Me And My Movie

This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency.  To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life.  I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret.

Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared:

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When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square.

I was expecting to like it.

I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get.

The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction.

Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship.  Top Gun is extra special to me.  That movie wasn't the first film I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which was the best movie theatre in Manhattan.  But it was the first movie I saw at the Astor Plaza after starting at JABberwocky.  Before, I was visiting the Astor Plaza.  After, I was living there.  And over the thirteen years that separated Top Gun from Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise had a misfire or two (Days of Thunder, Interview with the Vampire), but for the most part, he was hitting it out of the park every time up to the plate.  Rain Man, The Color of Money, Born of the Fourth of July, The Firm, A Few Good Men, Mission: Impossible.  Even Cocktail and Far and Away -- if you think they worked (and I did, at least at the time I first saw), they worked because of Tom.  The films were generally hugely successful at the box office.  They were also more often than not hugely successful artistically.  The directors or screenwriters included the likes of Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Tony Scott and Sydney Pollack.  All have made significant contributions to cinema.  And the co-stars?  Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Brad Pitt.  These movies garnered a lot of Oscar nominations for people besides Tom Cruise, whose artistic contributions to cinema over a long career are, I think, under-appreciated.

And then Cameron Crowe.  25 years later we still reference the classic scene in Say Anything of John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box to woo his girlfriend.  And in 1996 when Jerry Maguire was open, that classic scene was much nearer in the past.  There was a frisson to a new Cameron Crowe film.  But Say Anything was good on many levels, including the overall quality of the performances.  Not just John Cusack's defining performance, but the best performance from John Mahoney.  Forget Frasier.  Has Mahoney ever been better than Lloyd Dobler’s nemesis, the father who doesn’t want Lloyd dating his daughter.

For both Cruise and Crowe, their movies were often my soundtrack.   Working with music supervisor Danny Bramson, Say Anything and Singles were full of great tunes.  Bramson's one of the best at this. He also helped pick the music for the very lyrical Bull Durham soundtrack.  Rain Man had one of Hans Zimmer’s best scores.  The Color of Money was full of great tunes.  There were the soaring trumpet solos in John Williams’ Fourth of July score, and the jazzy piano of Dave Grusin’s music for The Firm.

So Tom Cruise was going to be in a Cameron Crowe movie.

Which was not just my soundtrack, but my life.

Jerry Maguire and I -- it turned out we were both agents who’d come to have issues with our bosses.

I’d been working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.  Scott  Meredith died.  The people with the clients and the money walked out the door to start their own agency.  A rich guy purchased Scott Meredith and had lots and lots of bad ideas, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn’t going to just agree with them all.  Working for Scott hadn’t been fun; I didn’t need to bend over backwards to work for another bad boss.  A year-and-some after the agency was sold, did I know the day I was fired, twenty years ago this month, that I was going to be fired?  No.  But when the office was being renovated in the summer of 1994, I wasn’t entirely joking when I told people I got a fax to have at home just in case the boss had other plans for me.

After Jerry wrote his mission statement, he knew there might be repercussions.  He knew just about the moment he hit “save.”  He didn’t know Sugar was taking him to lunch to fire him, but deep down, he wasn’t shocked by the news.

The phone jockeying that followed?  That was me, twenty years ago this month.  My boss, he didn’t care about my clients.  If he wanted my clients, he wouldn’t have fired me.  But boy, did I spend a lot of time on the phone in October 1994.  I had a $300+ phone bill that month.  Because even if I wasn’t competing with my boss, I was competing with the Scott Meredith guys that had broken off 18 months earlier, and any and every other option besides me that any of my clients might have had.  Jerry Maguire’s a movie.  In real life, I doubt there’d be the crying gymnast picking up the wrong line.  But in its essence, every moment Jerry spends on the phone that afternoon is entirely real.

I’m not sure if it’s me or Jerry who headed off to our own businesses with a bigger stock of naiveté. I talked to an accountant enough to understand I’d have self-employment tax weighing down on me whether I was actually making any money or not, but my “business plan” was a sheet of my Scott Meredith memo paper where I roughed out that I needed $24-25K in commission my first year, that I knew where half of it would come from, and that I would come up with the other half.  But honestly, I never thought much about doing anything else.  And while Jerry Maguire and I both settled into home offices, for me the home office was all I needed.  Jerry Maguire needed more. He had a much bigger income potential because he was representing big-time athletes, not a bunch of sf/fantasy authors that were little known outside their fields.  But he had champagne tastes.  He needed the fancy suits and the fancy cars and the ability to look rich and act rich and compete with Bob Sugar.  I was fine settling into my one bedroom and moving furniture around to make room for a desk (cheap do-it-yourself from Staples), a filing cabinet, and a hand-me-down copier from my parents.

So Jerry Maguire might have been nominated for five Academy Awards: Picture, Actor (Cruise), Supporting Actor (Gooding Jr. who won), Screenplay (Crowe) and Editing. It might have spawned a sea of catch phrases that are as or more enduring as Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box in Say Anything.  That’s not why we’re here watching Jerry Maguire today.  There are other favorite films of mine that have probably aged better which are even more iconic.

Here is why we’re here:

When I sat in the Lincoln Square on that Friday night in 1994, having paid full tariff for a Manhattan ticket at a time when my first choice was always the Saturday bargain matineee in Queens, my story was unfolding in real time with Jerry’s.  I laughed a lot.  Too much; I earned some weird looks from people in the row behind me who couldn’t fully appreciate the jokes, because who else but me really could?  But I squirmed a little bit.  I wasn’t sure how the health insurance bills were going to be paid, or when or if I’d ever get a big offer coming across my fax machine.  I was two years into starting a business that spent five years working its way out of neutral.  I was still hoping to have Jerry Maguire’s happy ending.  And today, there’s no better way to say I had that happy ending than to be able to share Jerry Maguire with you.
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And what would I say after seeing Jerry Maguire again this weekend?

I own DVDs and BluRays, but I don't do them.  They're there for decoration.  I live in New York City, there are lots of movies to see, and I don't sit in my apartment to do them.

Which means there are films I love that I see over and over again because they're easy to see.  As an example, if I wanted to see The Shining, I could do that lots between Kubrick retrospectives or midnight showings or whatever.  Jerry Maguire isn't one of those films.  I haven't actually watched it in a while.

And in my notes above, I underestimated it.  The movie has aged pretty well, and is even more iconic than I remembered.  The number of little bits of dialogue in this film that have taken on a life of their own goes so far beyond just "show me the money" or "you complete me."  I don't know how many of them Crowe made up and how many he'd heard and used, but so much of the movie is in popular culture 18 years ago because it's in this movie.

In 1996, I could most appreciate the movie's tonal accuracy for the stuff at the beginning.  I was two years off from my own phone jockeying.  Which still feels accurate from a twenty-year remove.  But now I can appreciate it for so much more, especially at the end of the movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Rod Tidwell has his big game and gets his big contract.  It's very Hollywood, with Tidwell taking a big hit and being knocked out and doing this whole dance and the terms of his contract are revealed as a surprise on an ESPN interview show.  But if you cut away all the Hollywood trappings, every emotional beat is right.  Jerry Maguire, walking around the stadium after Tidwell's big game, is pretty much feeling the exact same beats that I felt a year ago, watching Brandon Sanderson win the Hugo Award for "The Emperor's Soul," and then hanging out with Brandon that night going for a celebratory late night nosh.  It was so dead-on right that I found myself tearing up at the ending.  I hadn't expected that.

So Cameron Crowe's screenplay is a masterpiece.

It doesn't get the emotional beats of being an agent right just by chance.  It doesn't fill itself up with cultural references just by chance.  These perfect words don't write themselves.

The acting.  This I knew. Strangely enough, both Jay Mohr and John Mahoney have the same initials.  Both are better known for stuff on TV.  Both give their best performances in a movie directed by Cameron Crowe.  Ione Skye?  Renée Zellwegger?  Again, both probably have their iconic roles in a Cameron Crowe movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.  Same thing.  Lili Taylor is hiding out in Say Anything.  Donal Logue (Harvey Dent on Gotham) is hiding out in Jerry Maguire.  Cast long enough, any movie you do can have someone important doing an early role, but Crowe -- he seems to keep doing it.

What a darned good movie.

Cultural Affairs, February 2014

Even by the standards of early year movies, the start of 2014 has been full of a stunning array of must skip movies.

I will include in that list the surprise sensation of February, the Lego Movie,  Surprisingly good reviews, robust box office indicative of strong word of mouth, and if I hadn't been attending with a friend I would have walked out after ten minutes, or retreated to a quiet corner to read on my iPad while the film played,  Thus was just another boring superhero movie with overlong fight scenes, only with Legos. Even at the end, the movie didn't have any charm for me.  Everything is not awesome.

Non-Stop on the other hand was a nice action movie.  Liam Neeson lends gravitas and depth to the role of an air marshall being framed for a remarkably clever feat of airplane crime.  The movie is never terribly believable but is always just plausible enough that I was willing to buy in.  I have no idea how the bad guys got at the pilot, or now they fond out secrets about the people the bad guys were framing, or how the rhetoric of the bad guys matched up with their plot, or why everyone got to lounge around the crash landing site at the end, or any one if a thousand other things.  But the movie moves briskly, has a jaunty score, generated real suspense, and works.  It will do OK at the box office but deserves to do better than that, since it does more in its limited way to entertain than a handful of overlong over CGId over pretentious superhero movies that collect in a day the box office receipts that this will collect over a weekend,

A book just came out called Mad As Hell, which chronicles the making of the movie Network, which I saw in Montclair, NJ in 1976.  In conjunction with the book's release the movie was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, followed by a discussion between Keith Olbermann and the book's author, NY Times reporter and culture writer David Itzkoff.  The movie holds up well, as good or bad as it was when it first came out almost 40 years ago.  It's very relevant for the science fiction fan, since it's a movie that seemed like science fiction at the time but has essentially come true.  A newscaster goes a little crazy, becomes the initiator of the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" catch phrase, and is rewarded by going from fired to being the host of a nightly news loud with segments from a psychic produced live to high ratings in front of a cheering live audience. Until he decides to take on his corporate overlords when they are going to be taken over by the Saudis, which has consequences.

So it holds up, but that means that the first half or two-thirds of the movie are still pretty much brilliant, while the latter sections never quite work as well as the rest of it.  When Robert Duvall leads a meeting where the TV execs discuss killing the now-wayward newscaster kind of like they might discuss changing the producer or the set, it doesn't quite work the way the rest of the movie does.  This is about as near to happening today as the rest of the things the movie depicts were near to happening 35 years ago.  The conglomeritization of the TV business, the resultant pressure on the news departments to make money instead of being loss leader public services, the move toward reality TV, TV becoming a platform for the shrillest voices over the voices of reason.  All of these things seemed unlikely in 1976, especially perhaps to those closest to the events, but were in fact just days away from, one-by-one, coming to pass.  And the movie anticipates these events with scabrous dialogue and brilliant performances and keen vision in just about every way.  But the next step still seems tacked on.  It's so close to being real that it kind of almost seems like a piece with the rest of the movie, but honestly, deep down, my instinct tells me that this is where Paddy Chayefsksy, the screenwriter, went from being a visionary to being as desperate to find an ending for his movie as his characters were to find a way out of the Howard Beale dilemma, so he came up with this.

In any event, it's a film worth seeing if you haven't.

The book was short, so I decided I had hours enough in the day to read the entirety of it, so I did.  I would have enjoyed it more if the gym hadn't been incredibly uncomfortable.  I wasn't working out all that hard, but it was so hot and humid even by gym standards that it wasn't a fun few hours of reading and exercising.  The book Mad as Hell is kind of like the movie it depicts.  Solid for the first two thirds.  Gives good background on the auteur of Network, Paddy Chayefsky, as context for his development of the movie itself.  It serves some nice dish on the casting and production and artistic decisions in the film.  I even got a little teary-eyed at the climax of the movie's story, when Chayefsky invites Peter Finch's wife to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept his posthumously awarded Oscar.  But the aftermath of the movie,the part that takes us from the vision of Network to today's reality, falls flat.  It's full of too many quotes from the usual suspects to say "yes, work of genius, look what happened" when I feel like a slightly longer second act that talked about the actual of what happened would have been more meaningful.  Don't just have Keith Olbermann tell us how real it all is, but talk about how Keith Olbermann has worked for a variety of conglomerates that have undergone the come-to-Jesus moments about the importance of profit to the business of television for the suits that run the business.  Actuallly write, even briefly, about the real life suits that are like the suits played by Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty.  Actually show how Brian Roberts at Comcast is the third cousin twice removed of the Ned Beatty character, or compare and contrast Fred Silverman,, the person who was closest at the time the movie was released to being the real-life Faye Dunaway.

That book would have diverged a little bit more from being a book about the making of Network to being a book about something a little bigger than just that, but it would have been a more important book that way, more enduring in the manner of Network itself.

My other recent cultural activities include a documentary about the Broadway performer Elaine Stritch, which was worth seeing for a Broadway/Sondheim admirer like I kind of am but not so much for a wider audience than that, and the actual Broadway play Outside Mullingar, from the pen of John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt).  The play has a great cast.  Readers of my blog are most likely to know Debra Messing from Will and Grace, but a NYC theatregoer will know Brian F. O'Byrne or Peter Maloney every bit as well.  They act up an entertaining storm that kept me well enough amused.  But I've seen better from Shanley, including Doubt and his recent Storefront Church, and for a play about true love I felt the characters did a better job of talking about their true love than actually showing it in a way that made the outcome personal to me.  So, enh.

Awards Season

This is the time of year when my membership to the Museum of the Moving Image is worth it, when the film distributors with movies they want to have in the mix for awards season get busy with screenings.  And as a general rule, if I can make it to a screening I will, it sometimes means seeing movies I wasn't interested in paying for that are screening late in their run, sometimes movies I'm not all that interested in at all, and not as often as I'd wish something I'm hugely enthusiastic to be seeing.

In the "purposely missed in theatres" category, was last weekend's screening of Beasts of the Southern Wild at the Museum.  This film has had buzz dating back to Sundance in January, when the Variety review called it a "stunning debut."  Hence, I was anticipating it.  But when it actually opened, and I read more reviews, I was quite certain of the fact that there was little the movie would have to offer me. Which, essentially, turned out to be true.  The lead character is a young child in a rural black island called The Bathtub quite isolated from even though on the US mainland. In that way, it reminds me of a movie called Daughters of the Dust about the gullah off the Carolinas.  Which I'm shocked to see came out 20 years ago!  Well, I remember it, not for the right reasons but I remember it.  And the lead character starts the movie by burning down the trailer she lives in, while the trailer burns down she retreats inside a cardboard box in the burning trailer and starts drawing little whatevers on the inside of it.  i.e., the lead character even by standards of young children is kind of a stupid idiot.  Thereafter, I decided it would be better to "rest my eyes" than actively engage with the movie.  I can report from my half-hearted viewing that the movie is technically well made, in that sense it is a stunning debut.  It has a loud blaring soundtrack that I found to be annoying interruption of my efforts to "rest my eyes," which other than the whole basic idea of the thing is the worst part of the movie from those things that the director can control.  The director and very young and very precocious lead actress did a Q&A afterward, which was quite interesting.  And the director grew up in Sunnyside, not far from the first home of JABberwocky.  If the director picks a more engaging subject matter, I'd try another film from him.  But this one, it's the last sentence of the lead para that's more relevant than the "stunning debut" at the start of the lead:  " emotionally wrenching if somewhat meandering parable likely to register strongest among critics and cineastes."  And I don't often like movies that will register strongest among critics and cineastes.  Even though I am in some ways both, I often don't like those kinds of movies.  Another recent example, the quite dreadful The Master.

Then a few days later, into Manhattan's First & 62nd Clearview Cinemas for The Variety Screening Series presentation of Anna Karenina.  Let us count the strikes against this one:  Tom Stoppard is a critic's darling of a playwright and screenwriter who rarely writes plays or movies that I like; the director Joe Wright is a little more of a tough call, his Hanna was an interesting action thriller but his adaptation of Atonement was entirely off my alley; the book isn't one I've had any interest in seeing.  So this one, if I'm enjoying an apple I can be enjoying it for a long time, and in this case, there was around 45 minutes that I watched the movie while noshing on a stayman.  During this time, I could determine that (a) for better or worse, the movie wasn't very good, but at least it was very good in ways completely and distinctly different from Atonement, so certainly Joe Wright isn't just doing the same thing over and over, he's experimenting and daring and putting it out there (b) whatever he was trying to do, he was entirely in control of it, everything in the movie was of a piece and with thought and logic behind it, which also has to be respected (c) that he had no interest in speaking to anyone who hadn't read the book, because after 45 minutes I had very little idea who the main characters were or what their goals or motivations were, or what their relationships were to one another, in fact the entire movie was incoherent, quite gloriously and perhaps intentionally incoherent, but incoherent nonetheless (d) that the casting seemed entirely off, with all of the young faces hiding behind period clothes that always seemed to be worn just a little bit self-consciously hidden behind (for the men) beards that were just a little too fake it was a little bit Bugsy Malone, if you ask me.  Those things having been determine, I again made a decision to "rest my eyes" which I did for most of the rest of the film.  Star Keira Knightley and director Joe Wright did a Q&A after, and I found them less engaging than the Q&A after Beasts, but it did confirm that there was a mind behind the movie making decisions, not decisions I cared for, but on both instances at least some respect is to be granted.

Finally, Life of Pi, again at the Museum of the Moving Images.  This was a pleasant surprise to me.  The book isn't one I've been interested in, the director Ang Lee has done things like Brokeback Mountain that I liked a lot and things like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon that I liked not at all.  In a nutshell, the story is about a boy who gets stranded on a boat with a tiger for a very very long time.  In fact, this was a movie which I saw when I was kind of tired, but where I wanted to fight to keep awake, unlike the others where I was quite happy to tune out.  So what did I like:  The screenplay takes a nice approach to framing the story, it has a certain artificiality to it, but once you get past that it works.  The casting is impeccable, the Pi at many different ages are good, there's an off note to the writer talking to Pi in the framing sequence but that seems intentional, and a closing monologue where we are presented with an alternate version of the story is genuinely exceptional, an acting tour de force where the camera keeps coming in tighter and tighter on an actor quite marvelously in control.  It's a rare movie that I might actually suggest seeing in 3D, it's very well done, never obtrusive or in your face but quietly adding to the story in all sorts of ways.  In that same vein, it's a movie that's filled with CGI, you don't have a live zebra on the boat with a live tiger, but never once did the CGI have the computer game feel that one can associate with parts of Star Wars Episodes 1-3, or Peter Jackson's King Kong, or the Transfomers movies, or a gazillion other things.  You know it can't be real, but you can't see the wires or the fakery or anything, and you end up accepting it entirely.  The music, that gets a thumbs up.  My one real quibble was with the shipwreck scene, which I felt was full of water and effects and noise and sound and things happening, but which on a storytelling basis of what was happening to whom where was every bit as incoherent as Anna Karenina, and in contrast to James Cameron's Titanic, which is everything in a shipwreck scene that this one isn't.  Q&A with the screenwriter.  The Life of Pi is a keeper, and well worth seeing when it opens in theatres.

While I did like Life of Pi, I think I would like even more if it had been a movie called Pitanic, about a star-crossed young couple who reach the lifeboats on a doomed luxury liner -- only to find out that the lifeboat also has a tiger on board!  Can Jack and Rose survive the tiger long enough to reach The Carpathia?  It might be a 4-hour long movie, but what a movie it would be!!

Married Life

Seen at the Museum of the Moving Image, Riklis Theatre, at a preview screening on Thursday March 6, 2008. 3.5 Slithy Toads

I hadn't heard much about this movie before the screening invitation arrived, and I don't think I knew anything about the director at all, but with a very reliable cast that includes Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdam, how bad could it be? And the night was open on my calendar, and the price (free) was right. More than worth it; it's not a great movie but it's more than passable.

SInce this is an indie release that may not get everywhere, a quickie synopsis. It's set in 1949, in Seattle but could be pretty much any place, and Chris Cooper is a salaryman who'd like to leave his wife (Clarkson) for the alluring McAdam. He shares this news with his friend Pierce Brosnan, who narrates, and Brosnan tells us that he quickly has his eyes set on getting McAdam for himself. Cooper decides it would be kinder to poison his wife than to leave her, and she turns out to be having an affair of her own. It's a bit of a roundelay, with some tension, some laughs, some sex. And it's entertaining throughout.

What keeps me from liking it more is what I wouldn't have expected, which is the very reliable cast that isn't always here. It's hard to know how much of it is the fault of the direction and how much the fault of the actors, but there are too many off notess. Rachel McAdam in particular looks like she's playing dress-up in her role of the ingenue, and strikes off notes left and right. Chris Cooper seems ill at ease at times. There are moments when he's as powerful and solid as you would expect him to be, but others when he too seems to be playing dress-up. And it's a period piece, but Pierce Brosnan seems to be in a period all his own. Not in the time of the movie, not quite the contemporary Brosnan of, let's say, The Matador, but stuck in a kind of limbo state. I felt as if there were times when the script or direction wanted to drag Patricia Clarkson into a limbo state of her own, but she ends up being the most successful at finding a note and tone that sustains her performance consistently.

For all its flaws, I liked the playfulness of this movie much more than the stolid earnestness of the somewhat similarly intentioned Far From Heaven.

Passages

This week saw the death of Leonard Rosenman, who won an Academy Award for his work adapting the musical score for Stanley Kubrick's classic Barry Lyndon, among many other film score credits. Most of Rosenman's movies were, as the saying goes, before my time, and before the age of film music by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams and John Barry that I consider classic, but there's no denying the power of his cv. He was a major influence on films and film music. And Barry Lyndon is an utter masterpiece, one of the Kubrick movies that I simply need to see in a theatre every three or five years to re-make my acquaintance. Music is an important part of its power.

The screening I saw of the new movie Married Life (post to come) was the final program at the Riklis Theatre of the Museum of the Moving Image, which is embarking on a major expansion and renovation that will see the Riklis demolished. I won't miss it a bit. It was designed and built in the mid-to-late 1980s, and has all the joys of many sloped floor multiplexes of that era. The raking wasn't that good, so it wasn't pleasant to have the seats ahead of you occupied. Low ceiling, small screen size, chairs that don't rock or recline. It was a museum theatre, and has been tended to pretty much the entire time by an excellent projection staff, and it had a very good sound system that was not necessarily common to the '80s-era multiplex. But it will be so much nicer in two years to see movies in a new stadium-seating theatre at the Museum, and I shan't complain if the smaller screening room that will also be part of the expansion is just that, a smaller screening room. I saw a lot of movies at the Riklis, so it has a fond memory or two attached, but good bye, and good riddance!

Have you played Atari today

I'm not, I don't think, one of those addictive personalities, but if there's one thing that's always been able to put me away for hours it's Super Breakout.

So tonight I went to the groundbreaking ceremony for the expansion of the Museum of the Moving Image, terribly underdressed in my work-at-home clothes surrounded by politicos in suits, and kind of wondering why I bothered.  But after the ceremony, roaming the gallery and new since the last time I'd been on the 3rd floor (because when you're a member, and you go all the time, you never actually go; I go to see a movie, see it, leave) was an old arcade Super Breakout, and there I was, young again, boppin' away on my 2600.

I wasn't very happy at first.  The high score was 180, and I wasn't coming close.  The bonus came at 400.  But of course, an addiction is an addiction is an addiction, and I kept hitting for a new game, and slowly but surely the Super Breakout skills started to come back.  I finally got the high score, and decided to walk away.  But then I got around ten steps and turned back, because I hadn't gotten my 400 for the bonus game...  After I got myself a 500 and had proven I could still bring my game to the Super Breakout paddle, I finally tore myself away.  I'm still a little surprised I didn't keep hitting that new game button until every politico had left, and they had to drag my away.

This is why I like it that I have one of those 2000-era Atari in-a-controller emulators.  And this is why I never actually turn it on.  Because once I start in on that Super Breakout, I ain't stopping. This is also why it's not always a good idea for me to have Entenmann's holiday pop-ems, M&Ms or Doritos hanging around in large quantities.