R.I.P. Ian Holm

It’s taken me a couple of days to process the passing of Ian Holm. I find it difficult to explain what a strange and magical effect the great English actor had on my life, popping up every few years in one or another of my favorite films, only to be followed by years of silence. The first time I saw him was in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien, in which he played the duplicitous and tragically repressed science officer Ash. His performance was something of a revelation for me (even at the age of twelve, when I saw the movie three times in the theater). Understated yet mesmerizing, he held his own in one-on-one scenes with the beautiful and smart Sigourney Weaver (or maybe she held her own with him—it’s hard to say). Together, they sold the idea that these were real people on a real ship facing a real motherfucking monster.

The next big movie I saw him in was 1981’s Chariots of Fire, in which he played a different kind of character, the witty and eccentric coach Sam Mussabini, who trains the brilliant but self-defeating runner Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross). With a glittering eye and a shrewd glance, Holm’s Mussabini sizes up Abrahams both as an athlete and as a person, calculating how to soothe the young man’s hatred of racism (which matches Mussabini’s own) as well as his crippling fear of failure. It’s a performance of amazing subtlety and warmth, for which he won a BAFTA as well as a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars.

Is America Trapped in an Alternate Timeline?

Now that we’re in the third week of social upheaval after the murder of George Floyd, this old post of mine seems terribly relevant (alas)…

Bakhtin's Cigarettes

Because I’ve been a science fiction fan since I was knee-high to an astrodroid, it’s probably not surprising that, as a teenager, I got into Philip K. Dick. PKD was the Pied-Piper of mind-bending, counter-cultural sci-fi, and he’s been read and adored by countless millions of know-it-all geek teens and brainy stoner-types. I was but one.

When I was fifteen, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep because I’d seen its brilliant on-screen incarnation, Blade Runner, and became obsessed with it. Eventually, I moved on to more of his books. But the only other PKD novel one that made a significant impact on me was The Man in the High Castle. This was Dick’s (now famous) vision of an alternate-universe America in which the fascists won World War II. (I am told by reliable sources that the book has been adapted into a fairly good…

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“The Big Short”: A Tragedy in Five Acts

When Adam McKay’s The Big Short came out in 2015, it was a modest hit, earning a respectable 133 million dollars worldwide (70 million domestically). But for a non-fiction biopic with a large cast, a complicated story-line, and a nerdy subject, the fact that it did even this well seems amazing.

True, the movie had some “A-list” leading men (Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale), but they functioned as character actors, lost in the ensemble nature of the work, which was itself a complex mélange of styles and concepts. The dialogue riddled with abstruse financial terms like Collateralized Debt Obligation, Credit Default Swap, and International Swaps and Derivatives Association license. So, again, its success seems almost miraculous.

But then again, every great movie, in retrospect, seems like a kind of miracle—a fabulously unlikely combination of talent, inspiration, and sweat. The Big Short is, undoubtedly, a Great Movie. I own a copy of the film and have watched it many times, and each viewing reveals some detail I missed previously. The film is so dense and complicated that I felt the need to write about it.