My wife and I binge-watched the second season of “Ozark” this weekend. Jason Bateman and Julia Garner continue to be very good, Janet McTeer is perfect as the cartel’s powerful attorney, but the season belongs to Laura Linney, who I once called the best actress of her generation. She is remarkable as Wendy Byrde, the Machiavellian woman pulling so many strings it’s hard to keep track. Brilliant work.
About a dozen people have come up to me in the last week to say they’d caught “Mississippi Grind,” the 2015 movie about poker players on the road that I appeared in for two minutes. Apparently, it just started streaming on Netflix. I always tell them that it represents two things you’ll never see again: 1) me in a major motion picture; and 2) me in a bowtie. I wrote about the whole experience here.
During the US Open, ESPN has been doing a lot of double boxes — putting two simultaneous tennis matches on the screen side by side. That would have been unheard of 20 years ago, when no one owned a widescreen TV. Now, we can see all the action on both with no problem.
Alert to all middle-aged men who still use the word “dude”: wearing your baseball hat backward is over. You should have stopped doing that when you turned 30, but you certainly ought to knock it off now because, in your vain attempt to look cool and younger, you’ve missed an important sign. If many social trends start with teenagers embracing them, here’s proof. The other day I was seated on a plane when an entire team of high school baseball players got on. They were all wearing their caps, but none of them had his on backwards. Zero. So, Mr. Middle Ager With A Man-Bun, turn that thing around and put the lid in the front, like the underpaid Vietnamese children who sewed it intended.