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In a short statement of how to do television the right way, the "stick" folks put together a perfect episode that delves into the indie game of golf and how ego can ruin it.

Pryce, Santi and his mom , Zero, and Mitts all combine on multilayered scheme that tops the hustle from the first episode, convincing Clark Ross to do the what he never would, sponsor Santi. Stick, in a way that I never saw coming when the show's first episode popped up a month or so ago, has managed to do something that few series' are able to do, make you root for the home team. And these days, that's a bonus that none of us expect.

Well. First of all, there is the cast. Henry Fonda as Bill Russell (no relation) and Cliff Robertson as his rival, the faux populist, Joe Cantwell, Edie Adams as his wife, and solid support actors, with great direction. No dead spots, it's a continuous swirl of the purgatory that is politics. Gore Vidal, who wrote the play 4 years earlier and then follows up with this screenplay, is at the height of his writing powers. And then there is the content. Prescient now as it was 60 years ago. The choices that successful politicians are force to make, sometimes right there in real time that will affect everything moving forward. My question remain: Why the hell isn't this film better known?

The first half hour or so of the movie was quite disorienting. I kept thinking that I was watching an MTV version of the film. I resigned myself to letting Chris Nolan be Chris. Cillian Murphy encompasses the weird manner that Oppenheimer put out there. And Emily Blunt is powerful as Kitty Oppenheimer. But the movie's fulcrum starts to shift to Robert Downey Jr's performance is Lewis Strauss, whose relationship with Oppenheimer changes the course of our collective history in a way that translates into the original cancel culture of the 50s where anyone who didn't toe the line was treated as a traitor.

Downey deserves serious consideration for an Oscar.