The Definitive Ranking of NFL Helmets and Jerseys

 Tier IV: What are we doing here?

32. New York Jets

"I've got an idea for new uniforms.  I want to go retro."

"Great!  But we already have retro unis from the '60s.  The evoke the era of Joe Namath."

"Yeah, but I want to do retro unis from the '90s.  They will evoke the era of washed up Boomer Esiason."

"Sounds great, let's do it."

31. Houston Texans

Bland, corporate, soulless.

30. Tampa Bay Buccaneers

I will admit to having a wholly irrational love for the Bucs' old creamsicle jerseys.  So maybe I'm biased.  But pewter belongs on candelabras, not uniforms.

29. Washington Commanders

The Washington Football Team could at least lay claim to some old school charm via the numbers on helmets.  Now the helmets feature a "W" that looks like it came from a Division II team.

Tier III: Fine, I guess

28. Kansas City Chiefs

Red and yellow are literally the two most unpleasant colors you could put together on uniforms.

27. Arizona Cardinals

I have some affection for the simplicity of the Cards' mostly white helmets.  But let's face it.  This team is not winning any style awards.

26. Chicago Bears

These uniforms are the NFL's version of the Yankees': classic but boring.

25. Seattle Seahawks

Perfectly adequate, except for the neon green, which looks great as an accent but occasionally is used as the primary color, which looks hideous.

24. Baltimore Ravens

This team and the four just below have sleek, modern-looking logos that are all just kind of dull.

23. New England Patriots

Bring back the old uniforms, you cowards!  The flag isn't red, white, and silver!

22. Atlanta Falcons

Perfectly dull uniforms for a perfectly dull team.  I'll never understand why they mostly ditched the red.

21. Denver Broncos and 20. Miami Dolphins

Likewise, both of these teams traded in tacky uniforms with character for streamlined versions that have no sense of history attached to them.

19. Detroit Lions

Would the Lions' unis seem more classic if the team had ever won anything?  They have a solid concept and they've stuck with it for decades.  Maybe if the team had a more significant place in league history, the jerseys would too.

18. Philadelphia Eagles

The wings on the helmets are a pretty good idea, and the colors are fine.  I'm not sure why I'm left a little cold by these.

Tier II: Prettaay, prettaay, prettaay good

17. Jacksonville Jaguars

Their helmet background used to have gold that faded into black.  It wasn't pretty, but at least it helped the team stand out in some way besides losing an epic number of games.

16. Indianapolis Colts and 15. Dallas Cowboys

In the same neighborhood as the Bears, but minimalism works for them.

14. Minnesota Vikings

The Purple People Eaters!  Purple uniforms with horns on the helmets sounds dumb on paper, yet somehow it works.

13. Tennessee Titans

Gregg Easterbrook famously dubbed them the "Flaming Thumbtacks."  But considering that logo, they look pretty good!

12. New Orleans Saints

They'll never live down the name, but the black and gold look helps make up for it.

11. Cleveland Browns

Sometimes you watch a movie that isn't terribly ambitious but accomplishes exactly what it tries to do.  That's the Browns' uniforms.  I hope they never change.

10. Carolina Panthers

Maybe I'm biased because these were my high school's colors, but the teal/black/silver combo really pops.

9. Los Angeles Rams

That swirling helmet is a great idea regardless of the colors.  But I would submit that it's not a coincidence that they won their two Super Bowls right before and after they adapted the navy and gold color pattern.

8. Buffalo Bills

Like the logos of the Ravens, Broncos, and Dolphins, this one is meant to convey forward motion.  The Bills' logo actually achieves it, though, thanks to that red streak.  The weird shape of the logo also gives it much more idiosyncratic charm.

Tier I: Iconic

7. San Francisco 49ers

With a name like that, you can't do much with the logo.  But the gold and red are *chef's kiss*.

6. Cincinnati Bengals

The Bengals have never won a Super Bowl, and yet their uniforms are still iconic.  The helmets are that damn good.

5. New York Giants

The road jerseys are pretty blah--white shirts and gray pants, really?--but the home unis, with the blue shirts, might be the best in football.

4. Green Bay Packers

There was once a rumor that the "G" stood for greatness.  It has since been debunked, but I like to believe it anyway.

3. Pittsburgh Steelers

Putting the logo on only one side of the helmet was an absolutely inspired choice.

2. Los Angeles Chargers

If there's any football jersey that ever had a chance of wowing a fashion designer, it would be the Chargers' powder blue home unis.  Nothing else even comes close.

1. Las Vegas Raiders

The Raiders' look is more than just iconic.  It encompasses the whole ethos of founder Al Davis: aggression at all times.  Sure, it's also associated with lots of penalties and dumb personnel moves.  But the Raiders' franchise has an identity.  That's more than you can say for most teams.

The Beatles: Get Back

We've always known the Beatles were always ahead of their time: a boy band conquering American lands with psychedelic jams.  Turns out they were ahead of their time in another way, too: they turned the cameras on.

Today, pop star documentaries are a dime a dozen.  The likes of P!nk, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber have put out officially sanctioned PR missives.  Some performers have allowed (still officially sanctioned) peeks behind the curtain in these films: Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish.

But nowadays cameras are ubiquitous.  Back in 1969, there was a thing called "film," and it wasn't cheap.  Expense, however, was rarely a consideration for a band that literally contemplated buying their own island.  And so, just a few months after the band had splintered during the making of the White Album, Paul decided the group would record a back to basics record--another thing the Beatles invented--in just a few weeks while cameras captured their every move.  What could go wrong?

Surprisingly little, actually, for much of the runtime of "The Beatles: Get Back," Peter Jackson's massive eight-hour documentary from the previously unused footage.  Paul forced the band to record everything together, live, and the gambit seems to have paid off in forcing them to interact.  It's striking how much Paul and John get along.  They get high and make each other laugh.  They jam with Yoko.  They may not collaborate as much, but they're still able to work together, refining each other's compositions.  There's also a fair amount of the serendipitous magic that seemed to follow this band around for a decade.  Paul vamps on two chords one morning and suddenly has "Get Back."  Billy Preston shows up to the studio to say hello and is quickly enlisted as their keyboard player.  Ringo plays a goofy snippet of "Octopus' Garden" and soon George has turned it into a real song.

Storm clouds do appear, however, first in the frustrations of George.  It's pretty tough to watch how this talented musician is treated by his bandmates: Paul as a kid brother, John as more of a nerd to bully.  His sudden departure from the band a week into rehearsals is almost unsurprising; he was simply tired of providing minor embellishments to the tunes of others.  The sudden rupture prompts much soul searching, culminating in the pinnacle of the doc: a secretly recorded conversation between John and Paul over lunch.  There's basically no rancor to it, just a fascinating exchange between two musical geniuses realizing they might only be able to walk the same path for so long.

If there's a fly in the ointment of this doc--and truth be told, the problem is big enough that it's more of a grizzly bear in a trailer park--it's that it was put together by Peter Jackson.  Between the end of "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," a totally unnecessary three-hour "King Kong," and not one but three Hobbit films, perhaps no living director has proven more willing to waste his audience's time.  Want ten minutes with a record executive talking about publishing rights?  Want to see the band sit around for an entire morning while the recording engineer tries to get the sound right?  Want to see several different half-assed performances of "Stand By Me" when the band gets sick of its own material?  Too bad!

The piece is a significant historical document nonetheless.  There's plenty of evidence in the documentary that the Beatles were on their last legs.  But the consolation prize is the evidence of all the great moments still to come for them.  Paul ponders buying a farm in Scotland.  John sings a couple lines with the vocal melody from "Imagine."  (The words are different, but it's clear the song was already banging around his head.)  George tries to get the band to do "All Things Must Pass"; John tries to mess with the lyrics, but George would have the last laugh.

The documentary's most poignant moment comes after George has quit and John has failed to show up one morning.  "And then there were two," Paul says, with tears in his eyes.  But--just at that moment--the phone rings.  It's John.  Lady luck was often on these lads' side.

Beautiful Boy and Ben is Back

As two awards-season films about parents and children struggling with the latter's addictions, Beautiful Boy and Ben is Back were always going to be linked.  The funny thing is that the movies take very different routes to get to much the same place, without ever being particularly good.

Beautiful Boy is based on the memoirs of both a father and his son.  It jumps around in time, examining how the son fell into addiction and how he struggled to get clean.  This approach feels like a good way to get at the truth of what really happened.  But the movie just sort of floats along, struggling to find its bearings.

Ben is Back puts a lot more narrative meat on the bone, making it both more compelling and more contrived.  When the son returns home from rehab for an ill-advised Christmas visit, someone breaks into his family's house and steals their dog.  He and his mother go on a journey to save the dog, reflect on how things got so bad, and prevent the son from relapsing or dying (which might be the same thing).

There are certain movies where the protagonist has to go up against something much bigger than herself.  It could be a natural disaster.  It could be sharks or dinosaurs.  It could be cancer.  Or it could be a parent battling a child's addiction.  In such cases, there isn't much opportunity for interesting drama.  There might be thrills, but the heroes' choices are severely curtailed; all they can do is try their best and hope for good fortune.

Another challenge for addiction movies is that there isn't much room for subtlety or nuance.  Every sideways glance is freighted with meaning, a sign that the characters aren't being totally honest with one another.  Every 30 second period alone is a chance for the addict to relapse.  And there aren't many grey areas in films like these: the addict is either on the wagon or falling back off.

Ben is Back tries to solve this problem by injecting some suspense into whether the addict is really being honest or is just looking for opportunities to get high.  And the actors all give committed performances.  But the script barely has to do any work to turn up the histrionics.  It's a bit like watching a movie about a sick puppy.  Its heavy emotions don't quite feel earned.

A Simple Favor

Paul Feig has had a strange career.  After starting out as an actor, he moved behind the camera.  He got his big break cocreating "Freaks and Geeks" with Judd Apatow.  The show was a very grounded drama examining the pitfalls of high school and aging.  He then made "I Am David," a film about a boy escaping from a concentration camp.  Heavy stuff.

Since then, though, he's mostly spent his time making ever-more ridiculous comedies such as "The Heat" and "Spy."  It's telling that when he and Apatow took over at the helm of "Bridesmaids," they made a small indie film much broader, most infamously by inserting an extended diarrhea-and-vomit sequence.

Feig's latest, "A Simple Favor," would seem to be a turn toward more serious fare.  There's infidelity, murder, and a mysterious disappearance.  Yet in a way, this film is as ridiculous as anything Feig has directed.  It offers up some scenic views before eventually driving into Crazytown.

Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie Smothers, a seemingly prudish stay-at-home mom whose life is changed when she meets fellow mom Emily, yet another uber-chic role for Blake Lively.  Emily shows off a depressive personality and hides a lot more.  One day, Emily asks Stephanie to pick her son up from school.  Then she doesn't come home.

This is all fun and games for a while, as Stephanie tries to track down Emily.  But even after she cracks that mystery, the film is still far from its endgame.  It piles on the twists until it collapses in on its own pretzel logic.  Eventually, keeping straight which characters are allied with one another becomes impossible.  Adding to the chaos, the script throws in plenty of broad comedy, too, along with some feints at observations on motherhood and female friendship that never really say anything.

It's a shame, because Kendrick nails every pose this ridiculous movie puts her into.  "A Simple Favor" is a movie that wants to give everything to everyone: Comedy!  Drama!  Suspense!  Surprise!  Social commentary!  But as has often been remarked this decade, one can't have it all.

What About Bob?

For one of our most beloved comedic actors, Bill Murray didn't make very many funny movies.  Caddyshack?  Stripes?  Ghostbusters?  All bad films.  (And the stakes in Groundhog Day are too high for it to be considered a comedy.) Part of the problem is that Murray's heyday was in the execrable '80s, probably the only decade in which Chevy Chase could have become a movie star. But some of the challenge stemmed from the nature of Murray's weirdo deadpan persona.  He's an odd sort to build a movie around.  When faced with a calamity, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, or Will Ferrell throw a tantrum.  Murray just shrugs his shoulders.

The genius of What About Bob? is that it takes the things everybody likes about Bill Murray and amplifies them.  He's the offbeat guy everyone wants to be around.  But his neuroses have also been cranked up to 11, and that serves as the engine for the plot.  He stalks his psychiatrist, played by a razor-sharp Richard Dreyfuss, but he's so nice about it that his shrink is the only one who seems bothered.  The film slowly becomes an adult version of Looney Tunes, with Dreyfuss' Elmer Fudd going to increasingly desperate lengths to get rid of Murray's Bugs Bunny.  His efforts to "get rid of" Bob become more literal as the movie goes along, giving the film a dark edge that helps prevent it from slipping into sentimentality.

The ending also helps in this regard.  Unlike Planes, Trains, and Automobiles--another comedy about a lovable loser with a finale smothered in Cheez-Wiz--What About Bob? never redeems Dreyfuss as the straight man.  It's content to subtly show that we may have something to learn from "crazy" people.  That the "sane" ones might not be so stable after all.

The Beguiled

The premise of Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled is almost literally a Monty Python sketch; the Pythons' Holy Grail, perhaps in a sendup of the source novel and previous film adaptation, has a scene with a setup that's only slightly more ridiculous.  In both cases, a young man (for the Pythons, a knight, for Coppola, a Union soldier) is injured and reaches a haven with no men to be found (in Grail, a monastery with nuns, in Beguiled, a boarding school with a couple of teachers and one rstudent who's rather mature for her age).  It's not hard to see the comic possibilities: in the climax of the Pythons' scene, one of the nuns announces their plans, stating, "And after the spanking, the oral sex!"  The knight replies, "Well, I could stay a bit longer..."

The inherent silliness is not lost on Coppola.  She's included some rather amusing moments in her film, particularly a scene in which the teachers and girls sing to the soldier.  As they beam at him and he smiles right back, there are a million things left unsaid.

And yet this film is actually toned down from the 1971 Clint Eastwood version, which is by all accounts much raunchier.  Even though the 2017 version is the more modern film, it's this one that relies more on meaningful glances.  There's been much discussion of the male gaze in recent years; you could say this film is about the female gaze, and the projections the women put onto the soldier: as a protector, an escape, or perhaps just a night of fun.

Yet apart from this theme and a couple of melodramatic twists that follow the source material, there isn't much to the film.  It's hard to see why Coppola felt a remake was necessary.  Particularly undeveloped are the relationships between the women, which seems like a missed opportunity in light of some juicy assignations that go down late in the film.  A worthwhile remake of this story could be made.  But this isn't it.

The Golden Slumbers Suite

I just got a book of essays on Beatles songs.  I'm doing one on the Golden Slumbers suite, because I can.

I prefer Paul.  I know that this is not the cool answer.  I know that John Lennon was a brilliant songwriter--probably more brilliant than Paul.  I know that I will never be smart enough to appreciate many of Lennon's songs.  I know that the Beatles would not have been a great band without the magic of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration.  I know that they would have been a lot less special with George Harrison.  (I'll put "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" up there with anything they ever did.)  I know that Ringo was fun.

I know that Paul could be maudlin.  Like Brett Favre, who once held the records for most touchdowns and interceptions, they are probably few people in pop history who have written more bad songs than McCartney.  I will forever hold a grudge against him for writing the hideous "Wonderful Christmastime," an insipid ditty for which he's probably made royalties in excess of the annual GDP of some small nations.

But come on.  Just look at this motherfucker's oeuvre.  If he had never written a song after the Beatles split, he would still be one of the greatest pop songwriters of all time.  If he had never written a song until after they split, he would still be on the greatest pop songwriters of all time.  One of my maxims is that songwriters have to keep experimenting to stay vital; basically no one in the pop canon can hold a candle to Macca in that regard.  He still doesn't get enough credit for how much he pushed himself.  From helping create pop's DNA with the Beatles to "Ram" to Wings to electronica to classical, he moved forward over and over instead of resting on his laurels.  Just listen to "Band on the Run," a song that's been played to death and yet still sounds interesting, thanks to Paul's funky detours.

The best part of Dave Grohl's Sound City, in which he records collaborations with pop stars using a famous sound board, is when McCartney, who's there to record "Long Tall Sally" with the surviving members of Nirvana, ditches that plan and says, "That's been done before.  Let's do something new."  They proceed to write "Cut Me Some Slack," five minutes of dumb, fun rock, in a matter of hours.  Grohl says, "If only it were always this easy."  Macca says, "It is."  That's Paul McCartney.

***

So where were we?  Oh, yeah, the Golden Slumbers suite.  Paul promises "I will sing you a lullaby," and boy does he ever.  Yes, it's boring to say it, but the melodies here are gorgeous.  Moreover, it's a nice quick spin through the Beatles' sound at the close of the final album they recorded.  There are guitar solos, horns, a callback to "You Never Give Me Your Money," and vocals from all four members.

Then there are the words.  Another maxim of mine: it's really hard to write lyrics that are profound without sounding silly.  Paul nails it here.  "Once there was a way/To get back homeward" is the perfect line for if your band is breaking up or your partner left you or your job sucks or basically any situation in which you realize that childhood was the best time, dammit, and you didn't appreciate it when you had the chance.  "Boy, you're gonna carry that weight" is a perfect pop juxtaposition, an uplifting melody undercut with melancholy.  You'll never find a better pub singalong.

And then?  "And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to the love/You make."  Would that it were true!  But you have to believe it, at least sometimes, or you'll never make it through your days.  Yes, Lennon was great.  But we needed Paul McCartney.