Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Winning Time/Howard Hawks
Director’s Note: Everyone in the department is diligently working on a set of easy-to-remember criteria for reviewing modern television series of less than 13 episodes. We are currently struggling with what would be more useful to you: (A) a review of the first episode—with the understanding that such a thing constitutes little more than a first impression; (B) a review of the first three episodes—the standard hook, and more than enough time to evaluate the series premise and overall tone; or (C) a review of the series once it is finished airing, with commentary about the value of a binge session included in the review.
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Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (HBO Max)
Webster’s dictionary defines a Pretentious Review as “any commentary that starts out with a definition from Webster’s Dictionary.” And yet, I feel obliged to share with you the prescient definition of a dynasty: a powerful group or family that maintains its position for a considerable time. That’s the Lakers of my youth, no doubt about it. They made basketball a household name. The players became household names. The Magic and Bird rivalry remains one of the great contentious friendships in all of sports. For 12 years, the Lakers were Basketball, and only the emergence of Michael Jordan in Chicago cast any kind of shadow on the Forum.
Winning Time audaciously attempts to tell that incredible story in a crackerjack, hyper-kinetic fashion that uses a lot of technical wizardry to recall those halcyon days of yesteryear. I don’t know if it works for anyone who was born after 1987, but for me, it felt like an acid flashback. Kudos to Executive Producer Adam McKay for actually figuring out how to utilize footnotes in a TV show. The rapidly changing angles, combined with faux film stock, Super 8, and even VHS tape overlays, should be alienating, but it’s just the opposite, pulling you in, making you feel like a fly on the wall.
I’m six episodes in on this tour-de-force and I don’t know what corner to peel back first. Where to start, where to start? Okay, most obviously, this is a sports story, which means there are winners and losers, good guys and bad guys, and clearly stated goals which must be achieved or All Is Lost. This theme is writ large and then parceled out to all of the “franchise players,” so that we find ourselves rooting for these folks, even when they are lying, cheating, nearly stealing, and in all other ways behaving reprehensibly. That’s not a problem for me, but it might be for you. My favorite sports movies include the Bad News Bears and Slapshot, so there’s your barometer, right there.
Winning Time is also a series of Rags-to-Riches stories, nestled one within the other, like Russian stacking dolls. It’s not unkind to say that the whole set-up was a teetering house of cards on a three-legged folding table that someone had left next to an open window. They were millimeters (John C. Reilly, doing his best work in years, uses a very specific kind of body hair for his hyperbolic increment) from financial collapse, several times, and it’s only by a combination of dumb luck, Chutzpah, and a kind of imbecilic fearlessness often found in teenage boys about to jump a ravine on their Huffy that saw their crazy-ass machinations through.
There’s also a Fish out of Water story, in the way Dr. Buss is treated by everyone in the league. They see him as a charlatan, a dilettante, and a wastrel, playing at being a franchise owner, without the slightest idea of what he’s doing. All of which, by the way, is true. But watching trickster characters take the piss out of stuffed shirts is a deeply ingrained American literary tradition. We do so love our con men.
I’ve got to issue a content warning, here: between the last two episodes of Minx and the mini-binge of these six eps of Winning Time, I’ve seen So. Much. Sex. Dongs everywhere, unfurled like party horns, a cornucopia of breasts, and a number of, ah, scenes which leaves nothing to the imagination. I am not prudish in any way, shape, or form, but a couple of the shots in this mini-series walk right up to the edge of me asking, “Okay, y’all, was that reeeeally necessary?” Oh, but the language, on the other hand, is a delight. Jerry West brings the heat constantly, and not since Al Swearingen have we enjoyed profanity as much. Oh, but It’s Not Porn...It’s HBO.
If you can get by all of that, Winning Time is riveting television. The “based on true incidents” is a very broad couch to sit on, and that’s okay to truncate things a bit in the interest of getting it all in the show. Take it with several grains of salt and just watch everyone go to work.
The 2022 NTAB Directorial Culture Exchange Update: Howard Hawks
Confession: This was one of mine, he said, surprising absolutely no one. Howard Hawks was one of those directors in Hollywood who was considered a workman, a professional who could shoot anything and bring it in on time, under budget, and looking good. He wasn’t an auteur, you see. But the thing about Hawks is this: look at the list of movies he shot, and then ask if you wouldn’t want him on your next picture? He had a flair for comedy, but he also knew how to shoot tough guys and give them personality. He loved dialogue, people talking, conversations, that pithy, punchy back-and-forth that you naturally associate with classic film and the Hollywood legends. If you don’t have at least one Howard Hawks movie on your list of favorites, then I have to question every life decision that got you to this point.
The Big Sleep (1946) is not the first Bogart and Bacall movie made (that would be To Have and to Have Not, also directed by Hawks), but what it has going for it is a screenplay written by Leigh Brackett based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. Bogart crackles in this movie, speaking fluent smart-ass, and when he and Bacall get in the same room, well, that’s that with that.
The Big Sleep is famous for its nigh incomprehensible plot, right up to and including an offscreen murder of a chauffer that no one, not even Chandler, knew who the murderer was. Treat it like the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, i.e., it’s whoever you think killed the chauffer. The takeaway here is the bristling dialogue, relaxed and also intense performances, brisk pace, and an indisputable classic in every single category. Jes had been reading Chandler and Hammett recently and was suitably impressed with the whole package, which is the correctly and only response.
For her selection, she was torn, eyeing a number of westerns, until I mentioned to her that the dinosaur capture sequence was Spielberg’s tribute to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! and that movie features Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk.” That cinched it for her. Also, Leigh Brackett was onhand again for the script chores,
John Wayne plays Sean Mercer, the head of a group of animal capture specialists who provide stock for zoos and wildlife preserves. The movie is hung very loosely on these capture scenes, with character-driven breaks in between. Brackett wrote the script based on the animal capture footage Hawks filmed, using the real actors, including John Wayne. The scenes of Wayne and the others, hanging off of the capture trucks, driving alongside these wild animals to slip nooses over their necks, is insane. No, really. You can’t watch the shots without your mouth hanging open; they don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Some of the footage is so jaw-dropping, you’ll swear it’s stuntmen, but nope, that’s John Wayne in there, holding onto ropes. The reason he had to be redubbed was that he was swearing like a sailor at the animals.
The not-action scenes are a little formulaic and hokey. Apparently, one only has to be in the same room with someone once to be in love with them. It’s all mostly played for laughs, but the end result is that the pacing suffers a bit, especially after the rhino capture sequence at the beginning of the movie. As uneven as it is, the spectacle far outweighs the film’s shortcomings. Hatari! is not high on a lot of people’s John Wayne lists, but it’s brilliant Howard Hawks and well worth the pittance to rent it.
C, I say! Then maybe A.
But C. Yes. For realz.
I say review after three episodes.
Hatari is up there for me. Much of it based on nostalgia, and the great photography in Africa.