great thing

Second in a series of stories profiling top high school football players by position. Today, Brian Bonner, Valencia running back.

There are many ways Brian Bonner of Valencia High impacts a football game. As a running back, using his 10.48-second speed in the 100 meters, any kind of opening creates the opportunity for a touchdown.

Ditto catching a ball out of the backfield and being allowed to improvise as he makes defenders miss. And then there’s kickoff returns, where he builds up speed like a locomotive and heads to the end zone faster than putting mustard on a hot dog.

“I think being versatile is very important,” he said. “A lot of teams in college look for a running back that can do more than run the ball. They want you to be able to catch and block.”

At 6 feet and 190 pounds, Bonner is ready to take a place among the many great Valencia backs of the past, from Manuel White to Shane Vereen to Steven Manfro, all of whom made it to the college ranks.

“It’s really cool to learn about the history of the other running backs and it would be an honor to be part of that group,” Bonner said. “I’ve learned all the great things they’ve done at Valencia.”

No one has been faster in Valencia history than Bonner, who started attracting attention when he ran 100 meters in 10.85 seconds during his last race as a freshman. A stampede of football offers started coming after his 10.48 time last year.

Brian Bonner of Valencia runs for yardage against West Ranch during his sophomore season.

(Craig Weston)

“My recruitment started to blow up,” he said. “They were really impressed by speed and my football form backed up my speed. The best way to determine how fast someone is by track times. People can see how fast you are as a player and it shows how important speed is to coaches.”

Bonner rushed for 1,493 yards and 25 touchdowns last season and also caught 40 passes for 498 yards and four touchdowns. He committed to Washington last month.

His combination of speed, size and versatility makes him a valuable offensive weapon. Add to that his patience and youth. He just turned 17 in July and was perfectly fine with playing junior varsity football as a freshman.

“I think everybody wants to play varsity as freshman,” he said. “Now that I look back, it was good. I learned things that I brought to varsity. I knew what to expect instead of being a freshman and not knowing what to expect.”

Valencia coach Larry Muir is plotting how to best use Bonner’s versatility and quickness.

“When you’re special, you have a skill set to catch the ball out of the backfield and he does that as well as anyone,” Muir said. “His speed is incredible, but when you get him in the open field and get him in open space, it’s fun to watch.”

It’s Bonner’s senior year, and he has no intention on relying what he’s done in the past or what 100-meter time he ran.

“You have to work hard, because everyone is going to get better,” he said. “You have to stand out and do things a lot of people won’t do to be the best. Putting in extra hours, learning the plays, learning defenses, becoming a student off the game.”

Thursday: St. John Bosco receiver Madden Williams.

Running backs to watch

Maliq Allen, St. John Bosco, 5-8, 180, Jr.: Showed flashes of brilliance with 1,003 yards rushing

Brian Bonner, Valencia, 6-0, 190, Sr.: Speed and hands make him explosive weapon

Justin Lewis, Mater Dei, 5-10, 195, Sr.: Thousand Oaks transfer gained 1,306 yards as junior

AJ McBean, Mira Costa, 5-11, 208, Jr.: Big back with speed and power

Sean Morris, Orange Lutheran, 5-10, 195, Sr.: Northwestern commit transfers from Loyola

Deshonne Redeaux, Oaks Christian, 6-0, 185, Sr.: USC commit has high expectations for senior season

Edward Rivera, Compton, 6-0, 185, Jr.: City Section transfer gained 1,843 yards and 21 TDs last season

Ceasar Reyes, Garfield, 5-11, 175, Jr.: Rushed for 1,520 yards, 22 TDs with relentless energy in 2024

Journee Tonga, Leuzinger, 5-8, 175, Sr.: Rushed for 2,267 yards, 29 TDs last season

Jorden Wells, Servite, 5-7, 150, So.: Let’s see what track speedster can do in first varsity season

At the beginning of “Mountainhead,” written and directed by Jesse Armstrong of “Succession” fame and premiering Saturday on HBO, three multibillionaire tech bros make their way by private plane, helicopter and SUV caravan to join a fourth in a big modernist house on an isolated, snowy mountaintop for a weekend of poker and drugs — “no deals, no meals, no high heels.” One might wish for an avalanche, were there anything higher to fall on them.

Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world’s richest man — imagine Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg put in a blender, as perhaps you have — commands a social media site with, wait for it, four billion subscribers, and has just released new “content tools” that allow for super high-res “unfalsifiable deep fakes.” As a result, the sectarian world is going up in flames. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival who had poached members of Venis’ team, has an AI algorithm capable of filtering out the bad information which Venis, closing the digital barn door after the cow is out, wants to acquire; but Jeff, for reasons of profit, power and/or ego, is not going to let it go.

Randall (Steve Carell), their gray-haired guru — they call him “Papa Bear,” though Jeff also dubs him “Dark Money Gandalf” — controls a lot of international infrastructure, including military. Preoccupied with his mortality — told by his latest oncologist that his cancer is incurable, he responds, “You are not a very intelligent person” — he’s hoping to upload his consciousness to the grid, a possibility Venis assures him is only five years off as long as he can get his hands on Jeff’s AI. The relatively inoffensive Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose house it is, hopes to expand the meditation app he created, into a lifestyle super app — offering “posture correction, therapy and a brand new color” — with his friends’ investment of “a b-nut,” i.e., a billion dollars. They call him “Souper,” for “soup kitchen,” because he is worth only $521 million. He’s the runt of the litter, and the comedy relief.

Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo, only worth half a million, who is the comedic relief in “Mountainhead.”

(Macall Polay / HBO)

For no given reason, they call themselves the Brewsters — perhaps just so they can crow “cock-a-doodle-brew.” They are full of themselves — “The great thing about me,” says Randall, “is that I know everyone and do everything” — and basically insecure.

They rewrite their fundamental nihilism into the belief that their business is good for mankind, whatever the actual human cost. “You’re always going to get some people dead,” Randall says. “Nothing means anything,” Venis says, “and everything’s funny and cool.” (But he does miss his mother and, in a particularly creepy interlude, his baby is brought up the mountain for an uncomfortable minute.) In the only scene to take them out of the house, the four travel to the crest of a mountain, where Hugo writes each man’s net worth in lipstick on his chest, they don hierarchical headgear and shout, “Mountain god accelerator legacy manifestation!” into the valley below, each adding a wish. It is, seemingly, something they have done before.

Randall name-checks philosophers — Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Marcus Aurelius — he misunderstands to his advantage and drops references to the Catiline Conspiracy and the Battle of Actium to make base actions sound important and dignified. He calls the president a “simpleton” — one assumes Armstrong is reflecting on the current one — but for all their power, money and influence, they all lack wisdom. And if recent years have taught us anything, it’s that these things are not mutually exclusive.

Venis thinks the violence engulfing the globe, which cannot touch him, may prove cathartic; Randall is “excited about these atrocities.” They discuss taking over “failing nations” to “show them how it’s done.” (In perhaps the film’s funniest line, Hugo, who has been working on his house, muses, “I don’t know if I want to run Argentina on my own — not on the back of a major construction project.”) They trade in gobbledygook phrases like “AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism,” “compound distillation effect” and “bootstrap to a corporate monarchy, cyber-state it to the singularity, eat the chaos,” which for all I know is just Armstrong quoting things people of this sort have actually said. It seems possible.

As the only one with a sense of humor and a semblance of perspective, Jeff is the most sympathetic of this toxic crew. He tracks the worsening world situation with some empathetic concern, but even though he holds the key to end the madness, he does not seem in a hurry to turn it. (Mostly he is concerned with his girlfriend, who is in Mexico, not so much because of the unrest, but because he fears she’s having sex.) Still, he stands a little apart, to his peril.

The first half of the film proceeds essentially as a play for four characters. Apart from Hugo’s asking for “help with the cold cuts” or inquiring whether everyone’s cool with reusing plates, there is a scarcely a line in which people talk like people; it is all theatrical declaration. To some extent it fits the coldness of the quartet — they hug and hoot and occasionally express a droplet of emotion, but the friendship on which they insist is competitive, transactional and illusory. They are not good company, but for those of us less than impressed by the whole “move fast and break things” thing, or not willing to bow down before ChatGPT and OpenAI or the actual tech billionaires deforming the world, there is some fun in watching them fall apart. In some ways, “Mountainhead” (rhymes with “Fountainhead”) feels as much a public service as an entertainment. So thanks for that, Jesse Armstrong.

When, in the farcical, action-oriented second half, some attempt to execute a … plot, they bumble and argue and push each other to the front. It is an old kind of movie comedy, and works pretty much as intended.