24 years ago today, the ‘severe clear’ skies above New York were overwhelmed by ash and smoke, by ignorance and hate. Fall and Rise is a history of that day, one that was good enough to be favorably compared to The Only Plane in the Sky. While the books are alike in being comprehensive histories of the day, Fall and Rise is more of a conventional narrative while Only Plane was oral-history focused. The goal of the book, Zuckoff writes at the beginning, was to make the day come alive for those who had only experienced it as “history”, as ink on a page. To that end, I think it succeeds: though as someone who did experience that day, for whom it was profoundly disturbing and formative, it’s hard for me to say it definitely does. It brought the day back to life for me, though, and its ending — which shows how survivors used the day as motivation to do more good in the world while they could — allows it to be slightly inspirational as well.
Fall and Rise‘s history section unfolds in two parts. The first introduces us to various passengersand air crew: we learn about them as people — their hobbies, their off work responsibilities, their passions, their stresses — and follow them as they rouse themselves and begin heading to work that fateful Tuesday. There’s also a mercifully short section on the cretins who perpetuated it. We follow the passengers and crew all the way until their respective ends, at which point the second section begins. The ground section has a much larger selection of ‘characters’, drawn from WTC workers, first responders, etc. Zuckoff manages the frenzied timelines well, by occasionally doing a zoom-out to remind readers that while this is happening here, this and that are happening there. This helps readers stay abreast of so much action scattered across theaters. It’s also useful to the narrative itself, because things did not happen in a vacuum: while the passengers and crew of American 11 died before anyone knew what was going on, as the hour dragged on information from various sources finally began filtering up to authorities who could put the pieces together. This was what allowed the passengers of United 93 to learn what had happened elsewhere in the US, and resolve to take action, overwhelming their captors and ensuring that at least part of the devil’s work went unaccomplished. The final section is much smaller, but allows the reader to find hope in the darkness — as survivors, or family and friends of victims, share how they have used the tragedy as inspiration to spread goodness in the world.
This was quite a good read: while I still champion Only Plane in the Sky, I can see why someone would prefer this one given the meaningful last section. Its stories of people helping each other out of the towers, or out of the darkness of the burning Pentagon wedge, are inspiring. Remembering the shared horror of 9/11, followed by the unity and resolve of 9/12 is bittersweet this September 11, given the current state of partisan rancor.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? A couple of memoirs about people who escaped from the North Tower on 9/11.
WHAT are you reading now? SPQR by Mary Beard (~70%through) and Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff. Fall and Rise is taking priority because I want to do a Thursday review of it, and SPQR isn’t taking off for me the way I figured it would be. I am enjoying it well enough, but it’s nothing like Tom Holland’s Rubicon. (Speaking of, he’s got several other Roman books…considering I listen to his podcast every week, time to get cracking on reading those!)
WHAT are you reading next? Most likely The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943- 1944 by Rick Atkinson. September is proving to be a month for chunksters, beginning with The Great Deluge and continuing.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “What is your superpower?” I don’t know if it’s a superpower, but I’m pretty good at spontaneous history lectures. I work as a local history librarian, so that comes in handy.
Today’s TTT is “Villains”. We did this one ….over a decade ago, so I’m going to compose this list without looking at that prior list, and try to focus on recent villains I’ve read. Turns out it’s…a lot of science fiction. But first, a Tuesday Tease!
With time, news becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happened to other people.For anyone who lived through September 11, time might dull the anger and grief that followed the death and destruction caused when terrorists turned four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles. But the memories won’t die. The pain of the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history cut too deep, leaving knots of psychic scars that make each day an experience of before and after, of adapting to a world changed physically by every security checkpoint and psychologically by every mention of the “homeland,” a word seldom used in the United States prior to the events now known as 9/11. (FALL AND RISE: THE STORY OF 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff
(1) The daemon, DAEMON. DAEMON is a novel about a machine intelligence that begins recruiting human agents to help it take over/restructure society. It’s really creepy.
(2) The antagonist in HUSK. I read this recently and still don’t want to spoil it for people, but it’s slightly similar to DAEMON in being a distributed intelligence. Imagine a villain that can watch you from every camera and take over robots to attack you.
(3) Alt-Jason, Dark Matter. Blake Crouch. A man fights for his family against….himself from another timeline, a man who resents the choices he made.
(4) Dallas, the Joe Pickett series. Dallas Cates is my favorite-to-hate villain of the Pickett series, in part because he’s such a believable psycho – a charismatic and abusive rodeo star. His multiple confrontations with Joe are far more memorable than the made-for-TV villains like Axel Soledad.
(5) The Party, 1984– or more specifically, O’Brien.
(6) The Circle/The Every. Dave Eggers. This is the same company, evolving from a social media giant in The Circle to one that monopolizes the consumer market as well. Imagine a fusion of Apple, Facebook, Google, Youtube, tiktok, wechat, Amazon, etc – a company so huge and pervasive it dominates culture.
(7) The Bureau of Technological Control, Influx. Daneil Suarez. Not going to spoil anything, but the BTC are even more invasive than O’Brien.
(8) Baron Harkonnen, Dune. Probably the most physically repulsive villain. He’s like a human Jabba the Hutt. (Actually, there was a human Jabba the Hutt, and every iteration of Harkonnen has been uglier.)
….honestly, I don’t read many books that have villains. For the last two, I’ll say…
Erik Ronningen came close to death several times on 9/11 as he made his way from the heights above Manhattan to the relative safety of the sidewalks below. The day after, while comparing notes with his wife, Ronningen was struck with the idea that living through an event such as this merited writing about. He began interviewing fellow survivors with an idea of writing a book for the first anniversary, but found that both they and he grew weary of contemplating such an awful day in their lives. After many years, he finally finished From the Inside Out, a narrative that incorporates his and other people who were inside the North Tower during 9/11. It makes sense that everyone he talked to escaped from the North Tower: that was where he worked, after all, and they were the people he labored with to get down and out before anything worse happened. The book is divided into three parts: Before, Impact, and Collapse. I’ve read the definitive oral history of 9/11, Only Plane in the Sky, and didn’t figure for any surprises here — and yet still there were a few. It took far longer for people to realize the enormity of the plane’s impact than it should have, depending on the floor: one man who had survived the 1993 bombings assumed this was more of the same, and spent precious time inventorying his file cabinets to remove documents and computer media that he didn’t want to be separated from during the downtime. Another surprise was how insulated the people in the North Tower were from events outside: those who escaped were moving down stairwells full of other escapees, and when they emerged to find the plaza littered with paper, debris, and — horrifyingly — bodies, they were dumbfounded. Still worse, when they looked up they saw that the South Tower was also on fire, even worse off than its sister tower — the pilots of the United flight hit it at speeds surpassing AA-11, speeds that would have cased breakup in flight — and soon realize they weren’t out of the danger zone yet. This is an immersive narrative but is far surpassed by Only Plane.
Then the blizzard began—a blizzard of falling paper, debris, and rubbish forced out of the upper tower from the explosion, resembling a midwinter, Great Plains storm. So intense was the raining wreckage that the beautiful view of New York Harbor could no longer be seen. A FedEx package came spiraling down in the mix made Erik immediately think of the Tom Hanks’ movie Cast Away. The mind is a curious mechanism.
.
Leslie Haskin’s memoir is rather different: for one, it’s a personal memoir, and it’s very introspective. If this were fiction, it would be counted as a novella given its length (just over a hundred pages): it ostensibly focuses only on her own experience, though it does include a section with vivid description that could have only been sourced through speaking to others. (She describes the collapse of the South Tower as if she were in the area, whereas she was sitting on the commuter boat traumatized and learned about it through people screaming about it.) Haskin worked in an insurance office on the North Tower, and while dozens of floors below the impact zone, she describes a harrowing scene of ceilings collapsing, visible fire, etc. On first reading this didn’t make much sense to me because Ronningen’s account has him much closer to impact, but with none of the “The building is about to fall!!” drama that Haskin records in her office. After thinking about it, though, I realized Haskin’s floor could have been hit by the fireball that swept through the elevator shafts — that seems especially likely given that her floor was very close to the first skylobby where people changed elevators, and that she encountered severe burn victims on her own way down. Her prose is vivid to the point of florid, but given that she was put into a state of severe mental distress after the event. I’m not inclined to be critical.
I’ve been collecting WTC photos since high school, haunted by watching the Towers burn and fall on live tv. Some of the most interesting I’ve seen have been inside Windows of the World, a restaurant that occupied two of the top stories on the North Tower. It was due to celebrate its 25th anniversary a month before the obscene assault that was 9/11, having made itself New York’s premiere dining experience. The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World is a history of not only the restaurant, but of New York City’s postwar rise, its struggle in the 1970s, and the role of the Trade Towers in revitalizing it — and of Windows in broadcasting it. As I’ve never read a formal history of how the Trade Towers came to be, that was fascinating in its own right — but the focus on Windows brought other subjects into consideration. I was astonished to learn, for instance, that most of the Towers’ food services were centrally owned and organized, and that food served by the Windows staff was prepped over a hundred stories below where food from other restaurants was also being made ready. It was an unexpected look into how the Towers actually functioned. There were also some astonishing stories, like the arrest of a robber at Windows while said robber’s wedding reception was kicking off: in the audience were interesting figures like Paul Castellano, Gambino crime family kingpin, and members of the Bonanno family.
The major figure of The Most Spectacular Restaurant is Joe Baum, a New York restaurateur who rose to fame through a series of themed restaurants like The Forum of the Caesars and the Four Seasons. He focused on making restaurant dining an experience, not just a time of eating well-prepared food in comfortable conditions. Baum was known for his high attention to detail, whether in perpetuating the aesthetics of the restaurant — the Roman restaurant served wine in iced buckets modeled after centurion helmets — or in customer service. “Every thing we do is marketing,” he said — everything a guest would see or touch or taste was a way to impress and sell the restaurant. Given that his establishments attracted major clientele like the Kennedys — Marilyn Monroe gave her infamous serenade to JFK in Baum’s restaurant — he was chosen to create a restaurant to headline the Trade Towers. The importance of the restaurants was deemed such that Baum’s need for wider windows forced a change that would ripple throughout both towers, not just the North tower where Windows would be. Amusingly, Baum also headed the design of a cafeteria that would serve construction workers during the Towers’ build-out: he incorporated wood and concrete into its aesthetics and called it “The Loading Zone”. Baum would be responsible for bringing Windows to life, and then — after a long removal from the restaurant — overseeing its redesign and reopening after the bombing of the towers. Although cost overruns were the norm with Baum (“the only man who can blow an unlimited budget”) his knack for anticipating what would bring in customers was such that after he left Windows, he was paid $250 million to advise on revamping the restaurant at Rockefeller Center. There are other figures, though, like Kevin Zraly — an intense oenophile who guided the creation of Windows’ approach to wine and taught a wine-appreciation class to members of the Club, an elite social group headquartered at Windows.
Most of the 1980s and early 1990s are passed over: the restaurant appears to have maintained overall fiscal success despite losing its luster over the years, finding itself outstripped by newer restaurants. After Baum leaves the scene, the book has a brief transition period before jumping into the 1993 bombing of the Trade Towers. While the parking lot bomb didn’t cause any direct damage to the restaurant itself, aside from smoke damage, the food-prep and mechanical utilities it relied on were so destroyed that it was forced to close. Baum returned to oversee a redesign of the interior, and nearly three years later Windows was officially reopened. (There’s an amusing article about the reopening called “Windows 96”, a play on Microsoft Windows 95’s staggering launch the prior year.) The redesign also affected the menu: while the original Windows was very French, the new Windows incorporated more food trends of the 1990s, like sushi and kabob, despite Baum’s resistance to “New American Cuisine”. He oversaw the launch, but would surrender to prostate cancer within two years — probably a great mercy given that it meant he wouldn’t see the destruction of what he’d poured so much of himself into across the course of decades.
The book ends, as the reader might expect, with the horror of 9/11: Windows was directly above the impact zone and its staff and morning guests were quickly overwhelmed by smoke. The morning manager called for help several times, but with both stairwells blocked, there was precious little the dispatcher could do. Close to eighty Windows employees lost their lives that day, and survivors — those not on shift, or who were seeing to business in other areas of the complex or the city — clung together, helping one another find work. Some even created their own restaurant together, one that reflected Windows’ increasingly cosmopolitan menu. This spoke volumes to me about the camaraderie that existed at the restaurant in its “city in the sky”
This was quite an interesting read; the author wrote it as a tribute to a restaurant that was a large part of his life, the site of many “occasion” dinners — birthdays, anniversaries, etc. It’s based on hundred of interviews and the research and records already created by Zraly and Baum. The sommelier Zraly had begun work on a book like this before, but found it too emotionally difficult to begin writing: he was able to connect Roston to many of the people whose memories are recorded here. The book also draws extensively on newspaper articles and the like. The under-the-hood restaurant workings might be tedious for some readers, but I enjoyed learning about restaurant operations — and the inner workings of the Towers — along with the story of the restaurant itself. Occasionally the author tries to connect the story to that of broader New York, but that angle makes marginal contact with the ball at best. The only exception for me was getting the “Windows” version of what happened the night New York’s five boroughs all lost power in 1977. Suddenly being at the top of a 110 story skyscraper in a sea of darkness — and later, violent looting — would be nightmarish. This was a history that proved to have multiple points of fascination, and was clearly written with affection.
Highlights:
“‘Windows is the most important thing in this complex. I don’t care if the place is burning down. If Windows has a problem, you fix it first,’” Bob DiChiara, then the top electrical operations supervisor for the building, recalls Tozzoli saying. “That was Guy’s mantra. Windows had to be successful. If it failed, he failed.”
Baum was also overseeing the essential task of creating a kitchen 109 floors below, on the B2 level of the World Trade Center, to streamline food production through an efficient system that took advantage of economies of scale. There were to be twenty or more different food services operations. On the 107th floor were the five restaurants and bars, plus catering, that fell under the Windows on the World rubric.
Windows on the World would do a greater share of its preparation work in its own kitchen, but the rule for the restaurants and food stations below the 107th floor was to have Central Services, which covered twenty-seven thousand square feet, provide almost all the initial preparation of raw materials. For instance, cabbage would be sliced and slaw dressing mixed, and then the food services employees in the separate sites could mix the two together. “The only difference between us and a high-school cafeteria is care,” Baum said to a journalist of his future food Shangri-La.
As if he didn’t have enough on his plate. He was chasing down porcelain Rosenthal ashtrays, importing Sambonet coffee thermoses from Italy, and getting the proper materials for a brass railing that would hold up a movable ladder used in the City Lights Bar. “Everything we do is marketing,” Baum would say, meaning every item that a guest would see or touch or taste was another way to sell the restaurant.
Criminality was part of the culture. You could barely walk a block without seeing a car with a pathetic NO RADIO or THE LAST GUY GOT EVERYTHING sign. The clamor of car alarms at night was the city’s sick spin on chirping crickets.
We love Joe, but he’s the only guy who can outspend an unlimited budget.
Joe Baum is buried in a cemetery in Westchester. His children had his gravestone fabricated from the same green granite that he’d chosen for his kitchen countertops. On it, they inscribed, No more changes . . . Yet.
Related: Windows on the World article that mentions the restaurant being spotlit by New York magazine, as well as the “Windows 96” article.
In September 2005, I remember watching the approach of Hurricane Katrina with a wary eye; just a year before, my own area had been savaged by Hurricane Ivan. I had no desire to live through that again, especially now that I was working in a glass factory. As luck would have it, Katrina wandered steadily west, and we were largely spared — but the TV images of the aftermath have stuck with me for twenty years, especially people stranded on the interstates and parking lots full of flooded busses that could have been used in evacuations. Last week was the 20th anniversary of Katrina’s landfall, and I figured it was high time I read this history — which I’ve been eying for at least fifteen years. It was published very quickly after the storm itself, and does not pretend to be an impartial history in the least. It’s instead written with teeth bared, with specific targets like Ray Nagin in mind. Its transparent passion serves the narrative more than diminishing it, I think, recalling Americans’ horror and shame at seeing residents of a major city neglected — and their anger, too, as we realized many of the Guardsmen who could have been deployed were instead being uselessly shot at in Iraq.
As with San Francisco in 1906, the worst destruction came not from the disaster itself but from its aftermath. In San Francisco, fires consumed the city; in New Orleans, the levees cracked under stress, and the city filled like a muddy and increasingly toxic punchbowl. Faulty engineering played its part — some levees were old, neglected, or shoddily built — but government incompetence turned vulnerabilities into catastrophe. Confusion reigned over who was in charge. FEMA, which had handled several earlier storms that year, saw itself mainly as a coordinator: local officials requested aid, and FEMA matched them with public or private suppliers. That model collapsed when the city was cut off from the outside world, its bridges impassable, communications dead, and its mayor hiding in a hotel. (It didn’t help that for much of its early life, FEMA’s leadership was often staffed with political favorites of the reigning administration, disaster-response experience not required.) Florida’s officials, drilled by annual hurricanes, responded effectively; New Orleans, by contrast, hadn’t been hit hard in decades, and it showed. Evacuation was delayed until it was too late for many — even assuming the poor had the means to leave. Buses that could have saved lives were left idle and flooded, while the National Guard concentrated their forces in a zone directly in Katrina’s path. Governor Blanco handled things better at the state level, putting Fish & Wildlife into service and making sure they had boats stationed at diverse areas to better serve the people. As in subsequent disasters, the private sector also stepped up: Walmart poured resources into the area, and the “Cajun Navy” was born: that was a particular surprise for me, as I associated the name with the private rescue navy that erupted after Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas a few years back.
The problems only grew worse as the days ticked by: the people of New Orleans felt abandoned, and amid the heat and stress bad behavior grew all around. The first responders here were residents of New Orleans: they had lost their own homes, they were concerned about their own parents and children, and some like the police cracked under pressure, turning down their empathy toward those in need. Others deserted their posts, and some participated in criminal behavior themselves. It didn’t help that in the early hours opportunists began looting in earnest, behavior that grew to the point that the mayor redirected police attention from search and rescue to squelching the open theft that was taking place all over the city. This looting was not food and water , as criminal apologists would have it: one hardware store owner saw people trying to steal a washing machine before he and other business owners began defending their livelihoods with firearms A lot of the criminality wasn’t just opportunism, it was outright barbarism: stores were trashed (and desks defecated upon) for no reason other than that social norms had been disrupted. The criminal element was also defending its crimes, shooting at Coast Guard helos and the like who approached trying to bring aid — and they were industrious in their perverse way, breaking into one business’s vehicle yard, stealing its trucks, and using them to pick up stolen goods. There were still hope spots, though, like citizens taking it upon themselves to rescue those in danger, and the fact that most of the zoo’s 1500 animals survived: it helped that the Zoo had firm disaster-response plans in place.
This was a harrowing book to read, but informative. While I’d long heard of Katrina as a case study in mismanagement at every level, this account illustrates it vividly — from Mayor Nagin hiding in the Hyatt, to FEMA’s passivity and its director’s obsession with optics over action. The flood’s aftermath emerges here as a mix of nobility and savagery, though barbarism seems to have had the upper hand. That tension is one of the reasons I find reading about disasters so compelling — they lay bare the best and worst of human behavior at once. One hopes that both New Orleans and FEMA learned lessons from this and are more prepared for the next Big One, but given the abandonment of the mountain country during Hurricane Helene last year, I have my doubts about the feds at least.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Book Reviews is, “Books I Keep Meaning to Read But Haven’t”. But first, WWW Wednesday.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Great Deluge, a quasi-history of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans. I say quasi- because it was written within a year of the storm striking, and the author obviously has targets to attack. I also finished listening to Anthony Esolen’s four-hour lecture series on The Inferno, which originated within Catholic Courses but which is now available on Audible. While it’s not a book, it’s literature related so I figured it bore mentioning. While I’ve read Esolen’s translations of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso before, this lecture added the pleasure of Esolen quoting from the book in medieval Italian when he wanted us to hear the music in Dante’s writing.
WHAT are you reading now? I’m….sort of listening to Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids, a collection of “Golly gee, if it wasn’t for this one little thing, then this one BIG thing would be like, totally different!!!!” anecodotes that encompass science, history, politics, etc. It’s interesting as far as trivia goes, but not impressive. That’s just in-car listening, though. I also cracked open SQPR by Mary Beard.
WHAT are you reading next? Hopefully The Day of Battle, on WW2 in Sicily and Italy after OPERATION HUSKY.
Long and Short Prompt: Books We Keep Meaning to Read
(1) Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville. This is a book that frequently comes up in other stuff I read. I would also like to make good Iran’s president Khatami’s faith that Americans are familiar with it:
(2) The Shahnameh, which I’ve wanted to experience since encountering quotes from it in the writings of Anita Amirrezvani’s Persian historical fiction.
(3) Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq, Ashley Jackson. The beginning of DC’s long entanglement.
(4) SQPR, Mary Beard. A history of Rome up until the early Republic. Haven’t tried Beard out as an author and I’ve heard good things. I did pick this one up yesterday to start looking into.
(5) The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant. Durant’s magisterial Story of Civilization remains one of my favorite reads of the last twenty years, so I want to see what he has to say about the pursuit of wisdom.
(6) The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, Andy Crouch.
(7) Tarkin, James Luceno. This is a Star Wars novel about Grand Moff Tarkin, once brilliantly played by Peter Cushing in Star Wars.
(8) The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony. I’ve had this on my amazon wishlist for twenty years and it’s never once dipped under $20.
(9) Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson. The rare BB title I’ve not yet read.
(10) The Sopranos Sessions, Matt Seitz. A rare Sopranos book I’ve not red.
Today’s TTT is books with occupations in the title: I’m going to go back to 2007 and work my way forward, limiting each year to one book. But first, a tease!
What they understood at Johnny White’s, however, was what most Americans had yet to accept, was that New Orleans was no longer a city. It was a smattering if islands, rising out of the 80% of the city’s land that was submerged. THE GREAT DELUGE
The Undertaker’s Widow, Philip Margolin. One of my earliest (2008) blogging reads, but I remember nothing about it. Margolin is a thriller writer who I’ve forgotten about over the years despite reading a bit from in the mid-2000s.
Boss of Bosses, Joseph F. O’Brien and Andris Kurins. On the criminal career and takedown of Paul Castellano, don of the Gambino family and overall Mafia heavyweight. .
Captain Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forester. Naval fiction set during the Napoleonic wars. The entire series was fun.
The Revolutionist, Robert Littell. Historical fiction about the Russian Revolution, in which a young idealist sees it betrayed by the opportunistic schemes of an increasingly smaller Bolshevik inner circle.
The Coffee Trader, David Liss. A historical fiction business thriller about this “coffee” stuff that’s suddenly all the rage in Age of Discovery Europe.
August ended with a surprisingly abrupt break from the intense heat and humidity that usually mark this period in Alabama: a cold front moved in, and as our air-conditioners suddenly turned off for the first time since May we sat and marveled at the strange silence. I even got to sit outside and read, something I haven’t done since spring gave way to the Great Sticky Siege. Reading-wise, I opened the month by rereading Roswell High, a series I read in middle school, and then began making amends to my nonfiction queen by switching to history. There were some more SF titles in there, too, meaning fiction is again beating nonfiction. We’ll see if September can correct that. Nothing was done on any challenges, I’m afraid, and the heat’s been such that I didn’t even get out and about to get any interesting photos, hence my using a funny Strange New Worlds meme I liberated from Facebook. I don’t think I’ll finish anything tonight- – I could finish a book on Atlanta’s homeless population, but it’s so depressing I keep reading of Hurricane Katrina and Chernobyl instead — so I’m posting the monthly review today.
New Acquisitions
I preordered Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be released in the latter half of September.
Coming up in September
No firm plans, but I do have one title checked out for 9/11, one focused on Windows on the World, and I might do a science push. I’m also anticipating the release of This is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Will be interesting see how similar or different it is from How the Internet Happened.
Moviewatch August 2025
As mentioned previously, my cinema buddy who I’ve been watching 2-3 films a week ever since 2022 has left town. I figured my movie-watching would crater this month, but it appears that three years of regular movie-watching have created a bit of a habit. I watched as many movies as I’ve been watching, but now they’re less….random, I’d say, and more representative of my tendency — in books or movies — to go off on a tangent for a bit. I went on several genre and actor streaks as the month wore on.
Men in Black III. I watched the original movie when it came out, of course, and tolerated the second one, but it wasn’t until that I saw Josh Brolin’s Tommy Lee Jones impersonation – which he does throughout this film – that I thought, holy WOW do I need to see this. Will Smith is “J” and is thrown back in time to 1969 to help his partner K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin) knock off an alien who wants to destroy Earth. This involves manhandling Andy Warhol and putting a thingy on the Apollo 11 Saturn-10. Such a good film, between the acting and the raygun gothic tech.
pastK: Okay, future boy, where to? J: Uh…wherever you went to last time. pK: I didn’t tell you where I went? J: We don’t really …talk. pK: What kind of partners sit in a car every day for fourteen years and don’t talk? J: EXACTLY. It’s dysfunctional.
J: The hell happened to you, man? pK: I don’t know, slick, it hasn’t happened yet.
Buzz Aldrin: If we call this in, they’ll scrub the launch. Neil Armstrong: I didn’t see anything.
The Naked Gun, 2025. Starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, this is a sequel-in-spirit to the Leslie Nielsen movies. I haven’t seen those (Yes, I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley), but I was laughing the entire time throughout this one. Could have done without the graphical-suggestive sex scenes.
“It says here you did 20 years for man’s laughter. It must have been quite the joke.”
The Naked Gun, 1988. The Lelsie Nielsen original, in which the detective foils a plot to knock off Queen Elizabeth by…serving as umpire in a baseball game. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! also appears.
Loaded Weapon, 1993. Emilio Estevez (Coach Bombay) and Samuel L. Jackson feature in this cop-movie spoof that has a loaded cast: William Shatner and Tim Curry are recurring characters, and Jimmy Doohan (Scotty) and F. Murray Abraham both make cameo appearances. There was an unexpected Silence of the Lambs reference.
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Last month I watched the second in this set of French movies parodying James Bond, with an agent who is suave and potent but largely oblivious to context. This is the original of the modern movies. 117 is sent to Cairo and has no idea that Muslims frown on alcohol, for instance – and is so annoyed by the call to prayer at oh-dark-thirty in the morning that he accosts the nearest rabble-rouser and unwittingly inspires a jihad. Quite amusing but the Lost in Rio mocking of 1960s counterculture was funnier. Evidently there were films in the 1950s and ‘60s where the character was much more serious, but here he’s a delightful caricature.
This may give an idea of….some of the spirit of the film.
My Cousin Vinnie, 1992. A fourth or fifth rewatch for me. Joe Pesci plays a newly minted lawyuh from New York who comes down to Alabama to save his cousin and his friend who were arrested for murder in what has to be a case of mistaken identity. The movie is noted for its courtroom accuracy and is one of my favorite comedies for its “fish out of watuh” antics, plus the lovely brilliance that is Marisa Tomei. Fred Gwynne also nails the slightly aristocratic southern judge. Lane Smith did a solid job, as well. As a fan of real grits, I love that the evidence hinges on how long they take to cook.
“No self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits. I take PRIDE in my grits.”
Devil’s Advocate, 1997. A movie I’ve watched repeatedly, both for its disturbing nature and its acting talent. Keanu Reeves plays a hotshot attorney who makes a bad moral decision to maintain his winning streak and is thereafter tempted by the Devil, in the form of a senior attorney, John Milton. One of the more disturbing bits is the ending, in which Reeves’ character is given a second chance, pursues good, and is nonetheless targeted by Milton.
Cowboys & Aliens, 2011. An outlaw, the sheriff and his posse, a bunch of brigands, and even the Apache have to team together to take out a buncha illegal aliens who want to take our gold.
Enough Said, 2013.Julia-Marie Dreyfuss is a divorced masseuse who makes a new friend and client at a party, and meets a funny guy (James Gandolfini) to boot. Funny guy asks her out and they begin dating. New Friend keeps talking about her ex-husband. Ex-husband and funny guy are the same man. Dramedy ensues. My first time seeing JMD in a semi-serious role, since I was only familiar with her from The New Adventures of the Old Christine. She was in Hannah and her Sisters, another drama with some comic elements, but wasn’t the star.
Get Shorty, 1995. Where to begin? John Travolta! Frank Danny DeVito! Gene Hackman! James Gandolfini! …okay, it’s mostly John Travolta and Gene Hackman. Travolta is a loan shark who is being pressured by his new boss (a man whose nose he once broke and whose head he once grazed with a bullet) to produce $15,000 in three days or suffer the consequences. So, he ends up in LA trying to help Gene Hackman produce a movie. Then Pablo Escobar gets involved. A surprisingly fun crime story.
Welcome to the Rileys, 2010. A dramatic role for both James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart. Gandolfini plays a businessman who goes to New Orleans for a conference, and encounters a young girl in distress who reminds him of his late daughter. An interesting if awkward relationship evolves between the two of them, in which Gandolfini’s character begins acting like a father toward her. Then his wife – intensely agoraphobic – is so disturbed at his decision to have an unexplained prolonged stay in the Big Easy arrives, and things get deeper. Good story and solid acting all around. It reminded me slightly of My First Mister, a film starring Leelee Sobieski and Albert Brooks, about the unlikely friendship between an isolated goth teenager and an intensely….reserved and isolated owner of a clothing store. Gandolfini’s relationship with Stewart is more obviously paternal, though. (Of course, it’s been fifteen years at least since I last watched My First Mister.)
Mobsters, 1991. F. Murray Abraham! I didn’t realize this was my introduction to one of my favorite actors. A gangster movie charting the rise of the Syndicate, featuring Christian Slater as Charles Luciano, who with Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel, and Frank Costello revolutionized organized crime. I watched this during my obsessive Mafia phase in the early-mid 2000s. (I was also obsessed with the American Civil War and World War 2 at this time, so I haven’t changed in having multiple obsessions.) Michael Gambon also features as one of the mustache petes the Fab Four have to knock off on their way to the top. That really made the later Harry Potter movies weird for me. Pretty sure when I originally watched this as a teenager I just loved seeing how the 1920s and 1930s “were”.
Luciano: I don’t have a wife. Rothstein: Why not? Luciano: Emotion…is dangerous. Rothstein: Aren’t you human? Luciano: Would it help?
Luciano: I don’t bend over. It’s too hard to stand up straight again.
(Target): Jesus, Charlie, you want revenge after fifteen years? Luciano: I’ve been busy.
Capone: Julius Caesar never took no vote. Luciano: Caesar ended up dead on the street.
Carnage, 2011. I have only watched Inglorious Basterds one time since its release, but I have rewatched every single Christoph Waltz scene more times than I can remember. I asked ChatGPT for movies where Waltz was a similarly dominant presence, and it recommended this – a comedy wherein he features alongside JODIE FOSTER!!, Kate Winslet, and that guy from Step-Brothers who isn’t Will Ferrell. Four parents meet in a room to discuss what to do after their respective children get in a fight that ends with broken teeth. They get into a lot of side discussions and there’s interesting shifting character dynamics: different characters side with one another in different scenes depending on where the conversation is going. (This gets…more interesting after a bottle of 18 year old single-malt Scotch is uncorked.) This is a difficult movie to summarize, but if you’re into character drama like myself it’s quite a treat, especially with heavyweights like Waltz and Foster aboard. A plausible drinking game could be composed of the times that Waltz and Winslet take on or take off their coats and attempt to leave.
“You know my wife dressed me up as a LIBERAL?!”
“WHAT YOU DID TO THAT HAMSTER WAS WRONG!”
No Country for Old Men, 2007. I watched this for Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin. Brolin plays a hunter who stumbles upon the scene of a violent shootout, with a bunch of dead suits and deader Mexicans and a bag containing $2 mill. Brolin takes the money, but doesn’t realize the bag has a tracker in it. Soon he’s being stalked by a dead-eyed psychopath, a killer-for-hire (Javier Bardem) who Tommy Lee Jones is also after. Good drama, but bleak ending. I…don’t like watching Javier Bardem. He’s unsettling. Both films I’ve seen him in (Skyfall being the other), I kept wanting him to go away.
The Mexican, 2001. Brad Pitt is a working boy in hock to a gangster trying to move a stolen antique pistol (“The Mexican”) that’s supposedly cursed; his girlfriend Julia Roberts wants him to give up his ways of Amateur Minionry and go work in an office managing TPS reports or something. When Pitt arrives in Mexico, things go south: his contact gets nailed by a falling bullet from morons shooting their pistols into the air to celebrate some Mexican holiday, and then some random hoods steal his car that has the priceless antique in it. Gandolfini plays an oddly empathetic hitman who wants the pistol back, so he kidnaps Julia Roberts. Then he picks up a postman in a bar, and the three of them have a merrie old time dancing and talking about relationships while Brad Pitt is trying to find “The Mexican” and not get knocked off by his bosses or a legion of people in Mexico who want it. It’s an interesting mix of action-drama and comedy.
“You’re very sensitive for a cold-blooded hitman.”
If I do watch anything tonight, I’ll just add it to September’s list.
The War between the States is nearly a year old, but Abraham Lincoln now has a bigger problem. Last November, a Navy ship intercepted a British mail packet on suspicion that it was carrying Confederate diplomats bound for Europe; the two men were promptly imprisoned, but Her Majesty’s government is not pleased that a British ship was accosted and its passengers kidnapped by some uppity colonists. A terse letter is prepared – but whereas in our timeline the letter was modified to be more diplomatic by Prince Albert, here his illness puts him in bed and the potentially explosive communique is sent as-is. The result is a growing diplomatic crisis (an intensified Trent Affair) that adds to the gloom around the White House – gloom already thick from the death of Lincoln’s son and the ongoing war. The tension breaks into open war after Canadian militia in pursuit of honest moonshiners encounter American cavalry patrolling the border and shots are fired. While this sounds like the beginning of a “Confederate Victory” story, Stars and Stripes Forever is far more interesting than that. Light spoilers to follow.
For the most part, Stars and Stripes Forever is solid historical fiction: even when the reader hits the point of divergence, the nature of mid-19th century communications is such that it takes months for any effects to be witnessed. The battle of Shiloh happens months after the affair’s kickoff point, and in a way sets the stage for what happens. While 1861 was the first year of the war between the states, it was more of a time of preparation interrupted by numerous small skirmishes like First Manassas and Ball’s Bluff. Shiloh, though, was a taste of the horrors to come, destroying over twenty thousand lives across the span of two days. In our timeline it was soon surpassed by the charnal house of Sharpsburg/Antietam, and then later the three-day scrum that was Gettysburg. Here, though, it creates a somber mood that leds to opportunity after Hanlon’s Razor goes into effect. A British commander with his dander up misreads a map – and a flag – and tears into Biloxi, burning the town and raping its women. Astonishingly, this leads to a local armistice between the Union and Confederate generals who agree to focus on their now-mutual enemy – and things get even more interesting.
I enjoyed this novel thoroughly, especially for the one-two combo that Shiloh and the armistice create in the psyche of Generals Sherman and Beauregard – a sense of what are we doing fighting one another. The action and characterization are good on the American side: I suspect a British reader would find Victoria’s rendering here annoying, as she’s positively hysteric following the death of Albert and blames it on Washington given that stress over the situation supposedly aggravated his condition. That growing wrath for the North drives a lot of what follows. The British diplomatic response is the weakest part of the novel, largely because they do nothing in the wake of the wrong-flag affair. At this point, though, I was more fascinated by the interactions between Union and Confederate officials and politicians: Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Sherman, and Lee frequently meet as their respective nations begin collaborating to meet an ever-increasing British challenge. While there’s a fair bit of implausibility here, it made for a gripping novel nonetheless.
As a point of historical trivia: the original and primary Confederate national flag, “The Stars and Bars”, was so easy to confuse with the Union flag (as a Brit did here) that the Confederate Congress changed it several times in the later half of the war. What most people think of as the “Confederate flag” or the “Rebel Flag” is the infantry battle standard, which was briefly incorporated into a very poorly conceived replacement national flag: the Battle Flag in one corner of a mostly-white banner. After everyone pointed out that a mostly-white-flag looks like a surrender flag, the design got even sillier by adding a red bar to the end. They probably would have been better off just flying the infantry standard!
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