PGA & Tully

What a nice four days for tv sports. I spent all weekend watching every shot hit by every hitter in the 100^th playing of the PGA Championship, and the suspense and drama were beautiful. And the outcome for Tiger was wonderful, second place alone behind the winner, Brooks Koepka. He has now pretty much shut the mouths of those talking heads who didn’t think he could even make the cut, let alone contend. If he can get his driver straightened out, he’ll be contending every week from now on. And, yes, Captain Jim Furyk will now have to pick him for the Ryder Cup.

We rented a movie from Direct TV last night, Tully with Charlize Theron, and were both impressed with Charlize Theron more than with the movie. I remember seeing her as guest on Ellen Degeneris where she told Ellen that her last name was pronounced as the one-syllable “throne” and not “THAIR-on.” Odd that virtually no one ever pronounces it as “throne,” odd that she never corrects anyone. Although the movie was very good, Charlize was even better. She seems to choose odd roles in her film career. I know she’s made a bunch but the only ones I remember vividly are the ones in which she plays an oddball of sorts. I remember her in that perfectly awful thing she did with Will Smith and Matt Damon, The Legend of Bagger Vance, a film that pretended to understand golf and didn’t have a clue. She went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of the monstrous serial killer in Monster, and was nominated for another unusual role as the only woman working in a Minnesota steel mill in North Country, neither film that played on her beauty. And now here she is as a tired, very over-weight mother of two with the third due right after the film begins. It may not have been a tour de force role, but it was pretty close. Tully was listed as a comedy, but there was absolutely no laughter in it. The story about the difficulties of raising three children with very little help from her husband was disconcertingly depressing. There were also a few unanswered questions about how the night nannie, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), came to be there to help with the burden of night care for Marlo’s newborn. The trickery with what was real and what was imagined defied logic. But it was still a film I’ll remember for a long time.