My All First Weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament Team

The baseline is excellence for the first two rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. That’s what makes the rare duds, or semi-duds, stand out. And though given America’s present state, I was hoping the universe might grant us a great opening weekend of the tourney, rather than an A, A-, or even just a nice B, we got, like, a D+, C-, maybe shaded up to a C by virtue of not just an entertaining but dramatic Maryland / Colorado State game that concluded on a thirst-quenching buzzer beater. (The buzzer beater was in all likelihood preceded by an uncalled travel, and Jordan pushed off on Russell, and Kenny Anderson didn’t get his shot off before the buzzer against Michigan State, and it’s always been burning since the world’s been turning.) Maybe that means the regionals will be more exciting, and maybe that means the Final Four matchups will be more compelling, but I learned a long, long time ago that I will always take a joyfully chaotic, upset-laden first four days of the NCAA Tournament over a scintillating, chalk-heavy Final Four. Still. The players and their performances took me away for 96 hours. I needed it. Some notes by way of a team. 

Were you not entertained? Eh, sometimes. 

My All First Weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament Team

Josh Hubbard, Mississippi State. Of all the great men’s college basketball archetypes, perhaps none are greater than the chesty, undersized point guard who looks for his own shot as much as everyone else’s. In leading all scorers in the Bulldogs’ 75-72 first round defeat to Baylor with 26 points by blowing past defenders time and again and seeming to launch himself into the sky for three-point shots over the taller opposition with an invisible pogo stick, he was a joy to watch. The only downside was that, in a terribly ironic twist, rather than find a way to take the possible game-tying shot at the end, he passed off and they were sent packing. Ah, and so it is.   

John Tonje, Wisconsin. A 2nd team AP All American, it turns out, John Tonje’s 37-point 2nd round performance against BYU was likely not a surprise to anyone paying close attention to college basketball all season but he was a surprise to me. I confess that I thought Wisconsin was an offense designed to average 52.3 ppg in perpetuity but it seems coach Greg Gard saw some semblance of the light and handed over the keys to graduate transfer Tonje. That 37 came on a mere 18 shots, and by hitting 14 of 16 from the charity stripe, at once embodying and transcending the longstanding Badger ethos in so much as he was efficiently electrifying (electrifyingly efficient). And though he could not quite bring his team all the way back against BYU, succumbing 91-89 when his game-tying attempt went awry, like his counterpart Hubbard, he nevertheless won the weekend in defeat. Vaya con dios. 

Bennett Stirtz, Drake. Drake’s strategy of bleeding the shot clock nearly every possession in their opening round upset of Missouri and second round defeat to Texas Tech sounds boring, it not agitating (play some basketball, already!), but it wasn’t, not once you understood and surrendered to Stirtz’s rhythm. An improbable mix of the Hick from French Lick and Pearl Washington, Stirtz had every possession on a string, and just when you’d think Drake was going to have to force a bad shot, they’d get a good one instead, as if Stirtz had foreseen it all along. As a native Iowan, it’s one of the ultra-rare times that a team from Iowa flaming out has not left me despondent, just thankful to have had the experience at all.

Rúben Prey, St. John’s. Like the 1990s New York Knicks crossed with The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, St. John’s was so much more eccentric and fun than a team bankrolled by some loudmouthed businessman has any right to be. And though the starting five got the pub, it was this Portuguese freshman whom I found most compelling. It was Prey’s look, one part Robin Lopez, one part Julius Michalik, the Slovakian who starred at Iowa State in the 90s and already had a receding hairline as a freshman, but it was also the way Prey played. He defended, he screened, he crashed the glass, he would just come in for two, three minutes at a time and work his ass off and then go back to the bench. 

Julian Reese, Maryland. To paraphrase Pendant Publishing editor and J. Peterman catalogue copy writer Elaine Benes, I didn’t know Angel Reese’s little brother played basketball. 

6th Man: Bowen Born, Colorado State. A native of the small town just south of Des Moines where I briefly lived at the turn of the century, Born transferred from Northern Iowa to Colorado State which, I confess, I did not even realize until he subbed into his team’s opening round win against Memphis. Though he is the same height as Hubbard, 5'11", he looked even smaller out there, maybe because he is more wiry, less chesty, complete with one of those semi-tragic college kid moustaches, and yet. He refused to just hang around the three-point line, eating dudes alive off the dribble and attacking those tall trees in the paint with an array of deft maneuvers that always allowed him to get his shot off over and around defenders who seemed to be asking themselves in mid-air: How on earth did he do that? I think I laughed every time he scored. I would have taken another 15 minutes of this dude over another four games of Cooper Flagg in a heartbeat. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Port of Shadows (1938)

“Port of Shadows,” or “The Dock of Mists” in French, was initially banned by the French government, as an opening title explains, for being “immoral, depressing and detrimental to young people.” That’s the antithesis of art, of course, and I’d like to think everybody here knows that, but you can also see why some unscrupulous philistine might have thought that way. “With every sunrise,” says Nelly (Michèle Morgan), “we think something new is going to happen, something fresh. Then the sun goes to bed and so do we.” Funny thing is, as the title suggests, the sun never rises in director Marcel Carné’s poetically realist film; there is just an omnipresent fog enveloping the French port city of Le Havre. That’s where French soldier Jean (Jean Gabin) arrives as “Port of Shadows” begins, having just saved a stray dog from being run over. It’s a hopeful and kind prologue belying a conclusion that is the opposite. This is a movie, after all, that doesn’t see swimmers as people splashing around in the water, as one character puts it, but people waiting to drown. Befitting the genre, that is just about the most poetically realist variation of glass half empty philosophy I’ve ever heard. Bravo.

Though it is never explicitly stated that Jean has gone AWOL, it is implied, nevertheless, in his search for a ship to take him out of Le Havre posthaste. If he is a deserter, Nelly is a runaway, having the fled the home where she lives with her godfather Zabel (Michel Simon) while also trying to evade the pursuit of gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) who, in turn, is seeking her ex-boyfriend Maurice. Zabel is a real piece of work, masquerading as a worldly member of the community even as a self-pitying monster lurks just beneath. “It’s horrible to love like Romeo when you look like Bluebeard,” he says at one point which Simon turns into a comically horrifying whine of desperation. His demise is shocking, not for it happening but how it happens, filmed in canted angles, and scored to the church music the character prefers, a juxtaposition evoking the absence of God, as if we are all left to fend for ourselves. The only thing scarier than his death Lucien’s unnamed lady friend (Jenny Burnay, I think, based on the IMDb credits and accompanying photo which I note because I really want to give the actor credit for this) laughing at him after he is slapped in an amusement park by Jean that is so coldly mocking you can’t help but see why that paper gangster might finally be moved to the movie’s culminating act. 

Jean and Nelly fall in love, of course, but it never feels quite real. That’s a compliment, not a criticism. It is also Carné’s intention, illustrated in Jean’s literal observation that theirs is “Like the movies…love at first sight.” And that’s why in eschewing shipping out to parts unknown to track down Nelly instead, he surrenders to the fantasy even as he opens himself up to Lucien’s revenge. That temptation to deny reality must have been alluring in 1938 France, what with the fall of the Popular Front and a looming World War. Between memory holing the COVID-19 pandemic and rewriting the January 6th insurrection as Not That Bad, America has lately been demonstrating a willingness to deny reality too. And as much as anything while watching “Port of Shadows,” I found myself wishing American movies would stop shrinking from this confusing, terrifying moment with so much of the SOS (same old streaming) and meet it with a whole new genre a la poetic realism to call our own.  

A Post for the Michael Clayton Hive Only

Congratulations to one of St. John’s University’s most distinguished alums, Michael Clayton, class of 1980 and current special counsel specializing in wills and trusts at the law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, on the basketball team’s first Big East Conference Tournament championship in a quarter-century and first outright Big East Conference championship in 40 years.

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Time for Burning (1966)

How many times have you heard that the best remedy for bridging our great American divide is conversation, sitting down with someone of an opposing viewpoint and talking it through? This proposed solution, however, is nothing new, as “A Time for Burning,” currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, demonstrates. In 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a Lutheran minister in Omaha, L. William Youngdahl, sought to have his parishioners engage with black members of the community in conversation to help bridge their divide and perhaps begin the road to integrating their church. But Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey’s ensuing 1966 documentary is not about those conversations. No, it is about the conversations to have those conversations, none of which (spoiler alert) come to pass, as Youngdahl finds a flock laying claim to an open mind while cycling through a litany of close-minded excuses of it being too big a first step, too soon, etc., prompting Youngdahl to wonder aloud, “How many years do I need to prepare myself in order to talk with another human being? What am I waiting for?” The black barber that Youngdahl visits in the documentary’s most searing scene would probably tell him that they’re all waiting out the end of the world.

That black barber turns out to be Ernie Chambers who would go on to become Nebraska’s longest serving state senator. And Youngdahl’s congregation is not juxtaposed against Chambers so much as it is described by Chambers in the exact religiously hypocritical terms that they are shown to embody. Indeed, the two men are not really even having a discussion at all; rather Chambers is telling Youngdahl exactly like it is and in terms as likely to infuriate white liberals as white conservatives. (White Supremacy in one minute explains someone who uploaded this scene to YouTube.) And though “A Time for Burning” might classify itself as cinéma vérité, suggesting it is free from aesthetic embellishment, the severe close-ups of the two men in these moments are incredible. The palpable perspiration on Youngdahl’s face and his agonized eyes encapsulate hearing something so difficult while these intimate glimpses of Chambers capture him just as he is described later: “He talked hate, hate, hate, but his eyes were full of love.” Youngdahl leaves this conversation in distress, and though he professes a genuine desire in wanting to listen, Chambers’s prediction that by merely trying to listen, by trying to do something, Youngdahl will be relieved of his ministerial duty, proves prophetic.

Yet, there is one figurative, even semi-literal, ray of light in the form of Ray Christensen. One of Youngdahl’s parishioners, he begins “A Time for Burning” like all the others, not skeptical, exactly, of the intention but hesitant, worried it will fracture the church, only to experience something like a conversion in meeting with several leaders of the black community in Omaha, including Chambers. Christensen’s very air changes, no longer equivocating but speaking with the forceful clarity of someone who has seen the light, only to be stymied as Youngdahl was by fellow congregants who have not. That includes Christensen’s own wife. She yearns for a return to normalcy, you might say, for the church to remain a place where people can gather in peace. “This isn’t the peace that Christ was talking about,” Christensen says in referring to the organ, the hymns, the stained-glass windows. “It’s the wrapping paper.” “A Time for Burning” brings that wrapping paper to life as it ends with scenes from a church service and a hymn laid over it on the soundtrack that given what we have seen does not feel like an affirmation but an open-ended question. “There is a power in me somewhere / I know it’s there.” 

My Favorite Gene Hackman Line Readings

I know, I know. My eulogy for Gene Hackman argued that he was such a quality actor, he did not even need lines to impart character and feeling. And that’s still true. But movies haven’t been silent since 1927, baby, and though I feel like modern movies would benefit not so much from wordlessness as more attention to visual storytelling, there is also so much character and feeling that can be imparted through line readings. Even more than that, some actors can take certain lines that are dead on arrival and then revive them. Hackman could do both. See below.

“I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead ‘til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.” – “Unforgiven” (1992). It’s everything, but it’s chiefly the way he says “Nebraska.” He emphasizes the second syllable by stretching it out, bringing the vast, desolate prairie of the state to life in his elocution and in doing so, improbably, incredibly inverting the neighboring state’s “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.” 

“It was just a bunch of N*zi goons.” – “The Package” (1989). As a green beret who finds himself trying to prevent an assassination, the way Hackman says this line, dismissively, with both a literal and figurative shrug, is not making light of their abhorrent ideology, not at all, but rightly reducing it to gum on his shoe.

“Trials are too important to be left up to juries.” – “Runaway Jury” (2003). It’s a trailer line, meaning a line that effectively describes the entire movie, one in which Hackman’s diabolical jury consultant works to swing a trial in favor of his wealthy clients. Yet, Hackman sells it by saying it in such a way to convey how his character is selling something, a service, the little leading chuckle at the end and the fiendish winkle in his eye deftly conveying not so much that the actor is on the joke but that the character is in on the joke, a well-heeled huckster giving you his signature pitch.

“Well, keep your strength in the dribble, alright.” – “Hoosiers” (1986). There’s the moment during the regional finals when the god-fearing bench player Strap is unexpectedly thrust into action and answers the bell and when Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale asks what’s gotten into him, Strap replies, matter-of-factly, “The Lord. I can feel his strength.” And Dale’s reply, gleaned from the two critical baskets Strap scores coming without bouncing the ball even a single time, is a line that Hackman does not render mean-spirited like a non-believer telling a believer he’s full of crap, but more akin to a semi-bemused matter-of-fact strict believer of his own in basketball fundamentals.

“Are you listening to me?” “Yes, I am!” – “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001). True, few lines have ever made me LLOL (literally laugh out loud) in a movie theater louder than Hackman in this same movie saying, “This is my adopted daughter Margot Tennenbaum,” giving it a real ring of familiar formality, an asshole who does not quite know he’s an asshole, but it’s this line, “Yes, I am” that I think of most. It happens when his son Chas (Ben Stiller) is ordering his father Royal (Hackman) to stay from his sons, Royal’s grandsons, but he’s not sure his dad seems to be hearing. “Are you listening?” Chas demands and the parenthetical instruction in West Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplay is “screams” which is exactly how Stiller reads it. Royal’s response in the screenplay, however, contains no such parenthetical and the line “Yes, I am” concludes with a period rather than an exclamation. But Hackman does not just say it; he screams it right back; as he does the following line, “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown!”

Wes Anderson often likes to employ symmetrical frames with his actors looking directly into the camera, essentially opening a portal between them and us. This scene is symmetrically framed, too, though the actors are not looking at us, and yet, Hackman opens that portal, nonetheless. He opens it by seeming to respond to Stiller in the moment, an actor utterly alive to his character, to his scene, to the camera. 

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

Anora

We meet Ani (Mikey Madison), short for “Anora,” in the middle of a lap dance. That’s because it’s her job, and despite the neon lights and music, it feels no different than, say, peddling candy at Coney Island, another location that writer and director Sean Baker’s movie briefly visits; it’s hard out here. So, hard in fact, that when a wealthy Russian playboy, Ivan (Mark Edelshteyn), pays Ani to be his girlfriend for the week, a la Edward Lewis and Vivian Ward, and whisks her away to Las Vegas and asks her to marry him, she agrees. She is not swept off her feet so much as swept up in his extravagant lifestyle, all embodied in how Baker, who triples as editor, composes this sequence as essentially one breathless rush. And though Ani insists on a 3-carat ring in the wake of his proposal, suggesting she still grasps the transactional nature of their relationship, when Baker drops Robin Schulz’s reworking of Take That’s “Greatest Day” on the soundtrack in the wake of their wedding, the garish Vegas lights they stand beneath manage to momentarily gleam, and you might even believe the song’s words, as she might, that the future is theirs to find.

It isn’t, though. Alas, Ivan is merely the idiot son, to quote the Handsome Furs, of Russian Oligarchs, and upon learning of his sudden marriage, they dispatch two Armenian thugs, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and one Russian thug, Igor (Yura Borisov), to round up the newlyweds and annul the union. An Armenian Orthodox priest, Toros is literally summoned in the middle of a baptism, suggesting money always comes before God. The job proves more difficult than expected, however, when Ivan flees, going on a bender of strip clubs, sort of the idiot son’s version of running away home. His jilted wife and his peeved pursuers, then, form an unlikely quartet, at once aligned and in opposition, chasing Ivan across Brooklyn as a “Pretty Woman”-like fantasy recalibrates as a black-hearted comedy.

Indeed, though “Anora” is an independent, it often feels transplanted from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like 90 years ago this might have been a vehicle for Mae West. There is a distinct screwball energy to the chase scenes, in ways both big and small, in the out-and-out angry desperation effused by Karragulianas as Toros, and in the dumplings Garnik uses to nurse a wound in lieu of ice. Yet, at the same time, Baker’s editing is not always fast-paced, lingering on the real menace in the air, as in the sequence where Garnik and Igor try to corral the scrappy Ani. It’s deliberately and effectively unsettling; I kept laughing and then I kept feeling guilty for laughing.

Ultimately, though, “Anora” is not quite as difficult nor revelatory as these tangled sensations would suggest. True, there is something moving in the emergent Alice/Uncas like relationship of Ani and Igor, two physical laborers in their respective ways, proletariats under the thumb of the bourgeoisie. But the class commentary is not as nimbly sewn into the plot as a Golden Age comedy and what’s more never cuts all that deep, as obvious as the divide between Ani’s house beneath the train tracks and Ivan’s on the water. When Toros gives a maid a bigger-than-usual tip to clean up Ivan’s bigger-than-usual mess, the capping shot of the maid is as funny as it is revealing, the movie itself treating her as Toros does, uninterested in her plight, abandoning her just as he does.

“Anora” is not uninterested in Ani’s plight, obviously, it’s front and center, but it also never entirely brings her to life. Madison’s performance is lively, often incredibly so, but that is not quite the same thing. And by rendering “Anora” so plot-forward, Baker essentially yokes his characters to it, rarely stopping to have them explicate ideas or thoughts, meaning that any sense of character is what the actors bring. Maybe that’s less important with the secondary people but it’s a significant flaw where Ani is concerned. And for all of Madison’s energy, who Ani truly is and how she feels is much less clear, underlined in how we never quite know if she’s really in love with Ivan and going after him on blind faith, or if she’s hoping to ultimately play his family for a big payday. Maybe she doesn’t know herself, but if so, that inner struggle does not emerge, and it means what would be an utterly brutal punch of a denouement only half-connects.