Movies: Day and Date Theater

Once more into darkest cable box, armed only with blog and remote, to spotlight a pair of movies released to theaters and on demand simultaneously.

Arbitrage. There are heroes, and then there are protagonists. Richard Gere clearly plays the latter here. His Robert Miller is a respected financier, an oracle of Wall Street. Only he’s shorted himself on magic. Having taken a multimillion dollar bath on Russian copper, he’s borrowed a fortune to make his firm seem solvent in order to hoodwink a competitor into buying it. The papers haven’t been signed yet, and his CIO daughter is on the trail of his skullduggery. What he needs is a relaxing night upstate with his French mistress. But Miller dozes off behind the wheel, wrecking the car and killing her. He flees the scene with the aid of his late driver’s son, unintentionally putting the young man’s future in jeopardy.

Astonishingly, you end up rooting for Gere’s master of the universe to get away with, if not murder, then massive fraud and manslaughter. As writer/director Nicholas Jarecki provides a behind-the-velvet-ropes-and-curtains tour of Manhattan’s tonier precincts, the film plays like a particularly luxe episode of Law & Order with no order and precious little law. (You do get Tim Roth as an outer borough Columbo who knows Miller is guilty and will cut corners to prove it.) A terrific Gere is ably supported by several actors portraying the celestial objects drawn into Miller’s orbit, like Susan Sarandon as the wife who has learned a thing or two about negotiating and Stuart Margolin as his cagey attorney. A sleek, suspenseful look at how the other 53% lives.
 
Knuckleball! In some sense, this engaging documentary came out a year early. It focuses on the 2011 baseball season as Tim Wakefield prepares to close out a lengthy career based on the fluttery pitch of the title, leaving the Mets’ R.A. Dickey as the game’s last such hurler. One season later, Dickey is an All-Star and a factor in the Cy Young conversation, having notched 19 wins and counting, leading the league in ERA and innings pitched, and ranked second in strikeouts. In perfecting an 80 mph version of the knuckler, Dickey has come as close as anyone to doing the unthinkable: inventing a new pitch. A brief primer on mechanics would have been welcome, but otherwise the film does an admirable job explaining the commitment required to master a pitch that, in the words of Jim Bouton, demands “the fingertips of a safecracker and the heart of a Zen Buddhist,” as well as profiling the handful of members of the brotherhood.

Books: Stranger Than Fiction

A pair of fascinating non-fiction books to recommend ...

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer. Science journalist Foer covers the U.S. Memory Championship. The following year he’s back – as a competitor. The book details his training, utilizing techniques that date back to ancient Greece. Foer also explains our evolving understanding of how memory works, and how it’s changing in the internet age. He avers more than once that the approach described won’t help you remember where you left your car keys. But there’s a sequence where his trainer gets him to remember a random list, and Foer encourages the reader to personalize the technique. I did, and that list is now in my head to stay. This stuff works.

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson. A chilling proposition lies at the core of the book, subtitled “A Journey Through the Madness Industry.” The traits that define psychopaths – confidence, charm, narcissism – are shared by politicians and captains of industry. Does that mean the world is run by lunatics? How do we define madness, anyway? Ronson (Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats) writes with a hugely engaging style, inserting himself and his own neuroses into the material in a way that illuminates the questions he raises.

Ruth Roberts, R.I.P.

The songwriter died July 1 at age 84. Her work was recorded by Buddy Holly and the Beatles among others. But her greatest accomplishment is my all-time favorite song: “Meet the Mets.”

Movie: The Last Play at Shea (2010)

It’s only February and I’m prepared to call this movie the DVD of the year. Just bear in mind who’s telling you that.

The Last Play at Shea is a history of the now-demolished Shea Stadium as both home of the New York Mets and a music venue. Which means it’s a franchise highlight reel, a beautifully animated short about urban planning, a concert film depicting the final blowout show at the stadium, a biography of that evening’s headliner Billy Joel, and an exploration of the dictum voiced by Noah Cross in Chinatown: “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

Mets fans said it for years: Shea’s a dump, but it’s our dump. When magic happened within its confines, it lasted. The Mets may have only won two world championships, but the finales of 1969 and 1986 remain among the most dramatic in baseball history. Shea was no cathedral of the game, but it was hallowed ground. I made a special pilgrimage back home in 2008 to see the Mets there one last time. That ticket stub, autographed by Tom Seaver, is framed and on my desk.

Billy Joel was the perfect choice to sing the place down. He’s a lot like the Mets: working class, chip on the shoulder, full of unwarranted bravado, never respected by critics, outshined by brighter lights in the city proper, his flaws magnified and his genuine accomplishments ignored. Plus he’s from the neighborhood. Even at the height of his fame he wasn’t cool, but he has lasted. He hasn’t released an album of new material in almost twenty years, but he remains among the highest-grossing live acts in the country. And he still puts on a hell of a show. It’s something to hear “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” knowing that Shea’s facing a date with the wrecking ball. Joel’s finest songs, several of which we hear, have a bittersweet quality, an acknowledgement of disappointment and the impermanence of things. Feelings Mets fan are all too familiar with. But we keep stepping up to the plate and taking our cuts. We’re just doing so on the other side of the parking lot now. You may not grow misty-eyed like I did – who am I kidding? I was bawling – but you’ll enjoy the movie.