The Virtual Sewing Room

Consider yourself fortunate if you have an entire room you can dedicate to sewing. My dream room would include a specialized sewing table, heavy-duty machine, a corkboarded wall to pin ideas and photos, a filing box for patterns, a specially-designed box for thread and bobbins, several bins for fabric and leftovers, a long foldable table to cut patterns, and a tall mirror.

I've got the heavy-duty machine. The rest is not feasible in a two-bedroom apartment where I've already donated the spare room to my tech toys -- especially the corkboard wall. I had one as a child, but as an adult, they've gone the way of dark wood-paneled interiors.

My virtual sewing room consists of the dining room table, with fabric laid out on the living room carpet for some tracing jobs if I can't fit the entire pattern piece and the fabric onto the table. Some projects required a ridiculous amount of fabric, ridiculous only because said fabric hadn't been pleated or wrapped around my body yet, where the sheer yardage made sense. I use a rotary cutter on fabrics with a mat underneath. My heavy-duty Singer sits on the edge of the table, ready for action.

I don't have a dedicated sewing machine table. I tried using a TV tray, hoping it would be sturdy enough. One test with the Singer produced way too much wobble. I also tried my Table-Mate -- yes, the same one you've seen on TV. It also failed the stress test. I thought about buying another small folding table, but then we get into storage issues. That table needs to fold up neatly into my storage closet, which is already cramped for space.

One day, I will find a better solution. For now, I have this, and I don't care about the layout of the room as long as the layout of the project turns out the way I want.

Paper Tiger

It sounded feasable. It looked affordable. And for a gotta-have-it-by-this-day person, the offer proved irresistible: save a few bucks by purchasing a downloadable pattern, print it on my laser printer, and tape it up.

Ha ha ha. Sucker.

What they don't tell you in the fine print, and what you better be sure of before you go to print, is that your printer better be capable of printing from edge to edge. You cannot shrink each page to fit on to the paper. Everything needs to scale out to the width of the printed sheet.

I like my Brother laser printer. It cost less than $100 when I bought it about a decade ago, and it still runs beautifully. It's not a toner hog, but I'm not a printing hog. In a few mouse clicks, I sent over its biggest challenge.

One part of that challenge was the one I couldn't see. The notches on each each of each page, the ones that told me where to connect the page to its sibling pages, failed to resolve. They fell just outside the Brother's printable area, and nothing in the settings could change that. Thus, I had a 60-page jigsaw puzzle on my hands.

I spent an entire Saturday, one I had hoped to use cutting fabric, arranging the parts according to a one-page master sheet -- the equivalent of a box cover. I needed tape, and a lot of it. I needed patience. I needed scissors to trim away the parts of this puzzle which would amount to nothing. I needed a sense of deduction. I really needed a bigger table.

After some three hours of effort, the messy but completed pattern for a pair of 1600's breeches lay on my table, ready to be cut out -- the paper pattern that is, not the fabric for the breeches themselves.

I saved about $10. But I spent a lot more time than I wanted. Had this been a mob cap, the paper pattern would've been a cinch. This, however, was an intricate design with separate pieces for the inner and outer parts. At least the pattern is printed on quality paper stock instead of that flimsy onionskin tissue paper you find with so many papers. It's not pretty to look at, but it will hold up if I want to make more.

Pinned Down

It's tempting: I'm eager to get a project done, I feel like I'm in control of the fabric passing underneath the presser foot, and so who needs pins? That's where I have to stop and recall the agony of misaligned pieces and fabric catches, the overture to the drama of the seam ripper.

My sewing mentors have shown your humble servant how to pin effectively without overdoing it, and especially without destroying the sewing machine's needle -- and if you haven't broken a few of those as a soldier of the cloth, I'm told, you haven't earned your stripes yet. Madame Sherri admits she's particular about pinning; she'll put ten pins into a curve where three or four will do. I prefer to pin sparingly and intentionally in the manner of a championship boxer who throws fewer punches but lands more of them.

I probably do a lot of it wrong, pinning vertically when I should be doing it horizontally, on the wrong side of the fabric that will end up underneath the machine's foot, buried in lumps of fabric I'll have to dig out. I eventually get to them all, and I haven't broken a needle yet. Many people use pins to mark points instead of fabric markers. I've done some of that, but when a loose pin slips out as I'm wrangling with the fabric, I'm in trouble.

Sometimes I'll press my luck on a small item I can guide beneath the presser foot that won't slide around on me. That might have my Home Economics teacher gasping for air, but I think even she realized guys like to take shortcuts every now and then.

For Healthy Teeth And Hardy Buttons

Early on in my historic re-enacting life, I learned a secret that would serve me well: dental floss is the answer when ordinary thread can't cut it.

I've used it time and again on buttons. They tend to come off my weskits and frock coats after vigorous dancing. Reinforcing the entire garment down the line of decorative buttons keeps them on when a Virginia Reel threatens to take them off. I learned at my very first historic ball buttons were going to taunt me. Since then I've taken proactive measures wherever I could.

Lady Sherri asked me, "Why don't you just use carpet thread?"

I would if I didn't have so much dental floss around after getting freebies from the dentist with each visit. One pack will easily reinforce about two coats' worth of buttons. I also use it to sew down the flaps on my buckled shoes if they curl up. The mint scent isn't a distraction.

Don't ask me to try it in the machine. No, no, no.

Eye Of The Needle

"Who taught you how to thread a needle like that?"

One of my sewing mentors watched curiously as I stuck a single thread through the eye and pulled it back, twizzling it around to thread close to the needle to hold it together, more or less. I frankly couldn't remember who taught me that, or whether I just made it up as I went along.

"I've never seen anybody do it that way," she observed.

She wasn't objecting. But she did have a system that worked for: using one of my little fingers to make a knot in the ends of the thread so that I would draw two threads at a time through the fabric. I had trouble getting my fingers to knot the thread, which is probably why I fell back on my own system long, long ago.

I don't enjoy hand stitching, but it's a fact of life for buttons and touch-up jobs. I recently learned of at least four different hand stitches: blind stitch (which I don't want to do), whip stitch (which I have done before I knew it was called a whip stitch), basting stitch (which I can do with the machine), and back stitch (which I've done in a few fix-up jobs). Die-hard historic sewing purists will not go near a machine if they're sewing something made before the machine came around, which is more than understandable. One historic friend of mine is hand-sewing a soldier's Civil War shirt to add to the authenticity factor.

People like me, however, have limited time, lots of projects pinging around in our heads, and we want to spend less time sewing the garment so we can spend more time wearing it. I have devised ways to get around instructions telling you to hand-sew something. Many times I can fold the fabric into the machine to create the same result of the hand-stitch, just faster. In many of those cases, the handwheel on the machine serves the function of the hand-stich. I turn it slowly, and slow and steady prevails.

Any hand stitching I do for an extended amount of seam is going to look like a horror show on fabric, as much as I try to keep things neat. I had to whip stitch all away around the waistband of my puffy 1600's breeches, when I probably could've found a way to do it by machine with enough thought and experimentation. Nobody will see that part of my handiwork, thankfully. When the instructions called for your servant to hand stitch the bottom leg cuffs, I hacked a way out of it with nobody the wiser.

As my skill level rises, I'll probably find a way to hack around more hand-stitching work. Period correct it's not, but unless you want to get out the magnifying glass and inspect it, I doubt you'd ever know the difference.

Project #3: Puffy Shirt (Take 1)

STARTED: October 2015

COMPLETED: Three days after beginning in October 2015

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Medium

THE IDEA: I like my Jacobite shirt I wear with my Scottish attire because it has puffy sleeves. But I felt I could make something even puffier. I also wanted a longer shirt, more like a tunic, perhaps something befitting of an Eastern European peasant.

THE CHALLENGES: I acquired the pattern (Butterick B4486) for less than a dollar at Savers. I acquired the fabric from Hancock for about $15, picking Kona cotton. I could've gone with muslin, but what I saw on the bolts didn't look good enough, and some of the fabric that did was a little too sheen. This is a historic shirt, not a wet t-shirt contest. I went with the Kona because of its stark white look and sturdiness.

Immediately I ran into challenges. That pattern I bought from the thrift store lacked a couple of pieces: the sleeves. I purchased another at Hancock for a ridiculously cheap price. Then I got home to find those missing pieces from the discount-store pattern had actually fallen on the floor undetected while I was unpacking it.

I also goofed on how much fabric I needed, and I ended up buying half a yard too little. But I was determined to make it work with what I had. So what if the sleeves were just a little bit shorter? Maybe they wouldn't have as much puff, but I could compensate in other ways.

Once I had the parts cut out, I tried to follow the instructions to the letter. Tried. I have no problem with sewing together big pieces. It's the tiny bands and hems and holes that turn my efforts into amateur night. I got the collar on with minimal muss and fuss. Those front neck bands refused to be rational. I won't talk about the bottom of the neck opening.

I still had to deal with the sleeves. I've basted and gathered before, and I figured it wouldn't be much of a chore after my experience on the puffy pants. Wrong again. Those puffy cranky sleeve ends refused to gather into a rational layout. Then I had to figure out a way to get them into the cuff and finish off the sleeve.

This is where your humble servant will admit he skipped steps he didn't understand, couldn't execute, or thought he could simplify. The result on the outside doesn't look bad. The inside view will have you experienced tailors demanding I turn in my needle. Somehow, I made this process look halfway neat.

Many of you will say the seam ripper has become either your best friend or your most demanding mistress. I turned to it several times over the course of this project: first, to give me some more room to account for my fattening stomach; second, to give more puff to my sleeves; and third, to begin undoing the mess created by making two left sleeves.

When I got my bearings straight and everything sewn together and hemmed up around the loose edges, I still had to make buttonholes. Somebody forgot to tell me the machine won't do it well when you have a pile of sloppy fabric above the feed dogs. Improvisation, frustration, and Fray-Check followed.

THE RESULT: In this quick-turn project, done on a whim while I was home with family, I ended up with a peasant shirt that draped nicely down my thighs but caught on my right shoulder. I couldn't figure out why. The other shoulder felt fine. I tested it out at a historic dance with my puffy breeches, a woolen belt and a faux-fur hat: instant Cossack.

I later discovered my sleeves were still too short, after comparing them to another shirt. And after one washing... well, that was the step I should've done first and avoided the cursed shrinkage.

The shirt now sits in my wardrobe in a state of limbo. I don't know if I will ever be able to wear it again unless somebody can tell me a way to unshrink it. I suspect it will go to an aspiring merry peasant someday.

As for your humble servant, I can always make another shirt.... something in blue, perhaps?

TO BE CONTINUED...

To Hack With It

Why does Simplicity sell patterns under that name when some of the things you have to do for them seem less than simple? Like very small hems? Like preparatory stitches before the actual ones?

If you are experienced seamstress -- or seamster, in my gender -- you can ignore the rest of this, because your knowledge base and cloth soldiering will tell you this is kid stuff. But when you're a kid behind the machine, the kid stuff isn't kid stuff. This is where I trim the instructions and add some creative license.

In at least three projects now, I have substituted steps to make my life easier. A couple of big modifications involved instructions to sew by hand. But I found a way to get the same result using the machine -- and with a stronger stitch, too. Some patterns I've hacked because I wanted more of one thing or less of another, as you will see when I discuss some more projects here.

Is this sewing sacrilege? Not on your life, according to my two sewing mentors. One of them is my dear Auntie Susan, sewing pro who has made more than a few adjustments to the rules that come with the pattern. She was the one who offered to make me a new pair of stark white 1700's breeches when I started re-enacting. I know she made a few adjustments to make things easier on both her efforts and my body, although with time and my subtle shape-shifting, those 1770's breeches are now fitting me more like a pair of early 1800's pantaloons -- tight and to the point.

Various patterns are meant to be hacked, as we had to do on the weskit project. The layout specifically instructs you where you can add and lengthen. But if you don't see that, it's time to use your head and maybe some butcher paper. While I was working on my weskit, a young lady next to me was designing her own pattern for a corset. She knew there was little room for error, but she needed enough room to breathe. That's a task I don't envy one bit. If men nowadays had to wear corsets, you'd see the obesity epidemic plunge.

I consider making your own patterns like graduate school. I'm not there yet, but in my bookcase, I have a paperback titled How To Make Historic Clothing. It doesn't provide a lot of specifics, but it does have a lot of outlines. Someday, I'll get there, when the time is right.

Project #2: The 1600's Puffy Breeches

STARTED: August 2015

COMPLETED: September 2015

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Medium

THE IDEA: After seeing the interpreters at Jamestowne Settlement wear these puffy pants, I wanted a pair. They looked outrageously comfortable. And they also might double for Cossack pants, fitting my "one item, multiple uses" goal.

THE CHALLENGES: I downloaded a pattern from Reconstructing History. Just piecing the pattern together was a major accomplishment, as I will discuss later in this series.

My fabric came from SAS. I chose lightweight maroon muslin with muslin backing at a total cost of less than $20. I kept the budget low; this was the first project I was attempting to start and finish with little outside coaching or supervision, and if I messed it up, I didn't want to be out a fortune.

Cutting the pattern proved challenging. The pieces filled my kitchen table and then some. I had to keep setting and resetting my cutting mat.

I didn't know how to gather from a basting stitch before taking these pants on. That's where I got more coaching from my sewing mentor, who showed me how to pull in the fabric without breaking the basting thread. Dozens upon dozens of crinkles later, I had my gathers ready to sew down -- after I made another waistband to replace the one I sewed incorrectly and made too small. I had to do the same for the lining and then join the two.

The instructions called for a hand whip-stitch to help secure the waistband to the top of the pants legs. I put that in, painstakingly. But when it came to attaching the bottom cuffs of the pant legs, I discovered a way to cheat using a machine stitch. I made several passes over those legs to secure them, knowing those legs would get a vigorous workout from dancing. Along the way, I had to tack in tiny gathers that weren't sewn down.

The instructions for the fly piece, in my opinion, lacked clarity. I got a couple of hints after an email to Reconstructing History: "The Fly should be attached to the left side, as worn. The buttons should be attached to the right leg as worn. You'll be pulling the Fly from the left over the buttons to close."

With that, I made the buttonholes, attached the fly and then the fabric-covered buttons, which I easily made from a kit I got at Hancock. I also needed to adjust the button on the waistband for my deceptive middle.

THE RESULT: Indeed these breeches are the most comfortable I've ever worn. Because the lining is smaller than the outer fabric, the puff holds up very well and doesn't flatten out. People marvel at how full they look. They don't feel heavy at all. And they work beautifully with my Puritan tunic -- I found that out at Thanksgiving. They also look great with a puffy peasant shirt, which I will discuss later.

All This And Pockets, Too!

The next phase for the new coat is underway. Here you see the back and the two front parts along with some lining on the far left.

Most of this day's effort went into the pockets. It involves sewing one piece of pocket lining to the front, then cutting the actual pocket hole inside the narrow part you just sewed, and then stuffing it all in before you sew of the back of the pocket. Then come the flaps, which have to be carefully sewn together, turned right side around, and then pressed before topstitching the flap just above the pocket. They don't have buttonholes, yet.

Next come the sleeves. Stay tuned...

Project #1: The Red Weskit

STARTED: June 2015

COMPLETED: August 2015

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Medium

THE IDEA: For my return to sewing, I wanted a practical project. No more pillows. No more aprons. This weskit -- what we now call a vest -- would replace one I bought on eBay several years ago when I had a smaller stomach. I wanted red to go with my Royal Stewart kilt. But the item could easily go with white breeches, stockings and a coat for a civilian 18th Century outfit. "One item, multiple uses," has become a key component of the historic clothing I acquire. I don't want something that will only work with one look. It has to have adaptability.

THE PROCESS: Acquiring the material proved more challenging than I expected. I wanted to go with pure linen, but after scouring every Jo-Ann in Tucson along with Hancock Fabrics, I couldn't find pure linen in either the color or quantity I desired. I could have cheated and gone with a linen blend, but I wanted to start off right. I ended up picking red cotton with white muslin backing.

My sewing friend and mentor had the pattern, which we modified so that the weskit hung halfway down my thighs, as weskits in the 1740's and before often did. As the 1700's progressed, the weskits shrunk, so by the turn of the century, they more closely resembled our modern-day vest.

I spent at least half an hour cutting the pieces carefully with scissors. That convinced me to add the first thing to my sewing-room wish list: a rolling cutter.

Assembly came over the course of three sessions with my friend's machine. As each step came together, and I saw the project taking shape, quitting for the day proved tough. I could've sewed all night. My teacher-mentor noted I had drive.

If only I had my own machine... which I was working on acquiring.

THE CHALLENGES: Beginner's anxiety is compounded by not having a spare empty bobbin. We wound my red thread onto another threaded bobbin which had some room to spare. That trick worked until the time came to sew buttonholes. The red thread ran out and the orange thread wound beneath it caught on. Suddenly I had a buttonhole with a hybrid red-orange lining.

My teacher sighed and reached for the seam ripper.

"Hold on," I said. "We can fix this. Do you have a red Sharpie?"

Indeed, she did. I carefully dotted the orange threads into the shade of red we needed.

"That's the guy's way of fixing it," I remarked, envisioning Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor recovering from a sewing disaster.

We didn't have to use the seam ripper very much. Prudent stitching and experienced coaching made the difference.

THE RESULT: Adding brass buttons from Benno's completed the look and added a burst of elegance. Working sizable pockets mean I have a place to stash a non-period wallet and smartphone. It doesn't press on me like a girdle or drape all over like it's two sizes too big.

Mission accomplished.

The First Cut Is The Messiest

Here you see just some of the pieces going into my new fancy ball coat. Cutting these large segments out required a big chunk of an afternoon and a large table. The lighter-colored fabric is for the lining.

What you can't see is all the thread dust and lint left behind in the aftermath of this cutting session. The rolling cutter is hating me, but it beat using a scissors. I still have to cut out the pieces for the matching breeches, which I am hoping will remain a simple project. I have a pattern for a period-correct pair of 1700's fall-front breeches, but the instructions warn quite clearly that it's a time-consuming effort. I see most of my time going into the coat, which will be the most visible part of the look. And a lot of it will cover the breeches, as those coats often did. Therefore, I made an executive decision to go with a simpler breeches pattern from Butterick.

Now comes the task of slowly putting all these pieces together.

Stay tuned...

The First Stitches

My sewing journey begins some 30 years ago, in a middle-school Home Economics class, on a well-worn Bernina. The class spends half the semester in the kitchen and the other half in the sewing room. That's where I learn how to thread a bobbin, work a hand wheel, spot a selvage, cut a pattern, and use a seam ripper. We practice our stitching on paper before putting a needle on fabric, mastering the art of controlling the pedal and the presser foot.

The guy in front of me enjoys messing with my machine. I break at least one needle. I could've broken a whole lot more if those Berninas hadn't been built to withstand reckless youth.

We make aprons out of denim, although I don't think I ever wear mine more than a few times -- that strap was flimsy.  We make simple pairs of sweat pants; I forget what happened to my pair.  Perhaps it wasn't big enough in the end. I do find use for the super-sized pillow I create, which props your humble kid servant up in bed for reading or the TV.

Aside from a repair job on my Royal Father's driving gloves, I never had the need to sit down in front of the needle. Thus, what I learned in front of the middle-school sewing machine evaporated over the decades.

When I started wearing historical clothing, I found willing seamstresses and tailors. I paid them, and they made what I needed to my specifications. But part of me still wanted to do it myself, not wanting to have to occupy friends who had other projects to indulge my creature comforts. I wanted the freedom to see something and then make it.

For the young people reading this: it's not out of character for men to sew. Men are tailors after all, as a good friend reminded me. So when one of my historical friends offered a sewing day for the ladies, I took the leap of wanting to get in.

"One [outfit] I would like to make is a mid-1700's green frock coat -- with large sleeves," I wrote in an email, explaining the method to my madness. "I would like to try my hand for starters at a mid-1700's linen weskit (the longer, mid-thigh variety) in a red colour -- something to go with one of my kilts or other colonial outfits."

So on a Saturday last June, in front of my teacher and mentor's Brother machine, I started pulling threads from the fabric of my memories as I re-learned the craft with some coaching.

In a great miracle, that knowledge returned with minimal mistakes. My coach helped refresh my memory, but she didn't have to prompt or prod too much. A simple reminder here and there sufficed, leaving her to attend to other sewing projects with other sewers while I plugged away. Slow and steady stitching won the race. What problems I encountered were not beyond repair. I chose the weskit because it wasn't too easy and wasn't too hard. Win or lose, I would wear the fruits of my labour. After a few sessions on that borrowed machine, I had my weskit. After another long afternoon with a needle and thread, I had the buttons attached. And mostly, I had pride.

The weskit I fashioned in the top half of the photo would encourage your humble servant to take on the puffy pants in the bottom half.

Fashionable Without Fail

All this month on 30/30, I'll be diving into my sewing life. Yes, I sew. Men sew. And men who love historic fashion often learn to sew because it's the most practical way they can get into more outfits. For your humble servant, it means more outfits for more fancy historic balls. Fancy historic balls require fancier outfits than the ones I have made up to now. Thus the challenge before me:

This lump of satin jacquard on the left and lining on the right will be cut and stitched into a 1740's coat with matching knee breeches. The goal is to get it done in time for the next ball in Williamsburg coming up in March. I'm shooting for a fuller version of what I wore last year -- an outfit actually made more than five years ago.

You can see the beauty in this outfit.  What you can't see is how tight the breeches are in the front and how the weskit (vest) feels more like a girdle at certain times -- mostly after eating. Time is not good to the waistline of a gentleman who's been around for (2)43 years.

Why make another outfit when I have several others I could already wear to the ball? I think this clip from Tootsie explains it well:



This will be the toughest project I have taken on so far, mainly because I'm using better material -- and more expensive, too. The tab for the raw materials comes out to about $60 from SAS. My previous efforts have run in the $20 range, mostly because I didn't trust myself with more expensive fabric... yet.

After five sewing projects now, I'm finally ready to kick up a big notch. You're invited to watch this project come to fruition or disintegrate into frustration. Failure is not an option. Along the way, I'll be filling you in on how I went from pining over historic attire to making it.

It's The Economy, (And Wall Street Is) Stupid

Reel To Reel: The Big Short

Going Rate: Worth full price admission
Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt
Rated: R
Red Flags: Multiple f-bombs and two scenes inside a strip club

In one my Royal Father's favorite movies, Trading Places, the characters portrayed by Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy reek revenge against their bosses and get rich by short-selling futures in the commodities market. The Big Short shows us the same process, only billions of dollars bigger and all true. It zooms in on the securities nobody thought would crumble -- until they did and took the economy down with them in 2008. It's easily my favorite movie of this year and the best movie about Wall Street I've seen since Wall Street.

The film, based on Michael Lewis' book of the same name, follows three sets of traders as they discover dangerous problems with mortgage-backed bonds. Brokers have been pushing their stability and quality, but it turns out the securities -- which are bundles of individual mortgages sold as investments -- contain oodles of sub-prime loans. Sub-prime, by the way, is Wall Street politeness for saying, "These loans are [bleep]!"

Eccentric, dressed-down hedge fund manager Dr. Michael Burry (Bale) discovers it first by looking under the hood of the bonds and discovering an alarming amount of loans about to go bad. The fat cats don't see it yet, but the analysis from his think-tank mind predicts massive defaults are coming as people get shocked by adjustable rate mortgages or end up falling behind on loans they never should have gotten in the first place. Burry wants to take the groundbreaking step of betting against the housing market. It's so unheard of, he doesn't even have a way to do it until he convinces big investment firms to create credit-default swaps, a form of insurance that's not technically insurance nor regulated like it.

Other traders smell trouble. Button-down investor Jared Vennett (Gosling) hears Burry is buying up massive amounts of swaps and decides to get in on the action after doing his own homework. A misdialed phone call accidentally tips off capitalist crusader and trader Mark Baum (Carell), who is already convinced the financial world has it in for the little guy. Vennett and Blum team up after Blum's team discovers the flimsiness of the mortgages and the cracks forming in the housing sector. In a garage, financial whizkids Jamie Shipley (John Magaro) and Charlie Geller (Finn Wittrock) also get wind of what Vennett knows. But they can't pull off the massive financial operations they need to cash in until they turn to reclusive retired banker Ben Rickert (Pitt), the man who can get them to the big boys' table.

The financial instruments at the heart of this can be hard to comprehend. The film takes the inventive step of breaking the fourth wall and bringing in celebrities to give us quick Wall Street lessons, including Selena Gomez explaining issues with collateralized debt obligations and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain using a stew to demonstrate how Wall Street makes bad bonds look good. Many of the key players themselves also speak directly to us, aided by flashy editing and illustrations, making this a mashup of Wall Street and GoodFellas with a touch of Oceans 11. It feels like the kind of film Martin Scorsese and Guy Ritchie would crank out if they combined directorial forces, only it's directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman) as a rollicking black financial comedy.

The Big Short doesn't present us with any clear good or bad guys. It reminds us the people who are getting rich off multiple layers of convoluted Wall Street risk are betting against the American economy. As they win, financial institutions collapse, millions lose jobs, and the recession hits. Wall Street's big players are stupid, clueless, criminal, or just problem gamblers. We see how fast and loose the markets play with securities, as one risky bet becomes an even bigger risky bet which is then folded into an even larger bet. Yet we can still relate to all this financial abstraction on a human level through the traders who discover it. They -- and we -- are shocked to find so much money flowing into such crummy investments, ones people don't even understand.

I have told you before that derivatives -- which include mortgage-backed securities -- are a bad habit Wall Street just can't kick. Even though the feds have tried reining them in, the financial lobby is a powerful player, and we are once again seeing the kinds of risky instruments on the market that got us into this mess.

Many of you will also be asking, "Why didn't the fat cats go to prison for this?" It's a simple explanation: in Las Vegas, you don't go to jail for making bad bets. You just lose money. However, in Vegas you're playing with your own money. On Wall Street, the big shots are playing with your pension fund and IRA's, but it's considered a bet, not an investment, at all the convenient times.

The Big Short brings this all into focus and makes us understand it all. You don't have to be a financial guru to love this picture. You just have to have a brain and a willingness to accept the truth everybody else believes they can trade away.

The Force Is Strong With This One

Reel To Reel: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Going Rate: Worth full price admission in IMAX
Starring: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Max von Sydow
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Lightsaber battles, blaster fire, X-wings vs. TIE fighters... you know the drill

Getting Star Wars away from George Lucas is the best thing to happen to this saga in a long time. While Lucas created the trilogy and the mythology, his three prequels to the classic trilogy lacked emotional depth to go with their visual dazzle. At times, it felt like he was mailing it in. More often, the first three pictures felt lame. Apart from a few scenes in The Phantom Menace, I don't have any standout memories of them. When Lucas sold his studio to Disney, and Disney announced it would make new Star Wars pictures, you knew things were going to be different, and better.

Director J.J. Abrams delivers on that new hope. He has made a picture that will resonate with both fanboys and casual fans. It's a picture that works because of its economy, taking us back to the familiar with plenty of inside references rather than trying to create vast new worlds. It creates likeable new heroes while catching up on the old ones. Yes, Han Solo (Ford), Princess Leia (Fisher), Chewbacca (Mayhew), Master Luke Skywalker (Hamill), C3-PO (Daniels) and R2-D2 are along for the ride. Yet they are more of a bridge between old and new without having to prop the film up.

I refuse to get into plot points because so much of Star Wars' fun comes from letting it play out before you. I also don't want this site to get blocked by various spoiler-sniffing apps floating around. I will just tell you that planetary scavenger Rey (Ridley), reluctant stormtrooper Finn (Boyega), and ace fighter pilot Poe (Issac) are all thrown together into a mission to defeat another plot from a new form of the old Empire. Leading the way and stealing the show is the nerdily-cute BB-8 rolling ball droid, which will remind you of how much you enjoyed first watching R2-D2. BB-8 is sure to end up on many a Christmas list.

All you really need to know beyond this is that The Force Awakens contains everything you want and nothing you don't. You won't find aberrations like Jar-Jar in this film, nor Ewoks, nor pod racers. Like he did with the Star Trek reboot several years ago, Abrams has transformed something with waning cool into current cool. At least two more sequels are in the works. Let's hope Abrams keeps it going.

War Of Words

Reel To Reel: Trumbo

Going Rate: Worth full price admission
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Helen Mirren
Rated: R
Red Flags: Multiple uses of the f-word, brief male rear nudity

I had never heard of Dalton Trumbo before I saw this picture, even though he wrote dozens of screenplays -- some classic, some fine, some just skirting the garbage can -- along with several novels. I turn out at least two dozen short TV news scripts a day. Trumbo could crank out a 100-page screenplay in three days with some baseline of quality, all with a typewriter, scissors and cellophane tape. But his overwhelming contribution to Hollywood was breaking its notorious blacklist, something intended to protect American values while violating the spirit of a sacred American tenet: the First Amendment.

Trumbo walks us through the story of its title character (Cranston) as the Red Scare closes in around him. He's one of the highest paid contract writers in Hollywood when word of his Communist sympathies filters back to Washington. He and nine others in the film industry are subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo and the others realize it's a kangaroo court and refuse to answer questions. Congress finds them in contempt, sending Trumbo and the others to jail.

After nearly a year in the can, he returns home to find a strong family but a broken career. He can't work for any major studio. He sells a screenplay for Roman Holiday through a front writer, but he realizes he will have to take on more work to keep the lights on. Trumbo goes to work for a small B-movie studio whose co-topper Frank King (Goodman) unapologetically unspools garbage onto the screen. King is ecstatic to see the quality of Trumbo's work, and the studio gives him steady work as a writer and script doctor. Trumbo soon devises an underground network to keep himself and fellow blacklisted writers in business.

A key ally is fellow screen scribe Alan Hird (Louis C.K.), an idealist who wants to take the studios to court. Being a member of the Communist party isn't illegal, the argument goes, and somebody needs to stand. Trumbo argues the deck is stacked against the Hollywood Ten, and they need to find other ways to stand on principle while still winning by making a living. Hird is in a fight for his life on multiple fronts; he's suffering from lung cancer along with a career in crisis. Trumbo also puts a lot on the line as he involves his entire family in his work, forcing them to help retype and ferry scripts.

On the other side of the equation, you have the Hollywood brass who lack spine. They're putty in the hands of powerful gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Mirren), the Nikki Finke of her time. Michael Stuhlbarg turns in a capable performance as Edward G. Robinson, who named names to keep working and found no peace. But the film belongs to Bryan Cranston, whose irascible portrayal of Trumbo -- wit, warts and all -- powers the film. Even though we have a hard time understanding whether the famed screenwriter had method to his madness or just madness, we can't stop watching him puff his cigarettes and pound his typewriter between riffs and bouts with Hollywood's players.

It's hard to ignore the present-day parallels. As this post hits, we are in the middle of a national debate over freedom of religion versus terrorist religious extremism and how this nation should respond to it. Several are raising the spectre of Hitler. The spectre of HUAC seems much more fitting.

It's Not War, It's Personal

Reel To Reel: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Going Rate: Worth full price admission
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Julianne Moore
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Intense action violence

Some of you wanted to see the evil President Snow of Panem go up in flames, perhaps with somebody snarking "Extra crispy!" as it happened. Sorry, folks, you ain't gettin' it.

The conclusion of the Hunger Games series wallows through the moral ambiguities of a bloody revolution where freedom is the rallying cry, but control is the goal. It has a lot to say about war, sacrifice and tyranny against a backdrop of nightmarish battle sequences interposed with its heroine recovering from nearly getting killed time and again.

Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) is in one of those recovery phases as the picture begins, while her love Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson) is strapped in an isolation chamber. Medics work to deprogram him from a highly potent Capitol brainwashing technique that sends him into fits of rage. The rebellion against President Snow (Donald Sutherland, again deliciously evil) is making progress towards the Capitol, and the 12 districts are unifying for the final push. District 13 president and rebellion leader Alma Coin (Moore) says Katniss' work is done; she should rest and let the rebels finish their work. When victory is theirs, the new government will fly her in for the surrender ceremony.

Our heroine won't have it that way. She wants President Snow dead for everybody he's killed or harmed, including Peeta. Snow's decadence eats at her, and she wants to settle more than a few old scores. Katniss sneaks onto a transport and eventually falls in with a "star squad" whose purpose is to make more propaganda films a safe distance away from the front lines. Still, they have to avoid "pods:" creatively diabolical booby traps scattered across abandoned parts of the Capitol. Once you see what these pods do, you realize the Geneva Convention doesn't exist in Panem -- or maybe they just ignore it. As Katniss and her crew get closer to the presidential mansion and the casualties mount, so do a few uncomfortable truths. She realizes what she desires from the revolution and what might actually happen are growing further apart, and she has to wonder, is she a pawn?

As I said in my review of Mockingjay Part 1, I don't consider The Hunger Games science fiction as much as social-science fiction. The gizmos and special effects don't drive this story -- it's the complex world devised by Suzanne Collins with its broad themes of power versus liberty interposed with the horrors of war on a deeply personal level. This is not one of those 1980's sci-fi actioners where Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris would beat the pulp out of President Snow at the end. It's good for your grey matter, but fercryinoutloud, let's have a little bit more fashion sense than the people in the Capitol.

Mockingjay - Part 2 wraps everything up, but it still leaves some wiggle room for another film. Whether Collins and Hollywood want that to happen is up to them, but I can see the possibilities. These four films have laid a lot of groundwork and planted seeds. We'll see if somebody wants another reaping, er, harvest.

A Game Of Human Chess

Reel To Reel: Bridge Of Spies

Going Rate: Worth full price admission
Starring: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Alan Alda
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: A couple of f-bombs and Cold War-related violence

A co-worker of mine once said public defenders were a garbage chute to prison. In many cases, he's right. They are assigned a thankless task of representing various levels of scum, many of them guilty as sin, with only the time or resources to present a token defense or at least engineer a plea deal. But every so often, a huge case comes along requiring solid litigation chops. At the very least, the system needs a defender who will keep a guilty verdict from being tossed on appeal due to ineffective counsel.

It's that scenario which thrusts insurance attorney James Donovan (Hanks) into an espionage case in 1957 Cold War America. His legal superiors throw him the case of Rudolf Abel (Rylance), a Soviet Spy posing as a quiet artist in New York City. Hanks has little practical experience in criminal trials; he makes a living negotiating settlements and explaining to courts and clients why a car hitting a group of five people is one liability claim, not five. He does it with cool and logical finesse, boiling down obtuse legal principles into simple truths. Hanks is no garbage-chute lawyer. Although initially unsure about his ability, Donovan locks on to a basic principle: Abel is innocent until proven guilty, and if our Constitution means anything, it has to work for both the innocent and the guilty, especially to show the world -- especially the Soviets -- that the American legal system is not a show-trial machine.

Abel is no caricature of a foreign agent. The grandfatherly figure speaks of loss and hardship, not Communist propaganda. He and Donovan establish a mutual respect, adding to the lawyer's determination against a system determined to cut corners to put him away. Inevitably, it happens, but Donovan engineers a sentence he believes will hold value in the long run: prison versus the electric chair. The shrewdness of that sentence comes into play when the Soviets capture U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell). The feds call Donovan into service once more to engineer the deal of a lifetime that will swap Powers for Abel.

Hanks' performance will remind many of you of Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird. Indeed, according to director Steven Spielberg, Peck was once attached to play Donovan when MGM considered making this story into a movie in the 1960's. (The studio ultimately abandoned the project due to Cold War politics.) Yet Hanks' Donovan is more of a negotiator than a litigator, someone who can see every move and countermove and carefully select the right words. As we see several times, that skill enables Donovan to survive complication after complication when he finds out the deal he's negotiating comes with wrinkles.

Bridge Of Spies gets props for staying a Cold War thriller and not trying to become a back-door swipe at U.S. policies in the War on Terror. Hanks' rhetoric could've easily steered it that way, but Spielberg isn't an activist director, and he knows when to pull up. The real story is the submerging of a working-class lawyer into a thick world of espionage with tripwires and trapdoors all around. Curiously, Joel and Ethan Coen did a rewrite of the original screenplay by Matt Charman, one of the few projects they have worked on without either directing or producing.

And once again, we see Tom Hanks in another comfortably-fitting role, much more so than the last time I saw him as Walt Disney in last year's Saving Mr. Banks. We've come to depend on him to deliver hero after to hero. How much more can he give us?

Don't Look Down

Reel To Reel: The Walk

Going Rate: Worth full price admission (and in IMAX 3D)
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlotte Le Bon, Ben Kingsley
Rated: PG (but really more of a hard G)
Red Flags: mild language, scarily realistic scenes of heightened peril (Note: this may not be for people with vertigo or fear of high places)

In all the tributes following the 9/11 attacks, I am amazed I never heard about Philippe Petite's stunning walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's likely many people didn't hear about it when it happened on August 7, 1974. News of Petit's walk was buried in the Watergate crisis; President Nixon would announce his resignation one day later. Still, the networks carved out some time for it.



The documentary Man On Wire chronicles Petit's walk, but not to the dizzying, dazzling degree as director Robert Zemeckis, whose biggest challenge was recreating two buildings that aren't there anymore. The film uses a mixture of CGI and reconstructions of the WTC's top floors. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt not only learned to walk on a wire but speak fluent French, and he envelops the role of Petit completely as a creatively crazy Parisian street performer who's looking for the next place to "hang my wire."

Petit breaks the fourth wall, narrating from the torch platform of the Statue of Liberty, twin towers over his shoulder. He shows us how an emergency trip to the dentist led him to a magazine chronicling the construction of the twin towers, which in the finishing phase at the time of his stunt. He immediately knows he wants to make a walk between them, something he calls "the coup."

Here's where The Walk becomes a caper film in which nobody is robbed, killed or blown up. Petit's enthusiastic sense of adventure tinged with anarchy attracts a crew, including a photographer, a math wizard who's afraid of heights, an electronics-store hustle artist, an inside man at the WTC, and yes, a girl -- a fellow street performer named Annie (Le Bon). Petit breezes us through the plotting and planning phases, where he learns as much about the towers as he can, taking countless photographs and even posing as a reporter to gather crucial information. The team develops an intricate scheme for getting up to the top of the towers over a period of more than 12 hours, running the wire across (with the help of a bow and arrow) and stabilizing it. Petit's co-conspirators must also deal with his borderline insanity and compulsions as a self-proclaimed artist and not some mere performer. His purity of intentions brings him into conflict with his mentor, Papa Rudy (Kingsley), a circus high-wire guru who instructs Philipe in the methods and secrets.

The payoff is huge. Petit's multiple walks across the wire are frighteningly realistic. We know it's a film, and we know Petit survives it, but the seamless CGI enhanced by 3D and the camera which floats around him put you up there with him. Don't eat a big lunch. This is a film you feel in the gut when you hold your breath and contemplate the extreme danger of this stunt.

Petit never directly explains to us why he chose the Twin Towers, but somehow we understand it through his eccentric personality. I also liked how the film dodged shoving a romantic subplot between Petit and Annie down our necks. This movie is tight and focused, just like the man and his wire.

Another thing you won't see: a direct reference to the 9/11 attacks. A tribute is there, however, and you'll know it when you see it.

Dealing With The Devil

Reel To Reel: Black Mass

Going Rate: Worth matinee price
Starring: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon
Rated: R
Red Flags: Graphic bursts of intense bloody violence, strong language

Irish gangster James "Whitey" Bulger had a lock on Boston's underworld in the late 1970's and 1980's largely because an FBI agent protected him and used him as an informant, allowing Bulger's criminal enterprise to grow nearly unchecked and failing to prevent several murders. Those included the high-profile whacking of former Tulsa businessman Roger Wheeler, a case still pending in the courts even as Bulger serves out two consecutive life sentences in prison after years on the lam. Black Mass is a chilling look at what the feds got for their end of the bargain.

Most of that chill comes from Johnny Depp's performance as Bulger, a tailspin of evil as the picture unfolds. Even in his rare lighter moments -- like a scene where Bulger explains to his son how to beat up another kid without getting caught -- Depp's Bulger is still icily dark. He surrounds himself with equally evil, foul-mouthed henchmen who provide the narrative backbone of the film in FBI interviews. But in Whitey's world, it's not crime; it's about standing up for the "Southies," those in South Boston's working-class mean streets now getting squeezed as the Italian mafia moves in on them.

Fellow Southie, friend of Bugler and FBI agent John Connolly (Edgerton) knows Whitey is facing a turf war. He also needs something to make a case on the Angiulo Brothers, whom the feds know about but can't seem to bust. Connolly makes a blockbuster proposition to his bosses: let Bulger become a high-level confidential informant on the Angiulos and get what they need to run them out of Boston. Bulger reluctantly agrees, not considering it ratting or "informing" but improving business by running out competition.

Bulger has to abide by some simple ground rules, if that's even possible: no drugs, no murders. Those rules soon get clipped as Bulger's life deteriorates, starting with the death of his son. Connolly also finds himself pulled deeper into darkness as he tries to cover up his informant's escalating criminal escapades and keep his bosses off his back. As you might expect, so much of Bulger's life isn't on the screen, including the years laying low from the feds until they finally caught him in California in 2011, living under another name and looking like a frail old man rather than a powerful mob boss.

Black Mass will remind you of two other films, both by Martin Scorsese: The Departed, inspired by Bulger's life, and GoodFellas, which the film mimics at certain points, even including its own version of the famous "You Think I'm Funny" scene. Those two films had style and a darkly comic sense of how banal mafia life could be at times. Black Mass is all business, and although it makes a token attempt at Bulger's domestic issues, they're mainly there to convince us Bulger had only sparse humanity.

I kept watching Edgerson as Agent Connolly in his pompadour and wondered if he was looking for a role on The Sopranos instead of mob information. His protection of Bulger became a real-life embarrassment for the FBI, a finer point the film nearly overlooks. Like Bulger, the agent sees himself also protecting his friends and fellow Southies, a rationalization that drives his agenda.

The main reason to see Black Mass is for Depp's brilliant performance, calculated and cruel. He attempted to meet with Bulger himself in the preparation for the role. He had to settle for fine tuning from Bulger's lawyer. Bulger still isn't ratting, even after all this time, not even on himself.