Friends vs. How I Met Your Mother: The Ultimate Battle!

It just had to be that this year’s finale of How I Met Your Mother was going to share space with the 20th anniversary of the debut of Friends, didn’t it? It seems pretty appropriate; the two sitcoms have been favorably compared to each other through most of their runs. Hell, its even been argued that the two of them might as well be the same show. They both star characters who live in a parallel universe’s version of New York City where there is no diversity and rent control is a thing. Both of them feature years-long story arcs about the romance between two particular characters; both are brought up in efforts to define their generations through pop culture. At first glance, there is some definite evidence that How I Met Your Mother was taking its cues from Friends. When you try to really compare the two of them side by side, though, the real differences start blaring at you, and you’re then forced into one of those corners where you have to take a Beatles/Elvis stance: You only get one pick and you have to hate the other one.

Fine. That’s not something I have too big a problem with. My problem begins with the fact that so many writers seem so eager to automatically throw the statue at Friends, mostly because they grew up watching it. It’s an interesting phenomenon; it’s one thing to believe everything was better back in your day, but it’s another thing completely to refuse to acknowledge if something may or may not be better based strictly on nostalgia for childhood heroes. So now, it’s time to look at both of these shows as empirically as possible. To prepare, I’m binge-watching DVDs and online streams of as many episodes of both shows as I can. I doubt I’ll get to them all, but I can get to an enormous chunk of both. So let’s do this! Friends vs. How I Met Your Mother. One day, I’ll learn.

Characters
Friends gave us Rachel Green, Monica and Ross Geller, Phoebe Buffay, Joey Tribbiani, and Chandler Bing. HIMYM introduced Ted Mosby, Lily Aldrin, Marshall Erikson, Robin Scherbatsky, Barney Stinson, and Tracy McConnell (she was one of the main cast characters during her brief stint on the show, so much so that her actress’s name was in the opening credits, so yes, she counts). Some of these characters share remarkable similarities to each other, at least in a few ways: Barney shares the fact that no one knows what he does with Chandler and his tendencies with women with Joey; Lily and Monica share some apparent neuroticism and spontaneity; Ross and Ted both have penchants for romanticism. Characters in both shows reach ridiculous low points – in Friends, Phoebe tried to keep one of the triplets, while Ted made Robin get rid of her dogs in HIMYM. Yet, for all the similarities, the characters all took different paths in their development. The characters on Friends developed and matured in a more subtle manner while the HIMYM gang was more up front about their changes of character. On the other hand, the differences between all the characters in the show were a lot more obvious on HIMYM. HIMYM also stereotyped less; Friends had its ditz, its romantic, its career person, and its man’s man. HIMYM frequently crossed these traits over from character to character; career woman Robin was also the show’s man’s man, for example – she loved guns, hockey, scotch, and cigars. Lily, Marshall, and Barney all shared the role of the ditz.
Winner
I prefer HIMYM. Issue one: Phoebe. I love her, and she’s one thing that could be counted on to rescue Friends when it was having trouble, but she’s a waste of space and seemed to be shoehorned in. HIMYM never felt like it was having any trouble trying to fit any characters in, even during the last season, when Tracy was added to the main cast outright. Issue two: The development arcs of Barney and Tracy showed what HIMYM was capable of at its best. Usually when a TV show runs long, all the characters start out as fully realized humans and, as the writers start to feel stretched for creativity, they start to fall back on some of the more unique quirks of the characters, flanderizing them until they’re nothing but quirks. Barney went the opposite route; he was a fully realized caricature through the first few seasons with a few glimmers of humanity; as he developed, he matured, and his better side came out as he decided to settle and form a relationship with his estranged father. (This is why I’m always amazed when critics bitch about HIMYM’s later seasons; did they really miss the old, borderline rapist Barney that much? His development made the whole series very satisfying.) And while we only had Tracy around in one season which didn’t span every episode, her development was so strong that the audience felt totally gypped by the finale. Issue three: The cast of Friends sometimes came across as so interchangeable that it could have melded together at certain times. Trying to tell them apart when they get angry or upset – which happens often enough – can be something of a chore. The characters on HIMYM never fell out of their personas and blended together to such an extent. Of course, that’s an issue with Friends, and not exactly a flaw…

Cast Chemistry
It’s very possible Friends and HIMYM were cast in two different and very distinct ways. The cast of HIMYM looks like the actors were all tested and chosen purely on the strength of their individual character portrayals before being rounded up and thrown at each other, and it turned out to work for the best. Friends seems to have been cast with character chemistry as the first thing in mind, like the actors were whittled down to a particular selection and then tested against each other. HIMYM cast the most talented actors it could find for its characters; Friends cast good actors who made each other look great. The difference definitely shows in the final products. Friends ended up casting six unknowns and making household names of not only Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross, but also actors Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Le Blanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer. The actors flew off each other like atomic particles and were so closely bonded when the cameras were off that the emotion they felt in the final episode was genuine. HIMYM can counter using the fact that its individual performances were better; Neil Patrick Harris and Cristin Milioti could both clearly act circles around every other cast member on either show, and the others were excellent as well. The particular traits of every character on HIMYM were also highlighted more, so all six actors had to perform an exceptional balancing act to see their characters were able to merge those traits into someone whole, and not just a mess of ideas the writers could flanderize at will. They all succeeded.
Winner
This one goes to Friends. While the cast of HIMYM did everything right, it wasn’t enough to stop the emergence of Barney Stinson as a breakout character. Although Barney eventually developed into a complete character, it’s still his early Bro Code and Playbook musings which dominate HIMYM popular lexicon. In the meantime, Alyson Hannigan’s name is still synonymous with Willow Rosenberg, her character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Neil Patrick Harris didn’t make anyone forget Doogie Howser; and Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders are both still remembered purely as Ted and Robin. Jason Segel and Cristin Milioti are popular movie and Broadway commodities, respectively. The Friends cast, meanwhile, are still associated with each other, no matter how far away from the show they’ve gotten. No matter how successful Jennifer Aniston gets, when her name is brought up, she is still just another name among six particular TV actors.

Overdone Romance We Got Sick Of
In the first episode of Friends, we met Ross Geller, a very recent and heartbroken divorcee; and Rachel Green, a runaway bride. Right off the bat, from first to last, the show did everything it could to throw the two of them together. So the two of them took some pretty nasty trips in the ten years Friends lasted on the air before finally settling into their surefire happily ever after in the final episode. The drama between Ross and Rachel took such absurd turns that, at some point, you have to wonder if the writers were intentionally prying the two of them apart and teasing the audience just to prolong the romance. It devolved into soap opera territory. Everything moved right along for the two of them at first; they crushed on each other in the first season; were dating in the second; broken up in the third because Rachel decided she needed an indefinite alone period, in which Ross jumped another girl’s bones; and reconciling only to break up again in the fourth. It’s a reasonable trajectory, but it gets spoiled by the end of the fourth when Ross marries a rebound fling and says Rachel’s name at the wedding, and from there it just got absurd. HIMYM did a bold thing by introducing Ted to Robin in the pilot episode, only to clearly establish in the end that Robin isn’t The Mother. It helped free up the show to give a few romance storylines to Ted and Robin because, since it was established that Robin wasn’t The Mother, the show was able to try anything it wanted for awhile. Like Rachel and Ross, though, it devolved, and by the eighth season they were dredging up the idea of Ted still being in love with Robin, who had been established as Barney’s match for some time by then. Ted’s romantic past with Robin, in fact, hadn’t been any obstacle between him and Robin or Robin and Barney for a long time, but creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas decided to shoehorn an ending they had written for Ted and Robin seven years before the show concluded.
Winner
You know what? I’m giving the edge here to HIMYM. I know I have every reason in the world to prefer Ross and Rachel; after all, Friends didn’t tell us well in advance that Ross and Rachel weren’t ultimately each other’s other halves. It didn’t make a big show of one of them completely letting go of the other one in the final season to show us once and for all that it wasn’t meant to be, over and out, only to renege. Friends didn’t kill one of the main characters, as if she was an inconvenience to the writers, just to make it happen! But what Friends did do that made Ross and Rachel inexcusable was turn their first breakup into a goddamned punchline! “We were on a break! We were on a break!” I’d like to show Ross Geller a fucking break! Besides, between their drunken Vegas wedding, their love child, and Rachel’s final decision to stay with Ross, it’s not like they were lacking for drama.

Resonance With Times
For being a voice sitcom sparked from the grunge era, Friends certainly packed a lot of shining optimism. I’m not saying everything was always wonderful for the characters on the show. Hell, Phoebe sang “Smelly Cat,” which could have fit right into the Lilith Fair lineup. The characters, however, seemed to develop that great Hollywood character habit of failing upward. Setbacks never seemed to affect them very much, and usually they quickly landed on their feet. Friends also came off geared toward a mainstream audience; right in the first season, Phoebe has a quick fling with a physicist who is a little uncomfortable with the idea of romance and spontaneity. It was the typical trope of the time: Nerds are to be ridiculed. In addition, while Friends did deal with homosexuality, it treated homosexuality like an odd character tick; something which was bad at the time, and absolutely inexcusable now. In HIMYM, setbacks were really that; they properly set the characters back. Although it’s treated like an idealistic fairy tale, there is a very dark vein streaming through the world of HIMYM, and the characters regularly end up in compromised positions, frequently embarrassed and humiliated while trying to make the best of what just happened to them. Lily leaving Marshall to pursue her dream of being an artist is one example; Robin’s anchor job on early AM TV is another; and Ted trying to start his own architectural firm is a third. There is also the geek factor; HIMYM actually has TV’s best attitude toward geeks. Marshall, Ted, and Barney are all huge Star Wars freaks, and Barney even has life-size Stormtrooper armor in his apartment; they love to play laser tag; they’re frequently seen playing video games; and they enjoy an annual event called Robots vs. Wrestlers.
Winner
HIMYM. Although Friends featured cell phones and laptops long before they were in vogue, and it did improve its view on gays – even showing a wedding between a gay couple long before the current gay rights movement – it still set out to give viewers a look at normal, mainstream people with socially acceptable interests. It perceived outsiders as geeks or thugs in a negative way. Setbacks on Friends barely made any lasting dents in the characters. On HIMYM, setbacks were real stingers, and the characters were frequently seen doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily do in mentally broken states. HIMYM also had the more accurate take on geeks – their geek interests, while prominent, aren’t caricatures, and they don’t define the characters. Rather, geek interests and tendencies are treated as side interests of the main characters, who are able to keep their geek lives and professional lives separate.

Emotional Impact
In any good TV show, we need to be able to sympathize with the characters; otherwise, when we laugh, we’re laughing at them instead of with them. Therefore, it helps to have great ways of projecting times and scenes of deep emotions. Friends axed one of the most insufferable tropes that came to define sitcoms in the previous decade – the Full House music, which replaced real emotion with gagging melodrama. Otherwise, emotion was conveyed by the actors and the script, both of which did fine jobs, and music which was performed by professional musicians. Occasionally, the camera would zoom in very slowly on the troubled character or the character would be isolated. HIMYM, being a more surreal show than Friends, would frequently use surrealism to convey a sense of sadness. It was also privy to using its stilted structure to do the same, allowing it to move back and forth between conversations about the character and the affected character. The portrayals of the characters and the music was frequently a big help as well. Friends, however, conveyed its emotion in a straightforward fashion while HIMYM usually had a joke or two waiting to be used to lighten the mood a little bit.
Winner
HIMYM. The trouble with trying to provide emotional heft strictly through the affected characters is that it’s like describing the symptoms. Sure, you can sympathize, but there’s no real relation unless you’ve personally been there yourself. HIMYM’s surrealism is more than a quirk; it’s an effective way to paint a very exacting picture of what the characters are experiencing. In one episode, for example, Robin learns she’s barren and can never have kids. Instead of simply saying it, the episode cuts to a pair of kids in a living room which are ostensibly Robin’s as Robin narrates to them. Then they fade away as the room is replaced by snowy Central Park and the sofa is replaced by a park bench which Robin is sitting in, drinking a carton of eggnog, contemplating what she just learned. One later episode of season eight, “The Time Travelers,” so brilliantly captures the true essence of Ted’s loneliness that I have trouble watching it: Ted, Barney, Robin, Marshall, and Lily meet in MacLaren’s for a night or Robots vs. Wrestlers Legends. Ted is busy the following day and unsure whether or not to go, and debates the pros and cons of going with Barney as well as future versions of themselves. This might sound odd, but it’s a sort of surreal vision the show has come to be known for. Marshall and Robin get into a fight about who named a drink served by the bar. Soon, Coat Check Girl – a guest character from one of HIMYM’s first episodes – walks in. Ted recognizes her and starts to wander over to talk to her, but is stopped by two future versions of Coat Check Girl. Both warn him that a relationship with her would be doomed, and he gets distracted long enough for the real Coat Check Girl to leave. Finally, he returns to Barney and says he’s out for the night, and in an understated and very eloquent monologue, Barney tells Ted the cocktail incident is a five-year-old memory and the rest of the night was a product of his imagination, and Ted was debating whether to go alone the entire night. Ted leaves, and Narrator Ted imagines his past self running to The Mother’s apartment and delivering Ted’s now-famous “45 days” monologue to the unseen Mother. The effect is heightened later; of note, “The Time Travelers” is the final episode which involves any interactions with the unseen form of The Mother. Four episodes later, after years of teases, the conceptual Mother ceased to exist, and the actual Mother was finally revealed. Although the reveal was simple – even anticlimactic – it worked because of the sense we received for Ted’s sadness over the course of the season and the fact that the story’s endgame was now in sight. Ted himself wasn’t aware of it yet, but the audience knew he would be meeting his perfect girl within – in the show’s time – just a couple more days.

Opening Theme
Friends opens with one of the greatest opening themes of all time: “I’ll be There for You” by The Rembrandts. The song is a definite by-product of the 90’s, and it has the rough, unvarnished edges of the traditional grunge sound. It’s a pretty downcast song, too, describing a lot of bad, serious situations before launching into its memorable hook, which promises that, no matter what happens, they’ll always be there for you. It’s one of those theme songs that transcended its opening theme status and became a heavily rotated radio hit. HIMYM opens with an iconic “ba, ba ba ba ba” going along with its title card, but what most people don’t know is that’s the very tail end of a legitimate song called “Hey Beautiful” by The Solids, a band the show’s creators play in. Like the Friends theme, the song is a definite product of the times in a musical sense. The lyrics don’t make nearly as much sense – I’m surmising the second verse is about the song’s narrator trying to gather the courage to talk to a girl he spotted and thinks is beautiful, but the phrasing is a little random and haphazard. It’s a great song, though, and it’s one of the few millennial rock songs which, while it relies on the slow-driving, smoothly-laid harmony and melodramatic vocals, still lets the background music massage the scene instead of dominating the song and destroying rock music for a decade to come. Also, while the synthesizer is used throughout, it’s used in a minimalist fashion.
Winner
Friends. The HIMYM theme was an early version of a trend that’s setting rock music back decades. The Friends theme is a great song, and its message about optimism and togetherness through even the toughest of times is more resonant now than it was when Friends was the show to watch. Also, “Hey Beautiful” isn’t the most technically sound song, either. Even with better lyrics, its time signature changes are less than subtle. Face it, there’s a reason you didn’t know “Hey Beautiful” was a full song until you read this.

Format And Structure
Although every story has a beginning, middle, and end, Friends and HIMYM both got around to showing their beginnings, middles, and ends in different ways. Both of them also used heavily serialized formats. Friends took its cues from most every sitcom that came before it, which means it tells its stories in a straightforward, linear fashion. While this makes the typical episode of Friends easy to follow, it also makes it a bit more difficult to jump in the middle of an episode. Since the show is serialized, a big secret revealed in an episode with series-changing ramifications could easily be missed. When Friends performs flashbacks, it does them smoothly, skillfully weaving them into the main structure of the show. HIMYM uses a flashback as the very plot of the show. It’s prone to jumping and stilting around a lot more; a frequent device seen on HIMYM is to place the audience into the middle of a scene and then go back and explain how the characters came to that point. HIMYM tells stories in a much more freewheeling manner. It will use surrealism, roshamen viewpoints, intercutting, and flashbacks and flashforwards in order to get the point across. Both shows demand your attention, but HIMYM will go out of its way to make sure it has it. HIMYM also based its entire existence on a large story arc, which demanded bold risks from the creators when it worked and ended up sticking around for awhile. Some of those risks were good and allowed the show to keep revealing hidden depths to its characters; some were bad and allowed them to prolong the show (Ted and Robin, ahem).
Winner
HIMYM. The format keeps finding different ways of telling stories to emphasize small moments which impacted The Narrator’s life. Not only is it an effective way to keep interest in a story, it frees up the writers to splice other scenes into the narrative, make concurrent callbacks, and even reformat the entire show, which is what happened in the final season. Furthermore, the ultimate story arc allowed the creators to gradually reveal the show’s big secrets about how Ted met The Mother. Think about it: What did we know about Ted meeting The Mother in the pilot? They met at a wedding. That was it. After the first season finale had Marshall and Lily break up, most of the the subsequent season finales peeled back more big secrets about the wedding and the meeting. At the end of season two, Ted and Robin broke up, which we knew would happen, since Robin was established in the pilot as not being The Mother. In the season three finale, Ted proposes to Stella, but she isn’t The Mother. Season four, Ted tells his kids that The Mother was in an economics class he taught by accident. In season six, it started really heating up; the groom, long believed to be an offhand friend of Ted’s like Punchy or Ranjit, was shown to be Barney. In season seven, it was the bride’s turn to be shown onscreen; it was Robin. The season eight finale gave us our first glimpse of Tracy McConnell. And the series finale the next season, well, I’ll be nice and just pretend it never happened.

Running Gags
Every good sitcom has its share of in-jokes which, despite being an eternal theme in the series canon, can be easily picked up and appreciated by newcomers. Friends and HIMYM are no exceptions. In fact, they even share very similar running gags: One is that Barney and Chandler both work mystery jobs which no one else on their shows knows. It works better for HIMYM, though, because Chandler eventually gets promoted while Barney – who seemingly drags in endless oceans of money for nothing – reveals that his “eh, please” response to everyone else’s job inquiries is really an acronym for Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything. Basically, if his corporation is ever caught in one of its more unseemly activities, Barney is the one set up to take their fall. Another is they each had a character with a musical career. Friends gave us Phoebe, who sang some of the darkest, weirdest folk songs you will ever hear with an earnestly upbeat attitude. HIMYM had Robin, a former teenage pop star in her native Canada named Robin Sparkles who had one minor hit and was so embarrassed about it that she told outrageous lies to her friends to try to hide it. They both had catchphrase-spewing ladies’ men as main characters – Joey and Barney. Beyond those, Friends introduced us to Ugly Naked Guy, a nudist from a neighboring building. HIMYM had The Bro Code and The Playbook. There was Fat Monica on Friends, and HIMYM had Lily’s odd sexual fetishes. These lists aren’t even close to exhaustive.
Winner
This should be even, but I’m giving the edge to HIMYM for a few reasons. First of all, Phoebe’s songs are only written to highlight her ditziness, and sitcom ditzes are a dime a dozen. Robin’s singing career gave her backstory an interesting twist, and her reluctance to ever talk about it added a dimension to her character. Second, Ugly Naked Guy was originally a hidden character who was there strictly for laughs. At some point, though, Friends decided it had to break that rule and give Ugly Naked Guy screen time. There’s a sacred law of sitcoms which have hidden characters there strictly for laughs that says you never, ever show the character. Never, because it would ruin the mental projection of the character the audience built for itself. It’s why all the Maris jokes from Frasier worked so well – they never showed Maris, and we were given unlimited depth to project how awful she was. Third, Friends turned “We were on a break!” into a catchphrase for Ross. It’s with that one Friends torpedoed any chance of winning a battle of running gags.

Friends just got its ass handed to it. Yes, Friends was great when it was good; upon my repeat viewings, it holds up much better than I expected it to. It was one of the major cultural voices of its generation, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a Cheers knockoff which became popular because it came along at the right time. How I Met Your Mother was something that came flying out of the blue, combining the surrealism of Scrubs, flying hijinks of Malcolm in the Middle, and yes, the emotional gravitas of Friends itself with a groundbreaking story structure. Friends was a product of its time. How I Met Your Mother turned out to be well ahead of it.

Working the Method: Al Pacino vs. Robert De Niro

Marlon Brando died ten years ago this year. Back when all the Brando memorials came out, the acting legend was lauded for a handful of movies he made. That’s all it was, though; just a handful, and there’s a reason for that: Brando’s choices of film roles left a lot to be desired. Many people rightfully single out the handful of truly iconic movies he was in, because he did manage to get his name atop the marquee of some great ones: A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, The Wild One, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now. That there is a Criterion Collection of filmmaking excellence. But does anyone remember The Nightcomers? How about Burn, in which Brando wrote in his autobiography he believed he gave his best-ever performance? A Countess from Hong Kong? Sayonara, which fell out of remembrance in pure spite of receiving an incredible ten Oscar nominations – including Best Actor for Brando – winning five? Yeah, looking at Brando’s total film list, he comes off as less an actor who thought carefully about how good the scripts were and more like someone who just threw until something hit.

While Marlon Brando made a few good movies, he’s best known for his cultural influence, but even more so for what I’m debating now: His acting influence. Brando was the original poster boy of Method acting, which threw movie performances for a loop. For an enormous chunk of the 20th Century, it was common for filmmakers to nab their stars right from the stage, which is why performances from earlier movies are so much different. The Method relied on emotional memory, in which an actor focuses inward to basically bring out the character, in extreme cases turning the actor into a whole different person. Brando’s performances unleashed a beastly wave of actors who perfected what he started, and into this wave during the renegade period of filmmaking – late 60’s through the 70’s – entered maybe the two greatest movie stars of all time: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. The 70’s released any number of screen legends – Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman are arguably the most notable among them – but it’s Pacino and De Niro who are scratched into the stars as Brando’s immediate torch-carriers. Before them, there was never a pair of actors who combined such presence, versatility, iconoclasm, and charisma to such a high level of consistency and memorability. Both actors are in their 70’s now, and with the “After Them” period sadly approaching, I’m still not sure we’ve found anyone on Earth who could so much as meet them halfway. Yes, the candidates are out there, but they all lack in one area or another. 

That being the case, it’s still Pacino and De Niro who dominate all the film school best actor ever conversations. Now, it might be unfair to compare two different actors, but Pacino and De Niro have also had such incredible career parallels that Pacino vs. De Niro became a 90’s debate before anyone knew just what the hell a 90’s debate was. Both are native New Yorkers who were taught by Method legends; De Niro learned his craft under Stella Adler (who taught Brando himself) while Pacino makes the case for Adler’s fierce rival, Lee Strasberg. Both performed to acclaim onstage before being noticed by critics in indie movies – Pacino in Panic in Needle Park and De Niro in Bang the Drum Slowly. Both rose to stardom in the 70’s in a series of iconic roles from classic movies. Both are popular for their parts in gangster movies. Both hit the skids during the 80’s before hitting their apexes in the 90’s. Both are in paycheck-cashing periods now. (Though De Niro seems to be undergoing a mini-resurrection.) Most importantly, both are among those people who force fans who favor one to bolster the other as much as possible while still defending their choice. So let’s do this! Al Pacino vs. Robert De Niro. One day, I’ll learn. 

Style
It’s tempting to say both actors use the same style, but when you take a real look at their performances, you start to notice just how different they are. De Niro tends to understate a lot of his roles, bringing the common idea of quiet strength. Pacino is a lot more explosive, and its given rise to the concept of “Shouty Al,” scenes in which Pacino starts hamming it up and goes over the top. This isn’t to say that Pacino breaks character. He just appears to have a knack for picking roles which give him good five-minute power speeches, and when the final delivery comes in his movies, you know exactly when he’s going to start spouting all the best lines – the ones you’re going to be remembering and quoting for the next decade. It’s fairly safe to say Pacino has the better presence of the two of them, but what De Niro doesn’t use in presence, he makes up with his sheer versatility. When De Niro steals a scene, you can’t help but get the impression sometimes that he’s doing it by accident, and that’s he’s trying to come off as more of a compliment to the movie’s other actors rather than as the marquee star in his own right. 
Winner
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod….. De Niro by about a hair. Lord knows this isn’t a knock against Pacino, but rather a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that there seems to come times in many of Pacino’s flicks when Al starts to slightly crack under intensity and he needs to let everything out. The reason “Shouty Al” is such a popular idea is because he always seems to include that single scene in a movie which is wrapped up and sent right to the Oscar committee immediately after it gets shot. You know these scenes when you see them, and can easily hear Pacino tacking an “I’M AL FUCKING PACINO!” right onto the end of it. De Niro can be small. Pacino not so much, even when he tries.

Breakthrough Performances
Okay, everyone can pinpoint Pacino’s breakthrough performance: A bit part playing a character named Michael Corleone in a small indie flick called The Godfather. I know, blink and you’ll miss it completely, right? De Niro’s big breakthrough is a little bit harder to spot, but most people are willing to credit the movie which also put director Martin Scorsese on the map: Mean Streets. With Pacino, you have to take into consideration the fact that he was playing what turned out to be an ego-check role, acting against a cast that also included James Caan and Robert Duvall. Marlon Brando gave the movie a major coup, a real marquee name to attract viewers and a small piece of prestige to go with it. It was Pacino who played the main role as Michael, though, and when Mario Puzo – the author of the book The Godfather was based on – learned that, he was pissed off and went around denouncing the movie until it was released. He changed his mind about Pacino immediately after seeing it. Mean Streets didn’t have nearly so much going for it. The cast and director were all basically unknowns, and during that part of his career, Martin Scorsese had done his only major movie, Who’s that Knocking at My Door?, with his Mean Streets star, Harvey Keitel. When Mean Streets came out a year after The Godfather, Scorsese was absolutely convinced that Keitel was going to be his guy, the big name marquee actor who would soon be bringing name recognition to Scorsese’s pictures. He kept on believing it even after the National Society of Film Critics gave De Niro the award for Best Supporting Actor in his role as Johnny Boy, and still believed it until he started making Taxi Driver.
Winner
This goes to Pacino. Great as De Niro played his role as Johnny Boy, all of the gravitas from Mean Streets was dropped onto Harvey Keitel’s head, and he did justice to the movie. Had Johnny Boy been removed, the movie would be different, but not by much, and it’s pretty easy to imagine Keitel moving on to take up the mantle that De Niro eventually picked up – it isn’t like Keitel is lacking for talent, after all. Pacino not only had to convincingly play the center of gravity in an epic drama, he had to play a very tricky role which required him to subtly shift from a sort of offhand, low-key family oddball into the cold, calculating, domineering head honcho crime boss while also getting an audience to think his character believes in his heart of hearts that he didn’t change at all. Pacino screws that up, one of the great, defining masterpieces of American cinema is totally ruined.

Popular, Acclaimed, and Iconic Roles
Oh god, where to begin? I guess the logical starting point would be The Godfather movies, because both Pacino and De Niro played parts which defined their characters. Pacino, of course, was Michael Corleone. Michael’s father, Vito, is the only movie character in history for whom two Oscars have been awarded to two different actors for playing him. Brando won Best Actor in 1972 for playing classic Vito, while it was De Niro who took home the 1974 Best Supporting Actor prize for playing a younger version of Vito in The Godfather Part II – a role for which De Niro barely spoke a single word in English! After The Godfather Part II, Pacino and De Niro spent the entire rest of the 70’s going head to head in an incredible iconoclast contest, playing meaty role after meaty role in a damn near flawless string of movies. Pacino went on to Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and …And Justice for All, all of which he received numerous award nominations for. He even made a movie during the time called Bobby Deerfield which netted him a Golden Globe nomination, even though most people forgot the thing existed. De Niro ran through a highly successful stretch as well, which included Oscar nominations for Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter. After speedbumping through the 80’s, they both hit highs again during the 90’s, Pacino in movies like Glengarry Glen Ross, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Advocate, The Insider, and Any Given Sunday while also reprising his old role as Michael Corleone one more time. De Niro also returned to his gangster guns in the 90’s with Goodfellas and Casino, but also making Cape Fear, Awakenings, A Bronx Tale, and Jackie Brown, and keep in mind I haven’t even scratched the surface with either of them. Smack in the center of the 90’s, they collaborated in the ultimate robbery movie, Heat, probably the greatest unheralded movie ever made when it was released, and now properly revered in hindsight. They also both portrayed brilliant parodies of the gangster characters that made them popular in the 90’s: In 1990, Pacino played Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice, the main villain in Dick Tracy, while De Niro waited until the other end of the decade before playing Paul Vitti in Analyze This! And for all we know about their nadirs in the 80’s, both actors still managed to carve out niches. Pacino played Tony Montana, one of the decades true icons and a guy who summarized everything both right and wrong about the country’s mindset during the decade; and playing the lead in an understated but well-liked low-key comedy called Author! Author! De Niro’s 80’s started with a bang: He won his very deserved Best Actor Oscar for Raging Bull. Although it wasn’t a sign for his 80’s, he still managed to do a few things very few other actors ever would have attempted: Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s supremely odd The King of Comedy; Sergio Leone’s massive four-hour fucker of a gangstar epic Once Upon a Time in America (which I’ve seen, but never in its entirety); and Terry Gilliam’s surrealist and fantastical Brazil before his work in 1987’s Midnight Run and The Untouchables signaled a real return to form.
Winner
I’d be a complete moron to try to pick this one. Michael Corleone against Jimmy Conway? Frank Serpico vs. Travis Bickle? Max Cady vs. Frank Slade? I know what my personal preference is, but trying to choose one on empirical evidence is way too difficult to judge. You pick them. Then I’ll commend you for your excellent taste.

Role that Shouldn’t have Worked but did Anyway
You could probably think of a few candidates for both actors – Fearless Leader in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle for De Niro, Ivan Travalian in Author! Author! for Pacino, Max Cady in Cape Fear for De Niro, Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross for Pacino. But I’m just going to stick with the two that really stick out: De Niro played Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. You would expect a movie called The King of Comedy in which Jerry Lewis is one of the stars to be a laff riot, but the movie is instead a very dark comedy coupled with a weird form of thriller with a little bit of drama mixed in. You would expect the lead of a movie like this to try to lighten the mood as much as possible, but trying to play a role directly for laughs means trying to emphasize some moments harder than others and sometimes dialing back the other nuances and intricacies of the character in order to do it right. De Niro, however, usually isn’t the kind of actor who half-asses a character to punctuate particular scenes, so he plays Pupkin straight, and it results in a performance of a character who comes off creepy and a little angry. Pacino’s usual suspect in this category is much better known because it sticks out like a sore thumb: Tony Montana from Scarface. Although Scarface looks like a regular old gangster flick from the outside with little nuances thrown in by screenwriter Oliver Stone clearly making this sucker the typical gangster morality tale, the movie’s entire point flew about three atmospheres over everyone’s head. Instead of seeing a theme about greed doing in a sick bastard of a human being – which was the theme, make no mistake – people saw a story of a man rising up and living the American Dream to an extreme excess, basically reinterpreting the movie. And Pacino’s dynamo of a performance was probably the defining factor. Although Pacino playing Montana should never, ever be mistaken for a good movie performance, it was booming, charismatic, and cutthroat in ways which made an otherwise high-powered cast look puny next to Pacino. 
Winner
Pacino. He’s the reason Scarface managed to transcend its medium and why its true meaning has been sapped away in favor of a strict Reaganist interpretation. De Niro’s performance in The King of Comedy, while very effective, also didn’t have any real sign of De Niro trying to hoist the entire movie; in fact, De Niro appeared to be acting perfectly in synch with director Martin Scorsese, who appeared to be making the kind of movie The King of Comedy turned out to be. Scarface ended up crossing a thematic line by freak accident because of Pacino, and it didn’t look like Scarface’s director, Brian De Palma, had much of an interest in rectifying what was happening or directing it to any vision of his own. In fact, it looks like De Palma was barely involved at all, and that he directed mostly by mailing in his daily stage notes from whatever vacation spot he happened to be sipping mai thais from.

Down Periods
General wisdom regarding both actors: Even periods are lean, odd periods are awesome. The truth is somewhere in between. The early nadir for both actors is generally considered the 80’s, but that’s a little hard on them from a more revisionist point. Pacino didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the 80’s being a movie star. Pacino made only five movies during the decade: Cruising, Author! Author!, Scarface, Revolution, and Sea of Love. Cruising was roundly bashed by critics and also by gay rights groups who believed it was homophobic. The reception warmed somewhat over the years, but never really thawed. Author! Author! and Scarface were also beat up, but years have been kind to both. Revolution was completely forgotten, and at that point, Pacino took the apparent hint and ducked out of movies for the next four years before finally returning to form with Sea of Love in 1989. De Niro made a lot more movies during the time. He started the decade with Raging Bull, which many consider the crowning performance of his career. While he did make forgettables like The Mission and Angel Heart during the time, he also appeared in Terry Gilliam’s strange movie about love and happiness in a clockwork world, Brazil; and in Sergio Leone’s ambitious epic Once Upon a Time in America; he also played one of his more popular roles, Al Capone in The Untouchables, before his big return in 1988’s Midnight Run. Came the millennium, both appeared to get a little less choosy about their roles as well, so their dreck started to trickle in: Simone, Showtime, The Recruit, Gigli, 88 Minutes, New Year’s Eve, Last Vegas, Jack and Jill…. It’s a list that might have been unfathomable 20 years ago, but it’s happening. 
Winner
Let’s see. Who’s down period movies would I rather watch? De Niro’s. Near the end of his career, Pacino can’t seem to help but keep being Al Pacino. While De Niro isn’t exactly testing his range either, he does seem to be having a lot more fun lately. We give De Niro a lot of shit for making more comedies now, but he’s been a sort of stealth comedy guy since Midnight Run in 1988, or 1983 if you count The King of Comedy (I don’t). I actually enjoyed The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and got a kick out of De Niro Yankovic-ing his role from Taxi Driver in that movie, and lampooning his own gangster roles in Analyze This! and Analyze That! He’s proven bankable as a screwball comedy star, and his career is lately rising again: He earned acclaim for Being Flynn, played an uncredited role in American Hustle, and was granted an Oscar nomination for Silver Linings Playbook. Hell, Pacino seems to be on an upward trajectory too, having won a lot of acclaim for playing Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Phil Spector in TV movies with the TV industry booming like never before. There are rumors of De Niro and Pacino teaming up for another movie which will be helmed by Martin Scorsese. I hope to god that’s true. 

Underrated Movies
Wow…. For Pacino, it takes work to think of a particular movie I think is completely underrated. Do I go with his screen-winking redefinition of the Devil in The Devil’s Advocate? His disgustingly overlooked …And Justice for All? The Insider? One of my very favorite Pacino movies is Carlito’s Way, a Brian De Palma thriller about a reformed drug dealer trying to go straight. It’s a gangster movie that holds up against anything else either Pacino or De Niro has ever done. De Palma is in top form, there’s a fantastic supporting performance from Sean Penn – who plays the lawyer responsible for leading Pacino’s character, Carlito Brigante, back onto the path he tried so hard to escape – and while Pacino is never small, he nicely understates himself and gives a true heart to his character. In a fashion, Carlito’s Way is a sort of reverse gangster movie. Instead of the head gangster starting with ambiguous morality being taken further across the moral event horizon, Carlito’s Way introduces a gangster who saw the light and is dragged away from it kicking and screaming. Many of the more sympathetic gangster characters want redemption. Carlito already found redemption; what he wants is his ticket out. I’m sure Midnight Run is a popular candidate for De Niro, but that movie has the benefit of hindsight now, and most seem to believe it’s a solid comedy that holds up well, with De Niro playing perfectly into character. The one that really stands out to me, is Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 movie Jackie Brown. Tarantino, at the time, was looking like the direct successor to Martin Scorsese while also being a wholly original screenwriter. Jackie Brown is an adaptation of the late Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch, and one of the few Leonard adaptations that worked the way it’s supposed to. Instead of merely giving us an ordinary story stylistically directed and written (which, let’s face it, was what Pulp Fiction and the grossly overrated Reservoir Dogs both were), Jackie Brown focuses a lot more on creating rounded characters and relationships – so much so that the movie was attacked by some for its slow pace. De Niro plays Louis Gara, a dimwit pothead fresh off a prison stint, who simply goes along with his old cellmate’s idea just because he seems to be bored. It’s one of his last truly great performances in one of the most underrated movies ever released.
Winner
Pacino. Great as Jackie Brown is, and great as De Niro is in it, there’s not a single reason to hand this one to De Niro. He’s a supporting character in a movie defined by Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robert Forster, and it’s entirely possible a more casual moviegoer or less knowledgeable in the nuances of good film acting would write him off. Pacino, just as he did in his earlier collaboration with De Palma (which happened to be Scarface), carried Carlito’s Way and gave it its beating soul. 

Playing Against Type
Despite the prominence of their movies, this is actually a little harder to think of than you would expect because they’ve both created brands on playing gritty tough guy characters. For Pacino, certainly Scent of a Woman makes an argument, but the one that really sticks out in my mind is a disremembered 1991 romance called Frankie and Johnny. Pacino plays the titular Johnny, trying to woo a woman named Frankie, and that line sums up the whole movie. It’s an odd movie in large part due to its very existence – it’s not a snarky romantic comedy where the characters are either teenagers or twentysomethings with wealth, professional accomplishments, and reputations well beyond their years. Both characters are rutted, in the middle of their lives in which they’re merely existing and searching for some sort of purpose. It might be the sweetest role Pacino ever played, and the movie doesn’t try to spice itself up with any tricks – it’s earnest and straightforward. There’s more playing against type in De Niro’s body of work, since he was the busier and more experimental of the two. Do I go with Flawless? Awakenings? The biting political comedy Wag the Dog? Off-kilter as those were for De Niro, what I’m really going to go with is Brazil. Terry Gilliam’s vicious satire against bureaucracy and high-level incompetence has De Niro in one of his more comedic forms playing Harry Tuttle, a rebel leader and renegade air conditioning specialist who helps Jonathan Pryce’s main character, Sam Lowry, escape a pair of Central Services workers who are actually there to serve a much nastier purpose than their humble service titles imply. For all the actual comedies De Niro made, he was probably used most effectively as Tuttle, who is more or less a caricature of a fast-talking salesman but is able to do the job, along with showing Pryce that his feelings toward the oppressive Central Services are spot-on.
Winner
De Niro. Both Pacino and De Niro do drama all the time, and they both excel at it. So while Pacino’s role in Frankie and Johnny is notable in its tenderness, Johnny does tend to come off sometimes as the post-prison Sonny Wortzik (Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon). Although not necessarily a comic role, De Niro’s Harry Tuttle was played rather comedically, and we got a sense of what De Niro could do when he wasn’t losing his temper or brooding. Although De Niro’s appearance in Brazil was little more than a cameo, it certainly left an impression on filmgoers. As for my own personal biases, I’m ever a romantic at heart, but romance isn’t something I enjoy as an entertainment genre. Brazil, meanwhile, is one of my all-time favorite movies, a funny but brutal shot at the idea of bureaucratic control of society. There was never a movie like Brazil before, and we may never find one like it again; this is the kind of movie studios live in abject fear of, because it goes against every ethos Hollywood movies push, and it’s way too elaborate to be made independently. It takes place in a strange fantasy world with little semblance of sanity to start with, and it gradually loses what little ground it was standing on in the first place, culminating in an ending which spirals away from any control or sense, taking you on a path which makes you wonder whether you should be cheering, laughing, or just gaping in amazement…. Before ultimately swiping the rug and absolutely crushing your heart.

Oscar Roles
This one is simple: De Niro won his first Oscar in 1974, the Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. He won his second in 1980 – Best Actor for playing Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Pacino won his only Oscar in 1992 for Best Actor, playing Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman.
Winner
Honestly, it’s sad that this popularity contest gets so much attention at all, and looking over this category, it’s easy to see why. De Niro got an award for which he not only performed almost entirely in a language that wasn’t his, but which was already portrayed two years earlier by Marlon fucking Brando, who also won an Oscar playing it! His second Oscar was the result of an all-time great performance, for which he had to quickly put on a dangerous amount of weight for two scenes which didn’t last a collective total of ten minutes. Pacino was awesome in Scent of a Woman, yes; he even managed to trick many people into thinking Chris O’Donnell was a good actor for awhile. But Frank Slade had none of the manic intensity of Pacino’s early Oscar-nom roles, and it’s generally accepted fact that the Academy was throwing the lifetime achievement Oscar at him. This category belongs to De Niro.

Gangsters
Although gangster and crime roles actually make up very little of the filmographies of both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, both of them are indelibly weaved into the image, defining and redefining the common gangster in much the ways of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney before them. Both actors broke through playing gangsters; Pacino played Michael Corleone, a straight man who eventually became the personification of evil. De Niro played Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, a nutty trench gangster with grand delusions of hitting the organized crime bigtime. When Pacino returned as the Corleone patriarch two years later, he brought De Niro with him to play a younger version of his pop, and ever since I first saw The Godfather Part II, I always thought young Vito’s story was the more engaging of the two. Pacino’s portrayal of Tony Montana was like a steroid-addled cartoon, while De Niro’s supporting role as Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas tricked a lot of people into thinking Jimmy was the center of the movie; a hell of a trick, considering how great Ray Liotta was as main character Henry Hill. De Niro was the reigning overlord of Tangiers in Casino, a cold, calculating, strategy-oriented businessman whose control just didn’t extend quite as far as he thought it did. Pacino was the world’s only gangster with a heart in the sorely underrated Carlito’s Way, and later played Lefty Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco – the character De Niro’s Johnny Boy might have become had he lived longer. De Niro was the very face of all-time gangster-dom in The Untouchables as Al Capone, a wisecracking and dominating villain who, in all honesty, is the only reason to watch the movie. Pacino parodied his gangster characters in Dick Tracy, while De Niro made fun of his image in Analyze This! and Analyze That!
Winner
I know there are people who are automatically going to throw this at Pacino just because he was The Godfather, but that’s a huge disservice to De Niro which requires forgetting that De Niro also played The Godfather. Fuck this. You choose, and I’ll commend you on having excellent taste.

Wow. Close. So close. If you want to state your defense for Al Pacino, I totally understand, but Robert De Niro wins this sucker.

The Schlock-Down: Michael Bay vs. Roland Emmerich

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I love a good, schlocky disaster movie, and as far as good, schlocky disaster movies go, 1998 was a real watershed year. We got two movies about giant asteroids slamming into the Earth, and another movie about a giant lizard wrecking Manhattan. The truly important aspect of 1998 in disaster movies, though, is that two of them were directed by two men whose names would soon go on to become synonymous epitomes of the schlock disaster movie genre: Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay. Today, of course, both of those directors are very well-known and widely panned as blights on silver screen entertainment, but back then, things were a little bit different. While both Emmerich and Bay were working directors, they were more or less fairly well-regarded newcomers who both showed a lot of promise with their genres. Both were a mere two years removed from blockbuster extravaganzas of movies; Emmerich’s Independence Day was the ruling box office champion of 1996 for miles, and Bay’s The Rock was fourth or fifth in the standings. While both of those movies have an enormous share of haters today, they were actually pretty well-received at the time.

1998, though, is when both directors – Bay in particular – started turning toward a drastic style shift. After making their first handful of movies in relative anonymity, Emmerich’s Godzilla and Bay’s Armageddon saw both of them turn toward the trademark styles they’ve come to define for themselves. They also started the shifting of the very ethos of disaster movies; whereas many previous disaster flicks made a point of focusing on the human drama surrounding disasters, the advent of CGI imagery allowed filmmakers to start zooming in more on the disasters themselves, and not many directors have been living and dying by that rule like Emmerich and Bay. While this has resulted in wholesale hatred from a lot of serious moviegoers and critics, its also resulted in big bucks from audiences who, no matter how much they love movies for their artistic merits, still believe movies are ultimately a form of escapism. This summer, Bay is acting as the producer of a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (NOT the director, as many think), while helming the next Transformers movie. Emmerich, well, he’s related to this because there was a new Godzilla movie which was just released. And while I haven’t seen every movie by either director, I’m extremely well-versed in the work of both. So let’s do this! Roland Emmerich vs. Michael Bay. One day, I’ll learn.

Shooting Style
Basic style is what most people comparing Emmerich and Bay automatically think of, which is a perfectly natural thing to do because they do the same thing in such different ways. The best explanation I can give for their stylistic differences comes from an article I read recently on a site I can’t remember (I think it might have been Whatculture): Emmerich thinks of his sequences in terms of sequences while Bay sees sequences as sums of his shots. In Bay’s case, style results in a lot of confusion because he has a habit of trying to get every shot from every conceivable angle, and the final product will frequently produce all those different angles spliced together. The result is meant to look flashy and exciting, and there are times when it can work if it’s used right. Bay’s problem is his sworn reliance on that style, and the way he uses his lighting effects much of the time combines with his shot style to form something which tries to be edgy, but which has the potential to bring seizures. When Emmerich shoots a sequence, he wants viewers to behold the scale of the thing. Emmerich tends to rely a lot on wide pans which present a more contextual view of the destruction, and he’ll frequently add a little bit of accent by giving us occasional character viewpoints or otherwise showing us models of everyday cars or houses in order to let us grasp the sheer size of the event.
Winner
Roland Emmerich. Emmerich shoots his disasters to make them look like disasters, and you can’t help but marvel at the way he makes things collapse around and into themselves. I swear, Roland Emmerich movies have probably inspired the next generation of demolition experts.

Storytelling Style
Emmerich’s way of telling the stories in his movies often results in regular token critical beatings, but for some reason, he usually manages to escape without any real damage to his credibility. That’s a way of saying that while Emmerich is regularly hammered for his storytelling, everyone doing the hammering seems to forget about Emmerich’s story flaws until his next movie comes along. (The exception would be Independence Day, which people gleefully pick apart.) Of course, the best thing that can probably happen to stories in modern disaster movies is people forgetting them because they can be so redundant, but Emmerich does use staples. He frequently relies on the strength of the ensemble cast to try to bring human faces to his movies. Unfortunately, the trouble with ensemble casts is, between the multitude of characters and destruction, no one gets developed, and cheesy melodrama with the occasional high-handed Message becomes the order of nature for Emmerich. Even his better movies tend to rely on melodrama. Emmerich also has a thing for conspiracies and fringe theories – Roswell (Independence Day); Atlantis-like prehistoric civilization (10,000 BC); ancient astronauts (Stargate); and even Shakespeare not having written his own work (Anonymous) have all been explored by Emmerich, and it even culminated in an entire movie about that big-ass apocalypse we were supposed to have in 1012. Bay approaches his stories with more of a frat boy mentality. He’s best known for his explosions, in your face style of 90’s hubris humor, and frequent use of the USA military. Bay frequently defends himself against criticism by pointing out that his movies aren’t made for art house snobs, but this tends to show more in some of his movies than others. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is particularly egregious in its pandering to the young adolescent, with its servings of juvenile humor, explosions, and cleavage. Lately, Bay seems to enjoy overcooking his movies, and he seems to be falling back on certain safety tropes like the buddy movie (Bad Boys); the honorable sacrifice (Armageddon), and the aforementioned military porn (damn near all of them).
Winner
Roland Emmerich. Despite my own criticisms of Michael Bay, I’m entirely capable of enjoying his style. I just have to be in the right mood in order to swallow one of his increasingly long boom festivals. Where Emmerich really gets the edge, though, is in his concepts. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I do enjoy interesting ideas, and Emmerich likes to take fringe thoughts and run them to their furthest logical extremes.

Misguided Attempt at Historical Prestige Piece
Emmerich directed The Patriot in 2000, and Bay followed in 2001 with Pearl Harbor. Both movies revolved around huge seminal events in American history: The Patriot took place during the American Revolution and Pearl Harbor, of course, was about the Missouri Compromise. Both were written less with an emphasis on accuracy than jingoism, and therefore both are wildly inaccurate. Notoriously so, in fact, to the point that both have been singled out for inaccuracies many times in an industry where historical inaccuracy is not only accepted, but seen as a boon which keeps the story running. Both use black characters as tokens. Both paint the other side dark – The Patriot’s redcoats and Pearl Harbor’s Japanese are both seen as violent maniacs, although Pearl Harbor made a (very half-witted) attempt to tell things from Japan’s side. The Patriot is probably the more melodramatic – a daughter whose anger caused her to never talk? FUCKING REALLY?! – and the one that dodges history more; it ignores the slavery issue completely and Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, was based on Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, who in real life hunted Indians for fun and raped slaves. Pearl Harbor, meanwhile, shows the Japanese bombing civilians – which NEVER HAPPENED – and uses that damned trope where the badass fighter pilots basically get promoted for endangering themselves, other soldiers, and expensive military equipment. Both fall back into cliche and caricature repeatedly. Where they differ is that in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay was trying to skirt James Cameron’s Titanic by setting up a love story through a disaster backdrop. That’s the biggest weakness of Pearl Harbor; the buildup is insufferable, the main characters – especially Ben Affleck’s Rafe – are either dumb or jerkasses, and the movie makes use of every love triangle cliche ever. The Patriot, meanwhile, is more interested in being American Braveheart. Emmerich even managed to cop Mel Gibson to play the lead, and Benjamin Martin is virtually indistinguishable from William Wallace. The Patriot, though, tries to play the action epic straight to what it is.
Winner
Roland Emmerich. Braveheart is a much better movie than Titanic, and so The Patriot succeeds in spite of itself and its ridiculous cliches. Besides, The Patriot really is an inspirational movie which uses plenty of action to spur the story along. With Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay basically forgot who he is and what he does. There’s no action until the halfway point and by then, you hope all the main characters are killed in the bombing. Also, the performances in The Patriot are infinitely better.

Popcorn Factor
It’s difficult to find the greatest moment of cheese from both Emmerich and Bay, but for different reasons. It was pointed out at me recently that Emmerich’s movies have a common vein running through them in the way they bring people of all different backgrounds together in the face of whatever worst case scenario Emmerich is peddling this time. It’s not as if Emmerich doesn’t have any sense of fun in his movies, but it’s so buried behind his other themes, it doesn’t even seem like it’s there half the time. The Patriot may be his most unintentional moment of cheese, but for sheer schlock value, it doesn’t get much better than Independence Day. Even Independence Day is played a bit too seriously for its own good, though, between the comedic moments of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum and the melodramatic moments being written and performed in a subtle manner which makes them pretty affecting. It’s hard to pick a particular moment for Michael Bay, too, but that’s because his career has been nothing but highball cheese. If I had to pick off the top, though, it’s almost certainly Armageddon. The first half of Armageddon comes off like a comedy; the second half like a drama, and Bay makes no effort to hide the shift; he switches gears the moment the movie does. Bay knows what kinds of movies people enjoy seeing in the theater, and he goes out of his way – frequently to his own detriment – to show that movies are supposed to be fun.
Winner
Michael Bay. Emmerich too frequently forgets people don’t pay ticket money to see his movies for high-handed messianic messages. Bay, for the most part, remembers he’s an entertainer above all else even in his worst moments. The one time he forgot it was when he made Pearl Harbor, but he seems to have realized his mistake there and gone right back to what he knows best.

Best-Reviewed Movie
I’m getting my information from Rotten Tomatoes, which includes heavy critical archives, and besides, I was listed there myself as a critic when Netjak was still running. Bay’s best-rated movie was The Rock, which scored a solid 67 percent. Emmerich’s best-rated was The Patriot, which scored a respectable 62 percent. (Independence Day scored 60 percent.) From objective standpoints, it’s difficult to argue either one; although I’m not sure I would score The Patriot higher than Independence Day, I’ll go with it. The Rock has Bay directing almost perfectly to type – it’s an adrenaline action thriller movie with clear nods to Die Hard, which I would give it a favorable comparison to. Where Bay isn’t actually directing to type, though, are points where he’s directing above the tropes he’s known for. The characters in The Rock are formulaic as hell, but they’re not insufferably immature or stupid, and all are played with conviction by Oscar-winning actors Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, and Ed Harris. None of Bay’s juvenile humor is here, and so we get an action movie which is fun and exciting without trying too hard. From Emmerich, there’s The Patriot, which has excellent action sequences as well, complimented by compelling performances. The scale tips at the amount of bloat and caricature, and The Patriot has this in spades. Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Jason Isaacs, Tcheky Karyo, and the rest are intense and compelling in their parts, but they aren’t enough to make anyone forget how melodramatic and choppy the script can be.
Winner
Michael Bay. Given the choice of The Rock or The Patriot, there’s no question which one I’d rather watch. As much as I enjoy The Patriot, the movie is still a little too bloated for its own good, and the actors aren’t good enough to excuse the melodrama. The Rock is shorter, moves faster, is free of any melodrama, and while Bay was directing into type, he frequently chooses to take the high road, and you know what? While Michael Bay will probably never be mistaken for an artiste, when he has an array of great actors and ignores juvenile humor to focus on action, he’s a very good director. If Independence Day had only gotten three more points on the Tomatometer, things might have gone better for Emmerich, but it didn’t.

Worst-Reviewed Movie
Emmerich’s worst-rated Tomatometer movie is 10,000 BC, with eight percent. No surprise there. Bay’s is…. BAD BOYS II?! Yeah, it looks like critics are a bunch of fucking idiots again, because Pearl Harbor somehow managed to score two points higher than Bad Boys II – 25 percent to 23 percent. This is completely unacceptable to me because Pearl Harbor was as bad as it gets, while Bad Boys II was gloriously overblown, and one of the few movies to come out over the last decade which gave a real jolt of electricity to the catatonic genre. Unfortunately, the rules I made for this say I have to use the highest and lowest rated, not the ones I agree with. On the upside, though, I can spare everyone a real rant since I haven’t yet seen 10,000 BC. (Although I’m definitely planning to!)
Winner
None. It wouldn’t be fair to pick a winner when I haven’t seen both qualifying movies, although 10,000 BC has some real work cut out for it for me to prefer it to Bad Boys II.

Overkill
Michael Bay’s movies are filled with overkill. They’re overkill in and of themselves, but for the last seven years, Bay has been placing an emphasis on the Transformers series. The fourth Transformers movie will be released this month; Bay directed it, just as he did the last three. Transformers appears to be becoming Bay’s signature series; they comprise four of his last five movies as a director. They also run the gamut in quality; the original Transformers is seen as one of his best efforts; Revenge of the Fallen usually occupies discussions about whether or not it’s worse than Pearl Harbor, and while Bay himself does defend it, he admits it deserved a bit of the hate it got; and Dark of the Moon is generally seen as solid, if not great. Bay’s signature style is frequently referred to as “Bayhem,” and that’s a pretty decent summary of it. Not only is there a ton of action in a Michael Bay movie, but between the action and character threads, Bay’s movies tend to haphazardly tumble toward a conclusion, and so they are able to be mayhem even when there’s no mayhem. Also, Bay’s movies are getting longer and longer lately. Roland Emmerich’s movies also seem to be expanding in length quite a bit. Emmerich, however, usually isn’t privy to turning his movies into series (although the long-rumored Independence Day sequel is now officially slated for release next year) – in a lot of his movies, the world is virtually ruined by the end anyway, so it’s tough to make a sequel which would blow more shit up with no shit to blow up. Emmerich’s overkill is still there, though, which you can see in themes. He’s destroyed the world three separate times (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) and turned the White House into a target several times as well, in Independence Day, 2012, and White House Down. Emmerich makes such a habit of it, you would think he’s an honorary member of the Tea Party.
Winner
I’m calling this a draw. Much as I love both Emmerich and Bay, it would be difficult for me to really marathon with a collection of either of their movies.

Overall Body of Work
Believe it or not, both Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay have themes which reach across much of their bodies of work. Emmerich’s demolition festivals usually tend to unite people. He’s even told that common thread across dimensions in Stargate. A lot of Emmerich’s best-known movies feature it: Independence Day; The Day After Tomorrow; 2012; and even Godzilla all have that theme, and it’s blindingly apparent in each movie. Bay’s theme is broader: Let’s blow some shit up! As to the actual quality of their work, though, you have to first accept the fact their movies aren’t high art. Bay seems more aware of this than Emmerich, and he tends to embrace it in the name of escapist entertainment and commercial success. Emmerich isn’t quite so willing to fall into trope, and so while Michael Bay’s movies tend to be very similar to each other, Emmerich’s are a lot more sporadic as he tries to reach out to different genres. Aside from the disaster movies Emmerich is known for, he’s also frequently directed against type. We know Emmerich’s disaster movies, but Stargate; The Patriot; 10,000 BC; Anonymous; and White House Down aren’t really typical of Roland Emmerich. The results have varied – The Patriot was his best-received movie, remember, while 10,000 BC was the worst – but I have yet to see a Roland Emmerich movie I thought was a complete waste of time. Michael Bay is probably the worse director of the two, but it’s hard to tell since he is more prone to stay in his comfort zone with his signature style. The quality of his work is pretty varied as well – while Emmerich’s worst movie was more hated than Bay’s worst (Bad Boys II for the critics, Pearl Harbor for anyone else), his best (The Rock) is considered better than Emmerich’s best (The Patriot to many, Independence Day to me). Bay’s work, though, tends to lean into the terrible-but-entertaining categorization, and it’s hard to argue that any of his work could help define any genres. It’s easier to make the case for Emmerich because he was instrumental in redefining disaster movies for both better and worse. His straight disaster movies are eye-popping and convincingly use models and CGI. The Patriot aside, the only times people seem to truly hate Emmerich is when he directs against type.
Winner
I’m giving it to Roland Emmerich. Michael Bay is great in small doses, and he also has a habit of sticking to the things he knows. I appreciate Emmerich’s attempts to direct against his type more because his work outside his comfort zone at least tends to be interesting.

Roland Emmerich takes it against Michael Bay. I will note again, though, that I haven’t seen every movie by both directors, so I may end up feeling differently soon. The Michael Bay movies I missed, in fact, are The Island and Pain and Gain, both of which are lower-budget, more cerebral, and from what I’ve heard, more challenging and against type for Bay. From where I stand now, though, the champion is Emmerich.

Quantified Sports Suffering in Buffalo vs. Cleveland: The Ultimate Battle!

Buffalo and Cleveland could be twins. Their locations are similar, their histories are similar, their lifestyles, vital statistics, and living costs are all similar. Hell, the two even share their sports pain with each other, at least to such a point that fans in the two cities frequently root for each other’s teams unless their own teams are compromised in doing so. The sports fans in Buffalo and Cleveland have both suffered more than any fans in proximity to the Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs ever have. And yet, it’s Cleveland that seems to be getting all the publicity for how bad their fans have it, even though Buffalo arguably had it worse over the years. They’ve built such a brand name on hard losses that you wonder if any of the teams there really are interested in winning, just because a feel-good story would ruin the bad voodoo. Perhaps they think all the non-Clevelanders who follow Cleveland’s teams – and there are a ton of them, far more so than for any of the teams in Buffalo – would pat themselves on the back, compliment themselves for sticking it out, and bounce off to different teams.

A little movie called Draft Day was released this week. It’s about the GM of the Cleveland Browns and his fight for the year’s coveted draft pick, a guy who will uplift the city and its fans and relieve everyone of all their suffering. Buffalo has a small stake in this because Draft Day was dangerously close to revolving around the Buffalo Bills. After Cleveland stepped in and offered better incentives to Hollywood to make Draft Day about their football team, it was an instance of Buffalo getting nationally lowballed in accounts of its sports suffering yet again, and I asked myself: Which one of these cities really has it worse when it comes to professional sports? So let’s do this! Quantified sports suffering in Buffalo vs. Cleveland. One day, I’ll learn.

Past Glories
The thing about record books is that they’re there to preserve things. The histories of your sports teams are something you want to hold onto, because sports are part of popular culture, historical culture, and the entertainment industry. And once something happened to your sports team, it can’t be erased, and when a moment of real significance happens – whether it’s good or bad – it becomes something that helps define the team. This applies double to both championships and last-place finishes. When it comes to the defining moments of the past, Cleveland shines: Although the Browns never made the Super Bowl, they did win four NFL Championships which are their forever. If we extend the history back through the AAFC – which we should – that number is ramped up to eight, with the four titles Cleveland won in the four years the AAFC existed. (In the 1948 AAFC Championship, the Browns whomped the original Buffalo Bills 49-7.) Although the Browns stopped winning titles after the 60’s, they had plenty of huge moments after that, and they were also coached by one of football’s greatest innovators (Paul Brown) and fielded the greatest football player in history (Jim Brown). Of course, the original Browns are now the Baltimore Ravens, but for the sake of consistency, I’m going to play the same game with them the NFL does and pretend the team just “suspended operations” for two years and consider the brand new team the same team. In baseball, the Cleveland Indians won five Pennants and two World Series titles. Even a 1954 World Series loss became iconic to baseball lore when the Tribe became arguably the best team to ever lose the Series – they won 111 games that year; they were also one of Bill Veeck’s teams, and were the first AL team to integrate. The terminally bad Cavs even made a significant impact on the NBA when they drafted LeBron James, who became the league’s best player and took the Cavs to their only NBA Finals, an unwinnable series against an invincible San Antonio Spurs team. As for Buffalo, glory came in fleeting moments at its best. The AAFC Bills made the aforementioned title game in an otherwise resoundingly average existence before the AAFC/NFL merger stomped them out. The current Bills were one of the original AFL teams in 1959, and they reeled in dominant repeat championships in 1964 and 1965 and played in the game in 1966. The 1966 game is a big question mark among Bills fans regarding what could have been because winning it would have catapulted them into the first-ever Super Bowl (where they would have gotten trashed by Vince Lombardi’s Packers). After that, they experienced decency for a brief stretch in the 70’s with OJ Simpson, but were mostly terrible with an occasional average year thrown in to tease the fans. Even in the 80’s, when the Bills finally became legitimately good, they lost four straight Super Bowls. The Sabres have won three Conference Championships and one Presidents’ Trophy, but before today’s record losing became a problem with them, the Sabres made a habit of having a great season and watching it go to waste when the Boston Bruins would inevitably steal the division title and the Sabres would get knocked out of the first round of the playoffs. Buffalo’s strongest point right now is its lacrosse team, and while the city was once one of the richest and most important cities in the world, it somehow never had a professional major league baseball team – in fact it lost several bids for one.
Winner
There are those who might argue that Cleveland should get this, since it fell so much further. But my thoughts about that argument were explained when I mentioned records. I’m not doing this by ignoring any parts of a team’s past just because it didn’t happen in my lifetime, and past glories beat no glories any day of the week. Therefore, Buffalo is the so-called winner here.

National Embarrassment
This isn’t an on-field embarrassment I’m trying to cover now – every team has those, even the Yankees. For this category, I’m covering something that transcended what happened on the field and worked its way into national consciousness. And both cities provide very easy choices: For Cleveland, it was The Decision. In case your memory is geared toward the short term, here’s what happened: Cleveland had LeBron James, the NBA’s most transcendent and gifted player since Michael Jordan. However, he became a free agent, and some media prick decided his decision about where he was going to play was a big enough deal to warrant an hour-long TV special on ESPN. There was speculation about James everywhere, and the show was little more than waffling for an hour until decision time came and James publicly humiliated his devoted Cleveland fanbase by saying he was off to the Miami Heat. It wasn’t the actual decision that sparked outrage in Cleveland so much as it was airing it on national TV. Rust Belt people are a prideful group who believe in their cities, no matter how poorly reputed, and are always willing to do their part in trying to bring them back from the dead. James failed to understand that he was putting a viable face on Cleveland, and The Decision flew right in the face of a city trying to pull itself back together and positively promote itself. So when the Cavaliers owner told James off in a public note and Clevelanders started burning James in effigy, it was an effort to spare their own pride. Another group of people who failed to understand Cleveland’s mentality were critical theorists – who, notably, in my experiences, all say with great pride that they don’t care about professional sports (unless they’re griping about someone’s insane contract, an issue which I think unites everyone) – who couldn’t resist the urge to apply their favorite label to Cleveland by calling fans racists. Buffalo’s greatest embarrassment was so terrible and so wrong that calling it an embarrassment is being way too soft. In the 70’s, Buffalo had a star running back named OJ Simpson, who was comparable to LeBron James for everything. Simpson didn’t bounce from Buffalo, either – although he lived in California, he was always very proud to represent Buffalo, never said anything bad about the city, and was a regular at Bills games after retiring. And then in 1994, he was accused of murdering his wife, and while the law said he wasn’t guilty, the evidence was more than strong enough for the people to be very convinced otherwise. Simpson turned out to be a public projection presented in the place of a private scumbag. In 2007, Simpson robbed a Las Vegas hotel, and received a disproportionately long sentence of 33 years which many people believe was the law making up for what it didn’t do in 1994.
Winner
Buffalo. Although people in Cleveland will certainly try to use a metaphorical argument, no one was killed in regard to The Decision. In fact, after the initial anger period, Cleveland’s basketball fans are starting to act like they would welcome him back if he ever returned to the Cavaliers. While James himself had image problems in the immediate aftermath of The Decision, he’s also conducted himself in a way which laid them to rest, and even he now admits he sees why The Decision was a bad idea. By all accounts, James is a good man and a class act. Buffalo sports fans are actively trying to remove themselves of any connections to OJ Simpson, and have passed around several petitions asking for his name to be pulled from Ralph Wilson Stadium’s Wall of Fame.

Lost Team
Unfortunately, while the record books say the Cleveland Browns “suspended operations” for two years, records and ownership are very different things, and so the shared history won’t nullify the fact that one of the proudest NFL cities in the country was robbed of its team. Yes, they got them “back,” but the Browns being taken at all was no small thing. The owner who committed the robbery, Art Modell, is more hated in Cleveland than LeBron James ever was. We’re talking about a rabidly nutty fanbase here, and a very extensive one – Browns Backers Worldwide is the most extensive fan organization in the United States, and branches can be found in every major US city. (The largest is in Phoenix.) They also have an enormous foreign presence on US military bases, as well as proper foreign countries including Egypt, Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka…. And even the McMurdo Station in freaking Antarctica! Their two largest international chapters are in Alon Shvut, Israel, and Niagara Falls, Canada. The latter chapter is saying something because Niagara Falls is a clear encroachment in Bills territory. Bills Backers International is no slouch either, but how does a group as huge and devoted as Cleveland lose its team in the first place? Buffalo also has a serious lost team in its past: In 1970, the NBA oversaw the foundation of the Buffalo Braves, an exciting, run and gun team which featured coaching legend Jack Ramsey and MVP center Bob McAdoo. The Braves did manage to catch a base of hardcore fans, including current Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, a New York City native who chose the Braves as his team over both the Knicks and Nets and attended college in Buffalo because of his respect for them. The NBA is one of the most visible and ubiquitous sports leagues in the country. Its stars tend to be the most popular, because they’re the most versatile in regards to the way the sport is played (unlike baseball or football) and the ones who spend the most time in the game (unlike hockey, where stars get shifts of a few minutes and play maybe 20 minutes, a great basketball player can spend 35-40 minutes of a 48-minute game on the floor).
Winner
Cleveland by a distance of at least three states. They lost a team in the country’s most popular sport, the one whose championship game is seen as almost a national holiday. While no one could ever argue the popularity of the NBA, first of all, the NBA is the youngest pro sports league in the country, and the Braves existed before it morphed into the juggernaut it is today. The Braves left in 1978; the league was seriously cash-strapped right through the early 80’s, and moving teams was still fairly common when the Braves were on the outs. Hell, even the NBA Finals were usually shown on tape delay, if they were shown on TV at all. There’s also the impact of what the teams became after leaving. The Browns became the Baltimore Ravens, two-time Super Bowl champions. The Braves became the San Diego Clippers, then became the Los Angeles Clippers six years later, and they still haven’t won anything. Hell, they’ve been the poster boys of losing basketball, and it’s not until just now that the Clippers are giving their fans the kinds of successes they enjoyed as the Braves (who were consistently good for several years). Also, this can’t be understated: Cleveland got a team back, and that team was given the right to say it was the old team! While the loss of the Braves undoubtedly hurt, that’s nothing on losing a world class NFL franchise.

The Title that Got Away
Buffalo and Cleveland both have moments of pain quantified by the fact that they were a hair away from winning the league title when karma snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In both cases, the events happened in the 90’s, long enough for the title draughts to have really sunk in by then. The Cleveland Indians had been in the dumps since the trade of Rocky Colavito, but in the 90’s, they were finally dominant again. They brought home two Pennants during the decade, and as for what happened during the World Series, I’m fairly sure the 1995 loss to the Atlanta Braves team no one was expected to beat is forgivable. In 1997, though, it was different: The Tribe played against the Florida Marlins to a seventh game, and they were one run up in the ninth inning with two outs left when close Jose Mesa – one of baseball’s best – spaced out. Long story short, the Marlins made up the run, the game went to extra innings, and the Marlins pulled it out. The Indians haven’t gotten that close since. The Bills played the closest Super Bowl in history against the New York Giants. Behind 20-19 with eight seconds left, their kicker shanked a 47-yard field goal try to the right.
Winner
I’m calling this a draw. It’s disgusting the Bills lost to the Giants in such a way – while revisionist NFL commentators like to say now the Bills couldn’t have won, they ignore the fact that the Bills weren’t playing like themselves. They were making mistakes and errors all game against a Giants team playing at its absolute, peak best. Had the Bills been doing the same, the closer score of that game would have been about 38-10, Buffalo. As for Cleveland, yes, they were fielding what was pretty much an all-star team too. However, what everyone conveniently forgets is that they were also playing against an all-star team. Florida won by spending big on guys like Al Leiter, Gary Sheffield, Moises Alou, Bobby Bonilla, Kevin Brown, Robb Nen, and Luis Castillo. That’s not what you would call light makeup. Jose Mesa was an outstanding closer, just as Buffalo’s Scott Norwood was an excellent kicker, and both blew it when they couldn’t afford to.

Signature Losing Streaks
This is a tougher and more significant contest than you might expect. A nice long streak can say a lot about a team. I guess the logical place to start with Cleveland would be in the NBA, where the Cavaliers have managed to reel in 26 losses in a row on more than one occasion. Everyone knows that. The more significant streak, though, is the brief run of appearances the Browns made in the AFC Conference Championship back in the 80’s. How much of a streak this really is depends on interpretation, but the Browns appeared in three AFC Championships in the 80’s, all against the Denver Broncos. They lost all three. Then, of course, there’s the Buffalo Bills and their two very famous losing streaks. They made it to the Super Bowl an unprecedented four years in a row, and are still the only team to ever do that. They also lost all four, as if anyone in Buffalo needs reminding. Known as well in Buffalo, however, is that back in the terrible 70’s, the Bills also managed to drop 20 games straight to the Miami Dolphins. You think they have it bad with their recent losing streaks against the Belichick/Brady Patriots? That was nothing compared to what Schula’s ‘Phins did to them every year for ten straight years.
Winner
Buffalo. I take nothing away from Cleveland here, but both of Buffalo’s major streaks were in the country’s major sport, and one of them involved, you know, losing the damned Super Bowl every year! Also, the Bills have a streak of playoff-free years that dates all the way back to 1999. The Browns have a similar streak, but it “only” goes back to 2002.

Ownership Problems
You don’t get a bad team without a bad owner, and the owners of the Browns and Cavaliers have proved that many times over throughout the years. Bad as the new Browns are, though, they all still take a backseat in Cleveland to Art Modell, who sinned against Cleveland when he moved the Browns to Baltimore. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Cavaliers fans have had to deal with Ted Stepien. While Stepien was only there for a few years, he left a mark. He was Jerry Jones before Jerry Jones was, interfering with the running of the team’s operations to such an extent that the NBA had to instate a rule specifically to prevent him from drafting first-round picks in consecutive years. Buffalo’s ownership problems have also been apparent, but the Bills were owned by Ralph Wilson for 54 years before Wilson died last week. The Sabres have had a more eclectic ownership history which involved the Knox family, the NHL, and Tom Golisano before Terry Pegula took them over and wimped out when it came to making the necessary changes of guard.
Winner
Cleveland. Ted Stepien was just too vile of a human being, and Art Modell screwed the city out of a champion football team. Whatever can be said about Wilson or Pegula, they were truly committed to their area and were class acts and fans of the teams they owned, for better and worse. 

Bad Draft Picks
In Cleveland, Tim Couch, Luke Jackson, and Brady Quinn aren’t lacking for haters, but I don’t even have to do any research to know their worst draft pick, ever, across any sport: If your starting quarterback is a rookie who is already 29 years old, you fucked up. With competent coaching, poor Brandon Weeden could have been a nice placeholder for a year or two until their guy finally came to town, but we can’t allow ourselves to go very far beyond that. There are a few Buffalo players in history who could qualify as the worst – John McCargo, anyone? Say what you will about the Bills’ bad picks, though, but they all at least signed contracts. Barrett Heisten, the 1999 first round pick of the Buffalo Sabres, never did that. Although that might have been a blessing in disguise, because Heisten played ten NHL games in his entire career, all with the New York Rangers, and his points column has a big fat goose egg in it. Six picks later, the Ottawa Senators got Martin Havlat.
Winner
Cleveland. Brandon Weeden was in the more popular sport, with the more visible team, and the media never let anyone forget the Browns were staking their future on a first round quarterback who was about to hit the wrong side of 30. Either the team was trying to outsmart itself or it stopped giving a shit years ago. How the hell does a general manager mess up like that?

Signature Losses
Both cities are steeped in the lore of bad losses. Cleveland has incidents like The Fumble, The Drive, The Shot, and Red Right 88 to live down. All of those were playoff losses, and two of them involved the Browns in the AFC Championship. The Shot, we can say, wasn’t too bad because the Cavaliers were in a lower playoff round playing against the Jordan Bulls, and it was Jordan who made The Shot. The Drive is sort of the same – John Elway was being John Elway, and the incident didn’t win the game for Denver, but took it into overtime. The other two, however, are inexcusable. Buffalo is still living down The Drop, No Goal, the Music City Miracle, and The Bounce. Buffalo likes to blame bad refereeing, and makes the claim about No Goal and the Music City Miracle. The Bounce was a wild act of physics that happened to defy Dominick Hasek’s spine. The Drop, like The Fumble (running back Ernest Byner fumbling at the two yard line) and Red Right 88 (the Browns making a desperation pass that failed when a field goal would have worked), just inexplicably happened when it shouldn’t have. The Music City Miracle, though, was entirely legit. It was a great play made against bad kickoff coverage, and no amount of griping about the refs being under someone’s belt will change the fact that science and math have both proven that amazing play was either backward or straight to side side, at the very least. 
Winner
This one is a tie. Even though No Goal happened in the Stanley Cup Finals and gave the Cup to the Stars, the Sabres could well have lost anyway even if it had gone in their direction. Cleveland’s gaffes cost them more than one trip to the Finals, so those are just as evil. The Drop and The Fumble are very similar – almost comical robberies of surefire game-winning touchdowns. So how about Buffalo and Cleveland meet in a nice sports bar over this and cry into our Great Lakes and Brooklyn Brewery microbrews together?

Signature Athlete Who Gave the City the Finger on the Way Out
Poor Cleveland. LeBron James came, and we all believed he would be a Cavalier forever. For seven years, all basketball aficionados were Cavs fans to at least some extent. When they made the Finals for the first time in 2007, I think nearly everyone was rooting for him to defy the odds and lead Cleveland to a stunning upset over the Spurs. Then in 2010, James briefly became the enemy of NBA followers everywhere with The Decision. Although there was more subtlety to it, Buffalo got a whiff of what this might be like when the Bills used their first 2002 draft pick on Willis McGahee. McGahee sat behind Travis Henry for a year, and when the Bills turned the corner in 2004 – their only winning season of the millennium – it was largely because McGahee was given the keys. McGahee played brilliantly for the next couple of seasons, but he also took his complaints about Buffalo to the media. Buffalo had loved McGahee, and he decided to turn around and spit right in the city’s face. Buffalo is one of those places where insiders can trash the place as much as they please – when we do it, it has a lot to do with frustration over how the city isn’t using its full potential. When outsiders do it, it’s because they never made the effort to get to know the place. McGahee was shipped to Baltimore. When he found that out, he apparently ran screaming around his house.
Winner
Cleveland. A fiasco like The Decision will get a tortured sports city pretty far when it comes to athletes sticking up their fingers.

The so-called winner in the tortured sports pantheon truly is Cleveland. You have to admit, though, Buffalo made it a hell of a fight.

Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana: The Ultimate Battle!

Uma Thurman’s character from Pulp Fiction has one scene in which she brilliantly assesses Beatles people and Elvis people. Yes, it’s quite possible for an Elvis person to love The Beatles and vice versa, but when asked, you define yourself by just one of those two and swear by them. You don’t get to be a Beatles person AND an Elvis person. The same little identification philosophy can also be applied to various other little walks of life: Are you a Super NES person or a Genesis person? Tom Brady or Peyton Manning? Coke or Pepsi? There are times when it’s actually very easy to love both, but when it comes to direct comparisons between them, you play up the greatness of the first option and hate the second option’s guts. All comers who argue otherwise are just contrarian fools.

This line of thought can be applied to musical subgenres, too. Take grunge, the scratchy, underproduced music which gets credit for taking rock music off life support after it was put there by whiffing too much of the hairspray it wore in the 80’s. There were several good grunge bands, but the eternal grudge match between grunge giants begins and ends with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Those two are the faces of grunge, probably because they’re the two acts with the most longevity. Now, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, it’s important to note, are also two bands which are very different in many, many ways, something which Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain always seemed to get a kick out of mentioning. That didn’t keep everyone in the industrialized world from tossing the two bands into the same corner, though, and so we’ve come down to another one of those forevermore fights. And with this year being the 20th anniversary of a popular and acclaimed album from each band (Nirvana released In Utero in 1993, and Pearl Jam released Vs.) and next year being the 20-year mark of Cobain’s suicide, media followers everywhere decided now is the time to revisit one of the last great grunge years. And, being a glutton for punishment, I’m not going to stand above all as an exception to the rule. I WILL, however, stand above other typical cultural onlookers who play up the talents of both bands, praising them, and telling you to just go flip a coin when it’s time to decide to like one better than the other. That’s a cop out. I’m looking to define this sucker. So let’s do this! Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana. One day, I’ll learn.

Vocals
Kurt Cobain was a very competent vocalist whenever he decided to make the effort. One needs only listen to Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York album for infallible proof of this fact. After listening to Unplugged in New York, though, one also only needs to play one of the two Nirvana albums that aren’t Nevermind to hear that Cobain spent his time coasting through his vocal duties. Yeah, he could be a somber and emotional vocalist, but doing that regularly would have required him to have more settings on his voice switch than just mumble unintelligibly and scream at the top of his lungs, frequently in a stuttering form in the same song. Pearl Jam’s frontman, Eddie Vedder, couldn’t be called a first-tier singer. Hell, he screams too, and he tends to adopt a low growl for the points where Cobain would have screamed. However, when Vedder deploys his distinctive low baritone indoor voice, he can be solemn, sad (“Better Man”), haunting, and sardonic (“Rats”) with just the lightest touches. Cobain almost seemed like he was trying to hide behind his vocals. Vedder embraces his vocal weaknesses and maximizes them so they compliment his strengths.
Winner
Pearl Jam. Perhaps the most damning aspect of Kurt Cobain’s vocal work isn’t his own vocal work, but the fact that parodist Weird Al Yankovic recorded his own spin on Nirvana’s popular anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with a song called “Smells Like Nirvana,” in which he made fun of Nirvana for the fact that nobody could understand what Kurt Cobain was mumbling and screaming. It’s one of Weird Al’s signature hits.

Musicianship
There’s an obvious handicap at play here because Nirvana, at most, had four active musicians if you decide to count Pat Smear, who may or may not have been an official member of the band. While Smear expanded Nirvana’s sound on In Utero, he never really received official credit, and he’s never included in the lineup of classic Nirvana members. Pearl Jam never had less than five active musicians; three alone on guitar: Vedder, Mike McCready, and Stone Gossard. Since McCready is the lead guitarist, let’s briefly remove him from the equation and reduce Pearl Jam to four members. With Vedder and Gossard now set against Smear and Cobain, we’ve now got the defining sounds of the bands: A classic rock influence against a punk influence. There’s not much of a contest here because punk is the dregs of rock genres anyway. Punk is music for people who want to be in bands without taking the trouble to learn anything about music or instruments. Punk is a single note and a repetitive lyric being vocalized without being truly sung. Classic rock is performed by people who spent hours in practice, perfecting their musicianship. The bass contest is between Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, a contest I’ll cede to Novoselic because so much of Nirvana’s sound was carried through his bass. Although everyone remembers the hook of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it’s Novoselic who carried Nirvana through the verses of the song, as well as a lot of Nirvana’s other truly great songs like “In Bloom,” “Sliver,” and “Heart-Shaped Box,” and his booming lines were simple but powerful foundations that gave Nirvana’s songs a lot of their power. On drums, Nirvana had Dave Grohl, who – unbeknownst to the public at the time – turned out to be the band’s best musician. Unfortunately, this is about his drumming, so I have to write off everything he accomplished as the frontman of Foo Fighters. Pearl Jam employed a handful of drummers after their breakthrough, but current drummer Matt Cameron as been with them since 1998, and in my book that’s long enough to call him their definitive drummer. In the greatest drum class in history from the most drum-heavy rock genre, both Grohl and Cameron (whose pervious gigs included Soundgarden) are rightfully considered top tier gods who could hold their own among enduring legends like Keith Moon and Neil Peart, so I’ll call this a draw.
Winner
Pearl Jam. I handicapped in the previous paragraph for having an extra musician. Unfortunately for Nirvana, Pearl Jam played more complex music with a cast that was at least equal to their talent. Bringing McCready back into the equation, the contest is suddenly more one-sided, and Nirvana’s guitar weaknesses can’t hide behind maybe-member Smear forever. And let’s not kid ourselves; Nirvana did have weaknesses on guitar. Kurt Cobain’s greatest gift was in song construction, and his song construction managed to hide the fact that he wasn’t doing anything extraordinary as a guitarist. A large chunk of his work actually sounds downright amateur when Nirvana’s work is stripped down by piece.

Overall Sound
This is an area where these two bands seriously differ, and point A for why they really shouldn’t be categorized together. They’re both Seattle grunge bands, but that’s about the only thing they have in common. Kurt Cobain’s whole object was to be a great punk god, and my description of punk in the last section completely sums up my attitude toward punk – if you want to be a musician, either learn to play the fucking music or don’t be a musician! Music is art, but punk is the manic, street artist revolutionary wannabe for whom “art for the people” is the defense commonly used to excuse the lack of talent, organization, and – a lot of the time – vision. Nirvana is one of two bands to perform the trick of making punk listenable (the other being Green Day, who added a second chord and a competent singer), but despite that, they were a band of punk extremes. They wandered too far in one or the other direction. When they made it too close to traditional rock, they would be in the position of a good mainstream band, if not exactly a pop band. That would be their cue to switch direction and move too far back toward punk, which would turn them into screaming instrument-whippers. (Listen: “Territorial Pissings,” “Scentless Apprentice,” “Milk It.”) Pearl Jam’s sound could be shoved back 20 years prior to the original release of Ten, and it wouldn’t sound very out-of-place. It’s more what people tend to think of when they think of rock music – reliance on guitar rhythm, six or eight vocal lines per verse excluding bridges and hooks, guitar solos. The risk of Pearl Jam’s style, though, is an accusation that I’m playing it safe by stating my preference of a decent, constant musical flow than constant stuttering, white noise, and undecided grinding broken guitar explosions.
Winner
Pearl Jam. For some reason, critics still have two problems: They’re either: 1 – confusing “original” for “good” or 2 – believing the two terms are synonyms. Well, I don’t buy that. It isn’t like Pearl Jam never took any musical risks, after all. It’s that Pearl Jam’s risks always seemed to get panned. Remember the whole No Code fiasco? Sure, everyone is acting all buddy/buddy with Pearl Jam’s fourth album now, but that’s convenient forgetfulness to make up for the fact that Pearl Jam turned out to have more longevity as a band than anyone expected. No Code was reviled as Pearl Jam’s greatest mistake for years after its release. All the hoopla over No Code, by the way, also happened to come immediately after the band’s sterling Vitalogy album, in which the band made a departure from the sound they had established on Ten and Vs. to give the world something with a slightly more punk flavor. In the meantime, about half of Nirvana’s work could have been penned by fifth-graders, including the more original stuff. The band in general was apparently fond of grinding, screeching guitars, and choppy album consistency.

Songs
Pearl Jam just released its tenth studio album. It’s called Lightning Bolt, and it’s setting alight music critics everywhere. They clearly have the advantage in the quantity department, but this is more about quality. And in this respect, Nirvana can give them a fight. Songwriting was Kurt Cobain’s greatest strength. He was never the most talented musician the world has ever seen, but his ability to write songs continually tricks people into believing he was because he always got the most mileage out of the few strengths he had. Pearl Jam could tell more storytelling and descriptive lyrics, and their music was a lot more complex. Nirvana’s musical model, though, has proven to give us more enduring songs. Everyone can automatically hum the explosive chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which is basically the theme song of the 90’s. While “Jeremy” is another popular 90’s anthem, anyone asked to sing a bar or two of it will come up with a blank stare. Nirvana doesn’t have much greatness in the way of lyrics, though. “Aneurysm” is mostly repeated chorus. “School” has nine words repeated. Too much of the lyrical content in general is just plain juvenile. Pearl Jam’s lyrics could, like Eddie Vedder’s voice, take a large number of tones. “Daughter,” told through the eyes of a young girl, is a stellar example.
Winner
I take nothing away from either band in this category. Both have done outstanding work. When I began, I wanted – and was expecting – to give this to Nirvana. Well, I’m going to call this one a draw. Pearl Jam’s songs are better, but simply planting them with the victory would be depriving Kurt Cobain of his own abilities as a songwriter. And since his work was keeping Nirvana afloat, he deserves recognition. Pick your poison.

Longevity
I’m going to briefly use The Lazarus Machine on Kurt Cobain for a moment. Pearl Jam has had the longer career by a wide mile, despite no one thinking they were going to be around for very long. Eddie Vedder is a passionate activist, after all, and he’s never been afraid to stand up for what’s right. It reflects on a lot of Pearl Jam’s songs like “Even Flow” and “World Wide Suicide.” What this means is that Pearl Jam survived a handful of politically-based scares which would have destroyed a lot of other bands. They went to war against Ticketmaster, a corporate giant that sold most of the concert tickets at their big venues. On Nirvana’s end, the popular narrative is that Nirvana would have gone on to further their fame and fortune. I don’t doubt this. But fame and fortune only last in the music industry until you make a lousy album, and sometimes it only goes until the point where someone in the band flips out. There’s no real evidence that Nirvana would have lasted beyond In Utero. Dave Grohl had been trying his hand at songwriting for some time by then, and it took him just two years after the end of Nirvana to rise from the ashes as the frontman of a new band, the Foo Fighters, who have now been around for 17 years. Cobain carried around a bit of an attitude, though, and he complained constantly about things beyond his control. Fans weren’t getting him, the producer ruined Nevermind, the TV show lip-synchs, this or that band is a sellout. He also didn’t appear very bent on fixing things he could control – he hated Bleach, Nirvana’s debut album. He had also reached the point that he believed Nirvana had reached their creative peak, which he alluded to in his suicide note.
Winner
Pearl Jam. At Cobain’s rate, Nirvana might have been able to produce three more albums, and I’ll only give them that out of the greatest generosity my heart will allow. A more realistic estimate has them barely making it through one more before Cobain called quits to the entire band and, sickened of his fans and image, done the Axl Rose routine. Except that in Nirvana’s version, there’s no promise of the Chinese Democracy album at the end.

Image
The nutshell imagery has folks envisioning Nirvana as an angry, tortured band, making authentic and heartfelt music that speaks for the masses while Pearl Jam is a band of idiots obsessed with showing everyone that they’re not sellouts. Are you fucking kidding me?! Everything Pearl Jam did, especially early in their career, had no personal benefit to the band. They refused to make music videos, got into a war with the corporation that pretty much owned all the big concert halls because of what the band said was ticket gouging, and are legendary for their live performances. In other words, they refused to have their fans’ personal song interpretations compromised, stood up to a big corporation because they thought their fans were being screwed, and always run onstage and give 100 percent, gee, look, for their fans! Ya think this is a band that’s fond of its fans? On the other end, there’s Nirvana, a band which created a debut album which the frontman himself hated even though he wrote every song on it; wanted to call its second album Sheep because they thought it had too much of a pretty, mainstream sheen; and made their third album solely as an effort to alienate people. And while people hemmed and hawed about how Kurt Cobain was angsty and authentic and all that other stuff, Cobain was turning the stripped, fundamentals-heavy sound he helped create into a playland where only his own version of the cool kids could dance. And his version of the cool kids was pretty narrow. His feud with Axl Rose happened because Cobain created it and considered Rose a sellout. He took potshots at Pearl Jam too, calling the band out for using too many guitar solos and a shot reserved for Jeff Ament because Ament liked to play basketball. It was Vedder, by the way, who caught Cobain for the bully he had turned into. Sayeth the legend, Vedder called Cobain out of the blue and the battle ended, and the two of them were on much better terms by Cobain’s death.
Winner
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam. It was summed up in one novel which described Pearl Jam as being the band of the people and Nirvana as the band that hated its people. While I have no doubt Cobain meant everything he sang, he is also the early prototype of the modern hipster: A man who tracked the mainstream and made business decisions accordingly, all carefully calculated to project the image of how much he didn’t care. Pearl Jam wins this battle or you’re a fucking moron who needs to trade in your tasteful music card right now and go buy the new album from Justin Bieber. You’re not ready to have a conversation about grownup music yet.

Breakthrough
Pearl Jam’s first album was Ten, and they busted into the mainstream right off the bat with it. Nirvana had to wait until their second album, Nevermind, to catch fire. Both of these albums are outstanding, and feature the bands at the top of their games. Nevermind, however, has a limit in its sounds. It’s either similar-sounding one-note guitar work or sardonic acoustic songs. They’re great songs, mind you, but Nevermind really doesn’t venture out to sound all that different from itself. Ten is a haunting album loaded with stories, anger, and pain. It tackles a variety of social ills as well as personal issues, trying to reach out and grab everyone surrounding it. Ten is situational and existential while Nevermind is merely existential.
Winner
You can’t go wrong with either, but my personal preference is for Ten.

Pearl Jam rolls over Nirvana in every way. Stripped of their air of authenticity, Nirvana is a band for people who think they’re authentic, but who are in truth just hipsters.

Manning vs. Brady: The Ultimate Battle!

Words like greatness and champion tend to conjure images of our greatest athletes soaring above and beyond the limits of our imaginations. Imaginations which you’ll have to use for the purposes of this article, because being saccharine when it comes to professional sports has never been a great specialty of mine.

So anyway, the battle lines have long been drawn in the NFL fandom. You’re either a Peyton Manning man or a Tom Brady man; one of these two is going to go down in history as the greatest quarterback of all time, and the other is going to be remembered as 1a. It’s the closest thing the NFL has to a good against evil rivalry right now, although the roles have managed to invert themselves: The gifted, strong-armed man who was the son of a quarterback and the brother of another quarterback and was raised almost purely to epitomize everything a proper pocket passer should be is the good guy in this case, while the scrappy underdog who was inconspicuously raised in California, had to prove himself at the University of Michigan, was drafted in the fifth round, and whose big break was one of Drew Bledsoe’s bones is considered the bad guy. While so-called analysts were debating stat and MVP King Manning against Super Bowl Champion Brady for years, both Rob and I were devoted Manning men. Then something funny happened: Brady started putting up video game numbers himself, and the debate between Manning and Brady was suddenly a real debate. Rob stuck with Manning through and through, but I began questioning who was the true superior of the two. Lately, it seems like everything between them has been a one-upsmanship contest which the rest of the NFL just got stuck in. Just when I think Brady proved himself the inarguable superior by throwing for over 500 yards in a single game, Manning will heave seven touchdown passes in a single game. Forget the hype; the NFL is a battlefield between Manning and Brady, and every other team is just caught in the middle. So who is actually better? Well, it’s time to throw my own five cents into this bloodletting. So let’s do this! Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady. One day, I’ll learn.

Coaching
Peyton Manning played for a bunch of coaches – Jim Mora, Tony Dungy, and Jim Caldwell with the Indianapolis Colts. Upon his move to the Denver Broncos, Manning switched to coach John Fox. Non-fans might not notice this at first glance, but that’s not a particularly impressive spate of coaches. Dungy is the only coach of that bunch who could give fans any bragging rights – he’s the team’s all-time winningest coach, at least in Indy – and even he struggled to fix a defense which constantly played like a screen door on a submarine. So it was left on Manning’s head to lead all of those coaches to 13-win years at one point or another. Consider that: Four different head coaches, four new systems to learn, and one of them came with a move to a city where there’s no atmosphere and athletes have to be told to remember to breathe. Tom Brady has had only one single coach throughout the entirety of his NFL career. Not just any coach either, but Darth freaking Vader…. I mean, Bill freaking Belichick, a man who specialized in defense when he began his tenure with the New England Patriots and, when his guys got old, pulled a switcheroo and morphed into Air Belichick. That’s not only stability, it’s stability with a coach who can teach you rocket science.
Edge
Peyton Manning. For everything we know about what a natural athlete he is, Peyton Manning clearly put in extra credit to learn every new system thrown at him. He’s done that so often that any discussion over the league MVP revolves around who will be second to Manning. Tom Brady knows only his one guy. I’d like to see how he does without a wizard calling his shots before coming back to review this decision.

Beginning Situation
Quarterback is a difficult position to really get ahold of in the NFL. It’s why so few teams come up with even one serviceable QB they can safely call their franchise guy, so it’s safe to factor in just what they did when they were first thrown to the wolves. Manning won all of three games in his rookie season with the Colts. In his first real season as a starter, Brady didn’t do very much better. He only took the New England Patriots to, uh, their first ever Super Bowl victory. However, what should be be remembered here is that Tom Brady was drafted in 2000 and spent his first season sitting on his ass watching and learning from Drew Bledsoe, a 40,000-yard clubber himself who took the Patriots to a nigh-unwinnable Super Bowl against the Green Bay Packers a few years earlier. In practices, he was learning the system of Bill Belichick. What does it all mean? That by the time Tom Brady won his promotion, he knew all the ropes, an advantage Peyton Manning didn’t have. I won’t factor in what Manning did during his first year in Denver, because by the time he got there, the Broncos were such an awesome team that Tim Tebow was able to get them into the playoffs.
Edge
Peyton Manning. Tom Brady never had to deal with a team that was a disorganized mess even before Marshall Faulk left.

Clutch Reputations
Peyton Manning has 38 fourth-quarter comebacks. Tom Brady has 27. Now, this can easily be nullified by pointing out the fact that if the quarterbacks are any good, they don’t find themselves playing from behind very often, and with Brady there’s certainly a case in that. Brady’s top year for comebacks was seven in 2003, when the Patriots weren’t leaking like drunks on defense. He seems to be playing from behind less and less. Manning has more comebacks to his name despite his reputation as a choker, and three times in his career he managed to lead his team to seven comebacks in a single season. Blame his defense. The dirty little secret of the New England Patriots is that, in spite of his fearless leader reputation, Tom Brady’s props as the clutch man in the Super Bowl are overblown. He’s played in the Big Game five times. The first two times, he merely brought his team to ties. In both final drives – which cemented his reputation, I might add – he wasn’t imitating Joe Montana or Eli Manning. All he did was lead the Patriots down the field, into…. Field goal position! Where his uber-clutch kicker broke tie games in the closing seconds! Kind of removes the sense of urgency, doesn’t it? In the third Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles had a real shot at winning. Brady had no control over the end drives, but reeled in the Lombardi Trophy anyway because Philly’s coach couldn’t remember the time. Fourth Super Bowl against the New York Giants? That was a big one. Truly down by three points, Brady really needed a touchdown. There was a real sense of urgency because even if the Patriots kicked a field goal, that meant time would run out and the Giants would get another shot in overtime. And Tom Terrific couldn’t even get his team into field goal range. In his fifth Super Bowl, again against the Giants, Brady led the Pats on the final drive again, and this time his team was down by four so no touchdown, no ring, game, set, and match. Not only did Brady blow it, he didn’t even get within a reach of the endzone which was safe enough for New England to try anything other than a hail mary. I’m taking pleasure in Brady-bashing because while no one points this out, everyone loves to mock Manning’s one big comeback failure in the Super Bowl: The interception to Tracy Porter against the New Orleans Saints.
Edge
Take your chance. On the one hand, Peyton Manning comes back more often, but he’s more prone to mistakes. On the other, there’s Tom Brady, who looks lost when he’s truly behind in the Super Bowl under assault because he isn’t used to having to come back, but at least he doesn’t throw game-sealing interceptions.

Playing Style
Neither of these guys can be called a bad runner, but they’re both traditional pocket passers, which makes both of them relics in the new, mobile NFL. Of course, that doesn’t mean a whole lot because even in their career twilights, both are still capable of killing you. They just have different ways of going about it. Manning has always been more of a big play quarterback. Watching him, one gets the sense that he’s going for broke on each and every pass he throws. It’s high risk, high reward for Manning, a man who never heard of such a thing as game management until late in his career. He is a regular scrimmage line maestro who frequently calls his own plays and changes them at will if his gut is telling him the other defense is going to pull something. Tom Brady clearly knew the concept of game management from the moment he took over the starting job from Bledsoe in New England. Hell, it’s the reason he’s been so successful. Brady is more willing to spread the ball out, change receivers, and throw short-yardage passes for small gains to hack away at a defense if his team is on the ropes. It’s not the most exciting way to get the job done, but it works, and the risks aren’t as great. This shows in the interception numbers for both players – Manning has thrown considerably more career interceptions (209 to Brady’s 123) and his single-season interception high of 28 is twice that of Brady’s 14.
Edge
Tom Brady. If I have to protect a small lead, I need to know the ball is going to actually be safe.

Personnel
The common perception is that Peyton Manning lifted the NFL version of The Mighty Ducks while Tom Brady coasted by on the cream of the crop. When it comes to defense, Manning has always been shafted, while Brady only started getting screwed over around 2006. Manning had the career entirety of receiver Marvin Harrison for the bulk of both their careers, and Harrison is a guy who ranks in the Jerry Rice suites in several receiving categories, including career receptions – he’s one of only four to reel in 1000 balls, and he ranks first in average receptions per season. Manning also enjoyed the sustained ground support of Edgerrin James for an enormous chunk of time, and James was no half-ass runner – he holds five career rushing records for the Colts. Over his career, Manning also got the considerable services of other Pro Bowlers like center Jeff Saturday, wide receiver Reggie Wayne lining up opposite Harrison, running back Joseph Addai, and tight end Ken Dilger. Now, do you know who Antowain Smith is? He was the running back for the Patriots in New England’s first two Super Bowl victories, and a reject from the Buffalo Bills who really didn’t have much to offer beyond his willingness to take a few hits. It’s true that like Manning, Tom Brady enjoyed the protection of an all-world offensive line, an all-time great receiver (Randy Moss) and an all-time great running back (Corey Dillon). However, Moss and Dillon came years apart and played for the Patriots for less than three years! Dillon retired soon after helping the Patriots to their third Super Bowl, and Moss was shipped. New England is infamously unsentimental when it comes to keeping its guys, and Brady has had to get used to seeing his running backs and receivers get knocked down the depth chart and ditched entirely. Receiver Troy Brown had a Pro Bowl in an otherwise inconspicuous career, and he needed Brady to get it. Deion Branch was a Super Bowl MVP, an honor which probably topped his otherwise ordinary career. Wes Welker and Rob Gronkowski are the closest things Brady ever had to favorite targets, but Welker is catching Peyton’s bombs in Denver now, and Gronk hasn’t been around for very long yet. Of course, the reverse arguments came when both players were injured; when Brady went down for the 2008 season, Matt Cassel won eleven games in his absence. When Manning was hurt in 2011, the Colts won two games.
Edge
Tom Brady. Manning has had the kind of stability with his players that Brady has had only with his coach. Yes, Manning-less Indianapolis won just two games, but that wasn’t a particularly good personnel year for them from any standpoint. You couldn’t say that about the 2008 Patriots.

Opposition
Yeah, I know, what the hell kind of a category is this? It isn’t like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are facing the 1983 quarterback draft class twice every season. Brady plies his trade in the AFC East against the Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, and New York Jets. During his career, the Jets have had a few nice runs, but they didn’t come off as a wake-up call to the Patriots even at their best. The Bills and Dolphins have been in some of the weirdest messes in league history – Buffalo’s playoff drought is the league’s longest, and Miami once had a potential all-time great running back quit to go find himself before returning a couple of years later. Not that Manning spent his career in any less of a comfy situation – the league’s divisional layout was rearranged in 2002 to create the AFC South for the expansion Houston Texans, who just happen to share their division with the Colts. Manning also got to pick on the perpetually hapless Jacksonville Jaguars. The only team which was enough to threaten Indy was the Tennessee Titans, but even they were a spotty, frustrating team which could win twelve games one season then five the next. And when Manning went to Denver, his quality of opposition somehow managed to get even worse. The Kansas City Chiefs have fans pausing for thought with new coach Andy Reid and new quarterback Alex Smith, but that might well turn out to be a tease. The days of the San Diego Chargers being an offensive dynamo are gone and their window is firmly nailed shut for now, while the Oakland Raiders might be the worst team in the league.
Edge
Tom Brady. First of all, no player has ever tormented a single team the way Brady has beat on the Buffalo Bills. Yes, it’s the bizarro version of the Bills, but even so, a 23-2 record against a divisional rival is something to behold. Also, for all my complaining about his clutch Super Bowl performances not being all that clutch, Brady won his first Super Bowl against the St. Louis Rams, still in their Greatest Show on Turf years. He won one of the most exciting shootouts in Super Bowl history against the Carolina Panthers, and the next year he played outstanding football against a Philadelphia Eagles team which many onlookers believe lost to itself more than it lost to the Patriots. Manning’s first Super Bowl opponent was the Chicago Bears, who won 13 games, but only because they hit their apex and had a weak schedule during a stretch when the NFC had a serious power void.. Manning’s second Super Bowl was against the visibly superior New Orleans Saints, and fuck the gambling line because the oddsmakers aren’t football fans anyway.

Accomplishments
This one can keep us up for awhile. Both have done an impressive number of things. Peyton Manning broke the record for touchdowns thrown in a single season in 2006, then Brady broke Manning’s record the following year. Peyton Manning threw seven touchdowns in his last game, something which hasn’t happened since 1944. Brady threw for 500 yards in a single game a couple of years ago. Brady also has a still-rare 5000-yard season under his belt now, and is second on the list for consecutive games with one touchdown pass with 49. Manning won four league MVP awards, Brady two. Manning was the fastest player to ever reach several large career milestones, including 50,000 passing yards and 400 touchdown passes. Both have been Super Bowl MVPs, and both are all-time leaders for their teams in several categories.
Edge
Tom Brady. This came down to what bragging rights these guys give the fans, and a 3-2 record in the Super Bowl trumps everything. Yes, Manning may be statistically better in a lot of categories, but I guarantee you no one in Indianapolis is walking around in a T-shirt touting Manning’s MVP years.

Biases
Peyton Manning played in a fellow Rust Belt city. Tom Brady is an All-American Golden Boy who became a celebrity being a fucking Patriot.
Edge
Peyton Manning. Even New England’s most diehard fans accept the fact that they’d probably hate Brady’s guts if he wasn’t playing on their team.

Have all my bases been covered? I love Peyton Manning. I love Tom Brady, at least the extent to which a non-Patriots fan can love Tom Brady. But in a heartbeat, my money is on Brady. At least in real life because his team-first philosophy is costing me fantasy points. Next year I’m taking Manning in fantasy football. But overall, Brady is better. Watch Rob limply attempt to debate this in our next book, Nick and Rob Explode the NFL.