Seasoned commentator David Gergen to PBS Newshour‘s Judy Woodruff on 5.13.22 [during the Cannes Film Festival]: “[The Presidency] requires a keen sense of judgment. And you…I just turned 80. And I can just…I can tell you, you lose your…you lose a step. You’re not as sharp. You are more forgetful. You’re not quite sure where you’re going. You can’t…that’s too old to be in the presidency. I think people like Biden and Trump ought to both step back and leave open the door to younger people.”

Naturally, sucker that I am, I’m thinking about it. $35 — streets on 8.9.22.

Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Dean Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Ray Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and poor, treated-like-dirt Kim Novak (i.e. “Polly the pistol”). Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow.

Two baseball moments happened over the weekend — one that made me feel like an over-the-hill weakling, and another that made my heart swell a bit and even brought me to the edge of tears.

Moment #1 was having a catch with Jett in a Montclair park. To my surprise and horror I discovered that my throwing arm is stiff and more out-of-shape than usual. The first few throws were actually painful — I cried out John McEnroe-style with each toss. I gradually limbered up but for a while there I was crestfallen.

Moment #2 happened when I saw Sean Mullin‘s It Ain’t Over, an affectionate, unexpectedly emotional Yogi Berra doc that’s playing at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Speaking as one who grew up in the tristate area (New Jersey, Connecticut, Manhattan) and managed to attend a grand total of two Yankee games and no Mets games that whole time, I’m not what you’d call a diehard baseball fan. But I certainly knew and admired Berra (1925-2015), a legendary Yankee catcher (18 seasons), power hitter, “bad ball” hitter and shoot-from-the-hip philosopher whose peak years were in the ’50s and early ’60s.

Yogi Berra is one of the greatest sounding baseball names of all time, right up there with Moose Skowron, Goose Gossage, Miller Huggins, Ty Cobb, Bobo Rivera, Ryne Duren, Hoyt Wilhelm, Duke Snider and Mookie Wilson. (Berra’s birth name was Lorenzo Pietro Berra.)

There was always something simian about Berra’s size (he stood 5’7″) and facial features, but what a magnificent athlete. Named the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award three times, an All-Star player 18 times, played in 10 World Series championships (more than any other player in MLB history), a career batting average of 285 (struck or thrown out 7 out of 10 times — Mickey Mantle ended up with .298), caught Don Larsen‘s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, etc.

And what a TV pitchman! Yoohoo chocolate drink, Camel cigarettes, Florida Orange Juice, Kinney Shoes, Miller Lite, etc.

What does Mullin’s doc do with all this? Nothing miraculous but it always satisfies. Mullin just lays it out, decade by decade, straight and plain, St. Louis childhood to World War II to years of Yankee (and later N.Y. Mets) glory and into the coaching years, and always with an emotional gloss or spin of some kind.

Is it par for the course and familiar as fuck to share various affectionate, awe-struck observations from players, commentators and family members who were Berra fans over the years (Billy Crystal, Derek Jeter, Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Joe Garagiola, Roger Angell, Bobby Richardson, Whitey Herzog, Tony Kubek, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry and the Berra family — Dale, Tim, Larry, late wife Carmen and granddaughter Lindsay Berra)? Yes, but it works here. Of course it does…you want it.

Does the doc feature a villain? You betcha — Hannah-Barbera’s Yogi Bear, a revoltingly cheerful cartoon character who came along in 1958, and was hated by Berra and everyone else over the age of ten. Thank God the doc doesn’t feature “Yogi,” a 1960 pop tune by the Ivy Three.

The personal Yogi stuff puts the hook in. The 65-year marriage to Carmen (1949 to her death in 2014). Home life in Montclair. The TV pitchman career. The D-Day heroism. Yogi’s long feud with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner after the latter fired him as manager (and by proxy yet). Dale Berra sharing the intervention moment when Yogi and his brothers confronted him about cocaine addiction.

I’ve decided to devote a separate piece to the better-known Yogi-isms — poorly worded sayings that don’t sound right at first, but start to sound right the more you repeat them or think about them.