What to know when the Vikings host the Detroit Lions on Sunday afternoon:
Lions at Vikings
When: 12 p.m. Sunday
Where: U.S. Bank Stadium
TV: FOX
Radio: KFAN
Line: Lions – 3.0
Over/Under: 47.5
Keys for the Vikings
— The best way for the Vikings to defend this weekend will be by pressuring Lions quarterback Jared Goff. It will be on defensive coordinator Brian Flores to draw up exotic blitz packages that make Goff uncomfortable in the pocket. In the past, Goff has shown that he can be affected by pressure in his face.
— On the flip side, the Vikings should be able to attack the Lions downfield when they’re on offense. The last time the teams met, star receiver Justin Jefferson dominated with more more than 200 yards receiving. If he can make a similar impact this time, the Vikings will have a pretty good chance at an upset victory.
Keys for the Lions
— If the Vikings are going to try to pressure Goff, the Lions need to counter by running the ball with regularity. The running back combo of veteran David Montgomery and rookie Jahmyr Gibbs has been a godsend for the Lions this season. It would behoove them to get Montgomery and Gibbs rolling in this one.
— There should be ample opportunity for Lions pass rusher Aidan Hutchinson to make his presence felt. If he can sack Vikings quarterback Nick Mullens a couple of times, or even simply generate some hurries, the Vikings might have a difficult time operating offensively. The fact that Mullens has a tendency to turn the ball over should not be overlooked.
When director Matthew Brown was ready to cast “Freud’s Last Session,” a film that imagines a conversation between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, it was Anthony Hopkins he thought of first to play the father of psychoanalysis.
“Anthony Hopkins, that was always the No. 1 you could ever dream of getting,” Brown says. “I wasn’t surprised when he said no at first. I think he was in the midst of [the film] ‘The Father.’”
But Brown didn’t give up on the dream. He worked on the script that he co-wrote with Mark St. Germain, who had written the stage play upon which the movie was adapted, and found a way to get it back in front of Hopkins once more.
“When he said yes, it was basically ‘game on’ at that point,” Brown says.
Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis and Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Sabrina Lantos, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Sabrina Lantos, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Sabrina Lantos, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Patrick Redmond, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Liv Lisa Fries as Anna Freud in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Patrick Redmond, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in “Freud’s Last Session,” a new film from director and cowriter Matthew Brown which opens Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (Photo by Patrick Redmond, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
British actor Matthew Goode, known for his work on television in “Downton Abbey” and “The Good Wife,” and in film for “The Imitation Game” and “Watchmen,” was cast as C.S. Lewis.
“Matthew, as much as he loved me or the material, I think he was just as excited to get the chance to work with Anthony Hopkins, who was a childhood hero to him,” he says. “That brings its own challenges, because we’re all in awe,” Brown says. “He’s the great one, and we’re all intimidated.
“Somebody asked, ‘What’s it like to direct Tony Hopkins?’” Brown says. “I was like, You don’t even get a chance to think about it because he engages with you so fast. And he’s so excited about the work that you just fall right in and everyone’s just working.
“He brings everybody’s A-game out, and that’s something you learn when you’re working on a film like that. What that actually looks like.”
In “Freud’s Last Session,” which opens Friday, Dec. 22, Freud and Lewis meet in England in September 1939 as Germany invades Poland and the world is fraught with fear. Freud, an atheist, who is just weeks away from dying from cancer, wants to talk with Lewis, a former nonbeliever, about his belief in God.
Their conversation, interspersed with recollections of their earlier lives, Freud’s struggle with his daughter Anna, and Lewis’s PTSD from World War I, shifts from sharp realism to dream-like reveries, as the two men debate their beliefs with each other.
Q. How did you come to the story? Through Mark St. Germain’s play or Armand Nicholi’s book [“The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life”] that inspired the play?
I should also say my father is a psychiatrist, so there’s that. It came to me as a first draft of a screenplay that was based on the play that was based on the work by Nicholi, which was a class up at Harvard that ran for 35 years. It was a course that looked at atheism through the eyes of Freud.
And then about halfway through, Armand wanted to have a counterpoint, and he chose C.S. Lewis to represent. Because Lewis had his own journey from atheism to finding his faith.
Then Mark wrote a beautiful play, that was incredible, but it was all set in one room, which is a challenge for a film.
Q. So what needed to happen to expand it beyond the room to make it work better as a feature?
It started with the arc of the conversation, you know, the intellectual conversation. But then you also have these two incredibly interesting people, both just brilliant and creative. We understand that about C.S. Lewis and Freud, but they were also incredibly flawed human beings, which is fascinating. They were so complicated.
So that needed to be investigated. And I felt that in order to really feel that as an audience member, that we had a grasp on it, that to get outside the room and into some of their lives was going to be essential.
Like PTSD for Lewis. You can say he has PTSD, but until you’ve been in those trenches … I think it makes a big difference and gives some weight to the characters beyond just an intellectual conversation. And it also opens it up visually. I’m excited because I think every time we leave the room, we’re moving that personal inner life story forward.
Q. There’s an interesting mix of realism – in the trenches, bombs going off – and a sort of dreamy quality. How’d you settle on the visual tone of the film?
You have these ideas when you go into making a film of what you’ll be able to do or what your budget will be, and how you can go about doing that. So on the page, there were some things that were written that would have been incredibly high-budget CGI.
But I had an incredible cinematographer, Ben Smithard, and we just did it all in-camera. That deer actually did all that stuff. We brought a giant mirror that we dragged into the middle of the battlefield, and we were bending the mirror to create effects.
I think working with Hopkins and Matthew over the couple of weeks in the room was the most exciting aspect of it. But the other side of it, trying to find that mix between reality and fantasy, and that dreamlike quality, that to me was really a fun challenge, and I hope that audiences enjoy that.
Q: It’s interesting that Anthony Hopkins played C.S. Lewis 30 years ago in ‘Shadowlands.’ What was it like to have him, with that experience, playing Freud opposite Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis here.
A: That was interesting. Matthew did a little homage to him and wore the same sweater and suit that (Hopkins) wore in ‘Shadowlands.’ But beyond that, he had a chance to talk to him, as did I, about his own take on Lewis. And so we had some insights there.
He kind of said just do your own thing, make your own way here. This was a dream film, you know, we don’t know if it actually happened or didn’t happen. So it gave us all a bit of freedom.
I think Hopkins also really felt like, Let’s lean into the dream aspects as well. So he was on board for that. He’s incredibly creatively generous, and just, it was a real joy. It’s not one of those things where you’re just sugarcoating it, or saying, ‘Oh, he’s really unbelievable.’ I mean, people don’t know he’s a world-class musician and painter, but that whole last waltz at the end of the film was something that he wrote.
Q: You mentioned the excitement of spending days filming the two of them in the set of Freud’s office. As the director, what was that like?
A: It was a challenge because we were doing, at times, seven pages a day. And, I mean, Hopkins is older. [He turns 86 on Dec. 31.] And he’s not using an earpiece, he’s not using big cue cards. He did so much preparation for this film.
Basically, we needed to get a really safe space on that stage. We managed to do it in a linear form. We weren’t jumping all around, so we could take it from the beginning to the end, for the most part, which was a big help. We were all kind of emotionally tracking where we were together.
I think it’s a tribute to Matthew and his kindness, and Tony’s kindness, really. That’s what it comes down to, just respect and trust.
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Q: The story takes place more than 80 years ago. How do you imagine audiences will connect to ‘Freud’s Last Session’ and find it relevant to their lives today?
A: I mean, I guess the question of our time is science versus religion. But the culture that was happening in 1939, it was one of fear. It was tyranny and fascism on the rise. It was a scary time. You don’t have to be too astute to catch the parallels between the two. It feels like this could be happening today as much as it was happening then.
I started working on this about five, six years ago, and at that time I thought, wow, this feels timely. I mean, things have gotten to the point where you can’t say anything anymore because you’re afraid you’re going to get canceled from one side or canceled from the other side. And that’s a really scary thing.
You hope that when people come out of this movie, maybe they’ll turn to the person next to them and be able to have a conversation and do it with respect. It was really nice, even if it is somewhat fictional to have C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, two of the greatest minds of the 20th century, actually wanting to do it because they’re intellectually curious.
Donald Trump’s lead in 2024 election polls has him eyeing a long-shot gambit: attracting a larger share of Black voters than any Republican presidential candidate in modern history.
Despite a long history of racially divisive comments and repeated contacts with White nationalists, Trump now enjoys the some of the highest ratings among Black voters of any candidate from his party, according to some national and swing state polls. That’s because discontent with Joe Biden, especially on economic issues, has eroded the president’s support in a group that is likely to be key to his bid to win reelection in November.
The Trump campaign’s push, kicking off once he gets through the primaries and including television ads and outreach by prominent Black supporters aimed at portraying the billionaire as sympathetic to the working class, is ambitious. Allies are aiming for Trump to collect as much as a quarter of the Black vote — well above the 5% to 12% that surveys show he won in 2020.
In a race that’s virtually certain to be close, the focus highlights how Trump aims to target some key traditionally Democratic constituencies to sap support for Biden in swing states like Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan that will be critical to victory.
“Regardless of how you think of Donald Trump or his campaign, he is doing the politically smart thing,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a Trump critic. “He is seizing on a weakness of the Democratic nominee and the Democratic Party.”
His campaign has no illusions that he can win a majority of the Black vote next year. But if he can shave even a few points off Biden’s support, that could be decisive in some swing states. Earning more support from Black voters could also help Trump make up for his mercurial relationship with suburban women, turned off by Republicans’ efforts nationwide to restrict abortion access.
Biden’s favorability among Black voters in seven swing states has slipped 7 percentage points since October, to 61% this month, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Trump’s held steady at about 25%.
National surveys show a more mixed picture, with the share of Black voters saying they would back the former president ranging from 14% to more than 30%.
Biden’s campaign has repeatedly argued that the polls now aren’t an accurate predictor of voter sentiment on Election Day. Sam Fulwood III, who has surveyed Black public opinion for the African American Research Collaborative, urged skepticism of national polls with small samples of Black voters, who he calls “the real swing voters.”
“They swing not between Democrats and Republicans, but between showing up and not showing up. Overwhelmingly Black voters who do show up show up for Democrats,” he said.
Biden enjoyed strong turnout among Black voters in the 2020 election, winning about 90% of their votes. That race took place amid a global racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, an African American man who died at the hands of White police officers. Trump took a combative approach to the protests and unrest that followed, in line with the racially charged rhetoric that was a hallmark of his 2016 campaign.
He repeatedly insisted that Barack Obama, the first Black president, wasn’t born in the U.S., despite evidence to the contrary. In 2017, he said there were some “very fine people” at White-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Just after announcing his campaign last year, Trump dined with White supremacist leader and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
But at least in polls, voters are signaling that their belief that Trump could better solve economic problems like inflation outweighs distaste with his past comments. It is part of a larger challenge that has bedeviled Biden’s reelection efforts: how to rekindle the anxiety about Trump that drove voters in 2020.
In addition to pastors, celebrities and former top administration officials, the Trump campaign will lean heavily on a handful of young Black congressmen and state politicians to help make their case.
The former president’s potential list of running mates also includes a handful of prominent Black politicians, including Republican Representatives Byron Donalds and Wesley Hunt as well as Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said a source briefed on the internal discussions.
“I’m not trying to tell Black people to vote Republican. I am telling them to vote for Trump,” said Darrell Scott, an informal adviser to the campaign who was one of the first Black pastors to support Trump. “The party still has not shaken that anti-Black reputation, but they do not see that in Trump.”
The campaign also intends to hit Biden for spending on overseas conflicts like Ukraine and Gaza at the expense of domestic pocketbook issues that matter to voters.
“This will be our strongest effort yet with the African American community,” said Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, who said much of Trump’s message will be tied to the state of the economy.
Biden campaign officials argue that once the race picks up and voters realize the only real choice is between Trump and the president, traditional Democratic constituencies like Black voters, young people and women will be turned off by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and support Biden once again.
By more than a 6-to-1 ratio, Black voters in swing states say the economy is better off under Biden than it was under Trump, according to the Bloomberg poll.
Still, the party is already trying to reverse the slide with the constituency. The Democratic National Committee unveiled a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign featuring Black voters and highlighting Biden’s efforts to reduce health-care costs and support small businesses. It’s been an uphill fight so far.
“Black Americans do not feel that they are reaping the reward from being so loyal to the Democratic Party,” said Ronnie Oliva, a political strategist who has advised Democratic stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There’s a desperation there just to find someone, anyone. They’re thinking that at least Trump says it how he means it, so maybe if we can get our agenda in front of him, he’ll get it done.”
In Thursday night’s 4-3 overtime victory over Montreal, Marco Rossi scored a goal, earned an assist and received a five-minute major for fighting, picking up a rare Gordie Howe hat trick.
The Wild’s rookie center now has half as many as Gordie Howe did.
Over 25 NHL seasons, Howe earned a reputation as one of hockey’s best and toughest players, registering 786 goals and 1,809 points. And it’s difficult to chart his fights, and therefore how many Gordie Howe hat tricks he really had. But after cross-referencing several articles with Howe’s prohockey.com game logs, for points and 5-minute majors, it appears the answer is two (see chart).
“He’s only had a couple of them. I don’t know who called it that,” Howe’s son, Marty, told Sportsnet’s Luke Fox. “The Gordie Howe hat trick should really be a goal, an assist and a cross-check to the face. That might be more accurate.”
After giving the Wild a 2-0 first-period lead with a snap shot from the left circle, Rossi — a stout but average-sized young man — picked a fight with Montreal’s Kaiden Guhle after the Canadiens’ blue liner leveled Kirill Kaprizov with what Rossi thought was a dangerous check into the boards.
It was Rossi’s first hockey fight, at any level.
“It went so quickly, so I wasn’t thinking so much,” he said.
Rossi was given a 5-minute major for fighting, 2 minutes for instigating and a 10-minute game misconduct — a tough 17 minutes for a team that already was skating 11 forwards. But he received plaudits from his teammates.
“It’s a pack mentality in here, obviously. We all care about each other,” said veteran defenseman Zach Bogosian, who was among three teammates who skated to the box to commend Rossi for the fight. “Any time you see someone get hit of that magnitude, you want to stick up for them.
“It’s certainly not an easy thing to do, putting your body on the line like that. But it was great to see him do it. Those are character-building moments within the locker room. Maybe from the outside, they don’t really get acknowledged too much, but it means a lot to a lot of guys in here.”
Brock Faber and Vinni Lettieri also went to the box for fist bumps, and when Rossi returned midway through the third period, he earned an assist on Faber’s power-play goal with 8:57 remaining.
“It’s nice get the support from there, and it cheered me up, so it was nice,” Rossi said.
Briefly
Ryan Hartman was scratched from Thursday’s game because of an upper-body injury. Coach John Hynes said he is day to day. … Jared Spurgeon (lower body) also remains day to day, although he has missed the past five games. He skated by himself on Thursday morning. … The Wild took Friday off.
Gordie’s gold
It’s named after him, but Gordie Howe had only two Gordie Howe tricks — a goal, an assist and a fight — in a storied 25-year NHL career. Here are the games in which he was issued a 5-minute major and earned at least a point:
