jazz recording proves integral to the mystery, and Litel amuses as the detective who spends his days off listening to his collection of sides. But one sequence elevates The Crimson Canary above the level of crackpot if amiable programmer and transforms it into a must-see.

The action, which had been lurching along anyway, stops dead when Danny and Johnny pause at a club offering an extraordinary bill. Josh White sings the funny yet sad folk song “One Meat Ball,” and saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins takes the stage all too briefly, backed by Howard McGhee on trumpet, Sir Charles Thompson on piano, Denzil Best on drums, and Oscar Pettiford on bass. As amazing as it is to see rare footage of Hawkins, it’s the amount of ash on the cigarette between Pettiford’s lips as he works the bass that made an impression on me.

The versions of Face the Music and The Crimson Canary available on YouTube aren’t of high quality, but they’re watchable. These titles may screen in far better shape at Noir City fests later this year. A reminder that the Seattle installment kicks off on Friday, February 13.

What (Else) I’m Watching

Tickets for the first Seattle screening of The Donn of Tiki (2024) went so quickly that I missed out. When a return engagement was announced, I didn’t hesitate. That show also sold out. Directors Alex Lamb and Max Well are currently four-walling their partially-crowdfunded documentary about Donn Beach, aka Don the Beachcomber, pioneer of tiki culture, at venues around the country. Cocktail fanatics should keep their eyes peeled.

Beach led an extraordinary life, trotting the globe, brushing shoulders with celebrities and mobsters as he spread the gospel of tiki. Lamb and Well assemble an impressive array of experts to tell his story, including Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, holding forth at his excellent New Orleans bar Latitude 29; Martin Cate, founder of the excellent San Francisco bar Smuggler’s Cove; and rum historian Wayne Curtis. They also smartly use animation to recount Beach’s exploits. Stop-motion gives life to a vintage interview, while different styles are deployed for various eras of his life. The 1930s sections, including a risqué story involving regular customer Marlene Dietrich, are rendered in a manner that calls to mind the Fleischer Brothers, while the 1940s and ‘50s scenes more closely resemble the Warner Brothers palette.

It turns out the only thing holding together the mélange that is tiki—Cantonese food, Polynesian atmosphere, and Caribbean cocktails—is Donn Beach himself; the grub only became an element when he moved the original Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood to a larger Chinese restaurant space across the street and couldn’t be bothered to change the menu. Tiki drinks are being rebranded as tropical cocktails given the valid charges of cultural opportunism, so it was interesting to hear AAPI scholars praise Donn for presenting and preserving authentic Hawaiian culture when many powers that be were intent on showing how true-blue American the islands were in the Eisenhower-era press for statehood.1

The Donn of Tiki returns to Seattle for a third show on February 16—hey, that’s during my Noir City stint!—with additional screenings and cities to be announced.

This year the program shines the spotlight on musicians. The emphasis, given the classic noir timeframe, is naturally on jazz, but country and rock and roll are also on the playlist. Plenty of real-life musicians—Louis Armstrong! Ella Fitzgerald! Sammy Davis Jr! Elvis!—will appear on the big screen, along with noir mainstays like Robert Mitchum, Dan Duryea, and Ida Lupino.

Seattle’s shorter, all-digital fest means we don’t get every title screened at the just-wrapped mothership Noir City event in Oakland.1 More’s the pity; I would love to see the gonzo Blues in the Night (1941) in the theater, and some of the curios are passing us by. But the fifteen films we’re showing are definitely worth coming out for. As for my attempts to say anything meaningful about jazz … we’ll see. I am in the process of consulting experts.

Here’s the full lineup, with the films introduced by yours truly in BOLD. If you’re in town, swing by and swing.

Friday, February 13 – Black Angel (1946)

Saturday, February 14 – Nora Prentiss (1946) / The Man I Love (1946) / Gilda (1946)

Sunday, February 15 – A Man Called Adam (1966) / Young Man with a Horn (1950) / The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

Monday, February 16 – Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) / Love Me or Leave Me (1955)

Tuesday, February 17 – Sweet Smell of Success (1957) / King Creole (1958)

Wednesday, February 18 – Thunder Road (1958) / To Have and Have Not (1944)

Thursday, February 19 – Kansas City (1996) / Round Midnight (1986)

And when I did, I would have written it in my desk calendar. I keep track of such information, too, and have done for decades. As soon as I finish a book or movie, I scribble the essentials down. What then happens to this vital data? Nothing. I eventually toss the calendar, and the list of titles goes with it. Making me wonder why I bother in the first place.

Inspired by Soderbergh’s latest compilation, I decided to release my own version this year. Mine would look a little different. Soderbergh logs all the sports he watches; were I to do that, I’d write BASEBALL every day from the start of spring training to the end of the World Series.2 And I only count a TV series if I watch a season in its entirety; I don’t care to leave a digital trail of every show where I sampled the pilot and thought, “Nah,” or, even worse, ones where I made it through five or more episodes only to realize, “I don’t care what happens to these characters.” There are more of those than I want to admit. But I’ll also cheerfully plead guilty to mainlining all eighteen episodes of the deranged Doctor Odyssey (RIP).

I put in the time on this project. I looked up release and publication dates. I noted the lengthy subtitle of every nonfiction book to provide context. I pulled together a list that was through and accurate, and it took so much longer than I expected.

When I finally finished and settled in to watch a movie that would be dutifully entered into my 2026 calendar, a thought struck me with force: Don’t publish this.

Why? Because nobody would care. I’d just spent hours creating a solo version of Letterboxd. Whenever people post links to their Letterboxd accounts, I never click through. There’s no reason to inflict this minutia on anyone else. I’m not a movie critic or a working filmmaker like Soderbergh. If there are patterns or secrets to be divined from my media diet, I’d prefer to keep that intel to myself. About all you could discern from my list is the approximate date Chris Elford and I signed the contract for A Hell of a Drink, because of the spike in horror movies and related reading.

Still, a rough analysis of the numbers—

• In 2025, I saw 203 movies and read 87 books. I have seen and read more in other years. A Hell of a Drink skewed both totals.

• The strangest double bill took place on May 16, when I watched Riefenstahl and Paddington in Peru (both US 2025). Even funnier: that was our wedding anniversary.

• Of the 203 movies, I saw 42 of them in the theater. That’s up since the end of the pandemic, but nowhere near what it used to be.

• Many of those 42 films were archival presentations. I intend to maintain that trend; one of my first 2026 forays was to a 4K restoration of Ikarie XB-1 (1963), a Czechoslovakian adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem story that influenced the production design of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and features a sequence that plays like a rough draft of Alien (1979).3

Back in the dark ages of blogging, I’d post top ten lists. I’m not about to revive the practice, but all those hours of toil should yield something. So here are five favorite films from 2025: Eephus, No Other Choice, The Secret Agent, Blue Moon, and Presence. That last entry was directed by—guess who—Steven Soderbergh.

What I’m Reading

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is among our best longform journalists. Her latest New York Times essay, in which she attempts to make sense of the devotion to the new Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat that has led her to see the show thirteen times (if not more by now), hit me hard. It says so much about life, growing older, and what we want from art. A choice excerpt:

Because outside that theater, there is a flatness — an anhedonic quality that, yes, is associated with aging and maybe even with depression too, but it’s also associated with the state of the culture these days, a new culture that asks nothing of us but instead meets us where we are, which is on our phones and not interested in surprise or new emotion.

What I’m Drinking

Work continues apace on A Hell of a Drink. Chris road-tested the below concoction last week, and I showed up to do my part by sampling the entire glass pictured.

To answer your questions: 1) Yes, all of these ingredients are in one cocktail. 2) Yes, it tastes amazing. 3) No, I won’t reveal which horror movie inspired it—that’s what the book, coming in 2027, is for—but some of you can probably guess. All the clues are there.

Foolish though it may be, I still greet each new year with a sense of optimism. That’s primarily because I’ve never been a holiday person. I bound into January 1 in an upbeat mood, thinking At least that’s over with and knowing that pitchers and catchers report next month.

2025 in many respects was suboptimal. Hollywood, which had been repeating the mantra “Survive till ‘25” for all of the previous year, still hasn’t emerged from its malaise, leaving various projects I’m working on in limbo. Another few were added to this pile this annum, so let’s hope the logjam breaks soon.

I kept busy in the meantime. The high point of the year workwise was finding a home at Sasquatch Books for A Hell of a Drink, which I’m writing with my friend, bartender Chris Elford. This compendium of original cocktails inspired by seven decades of horror films has rounded into shape quickly, and some of the surprises that Chris and I cooked up for the book have already come to fruition. 2025 wasn’t a total bust. And once it’s January, Chris and I can finally say that our book will be out next year.

CrimeReads welcomed me back for a pair of articles, one on The Comeback Trail, a snakebit remake of a movie with an even more tortured history, and the other a survey of the underappreciated directorial career of comic titan Danny DeVito.

The bulk of what I wrote appeared right here. What follows is a recap of the year at Cocktails and Crime, with drink recipes scattered hither and yon.

• I spend the holidays with Nicholas Hoult, taking in a trio of the actor’s films

• Some L.A. crime fiction

• New biographies of Johnny Carson and Dorothy Parker, plus the best movie night I’ve had in a while

• A preview of Noir City Seattle, which I cohosted, and the movies Presence and Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

• A Noir City postmortem

• I’m blown away by The Penguin, plus new books by Sara Gran and Bruce Vilanch

• Nothing but love for Christa Faust’s The Get Off, then Laura Lippman’s latest sends me in search of more maritime mayhem

• Recent releases including my favorite film of 2025, Eephus

• The most-read post of the year and coincidentally a personal favorite: I revisit David Lynch’s Dune on the big screen for the first time in forty years

• Background on my CrimeReads article about The Comeback Trail that spotlights the astonishing career of filmmaker Harry Hurwitz, which ran the gamut from Charlie Chaplin to disco vampires

• Trying to regain my fiction writing mojo by serving as an Edgars judge and reading a trio of novels that spawned some classic movie thrillers1

• Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) report, part one: documentaries on food, drink, and film

• SIFF report, part two: vintage 3D noir and crime films

• I run a 5K, see some big-screen Kurosawa, and report on recent reading

• Class as treated in a pair of current crime novels, plus must-see French mushroom noir

• A pair of baseball books

• The Facebook memoir Careless People prompts a social media report card

• I make my documentary debut, and spend my birthday seeing even more big-screen Kurosawa

• A quartet of new crime movies

• Background on my DeVito article for CrimeReads

• An old favorite, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), returns to the big screen for its fortieth anniversary, plus a pair of music documentaries

• All the scoop on A Hell of a Drink and words on Relay, one of the best thrillers of 2025, which at the moment is available on Netflix

• What I learned from Elmore Leonard, plus I drink my way around Chicago

• The vintage mysteries I’ve read aloud this year2, and seeing Quiz Show (1994) on the big screen with Ken Jennings

• Cocktail history in comic book form, along with some interlocked recommendations in film, TV, and crime fiction

• The old guy films The Shrouds and The Alto Knights, tenuously linked to a new book by jazz legend Billy Hart with my friend Ethan Iverson

As always, my deepest thanks to C&C’s subscribers and anyone who has stopped by.

Over the last few years, we’ve developed a New Year’s Eve ritual. Rosemarie and I are fans of the New York-based jazz band The Hot Sardines. Lead singer Elizabeth Bougerol, aka Miz Elizabeth, is French, so in addition to their standing NYE show at Joe’s Pub the band livestreams an earlier performance timed to ring in the new year in Paris. We watch the show to kick off our own festivities. Fun fact: Miz Elizabeth is Miss Noir City 2026 and will be alongside Eddie Muller cohosting the Bay Area festival, stacked with movies about musicians. Many of those films will be at Noir City Seattle in February.

But this December 31^st will be different because, to my utter astonishment, The Hot Sardines will be performing live with the Seattle Symphony. Meaning for the first time in eons, we will be stepping out on New Year’s Eve.

Come January 1st, though, we’ll be up and out early for our other customary practice: a big breakfast—with booze if you’re so inclined—to set the tone for the twelve months to follow. 2026 won’t be an improvement on its own. We’ve got to get out there and make it happen.

The Shrouds (2025) is a work of David Cronenberg body horror that comes from a deeply personal place; the director, who turned 82 this year, has said it was inspired by the death of Carolyn Zeifman, his wife of 43 years. Lead actor Vincent Cassel even sports Cronenberg’s signature coiffure and minimalist wardrobe to lend the proceedings a more autobiographical air. Cassel plays Karsh Relikh, a name that seems like an anagram but doesn’t appear to be.1 Karsh has lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer, but he’s monetized his grief and launched GraveTech, a company employing a high-tech fabric to allow the bereaved to view the decomposing bodies of their loved ones.

At times the film is a chilly, deadpan technothriller. Karsh has cobbled together his enterprise from a variety of vendors, much the way Seth Brundle assembled his telepod in Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986). The shrouds themselves are a Chinese product while a recent hack of the company’s hardware is Russian, both nations determined to transform Karsh’s business into an intelligence asset although it’s unclear what exactly they’re going to learn.2 Less compelling are storylines suggesting Becca’s involvement in a medical conspiracy and her possible infidelity. Karsh, it should be noted, remains close to Becca’s twin sister Terry (also Kruger, who additionally plays Karsh’s AI assistant), which complicates his relationship with her ex-husband and his current tech consultant Maury (a squirrelly Guy Pearce).

Powering The Shrouds past its patchiness is its intimate portrayal of pain. Karsh dispassionately confesses his desire to leap into his wife’s casket at her funeral—an impulse Cronenberg admits he felt himself—and his satisfaction at still being involved with Becca’s body as it molders in the earth. (That he offers up the latter admission as blind date patter is an indication of Cronenberg’s mordant sense of humor.) But it’s in his recurring dreams that Karsh feels the full force of his anguish. Becca repeatedly leaves their marriage bed and returns diminished, parts of herself cut away. Holding her close only results in more broken bones, more misery. Karsh can meet new people and venture to distant lands but grief is a part of him now, like the strange growths on Becca’s bones that obsess him, a physical presence that even the shrouds can see.

The Alto Knights (2025) may be the definitive old guy movie, the cinematic equivalent of a book on submarine warfare you buy for that uncle you don’t really know. It’s directed by Barry Levinson (age 83), written by Nicholas Pileggi (92), and produced by Irwin Winkler (94). Star Robert De Niro is the spring chicken of the company at a spry 82 and he literally does the work of two actors, portraying both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, locked in a gangland feud in the 1950s. I watched the movie mainly because a clutch of critics raved about De Niro’s dueling performances, which play as more than a gimmick. De Niro lets the differing temperaments of the two men—the paranoid Genovese refusing to accept Costello’s word that he’s willing to walk away from the life—do much of the heavy lifting. It’s fun to see De Niro be on the receiving end of his own withering glare for once.

The familiar comforts of the old-school gangster movie are delivered with an unexpected telegraphic approach. Levinson and Pileggi expect the audience to be versed in this material, as if we all ordered Time-Life’s American Mobster books off an infomercial. When Genovese’s cronies begin yapping about “Reles” while Costello testifies during the Kefauver hearings, it would help to have seen Peter Falk’s Oscar-nominated turn as syndicate button man Abe “Kid Twist” Reles in Murder, Inc. (1960) beforehand, because the movie doesn’t slow down to catch you up. And if you don’t already understand the significance of the Kefauver hearings, you’re really out of luck.

Levinson at his best has always been an acute chronicler of creature comforts, his characters striving for signifiers of success. Think of Richard Dreyfuss’s salesman Bill Babowsky in Tin Men (1987) trying to buy a Cadillac without being hustled: “What do I wanna pay? I wanna pay nothing.” The Alto Knights is steeped in dense period detail. Roomy sedans, a range of sharp overcoats, the statement jewelry worn by Costello’s wife Bobbie (Debra Messing).3 I became obsessed with a set of green nesting tables in the Costello penthouse apartment. There’s an authenticity about the appointments, a sense that we’re receiving eyewitness testimony on the texture of a bygone world.

The Alto Knights not only understands it’s part of a tradition, it revels in the fact. Its climax is the infamous Apalachin meeting of 1957, which serves as the set-up for Analyze This (1999), a nearly thirty-year-old comedy that also trades on De Niro’s history with gangster films. It’s fitting that De Niro, as Costello, narrates the action as he did in The Irishman (2019). When an old man tells a story, it’s likely one you’ve heard before. But each rendition holds the promise of some small new revelation, even if it’s only what the old man opts to emphasize this time.

Quentin Tarantino has threatened to retire after his tenth film because “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker.” Living in a gerontocracy, I take the point. “I don’t think the world needs another movie from me,” Cronenberg says in a Criterion Channel interview about The Shrouds. “But we cannot forget the sense of play when it comes to movies … as long as I feel playful, I think it’s worth making another movie.” Levinson and De Niro show some of that same playfulness in The Alto Knights. I’m not making a case for these movies as among the best of the year or on their directors’ filmographies. They’re reports from precincts that only a few have the opportunity to visit, and for that reason alone I’m glad I caught up with them.

What I’m Reading

Cronenberg’s reminder about the sense of play also applies to jazz, where the prevailing ethos seems to be if you’ve got the chops, we’ll find the room. Seeing 91-year-old saxophonist Houston Person perform with the Emmet Cohen Trio earlier this year was testament to that.

The same spirit enlivens Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (2025), as told to my friend and Substack kingpin Ethan Iverson. Ethan smartly includes an appendix in which he speaks to Hart’s fellow drummers including Kush Abadey, Vinnie Sperrazza, and Nasheet Waits about what they’ve learned from the master.4 The sense that Hart’s recordings remain vital to the generations that followed him courses through the book. As Hart himself says, “If you do make something of quality, it has a chance of staying relevant.”

I enjoyed Billy’s reminiscences of appearing with the Jimmy Smith Trio in Get Yourself a College Girl (1964), a throwaway musical also featuring Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto that I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve watched more than once. During the shoot, Billy notes, “Burt Lancaster came over to greet us, all smiles, obviously happy to meet Jimmy Smith.” (Hart plays on several tracks on Smith’s Christmas ’64, aka Christmas Cookin’, a Chez K seasonal staple.) Billy keeps spreading knowledge, like saxophonist Eddie Harris’s counsel to check out people that nobody likes “because they have a tendency to be more original,” or keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s koan about editing your work in the moment: “Man, play only what you have to play.” Then there are the truths that Miles Davis alone can provide.

Sometimes, you can play behind the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker. Sometimes, you can play on top of the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker. Sometimes, you play right in the center of the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker!

And Billy has wisdom of his own to share. Like, “It always helps to treat every event with optimism” and the essential “Discipline + Humility = Concentration.” Reading Oceans of Time is like eavesdropping on a conversation between musicians after a set at the Vanguard. The Billy Hart Quartet’s Just (2025), with Ethan on piano, Ben Street on bass, and Mark Turner on saxophone, is a gorgeous album. Exhibit A: “Showdown,” composed by Ethan.

Wondrich is our foremost cocktail historian, the James Beard Award winner who canonized pioneering bartender Jerry Thomas in Imbibe! (2007) and coedited the gargantuan Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (2021). There’s no better authority to write an accessible, engaging chronology of the mixed drink, complete with recipes from throughout the ages and primers on various spirits and related topics, like Hollywood’s relationship with the cocktail.

Drinking is, or at least should be, a social practice, one primarily about your companions, your servers, your bartenders. Wondrich brings that point home by focusing on individuals, their faces evocatively captured and in some instances imagined by Kotz. You see the bartenders who made Cuba a drinkers’ destination for years, the AAPI craftsmen who provided the foundation for the tiki movement. Kotz plays with form, deploying a radically different graphic style for the section on the “so-called dark ages” of fern bars and Harvey Wallbangers. Every so often there’s a two-page spread that brims with information as it dazzles the eye.

I cleared my schedule when Wondrich announced he’d be in conversation with writer/former bartender Andrew Bohrer at Vinnie’s Wine Shop. Plenty more bartenders were in the packed house, with one quick to bring up a subject I was prepared to raise: the book’s shocking revelation that the Mai Tai, a quintessential tropical concoction, was introduced in … Seattle?!? Wondrich confirmed that the drink was launched at an outpost of “Trader Vic” Bergeron’s Outrigger in what is now the Westin Hotel, only blocks from Vinnie’s. When I order one to escape the gloomy Pacific Northwest winter, now it will be a nod to local history.

Vinnie’s served a different vintage libation during the event. The Fancy Gin Cocktail first appeared in the 1862 edition of Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tender’s Guide. The “fancy” part couldn’t be plainer: moisten the rim of the glass with a lemon twist before dropping it into the drink. A kissing cousin is the Improved Gin Cocktail, which swaps in maraschino for curaçao and adds a dash of absinthe. But to start, why not keep things simple, by which I mean fancy.

Fancy Gin Cocktail, adapted from Jerry Thomas’s recipe

• 2 oz. genever

• ¼ oz. curaçao

• ¼ oz. simple syrup

• 2 dashes Boker’s bitters (you can use Angostura)

Stir. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express a lemon twist over the drink, then rub it around the rim of the glass.

What I’m Reading and Watching, Connect-the-Dots Edition

Nouvelle Vague (2025) shouldn’t work yet proves utterly delightful. Director Richard Linklater’s chronicle of the making of Breathless (1960) sent me back to marvel anew at Jean-Luc Godard’s original film and at Linklater’s uncanny recreation of it. Nouvelle Vague succeeds at the difficult task of capturing an entire scene, the cauldron of creativity bubbling over at the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma, with Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and others in their circle conspiring to create movies, not merely write about them. The cast is so sprawling that Linklater’s film doesn’t bother to introduce them in a conventional way. Instead, we’re given a face and a name, the movie trusting us to work out each person’s significance. The on-the-fly approach is descended from Godard’s own shooting and editing techniques.

Damn near every actor is a dead ringer for the person they portray, with Zoey Deutch both a remarkable Jean Seberg and arguably a better Patricia than Seberg is in Breathless. Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) appears here as a hipster outcast from a Marvel movie, a stylish superhero whose power is his sangfroid; at no point is he ever flustered, flapped, or wrong. Godard as unassailably cool art god works for this movie, but I confess some lingering affection for the version of him in Godard Mon Amour (2017), written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius of The Artist. That Godard, played by Louis Garrel, was a nebbish perpetually exasperated by mere mortals’ refusal to acknowledge his superior taste and political acumen. I blame my own feelings toward Godard, an unquestionably galvanic figure responsible for multiple masterpieces including Breathless, plus several films I respect but don’t like and quite a few that I couldn’t finish. Or maybe I’m still carrying a grudge over the way he dusted Agnès Varda at the end of Faces Places (2017).

The artistic life has provided a rich vein for Linklater to mine in 2025. I knew almost instantly that I would love Blue Moon. Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is attending the 1943 Broadway opening of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner Richard Rodgers with new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II. As the cast belts out the title song (“We know we belong to the land …”), Hart leans over to his companion and says, “Here comes ‘grand’!” The jovial cattiness with which he delivers the zinger sealed the deal.

Hart slips out of the theater and heads to Sardi’s, where he tries not to drink as he steels himself to congratulate Rodgers on his triumph and possibly salvage their creative union. He also anticipates a dalliance with the young Yale student (Margaret Qualley) whom he’s half-convinced will be his salvation. The script by Robert Kaplow, whose novel Me and Orson Welles Linklater brought to the screen in 2008, could easily be a play, almost the entirety of its action playing out within the storied Big Stem eatery. But the joint can barely contain Hart. Hawke doesn’t resemble him physically—camera tricks are deployed to make him seem shorter—but is a near-perfect match otherwise; the lyricist is a world-class talker and “appreciator of beauty,” attributes that suit the actor to a T. Andrew Scott matches him in an extraordinary, subtle turn as Rodgers, patiently gladhanding well-wishers and hangers-on as he realizes that he has just transformed American theater. Rodgers is no villain but a craftsman who insists on a regular schedule. His ears can’t help pricking up as Hart pitches a gargantuan new show, but Hart’s glib insistence on satirizing everything—love, history, theatrical conventions—flies in the face of the emotional simplicity Rodgers wants to emphasize. Hart also has near-superhuman abilities here. In the span of an evening, he provides Baby Stephen Sondheim with a lyric that will appear in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; suggests to George Roy Hill, who will direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, that the key to career longevity is focusing on male friendship; and unlocks the secret of Stuart Little for E. B. White (a lovely performance by Patrick Kennedy, recently in Netflix’s Dept. Q). But it never comes off as showboating, merely engaging company. Rosemarie and I took in Blue Moon at a Saturday matinee. The movie played in one of the smaller auditoriums at the multiplex, and there were seats to spare. But for every member of that audience, there was nowhere else they’d rather be, their enthusiasm palpable. Forget all this talk about special effects-driven tentpoles. Blue Moon was the best theatrical experience I’ve had all year.

Ethan Hawke—you see what I’m doing here—has his most Ethan Hawke role to date in the FX series The Lowdown. Self-described “truthstorian” Lee Raybon is Tulsa’s biggest rabblerouser, picking fights with moneyed interests. His latest exposé on the powerful Washberg family hits the streets as one scion (Kyle MacLachlan) is cruising to election as Oklahoma’s governor. When the candidate’s “sensitive” brother (Tim Blake Nelson) commits suicide, Lee doesn’t buy the story. The name of native Sooner Jim Thompson is repeatedly invoked—a collection of first editions of his pulp novels kickstarts the action—but while the show’s debut season does build a solid noirish plot that redeems the hackneyed “land deal” trope, it shares the hangout vibe of creator Sterlin Harjo’s previous outing Reservation Dogs. That’s only to The Lowdown’s benefit, as these characters are worth spending time with: Lee, all motormouthed sincerity; Keith David’s private eye1, wondering if he’s on the right side of things; and a magnificent, where-has-she-been Jeanne Tripplehorn as the new Widow Washberg, hatching schemes of her own. Almost every episode turns the spotlight on a guest star, like a heartbreaking Graham Greene in one of his final appearances. Mention must be made of episode 5, a deep dive into male friendship with Peter Dinklage and Hawke embodying the two types that all Dudes of a Certain Age become: The One Who Hates Everything, and The One Who Thinks He Can Still Make a Difference. Consider this a thumbs-up from a dude who toggles between both.

Among The Lowdown’s staff writers is Oklahoma-born Edgar Award winner Lou Berney, whose new novel Crooks (2025) is about a crime family. Not in the sense that the federal government would slap a RICO charge against them.2 No, the Mercurios are a crime family in that each member of the clan has a touch of larceny in their heart. Only a genealogist could say how far back it goes: “A Mercurio probably sold counterfeit Michelangelos to gullible popes. A Mercurio probably supplied dice to the Roman legions and took a healthy cut of the action.” Berney starts the tale with parents Buddy and Lillian, who fall in love in the mob-run Las Vegas of the 1960s. He then follows their progeny around the globe and in and out of trouble: Los Angeles in the 1980s, the corporate Vegas of the ‘90s, the wild west of Moscow in the Yeltsin years. Each Mercurio sibling warrants their own story, especially Alice, who has done everything in her power to resist the siren song of lawlessness encoded in her DNA, and the unfortunately nicknamed Piggy, who just wants to see his kin again. Practically Dickensian in scope and chockful of Mercurio truisms like “Amateurs spend all their time figuring out a way in; professionals always make sure they know how to get out” and “It’s not what you do, it’s what people think you do,” Crooks is a bighearted novel about what you get from your family and what you take from them.

The position that Rosemarie and I took evolved over time and can be summarized thusly: she does the cooking. We both plan the meals, I do the shopping and pitch in on cleanup, but she handles the food prep.

My responsibility during that time is to serve as entertainment director. While Rosemarie cooks, I read aloud to her. I can’t remember how this practice began, but it’s been in place almost as long as we’ve been married. Selections have included biographies that are of interest to both of us and Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books, but our preferred material is Golden Age mysteries; we’re working our way through Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series. I throw myself into every performance, doing sound effects, accents, voices. Give me a martinet colonel or a barrister with a superiority complex and I will go full C. Aubrey Smith on the character. Occasionally I will make a celebrity casting decision that I stick with to the bitter end: “In this production, the role of the dissolute physician will be played by James Mason.” It’s fun. We assess clues and theorize who the killer might be while we dine.

Alas, our little theater company is on extended sabbatical. Last month Rosemarie took a tumble, courtesy of some uneven pavement. The spill happened while she was at work, so I only bore witness to the aftermath: one fractured elbow and twenty-four stitches underneath her chin, temporarily giving her a scar worthy of a roller-derby queen.1 Rest assured, she is already well on the way to recovery.2 At some point during our eight-hour ordeal in the emergency room, the thought idly occurred to me: Shit, I’m gonna have to cook dinner, aren’t I?

I am pleased to report that I have risen to the challenge, because Rosemarie is on hand to coach me. I have baked salmon, unraveled the conundrum of the air fryer, and served multiple meals involving pork resulting in zero (0) cases of trichinosis. It has been a learning experience. But the change in routine has gotten me thinking about some of the novels that I read aloud in 2025.

Ridiculous solutions be damned, I’m a sucker for a locked-room mystery. Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at His Residence (1946), also known as The Crooked Wreath, is routinely hailed as an exemplar of the form. British Library Crime Classics reprinted it last year. The set-up is familiar: Sir Richard Marsh summons his relatives to the family estate in the waning days of World War II and harrumphs ominously about disinheriting the lot of them, only to be murdered in seemingly impossible fashion. Inspector Cockrill, memorably portrayed by Alastair Sim in the Brand adaptation Green for Danger (1946), arrives to see justice done. The solution? Ridiculous, as promised. But while many locked-room tales focus on the puzzle at the expense of the characters, here the cast is vividly drawn as they hurl accusations at one another; the Marshes do more detecting than Cockrill does. The mood fuses Brideshead Revisited with Rebecca as the specter of Sir Richard’s late first wife hangs over the proceedings, the house, and the entire clan. And the ending, with the war coming home to Swanswater Manor in unexpected fashion, left an impression I won’t soon forget.

An unplanned festival of nautical mysteries earlier this year prompted a mini version featuring trains. C. Daly King’s oddball Obelists En Route (1934) takes place on the debut outing of the Transcontinental Express from New York to San Francisco, the festivities dampened when a big-wheel banker is fished out of the train’s swimming pool. Already I had questions: a train with a swimming pool? If the engineer slams on the brakes at a junction outside Omaha, won’t the water slosh into the club car? That mystery goes unsolved. King, a psychologist as well as a novelist,3 loads the passenger manifest with headshrinkers, each an adherent of a different school of thought that they apply to the case in language that makes sense only to them.

“It was no mere Dominance phenomenon, that murder, but a subtly managed affair, and there is a subtle, complicated personality behind it. A Duplex personality, not a straight-forward Appetitive one, I’ll wager.”

Thanks for that insight, Doc. I see our hour is up.

The introduction to the new edition offers a helpful warning that there are long-winded lectures about economics irrelevant to the plot that can be safely skipped. There’s also a bibliography, a “Clue Finder” cataloging every piece of information provided to the reader in the interest of fair play, and racist descriptions of railroad porters. Still, the contained setting and luxe atmosphere kept us reading.

Tetsuya Ayukawa’s The Black Swan Mystery (1959) at times veers close to the Monty Python sketch about a murder play built entirely around railway timetables. A corporate executive is found dead next to a train line. Ayukawa introduces several compelling elements that bear on the case, like a labor dispute and a shady religion, which are too often neglected in favor of more mundane ones like the railway timetables reproduced in the book. Ayukawa also regularly upsets expectations; new lead detectives are abruptly introduced partway through the book, and there are several jarring plot twists, the title itself being one. The milieu and overall mood, reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa films like The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low (1963), offer a fascinating glimpse into a Japanese society still haunted by the war. And the solution satisfies.

I may have leaned a little hard on the New England accents I encountered during my college years in Boston while reading Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players (1933). It’s a delightful twist on the theatrical murder as a widow recuperating from pneumonia on the Cape opens her vacation home to an itinerant troupe whose booking in the area seems to have been a ruse. When the company’s magician is murdered, it’s Asey Mayo, the “Codfish Sherlock Holmes,” to the rescue. He’s the inverse of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, a man modest about his many gifts. Taylor writes with a light comic touch, and the in-plain-sight answer to the mystery is one I should have figured out on my own.

Easily the favorite of all of our dinnertime reads, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley displays the ingenuity and playfulness of Golden Age authors even as mystery fiction was still rounding into form. Berkeley’s amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham has convened the “Crimes Circle” to hear evidence in a murder that has stumped Scotland Yard, one involving the tasty title confections (made with the liqueurs kummel, kirsch, and maraschino). The members of the Circle then undertake their own investigations and present their findings to the group. What we get, then, are a half-dozen solutions to the same mystery, each of which holds water. Later editions of the novel include additional proposed outcomes from Christianna Brand and Martin Edwards, the contemporary crime writer who has written extensively about Golden Age authors. I went with the OG version and its note-perfect ending.

Rosemarie has improved enough that we’re now tag-teaming dinner prep, a state of affairs that will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Still, I miss reading aloud. I’ve been wondering what Inspector Alleyn is up to.4

What I’m Watching

This week we attended a SIFF screening of Quiz Show (1994) introduced by none other than Jeopardy! host and Seattle resident Ken Jennings. The event had been scheduled prior to the September death of the film’s director Robert Redford, making the timing particularly poignant. In discussing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, Ken—I can’t call him Jennings given how often I watch him on TV—touched on the overall significance of these programs. They promote the concept of cultural literacy, an idea that has lost currency as people have become specialists, not generalists. He said that the collapse of the monoculture, which was admittedly not representative or inclusive, contributed to our current polarization. He also lamented that Jeopardy! was frequently dismissed as being about trivia when it is dedicated to facts, saying “you can’t do your own research” on the show and that you couldn’t answer a question about the moon landing with, “What is it never happened, Ken?” Rosemarie told me that during the orientation process when she was a contestant in the Alex Trebek era, it was repeatedly stressed that Jeopardy! was not a trivia show but a general knowledge one.

I hadn’t seen Quiz Show in twenty-something years, but by God does it hold up. Redford won his directorial Oscar for Ordinary People (1980) but Quiz Show is his masterpiece, the tragedy of a golden boy to whom everything came too easily. Paul Attanasio’s script is studded with dialogue that I quote to this day (“Queens is not New York”). It may legitimately be one of the best-cast films ever made. Of course the lead performances—John Turturro as the everyman contestant on Twenty-One cast aside in favor of Ralph Fiennes’ straight-from-Central-Casting Charles Van Doren5—shine, and Martin Scorsese plays a more menacing version of Lucifer here than Robert De Niro did in Angel Heart (1987). But everywhere you look, there’s someone on the way up. That guy outside a phone booth hassling Van Doren for an autograph? Mario Cantone. The smitten coed who wants to ask about “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is Calista Flockhart. On this viewing, I noticed that the NBC stage manager who utters a single line during the titles is beloved character actor William Fichtner.

Quiz Show was a Best Picture nominee alongside Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and eventual winner Forrest Gump, so it’s astonishing the extent to which the film has largely been memory-holed; Ken pointed out it’s never been released on Blu-ray. In 1994, the movie looked back almost four decades to a time when a rigged quiz show prompted a national reckoning on integrity. Thirty years later, it’s a reminder of another era, when a film about that subject would be made by a major studio, released in theaters, and completely taken for granted.

Biographies of writers can be tricky beasts, because an author’s lot is a dull one. Kushins doesn’t completely avoid the pitfall; Leonard gets an idea, he researches it, he writes it, he rewrites it, he publishes it, critics react to it, repeat several dozen times. What stands out amidst the nuts and bolts is Leonard’s relentless practicality. Early in his career, he would develop a piece of material as a book and a film simultaneously, aiming to write (and get paid for) both. In the 1970s, he spent considerable time on a project for Hollywood producer Howard Jaffe about fruit pickers inspired by labor leader Cesar Chavez. The project eventually collapsed, but Leonard never regretted the effort. He simply spun the research and what he’d written into four more screenplays including Mr. Majestyk (1974) and a novella called Picket Line which Kushins discovered in Leonard’s archive at the University of South Carolina. It was published for the first time earlier this year.

Leonard didn’t do sequels per se—Be Cool being the rare exception and, tellingly, a misfire—but he was savvy enough to bring characters back in different books, building the Elmore Leonard Literary Universe. The gambit carried over to the big screen when Michael Keaton played lunkheaded federal agent Ray Nicolette in both Jackie Brown (1997), adapted from Rum Punch (1992), and Out of Sight (1998). The name is spelled Nicolet in the novels, a distinction that would have mattered to Leonard; more than once in Cooler Than Cool, he spins his wheels on a book because a character “refuses to talk” until Leonard lands on their correct handle. I can confirm that this problem is real.

A pragmatic approach didn’t affect the breeziness of Leonard’s style. It diminishes his legacy to call Elmore Leonard a vibes writer, but there’s no denying that his books go down easy. You enjoy the mood and the company. What stands out upon reading this aptly titled biography is how cool Leonard is, not only as a writer but an individual. He embodied the sensibility conveyed in his fiction: curious, nonjudgmental, on the side of anybody going up against the system no matter what side of the law they’re on. He’s famous for his 10 Rules of Writing and there’s plenty more advice on the subject in the pages of Cooler Than Cool. Much of that counsel serves in good stead on other projects, including how to live your life.

I think the mistake most beginners make, they’re more concerned with creating something that sounds like writing, with clever images, descriptive passages, than they are with discovering their own basic attitude about putting words on paper. They want to have written before they know why they want to write or realize it’s going to take at least ten years to begin to learn how to realize that style comes out of attitude, not the clever arrangement of words.

I’m into my work now, all the way, and I’m not straining. I stop at six o’clock, but I’m giving it a full shot every day. I see that I can continue to get better at it. That’s an amazing thing, after thirty-two years, to know I can get better … From that, and from experience, I’ve concluded that you write most effectively when trying not to write.

The best time to begin writing a book is when you least expect to, always at some time before you think you’re ready to begin.

Cooler Than Cool prompted me to go back to early Leonard. I’d read Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) before because it’s Dutch rounding into crime fiction form and also because of its star-crossed Hollywood history. Alfred Hitchcock optioned the rights not long before he died and possibly approached Clint Eastwood about starring in it. It’s a fascinating potential collaboration, the most controlling of filmmakers taking on a book by the master of seat-of-your-pants plotting. But Eastwood, who’d already saddled up for the Leonard-scripted western Joe Kidd (1972), would have been a natural fit for the author’s rhythms, even in then-contemporary Detroit. Jack Ryan, who debuted in Leonard’s first crime novel The Big Bounce (1969), returns as a process server and finds himself enmeshed a scheme involving a missing stockholder and a repo man who not only knows what an étagère is but drops the word into conversation. There’s more solid existential advice here: “We’re all making the same trip, right? Trying to get along. Why should we fuck each other over and make life miserable?” Ryan is in recovery, just as Leonard was; Kushins covers the subject of Leonard’s alcoholism in detail, and Leonard wrote about it honestly.

The pain in withdrawal was the extreme feeling of anxiety that Ryan remembered well—a raw, hypersensitive feeling, like a sunburned nervous system—wanting to either take a drink or go out the window.

But Ryan still enjoys talking about his old habits.

I knew a guy who drank only Fresca and chartreuse. I took a sip one time, I said to him, ‘Jesus, this is the worst drink I ever tasted in my life.’ He said, ‘I know it is. It’s so bad you can’t drink very many of them.’

Trivia: Not long after revisiting Unknown Man I picked up Theater Kid (2025), the memoir by Rent and Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller, and learned that Seller’s troubled father was one of the Detroit process servers Leonard interviewed before writing the novel.

Somehow I had never read LaBrava (1983), which won Leonard an Edgar Award. You’d think I would have, considering—once again—its status as a Hollywood also-ran. Protracted attempts to turn the book into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman led directly to Leonard writing Get Shorty (1990), one of his greatest successes.

It’s easy to speculate on why Hoffman dithered about the movie. He would have played Joe LaBrava, a former Secret Service agent whose knack for surveillance photography has led him to an unlikely career in the arts. LaBrava ends up entangled with Jean Shaw, an actress he crushed on as a youth when he saw her playing femme fatale to Robert Mitchum. Jean tries to play out a film noir plot in real life, with LaBrava pressed into service to clean up the mess. LaBrava has a meaningful, intensely physical relationship with an older woman, which is pretty much guaranteed to give any leading man pause even though LaBrava is simultaneously sleeping with a woman younger than him. Maybe it’s just as well the movie never got off the ground. Again, Leonard offers life lessons galore through his characters.

Well, you could be serious and still have fun. In fact, he believed it was the secret of a happy life, if anybody wanted to know a secret.

How did they get so sure of themselves, these guys, without knowing anything? Like people who have read one book.

She liked them because working with professionals brought out the best in you; you could count on them for cues, sometimes inspiration. Whereas amateurs could ruin your concentration and timing, make you look awkward.

“You know what I think of that particular kind of pride—from eighty-years experience, from knowing all kinds of successful people with all kinds of dough who are now dead or else in jail? I think it’s a bunch of shit. Money and success’ve got nothing to do with making it on a day to day basis, and that’s all that counts.”

Let us pause to admire the sterling work that “success’ve” is doing in the above. And Fresca makes a return appearance.

Pouring double bourbons with a splash of Fresca Joe Stella said, “First one today. What time is it? Almost ten-thirty, that’s not bad. Long as you had breakfast.” He handed a drink to LaBrava and sat down with the bottle close to him on the desk.

LaBrava took a good sip.

“Nice drink, huh?”

“Not bad.”

“Refreshing with a little bite to it.”

I have a weird relationship with Fresca. My father, who worked for TWA, would bring entire cases home from the airport; tastes had changed and people weren’t guzzling it on planes anymore. On the weeks when he prepared my school lunches, I’d open the bag and find a leftover inflight meal and a can of Fresca. I can’t touch the stuff anymore. When I want a grapefruit soda for a paloma, it’s Jarritos or Squirt.

What I’m Drinking

Rosemarie and I spent some time in Chicago last month. Our first stop after checking in was Gus’ Sip & Dip, recommended by multiple bartender friends. As the name implies, this first-rate joint serves classic cocktails and dip sandwiches, and I would have eaten every meal there but my personal physician indicated this might be a poor choice. The smoked ham dip with cheddar fondue will haunt me for the rest of my days. Accompanying it: a phenomenal Brandy Wisconsin Old Fashioned, made with cognac and 7-Up. Not a Fresca in sight.

Another excellent drink came about because of a joke in The Music Man (1962), one of my favorite movies. Professor Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa and asks for a hotel recommendation. A shopkeeper replies, “Try the Palmer House in Chicago.” When I discovered the Palmer House was only blocks from where we were staying, I knew we’d be stopping in. We did so when I was in a particularly celebratory mood. We’d timed our trip to coincide with the penultimate series of baseball’s regular season. The Cubs were hosting the Mets, still in playoff contention. The game we attended was a back-and-forth affair with the Mets emerging triumphant—and, at that moment, in control of their own destiny. Of course, none of us are ever in control of our destinies, the illusion that we might be one of the saving graces of baseball.

The Mets were still alive on the season’s last day. Win game 162 and they’d be in. They were shut out instead and went home to stay. The Mariners, meanwhile, made it to game 7 of the American League Championship Series before losing to the Toronto Blue Jays. Which makes this the second consecutive year one of my teams has fallen in the league championship. A bitter blow, to be sure.

So I prefer to run the tape back to that late September night in Chicago, bounding onto the train at Wrigleyville full of optimism, stopping at the Palmer House for an excellent rye Manhattan, and toasting the possibilities. Because soon there’ll be no baseball at all.

Belly up to the bar while I tell you about A Hell of a Drink, coming in time for Halloween 2027.

I’ve mentioned my friend Chris Elford here before. He’s a world-class bartender, hospitality maestro, and all-around lovely fellow. He plied his trade in New York (where he invented the contemporary classic the Sharpie Mustache at Amor y Amargo) before coming to Seattle, where he now primarily hangs his hat at Here Today Brewery & Kitchen. He’s also one of the founders of Navy Strength, named best new American cocktail bar in 2018, and among his signature accomplishments is the annual October transformation of that tiki paradise into Nightmare on Wall Street, boasting a menu of original cocktails inspired by horror movies. A Hell of a Drink collects fifty of those malevolent mixtures, along with a bonanza of bonus material we’re not yet ready to discuss. It will be coming from Sasquatch Books, whose every publication is gorgeous, so our effort has found its ideal home.

Chris isolates elements from the movies that he loves, translates them into ingredients, then combines them in unexpected and satisfying ways. It’s an intensive approach I can’t wait to explore on the page. His personal journey to becoming a master mixologist and discerning horror fan is fascinating, one he’ll share in the book.

I’ve talked about how, like Chris, I came to cocktails late in life in Down the Hatch. As for horror movies, I’ve always been a fan, since my mother took me to see Alien (1979) when I was far, far too young.1 I grew up watching Chiller Theater on WPIX in New York2 and horror host Dr. Paul Bearer in south Florida. Still, every year when I rolled into Nightmare on Wall Street there’d be a few films I didn’t know, thanks to Chris’s deep love of the genre. I’ve been on quite the learning curve, catching up with titles like the grueling New French Extreme entry Frontier(s) (2007) and When Evil Lurks (2023), maybe the most harrowing film I’ve ever seen. Each movie becomes its own rabbit hole, leading to more movies. That difference in perspective—hardcore horror hound and curious casual appreciator—will only work to our collaboration’s advantage. Over the course of the last year, I’ve become the kind of person who turns up for Bring Her Back (2025) on opening weekend. I am a changed man, and the book hasn’t even been written yet.

Expect regular updates as Chris and I bring A Hell of a Drink to fruition. This is gonna be fun.

What I’m Drinking

The calendar says October, so obviously I’ve been at Nightmare on Wall Street, drinking my way through this year’s menu. For work, you understand. Consider if you will the Death’s Head Moth, Chris’s cocktail in honor of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which manages to incorporate both fava and chianti while acknowledging Hannibal Lecter’s status as an aesthete (cognac and Armagnac) and an erstwhile member of Baltimore society (a dusting of Old Bay seasoning). The Candyman naturally features honey along with Malört, Chicago’s favorite libation, and each glass comes with its own mirror. But Chris’s garnish game may have reached its peak with the Room 237, named of course for The Shining (1980).

The full menu is available through Halloween if you’re anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. Or you can wait for A Hell of a Drink.

On a related note, this weekend Chris will be running the Detroit marathon, the course taking him back to his birthplace of Windsor, Ontario. He’s using the marathon, his first, to raise money for the Chris Patino Hero Fund helping bartenders in need. If you can, please make a donation.

What I’m Watching

Relay (US 2025) received a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical release in August. It’s worth catching up with now, because the latest film from David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) is so far my favorite thriller of the year. Riz Ahmed stars as Ash, a freelance operative assisting whistleblowers who rue their decisions, brokering deals with the corporations these would-be crusaders once aimed to take down. He acts as an intermediary for both sides, maintaining his anonymity by exploiting technology, loopholes, and inherent biases. His approach is exemplified in the most ingenious aspect of Justin Piasecki’s script, Ash’s use of a relay service for the hearing impaired as his own personal cutout. It makes for a compelling dramatic exercise as the strangers employed by the service briefly become protagonists, delivering instructions and information without comprehending them, Ash pulling every string while remaining at a remove. The slow-burn suspense and the surface pleasures, including first-rate location shooting in New York City, blind you to the ethics of the situation until you realize that the film has been subtly addressing them all along.

What I’m Reading

It’s impossible to summarize Clown Town (2025), the latest in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, thanks to Herron’s cheerfully brutal approach to his characters’ morality and mortality.3 It’s a good bit darker than usual, possibly heralding a shift in the books’ trajectory. But it’s still funny, Herron effortlessly firing off descriptions like “The other Dog was reaching into his jacket for something, far more quickly than those words suggest.” Or this question from slovenly spymaster Jackson Lamb that draws considerable blood: “What, you think people make bombs without learning how first? Like it’s bungee jumping, or writing a novel?”

When Seattle’s Grand Illusion Cinema, currently in itinerant mode as it raises funds for a new home near the University of Washington, teamed up with SIFF Cinema for screenings of the new fortieth-anniversary 4K restoration of Brazil (1985), I bought tickets at once. Correction: a ticket. I knew I had to see the movie solo. Brazil was a foundational work for me, and I wanted to reexperience it by myself. Of course, I wasn’t only looking back at the movie. I was also spending time with the adolescent me, who for a while made Brazil part of his personality. Maybe he’d have something useful to tell me. Maybe he’d give me hope.

As a fan of Monty Python and Time Bandits (1981), I had followed co-writer/director Terry Gilliam’s battle against Universal Pictures to have his film released uncut. His campaign required skullduggery, the tactics not only successful but of a piece with the movie’s themes. In February 1986, Gilliam’s jet-black dystopian comedy finally opened in south Florida, where I was attending high school against my will. I didn’t have a car, so I told my older sister I’d pay for her ticket if she drove me to the Clearwater 5.2 I went twice more during its brief run, dragging different friends each time to the story of a timid bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) in a totalitarian state jolted out of complacency because of a fatal paperwork error, an air conditioning mishap, and an encounter with his (literal) dream woman.3

I received the videotape of Brazil as a gift that Christmas, because I wouldn’t shut up about the movie. I shoehorned references to it into multiple college essays, no matter the subject. I read and reread Jack Mathews’ behind-the-scenes account The Battle of Brazil (1987). For Christmas 1999, Rosemarie gave me Criterion’s deluxe 3-disc set containing every cut of the film.

But a curious thing can happen to your relationship with the touchstones of your youth. Some of them retain their hold, burnished by time. You grow distant from others. Your sensibilities change. Or you become embarrassed by the depth of feeling you possessed in that bristling, leather-jacket phase of life, your passion like a tattoo that you now regret and routinely cover up.

When I watched Brazil in my late thirties, I only noticed the seams. The dream sequences seemed clunky and obvious. The pacing dragged. The parts of the movie that resonated weren’t Gilliam’s visual jokes and flights of fancy and barely-contained rage, but the structure imposed on the chaos by playwright Tom Stoppard, the simple but devastating conceit of a citizen mistaken for a terrorist by the government, with no one willing to acknowledge the error, resenting the inconvenient demands for justice.

I couldn’t let the film’s fortieth—fortieth!—anniversary pass unremarked. I owed the movie too much.

Brazil is destined to play differently in 2025 America. I knew that going in. But I wasn’t prepared for how differently. Masked troops disappearing people without explanation. Random violence accepted as routine. Robert DeNiro’s heating engineer branded an enemy of the state for doing his job efficiently. And everywhere, individuals turning a blind eye to acts of oppression—at times tacitly participating in them—by blaming the system, willingly ignoring that they, and countless individuals like them, are the system.

The dream sequences still don’t work. Some of the jokes have dated. Others now cut even deeper. There are aspects of the movie I didn’t appreciate when I first saw it. I knew nothing about film noir then, so Gilliam’s use of its iconography was lost on me. A shot of Pryce emerging from the shadows in a trench coat and fedora that could have been out of an RKO film from 1947 made me gasp audibly in the dark.

When the movie ended, I sat there, processing it. Half in the 1980s, half in the now.

It’s a perennial question: what advice would you offer your younger self? But neophytes have wisdom to share as well. Time occasionally flows in both directions. You can place a message in a bottle and toss it into the future, trusting it will wash ashore when you need it. I hate that Brazil is relevant in a way that it wasn’t in 1985. But I’m glad that it exists as a warning, and that brooding teenaged me decided to pay attention to it.

What (Else) I’m Watching

Speaking of what I loved in my youth, my affection for Billy Joel is longstanding and without irony. Maybe it’s a Queens thing. So of course I subjected myself to all five hours of Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO). The documentary tends toward hagiography but serves as a reminder of how many good songs Joel has written, and why they’ve lasted. Toward the conclusion, critics observe that Joel is unique among rock stars of his age because his songs make more sense when performed by someone older. These comments are followed by archival footage of Joel on the day he signed with Columbia Records in 1973. The scruffy 24-year-old launches into “Piano Man,” about lonely souls coming to grips with their dreams not coming true, the narrator himself in that company. It’s a potent juxtaposition.

What disappointed me was the dearth of New York Mets content. Long Island boy Joel is a huge fan of the team, and “Piano Man” is played as an anthem at the games. Fortunately, there’s another entire documentary on the subject: The Last Play at Shea (2010), which is guaranteed to reduce me to rubble, just like Shea Stadium in the film.

Sticking to music documentaries, I went into Devo (Netflix) knowing only a handful of their songs and the fact that they were Johnny Slash’s ninth favorite band on Square Pegs. I kept waiting for “Dare to Be Stupid” until I remembered that was Weird Al Yankovic’s note-perfect tribute to the band’s style. But the point of Weird Al’s song is also consistent with Devo’s philosophy of de-evolution, which was deep and well-thought-out, forged by the band members’ experiences at Kent State University during and after the infamous shootings in 1970. Chris Smith directs, and as he proved with American Movie (1999) he has an affinity for Midwestern misfits. Sure, Devo turned up on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman but they also took gigs where you wouldn’t expect to see new wave acts, performing on Merv Griffin’s and Mike Douglas’s daytime shows because they wanted housewives to be exposed to the band. More of that inclusive subversion would be welcome. And “Freedom of Choice” and “Through Being Cool” remain bangers with great videos.

Early work. DeVito first made a splash as a director with the short film The Selling of Vince D’Angelo (1982). A fake documentary, it recounts the bid of a crooked Passaic councilman (DeVito) to be elected senator from New Jersey. The short was rediscovered in the wake of the 1992 Presidential race, then again in 2016 when critics noted that the D’Angelo campaign—relying on fear-mongering, race-baiting, and baseless personal attacks, along with the slogan “What The Hell You Got to Lose?”—prefigured the Trump playbook by decades. The short was made for the now-forgotten cable anthology Likely Stories (1981-83), which also served as incubator for the creative team behind This Is Spinal Tap (1984). A website dedicated to Likely Stories has preserved Vince D’Angelo in all its glory.1 DeVito prospered in the early days of what was then called “pay TV,” directing the first made-for-Showtime movie: The Ratings Game (1984), in which he also starred as a bottom-feeding Hollywood producer who concocts a scheme to hack the Nielsen TV ratings system.

Throw Momma from the Train. To be able to show scenes from Strangers on a Train (1951), producer Larry Brezner surrendered sequel and remake rights to Arthur (1981). That’s a heavy burden to place on a film, responsibility for not only the lackluster Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988) but also the execrable Russell Brand reboot of 2011. Luckily the trade-off is worth it. The scenes in the writing class are still brutal, particularly those featuring Mrs. Hazeltine (jazz singer Annie Ross), who doesn’t do a lick of research for her story set on a submarine but has a way with simile; Mickey Spillane would be proud of “His guts oozed nice, like a melted malted.” I’d stet it myself. The movie was released at the dawn of my surprisingly long career as a movie usher.2 Civilians likely don’t realize that ushers grade films exclusively on their end credits music, which we have to listen to repeatedly as we clean theaters. Throw Momma’s closing song, “Shikisa” by South African artist Sipho Mabuse, remains my favorite track to wield a broom to; I’ll sometimes play it while tidying up at home.

The War of the Roses. In the article, I argue for DeVito’s genius in casting Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, their shared screen history adding weight to their scenes as a battling couple. Not only had Douglas and DeVito been roommates decades earlier, but as producer Douglas asked DeVito to reprise his stage role as Martini in the 1975 film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All three would continue to work together, Turner and DeVito having recurring roles on Douglas’s TV series The Kominsky Method (2018-2021). The Crimson Eagle, the long-bruited third film in the Romancing the Stone series, never got off the ground. We’ll have to settle for their appearance as backup singers in the video for Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” from The Jewel of the Nile.3

As for who should play the Roses in a remake, assuming a remake is necessary, follow DeVito’s lead while allowing Tony McNamara’s writing credit to point the way. In another few years, pair Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling for the fourth time.

Hoffa. My favorite story from the production comes courtesy of Jon Favreau, an extra in the movie’s big set piece at a labor clash. He played one of the workers but wanted to stick around, so he ran back to wardrobe and said he’d been cast a strikebreaker. Meaning there’s a version of this movie where the future director of Elf and Iron Man beats himself up.

I have no problem with the movie’s positive portrayal of Hoffa—proud product of a union household here—and admire aspects of DeVito’s sincere attempt to forge an American epic on the scale of The Godfather. But David Mamet’s script constantly thwarts those ambitions. Take the scene where Jimmy Hoffa (Jack Nicholson) squares off against Robert F. Kennedy (Kevin Anderson) before the McClellan Committee in 1959.4 It’s a meticulous recreation of an actual hearing, every line taken from testimony and delivered with gusto by both actors—but they’re butting heads about people we haven’t met and never will meet, the issues at stake never explained, the accuracy for naught. Much stronger is a behind-the-scenes clash with Hoffa taking aim at the Kennedy mystique, barking, “Your family don’t impress me. Buncha rumrunners.” Patrick Goldstein, in an August 1992 Los Angeles Times article, accurately branded Mamet’s script “a Hollywood biographical fantasia, a spicy gumbo of fact and fiction,” with DeVito’s character inspired by Chuckie O’Brien, “a Hoffa crony often described as his adopted son” and Armand Assante’s mob boss based on Anthony Provenzano. Mamet the director thought enough of DeVito to cast him in Heist (2001), in which the actor participates in the most noir exchange of dialogue in the twenty-first century and possibly ever.

DeVito: Don’t you want to hear my last words?

Gene Hackman: I just did.

Matilda. Yes, I saw it in the theater even though it was aimed at kids. By this point, DeVito’s name as director was enough to get me to buy a ticket.

Death to Smoochy. And now we come to the real reason I wrote the article: to get people to watch this movie. I’ve found it hysterical for over two decades. I know about its critical reputation, and I don’t care. I laugh at this movie every time I see it, and I’ve seen it a lot. I quote from it routinely, usually Robin Williams’ more off-color lines. I’m also partial to one uttered by DeVito’s no-nonsense talent agent: “Allow me to untangle this web of shit.” The Jersey accent helps enormously.

Duplex. The only film DeVito directed that I dislike. The script by veteran Simpsons scribe Larry Doyle does feature several choice bits about writers, like Ben Stiller’s character grousing about not wanting to write at Starbucks with all the other novelists. Justin Theroux plays his crime writer pal, far more successful commercially but self-conscious about the quality of his prose. But I never need to see the “That was the only copy of my manuscript!” gag again. What professional writer doesn’t back up their work, for fuck’s sake?

Unrealized Projects. DeVito was attached to a number of proposed remakes. He was tapped to direct Tom Cruise in an update of I Married a Witch (1942).5 He was going to direct and star in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), and anyone who doubts that DeVito could play Sheridan Whiteside as written hasn’t seen him in Other People’s Money (1991), where he gets to deliver the buggy whip speech. I wish he’d followed through on plans to remake the French film La Chienne (1931), which already served as the basis of Scarlet Street (1945). The notion of DeVito playing Edward G. Robinson’s role from Scarlet tantalizes. For some reason the prospect called to mind DeVito’s turn in The Big Kahuna (1999), particularly his closing monologue.

Legacy. Last month, when protestors in New York City were throwing around ideas for Italians who might be honored in place of Christopher Columbus, a Danny DeVito chant broke out. I’ve heard worse suggestions. It seems unlikely, so let’s consider more reasonable options. I’m launching a campaign for either an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award or an honorary Oscar in light of what he’s accomplished as an actor, producer, director, and, in his words to the Daily News in 1987, “five-foot-tall Italian guy from New Jersey.”

One more time, check out the article at CrimeReads.

What I’m Drinking

Time to mix a cocktail in honor of the man of the hour. Danny DeVito is proud of his New Jersey roots—he’s the pitchman for Jersey Mike’s subs and is in a “grandpa group chat” with longtime friend Bruce Springsteen—so here’s one with a Garden State genealogy.6 The Newark is part of the extended Brooklyn family of drinks, this one created by Jim Meehan and John Deragon when they were at New York’s PDT. It swaps in Fernet Branca for the Brooklyn’s Amer Picon, but the key innovation is the use of Laird’s apple brandy from Monmouth County, NJ. It’s the perfect beverage for autumn, which will be here soon enough.

The Newark, by Jim Meehan and John Deragon

• 2 oz. Laird’s bonded straight apple brandy

• 1 oz. sweet vermouth

• ¼ oz. Fernet Branca

• ¼ oz. maraschino liqueur

Stir. Strain. No garnish.

H2L plants itself firmly in the front rank of New York City movies from the title sequence, a dizzying, glorious panorama of Manhattan as seen from Brooklyn set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma! The song underscores the heights from which mogul David King (Denzel Washington) is about to fall. On this beautiful morning, he will go from closing a backroom deal enabling him to purchase the company he started two decades ago to learning his son Trey has been abducted. Lee keeps the Big Apple energy boiling during the bravura ransom drop scene, which mainly takes place on the 4 train as it rumbles its way up to the Bronx. Some may scoff at the likelihood of the Yankees playing an afternoon game during the Puerto Rican Day parade, but all New Yorkers will say, “Sounds about right. Thanks, Mayor Adams.”

The movie keeps the core plot twist—by mistake, the kidnapper has grabbed Trey’s best friend, the son of his father’s chauffeur, but still demands King pay the ransom—while updating the story in other ways. King isn’t trying to take over a shoe manufacturer but a record label, a savvy change as we’ve moved from gray flannel suit capitalism to an era of personalities capturing eyeballs; as King constantly says, attention is the only currency that matters.2 The script by Alan Fox abandons the procedural structure, leaving the work of tracking down the kidnapper to King and his chauffeur Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). The police are kept at a remove both narratively and psychologically. The detectives assigned to the case treat King guardedly while regarding Christopher, an ex-convict, as a potential suspect.3 Lee tellingly shoots a scene in which two uniformed officers interview Rick Fox, playing himself as Trey’s basketball coach, so that the cops tower over the former NBA player.

Some of the alterations blunt suspense. Having King and his chauffeur be lifelong friends is an intriguing gambit. In the McBain and Kurosawa versions, King regards the man as nothing more than an employee, which makes it believable that he’d consider not paying the ransom in order to save his business. Removing that distance between the men in favor of a shared history sets up complications that the movie never fully exploits. Or maybe I just wanted to see Washington and Wright, two heavyweights, go toe to toe more. And the means by which King tumbles to the kidnapper’s identity comes together a few beats too quickly.

The appearance of the kidnapper in the form of A$AP Rocky gives H2L a third-act jolt. It’s a joy as always to watch Washington, who wears the mantle of authority with breathtaking ease. His character is aptly named, carrying himself like a monarch. When Wright’s Christopher implores King to save his son, Washington plays their dialogue with his eyes closed, in part to spare himself having to look at his friend in agony but mainly because King believes the only conversation that matters is the one he’s having with himself.

Spike Lee is incapable of making a boring movie. Highest 2 Lowest is no exception. It’s worth seeing in the theater before it drops on Apple TV+ on September 5 for the New York scenes alone.

Night Always Comes. I’ve written about the impression that Willy Vlautin’s 2021 noir novel The Night Always Comes made on me; it’s one of the few books of the past decade that I’ve read more than once. A 250-page panic attack, it tracks Lynette as she’s propelled out into the night in a last-chance bid to scrounge up the down payment on a house for herself and her family.

The Netflix adaptation is a worthy one.4 The film can’t hope to recreate the sense of precarity that permeates the book. It overcompensates early with a barrage of TV and radio reports on dire economic conditions, as if people teetering on the margins need to be reminded of their status. But once Lynette (Vanessa Kirby) heads out the door, a grim momentum takes hold. The cast is first-rate. Kirby lets us see Lynette fighting to hold herself together every second, hinting at a past that the movie slowly reveals. Julia Fox has a terrific scene as Lynette’s friend who has clawed her way to stability, still willing to tell Lynette mid-conversation, “You smell terrible.” Zack Gottsagen shines as Lynette’s developmentally disabled older brother. Every Jennifer Jason Leigh movie needs more Jennifer Jason Leigh. As Lynette’s mother, she doesn’t get the devastating speech from late in the book on the system being designed to crush people like their family and how her only goal in her remaining years is to rest at last. Her closing scenes with Kirby still pack a wallop. Portland, Oregon plays itself to good effect, with the house that Lynette is desperate to acquire particularly well cast. Perched above the interstate, it’s sturdy enough that someone could delude themselves into thinking they can improve it, and so shabby that another person would plausibly want to burn it to the ground.

Cloud. The latest film from Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse, Bright Future) begins as a harrowing look at how the frictionless existence afforded by the internet now taints every human interaction. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has a side hustle as an online reseller, manipulating people to buy items in bulk so he can jack up prices and blithely hocking counterfeit merchandise. He watches each bounty sell out with the detachment of a gambler, whatever joy he feels subsumed by the knowledge that he’s got to find his next score fast. Able to quit his day job, he moves to an isolated home in the mountains that he transforms into a warehouse, suited to packages and not people. His misdeeds begin to catch up with him, but Kurosawa sets the story in a benumbed world where revenge and even murder don’t get the blood racing. Cloud turns into a nightmare where every callous internet exchange and indifferent thought has in-your-face consequences, like a deadpan gunfight in a nondescript industrial landscape out of countless video games. The film has one more twist in store, its final scene on the nose, obscure, and deeply unsettling all at once. I’m not entirely sure what Cloud is saying. I’m not positive that the movie knows. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Weapons. Zach Cregger’s latest is being sold as a horror movie, which is most definitely is. For much of its running time it’s also a compelling mystery, Cregger’s script employing a looping structure as a disparate group of people try to discover what happened to seventeen classmates who vanished from their homes at 2:17 AM. Cregger juggles a range of tones including a surprising amount of comedy, and the wild ending demands to be seen in a theater with as many people as possible.5