As the NFL, player protests and presidential tweets are the stories on the front pages and lead the sports sections all over the country, another story concerning a practice nearly as old as racism, is rearing its ugly head in the area right where I live.
The subject is hazing. It is defined as “the imposition of strenuous, often humiliating, tasks as part of a program or rigorous physical training and initiation” I never joined a fraternity in college in part because I didn’t want to be picked on. (I must also admit that I have always drawn a diverse group of friends and acquaintances.) I had a roommate who did pledge a black fraternity and had to help him and his line mates in all of the things they had to do. I covered for them, hid them, did things to help them. Still, it was stupid waste of time to me.
Last week, five football players at Wheaton College were arrested and arraigned for a 2016 incident in which a freshman was restrained with duct tape, beaten and left half naked with two torn shoulders on a baseball field. The five were charged with aggravated battery, mob action, and unlawful restraint. All of them were on the team roster the weekend before the arraignments were set up, and three of them played in Wheaton’s victory over Carthage College the previous Saturday. Wheaton’s Division III team is the fourth ranked team in the country.
What made this even worse was the fact that the College, a conservative Christian school, did little or nothing about the incident and the fact that it took a year to get anything done about the situation appears to be another example that too often, the football program, wins, and by extension, its best players are above the law and sanctions. It has been an issue at the heart of every major college sports scandal.
The young men at Wheaton College had barely turned themselves in before Niles North High School, the school where the Indignant Daughters will attend soon, suspended the football program entirely as the Skokie Police Department investigates hazing among the football players. My oldest daughter swims at Niles North; I see the athletes – the football players, the soccer players; they all seem too young, too innocent, too naïve to be pulling this kind of shenanigans.
But I was a young man once, all hormones, bravado, and a deep insecurity, just like these young men. Kids can be cruel, and the thing about hazing that makes it self-perpetuating is that, eventually, the prey becomes the predator. Everyone gets a chance to get the karmic pay back on some young kid who wanted to be on the team, part of the scene. The hormones bring out the cruelness, add the testosterone that comes with football, and bad things happen.
Schools all over the country say that they have zero tolerance for hazing; many do. However, many coaches, still part of the uber macho culture of football, would rather turn a blind eye to what their young men were doing, especially if the team is good.
The question is: does cruelty make players better? Make teams better? I would like to think that the answer is no. It is long past time to make hazing a thing of the past – for athletes, fraternities, sororities, professional teams.

I have meant to address the Jamele Hill situation for awhile, but never got around to it. For those of you who don’t know, Ms. Hill is one of the anchors on the main 6:00 PM Eastern SportsCenter on ESPN along with Michael Smith. They are a departure from the usual SportsCenter anchors – both African-American, younger, with a looser vibe than the staid, news broadcast version of the show. I don’t watch it, mostly because that is the time when I’m managing the Indignant Daughters and their extracurricular activities. However, they seemed to be OK – upbeat, not as stereo typically “black” (loud and ignorant) as Stephen A. Smith.
However, Ms. Hill earned my respect a couple of weeks ago when she posted on Twitter that Donald Trump is a white supremacist after his “very good people on both sides” in response to the rioting and murder of a protester at Charlottesville. She was absolutely right, the current president has a long history of racism in renting his properties; his father was arrested at a KKK rally, much to his son’s chagrin; and Donald Trump has used divisive, race-baiting rhetoric to appeal to the deep racists throughout the country.
Of course, the thin-skinned Idiot-In-Chief and his minions called for ESPN to fire Ms. Hill, something that usually never done by a government, especially a president. Interestingly, ESPN and its parent Disney did not fire Ms. Hill, but she did apologize, not to Trump, but to the network. With the beginning of the football season and many African-Americans calling for a boycott of the NFL because no team would give a job to former Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Never one to think before he speaks, Trump, in front of an Alabama audience over the weekend that NFL Owners should fire any player who kneels for the national anthem.
Trump has a way of trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Over 300 players knelt at NFL games yesterday. Others lined up together with arms linked in protest of Trump’s statement. Every player except one on the Pittsburgh Steelers stayed in the locker room at Soldier Field against the Bears. Players in colleges, members of marching bands, coaches and even the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Shad Khan knelt with players before their game in London against the Baltimore Ravens. Of course, Khan is a Trump supporter, having given $1 million to his campaign. Later Ravens’ owner Steve Bisciotti released a statement that he supported the players peacefully protesting against the treatment of people of color by police and the society. Not only was Khan’s action strange, Bisciotti stopped his football people from signing Kaepernick during training camp because of the injury to starter Joe Flacco.
There are many people who want to keep politics off the field. “Shut up and play,” or to the journalists “shut up and cover the games,” but sport has always been in the forefront of racial change. One has only to know the stories of Jack Johnson, Jessie Owens, Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson, Willie O’Ree, Ali, to know that sport has been the one place where African-Americans have been permitted to succeed, and they have used this fame to spotlight issues concerning black people.
NFL owners, all white, all rich, all very proud men who don’t take guff from anyone, especially those they feel are beneath them, which is most of humanity especially those of color. With the discovery of mental injury from playing football in the form of CTE, now, perhaps more than ever, football players understand that football is a meat grinder; the players, always tossed out like yesterday’s garbage at the end of their careers, even more of a devalued commodity than ever before. The owners see reduced participation in football by middle class kids because of the risk of brain damage.
No one cares about the young black men’s brains. Talented black men would play football and basketball for the people’s entertainment, and get paid a great deal of money, which they would mismanage as the football players descended into dementia. And to put the players in their place, the owners have tried to make a statement with Kaepernick – any resistance will be met with unemployment, banishment.
Then Trump calls for any player who kneels for the anthem to be fired. He then ups the ante when Golden State Warrior star guard Steph Curry said that he would not go to the White House for the usual photo op with the President. Trump rescinded his invitation, bringing many more athletes, especially LeBron James into the fray, James calling Trump a punk.
Like the police who set the dogs and fire hoses on the protesters in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, all of the NFL owners and the Trump Administration have tried to put people down, and instead, the small smoke has turned into a bigger fire. The wish by the good ole boys that they can be left alone to watch their football in peace, will not happen. NFL ratings are down, in part because of all of the clamor. By now, I’m sure Commissioner Roger Goodell wishes he had pressed his rich, privileged bosses for one of them to sign Kaepernick, who pledged to stop his protest if he was signed.
I think that the protests will continue. I don’t plan on standing for the anthem in the future (I had stopped last fall but began standing again after Kaepernick said that he didn’t vote in the presidential election since Trump and Clinton were equivalent). The more dog whistle statements to motivate the racists Trump and GOP Congressmen make, the more people will be kneeling. Which is only right and fitting.

The NFL is in trouble. For now, ratings are down; for the future, CTE looms over the sport like a toxic cloud. A nearby suburb is having trouble fielding football teams at the pee-wee level. Yes, there are still plenty of athletes playing high school and college football, but young boys, especially from middle class and upper middle class families are deciding that the risk of brain injury and trauma are not worth it.
How much longer will there be enough players to field the hundreds of high school and college football teams? And who will be playing? The poor? Football is already disproportionately African-American; with the Black Lives Matter movement and white supremacist feelings on the rise, what does this say about the nature of football? It’s OK as long as young black men are killing themselves for our entertainment.
The league, usually very good in public relations, is doing a horrible job now. Due to time, I have failed to write about the Ezekiel Elliott situation in Dallas. Elliott reportedly hit his girlfriend on several occasions while the running back was earning the rookie of the year on the field. The NFL took an exceedingly long time to investigate the incident of the best running back in the league on the biggest team, the Dallas Cowboys.
Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league suspended Elliott for the first six games on the current season, a suspension that has been postponed by a stay issued by a Texas judge and has yet to be overturned. One should not be surprised that such an injunction comes from Texas, where it is said, there are only two sports – football and spring football. Like the Tom Brady suspension, Elliott and the players’ union are not fighting the suspension due to guilt or innocence, but perhaps overreach by the Commissioner.
Elliott’s playing and after 104 yards in the Cowboys’ first game against the Giants, the running back had only 8 yards on 9 attempts this past Sunday in a horrible loss to the Denver Broncos. Worse yet, Elliott is getting called out for giving up on a play: not helping to run down an opposing player who had intercepted a pass. Lots of pundits, including some Hall of Famers are saying that Elliott “gave up” on his team. The only person standing up for the man seems to be Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, which in the final analysis, the only person Elliott needs.
Through all of this, remaining unemployed is Colin Kaepernick. Not only does he remain without a team, some owners have been quoted as saying that they passed on him solely because of his political protest last season. Meanwhile, there are some black people boycotting the games. I admit that I haven’t watched much, in part because of my schedule, but also because watching the games has put a sour taste in my mouth.
Once again, a passive political statement, one which was only highlighted by the media who happened to see Kaepernick failing to stand for the national anthem, gets a player punished much more than one who reportedly beat his girlfriend. Both Elliott and Kaepernick are black, and there have been some players currently kneeling for the anthem this season. Even Tom Brady and other superstars have said that it is ridiculous that so many journeymen at best have jobs and a former Super Bowl starter can’t find work.
Like the Trump disaster, the Kaepernick situation is a mirror into the soul of the nation and league. Issues of privilege, equal rights, are in the forefront of the national discussion. Many people wish that everyone would be quiet and just play football, but that is not possible. I believe that collusion can be proven against Kaepernick and if he never plays again, there’s a multimillion dollar lawsuit for denying Kaepernick’s ability to earn a living, but Kaepernick knows that this would end his career for sure. So, he’s laying low, making the occasional statement about being ready to play, doing charitable work, which makes the league look even worse. I’m sure Ezekiel Elliott will serve his suspension; he may do time in jail, although that’s less certain.
No matter what, the NFL is in deep trouble. And they know it.

It is always said that the most popular player in Chicago is always the Bears’ backup quarterback. Mike Glennon was signed as the short term answer, but the Bears drafted Matt Trubisky to be the QB of the future, even though Glennon isn’t very old.
We had a feeling that the Bears were going to be a very bad team this season, especially after Glennon played poorly in the preseason until the last game. In the first game of the season, the Bears played the NFC Champion Atlanta Falcons a close game that Glennon was unable to pull off in the final minutes. Still, there were lots of calls for the youngster on the bench. The calls have become even more insistent after Glennon made three turnovers in the first half of last Sunday’s game against Tampa Bay. The Buccaneers led 26-0 at halftime and the game was all but over.
Head Coach John Fox, already holding the hottest seat in the NFL, announced that Glennon will start next week’s game against the 2-0 Pittsburgh Steelers. The press, the fans, social media are all calling for Fox’s head/job, saying that Fox refuses to accept the inevitable, Matt Trubisky will be the starting quarterback at some point this season.
However, with a patchwork offensive line and an injury depleted receiving corps, and facing one of the better defenses in the league, perhaps only someone suicidal would line up under center for the Bears this coming week. Maybe it would be smarter to allow some of the injured to return before throwing Trubisky to the lions?
I was against John Fox being hired; I shook my head when GM Ryan Pace overpaid for Glennon, but I gave his credit for only giving him big money for one year. Then however, I was surprised when they took the raw, untested Trubisky and gave up significant assets to move up one pick to get him.
I have written here several times that the biggest sales product of a sports franchise is hope. Even bad teams want to get high draft picks or sign free agents in order to sell hope for the future. The Bears have little hope and the fans aren’t buying what Pace and Fox and the owners, the McCaskey family, are selling. I foresee a lot of fans dressed like empty seats in the Bears’ future.

Monday, September 11, 2017

As I said in previous posts, certain themes become apparent of the films I watch. Most of the time, these themes are only apparent in retrospect. This is another of those times; I often pick movies based on my interests and one of my interests is history, especially history that occurred during my lifetime. All of today’s films met that criteria…
There are tons of films about the Kennedys, especially concerning the assassinated brothers, John and Bobby. As in life, the youngest brother, Ted, gets short shrift. Never president, he blazed in many ways as bright a legacy as his brothers but in a long career in Congress. The reason in many ways, was the death of Mary Jo Kopecki in a car accident at Chappaquiddick. Director John Curran (Stone, Tracks) took a well-researched screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan to dramatize the incident based on the historical record making no conjecture about the places in the story where no answer can be reached. What could have been a left wing whitewash or a right wing Kennedy attack was an even handed appraisal of what is known while leaving open what is not known for sure.
Jason Clark (Zero Dark Thirty, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) plays Ted Kennedy as a bit of a dimwitted son hungry for his father’s attention. Bruce Dern plays the handicapped Joe Kennedy still trying to get a son president. Many other great character actors have roles in this film, but most interesting are comedians Ed Helms (The Hangover films) and Jim Gaffigan playing real life friends and advisors to Kennedy.
For someone who lived through the story but never fully learned about the incident, it was illuminating. While not a documentary, people who see it may use the film as a starter to learn more. It certainly did for me.
Despite having an upcoming release date and big stars, I chose to watch Battle of the Sexes. Unlike Chappaquidick, I vividly remember the hype surrounding the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. For those who don’t remember or who haven’t seen the commercials, Riggs was a 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion and hustler who used the power of the media at a crucial point in the feminist movement to get big money matches against first Margaret Court then Ms. King.
Steve Carell does an excellent job playing Riggs as a hustler who did it all for money and fame (although the directors, Johnathan Dayton and Valarie Faris, the team who directed “Little Miss Sunshine,” makes the ending more about Riggs taking the match lightly and King training hard). The filmmakers also did a very good job of telling the story of the events occurring around each of the protagonists: Riggs had a rich wife who was tired of Riggs’ gambling; King was starting the Virginia Slims women tour and also finding out her sexuality. The tennis was shot well, with the filmmakers recreating the match because the video footage had deteriorated so poorly.
Carell’s performance and the events make the movie compelling, but I never could warm to Emma Stone as Billie Jean King. I was not a big fan of La La Land, and while I did like Ms. Stone’s Best Actress performance, I felt no affinity to the main characters who I thought was pretentious goofs. If only a black wig and glasses were enough to turn Ms. Stone into the tennis legend, the movie would work, but there was just something off about her performance. I can’t exactly put my finger on exactly what was off, but I never suspended disbelief watching her. (It was interesting that the film showed Margaret Court to be an out of step prude who was disapproving of Ms. King’s budding lesbianism. Mrs. Court has long been a Fundamentalist Christian staunchly opposed to LGBT rights.)
I had picked another motorcycle film called Motorrad, but instead, I was able to get a ticket to Mark Felt: The Many Who Brought Down The White House (unusual because it was a “Premium” showing meaning that the director and stars would be there). Peter Landesman (Concussion) directed the story of Felt, Bob Woodward’s Watergate source, known in history as “Deep Throat.”
Liam Neeson played Felt, the number 2 man at the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s person filter of all of the dirty secrets and peccadillos of the rich and powerful. He was a complex man who ordered all types of dirt digging and illegal spying on people, but was aghast at Richard Nixon’s ham-handed attempts to limit the Bureau’s investigation. In order for the truth to come out, Felt did what he was completely against doing up to then, alerting the press to get the story out.
Neeson was very good, as was Diane Lane, who played Felt’s troubled wife. They were both at the screening, as was Landesman (who I met at TIFF some years ago after he had premiered “Parkland” which was about the hospital where JFK was taken after being shot). I never knew that the director had been a journalist, which is why he is drawn to the stories he makes. He met Felt before he died and used his own memoirs as the basis for the story. Landesman admitted that he considered cutting out the parking garage scenes with Woodward which have become iconic in the great film “All The President’s Men.” A scene was included, but it was very brief, which is probably smart since all I can see is Hal Holbrook in the earlier film.
This was a very good film (and I got a brief positive review from Carl Bernstein who I saw in the airport as I was leaving the country).
The film that followed was the World Premiere of James Franco’s new film The Disaster Artist, about the making of The Room, widely considered the worst film of all time. I was not going to the film, but I was able to get some nice pictures of the star.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

I don’t know why I chose the documentary Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond – With a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. I have seen the Andy Kaufman bio pic “Man on the Moon,” thought it was OK, but while I thought Kaufman funny at first, he lost me when he started wrestling women and his famous feud with wrestler Jerry Lawler. Also, I have never been a big Jim Carrey fan – the only film of his I liked was The Mask.
When I learned of the hours of footage Carrey had people film during his transformation into Kaufman, I admit being intrigued. Carrey himself admitted that he could not play Kaufman, he had to let Kaufman inhabit him, which led to some outrageous behavior. The film, directed by Chris Smith (“Yes Men,” “Collapse”), took all of the footage and added interviews with Carrey, who has worked only sporadically over the past several years and hasn’t had a bit starring role since Dumb and Dumber To in 2014 and really made a character study of Kaufman and Carrey. It was an interesting character study, but you really need to be a fan of Kaufman and/or Carrey to really appreciate it. If you are not, this is probably not the film for you.
Carrey of course has also been in the press more for the 2015 death of a former girlfriend Cathriona White and two wrongful death lawsuits, one from White’s husband and a second from White’s mother. The Carrey in the film appeared resigned to not being in the Hollywood spotlight, but afterward, Carrey actually showed up at the end of an early morning showing. Carrey was there with director Smit and also, Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s writing partner and occasionally character Tony Clifton and Kaufman’s partner Lynne Margulies.
Perhaps it was trying to remove the stain of the death and tabloid headlines; perhaps because Carrey has some high profile films and is also executive producing some television shows to publicize, but the star spent much time talking to the audience (myself included) and he was funny in the Q&A session, and was nice to everyone that he spoke with (again, including me). I don’t know what the future holds for Carrey, but this was a return to the spotlight worthy of Andy Kaufman.
Again, I could have waited until later in the year to see Guillermo del Toro’s new film The Shape of Water, but again, I’m glad to have seen it in Toronto. For one thing, the director attended the showing, and every Festival showing of the film was held in the Elgin Theater. The main character in the film, a mute girl, lives above a movie theater; the scenes of the theater were filmed in that very theater.
The film is a Cold War monster movie that become a tender romance. Sally Hawkins plays the young woman who cleans up a military facility with her friend played by Octavia Spencer. Eliza’s other friend is her neighbor, played by the excellent Richard Jenkins. One day, Eliza sees a sea monster being brought into the facility, ruled over by his handler, played by Michael Shannon (also in The Current War). The movie is a charming romance between a young woman who is looking for a place to belong and a “monster” who just wants to live in peace. A charming movie, but not on the level of Pan’s Labyrinth.
Again, I am a comic book guy. I read them; I love them, and yes, I have seen all of the comic book films, which is not the fare that comes to TIFF. However, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is the type of movie that is TIFF’s bread and butter. Psychologist William Moulton Marston was a professor at Harvard, assisted by his equally gifted wife who was unable to get the same respect as her husband. Marston (played by Luke Evans) falls for a young student, Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), and soon, so does his wife (Rebecca Hall). The three begin a very unconventional lifestyle with all three having a relationship including children. The family situation got them ousted from academia; meanwhile the three adults began experimenting in BDSM.
Unable to work at much else, Marston came up with the idea of a comic book with a woman protagonist. The character was Wonder Woman. The early books included bondage type images, much of it inspired by the two women in his wife.
While sometimes sexy, the topic was handled well by director/screenwriter Angela Robinson. It doesn’t go into much of the dealings with DC comics or the comic book history, but as a character study, it was a fine film, which is an interesting counter point to the big WW blockbuster. Knowing the background story before I came into the screening, I was still captivated by the film. The one thing I would say is that actors were much younger than the actual people and, much, much more attractive.
So, that ends my tales of my seventeenth trip to Toronto for the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a good festival and I only disliked one film, and that could have been impacted by me being tired. The toughest part of this exercise every year is ranking the films. Here Is my ranking for 2017:

14. Dark Is The Night
13. Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond – With a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
12. Battle of the Sexes
11. The Current War
10. The Shape of Water
9. Borg/McEnroe
8. Chappaquiddick
7. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House
6. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
5. The Children Act
4. Mary Shelley
3. Angels Wear White
2. 1%
1. Molly’s Game

Thanks for reading. I hope to get back with you next year!

I meant to comment on the Toronto International Film Festival when I was making my picks, before I left, but I ran out of time. In retrospect, it is better that I have done this now, after the fact. Before I dissect the films that I saw, there were a lot of factors, business and otherwise that made this a very unusual TIFF, my 17th trip to the Festival.
First, TIFF reduced the number of films shown this year by 20%, eliminating the Vanguard and City to City programs. Only occasionally would I pick a film from the Vanguard program, which are films from new and up-and-coming film makers, but I never selected anything from the City to City which was a program that selected one city from around the world and show films from that locale. Also, there seemed to be more films that already had not only distribution, but release dates, but to see stars, this was one way to do it. So, I saw more of those types of films than before.
Also, there are trends sometimes at TIFF and changes. For some odd reason, there were three films about professional tennis this year, two dramatizations and one documentary. (I saw the two dramatizations.) In addition, locations had been dropped, so it was even easier to go between theaters right in the center of downtown Toronto. Finally, the most hopeful sign was that there were more uplifting female protagonists and women directors than I can remember, and that’s certainly a good and very overdue thing.
Finally, while many of the showings were sold out as usual, there were more tickets available during the festival than I can remember. TIFF even sold tickets for $10 at their box office and online and even had a Groupon for $10 tickets. In the past, people took more chances on films than now. An article I read blamed the decline on less adventurous viewers, the rise of television as the source of more adventurous material, and the fact that the time of year, early September, works against TIFF since many buzz films hit Sundance or Cannes, or, more threatening, Telluride and Venice Film Festivals which are just before TIFF.
So, is TIFF going away? No, I don’t think so. The big pictures were very crowded, but what will the people behind TIFF do next year? We’ll have to see.
Now, on with the show…