Movie Nation

Computer-assisted animation has gotten so sharp, detailed and fluid that it’s almost a given that any animated film with any ambition at all is going to look sharp.

“The Wild Life,” a European riff on the story of Robinson Crusoe, is no exception. The colors are vibrant, the sea, palm trees, birds, bird-feathers and Crusoe’s red hair are almost photo-realistic.

But as a kids’ cartoon, “Wild Life” is a an utter dud. It’s a comic version of the tale told from the point of view of the animals on board various ships, and on the island where Crusoe (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal) is shipwrecked. And there isn’t a single laugh in it.

A red parrot Crusoe names “Tuesday” (Jay Jones) tells the story to a couple of rats on the pirate ship that rescues Crusoe. And his version of this classic adventure presents the intrepid castaway as a klutz who can’t walk without tripping, can’t shoot straight and wouldn’t have survived without the help of the animals there, or fruity/fishy bounties of the remote Pacific rock where he was marooned.

There are evil, carnivorous shipwrecked cats out to kill him, and eat the other wildlife (tapir, etc.). The critters, to a one, look at every Crusoe action with the same worried scowl. He is the real threat, to them.

“This is NOT good.”

Rats with Brit accents wisecrack at each other — “You are one kidney short of a meat pie!”

The parrot longs to escape “paradise” and see the world he suspects is just over the horizon.

It’s got drunken pirates singing sea chanteys (So drunk they can’t tell port from starboard. Or maybe that was the screenwriters.) and the most reliable adventure yarn of all time to work with.

And none of it is the least bit funny.

But again, at least the animation’s passable.

MPAA Rating:PG for mild action/peril and some rude humor

Cast: The voices of Yuri Lowenthal, Jay Jones, Debi Tinsley, others.
Credits: Written and directed by Vincent Kesteloot, Ben Stassen. A Lionsgate/Studiocanal release.

Running time: 1:30

The great James Caan classes up and adds a modicum of mystery to “The Good Neighbor,” a teens-torment-the-wrong-old-man thriller in the “Don’t Breathe” vein.

Or rather, that’s how it’s pitched. And had the filmmakers seen “Don’t Breathe” early enough, there would have been head-slapping and rewrites, tweaking and the like, to make this one work.

Because what they deliver is a drawn-out “surveillance” story, with a couple of tech savvy teenagers using hidden cameras to both watch every move of the “creepy psycho hermit” who lives next door.

But as “an experiment in perception,” smart-mouthed Ethan (Logan Miller of “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) wants to rig Old Man Grainey’s house so that the geezer thinks it’s haunted. And rich MIT-bound tech nerd Sean (Keir Gilchrist of “It Follows”) is just the guy to make this experiment come off.

They wire the old man’s house, switch on their monitors and giggle over Grainey’s reactions to thumps, power outages and a screen door that slams and clatters on a windless night, all by itself. They marvel at their power over him.

“It’s kind of beautiful, watching an old man sleep, wondering what he’s dreaming about.”

“World War I?”

Yeah, he’s going to MIT.

They wonder what’s behind that padlocked basement door. They call the cops, to rattle him. And they can’t figure out why this rude, mean old recluse “never once seemed afraid” of their every gimmick.

“Good Neighbor,” previously titled “The Waiting,” outstays its welcome, drifting on long after its climax. And the script forces an after-the-fact courtroom trial covered in flash-forwards into the structure, which art director turned director Kasra Farahani clumsily tries to disguise and integrate into the story without spoiling the suspense.

He fails.

Still, the kids are sharp, realistic and walk a fine line between unlikable and sympathetic.

And Caan plays this old man with a cagey resignation and menace. We do the math and try to figure out the possibilities. Is he keeping someone — perhaps his long-unseen wife — locked up downstairs? Did he kill her? Is he unafraid of the haunting because of guilt, or because he’s been haunted so long it rolls off his back?

The resolution would have had far more bite, suspense and satisfaction without the courtroom scenes. More moments were needed to establish Grainey as a realistic threat (again, see “Don’t Breathe”).

And a LOT less was needed after the climax, after the story has thrown its best punch.

Landing a lead like Caan underscores the fact that there was the germ of a twisty, tough thriller here. It’s too bad the script and uncertain direction let “The Good Neighbor” down.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, teen drinking

Cast: James Caan, Logan Miller, Keir Gilchrist, Laura Innes, Mindy Sterling
Credits: Directed by Kasra Farahani, script by Mark Bianculli, Jeff Richard. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:36

Well, like most Americans, I had no doubts — zero — about the heroism and grace under pressure of U.S. Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. But I do now, thanks to “Sully.”

So, thanks for that, Clint Eastwood.

“Sully” was the guy who brought that crippled Airbus down on the Hudson River back in 2009, right smack in the middle of New York, and saved 155 souls aboard. Eastwood’s movie is a study in cool, unshowy professionalism — that of Sullenberger, a pilot on the brink of retirement, his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), the equally experienced stewardesses, who followed protocol as they barked “Brace brace brace, don’t look up” over and over at the alarmed passengers who had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport.

“Sully” celebrates air traffic control, the calm enforced there, the crisp exchange of requests, suggestions and alternatives unemotionally delivered by radio — from plane to tower, airport to airport and eventually, tourist helicopter to tower and so on.

Ferryboat captains and police scuba divers/rescue swimmers alike keep it together, improvise and make even the most astonishing rescue of its type seem like another day on the job. These were, one and all, men and women with “The Right Stuff.”

But “Sully” is also about nagging guilt, nightmare scenarios and the adversarial nature of NTSB (National Transporation Safety Board) hearings. If there’s a criticism built into Eastwood’s movie, based on Sullenberger’s book, it is in that process. It’s as if the political Clint doesn’t realize that tough government inquiries are how all those myriad procedures were decided upon, how every stewardess and steward flying today knows that “Brace! Brace! Brace!” mantra and must follow it to the letter.

We see the crash — “This was not a crash. It was a forced water landing!” — from several angles through the film, 208 seconds replayed from the cabin, the cockpit, the control tower, and finally on the CVR (cockpit voice recorder). It is vivid, but not remotely as harrowing as those depicted in movies like “Fearless” or “Alive.” That it wasn’t is a tribute to the quick thinking of the pilot. No, he didn’t check all his data points. He “felt” the plane go. And the landing choice?

“I eyeballed it.”

Hanks plays this guy as stoic, exceptionally buttoned down, just what you’d want in your airline pilot — experienced, a safety expert whose post-retirement future was to be in consulting on that very subject, an ex-Air Force pilot who once guided a crippled combat jet to a safe landing, as seen in a flashback. It’s not a dazzling performance, just a comforting one. Eastwood has found another tough, professional Texan to embrace.

But Sully’s nightmares the day or two after the crash are the what ifs — a jetliner tearing through lower Manhattan or coastal New Jersey. And the first words from the NTSB (Mike O’Malley, Anna Gunn, Jamey Sheridan) are that he guessed wrong, read the data and the plane wrong. Simulations show this as an aircraft that could have returned to the airport.

I like the way Sheridan’s NTSB questioner can’t look Sully in the eyes, at first, and I love the script’s treatment of the heady, unnerving nature of sudden New York celebrity. Random women hug him, give him kisses. Limo drivers and hotel managers call it “an honor” to serve him.

Bartenders (Michael Rappaport) and barflies want to drink a “Sully” with him — “That’s a shot’a Grey Goose, and a splash of water! Get it?”

Because the media have decided, based on the survival of one and all, that Sully is a hero. He’s not so sure, the NTSB has its data driven doubts, and his rattled wife (Laura Linney) seems in shock, at a loss, fumbling for words of comfort that just won’t come.

Still, there are obvious missteps. Sully never announced to the passengers and crew that the engines were out and they were crashing, just an abrupt “Brace for impact.” He’s shown as unhurried, not panicked, but too distracted to jump on the radio to the tower to alert them that air sea rescue was going to be needed. When the plane comes to a halt, the limits to procedures — nobody is there to guide passengers off the wings and into life rafts because the stewardesses are still inside getting everybody off the plane — pop up.

The brevity — “Sully” is just 96 minutes long — and few flashbacks don’t get us past the mask that Sully himself wears for public consumption. The performances are, to a one, poker-faced and guarded. Hanks is no weepy “Captain Phillips” here. And all that plays into Eastwood’s on-screen ethos. Man-up, be prepared, do your job.

“Sully” might not rank among Eastwood’s greatest films, but it shows his canny skill at deciding how to tell a story in which everybody knows the ending. That he manages to make it suspenseful and downright moving shows him at his professional best, just like every everyday hero he celebrates in the film.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some peril and brief strong language

Cast: Tom Hanks, Laura Linney, Aaron Eckhart, Anna Gunn
Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, script by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book by Chesley “Sully” SullenbergerA Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:36

As the best day of my professional life happened in the early 1990s, when I followed Leonard Nimoy around central North Carolina on a location scout, pardon me while I get all weepy about his son’s lovely documentary, “For the Love of Spock.”

It’s an unalloyed joy, a film about the journeyman character actor who got the biggest of big breaks, had all kinds of fun with it, but transformed the character, the role and himself into an icon of nobility, generosity and humanity. But it’s also about a son remembering his dad, the ebb and flow of that relationship and how that mirrored the elder Nimoy’s growing into his greatest role, living up to it, and being a better father thanks to it.

Former entertainment lawyer turned director Adam Nimoy’s Kickstarter-funded marvel covers pretty much the full scope of his father’s life, the trek to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, the years of odd jobs — day work in the movies and two week guest spots on TV shows — through “Star Trek” and everything that made possible.

Using old interviews with his dad and the ones Adam conducted just before his father’s death, and clips from the TV shows, the movies, and interviews with legions of his colleagues, friends and fans, Nimoy the Younger constructs a definitive History of Trek, and an adoring portrait of his father, the Man Who Was Spock.

It’s not just anecdotes or Leonard reading from the audio book version of his autobiography (“I Am Spock”).  Almost everybody (not his first wife, not his widow) who needed to be in this story was interviewed. From vintage radio interviews with Gene Roddenberry to J.J. Abrams, they gush the same gusher. They all loved this guy.

Here’s childhood pal Barry Newman (“Vanishing Point”) recalling his visit to the set of the “Star Trek” pilot and his dire warning into Leonard’s pointy ears.

“‘Run,’ I said. ‘Get out of this. It’s a treadmill to oblivion!'”

Fans from Neal DeGrasse Tyson and a couple of NASA engineers, to Jason Alexander (who can do whole Kirk monologues, from memory and in character) and Simon Pegg talk about what made the character and the man special.

George Takei and Walter Koenig marvel at how Nimoy ensured that they stayed in the franchise as it migrated from canceled TV series to animated series to film franchise.

And just as everybody is getting all misty-eyed, here’s Nimoy singing “Bilbo Baggins,” and Shatner cracking wise that yeah, Leonard was the better singer of the two. But even Leonard was off key.

The father-son stuff is terrific (Nimoy’s daughter is here, too). I would’ve enjoyed more of the early life, in Boston, the barber’s son. And it’s a pity there were no clips (with rights approval) of Nimoy’s post-“Trek” stage career, “Man in the Glass Booth,” “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But “For the Love of Spock” is everything you’d hope for in a biography of one of the most universally beloved characters and character actors of all time.

No, he didn’t get to make his Siamese Twins biography, the film he was scouting in N.C. (Chang and Eng retired to White Oak, near Andy Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy) to film. Over the years, I have run into writers and others who found him to be a prima donna and a pill. This guy, for instance. 

Yes, he was an absentee dad for too long, and his first marriage didn’t endure. He still managed to ennoble an actor’s life, to be a mensch to friends, family and fans, even after he became so famous his life would never be the same.

He wore the ears, and wore them well.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a moment or two of profanity

Cast: Leonard Nimoy, Adam Nimoy, William Shatner, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Zachary Quinto, Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, J.J. Abrams, Nicholas Meyer, Jim Parsons, Jason Alexander, Simon Pegg, Neal DeGrasse-Tyson
Credits: Directed by Adam Nimoy. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Radar Online is reporting, and assorted British newspapers are doing what British newspapers do — stealing that reporting — that Sony and the Broccoli family and other producers backing the James Bond franchise are offering Daniel Craig $150 million Yankee greenbacks to return to the role for two more films.

Craig’s people have shot it down, because that’s a ridiculous amount seeing as how the films have shown diminishing returns, and it’s twice the amount he was reportedly offered back in May. Craig looked halfway out the door with “Spectre.” Two thirds of the way through it, he took on that “When is this over?” gaze. He met his obligation, and I said at the time in reviewing it (fanboy protests and British make-up-news scandal sheets notwithstanding) he was done. He’s young enough to more than manage a Pierce Brosnan length career post-Bond. And he’s a better actor, better than being pigeonholed like that.

Done. Find somebody else. But start with hiring a great screenwriter and it’ll be easier to fill the role, because that’s been an ongoing issue with this venerable franchise — crappy, recycled scripts.

Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the one about women refusing to make love until the men stop making making war, has proven as timely and malleable as any play the ancient Greeks gave us. Thousands of years before women got the vote in much of the world, the playwright spun a comic parable demonstrating the REAL power of women in a culture.

And it still resonates. Just last year, Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” re-set the women-on-a-sex-strike story in the mayhem of modern day Chicago.

Erase the violence and rub most of the sexual and political edge off that film, and you get something like “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?”, a gun-crazy “Lysistrata” with the feel of a PG-13 TV movie, perhaps one more inspired by “The Andy Griffith Show’s” sexless spin on “Lysistrata” back in the ’60s.

Matt Cooper’s film takes place in Rockford, Texas, a fruit-packing town that’s actually a pistol-packers paradise. “Live free, shoot straight” is the motto they slap up on signs you see as you enter the town limits.

Everybody there loves hunting, sport shooting and the comfort and safety they think their guns give them. Until one day, a kid who has absorbed more of the gun worship than the gun safety ethos of his parents takes his dad’s new pistol to school to show a friend.

A hail of misplaced and fortunately not-fatal bullets later, the boy’s mom, Jenna (Andrea Anders of “Modern Family” and “About a Boy” and many other TV series) is taken aback enough to wonder what kind of fatal-accident prone world they’re raising their children in. Her boy got a slap on the wrist from the school and the sheriff (John Heard). Boys will be boys and boys with guns, etc.

She’s a minority of one, but Jenna thinks Rockford should give up its guns.

“Every avalanche starts with a single snowflake.”

Her avalanche starts with her bookclub and snowballs from there. The women will swear off sex with their men until they destroy their assault rifles, shotguns and pistols. The menfolk, including Jenna’s husband (Matt Passmore of “The Glades”) get their “Second Amendment” backs up over this. And a battle of the sexes and war of wills is on.

John Michael Higgins is the politically spineless mayor, Horatio Sanz and Fernanda Romero are a couple trying to have a baby, Katherine McNamara is a teen who has been making her boyfriend wait — for a year — only to have this protest interrupt their coital plans.

And Cloris Leachman plays the obligatory potty-mouthed granny in this debate. She has the best speech, the testiest scene, laying down the straw men that gun control foes throw up “just like when they were fighting chlorinated water and smoking bans.”

The movie throws a few mass shooting statistics, a history of how the meaning of the Second Amendment was quite recently twisted and broad portrait of the gun lobby that did the twisting, here called The National Gun Association (whose leader reveres his “Cold Dead Hands” portrait of NRA spokesmodel Charlton Heston).

“I doubt the Founding Fathers had this ‘no sex’ thing in mind when they wrote all that stupid crap.”

But this is a toothless satire, a sermon lacking the bite or broad wit of similar films. Cooper attracted a few names to his script, but he’s no Christopher Guest (“Best in Show”) or Norman Lear (“Cold Turkey”). There’s no bite to the debate, no edge to the satire, no sin in the sex.(How DID this earn an R? MPAA hypocrisy?). And, if you’d care to notice, there’s no racial component to all this, either. There isn’t a black face to be seen in this corner of Texas.

That makes “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” a sermon sorely in need of more sass, more silliness and more sting. It’s pointless to show Jenna scanning the Internet, paging through all the mass shootings and careless “accidents” at gun shows without making the pointed and still very funny (See “The Simpsons,” “The Cartridge Family”) connection in the movie.

The setting and subtext were ripe for lampooning, and Cooper sensed that with his simplest, pithiest argument. He just didn’t take it far enough.

“When did you become such a damn liberal?”

“When did you become such an idiot?”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content and language

Cast: Andrea Anders, Matt Passmore, Katherine McNamara, John Heard, Cloris Leachman, John Michael Higgins, Horatio Sanz, Kevin Conroy
Credits: Written and directed by Matt Cooper. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:35

The pert perfection of Sarah Gadon — think Taylor Swift without the autotune — is given its first real test on the screen as something almost totally new in the movies — a “Mom Fatale” — in “The 9th Life of Louis Drax.” Alas, she’s no better here than she was in the woebegone “Indignation.”

“Drax” is an oddly remote and unaffecting (and unthrilling) thriller about a cruel and precocious nine year-old (Aiden Longworth of “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) whose mother is just catnip to the guys.

And that’s bad for the guys. Because young Louis, called “Lulu” by his parents, mistrusts men, thinking they only want “to sex” his mother and then hurt her. That leads to written , in nine-year-old scrawl, to one and all.

“Bad things will happen!”

But the bad things are already happening to Louis. He’s had an accident, at a picnic. He’s in a coma. It’s not, his doctor (Jamie Dornan) learns, the kid’s first dance with death. Read the title if you want to know how many preceded it.

Dr. Pascal (Dornan) tries to unravel the mystery of that day of the accident, and the kid’s past. There was a sympathetic shrink (Oliver Platt, terrific as always) treating him, puzzled by the child’s almost monstrous cruelty. He loves having pet hamsters, who all meet ugly ends.

There’s the boy’s boxer-with-a-temper dad (Aaron Paul), who’d have to be a suspect in any foul play. But not his mom. Oh no. Dr. Pascal is sure “You deserve better than this.”

“How do you know?”

“I can just TELL.”

The cop on the case (Molly Parker, so sarcastic you want to tear her head off) suspects one and all. Perhaps, like us, she’s seen any of the scads of TV medical dramas that have fed us remedial lessons in this sort of always-threatened/injured child cases.

Director Alexandre Aja has never come close to giving Hollywood a film as taut and frightening as his French breakout hit, “High Tension.” “Louis” has a creepily compelling young lead, but not much else. Paul isn’t scary enough to be the obvious suspect everyone else is sure he is.

There’s little suspense, and Dornan and Gadon both fail to register empathy, compassion, menace or fear.

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

But in the movie’s big scene, Platt’s shrink is our guide into one of the cinema’s most informative trips into hypnosis. And that lets “9th Life” do something that few movies that fail this completely in the first two acts ever manage.

It finishes well.

MPAA Rating:R (for some disturbing images and brief strong language)

Cast: Aiden Longworth, Jamie Dornan, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul,
Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Max Minghella, based on the Liz Jensen novel. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:30

The “big surprise” in “Morgan,” a bloody sci fi thriller spun around genetic engineering, is so obvious I won’t insult your intelligence by giving it away.

Hell, some of you have already figured it out, anyway, based on the headline, the still photo and my mention that there’s a “surprise” twist.

What they were shooting for here is an action-packed/bloodstained suspense pic about a scientifically engineered “It” who — OK “which” — is in danger of escaping from the lab where it was created.

Seth W. Owen’s script has moments that suggest he might have seen “A.I.,” or “Blade Runner” or “Ex Machina.”  And many, many more moments that suggest he didn’t and should have.

“Morgan” (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a paler-than-pale test-tube engineered human who with ashen lips, a teenage “girl” who is five years out of the test tube. And now she’s hurt somebody and a corporate “risk assessment” officer (Kate Mara) has been sent to the remote forest lab to figure out if she is too risky to bring to market, and how the isolated team that developed her — Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Boyd Holbrook, Michael Yare, Vinette Robinson and Chris Sullivan — screwed up. 

The team refers to Morgan as “her.” Lee isn’t having it. An “It” is what they’re dealing with, as in “after ‘It’s’ so-called birth” and the like. It hurt somebody.

“She has a right to make mistakes.”

“SHE has no rights whatsoever.”

Most have formed an attachment to Morgan, but not to Skip (Holbrook), whose scientific function is a mystery. He calls Morgan “C3PO,” at one point.

The story sets up a clumsy psycho-sexual dynamic and a faux family, but the film doesn’t develop those. The money scene is provided by “Corporate’s” psychologist, who carries out a psych evaluation. Paul Giamatti plays this scene the way you’d expect him to, with an utterly illogical eruption thrown in for bad measure.

There’s a lot of forest footage and production designed grays “Morgan,” down to the five year old teen’s omnipresent gray hoodie. What there isn’t is a lot of suspense. And I’m not just talking about the big reveal.

Mara and Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) don’t give us much to cling to, as viewers. Only Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) invites empathy. And only one moment has the poetry of its better sci-fi antecedents.

“Do you know the cruelest thing you can do to someone you’ve locked in a room? Press their face to the window.”

MPAA Rating: R for brutal violence, and some language

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook
Credits: Directed by Luke Scott, script by Seth W. Owen. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:32

When it’s all tallied up in that great counting house in the sky, or in Burbank, the summer cinema of 2016 may end up the second best ever (probably not) in terms of box office tmay end up the second best ever.

It sure didn’t feel that way. “Captain America” and “Finding Nemo” sequels did great, “Secret Life of Pets” performed and even “Suicide Squad” has cleared $300 million. But it wasn’t a season where the wind kept the sails full or audiences engaged.

The second horror hit of the summer owns this final weekend of the season. “Don’t Breathe” might catch “Lights Out” at the box office. Eventually.

But this weekend, which has, on occasion, produced an Oscar winner, won’t with “The Light Between Oceans,” a middling romance novel starring future Oscar contenders Fassbender and Vikander. Rachel Weisz, who won an Oscar in support in another late August release, “The Constant Gardener,” is the best thing in this one. “Light” is opening in the $5 million range, pathetic for a long holiday weekend. It’s a fall film that jumped the gun.

“Morgan,” a “we created a monster” in the lab thriller, is bombing — big time.

And nothing else, despite pushing “Hands of Stone” into more theaters and the superb quality of “Hell or High Water” or “Southside With You,” is making any money. “War Dogs” is indicative of the dogs of late summer. None of them have blown up.

“The Light Between Oceans” feels like a fall movie. It’s a sad romance, a period piece, a Michael Fassbender film with no funny costumes or comic book plot.

It’s lush and lovely, but a bit limp, like a well-written Nicholas Sparks novel filmed by an artist.  The director of “Blue Valentine” did it.

And it’s earning mixed reviews, a somber send off to a less than stellar summer. Or, if you prefer, a funereal fumble into fall.

I was re-watching “The Danish Girl” the other night, and couldn’t get over how much more adult Alicia Vikander came off in that one. Here, she’s more of a coquette, which makes her look entirely too impish and young for Fassbender.

“Morgan” is another “We’ve made a monster-person in the lab” thriller, with Kate Mara and Tobey Jones trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Poor reviews for that one. We’ve had two decent horror movies this summer, thank you. That’s all we’re entitled to.

Anything else opening wide? Well, Kevin Smith is still around, long after the era when he was “a thing.” “Yoga Hosers” is getting skewered for its amateurism, the fact that Smith put his daughter (and Johnny Depp’s kid) into a movie, despite a talent deficiency that suggested maybe bit parts were all they were up to.

Sometime, decades ago, somebody told Smith, “Don’t ever change, man.” And there you go.