Category Archives: Reviews

Friday Night Lies: ‘B.S. High’

Are you ready for some football? Donald Trump style? HBO offers both in its new documentary B.S. High.

Bishop Sycamore High School from Columbus, Ohio, clearly wasn’t — but that didn’t stop its head coach and co-founder Roy Johnson from somehow finding a way to get his team on the field against the storied national powerhouse IMG Academy on Aug. 29, 2021, in a game that was televised nationwide as part of the ESPN High School Kickoff Series.

What happened next will go down in infamy as one of the most bizarre, disturbing and inexplicable debacles in recent high school sports history. IMG destroyed Bishop Sycamore 58-0, but that just begins to tell the story.

From the opening kickoff, it was clear there was a huge talent chasm between the blue-chip prospects at IMG and the disorganized bunch from Bishop Sycamore to the point where the ESPN announcers expressed concern for the health and safety of the Sycamore players who were getting laid out all over the field. When a Bishop Sycamore player went down with a torn ACL, the team’s trainer knelt next to him to assess the extent of the injury. Bishop Sycamore’s “trainer” was the mother of a team member. She literally had the word “MOM” emblazoned across her T-shirt.

The disastrous game drew enough attention to get the school and Johnson investigated and eventually shut down. But that’s about all they could do because there’s no law against starting a fake school in Ohio, itself a pit.

At the beginning of Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe’s documentary, Johnson wants us to believe he had the best of intentions. “Are you a con man?” he is asked. That’s the question the doc unpacks over an hour and a half. Johnson’s only concession? He’s a liar, but he’s an “honest liar.”

Let’s be clear: There’s nothing honest about Johnson.

A few years back, Johnson started a school called Christians of Faith Academy and later changed its name to Bishop Sycamore. The school was supposed to be for athletically gifted but troubled Black kids who wanted college football scholarships. Johnson, the guy who kicked off the whole scheme, promised better grades, better entrance exam scores, and a path to a Division I school.

He manages to get a number of high school athletes on board, but here’s the kicker: The school didn’t exist. Johnson did put together a football team, coached it himself (with zero prior coaching experience), and even set up games against other high schools, including a televised match against the elite IMG Academy, a team so good that no other high school would accept a bid to play them except a fake one.

Johnson gets exposed, and the students lose a shot at college they didn’t know they never had. The “school” didn’t even have teachers. No studying happened. It was just a lousy football team. One kid did manage to get into a college, but his offer got yanked after they found out Bishop Sycamore was fake.

Johnson basically stuffed the kids into unpaid hotel rooms, fed them by scamming grocery stores, and even forged checks. He raised “tuition” funds through PPP Covid loans taken out in the names of these poor, unsuspecting kids who thought they were on the fast track to college.

As for Johnson? The guy shows no remorse in hours of B.S. High interviews. He’s almost proud he pushed the lie as far as he did. He brags about his cons, justifies his lies, and only really loses his cool when he’s shown a video of a former student calling him “evil.”

The documentary is fascinating, not just for showing how easy it is to pull off an elaborate con like this, but also for Johnson’s utter lack of empathy. Given the chance, he’d do it all over again because, for him, there’s no line between fame and infamy.

BS High is currently streaming on Max.


Richard Harrow and The Art of Coming Home

Boardwalk Empire  can be too on the nose. A malevolent physician is named Dr.Cotton. The primary African-American is called Chalky White. Each episode includes an epilogue in which writers explain the poetry of the title. It pays homage to (or borrows from) The Godfather so often the series could  have called itself The Corleones.

But the series about 1920’s bootleggers and crooked cops created arguably the greatest side character in television history: Richard Harrow.

Harrow is a World War I sharpshooter horribly disfigured in battle. When he returns from the war, he has to wear half a mask to cover his left eye, cheekbone and jaw, all obliterated from his face. He twitches, spasms and must force words through the gravel that is his voice box. His dialogue through four seasons perhaps would fill two pages. 

But what poetry comes from the character, both in word and gesture. He pines for love, for family — for an invitation home from a war he never asked for. 

I connected with him immediately: My uncle Guy, for whom I am named, lost an eye in WWII. His face also spasmed and twitched. He never married, and used his law degree to become a traveling salesman.

I summered with the man in 1984, and he never said a word about the war or his injuries. I used to squint on his extra glass eye, which he kept in a dresser drawer, just to imagine what his worldview captured. But you can’t recreate personal horror.

But Empire comes close. And that proximity manages to make Harrow beautiful.

His courtship of a woman is a fragile Valentine. His fostering of a war buddy’s son is the definition of fatherhood. His love for his sister is what Big Brothers yearns to be.

And when he must return to the bullet, he makes John Wick look like he’s struggling with a learner’s permit.

Like Breaking Bad, Empire is one season too long. And Empire doesn’t have an actor as compelling as Bryan Cranston. Steve Buscemi does a fine job as anti-protagonist Nucky Thompson. But the baby-faced, gnarly-toothed actor is not suited for menace. He’s suited to play Donny in The Big Lebowski, which he does to perfection. 

Even the actor who plays Harrow, Jack Huston, seems out of place behind the mask. On the red carpet and in talk show interviews, Huston is dashing in a mane of black hair, dark features and British accent. I wish he would have insisted on staying in character when he was out of it. 

But that’s the beauty of Boardwalk Empire. Pay close enough attention to the series, you’ll see it’s a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, with Nucky as Oz, his wife as Dorothy, his brother as Scarecrow, his nemesis as Cowardly Lion. 

And Richard Harrow as the Tin Woodsman, beating heart and all. 

‘Knock at The Cabin’: Get A Doorbell


M. Night Shyamalan is impossible to read, sometimes literally.

The writer/director/producer can burst from the cinematic gate with a film like The Sixth Sense, then drown in The Lady in The Water. He’ll post Signs, then fold in The Last Airbender. Split will shatter in Glass. The guy is as mercurial as quicksilver.

Alas, the thermostat is turned way down in Knock at The Cabin, a tepid suspense film that aims to bring the world to the edge of extinction, but instead brings the viewer to the brink of slumber.

Starring the behemoth (and talented) actor Dave Bautista, Cabin imagines a world facing mysterious and unexplained End Times, much like the turgid The Happening, which posited humankind’s demise by a gentle breeze (?).

Here, the threatening closing curtain comes from God Almighty, a stark and unfortunate break from Shyamalan’s previous works. He’s always been fascinated by the supernatural, but rarely do we see him quoting Scripture.

He doesn’t exactly do it here, but his four menacing home invaders do. They even wear the colors of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. But they don’t bring Conquest, War, Famine and Death. They bring an ultimatum to a vacationing family of three: Kill a loved loved one, or the world will exist in a “permanent midnight.” To prove their point, they inflict some savagery on each other.

Of course, in the Bible, even God said “psyche!” before Abraham was ordered to murder his son Isaac. Either Shyamalan didn’t read that far — or realized that wouldn’t make much of an impression in Hollywood, which is agnostic at best.

Cabin doesn’t make much of an impression, either, even when it’s streaming on Amazon.

Eric (Jonathan Voss) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) bring their adopted daughter Wen (newcomer Kristin Cui) to a remote Pennsylvania cabin for a getaway vacation. But it takes about five minutes for the excursion to turn menacing when Leonard (Bautista) and his unmerry band show up to tell them the bad news.

Though based on a popular book by Paul Tremblay, the movie’s 100-minute runtime wedges the story into an impossible corner of brief monologues to substitute for viable character fleshing (save for Bautista, who is terrific). The rest simply look scary or scared.

Religious rapture comes from sinful living. Cabin’s rapture comes from sinful screenwriting; We get no explanation for humanity’s eviction letter besides, you know, times are cuckoo. It’s not enough, and thus neither is our interest. The film doesn’t telegraph its ending: It broadcasts it in 4K.

There are a few glimmers. Bautista is mesmerizing in everything he does, and Cui holds more than her own. Shyamalan is great at casting kids, from Haley Joel Osment in Sense to Abigail Breslin in Signs.

But they are glimmers, not gold. Shyamalan is best when he’s exploring demons within, and too many run crisscross unleashed here. Even on a streamer, viewers are due at least a partial refund for this stay.