Fin: Film festivals in two cities, 'Astroball' and 'Moneyball,' and remembering a fallen Philly journalist

Notes on film festivals, journalistic capture from baseball to crypto, and a lot more.

I just came back from two days in New York for the New York Film Festival. What I saw and what I’ll be writing about from there will slowly trickle out over the next couple of months, but I can say that I had a better time than I have in past trips up for the fest. 

NYFF can be a bit intimidating, especially if you’re coming from out of town. Lincoln Center is a massive, imposing complex, and finding your way to the right theater at the right time and negotiating those long lines can be a lot. 

I lived in New York for five years and feel like I know the city pretty well, but I still have trouble remembering which one is Alice Tully Hall and which is the Walter Reade Theater. Not that I ever had much reason to be at Lincoln Center when I was in my early 20s when going to the movies usually meant the AMC Empire 25 or the 42nd Street E-Walk. 

Also in New York? I spent most of my free time walking, both in the park and in various neighborhoods, and found myself very frequently noticing that an old bar, restaurant, or store from the old days had been replaced by something different. I also made a pilgrimage to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood I rarely visited during my NYC days. This included a trip to Sweet Pickle Books, the most in-my-wheelhouse business that has ever existed. 

If you don’t have this exact autographed picture, with this exact caption, you might as well not even bother operating a pickle-themed bookstore on the Lower East Side:

The next fest

Speaking of film festivals… the lineup is out for the Philadelphia Film Festival, which runs October 19-29, at the Philadelphia Film Society’s venues. I’ll be covering it, here and elsewhere. 

The opening night film is American Fiction from Cord Jefferson, a guy I used to read back when he wrote for Gawker, while the closing night selection is Saltburn, the latest from Promising Young Woman director Emerald Fennell. Centerpieces include Maestro, Rustin, The Holdovers, and Sly, the documentary about a certain guy who there’s a statue of here in Philly. 

There’s lots of international stuff in the always-great Masters of Cinema category, including new ones from Hamaguchi, Kore-eda, Holland, and, yes, Wenders. And the documentary category has the films on Thomas Kincade, the Indigo Girls, and Gogol Bordello that I’ve been asking for screeners for since Sundance. 

Remembering Josh Kruger 

The Philadelphia journalism community suffered a terrible loss last week when Josh Kruger was killed in his home by an unknown assailant. He was 39. 

I don’t think I ever met Josh, but we had been mutuals on social media and interacted a few times there, and I remember pitching him when he was briefly the editor of Philadelphia Weekly. He and I wrote for a lot of the same places over the years, including the Inquirer and Philadelphia Magazine. 

There’s a stereotype about journalists these days that most of us are privileged and blinkered, overeducated and elite, and it's a stereotype because it’s very often true.  

But that wasn’t the case for Josh. While he did go to Penn, he had dealt with both addiction and homelessness and was open about his HIV-positive positive. Josh wrote very empathetically about the struggling people in the city of Philadelphia, and at one point paused his writing career to work at City Hall for the Office of Homeless Services. He was, in every way, the real deal.

Roxanne Patel Shepelavy said it best, in an obituary at Philadelphia Citizen: 

Kruger was most passionate when he wrote about the plight of people living on the streets, giving voice and clarity to those we’d rather not see. The first and one of the last pieces he wrote for The Citizen were both calls to solve what he saw as the solvable problem of housing for those most in need, starting with what should be a given — acknowledging their humanity…. Do you see the common theme here? Decency. Humanity. Common sense. A love for people in the city of Philadelphia, a love for Philadelphia and dismay at those who would let her down.

Since his death, and a couple of other recent killings of prominent progressive activist types, some of the worst people on the Internet have seen it fit to suggest that Josh Kruger and the others, because they held leftist political views and were sometimes critical of law enforcement,  somehow deserved to die. That they “fucked around and found out.” 

First of all, if you think Josh Kruger’s position was that all is hunky dory in Philadelphia and everyone should shut up about crime and disorder, you very clearly never read a word of his work, and almost certainly had never even heard of him prior to his death.

Kruger believed that Philly has many problems, crime among them- and he dedicated his life and career to exposing and trying to solve those problems. But the frequent depiction of Philadelphia as a worthless hellhole by conservative media, from Fox News to Elon Musk’s For You page, is exaggerated, racist, and done with extremely bad intentions. 

Let’s follow this logic to its natural conclusion: You must demand that every criminal be locked up forever, and also praise law enforcement to the skies at all times. Otherwise, you not only don’t deserve the protection of the police, but you also don’t deserve to be alive at all. And, once you die, your death will be mocked by ghouls who had never heard your name before that moment. 

If the Seth Rich murder had happened in 2023 instead of 2016, the right-wing reaction wouldn’t have been to spin an elaborate, false conspiracy theory about Wikileaks and Hillary Clinton ordering his death. It would be to declare that because Rich worked for a Democrat and was therefore probably soft on crime, he got what was coming to him. 

Meghan Markle, not a Senate candidate

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching old episodes of Suits on Netflix, and my main takeaways are that there’s no way in hell that guy could fake being a lawyer for more than five minutes, that I can’t believe the weird Dr. Feelgood guy from Billions played such a multifaceted, years-long role- and that Meghan Markle is a talented actress and very luminous screen presence. 

As a longtime non-obsessive of the British royals, I’ve never had much of an opinion on the Harry/Meghan stuff, except to notice that the media treatment of Markle reminds me a lot of those documentaries about the over-the-top sexist treatment of Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky back in the ‘90s, except in her case it’s all happening right now. 

I’ve noticed something else: These news stories about Markle are always extremely thinly sourced. The Daily Mail, last week, wrote that Markle’s “name is in the frame” for the U.S. Senate seat recently vacated by the death of Dianne Feinstein. It’s all part of a plan Meghan allegedly has to eventually become president of the United States.

Where did they get this idea? “Phones lit up” with the possibility. It was "bandied about in Hollywood.” “A Labor Party source” and a “friend of Gloria Steinem” are also quoted, but no one really from Markle’s camp. 

So this will all be added to the sprawling case against Meghan Markle, even though there doesn’t appear to be much indication that she ever seriously wanted to be a senator from California. And of course, the governor has appointed someone who isn’t Meghan Markle as the new senator.

That said- how hilarious would it be if Meghan Markle ran for president? It might set back Anglo-American relations to War of 1812 levels.

Their shit works in the playoffs

It hasn’t been a good year so far for the reputation of author Michael Lewis. First, much of the story behind The Blind Side fell apart, and Lewis delivered a series of baffling quotes in reaction (though, some of us were skeptical all along). Now, Lewis’ book about Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX — which happened while Lewis was embedded with SBF for months — is getting scathing reviews, most of which indicate that Lewis fell for SBF’s web of bullshit and still falls for it to this day. (Though I should note that I haven’t read the book yet, the business writer I trust most, Matthew Levine, takes the opposite view.)

I’ve written this before, but much as I love Moneyball, both Lewis’ book and the subsequent movie, there’s something a bit off there, as well: Moneyball was, at heart, a scheme by management to pay players little money and to come out looking like a genius after succeeding anyway. No wonder that book gained such purchase in the business world by managers eager to both pay little for labor and get extolled for how astute they were.

The book and movie treat it as an immutable law of physics that the Oakland A’s can’t spend as much money as the New York Yankees. But it’s not, it’s merely the choice by the wealthy real estate developer who owned the A’s at the time to not do so. Furthermore, in retrospect, it probably wasn’t that smart for Beane to give away all of his secrets in a magazine article, and later a book and movie. 

Anyway, if you’ve seen Moneyball, you may remember the scene at the end where the A’s lose a playoff series to the Minnesota Twins, with closer “Everyday” Eddie Guerrero on the mound. That game, in October of 2002 – in real life a day game rather than the movie’s night game — was the Twins’ last playoff series win to date, and the team hadn’t even won a playoff game since 2004, losing 18 straight. 

Both of those streaks, however, ended this week, when the Twins swept Toronto to advance to the ALDS. 

A YouTuber named Chris Hanel made a nearly two-hour video, in the tradition of Dorktown’s work, exploring the terrible, now-defunct streak:

The Twins will move on to play the Houston Astros in the next round.

This week’s writings

Speaking of the Astros, and of books about baseball ending with the word “Ball,” at Splice Today this week I reviewed The Astros Edge, a new PBS documentary produced by and starring Ben Reiter, the former Sports Illustrated writer. Reiter was in a similar situation as Lewis with SBF- he was embedded with a corrupt, rotten-to-the-core organization, in this case, the Houston Astros. He wrote a book about what a great job they did winning the World Series. 

That documentary, in which Reiter looks at the subsequent sign-stealing scandal and how he missed it all, is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a movie adaptation of Astroball. 

This week, here at the newsletter, I looked at the failure of post-The Last Dance sports documentaries, looked back on the 15th anniversary of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and reviewed the Philadelphia documentary series 72 Seconds in Rittenhouse Square and the NYFF film Hit Man. 

For Living Life Fearless, I looked back at 30 years of the football movie The Program.

Coming next week: More festival stuff, a look back at an original better than the sequel, and much more. As always, thank you for your support.