OVP: The Rock (1996)

Film: The Rock (1996)

Stars: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, John Spencer

Director: Michael Bay

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our last entry on Saturdays with the Stars, Sean Connery's career got a new life in the late 1980's when he won an Oscar for The Untouchables and followed that up with a mammoth hit in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  These two films set up the course for the remainder of his career-Connery would still star in major action films, but would take on an advisory role, frequently the vaunted elder who would mentor younger, more "age-appropriate" leads like Richard Gere, Wesley Snipes, and in today's film, Nicolas Cage.  These movies were hits.  Much was made (we'll get there in a second) about how Connery really ended his career with a sluggish slump into retirement, but this ignores that during the late 1980's, 1990's & into the 21st Century, when Connery was being knighted and being named the oldest man ever to achieve the title of "Sexiest Man Alive" from People Magazine, Connery starred in a number of smash hit movies like The Hunt for Red October, First Knight, The Rock, and Entrapment.  While other actors of his generation like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando had, by-and-large, been relegated to old man dramas (and in more cases than not, cemetery plots), Connery was a box office draw in the way that men decades younger than him were and was talked about as a still-relevant movie star.

(Spoilers Ahead) Perhaps this is best boiled down by talking about The Rock, the biggest hit he had during this era (the film would make $335M, adjusted for inflation that'd be $709M, which is basically impossible to do today without it being established IP).  The movie itself is made by Michael Bay, who at the time would've been short-hand for crap (or at least was headed in that direction), and in the past decade, has been saved by Millennial film fans (nostalgic for an era when IP wasn't the only way to make a movie) as being more worthy-of-praise than he was at the time.  The movie makes little sense, and not just because its politics so closely resemble Bay's rather sketchy takes on Libertarianism.  We have Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Harris) holding Alcatraz hostage in hopes of securing $100M for the families of those who died in top secret missions.  He is holding dozens of hostages on the island (tourists who have visited it), and the government sends in a team of agents, though they're quickly boiled down to just two: Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), a chemical weapons expert with little field experience, and retired Captain John Patrick Mason (Connery), the only man to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.  The two team up to not only stop Hummel from detonating a chemical weapon that could destroy tens of thousands, but also to see if Mason can get his freedom, which is dangled as incentive but all involved know is just a ruse to get his help.

The real enemy in this movie, it's worth noting, isn't Harris's general, but instead FBI Director James Womack (played by John Spencer), and that's because you don't get a government that wants to help the people in a Michael Bay picture.  Even more so than Clint Eastwood, Bay's films are quintessentially glorious, tech-savvy propaganda for government incompetence.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing (lord knows there's a case to be made that government incompetence dominates our collective consciousness in the Trump Era, and has to a degree in every administration), but it also means that The Rock is a movie you don't really want to think about too much, as it becomes too ridiculous & frequently too absurd to consider it technically.  A lot of your mileage with the movie will depend on your take on Connery & Cage's unlikely friendship, and your tolerance for gratuitous violence.  The violence here is less artful and more just disgusting, and I will own that I don't think Cage & Connery work at all.  Connery's performances with Costner & especially Ford in the late 1980's worked better because there was a subtlety, a clear driving friction with which they can find common ground.  But Cage is not a subtle actor, and Connery can't seem to find any sort of chemistry with him...it just feels like they're making two different movies.

Connery would continue making films regularly until 2003.  He ended his career with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a bad superhero movie that made a lot of money, which hadn't been the case for some of Connery's most recent endeavors like Playing by Heart and The Avengers (for the record, not a superhero movie).  He retired, and with the weird exception of an animated adventure film, never made another movie despite entreaties to join later installments in the Indiana Jones & 007 franchises, dying in 2020 at the age of 90 from a combination of pneumonia & dementia.  Despite decades of trying to escape it, the first line of his New York Times obituary of course included the words "James Bond."

Next month we're going to talk about one of Connery's peers, someone who would dominate action films in the 1960's and especially the 1970's.  Like Connery he wouldn't really get the credit for being the fine actor that he was, but unlike Connery, he didn't seem to care, finding "selling out" a bit more palatable when one gigantic smash hit that changed his career's trajectory captured the public consciousness (and divided critics, both cinematic & political).

OVP: The Untouchables (1987)

Film: The Untouchables (1987)

Stars: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Robert de Niro

Director: Brian de Palma

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Sean Connery*, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to cover two Connery films today as I missed last week, but didn't want to short-change him, so we'll talk through both his time in the 1980's and, this evening, the 1990's.  Connery was, by the early 1980's, a movie star but not a consistent box office presence.  While he had made hits (Time Bandits dwarfed its production costs in 1981), nothing he had done had, quite frankly, approached what he had achieved with James Bond, and as a result Connery was talked into making his final installment in the franchise in 1983 with Never Say Never Again.  This was something he did without Eon Productions (traditionally the production house for Bond films), and he did so in a head-to-head competition with Roger Moore, who had Octopussy out that year.  Both films were huge successes at the box office, though Moore's film ended up on top.  Connery hated the experience, and stuck to his commitment to "never again" after this one (he would never appear in a Bond film again), and indeed wouldn't even make a movie for two years after this.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connery probably could've played his types of middling, increasingly aging rogues & fictional knights forever for the rest of his career, the memory of Bond so appealing to nostalgic movie producers who grew up idolizing him, but it was today's film that truly changed the course of his career & legacy.  The Untouchables is a film where Connery gets second billing to Kevin Costner, not remotely as famous as him at the time, but it was a smart move to choose a supporting part.  The Untouchables is a highly-fictionalized look at Eliot Ness (Costner), the federal agent who led the efforts to take down Al Capone (de Niro), and features Connery in a role as a rogue cop, one who is brought in as part of Ness's operation, which is ultimately successful in beating Capone (or at least sending him to jail), but (because this is a Brian de Palma film) not without a lot of very bloody corpses along the way.  Like most of de Palma's films, I struggled with this.  Costner's one of the blandest leading men of his era, gorgeous but blank-faced and rarely a compelling figure in the lead (and if we're judging solely on looks, Andy Garcia is even prettier than him at this point), and Robert de Niro is actively terrible in this movie, a hint of the many cash-grabs the acting icon would have in the decades to come.  The best part of the movie, for me, was Ennio Morricone's score (and that flawless Giorgio Armani tailoring).

Connery is solid, though, not nearly as good as he is in, say, The Man Who Would Be King, but he's winning and very good at embracing the role of "aging sexy guy who mentors a younger star," something that he'd started with Christopher Lambert in 1986's Highlander, and which would become the bulk of the remainder of his career.  For much of the catty press he took back in 1983 for Never Say Never Again, about how he and Moore were far too old to be believable as aging action stars bedding women young enough to be their daughters, it did feel like Connery's place as an action star would soon fade.  But here, he showed how well he could fit in-he was a tough guy, someone who was grizzled but had "one last go in him" and this would be something he'd ride for the next 15 years or so, but also would carve out for others like him.  Action stars, because of Connery's work in this and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a few years later, had a path for a second act, one with a lot of box office (The Untouchables was a massive hit, the sixth highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 1987, and made 3x as much as de Palma's now much-obsessed Scarface), so the paydays (and movie stardom) could continue even as the stunt work became less intense.

It also would define Connery's career because it made him one of the only action stars to date to win an Academy Award.  In the 1980's, with a lot of Golden Age actors aging to the point where they were near death, we saw a lot of the leading actors of that era winning "sentimental" Oscars.  Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Geraldine Page, Don Ameche, Paul Newman, & Jessica Tandy would all take home Oscars at the time, and with this movie, Connery would as well.  Connery's win is one that it's hard to fault the Oscars (it's cool that he won a sstatue, even if I don't know that I'm going to agree with them in the 1987 OVP), and certainly they did worse in the era, but it gave him a nobility that would become a trademark the remainder of his life, and gave him a further distinction over future James Bond actors none of whom (to date) have ever gotten so much as a nomination.

My Thoughts on the Harry Potter Trailer

To know me is to know that I have a few passions that sort of define my personality.  In fact, if you read this blog for longer than five minutes, you could catch most of them: politics, the Oscars, travel, Lost...and Harry Potter.  Literally everyone in my universe knows that I absolutely adore Harry Potter.  From where I am writing this, I have a sword of Gryffindor, a Hedwig statue, a wand diagram framed photo, a Remembral, a stack of Chocolate Frog cards, at least 30 books & editions related to the series, a Deathly Hallows nightlight, a Hogwarts pillow, a Sorting Hat, a sticker book, a Hogwarts desk lamp, a mini wand stand, a pair of Harry's spectacles, a wand from Univeral Studios, and a Platform 9 3/4 piggy bank.  And that's literally JUST in this room.  If you walked the house, you'd find dozens, if not hundreds more things from the wizarding world.  I read the books for the first time as a teenager, and fell in love with them, to the point where they became my whole personality for a long time (perhaps still are to a degree), adored every movie (saw literally every single one, including Fantastic Beasts, opening weekend, most of them multiple times), and even have a Harry Potter Christmas tree with just ornaments for the show.  I abhor the politics of JK Rowling in real life, her transphobia is unacceptable and cruel, and heartbreaking for anyone who understood the message of a series of books about being yourself, and finding your own chosen family to celebrate the real you (I sometimes wish she'd read the Harry Potter book instead of wrote them...it'd have been a better learning opportunity for her), but I'm too vested to pretend I don't love the world that she created.

I have been upfront about my particular disdain for the concept of the upcoming TV series, though, and talked about it before on this blog.  I think that remakes, as a general rule, are aggressively boring, even those that pretend to be good.  They fall into one of two camps: they're either "fine" and are overpraised for being able to successfully navigate a new story with modern storytelling techniques, or they're just cookie-cutter carbon copies of the original.  There are (very rarely) movies that work as remakes, sometimes better than the original, though those usually aren't recreating classics (think something like the new Dune movies), but by-and-large most remakes are not good, and are the far more criminal adjective: boring.

But at this point I won't pretend that I won't watch the series, at least initially.  Curiosity, rabid Harry Potter love, and societal expectations for making this so much of my persona have made that impossible (it's like how, on rare occasion, I think I should skip the Oscars because after months of winter some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder has taken ahold, and I just don't want to...but I always do because it would destroy a cultivated personality around said show).  I don't expect it to be good or for me to like it, but I want to see what's happening.  And so I watched the trailer with hesitance, but also because I wanted it to be good-I always want movies & TV to be good, it takes up too much of my life to hope for something else.

My initial apprehension, though, feels warranted after watching it.  The TV show, because of the billions of dollars that has been spent on the theme parks & merchandise related to the series already, looks aesthetically similar to the movies starring Daniel Radcliffe.  I'm not one of those fans who is super precious about this (I would surely compare the two, but I think artists need to be able to have a vision beyond corporate overlords to be able to work, which is why I think Prisoner of Azkaban, the most off-the-beaten-path of the original eight films, is the best one), and to be fair it's honestly the video game Hogwarts Legacy that felt more the inspiration than the movies (perhaps a warning sign that you're overdoing the CGI too much when your set looks like a video game), but this is close enough as to be indistinguishable from the world that Chris Columbus brought forth 25 years ago.  In the same way that the Disney Princess line is too lucrative for Emma Watson's Belle to suddenly show up in a bright red dress instead of yellow, no one is thinking outside the box so that the series can easily be incorporated into the theme parks.

There are moments, I will admit, that are genuinely interesting in the trailer, which I've watched a half dozen times by now.  I'm a firm believer that television and film are different (no matter how much people want to treat them as the same), and there are moments in the trailer that feel like we're allowing the story to have some breathing room, perhaps even getting out from under not just the films, but also the books.  A few that standout to me is the concept of Harry's solo relationship to Aunt Petunia, his maternal aunt (in the movies and virtually all of the novels, you only see Harry with Petunia-and-Vernon as a combined unit, which in real life would be impossible...he'd surely spend time with her without Vernon in the house on occasion, and given her complicated feelings for him, this feels like an interesting door to unlock), as well as scenes of the kids playing and Hagrid making a snow angel.  These feel like we're growing character, and having that dreaded concept of a "filler" episode (something that is severely lacking & needed in modern television).  What I want is something new, and (again), I'm very open to not just having the exact same experience.  People have pointed out this is a story for children, and today's children have not encountered this story before with kids their own age so it's "okay" they're remaking it in that regard, which ignores the fact that, say, one generation of kids got The Wizard of Oz and another got Wicked, or that Greta Gerwig's upcoming The Magician's Nephew is a completely different tale than the usual batch from Narnia.  Giving us something more, a grittier, more "you can see it in your daily life" spin on the story is easily the most enticing part for me...you need to give the audience unexpected, even if it's not what they say they want.

But so much of what I saw falls short.  It's not that they have cast bad actors.  John Lithgow, Janet McTeer, Bel Powley, Johnny Flynn...these are actors who have given strong, sometimes great performances in the past.  But they are competing against original creations that are very hard to move beyond, particularly given the confines of a very rigid storytelling that won't let us think about these characters in different ways (i.e. how Cynthia Erivo & Margaret Hamilton are playing the same character, but are doing extremely different spins on it which allows both to work).  Nick Frost comes across the worst of the bunch.  If you'll recall, I nominated Robbie Coltrane for a My Ballot Award for the first film, and did so for a reason.  He took a character with little bearing on the plot (Hagrid is beloved, but he's not consequential to Harry's journey other than to start it, certainly not in the way that Dumbledore, Snape, or even someone like Umbridge or Sirius Black are), and made it iconic, feeling like it's plucked from the pages of Rowling's novel.  Frost doesn't have the same imposing nature & the same deep voice as Coltrane did, and while you cannot judge a performance solely from a trailer (and Frost's past acting surely indicates that he has the ability to play goofy, which is necessary for Hagrid), it reads like cosplay, which will get insufferable pretty quickly in a TV series.  Spending 8-10 hours saying "this was better the first time" is a dreadful way to spend a weekend.

In many ways this resembles a Disney live-action remake-it gives you a sense of the wonder, but feels like a copy (and in this case, a copy-of-a-copy).  The book and film series were wonderful, and done correctly.  Unless you expand beyond them, it's impossible to really top them, even if you come close.  It's not just Frost.  Hans Zimmer has made many memorable film scores...but he ain't John Williams.  Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Jason Isaacs, Imelda Staunton, Stuart Craig...the movie series was just too good to work in comparison.  I mean this genuinely when I say I don't see the point of this.  It's clear they didn't want to try something new (like a story about the founders of Hogwarts) because between The Rings of Power and Fantastic Beasts, movie studios are terrified to try something new because the public never reacts in the same way (and doesn't spend the same amount of cash), and even when a series actually works outside of those confines (think things like WandaVision, Andor, and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian), they don't learn that lesson.  But I can't help, while watching this, to feel sad-that for the first time the original Harry Potter series is going to settle for "pretty good."  I will watch it, as I said above-not just because of societal obligation, but out of genuine curiosity & intoxication with this world...but I don't expect to love it.  And it's not because I'm no longer a teenager (to know me is to know that I can still muster a sense of wonder with the best of them), but because what I'm seeing...isn't magical.

5 Thoughts on Tuesday's Elections

I'm not letting Tuesday's primaries go without weighing in a bit, even if we're a day later than I usually get this out (I had lunch plans yesterday, and evening plans, and...well, I have a life, I ain't make excuses for it).  But here are where I stand after the elections on Tuesday, the biggest being in Illinois.

1. Juliana Stratton Wins the Democratic Primary

The biggest news of the night was in the Illinois Democratic Senate primary, where Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton emerged victorious, beating two members of Congress (Raja Krishnamoorthi & Robin Kelly).  Stratton's win, at least on paper, was something of a mild upset, as Krishnamoorthi had led in virtually every poll up until the last couple of weeks before the election.  In many ways, this mirrored the Maryland Senate primary in 2024, where an establishment favorite was taking on a congressman with a gargantuan amount of money (by all accounts, Krishnamoorthi has basically spent his entire time in Congress waiting for this moment, and still managed to fail spectacularly), and then lost when polls closed because there was more excitement around her candidacy (aided by the endorsement of the extremely popular Gov. JB Pritzker).  In both cases, a Black woman emerged victorious, as Stratton (given the strong blue tilt of Illinois) will surely become the sixth Black woman to serve in the US Senate come January.

It's also worth noting that Krishnamoorthi & Kelly's losses come on the heels of Jasmine Crockett losing a few weeks ago.  Three House members all losing in rapid succession, particularly given Angie Craig's precarious polling position and Haley Stevens being in a basically tied race in Michigan, has me wondering if Democrats are punishing House members & wanting new blood in Washington.  It's hard not to start drawing a pattern here, particularly given the polling love for people like Graham Platner in Maine as well.

Mayor Daniel Biss (D-IL)

2. Daniel Biss Takes on the Squad (and AIPAC)

The other big story of the night was Daniel Biss in the 9th district, which is open due to Rep. Jan Schakowsky retiring.  Biss was seen by many (including me) as the heavy favorite, particularly given his noteworthy run for Governor in 2018 and his longtime tenure as a local politician (serving as both a State senator and mayor of Evanston).  His margin, though, was honestly kind of pathetic given how many advantages (the entire Democratic establishment backed him), as he only beat liberal activist Kat Abughazaleh by under 4-points.

Biss's win was in part a victory over the Squad (who had gone hard behind Abughazaleh), and in part a rebuke of AIPAC (which had heavily backed State Sen. Laura Fine, who came in third).  This makes it seem like he was a centrist or moderate choice, which is insane (Biss is very liberal, and will likely become one of the most progressive members of Congress when he's sworn in in this Harris +36 district), but more so that he kind of just wasn't that impressive of a candidate (and maybe his loss to JB Pritzker wasn't just about Pritzker's dominance, but also his own failings as a retail politician), and there was a win on the table for Abughazaleh if she'd been a better candidate.  That said, this seat is likely off the table for a while for someone like Abughazaleh.  Biss is only 48, and incumbents continually prove near-impossible to beat in Democratic primaries, so it's unlikely he'll have much issue in two years.

Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL)

3. Melissa Bean Returns to Congress...

Incumbents are also challenging to beat when they aren't even incumbents, I guess.  Melissa Bean, whom some will remember as being the Democrat that finally beat Phil Crane in 2004 (just to lose to arch conservative-turned-liberal convert Joe Walsh) became the first former member of Congress to win a primary to take back their old seat this year.  The 64-year-old Bean will have no problem winning this seat in November, though it remains to be seen what kind of a congresswoman she'll be.  Bean struck a very moderate profile when she was first in office, but her seat has changed pretty dramatically, and isn't the swing seat it once was.  While she might still stay moderate, she won't be able to be so too strongly without putting her left flank at risk in a primary.  Then again, it's also not clear how long Bean, who made a fortune in between her congressional runs working for financial institutions, wants to serve in Congress.  At 64, this could be something she's looking to do indefinitely, or something she just wanted to prove she could do.  Either way, she'll be part of a likely blue House majority in November.

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)

4. ...While Jesse Jackson, Jr. Does Not

She will not be joined by her former colleague in the House Jesse Jackson, Jr., though, as he came in a distant second to Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller on Tuesday.  Jackson was considered by most to be the frontrunner here, but he had little establishment support, with Miller and State Sen. Robert Peters splitting the establishment and left flank endorsements.  This was driven in part because Jackson was found guilty of wire and mail fraud in 2013 (it's the reason he had to resign from the House in 2012), which most people did not want to have their names associated with even though Jackson's name recognition, particularly days after his revered father's funeral, might have otherwise gotten him the victory.

It's worth noting that Jackson Jr. spent a rather memorable part of his eulogy for his father publicly chastising Presidents Clinton, Obama, & Biden, saying they "do not know" his father.  While his brother Jonathan (who is a sitting member of Congress already, and won his primary on Tuesday), chose to keep silent on such personal feuds, his brother did not, and you have to wonder if insulting the well-regarded last three Democratic presidents in such a blue primary was, even in a moment of grief...ill-advised.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA)

5. Warning Signs in Virginia for Redistricting

Most of the news on Tuesday came out of the Land of Lincoln, but not all of it, and not all of it was good news for the Democrats.  In a Trump +15 open General Assembly district in the Old Dominion, Republican Andrew Rice actually outperformed Trump by 10-points, a pretty impressive margin, and running counter to virtually every other narrative right now that has the Democrats looking at a blue wave.  This feels, to me, like a rejection of the recent move from the state legislature to redistrict the state, essentially gerrymandering Virginia to give the Democrats a probable path to a 10-1 majority, netting four seats, and potentially a House majority with it.  If you're Abigail Spanberger or Hakeem Jeffries right now, you're seeing this overperformance and have to be worried that the Democrats may have overshot their hand, and will have very public egg on their face if this doesn't pan out (not to mention high-profile congressional candidates like Shannon Taylor, Dan Helmer, Dorothy McAuliffe, and former House members Tom Perriello & Elaine Luria, who until Tuesday were probably already buying new drapes for their future offices, and are now in a situation where their blue districts are extremely at risk).  Much to watch here, but Democrats are likely to overspend & send in the A-Team (expect Obama, Harris, & AOC to start campaigning) given how much is at stake.

My 2025 Oscar Ballot

All right, it is the 98th Academy Awards tomorrow, and while I have never been able to do this before, thanks to efficient viewing (and, let's face it, seemingly less films at year-end that I have to track down...it does with each passing year feel a bit like Hollywood's output is getting smaller), I'm going to do something I've never done before: release the My Ballot Awards before the Academy Awards for that year.  If you haven't already seen it, check out the Oscar Viewing Project article I did for this year here, where I pick solely based off of Oscar's choices, but for those uninitiated, the My Ballot Awards are where I turn the tables and pick who I think should've been nominated for (and won) the awards that year.  Given that Oscar is adding a new category this year to the OVP (the Best Casting prize), I will be adding that as well, but that is the only change you'll see (also a reminder that for Animated Feature Film, I only pick three nominees & honestly think Oscar should do the same).  As a reminder for these awards, while I have seen all of the Oscar-nominated films in the narrative, feature-length categories (including Best International Feature Film, which I don't pick here but do see all five nominees), I can't see every film.  If you have a question about "why wasn't X included?" you can check to see if I've seen it yet by following me on Letterboxd here, or by sounding off in the comments (I do take recommendations).  With that said, here is our 32nd (we are one year away from being a third done with this project, and for the curious that year will be 1964 which I'm working on ardently).  Enjoy!

Editor's Note: A quick reminder that these My Ballot Awards, like the Oscar Viewing Project, are done entirely in a vacuum...I don't take into account people being overdue, an artist's personal life or politics, or if they've won before, just solely based on who was the best in that specific category.  There are times when you might put the hand on the scale for such things, but this project is not one of them.

Picture

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Black Bag

Hamnet

Jay Kelly

The Life of Chuck

The Mastermind

Materialists

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Twinless

Gold: About once a decade Oscar & I match up, and if One Battle After Another wins tomorrow (which I'm predicting it will, even if I'm not certain about it), we'll have our first overlap since Moonlight in 2016.  Paul Thomas Anderson's crackling, relevant look at a dictatorial USA and the way that it treats its citizens through a frequently comic lens is the sort of film you can watch and know it will become a classic.

Silver: In second, we have Chloe Zhao (who also got second in 2020) doing her thing once more, showing the meditative search for meaning in a world that offers little (and yet, offers it aplenty if you allow it to come in).  Hamnet is a thoughtful and heartbreaking look at what we give to our children, knowing that love cannot be taken back once it's given, even if fate or cruel destiny intervene.

Bronze: If there's a movie this year that is going to eventually be a "I knew this was great before anyone else did" picture, it's Black Bag, which had critical love early this year but got not a single Oscar nomination, something you'll find I rectify for this sleek, sexy thriller many times over in the coming categories.

Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another 

James Cameron, Avatar: Fire and Ash

Kleber Mendonca Filha, The Secret Agent

Steven Soderbergh, Black Bag

Chloe Zhao, Hamnet

Gold: Paul Thomas Anderson and I got off to a rocky start (I will own that I was one of those people who didn't really get into Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love is not a movie I reference regularly as a favorite).  But I've been kinder to him than Oscar has in the years since (he got Best Director from me in 2012, and Best Screenplay in both 2012 & 2021), and this being his magnum opus, I cannot deny him his laurels.

Silver: There is a part of me that wishes I had room for Chloe Zhao's beautiful use of nature in Hamnet.  A film that is about the stage, a place literally alien from the natural world, seems to feel such an odd place for us to connect to the quiet, but that is how her camera moves, pushing us into the sphere outside our homes.

Bronze: We're going 3/3 with the same medals for all three films, something we generally don't do (even with a voter of one), and there was part of me that debate giving this to Cameron for his gigantic expansion of the planet of Pandora.  However, I cannot deny the tension-building cosmopolitan spy ring he has crafted for Black Bag.

Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another 

Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

Paul Mescal, Hamnet

Dylan O'Brien, Twinless

Josh O'Connor, Wake Up Dead Man

Gold: Easily the best of the four acting lineups (and maybe one of the best lineups I've pulled together for Best Actor), I was torn between all three medalists, and at times felt all of them deserved the gold.  I'm going, though, with the unlikely choice of Dylan O'Brien, whose beautiful dual performance (of very different, and yet connected, twins) gives the film so much of its fire (and is the source of James Sweeney's obsession).

Silver: Leonardo DiCaprio is too big of a movie star to be positioned for a "comeback," but for an actor who has been nominated for six acting trophies so far in the My Ballot (if you want to see past contests, I have links to all of them at the bottom of this article, but know we haven't gotten to his Gilbert Grape and Titanic era quite yet), and he's giving some of his best work here as a neurotic, baked-out revolutionary who is trying to find his footing in the political chaos while also being a good parent.

Bronze: Speaking of "trying to be a good parent" we have Paul Mescal, our most consistent movie star in the 2020's (give or take his fellow nominee Josh O'Connor who could've been nominated for multiple movies this year without any shame), giving us a unique take on the Bard, one that feels appropriately selfish, lusty, and heartbroken.

Actress

Cate Blanchett, Black Bag

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Dakota Johnson, Materialists

Amanda Seyfried, The Testament of Ann Lee

Emma Stone, Bugonia

Gold: Mescal's romantic partner in Hamnet is our gold medalist, playing a sort of bewitched version of Anne Hathaway, one whose performance really comes to life as the film progresses.  In the final theatrical production scene of Hamnet, we see an openness to the world, which Buckley plays not just as a way for her to be able to connect to her dead son, but also to a community-at-large that shunned her.

Silver: Emma Stone has yet to get an acting gold medal from me, but lord knows she's trying, playing every part the way that Meryl Streep did in the 1980's or Jane Fonda did in the 1970's-as if it's an event.  Her terrifying embodiment of a toxic girl boss (the 5:30 PM scene will send chills down the spine of everyone who's ever worked in corporate America and had that boss), makes her the only person who can escape the preposterous nature of the film's final moments.

Bronze: I debated pretty hard between Seyfried and Blanchett for the final medal (Dakota is just happy to be here), which is hard to do given this is a very divergent pair of performances, but I ended up picking Amanda's Ann Lee.  I think what she does here is so fully-committed, not just to the unique vision of Mona Fastvold's musical, but also to the selfless egoism that it takes to believe you might be a deity.

Supporting Actor

Tom Burke, Black Bag

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

Noah Jupe, Hamnet

Jack O'Connell, Sinners

Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

Gold: Sean Penn is one of those actors who is almost certainly crazy (and would've gotten fired a lot more in a different field).  He's also an actor of great talent who frequently overacts or gets cast in bizarre roles.  But damn it if he isn't selling the hell out of his racist military man in One Battle After Another, playing appropriately over-the-top a cruel embodiment not just of hate, but its close sibling stupidity.  Those "greatest actor of his generation" plaudits he got in the 2000's sometimes feel deserved with work this good.

Silver: Tom Burke suffers from me giving this to Penn, as this is the closest in my mind of the four acting prizes between Gold & Silver.  Burke's role here, as a drunk, sexed-up (but charming) louse is marvelous, the best performance in a film brimming with them, and I love the way that years of stealing scenes with such a part culminated in this.  Can't wait for the role that is going to inevitably get him on Oscar's radar.

Bronze: A comeback of sorts for Benicio del Toro, who took the My Ballot gold medal from me in 2000, and hasn't been back since.  In a very quiet, limited bit of screen-time in One Battle After Another, he leaves an intense impression of a man you know will survive even as everything else is crumbling around him.

Supporting Actress

Marisa Abela, Black Bag

Glenn Close, Wake Up Dead Man

Regina Hall, One Battle After Another 

Amy Madigan, Weapons

Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Gold: Giving the best performance of her career, Amy Madigan's Aunt Gladys is a spooky creation to haunt the dreams, and a turn that belongs alongside Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby and Kathy Bates in Misery.  So much of the role is rounded in a cartoonishness, the garish way we look past aging women who try to show a bit of life and heap pity on them, that her big scene where she shows her plan feels all the more horrifying.  We all would fall in her wake.

Silver: You'll note that I don't have lead performances nominated in my supporting fields (Paul Mescal is where he's supposed to be), and what that opens up for us is the ability to nominate true supporting work that doesn't have a lot of screen-time, but is vital for a movie's success.  Such is the case for Regina Hall, a longtime comedic champ who aces this dramatic part, giving us a woman decades into the trenches, jaded but still nervous enough to feel fully vested.

Bronze: Teyana Taylor gets One Battle After Another its fifth & final acting medal (Chase Infiniti, for the curious, was sixth in Best Actress, so One Battle After Another nearly took up 30% of the performing nomination slots).  I loved the impression she made-Taylor's part is tricky, as she's virtually absent past the film's first hour, and needs to leave a long shadow for us to keep thinking back to how she plays a part in what's happening in the "present."  Taylor plays her so commandingly that's not a problem.

Adapted Screenplay

Hamnet

The Life of Chuck

One Battle After Another

Pillion

Wake Up Dead Man

Gold: So far every year of the 2020's the Best Picture winner has also taken a Best Screenplay gold medal, something I really hope gets disrupted (no category should have a cheat code to winning a tech category-it should always feel fluid).  But I'm picking in a vacuum, and in a vacuum the best script of 2025, filled with humor, observation, & terror, was One Battle After Another.

Silver: And this means, yet again, that Chloe Zhao must take a silver medal to Paul Thomas Anderson's gold, with Hamnet getting the second place here.  I have not read either source material, but given Hamnet in many ways feels so cinematic, almost to the point where it's too abstract to be written prose, I do wonder if Zhao's task might've been even more challenging than PTA's (though PTA is translating Thomas Pynchon so let's just call it a draw).

Bronze: And we'll end it with a bit of Stephen King, who had a banner 2025 (I nearly nominated The Long Walk here as well which (imho) is the best movie of 2025 I didn't find room for in a single category...weirdly both movies also starred Mark Hamill in very different turns).  The Life of Chuck is Mike Flanagan putting a bit of wonder alongside a solid dose of life-affirming sentimentality that I can't help but be consumed by.  The script's look at how we value our memories (and how we live in them) is so great (and that Tom Hiddleston dance number is one of the few moments this year where I was crying and smiling while watching at the same time, the best feeling a movie can provide).

Original Screenplay

Black Bag

Jay Kelly

Materialists

Sinners

Twinless

Gold: We are able to look beyond One Battle and Hamnet for a moment, and that's going to give the warped mind of James Sweeney a chance to shine.  In Twinless, we are given a tale of obsession, a friendly and sometimes sexual obsession, where Sweeney is driven mad over dual Dylan O'Brien's, an understandable feeling he turns into a harrowing thriller.

Silver: With Black Bag, we have a thriller as well, one more conventionally situated in the world of espionage, but one that is as much about the sexual dynamics (and the competitive angles) that come from marital love.  Soderbergh continues to be one of the best screenwriters for ensembles, making sure every part of this play feels rich & full.

Bronze: Longtime character actress Emily Mortimer joined Noah Baumbach in writing Jay Kelly, a movie that was totally in Oscar's wheelhouse and yet he didn't seem to care.  But I cared, and thought the way that they handled it, with a man at the crossroads of his life as he enters what he knows will be the last chapter of it.  I love the ways that it plays with age, showing that even as we get older, even with the fullest of lives, it always feels too short.

Animated Feature Film

Elio

Little Amelie, or the Character of Rain

Zootopia 2

Gold: I hate to start out any section like this, saying "this was a weak year" for a category as it feels like such a back-handed compliment to the movies being honored, but...this was a weak year for this category (not the only category I'd say that about either-Cinematography & Costume have both had better days).  Of the contenders, though, the one that spoke to me the most was the dazzling colors and thoughtful looks at grief in Elio, the best Pixar has been since at least Luca.

Silver: Another film that is weirdly centered on grief, though here it feels more at-home in a far more grown-up tale, is the Oscar-cited Little Amelie, proof that that Oscar does some good (I wasn't likely to have seen this otherwise), and I loved the ways that it shows how childhood echoes with you the remainder of your life.

Bronze: The first Zootopia movie was a delicious breath-of-fresh air, a mystery that told us a tale about racism that also was some of the best world-building I've ever seen from the Mouse House.  With that starting point, Zootopia 2 is merely just fun.  I wish it had had the guts to be a romance (given the box office numbers, I'm sure it will get there soon), but instead we just got more of a good thing.

Sound Mixing

F1

The History of Sound

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Warfare

Gold: In many ways "I Lied to You" was the scene of the year.  Sinners surely got most of its critical plaudits from this scene, and if/when it takes Sound at the Oscars tomorrow (it's in a tight race with the #2 on this list), it will be because of this scene, a jammed, ethereal look at the Black experience through music (with an impending horror movie about to take place).

Silver: Coming behind it is F1, a movie whose Sound Mixing is so compelling it could beat the most-nominated film in Oscar history.  Here it's a bit of a combination of experiences for Mixing vs. Editing, and some of that work is the way that it incorporates the score on-top of real-world sounds, but they also do a fantastic job of filming in cars so that you get that actual authentic rev & beat of the engine.

Bronze: One of the reasons I still keep these categories separate for these write-ups long after Oscar gave up on such things is that you get a movie like The History of Sound, which has almost no sound editing to speak of, but is a rich, beautiful look at music & nature.  You hear these two men falling in love, feeling each other through decades of song and the odes that bind us across communities.

Sound Editing

Avatar: Fire & Ash

F1

Nouvelle Vague

Tron: Ares

Warfare

Gold: That being said, F1 may have fine mixing, but it's a sound editors' wet dream.  The cascade of multiple cars, told across speeding raceways (oftentimes on different types of material), you are transported into this world that hundreds of millions devote their fandoms toward.  The strength of F1 isn't just in the lead performances from Pitt & Idris, but also in how it fills your aural canals so you're in the driver's seat.

Silver: Decades into Pandora, it's hard to top what we've already experienced, and yet...James Cameron knows his way around gushing water and (in something of a new twist) a land of fire.  The flame-filled battles and conflicts of Fire & Ash make it a fitting ending (even if that's not what we're getting...someone free James Cameron from this franchise please so I can get one more original idea from him before he goes), and one where the sounds are nearly equal to the visual effects.

Bronze: "War is hell" is a trope nearly as old as war films themselves, and so to say something new about it is nearly impossible.  But Warfare's take (not that it's cliche or a revelation, but instead that it's just pointless) is translated through the sounds of war, the omnipresent bullets and the surgical dicing that takes place in this picture in the most graphic scene at the picture's halfway point.

Note: Unlike the Oscars, for the modern My Ballot, I continue to keep the two Sound categories separate, rather than combine them like Oscar did since 2020.  If you want a direct comparison for the record, if I had combined them, I would've nominated: Avatar: Fire & Ash (Silver), F1 (Gold), The History of Sound, Sinners (Bronze), & Warfare.

Score

Hamnet

Jay Kelly

The Mastermind

Materialists

One Battle After Another

Gold: First a plug-we need to demand that major, wonderful film scores are available on streaming & physical music channels just as much as we do movies.  And that is more-than-true for something like The Mastermind, a movie with jazz-filled touches that will make you spend most of it wondering what 1940's legend did all of these recordings...only to realize this is somehow a 2025 creation.

Silver: That is not true for all of Hamnet, which has at its most critical moment a 20-year-old recording from Max Richter that might (in some worlds) disqualify it here.  But I do not have such qualms (I nominated Alexandre Desplat for this prize for The Tree of Life despite such reservations), and the rest of Hamnet is so good "On the Nature of Daylight" feels more like a cherry on a sundae than the main course.

Bronze: Richter, Jonny Greenwood, and Nicholas Britell feel like they are filling the backgrounds of all 2020's movies, the best of the best of this decade, and so it should surprise no one that with all three nominated, I'm going to give a second of them a medal.  In this case it's Britell, whose lush, sometimes too much (but it fits the plot so that works) score in Jay Kelly gives the film so much of its cinematic gilding.

Original Song

"Golden," KPop Demon Hunters

"I Lied to You," Sinners

"Our Love," The Ballad of Wallis Island

"Song For Henry," On Swift Horses

"Waiting on a Wish," Snow White

Gold: Hypocrisy, thy name is John.  I spend so much time complaining about how Oscar just nominates end credit songs for his films (this year, he did it three times), and here I have a quartet of songs that were performed in the movie, frequently as big musical numbers or in guiding the plot of the picture.  And yes, I'm going to still give the gold to the melodic "Song for Henry," perhaps the tune I listened to the most this year and shaped an otherwise kind of phoned-in movie in ways that made it feel far better than it actually was.

Silver: The best actual song scene of the year, though, was "I Lied to You," one of the best scenes of the year.  As a stand-alone piece of music I don't know that it feels in the same league as my personal tastes (I love the blues, typically, so this is more me going on vibes & what I like...I'm a movie guy, not a music guy) for some of the other songs, but damn if this (still solid) song doesn't work magic in Sinners.

Bronze: Do not come at me, KPop Demon Army.  I know I didn't nominate your (very average) picture for Best Animated Feature Film, but I am not incapable of enjoying the bouncy beats of your picture.  Part of me is still a little mad I couldn't put the infectiously ridiculous "Soda Pop" in as a nominee (it was in sixth), but at least the electric "Golden" will turn a lovely shade of bronze.

Art Direction

Avatar: Fire & Ash

Black Bag

F1

The Phoenician Scheme

Sinners

Gold: Art Direction means not just the buildings, but also the way that we build the sets and even the props that are happening onscreen.  I'm more inclined to celebrate this all-encompassing nature with movies like F1, meticulously giving us a world of shiny, flashy cars and curated quiet luxury that feels at once astronomical and realistic (for these people's bank accounts...not yours).

Silver: Behind it is a more conventional type of quiet luxury.  The posh office spaces, curated intellectual designs & fashions of Black Bag also give off the aura of "you can't afford this," which is character-building.  These people are sexy, smart, and dangerous (even to themselves).

Bronze: I am not someone that automatically name-checks every single Wes Anderson movie in the tech categories (though he's shown up before a few times), but when he gets it right, he really gets it right, and as you're about to see in the coming paragraphs, I was sold on the world-traveling aesthetic of The Phoenician Scheme, another in his increasingly personal string of 2020's films.

Casting

Black Bag

Hamnet

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sinners

Gold: The first year of doing this category, I feel a bit lost on how to grade this, but am going to give it a shot, kind of using the criteria of inventive casting, a solid ensemble feel, and making sure the performances match the script.  In this case, Hamnet is the top of the list.  Emily Watson's wonderful doom, two top-of-their-game leads, and the stunt casting that totally works of the two Jupe brothers playing mirror images of themselves is really well done, and a worthy inaugural gold medalist.

Silver: Behind it, though, is Sinners, a true ensemble movie where every character feels well-cast, and perhaps most crucially, doesn't necessarily rely upon known names to fill out every player in the plot.  When you have people online name-checking minor characters the way they do in major blockbusters, you're doing something right, and that's the case with Sinners, where the whole cast feels like we're in the same place.

Bronze: One Battle After Another can't get ahead of Sinners in part because it does cast big names (save for Chase Infiniti in a star-making role).  But even if the call-sheet has three Oscar winners and several prominent character actors, that doesn't mean that every part doesn't fit like a glove for these performers, and in some cases (particularly DiCaprio) it's spinning on its head their star persona.

Cinematography

Anemone

Black Bag

F1

Hamnet

Train Dreams

Gold: Sometimes movies feel like they're being made solely to have us marvel at gorgeous camerawork.  That doesn't always make for terrific filmmaking, but this category isn't Best Picture, now is it?  And Train Dreams is one of those movies, a film that looks at nature from every angle, and also quietly (I cannot believe a movie that requires you to put your phone down this much is on Netflix) gives us a changing sense of technology as we're going.

Silver: You spend all of Black Bag aware of light.  In an industry where most cinematographer's default is to have half of the screen as dark as possible to hide the CGI (looking at you, Sinners), this film has candle-glowing dinners, the natural light of a London sky, the soft humming interior lights of an office...all of this feels at once authentic and cinematic, something we should see more of on the big-screen.

Bronze: We're in our longest Terrence Malick drought this century, and it's getting to me as an ardent admirer of his work.  Not only did I shortlist Train Dreams (clearly paying homage to him), but I also have to include Hamnet (weirdly left out of this list with Oscar), a movie that uses natural lighting throughout, but also gives us a green sense of the English countryside, allowing us the same connection to it that Jessie Buckley's lead character feels throughout.

Costume

Black Bag

Kokuho

One Battle After Another

The Phoenician Scheme

Wicked: For Good

Gold: I am not afraid of contemporary design if it's done well, and this is a field where, quite frankly, you're seeing a lot of contemporary design honored.  Part of what makes Black Bag work is the quiet luxury angle.  We need to feel like these people aren't real...there's a level of authenticity in the performances, but these people are not just like you and me.  That's translated in the leather jacket and black jumpsuit Cate Blanchett wears while potentially committing treason (the jacket costs $5k if you want to try to emulate it), or in the black form-fitting turtlenecks in which Michael Fassbender instills a sense of "you'd fuck him too" vibes.

Silver: On the flip side, One Battle After Another does give us that realism.  Not only do we get Leo wearing that "retired dad" flannel night shirt & stocking cap that counters with the effortless cool of Teyana Taylor's character earlier in the film (hell, she wears the same outfit earlier in the picture and gives off totally different vibes), but we get to see that same sense of style in her daughter...even though they haven't met.  Talk about story-building through clothing.

Bronze: If you want to get into something more traditional (i.e. period or fantasy) with the third medalist, I'll give you that.  Costuming goddess Milena Canonero gives us the alabaster white nun's uniform, the impeccable suits and Scarlett Johansson's napkin-checkered shirt with sky high shorts in The Phoenician Scheme, every outfit feeling like a shorthand introduction for the audience to these characters.

Film Editing

Black Bag

Hamnet

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sinners

Gold: Balancing multiple plot lines, told decades apart, is the sort of thing that most filmmakers can't handle, and they get lost in the editing room where we stop caring about what happened before since it's not happening now.  But that's not how One Battle After Another works.  Instead, we spend it recalling, wondering how this story will be told in full, a 2.5-hour tale that doesn't once let up or make you want to look at your phone for the time.

Silver: Thrillers live-and-die in the editing room, and that's the case with Black Bag, a movie that always seems to be aware of the giant elephant in the room, whether that's a dinner party where we know a lie is about to be exposed, or something grander, like a literal ticking clock counting down if a man can trust his wife.

Bronze: Part of the genius of The Secret Agent (a great movie I really wanted to put into our stacked Best Actor field, and I'm feeling bad only got one medal in this whole article, but that's how it goes in the best year for movies since 2017) is that it is telling so many tales at once.  You have a seemingly arbitrary tale of a shark coming in at points, as well as looking back-and-forth as this story is told from the vantage of decades after-the-fact, and yet still feeling like a proper mystery.

Makeup & Hairstyling

Frankenstein

Kokuho

The Phoenician Scheme

Sinners

Weapons

Gold: The makeup effects in Kokuho are some of the best I've seen in a long time.  Usually when Oscar cites a random film out of nowhere, I roll my eyes and give it three stars because it's not that impressive...here, he outdid himself, not just giving us mountains of character-telling Kabuki makeup, but also some of the most impressively realistic aging makeup I've seen onscreen.

Silver: The Phoenician Scheme does what Wes Anderson does best-gives us a sea of the most famous actors working today, and lets them play pretend.  That shines in the way that we get a quirky business tyrant in Benicio del Toro, debonair (you can see a bit of Howard Hughes here) but still consistently ruffled, along with the gaudily over-enunciated nun played by Mia Threapleton.  It's makeup that not just tells a joke, but also looks good.

Bronze: Sometimes you get a nomination just from one creation in this field (indeed, that's true of two of these nominees), and no character this year was quite as singular as Aunt Gladys.  The way that we unfold her in three acts, a gigantic orange clown, a spooky under-the-mattress freak show, and then a stripped-down monster...it's Madigan working hand-in-hand with the makeup chair to make this woman an icon.

Visual Effects

Avatar: Fire & Ash

F1

How to Train Your Dragon

Thunderbolts

Tron: Ares

Gold: It almost feels tired to give yet another gold medal to a James Cameron movie, but if there's a less lazy way to pick the best of the cinematic VFX in a year, it didn't come in 2025.  Avatar stands so far above these with its realistic animation, body-capture tech, and gorgeously-lit cascades through land, fire, & water in Pandora, nothing else can compare.  This isn't quite in the same league as The Way of Water, but that's a bit like comparing Nadal's Grand Slam wins at Roland Garros...they're all works of art.

Silver: That said, I did really like the five films I picked here (I think this is the category I most outdid Oscar), and I'm going to remain surprised for a while that the Academy didn't see the glorious effects in Tron: Ares, filled with so much red, blue, & black cleverness in design, and didn't instantly want to put their stamp on it.

Bronze: It's always fun to chase two CGI-heavy films with a movie that (while very CGI heavy too, let's be real) also has some practical effects in the ways we handle these cars.  The combination of subtlety with the creation of some of these race tracks with the practical endurance of actual race cars in many scenes is a fitting close to honestly a terrific year for movies.

Other My Oscar Ballots: 1931, 1948, 1957, 1972, 1981, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

OVP: The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Film: The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Stars: Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith, John Huston

Director: John Milius

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

To most filmgoers, certainly in the 1970's, Sean Connery was essentially James Bond.  While other actors at that point (Roger Moore, George Lazenby, even David Niven) had played the part, Connery was Bond...and he wasn't super happy about it.  Connery is not the last of the actors this year we'll profile who struggled with being taken seriously as a thespian having enormous success in the realm of action movies, but he might be the most perturbed of the bunch.  Connery is a good actor, one who even during the height of Bond was working with important directors like Alfred Hitchcock & Sidney Lumet, but all the public saw him as was 007.  Literally-Michael Caine (Connery's longtime friend) would tell an anecdote about how upset Connery would get when someone would call him James Bond rather than his real name in the streets.  So it's not surprising that after Diamonds are Forever, a massive hit for United Artists in the early 1970's, that Connery largely eschewed the role, and in 1975 made two films involving Huston (one as his costar, the other as director-star) that would stand up as attempts for Connery to be taken more seriously as an actor.  One of these, The Man Who Would Be King, would become a classic, while the other would be quickly forgotten.

(Spoilers Ahead) We're choosing The Wind and the Lion and not The Man Who Would Be King because I always choose "new to me" movies for this series, and not only have I seen The Man Who Would Be King, but I also genuinely love it, so I couldn't go in unbiased if I tried (if you haven't seen it, add it to the Watchlist).  The Wind and the Lion is a weird amalgamation of historical drama and at least (to a degree) a romantic film, based in part on a true event involving President Teddy Roosevelt.  The film follows the kidnapping of Eden Pedecaris (Bergen), a wealthy woman stying with diplomats in Morocco by Mulai Ahmed Er Raisuli (Connery), as a way to start a Civil War in his country, one that will result in the Sultan leading Morocco to be publicly shamed.  They bond in a bit of Stockholm Syndrome as Eden comes to understand Raisuli's plight, though this is told with long swaths of the film going back to DC where President Roosevelt (Keith) is in the middle of his 1904 presidential bid, and attempting to use the kidnapping as a way to win over voters to win the election.

The Wind and the Lion is a weird movie, made stranger by the fact that it's based in part on a true story (though in real life Bergen's character was a man, almost certainly changed to a woman to help aid the romantic angle, as this was in the era where a giant epic needed to have a beautiful woman for the lead to fall in love with).  Connery is actually playing a real person, one who (like Connery) would live long after the events of this film.  The problem is that the film feels cartoonish in the many cutaways to the White House.  The movie might've been able to skate by without much chemistry between Bergen & Connery (Bergen is an odd actress, in that I don't generally like her in straight dramatic roles, but she's so compelling as a classy comedic role & she's so insanely gorgeous that I always hope I will find the drama that works for me), but these diversions distract too much, and make it feel silly, even if I adored the Jerry Goldsmith score.

And Connery does work in this role, and it's not a coincidence that the actor would excel for many years in epics and David Lean-style films for the remainder of his career (even if Connery would sadly never work with Lean directly).  He plays the part with a sort of majesty, an inherent otherworldliness that he would bring to roles like The Man Who Would Be King and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, two of his finest roles that I've seen.  It's also probably why he would eventually be offered the part (and then turn it down) as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings (given the deal that Connery got, had he taken the part it might've made him the highest-paid actor in cinema history (based on the rumors that have leaked about his offer and the percentage of the profits, he may well have made upwards of half a billion dollars from the part over the course of the series).

Ranting On...401k Withdrawal Penalties

Usually, I avoid talking about political issue topics on this blog, mostly because they bore me (I am not someone who enjoys debating a lot of political issues, particularly decades-long social issues like abortion or the death penalty, as I'm very unlikely to change your mind, and you won't change mind).  However, when it comes to a topic I haven't really thought about before, and am forming my opinion, I do think it's a good idea to try, and there was an issue on social media this week that I hadn't really considered, and want to have one of our old-fashioned "Ranting On..." articles (for those who are new, we used to do a "rant" every Friday, which is in part where this blog's name stems from) to talk through this: 401k withdrawal penalties.

This topic stemmed from a recent report from Vanguard (one of the world's largest mutual fund investment groups), which showed that 6% of their clients took a hardship withdrawal from their 401k's, up from 4.8% in 2024.  For those that don't know, in the United States a 401k is a standard-issue retirement account that contains stocks, mutual funds, target-date funds, and bonds that are intended to be used to cover a large portion of your retirement.  The idea around 401k's is that you will invest in them, and they will grow over time to stay by themselves.  Given that traditionally savings accounts will not get the kind of yield that a 401k can (a 5-8% growth model), this means that if you start saving in your 20's and 30's, over time the 401k will give you enough money to live off of when you stop working.

In the United States, 401k's are not treated as bank accounts as a result-they come with much stricter rules.  While a traditional savings or checking account is essentially yours to do what you want with it (deposit and withdraw whatever you like, though FDIC insurance and high-yield savings accounts plays a small factor in how fluid those assets are), 401k's you can only donate up to $24,500 a year (more if you're over 50), and you can't withdraw from it in the same way.  Unless you are 59 1/2 years old, any 401k withdrawal comes with a 10% penalty, on top of (assuming you have a traditional 401k and not a Roth 401k) the taxes you'll also have to pay on it.  After that age, which for Americans is when people start to retire, though that age may vary (particularly given that Medicare doesn't start until 65 and social security is pro-rated until you're 70 and doesn't start until you're 62), you can withdraw whenever you want, but until then you need to pay extra to get your money.

Here's where social media came in-the conversation coming out of the posts about Vanguard's study, showing more people wanted to take out a hardship withdrawal, largely sided with the idea that we shouldn't have hardship withdrawals at all, that people should be able to take out their 401k money whenever they wanted, without punishment.  In some essence, this is not a particularly bad idea.  Most Americans do not have a particularly robust savings account-the median amount of money that the average American has in their savings is about $5400 (the average should never be used in this case as representative because the United States, like much of the world, has a hoarded wealth problem with the superrich which skews that metric).  $5400 is not enough to cover most American households in times of hardship (think things like losing your job, a medical emergency, or your house potentially being foreclosed).  For American workers with a 401k, on the other hand, the National Institute on Retirement Security says that the median number is $40,000, considerably more money, and as a result, for people with retirement accounts, this is probably the most valuable asset they have short of selling their home.

There's a problem here-$40,000 is not remotely close to the number that most Americans likely need to be able to safely retire (that's about $1.5 million).  It's also something that, unless you are taking that money out immediately before retirement, you're taking away from yourself.  The money in your retirement account if you're in your 20's through 50's is money that you are expecting to compound.  Let's say you put $5k a year into your retirement account every year with 8% growth.  If you're 22, that would amount to $1.7 million.  If you're 42, on that same cadence, you'd have around $300k.  A huge factor in retirement savings is time-it's why you always hear "start saving early" and the money you take away now is not easily replaced later.

The government also provides a significant number of protections around 401k's as a result, knowing that in many cases this is the person's only source of income in retirement.  401k's cannot be taken in bankruptcy court and cannot be taken by creditors.  If your company provides matching funds for your 401k, that is a tax deduction (a huge incentive for companies to continue to provide these, and also, given how 401k's prevent a larger amount of seniors on welfare, a benefit to society as a whole).  These benefits, and the longer-term implications of people treating a 401k the same way that they treat an emergency fund, ultimately makes me think that the withdrawal penalties are worth it.

One of the weirder political ideologies of young Millennials and Gen Z, at least in their collective online presence, is that they have a bizarre combination of socialist and libertarian views around money.  They expect help with huge costs, especially things driven by inflation (i.e. rising costs of houses and higher education), but also are insistent on saying things like "it's my money, I can do what I want with it."  It's honestly weirdly reminiscent of Baby Boomer attitudes toward money and might be why Trump did surprisingly well with this group in 2024.

But ultimately, I think they're wrong to not want the penalties.  People hopefully won't use their 401k's as savings accounts.  The US economy cannot handle retirees increasingly reliant upon Social Security to pay their bills, and both Medicare and Social Security are on increasingly shaky grounds in terms of public assets even without that pressure.  But the hardship withdrawals guarantee people don't use them unless absolutely necessary (i.e. losing their house, medical fees).  It might be "your money" but it's money that has extra protections under the condition that you are saving it for when you retire.  And while many will glibly say "I'll never retire"...getting older frequently answers that question for you with an aging body & mind; most people cannot physically do the jobs that they did in their 30's, 40's, and 50's when they reach their 70's and 80's.  The withdrawal penalties help to protect people from themselves and needing to put very stringent parameters under what constitutes "an emergency."