Hockey for the 21st Century

These guys need to go away

 

 

The National Hockey League just finished its season and that’s a problem. It’s July and you may have noticed that not even Moose Jaw has any ice on the ponds. Training camps open in less than 10 weeks.

The NHL also lacks a major TV contract in the United States, which is a shame because it’s the most-exciting of the four “majors.” That’s also a problem, as these days few sports franchises can survive on ticket sales alone.

Those who aren’t hockey fans often complain that they have trouble following the game. They should, of course, learn how to watch it, but the NHL is also in need of changes that make it friendlier for TV, computers, and tablets. There are several changes the NHL desperately needs, none of which requires that all hockey players wear mullets:

 

 ·     -- Shorten the season by playing more games per week and by pulling NHL players out of Olympic competitions. They are professionals for heaven’s sake; leave the Olympics for amateurs. The season should open on November 1 and the Stanley Cup should be raised in mid-April.

·      --Do, however, widen rinks to the Olympic standard of 200 feet. This encourages more magnificent skating, leads to more odd-man rushes, and creates greater scoring opportunities.

·      --More importantly, a wider rink discourages boring clutch-and-grab hockey. On a wider sheet, good skaters zoom around the goons.

·      --Speaking of goons, hockey is a skill sport, not UFC on skates. Rodney Dangerfield once joked, “I went to fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” Good line, but in the age of much bigger players and revelations about CTE, the goons need to be retired. Some fans drool over bone-crunching checks and toe-to-toe scraps, but top players can skate up to 30 mph. Imagine what would happen if you aimed your car at a pole at 30 mph. Besides, would you rather see Connor McDavid on skates or a stretcher? 

     ---Either widen the nets or shrink goalie equipment once again.

·      --Promote the talent! If the lords of the boards and TV moguls are struggling with that concept, spend more time in Canada to see how it’s done.

_--- Have a trade deadline that makes sense. How about no trades after January 31? It's ridiculous when the teams that go to the playoffs scarcely resemble the ones that got there in the first place. Plus, late trade deadlines pretty much mean that the fans of mediocre teams are robbed of seeing anyone on the ice worth seeing.

---- No more expansion! Prune the dead wood. Five teams generate more than 25% of the league’s revenue and that must change. For the record, two of them play in Canada (Toronto and Montreal). And if anyone can explain to me why Phoenix, Miami, Raleigh, or Columbus still has a team, I’m listening. Winnipeg needs a new rink or wave goodbye. Ottawa could use one that’s actually in Ottawa and the less said about the Islanders’ two rinks, the better.

 

Rob Weir

Not Just Baseball but….

 

 

Clever, but MLB does have issues!
 

I made a $129 mistake this spring: I bought a subscription to MLB.com and I’ve already made a note to cancel it the day the World Series ends. 

Much has been written about the slow pace of baseball, but that’s not why it has become boring. All sports have become crushingly dull and television is a major culprit. Even so, baseball is in need of a major overhaul, though probably not in the direction the commissioner’s office is headed.  

Baseball been under the microscope more than any other sport and has dragged out all manner of gimmicks that reek of desperation, The first thing to do is dump all of the ridiculous crap currently being tried: beginning an extra-inning game with a runner on second, 7-inning doubleheaders, undressing pitchers in search of grip substances, etc. While we’re at it, dump Interleague play, an experiment whose day has passed, and serves only to cheapen the World Series. 

Here are some other ideas: 

 

·      Starting pitchers must complete at least 5 innings, even if they are getting shellacked. Cruel? No more so than some reserve outfielder being drafted as a reliever.

·      All relievers must throw to at least 3 batters. End the era of roster-clogging “specialists” who can only throw to one type of hitter. This would also speed the game along so we don’t have to endure the constant cycle of pitching changes and TV commercials.

·      Speaking of commercials, limit them to 2 minutes between innings. This alone would subtract at least 9 minutes from the game. Limit the break to 1 minute if a reliever comes in during an inning. In total, the average game would be over roughly 15 minutes faster.

·      Use technology to call balls and strikes, but mandate that umpire decisions on the field are final unless a rule infraction is at issue. No video reviews. This would save another 10 minutes.

·      Baseball also needs some new statistics to replace meaningless nerds-only gibberish. I suggest these: MHR (Meaningless Home Runs that come when the outcome isn’t in doubt); WCSP (Who Cares Slugging Percentage demerits for hitters who don’t produce in key situations); LRE (Little League Error for times in which a fielder doesn’t actually touch a ball that any Little Leaguer would have gotten to); YDDYJ (You Didn’t Do Your Job demerits each time hitters, fielders, and pitchers flub basic things); TS (Throw Strikes demerits to pitchers who manage to run 0-2 counts to 3-2; 5 demerits if they walk the hitter and 10 if they toss a 3-2 gopher ball).; BYG (Burn Your Glove demerits for catchers who call lousy games, don’t throw our runners, and are prone to passed balls. It’s also known as the Gary Sanchez Factor).

 

 

Now for a few things that would make the game more exciting to watch.

 

·      Baseball needs better coaching at every level. MLB has made home runs boring, as its biggest hitting “stars” strike out 25% of the time by swinging for the fences.

·      Hire coaches who teach situational hitting. This isn’t new. I learned on the playground that you choke up on the bat and cut down on your swing once there are two strikes on you. There’s a world of difference between “hitters” and “swingers.”

·      Teach bunting and I mean proper drag bunts. It’s pathetic to see some guy making millions stick his bat out in front of him like a statue before the pitcher even begins his wind up.

·      Teach other basic fundamentals. Like how to set your feet on a ground ball, how to execute a hit-and-run play, and how to beat a defensive shift.  

·      Baseball needs more speedy guys who can get on via an infield single. It would also be nice to see more base stealing, and runners with the speed to make it from first to third on a single to right.

·      If MLB abolishes sticky substances for pitchers, abolish pine tar for hitters. Allow pitchers to throw inside and call a strike is a hit batter has leaned into the strike zone.

·      Allow starting pitchers from the previous game to be replaced by one- or two-day call-ups from the minors.

·      Make the designated hitter rule applicable in both leagues. Most pitchers simply can’t hit and it’s boring to watch them try.

·      Owners should insist on contracts that are incentive-laden and provide for salary cuts for under-performance. Managers used to fine players who didn’t advance runners or plate a runner on third with less than two outs. Players should have to earn their salaries–just like the rest of us!

 

Now for the radical stuff.

 

First, institute a hard salary standard for all MLB teams. No more super-spenders or pocket-the-revenue owners.

·      Every team in MLB would have a set level for total salaries—say $150 million per roster Not a dime more and not a nickel less.

·      Cut ticket prices for fans by 20%.

 

My most radical proposal involves expansion and reemphasizing team success rather than single players. Hear me out. It’s modeled on European soccer leagues.

·      Create two MLB divisions in each league of 6 teams each and call it MLB-A. That would be 24 teams, not the current 30. The top two finishers in each division go to respective league playoffs seeded by their overall records (1 vs. 4; 2 vs. 3 vs. winners) and the survivors vie to play the winner of the other league’s playoffs in the World Series.

·      Take the 8 teams with the worst regular season winning percentages and drop them to an MLB-B division with a hard salary standard of $100 million. Players on teams dropped to the B-division incur an across-the-board salary cut of 1/3 and must play a full season of MLB-B even if they would otherwise be free agents.

·      Potential expansion cities include:  Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, Las Vegas, New Orleans, San Antonio, Portland, and Salt Lake City. Teams whose finances don’t work–goodbye Tampa!­– can be replaced by other cities and owners.

·      Each year, drop the bottom 8 from MLB-A to MLB-B and elevate the top 8 MLB-B squads to MLB-A with players receiving an immediate 33% bonus.

·      Reduce the regular season from 162 games to 154, with the season beginning no earlier than April 15.

 

Rob Weir

House in the Cerulean Sea: Fantasy for Adults Seeking Wonderment

 

THE HOUSE IN THE CURULEAN SEA (2020)

By T(ravis) J Klune

Tor Books, 396 pages.

★★★★★

  

 

 

If you like fantasy books, The House in the Cerulean Sea is like a Harry Potter-meets-Tim Burton novel for adults. It is also one of the most wildly creative works of fiction I’ve read since Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.

 

On paper, 40-year-old Linus Baker has an interesting job. He’s a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). You read that correctly. At some unspecified period in British history–probably either an alternative present or a very near future–magic has been decriminalized, though many individuals without such attributes distrust those who have them. (You can probably infer analogies to immigrants and people of color.) If it’s not easy being paranormal, imagine what’s it’s like for special needs children, some of whom don’t even have human bodies.  

 

That alone is an interesting twist on social work, but Baker isn’t exactly Mr. Excitement. He’s a roly-poly asexual bachelor, lives in an undersized home, is unpopular among his DICOMY colleagues, and his only real companion is Calliope, a cat with a mind and loyalties of its own. His job title notwithstanding, Baker is akin to the Charles Dickens character Thomas Gradgrind (from Hard Times); that is, he’s more of a cipher than a dynamo. He’s a facts guy like Gradgrind and a stickler for bureaucratic detail. He has memorized most of the DICOMY manual Rules and Regulations and treats it the way some literalists use holy books. Moreover, DICOMY isn’t an easy place to work. In what is perhaps a nod to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a shadowy group known only as Extremely Upper Management (EUM) issues directives and employees know that it’s seldom good if commanded to board the elevator and appear before the EUM.

 

 When Linus gets exactly such a summons, his colleagues prepare to divvy up the remains from what they assume will be his firing. They’re wrong; Linus has been given a special task for which he feels wholly unprepared. He is chosen because he’s a gradgrind who assumes Rules and Regulations protects children. EUM wants to send Linus to a coastal village, where he is to board a boat to an offshore island to investigate Marsyas Orphanage and its unconventional proprietor, Arthur Parnassus. The island name alludes to a Greek myth of a musical satyr who angered the gods. If Baker was apprehensive before, imagine setting foot on an island whose children are considered dangerous. They include Talia, a bearded female gnome who loves gardens; the diminutive Sal, a shapeshifter; lithe Phee, a sprite; the obsequious squid-like Chauncey, who dreams of becoming a bellhop; and Theodore, a wyvern (winged dragon), who communicates in chirps. It’s most infamous resident, though, is Lucy; it’s short for Lucifer and his father is listed as Satan!   

 

Calliope seems at home, but Linus is understandably ill at ease. Arthur and caretaker Zoe Chapelwhite aren’t what he expects either. Arthur doesn’t give a fig about Rules and Regulations. He sees his brood merely as children in need of healing and guidance, encourages Linus to get to know them, and trusts Baker to write his report to EUM however he feels is appropriate. He even encourages a field trip to the mainland village, a place the children have never been and whose residents are not exactly comfortable with the idea, though they’re very content to take government subsidies to supply the island through Chapelwhite or the price-gouging ferryman Merle.

 

As you can imagine, there’s not much the meets the eye that can be trusted on or off the island. The House in the Cerulean Sea is true to its subject in that it’s magical, but it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that surfaces are seldom the same as essence, an exploration of hidden identities, a paean to nature, a celebration of play, a cover-up, a love story, and a road map for how Linus finds his groove. Leave it someone named Lucifer to correct Linus when he proclaims he has no magic: “You do Mr. Baker. Arthur told me there can be magic in the ordinary.” Think of it; to those deemed weird, normal is exotic.

 

I will admit that sometimes the novel has a YA feel, but isn’t that another magical thing? How often must adults be remembered that wonderment comes in many forms and is everywhere when they bother to look for it? Or that, as another character put it, “You fear what you don’t understand.” Open this book and prepare to be enchanted.

 

Rob Weir

Mayflies: Punk Rock to Hard Decisions

 

MAYFLIES (2020/21)

By Andrew O’Hagan

Faber and Faber, 207 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Nature has its own rules. Mayflies have an average lifespan of 24 hours. In his sixth novel, Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan uses them as a metaphor to remind us that our own moment in the sun is briefer than we imagine when we bask in our youth and the world seems a cool stream into which we can wade at our leisure.

 

Mayflies centers on youthful male bonding. At is heart is the lifelong friendship between Tully Dawson and James “Noodles” Collins. Collins has just “divorced” his irresponsible parents. He is bright, well-read, and if his mentor English teacher has anything to do with it, bound for a university education. He’s not sure about that. His real mentor is Tully, whose dad Woodbine is a local soccer legend and whose mother Barbara treats Collins as one of her own.

 

Like most males in the Paisley suburb of Glasgow, Tully and Noodles are mad about football, especially Celtic, which commands fierce loyalty among Irish-heritage Scots such as they. But it’s 1986, and the Scottish working-class is reeling from Margaret Thatcher’s barbaric economic policies, the crushing of a massive miners’ strike, and her assault on unions. Thus, Tully and Noodles have a love greater than football: punk rock. Punk is to them as early rap was to disaffected black youth: a grassroots voice of defiance, rebellion, and rejection of Establishment values. Not since the mid-1960s had Western society experienced such a generation gap.

 

The first half of Mayflies depicts a drunken, stoned, f-bomb-laced, snogging, spit-soaked, head-bashing road trip to Manchester, England, for a punk rock band fest. It’s a veritable Mohawk-haired Woodstock–the 10^th anniversary of punk–headlined by heavyweights such as The Smiths, The Fall, Shop Assistants, and New Order. Everyone is going, even if means walking away from their jobs to be there. Or perhaps, especially if it means thumbing their noses at employers; Tully proudly calls himself a socialist and is of the anarchist end of that spectrum. Tully, Noodles, “Limbo” McCafferty, and “Tibbs” Lennox set off for Manchester, meet some young women, and run into other mates such as Bobby “Dr. Clogs” McCloy and David Hogg. Of their id-driven descent into mayhem O’Hagan writes, “The night seemed to last forever and there was no direction home.”   

 

What they did not realize as they spiked their hair with Coca-Cola was that they were experiencing an ending, not a beginning. The DYI ethos of anarcho-punk soon gave way to polished musicians and the music fragmented into subgenres such as alt-rock, New Wave, post-punk, and pop songs with grungy echoes. In short order, Thatcher was gone and followed by empty Tory suits like John Major and Gordon Brown. Then, Tony Blair took power, but his government often resembled Thatcherism with a human face, not a revival of the Labour Party.

 

Move the clock forward to 2017 and Jimmy Collins is a tie-wearing successful writer/journalist married to Iona, an in-demand actress/playwright. Tully has kept the faith, but only sort of; he’s Head of English at an East End Glasgow school and playing drums with a band called Kim Philby*. Tully also has terminal cancer and has two things on his plate before he checks out at age 53. He agrees to marry his long-term partner Anna, a Glasgow lawyer, but he makes Jimmy promise he will take him to Switzerland for a doctor-assisted suicide when his suffering becomes intolerable.

 

The wedding is more posh than Tully wished, but the Manchester lads reassemble. As is often the case, some remain simpatico and some are not. Clogs still insists, “Punk was right…. We are in a constant state of co-exploitation,” but Tibbs seems “made for reading glasses and sharp angles and a bit of grey.” The nuptials go well enough, but the final decision is tougher. Anna is against it and Iona, though supportive of James, observes, “Men have a way of writing themselves into each other’s experience and placing it away from the women they love.”   

 

Mayflies is a powerful book, but it should be noted that its two settings are radically different in tone. Numerous reviewers have commented upon the book’s “dark humor,” but some have confused smart characters and witty banter with comedy. It is more accurate to say that the first half is shot through with angst and the second with pathos. O’Hagan boots us from the world of potty-mouthed anger and into one described with prose that is eloquent, moving, and reflective. Is it too much of a stretch? Since we know nothing of the intervening 40 years, Mayflies occasionally reads as if it is two different novels welded together with a globby bead. I leave it to you to decide if the shift is too jarring, or an unsettling reminder that we are all mayflies.

 

Rob Weir  

 

* Kim Philby was a British intelligence agent and double agent who fled to the Soviet Union in 1963, when his cover was blown.  

Laura: A Twisty Noir Classic

 

LAURA (1944)

Directed by Otto Preminger

20^th Century Fox, 88 minutes, pre-ratings system

(In black and white)

★★★★

 

 

 

There are multiple reasons to prefer Laura for film noir fans wishing to discover/rediscover actress Gene Tierney. They begin with Otto Preminger. He was a legendary director, whereas John M. Stahl, the director of Leave Her to Heaven, was merely middle of the pack. Preminger also had the sense to film this noir classic in black and white, which is how films about shadowy characters should be done. Preminger dusted his frames with psychological theory rather than encasing them.

 

Laura is a study in obsession. It begins when New York City Police Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is assigned to a grisly murder scene. Wealthy advertising executive Laura Hunt (Tierney) is the presumed victim of a shotgun blast to the face. Although she was beautiful and accomplished, she also had a reputation for being difficult and ruthless, which means any of a number of people had motives to dispatch her. At first, McPherson centers his investigation on her snooty, no-account fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price). Carpenter, though, is a classic “kept man” with no discernible skills of his own, and that doesn’t completely add up. Maybe Hunt’s aunt, Ann Treadway (Judith Anderson), knows more than she lets on. She has also been bankrolling Carpenter and may have been having a side affair with him. There’s also a matter of a missing murder weapon and the ace in the hole: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb). He’s a newspaper writer who “made” Laura by lifting her out of her uncultivated bumpkin ways, mentoring her, and showering her with expensive gifts, including her pricey apartment and most of its flashy appointments. Lydecker insists their relationship was asexual, but he speaks of Laura as if she is one of his possessions.  

 

McPherson finds himself making repeated trips to Laura’s apartment, but we soon suspect that his motive is partly to solve the crime and partly because he has become creepily attracted to the large portrait of Laura hanging above the fireplace mantle. One night, McPherson falls asleep beneath her picture. When he is awoken, Laura is standing before him and it’s not a dream. It is soon deduced that the actual victim was one of Hunt’s models, Diane Redfern. Now, McPherson must add Laura to his list of suspects–perhaps even place her atop it. Yet, Mark finds himself falling in love with Laura. Can he do his duty or will he help her, even if it means letting a murderer walk away? We know what Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade would do, but is McPherson cut from the same trench coat cloth? And is Laura actually guilty of anything?

 

Laura is a corkscrew mystery involving a cast of oil-covered, morality-challenged characters. Who, if anyone, is telling the truth? And where is the rifle that killed Diane Redfern?  I called it a study of obsession and that should be interpreted literally and broadly. It seems that everyone–especially Lydecker and McPherson–is obsessed with Laura. She, in turn, seems demure, but we come to imagine she’s infatuated with herself. Or maybe not!

 

The acting–though affected in 1940s’ ways–is superb, even though Vincent Price apparently built this part of his career playing Tierney’s castoff lover. The much- underappreciated Dana Andrews strikes the needed balance between believability and cheesy fascination, and Tierney scores as a raven-haired femme fatale. (Don’t believe those garish 1940s posters in which she’s colorized to look like a redhead!) Clifton Webb, though, comes close to stealing the glory. His is a performance that walks several lines, not the least of which is the thin one between utterly contemptible and wholly fascinating. For what it’s worth, elements of Preminger’s own personality can be read into Webb-as-Lydecker. One could easily become obsessed by this film.

 

Rob Weir

Leave Her to Heaven: Technicolor, Histrioics, and Outmoded ideals

 

 

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)

Directed by John M. Stahl

20^th Century Fox, 110 minutes, pre-ratings system

★★

 

 

Leave Her to Heaven is sometimes dubbed the first “film noir” movie made in color. That is, of course, an oxymoron, made evident from its use of Technicolor, which remains the most vivid and crisp film stock in cinematic history. (Nothing used by today’s CGI whiz kids deserves to be mentioned in the same breath!) Leave Her to Heaven was Fox’s top-grossing movie of the entire 1940s and, though she was an also-ran, it garnered actress Gene Tierney’s only Oscar nomination.

 

First, a few words on Tierney. Beyond her first name­–she was named for her father’s brother who died young–there is nothing remotely sexually ambiguous about the glamorous, sultry, and striking Tierney. Today, though, only hardcore film fans recall her. If we cast pre-World War II actresses into the Big Dipper, the “bright” stars would bear names such Bacall, Bergman, Garland, Kelly, and Hepburn; Tierney would be at the duller end of the star spectrum hovering near Alcor. Such is the cruelty of popular culture fame.

 

There is also the issue that some things don’t age well and Leave Her to Heaven is one of them. Brush up on Freud and Greek mythology or you’ll wonder what the fuss was about in 1945. Tierney is Boston socialite Ellen Berent who, on the train to a New Mexico vacation “ranch”–and its posh digs deserve the quotation marks–encounters novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) on a train. He is taken by her beauty and unconventional spunk, but doesn’t expect to see her again. But, of course, he ends up at the same dude ranch. Small problem: She is engaged to marry soon-to-be district attorney Russell Quinton (Vincent Price). This is overcome when Ellen decides Richard is more fun–and he is–than the ambitious and sullen Russell. The two marry after a whirlwind courtship whose only note of discord is that Ellen is fixated on her late father and maybe a tad jealous of her cousin/adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

 

This is overcome when they move to Warm Springs, Georgia, to be near Richard’s beloved brother Danny (Daryl Hickman, brother of Dwayne, who was TV’s Dobie Gillis), who was felled by polio and is rehabbing. Outwardly, Ellen is affectionate to Danny, thus Richard dismisses a warning from Ellen’s mother that she has a problem in that she “loves too much.” After all, who could object to that? Call it the film’s Chekov’s gun.

 

This psychosis–as it was considered in prevailing Freudian psychology of the day–becomes acute when Danny is released from rehab and the three of them move into Richard’s “cabin” on a remote lake in Maine, where caretaker Leick (Chill Wills) presides with assumed paternal charm. (It’s no more a “cabin” than the New Mexico location is anyone’s idea of a working “ranch.”) Ellen yearns for a universe of two, not four, and certainly not the six to which it swells when her mother and Ruth come to visit. Several “accidents” occur, before the overwrought Ellen is driven to dispatch herself, but not without first framing Ruth for her “murder.”

 

By today’s standards, the acting is histrionic and numerous things transpire that fall into the category we could label: “That Wouldn’t Happen.” The court scene is especially non-credible. Can you imagine a trial whose prosecutor was none other than Ellen’s cast-off fiancé? Or that he’d be allowed to lead and browbeat witnesses without a peep from the defense attorney? The film’s resolution also seems as abrupt as Ellen and Richard’s leap from sparring to marriage.

 

In retrospect, the gorgeous Technicolor tones are the most memorable thing about the movie. The title comes from Hamlet, though you might come to doubt that heaven is Ellen’s final stop. If you give it a whirl, know that there are oblique nods to Greek figures such as Hippolyta, Medea, and the Sirens. Know also that the Electra complex was much en vogue in the 1940s, and that Chill Wills–who now seems like a character from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood–was once a respected comic actor and sometime country music performer from back when that genre was supposed to be goofy. Or, you might want to wait from my review of Laura, which was perhaps Tierney’s best screen performance.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

The Nest: British Conmen in the 1980s

 

THE NEST (2020)

Directed by Sean Durkin

IFC Films, 107 minutes, R (language, nudity)

★★

 

 

 

We don’t get all of the films released in Britain but to the best of my knowledge, there is a dearth of films that look at the hyperventilated capitalism of Margaret Thatcher’s reign of error in the 1980s. Most of the British actors I’ve seen in such films came to America to make films about the toxic speculative fever of the 1980s/90s. I simply don’t know of many UK films akin to The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street, The Big Short, or even Other People’s Money.

 

To be sure, there are plenty of British films about Thatcher’s cruel budgets that eviscerated organized labor and eliminated tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs–Mike Leigh has feasted on those topics–but not many turn their gaze to the midlevel money men akin to Icarus in business suits. In other words, a film like The Nest is long overdue. Alas, Britain remains in need of a good film on the topic. The Nest isn’t terrible, but it is as flat as month-old real ale.

 

Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) lives in New York with his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon); Sam (Oona Roche), Allison’s daughter from a previous partner; and their mutual son, Ben (Carlie Shotwell). They are a solid middle-class family, with Rory working in the financial sector and Allison training equestrian riders. Rory, though, has been following the superheated U.S. markets and has bigger dreams. He contacts Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin), an investor for whom he once worked, and informs his family that they are moving to England. Rory thinks he can bring his pokey countrymen up to warp speed, leases an enormous Surrey country estate, and uproots a contented family to make them accessories to his Brobdingnagian schemes.

 

I should remind readers that the early 1980s were still the infancy of second-wave feminism if, by that, we mean widespread cultural acceptance. Women–and perhaps especially so in the UK–were still expected to defer to male guidance. Call Allison an early adopter. Neither she nor her kids particularly like Britain and only Rory admires their creepy, dark new home. Allison quickly recognizes that the old pile is more a monument to Rory’s ego than a home for four. And this is just the tip of Rory’s delusions. He thinks he’s bringing Arthur up-to-date and will make a fortune for those who go along with his big plans. Arthur, on the other hand, is largely bemused by Rory and loves his energy, but he’s basically doing him a solid in the belief that Rory wanted to move back home.

 

Rory plays the game, but the only one he’s fooling with his puffed up, jargon-ridden rap is himself. He’s the lite beer version of Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and Kenneth Lay and when Arthur shoots down his big deal with the curt “you don’t pay attention to the details,” Rory is forced to grab at considerably thinner straws than he imagined. Arthur isn’t the only one calling for the hogwash bucket to be emptied. One of the few interesting parts of the film is Allison’s transformation from enabler to plug puller.

The Nest is meant to be an ironic twist on “nest egg,” investments earmarked for long-security goals in mind. Icarian gamblers often raid such funds in the hope that short-term cash infusions will yield instant riches. They are the stock broker equivalency of those who think they will break the casino bank. It’s the hare racing the tortoise and the moral of the adage that a fool and his money soon part company. Generally speaking, only the uber-rich walk away from the table with controlled damage.

 

The Nest would have been a much more interesting story with more Allison and less Rory. Carrie Coon is much more intriguing than Jude Law (though the two have a steamy sex scene). She does a slow burn, a personal tragedy sends her over the edge, and once she takes that step, there’s no turning back, and she unsheathes her metaphorical claws. Law could have done with a bit of her nuance; his Rory is such an obvious fraud that his fall is merely a question of how, not if. As we wait for it, backstories involving family crises–especially those of the children–feel more tacked on than integral to the unfolding drama. Too much occurs with so little foreshadowing that it seems like filler.

 

Britain needs a good mass market movie about the amorality of its 1980s capitalist conmen. Alas, The Nest is made of grass, string, and feathery down–too fragile to hold much of anything, including viewer interest.

 

Rob Weir