We went to see the Mister Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Everything we read and heard warned us to be ready to cry. One friend told me she had taken a box of tissues to the theater, then passed it through the crowd when everybody started sobbing. The movie is amazing – thoughtful, powerful, spiritual – but for me the heart punch didn’t happen until right at the end, when the filmmakers create a brilliant little moment that I won’t spoil here. The tears came then, and they came hard.
But I don’t want to say much more about the movie. I want to talk about after the movie.
There was a pretty good crowd – maybe 50 people on a Thursday night – and most of them left when the lights came up. But a dozen of us stayed. There were four people a couple rows behind us, and three people a row in front of us, and five of us – Alix and I, a friend we used to work with, and her parents.
And all three of our little groups just sat there and talked about the movie.
The people behind us talked about watching Mister Rogers when they were kids. A young woman in front of us got out her phone and found a YouTube clip of a moment shown during the credits. Our group got out the box of cupcakes our friends had brought – Alix and I just had our 20th anniversary, and each cupcake had icing that looked like a baseball with “20” between the seams. (Our first night out together was at a Hickory Crawdads game.)
Ushers usually come in right after every movie ends to sweep up and make sure everybody leaves. But nobody came. So the folks behind us lingered, and the ones in front of us lingered, and our group ate cupcakes in what I am sure was a flagrant violation of Regal Cinemas policy. I wish now that we would have talked to somebody in one of the other groups, but in the moment we were all deep in our own conversations.
Our group talked about what Fred Rogers would think of the way our world is now — if he would think that he had not done enough. We wondered what happened to some of the children in the movie. We agreed that the things Mister Rogers stood for – kindness, tolerance, love – are not naive or shallow but are the most profound and deepest things of all.
We all stayed for a good 20 minutes. I’ve been to hundreds of movies, but I’ve never seen that happen before.
It felt like we were sitting out on our porches on a long summer night.
Well, I’m in a movie. It’s a documentary called “Bound By Flesh” and it tells the story of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who were sideshow sensations in the ’20s and ’30s — they sang, played several instruments, and appeared in the cult horror classic “Freaks.” Their long trip through the shadier parts of show business ended in the early ’60s, when they landed in Charlotte, broke and looking for work. They spent the last few years of their lives here, and when a Broadway show about them launched in 1997, I wrote a story about their time in town.
A couple of years ago, I got an email from a woman named Leslie Zemeckis. You know the work of her husband, Robert — he directed the “Back to the Future” movies, “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away,” Denzel Washington’s “Flight.” Leslie is a filmmaker, too, and she had decided to make a documentary about the Hilton sisters. She came to Charlotte to interview me and a bunch of other folks who knew about Daisy and Violet in one way or another.
The film came out a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out that Time Warner Cable has it on demand — you can also get through iTunes and Amazon and other places. So I checked it out. It’s an interesting look at two women who had a rough but fascinating life, defined by the little ribbon of flesh that connected them.
I’ve done interviews for this sort of thing before where I didn’t make the final cut. But I’m in this one, starting about an hour in, and Leslie lets me yap about the Hiltons quite a bit in the last half-hour. I’ll just have them send the Oscar straight to the house. I hate tuxes.
Here’s the trailer:
A bit of North Carolina trivia: The world’s most famous conjoined twins, Chang and Eng Bunker — they’re the reason people came up with the name “Siamese twins” — ended up living on farmland in Mount Airy. They married sisters and fathered 21 children.
Now that I write sports for a living — it still feels weird to say that — I’ve talked a lot about my favorite sports moments of the year. I’ve already written about the stadium shaking in Gainesville and the moments right after the Alabama-LSU game and Johnny Football beating Alabama. So I left sports off this list. The one common thread among all these things is, they moved me — made me laugh or cry or think or sing along. Sometimes all at once.
It wasn’t until weeks after we saw this movie that I understood what I liked most about it. I grew up on those great ’70s detective shows — “Mannix,” “Barnaby Jones,” and of course “Rockford Files.” “Argo” is set in 1980, and that look is what got me — the washed-out lighting, all those wide lapels and shaggy haircuts. There are lots of other things to love about the movie. It’s a thriller, but (almost) all the violence is offscreen — the tense moments center around ordinary things, like whether someone will pick up the phone at a crucial moment. It’s like an Hitchcock movie in that way. It’s never wrong to put Alan Arkin, John Goodman and Bryan Cranston in a movie. Ben Affleck is just right for his role. It’s all based on a true story. But what I’ll remember is the way the film looks. “Argo” is basically the best “Mannix” ever made, and that’s a big compliment.
9. LCD Soundsystem + Miles Davis
So many people make so many mashups these days that just about every song has mated with every other somewhere on YouTube. But after seeing this, by Alessandro Greenspan, I never want to hear “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” in any other way. And I never want it lip-synced by anyone other than Kermit the Frog.
8. “Call Me Maybe”
For that keyboard riff in the chorus. For the twist at the end of the video. But mostly for that one line in the bridge:
Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad
That’s a line for anyone who’s been in love with the perfect idea of someone who just hasn’t come around yet. That’s a great pop lyric.
7. “Somebody that I Used To Know” (Walk Off the Earth cover)
Somehow I saw this before I heard Gotye’s original. I still like this version better. I’d pay to see a band play a whole set this way. “And now, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody…'”
At the beginning of the year I gathered a bunch of books on one shelf with the intention of reading them all in 2012. I ended up reading five of the 25, which is right at the Mendoza Line. What happened this year is the same thing that happens every year — I’d walk through a bookstore and new books would just stick to me, like I was made of Velcro. Austin Kleon’s book stuck early on, and it’s the one book I’ve kept nearby all year. This book is for all of us who fear that whatever creative work we’re doing is just theft from those who came before. The truth: it IS theft, and great artists have stolen from one another throughout the centuries — expressing old ideas in new ways is exactly how art gets made. This book will free your creative soul.
Full disclosure: I’m praising the work of friends here. Chris, from Esquire and ESPN the Magazine, is the best longform journalist in North America (I have to say it that way because he’s Canadian). “Animals” is the story of his that got the most attention this year — it’s about the men who had to hunt down the animals that escaped from a private zoo in Zanesville, Ohio. I know of at least three other big magazine pieces on the same story, but no one understood it the way Chris did, and no one else put the reader so deep inside it. There’s one paragraph, about a bear and a hunter and a camera that measures body heat, that breaks my heart every time I read it.
Having said all that, I enjoyed “The Honor System” even more. It starts off as the story of a stolen magic trick — a European magician has ripped off a trick made famous by Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller. (In this story, Teller speaks.) But soon the story rounds a sharp bend, and then another, and by the end it’s not clear if the trick is on Teller, Chris, the reader, or some combination of the three. I’ve emailed Chris about the story and I’m still not sure. But I am sure it’s an amazing feat of storytelling.
I’ve also, improbably, become friends with Michael Schur — former writer for “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live,” co-creator of Fire Joe Morgan, frequent Poscast guest, and, occasionally, Mose Schrute. Mike is now executive producer of “Parks and Recreation,” which tops all those other things (even Mose). “Parks and Rec” is something rare and remarkable — a comedy about nice people who like each other and care about the world around them. So many comedies center on jerks, or stupid people, or conflicts that would never happen in real life. That’s easy money. What’s hard is making a show that tilts the mirror just a little sideways, but is still cramp-in-the-side funny and earns its occasional moments of drama. I’m not sure “Parks and Rec” will ever be ranked with “Cheers” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” But it’s working the same ground. And it’s creating something beautiful.
Of all the music I never got to see live, I miss those great Memphis soul acts — Otis Redding, Sam and Dave — the most. Brittany Howard and the guys come as close as I’ve heard, and Brittany throws in a little Janis Joplin just to show off. “You Ain’t Alone” is the one that hooked me — if you don’t love this live version, me and you can’t be friends.
In many ways, the opposite of “Parks and Rec” — last season featured an Oxy-gulping villain, the murder of a thug named Devil, and a pig-butchering knife put to brutal use in the finale. But “Justified” also has dry, dark humor — it has to, it’s based on books by Elmore Leonard. And the characters are so deep and rich and well-acted that you’d watch just to listen to them talk to one another. Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder are fantastic, and Dickie Bennett’s hair — played by Jeremy Davies’ hair — should get a special Emmy every year. The new season starts Jan. 8, the day after the college football season ends. Somebody up there likes me.
OK, this is sports — but it’s also Bill Murray, and Bill Murray crosses all boundaries. Here’s the setup: Murray is co-owner of the Charleston RiverDogs, a minor-league baseball team in the South Atlantic League — or as most fans call it, the Sally League. The Sally League inducted Murray into its Hall of Fame this year, because when you can put Bill Murray in your Hall of Fame, that’s what you do.
So Bill Murray gets up to give his induction speech. He’s wearing a ridiculous outfit and he starts cracking jokes in exactly the way you would expect. But then he tells a story about the first time he saw Wrigley Field. And then he talks about the best corn dog he ever had. And then he gives the players advice that just happens to sum up his own life and career in one perfect Zen sentence: If you can stay light and stay loose and stay relaxed, you can play at the very highest level, as a baseball player or as a human being.
May we all love something in our lives as much as Bill Murray loves baseball, and may we all find our own ways to express that love. Happy New Year, everyone.
