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The 6 minutes opening montage of musical guests performing on SNL is brilliant and inventive. 

The rest of the documentary sails along doing what you would expect from an NBC produced documentary about the storied franchise celebrating 50 years on the air. 

Which is, everyone (perhaps rightly) pats themselves on the back a lot. 

According to Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music the historic comedy variety show was the place to be for musicians who were about to break big and a nurturing home for talented weirdos and a cultural icon that was unafraid to bring in artists that polite society wanted silenced. 

Honestly, can’t argue with most of that. I’m just not sure how much credit should be awarded for having Nirvana on your show when they were selling 100,000 albums a week. 

Adele makes a stronger case by noting that her first appearance on the show moved her album from the middle of the charts to the top — and that it happened on the flight home from NYC to England. 

She says, years later and still astonished, that she never believed in overnight successes until it happened to her. 

You are in good hands knowing that Questlove directed the documentary. And if you haven’t seen his Summer of Soul you should really get on that. 

SNL is such a cultural institution that I can mark my life by its controversies. 

So I distinctly remember when Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photo of the pope but I had no idea that Elvis Costello had ever been in trouble with the powers that be for changing a song at the last minute. 

The documentary moves expertly through its themes pointing out how SNL embraced rap music in its infancy, was willing to go with avante garde acts and blends in a litany of musical highlights. 

I’m a little bummed there is no country music at all in the thing but that’s probably to be expected from a show that for fifty years has desperately wanted to be seen as cool by whomever was in high school at the time. 

Ignore me, I’m bitter in my old age, this is entertaining and wonderful. If you are an SNL fan you are sure to enjoy it.

So we should talk a bit about how my mind works. Along with trying to watch most of the Oscar contenders each year, the superhero movies I care about and anything else that catches my attention I have a ever growing list of older movies I try to watch for the first time.

Sometimes it’s just something someone recommended online. But in most cases it’s a director who does interesting flicks and I’m working my way through their entire catalogue.

I can give you the perfect example of how these are the actions of a crazy person. In 2021, Clint Eastwood released Cry Macho. Critics hated it. Audiences ignored it and I put it on my list.

I got to it last year in the run-up to Juror #2. The critics were not wrong. But still, I have seen Cry Macho and it is now marked off the list because with it I have seen nearly everything Clint Eastwood ever directed.

And so it is with Spike Lee, who’s films range from instant historic classics to ‘oh my God what was he thinking’ and back again.

Malcolm X fundamentally changed, well if not my life, then my perspective about the world around me. Movies can do that, if you let them, they can show you how different the world is for other people.

He Got Game works in some parts because Denzel Washington can do anything once you point a camera at him. That includes making you think basketball superstar Ray Allen is his son (even though Ray can’t act and doesn’t look a thing like Denzel).

However, He Got Game mostly doesn’t get to the lofty heights you would want from a Spike Lee movie. The reasons are myriad. Denzel is in prison but is allowed out by the state’s governor because his son is a high school phenom and the governor wants Denzel to get him to sign with his favorite college program.

Sure.

It’s not that I thought that was impossible — people in high office do insane things like this all the time it seems — it’s just that I thought it was a weird basis for this type of flick.

And Ray Allen couldn’t pull his weight as an actor.

He Got Game has some great moments though and a final moving bit involving both men playing basketball on different courts that shows that they are forever connected.

I began Mo’ Better Blues having just finished He Got Game. Game is from 1998, Blues came in at 1990. This was his follow up to the huge hit that was Do The Right Thing.

Denzel plays Bleek Gilliam a successful jazz trumpet player and band leader who needs to get to the next level and out of the bad contract his manager and child hood friend (played by Spike Lee) signed with a local nightclub. Wesley Snipes is in the band but he wants to be the guy out front and he wants at least one of Denzel’s two girlfriends.

I feel like if a guy in a movie in 2024 had two girlfriends people in the audience might riot. But in 1990 the sexual politics of the situation were that Bleek had two women, they knew about each other, and no one was particularly happy except for Bleek after hours.

It all goes along fine (mostly) until both women show up at the nightclub where Bleek performs on the same night wearing the same dress.

If you were involved in this situation in any way you would not think it is funny but I howled when Spike Lee’s Giant reminded Bleek that he had told him not to buy the same dress for two women just because they were in a rush to get out of Paris.

There is more going on here than romantic troubles. Lee always has a keen eye for details about life in New York and was also concerned with the problems of successful young people having just recently become a successful young person himself.

I didn’t much care for the first half of it and then the band played a song I loved and the thing Lee had been working for during the first half of the movie snapped shut and then … well I just floated away with it.

I really loved the second half of it because it shifts almost completely from the kind of story you would expect to something new and wonderful.

Also, I’m not sure if this is the first Lee ended a movie with an I Love New York montage but it certainly won’t be his last.

It’s likely that no one would point you to Mo’ Better Blues if they were suggesting you try Spike Lee movies. It’s stuck between his breakout Do the Right Thing and his mountaintop Malcolm X.

But if you, like me, start working through Spike Lee movies, or Denzel performances or however you do it in your house, be sure and put it on your list.

One of the things I like the most about The Brutalist, I think, is that it is a movie that retains some of it’s secrets. 

Certainly, a lot of it drawn out right in front of you. This is an epic and I swear, almost a response to The Godfather. 

Mario Puzo had one of his characters say, right up front, “I believe in America.” 

Here Writer/Director Brady Corbet, joined by writer Mona Fastvold, begin their film with the Statue of Liberty upside down. 

Bold doesn’t do it justice. 

I think I could tell you the plot details of the rest of the movie and it would lose absolutely none of its power. 

Briefly, a Jewish immigrant and brilliant architect, played by Adrien Brody, escapes the chaos of Germany after World War 2 and starts a new life in Pennsylvania. He lives with his cousin and his cousin’s wife while awaiting word of his own wife and niece who are still trapped overseas. 

His life intersects with a powerful and wealthy family and they ultimately work together on a massive project. 

Honestly, I struggle for something to compare this to. Francis Coppola’s and Puzo’s Godfather, or There Will Be Blood, perhaps. The first section of the movie, an hour and a half or so that stops with an intermission, rumbles from one amazing scene to the next. It’s ferocious. 

This is what I came up with.

Have you seen The Deer Hunter? Director Michael Cimino and writers Quinn K. Redeker, Deric Washburn open the movie with 30 minutes at a wedding. It’s unreal in its specificity. 

Ok, one more, just because I recently watched and thought of this while typing. Terrance Malick’s Days of Heaven. I watched that entire movie and at nearly every scene I said, “My God, how did they do that?” 

That’s the first half of this. In the second half Corbet takes his foot off the gas. There is still not a bad scene in the bunch but it is not as frantic as the first section. 

Adrien Brody levitates. I assume he sent his agent and the film’s casting director all the flowers. Of course, you should not make The Brutalist without Brody. He’s just completely in his element and never makes a false move. 

For me, Guy Pearce, deserves the supporting actor award this year. Every thing he does and every story he tells builds to the denouement in a specific way. 

He’s charming and yet so obviously evil that as I watched it I kept being surprised that no one else in the movie noticed. Money can make the horrible seem respectable. Pearce never loses it or tries to soften it or shies away from this character. 

As just one example, consider the story he tells early on about his estranged grandparents. Now, having heard that story would you ever do business with this man? 

The movie draws some conclusions about America, and about the immigrant experience. It’s not wrong in its point of view. But for me, my gosh, there are big red flashing warning signs everywhere. 

As for secrets, there is a moment where a set of twins share a look, and it’s just a look, that suggests to me that their relationship is untoward. But the movie moves on. 

It does it again following an encounter with a spoiled rich man and a young immigrant woman. 

In both instances I thought there would be more. The second scene, in particular, set you up for a particular kind of finish. 

Instead, it’s a red herring that disguises what’s really about to happen. 

Or, there is truth to both things but Brody’s Laszlo Toth never learned more. And with him in the dark the audience is left wondering too. 

I love a movie that lingers as this one does. 

The film has a finale every bit as (sorry) brutal as the rest of the film. 

Then there is an epilogue that is kind of … quirky?

Certainly, while it explains some of the movie’s themes it also chooses to dance to a different tune right as the show closes. 

I am reminded of how podcaster John Siracusa describe the ending of Goodfellas. In the end, you will recall, Ray Liotta stands up in the witnesses stand, breaks the forth wall and quite literally walks the audience to the final moments of the film 

I’m paraphrasing it but Siracusa said essentially: By now Scorsese knows he has you and he can do anything he wants with you and so he does. 

If you don’t know what he means, when you get to the end of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist you will understand. 

Bob Dylan goes through four breakups in A Complete Unknown. The ugliest and most violent one is when he dumps the folk music nerds. 

That probably sounds harsh for the folk music nerds but honestly, I’m on their side.

As a country music nerd I fully believe that everytime a great country artists releases a pop, rock, punk, rap or EDM album an angel loses its wings. 

It isn’t easy to make any kind of movie but music biopics like sports dramas, seem to me, an outsider, to be a genre permanently set on the lowest difficulty level. 

If you like the artist, you likely will enjoy the songs and background scenes between songs will be interesting because fans can’t get enough of this stuff. 

A Complete Unknown is a little better than most of the rest for a host of reasons. 

The first, of course, is that Director James Mangold and writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald fill the film with early Dylan hits. 

There is other music here too, of course, but mostly the movie gives you the early catalogue of one of the world’s greatest songwriters. 

As Aces go, that’s not a bad one to have up your sleeve. 

Also, I’ve heard all of these songs thousands of times but the movie gives them context (whether true or not I can’t say) that brings even more meaning to the tunes. That’s standard music biopic stuff but it’s still wonderful to experience it with say Master’s of War, It Ain’t Me Babe and finally (spoilers) It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. 

The next solid choice is that the movie is mostly unafraid to present Dylan as a paranoid jerk. I’ve never met Mr. Dylan but paranoia and jerkitude radiate from him at least as much as his singular musical genius. 

Timothy Chalamet plays him – after he becomes famous – with a permanent snarl. And that pretty much jives with what I gleaned from all of his records between 1962 and 1979 when he found Jesus and released Slow Train Coming. 

The movie gives enough time to the music legends in Dylan’s orbit, Peter Seeger (Ed Norton), Joan Baez (Monica Barbara), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) to give you a sense of their lives at the time. But it never strays far from the main course — Bobby Zimmerman conquering the world. 

You get to see the most famous photo shoot in rock music history with Dylan and his then girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).

And you get Dylan’s love life, the 1960s folk scene and a picture perfect New York City.  The flick also builds to its central conflict; that Dylan is too big for folk music and is going to leave the genre for rock and roll. 

If Woodie Guthrie was Jesus and Pete Seeger was the Apostle Paul then Dylan is Seeger’s child in the faith. The movie opens as Dylan seeks out Guthrie, finds him in a hospital and also meets Seeger. 

One impressive song at the foot of a hospital bed later and Seeger adopts the new kid and helps him get his start. 

Seeger and the Folk crew see Dylan as someone who will finally take their vision of music and politics to a wider world. Dylan succeeds beyond all reasonable hopes and then … 

Well, what’s next after you have conquered the world? Especially, if you are permanently paranoid and unsatisfied no matter how good life gets. 

And, it ain’t like anybody anywhere is asking Bob Dylan was he wants. Dylan discovers that fame is just a host of people who want something from him in every moment of his life. 

And he wasn’t exactly Mr. Sunshine before that revelation. 

One of the tough lessons I learned from my father is that unhappy people are going to remain unhappy no matter what you do. 

Money, fame and relationships just won’t cut it when you’re a guy like Bob Dylan. 

Like any good ‘historical’ movie A Complete Unknown never lets the facts get in the way of the legend. My favorite bit of lore is that guitarist Al Kooper inserted himself into Dylan’s recording of Like A Rolling Stone by pretending he could play the organ even though he had never touched the thing in his life. 

The organ part in Dylan’s signature song is amazing. And in this telling Kooper somehow plays it just after someone shows him how to turn the machine on! 

Did that really happen? 

Well, by that point it didn’t matter. I wanted to believe. 

Don’t think twice, it’s alright. 

Sometimes you see a movie a quarter of a century later and you think, eh, maybe I was wrong. 

It’s not so much that my tastes have changed it’s that a lot of current movies look cheap and small. 

I didn’t hate this but I never got the full scale love that all my peers had for it back when I was in college. I just never could let go of several dumb turns of the plot and how pointless most of the violence seems to be. I mean this thing ends with a sword fight between a gladiator and an emperor. 

It’s a turn of events so ridiculous that I probably just threw up my hands. But the secret of gladiator is to embrace the ridiculous. It’s to accept that Director Ridley Scott left ‘this is all ridiculous’ safely back in the first half hour. 

Watching it again I couldn’t get over how great it all looks. It’s like suddenly watching Cecil B. Demille after a marathon of How I Met Your Mother. There’s nothing wrong with tv, I love tv, but movies can be a lot more if people will finance a great director and take the time to write a great script. 

Gladiator lacks a great script but it gets away with it. 

They used CGI to make a convincing Parthenon but they also had film cameras and hundreds extras throwing on armor and running at each other. Hard to explain this people now but up until the last 20 years or so every World War Two battle, Civil War conflict or samurai sword fight in the movies was recreated by the painstaking work of costume designers, production managers, camera operators and hundreds — sometimes thousands —  of extras who put on costumes and faked a war. 

We didn’t know what we had. 

The score by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard is wonderful. It just screams classic adventure moviemaking. It’s probably a little too happy for the dour revenge material but when it swelled I was moved regardless of what was happening on screen. 

Russell Crowe had been a big brute in American movies but between this and The Insider he became a star. He’s in another phase of his career now and he seems happy to play heavyweight older guys in mildly trashy movies. 

But seeing him in his prime makes me wish he would drop 50 pounds and move mountains again. 

Joaquin Phoenix is the smarmiest villian to ever smarm. And the rest of the cast are doing the heavy lifting character work that pulls a production like this along between one action scene and the next. 

In Gladiator 2 I was waiting for the Denzel scenes but here all the fun is had in the arena. The difference may be that all the other plot building in Gladiator didn’t make me cringe. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s serviceable.

Who knows, maybe in another 25 years I’ll be able to say I love this thing.

The best comic of 2024 is Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees.

It’s a serial killer tale set in a world of anthropomorphic animals. Well-drawn and sharply written, it’s perfect for Dexter and Silence of the Lamb fans and it is a great example of someone creating a story that can only work in the language of comics.  

It’s not that you can’t translate this to other mediums, in America you could do it with the muppets (not that Disney would) or in Japan you could do this with anime. But in comics, one person with the talent and drive can turn in a masterpiece mostly by himself. 

I can’t wait to read what Horvath does next. 

Grommets from writers Rick Remender and Brian Posehn and artists Brett Parson and Moreno Dinisio was a book that surprised me all year long. Here’s the description from Image:

“Two best-friend outcasts navigate the Sacramento suburbs of 1984, where they find a home in skateboard culture and punk rock.”

This may be one of the few comics that could accurately be described as a hang-out book. I loved hanging out with these 1980s era lost boys. 

If you pick this up and enjoy it I also recommend The Sacrificers from Remender, Dave McCaig, Max Fiumara. It is an entirely different sort of thing, a weird fantasy full of strange gods and creatures but wonderful all the same. 

Ok, let me tell you about two books I should have hated or at least completely ignored that I loved this year. 

I was both too old and too young for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when they came out. Too old for the toys and the cartoon to mean anything to me and too young to have read the Frank Millar comics they were lampooning. But this year’s relaunch was written by Jason Aaron and he is one of the best writers working in comics. It’s a wonderful action book with art by Joëlle Jones. It’s friendly enough for new readers and so good that I’m tempted to pick up a few omnibuses to see if there is anything in the 40-year publication history that I may have missed. 

The other is Transformers. I have never, ever, never cared for any version of Transformers. Not toys, not shows, not comics nor Michael Bay movies. But tell me Daniel Warren Johnson, truly one of the great writers and artists of his generation, has taken the reigns and I am in. And man, did that ever work out for me. 

Johnson and artist Mike Spicer craft a bold, fun take on the characters that is full of crazy robot action and just enough heart, and humanity, to make it worth your while.   

I’ve just scratched the surface of great comics this year.

Here are a few other highlights: 

Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, Wonder Woman by Tom King and Daniel Sampere. Helen’s story plays with Conan The Barbarian both the fiction and the fact about the Cimmerian’s author. Wonder Woman explores new territory in character that is almost a century old.

I read and loved everything Mark Waid wrote at DC including World’s Finest and Justice League Unlimited with artist Dan Mora and Batman and Robin Year One with Chris Samnee  

Ice Cream Man continues to be a dark little dose of Twilight Zoneesque horror. 

Fantastic Four (writer Ryan North, and artists Ivan Fiorelli, Carlos Gomez, and Iban Coello) is as fantastical as it should be.  

Gail Simone and David Marquez turned in a very fun Uncanny X-Men  

And Birds of Prey by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero passes the “are you not entertained” test every single month. 

My bank account and the long boxes in my office tell me this isn’t close to everything but these are some of the highlights. If you haven’t caught them yet I hope you try some of these out in the new year.

I liked everything about it except the script. 

Hollywood still has a few old lions roaming around ready to slay dragons and entertain the masses.

Denzel Washington is still money. All day.

Director Ridley Scott lucked out with Russel Crowe (and Joaquin Phoenix) a quarter century ago. Here he lucks out again getting the movie star equivalent of prime Mike Tyson to come in and knock out fools. 

“Your house, I own it,” Denzel’s Macrinus says at one point. He might as well have been saying, “Your movie, I own it.” 

The rest of this is such a mess that I quite literally felt relief everytime Denzel showed up. 

“Thank goodness, it’s another Denzel scene,” I whispered to myself at one point. 

That … is not the sign of a healthy movie. 

Of course, I know that most people aren’t wired like me and don’t come to something called Gladiator 2 for the intricacies of the plot. No one’s looking for Ben Hur or I, Claudius here. Or Spartacus. Or even Quo Vadis. 

And yes, those are all the Roman epics I can remember off the top of my head. 

They actually do the ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment at one point. It’s played for laughs but it was funny and I wasn’t offended. But I hope someone sent Dalton Trumbo’s family $50. 

Paul Mescal does what he can with a movie that isn’t all that interested in him except as a violence delivery device. 

The flashbacks fail him, the characters around him are all cardboard cutouts instead of real boys and he doesn’t get one line of dialogue as cool as, “Are you not entertained!” 

He seems like he’s having fun and we mostly go with it even when it’s ridiculous. Maybe especially when it’s ridiculous. 

Poor Connie Nielsen gets it worse as she campaigns for a return to a Rome governed by the senate and has to deal with a nonsensical subplot involving Mescal. 

Again, the writing fails the audience because at no point does anyone ever articulate why the old Rome is any better than the new. The movie clearly sides with Macrinus who believes that the old Rome is a lie and the only thing that ever meant anything was power. 

At one point he hisses about killing someone and says, “Politicssss.”

I can’t remember the full line and I can’t find it anywhere but I’m never gonna forget how Denzel added about 4 S’s to the end of ‘politics.’

Again, Denzel is Babe Ruth and the rest of the cast are just ballplayers. 

Pedro Pescal was given enough to do that you care about his fate. And because you cared about him when he and Mescal face off in the arena you actually care about the outcome. 

It’s the best arena scene and the other three had baboons, a rampaging rhino and frickin’ sharks! 

Funny what happens when you care about the characters. 

Ok here’s the rant you can ignore. 

I’ll tell you, sincerely, that I believe a lot of directors can do a lot of magical things and I enjoy a lot of what Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve and Michael Mann bring to the table. But I also am so incredibly tired of watching movies where every shot, special effect and camera movement was meticulously planned and no one gave two moments to think about the dialogue, motivations or whether anyone would give a shit about the characters. 

I’ll give you a perfect example. In any classic movie you have ever seen someone takes the time to introduce the other gladiators. Not a lot of time, just a bit of dialogue, a backstory or two. And there is some scene that explains why the gladiators would follow our hero to the death. Usually, he saves them and they connect and then they’ll die for him. 

Right? 

Ain’t none of that here. 

If you have seen this can you tell me with any certainty what Macrinus actual plan was? Did he want to be emperor? Did he just want to destroy Rome? Was he (spoiler) after vengeance against Poor Connie Nielsen because he was once a slave to her father? 

All of these things could be true and yet none of them could be true at the same time. 

In other words, this thing was a mess. A fun mess, to be sure. 

At the end Mescal is called on to deliver a speech in front of a horde of soldiers. That speech is supposed to signify … something about a new and better world. 

Damned if I can remember a word of it. And you can’t either. And that’s Gladiator 2 baby. 

As old Shakespeare once said, and Faulkner emphasized, it’s all sound and fury and not one gold denarii more. 

A decade or two ago I interviewed two miscreants who were spending their first night in jail and were about to spend a few years as guests of the State of Florida. 

They were in their early 20s and the state of Kentucky owed them a refund on their public education. 

He had shown up at her shack with a tank full of gas and fifty dollars in his pocket, professed his eternal love for her and said he would take her anywhere she wanted to go. 

She liked Spring Break and they picked my hometown of Panama City, Florida. 

When the money ran out they took to stealing cars and robbing stores and it didn’t take long until they were leading three sheriff’s agencies on a high speed pursuit through most of north Florida. 

When I got to him (let’s just call him Mickey) he denied everything. But when I said the driver pulled some real Smoky and the Bandit type maneuvers on the highway he smiled like someone had just given him a GED. 

She (let’s call her Minnie) denied everything too and never slipped, even a little bit, when I asked her what had happened. 

“We were just under the pier, hanging out and they all showed up and arrested us,” Minnie said. “We didn’t do nothing.”

Well, what did you think when 40 deputies showed up under that pier and arrested you? I asked. 

“I was dumbified,” Minnie replied. 

… 

I’m pretty sure we put dumbified in the headline. 

I thought of those two, for the first time in years, while watching Miami Blues. 

Alec Baldwin is fresh out of jail and he’s looking to share some of the meanness he learned in the joint with the rest of the world. 

He’s fun to watch because you can see that he only knows two types of people those who are about to be his marks and the victims of his violence. 

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a prostitute who is most likely underage and not experienced enough in the business to understand just how dangerous life with Baldwin’s Freddie Frenger will become. 

At one point in their relationship Leigh maps out a possible future involving buying a burger franchise, saving money, buying a house and living happily ever after. 

Freddie counters, let’s skip all that and get to the happily ever after. Why not, if they need cash there are always people he can assault and rob. 

There is a detective here (Fred Ward) who is, I suppose, chasing Freddie. But mostly he’s amused by Freddie. We meet him when he laughing about the manner of death of a Hare Krishna while the victim’s friend cries nearby. 

He’s clearly spent his career drunk, cynical and corrupt. Mind you, he’s no more corrupt than any other cop in this story and he does eventually, track Freddie down and confront him. 

It goes about like you might suspect. 

Ultimately, this is a black comedy that makes its mark on the crime genre. 

I thought it carried its weight and moved smoothly from one ridiculous moment to the next. 

I think the thing I enjoyed the most is that everybody on this movie was just so dumb. 

You’d hate to have dinner with any of these people but they are amusing from a distance. 

This movie is still around in my head because of one scene. 

A scene that I kept seeing over and over again as it showed up in various times on cable. That’s how we discovered stuff back then.

Someone who owned a cable network decided to play Roadhouse, The Princess Bride and The Sandlot in a near endless loop. 

The Princess Bride is one of my absolute favorite movies but I know that’s partly because when I needed an escape from the world it could always be found on television waiting for me.

And so it is with this scene in With Honors. 

I almost never saw what happened before that scene and almost certainly lost interest quickly after it. Because the movie can’t really sustain its premise. Though it tries to find other things (a mild love story, a tragic origin, and college theses) to keep you involved. 

But despite the failings of the rest of the movie this scene is near perfect and I’m going to give you the crux of it now.

Brendan Fraser (idealistic student) brings homeless guy (Joe Pesci) to a class at Harvard and they get into it with a smug politics professor played by (Gore Vidal!). 

And after some fooling around we get to the point: 

Simon Wilder (Pesci): You asked the question, sir, now let me answer it. The beauty of the Constitution is that it can always be changed. The beauty of the Constitution is that it makes no set law other than faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves.

Proffesor Pitkannan (Vidal):Faith in the wisdom of the people is exactly what makes the Constitution incomplete and crude.

Simon Wilder: Crude? No, sir. Our “founding parents” were pompous, white, middle-aged farmers, but they were also great men. Because they knew one thing that all great men should know: that they didn’t know everything. Sure, they’d make mistakes, but they made sure to leave a way to correct them. The president is not an “elected king,” no matter how many bombs he can drop. Because the “crude” Constitution doesn’t trust him. He’s just a bum, okay Mr. Pitkannan? He’s just a bum.

That scene was fun in 1994. It roars like thunder today. 

My belief, based on nothing, is that screenwriter William Mastrosimone had this scene in his head first, wrote it up and then tried to build the film around it. 

Alas, the rest of the movie, as I said, can’t live up to it.

Pesci gives his homeless character a catch phrase, “boy o boy.” The stakes are too low (no one cares about a Harvard thesis including the people studying at Harvard) and the phrases from classic literature don’t land like they should. 

By 1994 With Honors was joining a smorgasbord of movies about an eccentric guy who teaches young, naive young men how to live. 

Robin Williams had been our captain in Dead Poets Society and Al Pacino was an angry, blind, retired military officer in Scent of a Woman (Hoo-ah!). 

With Honors turned into the nadir of the genre and bombed at the box office despite some other scenes and moments that show promise. 

Watching it 30 years later and I got to enjoy how one character has the Flock of Seagulls haircut, the smooth 90s pop soundtrack and Brendan Fraser’s idealistic government student changing his thesis to say that the internet was coming to usher in a utopia yet undreamed of by our current reckoning. 

Sigh, if we only knew.