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There are two generally understood concepts of heaven. Concept #1 focuses on material-world stuff…pleasure, happiness, fulfillment, great sex, neck rubs, bags of money, great Italian food. Concept #2 is about a bullshit fairy tale after-realm that religious leaders have been selling to their parishioners for centuries, as in “be good and go to heaven.”

I’ve always said that if there’s a heaven, it certainly doesn’t work on a merit or virtuous behavior system. Upon dying everyone becomes Keir Dullea‘s space fetus at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or nobody does.

At the very end of Field of Dreams, a conversation between Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and the ghost of his dad, John (Dwier Brown), skirts both realms. And what John says is self-contradictory. Here’s how the scene plays:

Ray: “You played a good game.
Dad: “Thank you. (beat, beat) It’s so beautiful here. For me…for me, it’s like a dream come true. (beat) Can I ask you something?”

Slightly agog, Ray nods.

Dad: “Is this…is this heaven?”
Ray: “It’s Iowa.”
Dad: “Iowa?”
Ray: “Yeah.
Dad: “Coulda sworn it was heaven.”

Dad picks up catcher’s glove, Ray walks over…

Ray: “Is there a heaven?”
Dad: “Oh, yeah. It’s the place dreams come true.”

So let’s break this down, shall we?

John is an emissary from some kind of mystical, post-mortal realm (i.e., the same in which 2001‘s Dave Bowman resides, so to speak), and so he asks his son if the cornfield baseball diamond upon which they’re standing is heaven. Because the joy of playing baseball has so lifted and purified his spirits, John is suddenly wondering if this blissful feeling of cosmic radiance is a renewable thing on some level. John believes that Ray’s baseball diamond might be the ultimate OHM place to be.

Ray quietly tells him no, it’s not — that they’re just in Iowa. In response to which John, obviously uncertain which realm is up, replies that he “coulda sworn it was heaven.” In other words, for a dead guy John doesn’t know very much. He has an idea that Ray’s baseball diamond might be the epicenter of God’s perfect universe, but he’s not sure. He was just passing along a thought, a notion.

And then Ray, having been told in so many words that John isn’t exactly a fountain of all-knowing mystical knowledge of the wonders of the universe, and having just heard that John is as fascinated and mystified about where he is (not to mention who or what he is) as anyone else…knowing all this Ray asks John for some very basic dead-guy info: “Is there a heaven?”

And then John immediately switches gears. He is suddenly no longer the uncertain and questioning ghost, no longer the mystical dream-dweller. And so he tells Ray, “Oh, yeah”….as in “oh, son, relax your weary head because of course there’s a heaven…trust me, there is!”

And then he steps down off the cosmic pedestal and reverts to concept #1 as described above — heaven is not only real, he assures, but “the place [where] dreams come true.”

Repeating for clarity: Ghost John doesn’t have clue #1 about what heaven is or even what it might be, and so he asks his mortal son, an agnostic who only knows for certain what the material realm is, if he’s somehow arrived at the perfect cosmic place. But when Ray asks John if heaven is something pulsing and genuine, John does a 180 and tells Ray that, being a dead guy and all, that he’s absolutely certain that heaven is something with definable conditions and perimeters.

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…that last night’s Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa. was NOT played on the modest-sized, cornfield-flanked diamond that sits next to Ray Kinsella‘s (Kevin Costner‘s) Iowa farmhouse — built for the 1989 cult film, and which still stands and thrives today as a tourist attraction.

Last night’s game was played at a nearby (500 feet away) baseball field called the MLB at Field of Dreams, also cornfield-flanked but with stadium seating for 8000 people, according to both Fox Sports and The Sporting News.

In a pre-game press conference, Costner called Field of Dreams “the perfect little movie…the climax, rather than a big car chase, was ‘do you wanna have a catch?'”

Due respect but not quite. Field of Dreams was and is “a perfect little movie,” agreed, but it didn’t end with a father (Dwier Brown‘s John Kinsella) and son playing catch. If it HAD ended with the catch, Field wouldn’t be half the legendary perennial it’s become.

Field of Dreams ends, in fact, with a nighttime helicopter shot of a long stream of cars, lined up on a nearby road leading up to the Costner farmhouse. That shot of…what, 200 cars waiting to see the field and bask in those Shoeless Joe Burt Lancaster vibes…THAT’s what sold the film.

Without that line of cars, without that irrefutable evidence of what people want and need and long for in their lives, the film would’ve basically been a nice pipe dream.

Friendo: “To each his own, but every time Costner says ‘hey, dad, wanna have a catch?’, that chokes me up. That’s the film for me. The line of cars is just icing on the cake.”

HE to Friendo: “I never had a catch with my dad so it doesn’t get me as much. And in a broader sense sentiment doesn’t travel — it doesn’t expand or deepen. It always diminishes over time. Just ask John Ford and Steven Spielberg and the directors of The Bishop’s Wife and A Guy Named Joe. The only sentimental ending that never fails to get me is the Warren Beatty-Julie Christie ending of Heaven Can Wait, and for the worst of reasons.”

Friendo to HE: “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Fred Zinneman‘s Day of the Jackal (’73) is one of my all–time favorite docu–thrillers, yet I somehow missed this Special Edition Arrow Bluray when it popped three years ago. The quality of the jacket cover is a keeper in itself — it’s rare when original Bluray art improves this significantly upon the original materials.

My first association was Charles Laughton‘s Quasimodo; my second was Pietro Annigoni‘s JFK portrait.

But you know what? Eff this effing movie and the Arrow Bluray it rode in on. Because only head-in-the-sand types pay attention to ’70s movies in the first place. Just ask the HE comment buzzards — all that matters is the streaming of agreeable, adult-angled, mezzo-mezzo longform angel food cake. Get with the program, and enough with the cranky.

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If you’re standing on the road-facing side of the Poco Cielo hotel, it’s mainly about the rattle and gear-shifting and whaaagghhh of speeding trucks. It’s not pleasant. But if you’re on the ocean-facing side, of course, it’s soothing, transporting, etc.

Posted on 10.9.19: Yesterday three nice people (two guys and a gal) kicked the Bill-and-Monica saga around. I was one of the guys, but that’s as far as I’ll go with specifics. It started with a dispute about how much of a predator Bill Clinton might have been and how willing if not eager Ms. Lewinsky might have been.

Guy #1: Monica Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern and he was the President of the United States. “It’s honestly hard to think of a dynamic that is more clearly an egregious abuse of power,” wrote lawyer Lindsey Barrett on Twitter.

American columnist Kristen Powers tweeted, “This actually shouldn’t be so hard. Hillary isn’t responsible for what her husband did, but she should be able to recognize it as an abuse of power.”

Last March Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair that she considered the affair “a gross abuse of power”, adding “he was my boss…he was the most powerful man on the planet”.

HE: That aside, are you actually contending that Bill Clinton harassed and bullied Monica Lewinsky into having an affair against her will? Don’t various accounts argue with this notion quite strenuously?

Gal #1: “She might have been ample and Rubenesque but Monica was hot. Clinton didn’t pray on some poor ignored chubby girl. She flirted outrageously with him and he flirted back. He could not resist her because she was HIS type. Beanie Feldstein is not THAT type. This casting choice alone tells you this dramatization is going to be a one-sided story of a sexual predator, which is 100% wrong. She was in her early 20s and very, very willing.”

HE: We all understand the power dynamic, but how does that work in the theoretical case of the widowed Michael Douglas in The American President? No hitting on any White House staffer, regardless of age or position? Only lobbyists like Annette Bening’s Sydney? Who exactly is a U.S. President allowed to show interest in, given the huge imbalance of power and the likelihood of being attacked down the road by #MeToo?

Otherwise, bullshit. 22 year-olds are not babes in the woods or poor little lambs. My rule is that you’re on you’re own and expected to live and cope in the adult world when you hit 20 or your junior year in college. And certainly by age 21. (Any older guy who makes a play for a sophomore or freshman or any woman in her late teens is definitely crossing the line.) But it all changes at 20 or 21, and certainly by age 22, or a year past graduation.

Clinton is/was an opportunistic hound, but so was Benjamin (“the father of France”) Franklin. So was Warren G. Harding. So were FDR, JFK, Gary Hart. Not every powerful politician with a yen for the ladies is necessarily a criminal predator. Or were they all Harvey Weinstein in your eyes?

Men and women tend to use and exploit each other in the quiet corridors of power. Lewinsky knew what she was doing. She saw an opportunity, turned on the alpha, scored and then expected to be compensated with some kind of job advancement. Which is an occasional benefit from affairs of this sort. Pay for play has been a common dynamic in business & government cultures for quite a while now. She became irate and conflicted and given to Linda Tripp confessions when she wasn’t shown what she calculated was her due.

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The likely no-show of Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) at Venice, Telluride or Toronto is disappointing but understandable. But then the list of interesting-sounding films that won’t be debuting at the early-fall festivals is quite formidable.

Oh, wait…none of this matters because it’s all happening on streaming and cable!

From Jordan Ruimy‘s “PTA, Spielberg, Eastwood, Del Toro, and McKay Skipping Festivals“:

The no-shows include (1) Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro); (2) Soggy Bottom (Paul Thomas Anderson); (3) West Side Story (Steven Spielberg); (4) Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood); (5) Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay); (6) House of Gucci (Ridley Scott), (7) Being the Ricardos (Aaron Sorkin), (8) Tender Bar (George Clooney), (9) A Journal for Jordan (Denzel Washington)

And what about The Many Saints of Newark? That’s not doing Telluride either.

The big-name directors who will escort new films to the fall festivals include Pedro Almodovar, Jane Campion, Paul Schrader, Denis Villeneuve, Edgar Wright and Paolo Sorrentino.” Compare that roster to no Clint, no PTA, no Ridley, no Guillermo, no Denzel, no Adam McKay, no Spielberg, no Clooney, no Sorkin.

George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar (Amazon), a proletariat community relationship flick (Manhasset) with a father-son, male-role-model current, will presumably begin streaming sometime in the mid-to-late fall season. Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Chris Lloyd and Lily Rabe topline.

I’ll never touch another drop for the rest of my life, but every now and then (and I mean rarely) I’ll say to myself “I kind of miss that warm, boozy, half-in-the-bag camaraderie…stroll into a bar, bend the elbow, get a buzz-on,” etc. But not that much.

Review excerpt of same–titled book: “A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, J.R. Moehringer (played by Sheridan) grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house crammed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather (Chris Lloyd).

“Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns to his Uncle Charlie (Affleck), and subsequently, Uncle Charlie’s place of employment — a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage.

Publishers Weekly: “You needn’t be a writer to appreciate the romance of the corner tavern or, for that matter, of the local dive in a suburban strip mall.

“But perhaps it does take a writer to explain the appeal of these places that ought to offend us on any number of levels…[such as] what would we do without them, and what would we do without the companionship of fellow pilgrims whose journey through life requires the assistance of a drop or two?

More than anything else, Moehringer’s book is a homage to the culture of the local pub. That’s where young J.R. seeks out the companionship of male role models in place of his absent father, where he receives an education that has served him well in his career and where, inevitably, he looks for love, bemoans its absence and mourns its loss.

“Moehringer grew up in Manhasset, a place, he writes, that ‘believed in booze.’ At a young age, he became a regular — not a drinker, of course, for he was far too young. But while still tender of years, he was introduced to the culture, to the companionship and — yes — to the romance of it all. ”

“‘Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel close to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship,’ he writes. “For young J.R., that place was a gin mill on Plandome Road where his Uncle Charlie was a bartender and a patron.

The Tender Bar‘s emotional climax comes after its native son has found success as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. On September 11, 2001, almost 50 souls who lived and loved in Moehringer’s home town of Manhasset were killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One was a bartender we’ve met along the way. Another was one of the author’s cousin.

“Moehringer’s lovely evocation of an ordinary place filled with ordinary people gives dignity and meaning to those lost lives, and to his own.”

I personally feel as if a combination Amtrak and freight train that I’ve been riding on and living off most of my professional life (spiritually and economically) has jumped the tracks.

Even five years ago (summer of ‘16) we were all part of a hugely different landscape, or soul-scape even. Even with the overwhelming formulaic Marvel/D.C. scourge (which had begun around ’05) there were pockets of vibrancy…opportunities for surprises and odd possibilities….who knew?

Then the realm started to convulse and consume itself by way of four traumatic shake-ups that amounted to a perfect storm:

(a) the horror and chaos of Trump, and the sense that rural racist bumblefuck attitudes that Trump winked at and empowered (Charlottesville, George Floyd) + older white male sexist establishment attitudes (Weinstein, et. al.) had to be resisted head-on;

(b) regimented cinematic woke political currents (the traditional function of nervy smarthouse cinema up-ended by required SJW narratives & the transformation of Sundance and to a lesser extent Toronto into instructive progressive re-education camps);

(c) streaming overtaking exhibition (thus ensuring that the “go woke, go broke” effect wouldn’t interfere with said narrative); and…

(d) the concurrent pandemic effect of ‘20 and ‘21, which has all but killed exhibition (which had already been isolating itself by succumbing to the gladiator-arena syndrome, which was caused by a tidal shift in audience appetites due to adult-level dramas moving to cable and streaming).

The film world was far from idyllic before all this happened but the last four or five years have been shattering. The only upside I can see is that the pandemic ejected Trump from the White House, although the psychology of Trump Nation has obviously persisted if not metastasized.

…is that there might be some pregnant men out there who should know that it’s cool to get a Covid vaccine, according to the CDC. The story, titled “The C.D.C. Endorses Covid vaccinations During Pregnancy“, was written by Roni Caryn Rabin.

I don’t mean to sound clueless. We all watched Arnold Schwarzenegger get pregnant and give birth 27 years ago in Junior. But in the real political world of ’21 this is precisely the kind of thing that people hate about the progressive left. This plus CRT and a few other things is why the Democrats might (God forbid) suffer losses in the ’22 mid-terms, and why (God forbid) a monster like Ron DeSantis might prevail in ’24. Because generally speaking, Average Joes aren’t cool with the idea of men giving birth…we all know it’s happened between trans couples but c’mon, man…

“Things are looking bleak for our heroes: they gave it their best, and may have even briefly looked like winning, but in the end, the villains were too strong, the heroes too few, and all that’s left is just enough time for some last words and a Last Stand…

“…Wait, what’s that? Did I just hear a bugle?

“It’s the Cavalry, riding in to save the day! Maybe they’re some minor characters who’ve banded together to mount a rescue, or maybe they’re the local Men of Sherwood, or maybe they are characters Not Quite Dead after all, or maybe they’re Han Solo diving into the fray at the last minute. Any way you slice it they exist to storm in at the last minute, save the heroes and convert a Downer Ending into an out-and-out win for the good guys.

“This and other related tropes are named for the classic Western trope of the US cavalry charging over the brow of the hill just in time to save the beleaguered settlers from the Indians in far too many Westerns to count.” — from “The Cavalry,” www.tvtropes.org.

In this instance, the U.S. Cavalry arrives around the 1:30 mark. (Posted nearly three years by LatestSightings.com.)

Bill Murray in Mad Dog and Glory (1:20 mark): “The Seventh Cavalry. What’s that make us, the friggin’ Comanches? Dut-dah-dut-dah-dut-dah-dut-dah-TAT-tuh-TAT-tuh-dahhh!”

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All in a single comment thread posted today, the utterly cancerous malignancy afflicting movies today + the ADD effect of streaming — Dyson, Henry, Miesel and Rawls:

Miles Dyson: “It might be me, but streaming has made watching movies harder. I can’t get invested like I used to. There is a major difference between making an effort to go sit down in a cinema and launching an app. I find myself not sticking to things at all. A lot of it is so blah.”

Hardcore Henry: “I swear the rise of apps has single-handedly helped drive the rise of ADHD. I’m one of the most focused, undistracted people I know (not even trying to #humblebrag here — it certainly has its detriments) and the damn things make me fidget and twitch like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys.”

Pete Miesel: “Virtually every film coming out these days is a superhero movie, a film version of an amusement park ride, a remake of a TV series, an adaptation of a previously published novel, or a musical jukebox biography where every character addresses each other by their full names (‘good point, John Lennon of the Beatles’). And we’re worried about social realism??”

Lou Rawls’ Ego: “Most box office being from non-US markets is why movies are so dumb and bland.”