Edgy MD

Holy crap! First Vic Sage appearance in over three years!

My wife hunted this down again tonight. Terrific to stumble back into it.

Grizzled Texas Civil War veteran makes his living going from town to town and reading the news from far-off places to the hardscrabble folk trying to rebuild their lives in the war's aftermath. On the road between Wichita Falls and Dallas, he finds a lost girl. After sussing out her backstory, he reluctantly becomes her protector as he tries to unite her with her only living kin, as together they brave the hard roads of a rough country in a mostly lawless time. Features an alarming paucity of Queen music. [FIMG=450]https://lostposters.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/rs_w_1200_h_1200_614e4a70-1995-4a83-aae5-3804146b2cac.jpg[/FIMG]

Clearly you're a huge Mannequin fan, I see.

I just didn't get this film. My wife read to me an article that was titled "Hocus Pocus is a garbage movie that doesn't deserve your nostalgia." It was delightful and it made me try to think of other films that fit that description — films that were objectively excremental but it didn't matter to a generation who saw it at exactly the right age, and have kept it ever-green and ever-profitable by continuing to return to it. I wanted to put The Goonies and The Sandlot in this category, but couldn't bring myself to do it. The folks who defend those films are folks I have too much respect for, and I'll just assume that I missed something special and important. I'm not sure I can ever be as charitable to other well loved youth-oriented garbage of the past like Dirty Dancing or St. Elmo's Fire or Mannequin — and certainly not to Hocus Pocus — but fans of The Goonies and The Sandlot? You and me are good for now. For now! Anyhow, impressive interview. The kid seems to be on a root beer rush.

Thursday evening, Julio broke out of a 10-at-bat hitless mini-slump, going three-for-four with a homer and four RBI. His 39 RBI leave him tied for fourth in the massive (50-team) DSL.

Cinematic needledrops tend to make me suspicious. Which isn't to say that a few of them haven't broken through to me.

Lemme know when, and I'll share my thoughts!

An Oklahoma roughneck recovering from a checkered past works a few months at a time to save money to travel to Marseilles, France, where his daughter is serving time for murder. They don't have a great relationship, but he believes her to be innocent, and during one visit — despite few resources, connections, or language skills, along with a history of making things worse — he decides to stick around, find some work, and ask some questions. Do you want to stir up that water, Monsieur Americain? Zees ees not Oklahoma. Apparently, though, he does. [FIMG=400]http://www.impawards.com/2021/posters/stillwater_ver3.jpg[/FIMG]

When irony becomes substance and substance becomes irony and people are trying to get with the program but aren't sure whether they're being sincere or camping it up ... kind of makes this feel like 2023's most 1990s movie.

Born in 1999 in Kankakee, IL, the year the city was rated (by somebody) as "America's Worst Place to Live," in response to which David Letterman (or The Late Show) donated a pair of gazebos.

.328 / .387 / .612 // .999 To say Julio is coming back down to Earth is technically true. But "Earth," in this case, means the peak of Everest. And if he's not performing all the time at peak level, it's only because, like Will Hunting doing higher-level math at MIT, he's just bored with the idea that the game is supposed to be so damned challenging. Friday night against the DSL Giants, he went 3-for-4 with a homer and three RBI. It was his third three-hit game in his brief career. He's struck out eight times in 76 trips to the plate. And again, that's only because he sometimes gets bored.

So, what is the character of this film?

He's 17, and that means I'll likely be dead before he makes it to the majors, if he makes it to the majors, and he's a catcher, so that means he'll have to find a way to insert himself into a role that is more likely to be dominated by Francisco Álvarez and Kevin Pareda. But I've developed a rooting interest in Julio, because all great Mets are named Julio, and in his first eight games with the DSL OrangeMets (as opposed to the BlueMets), he's gone .462 / .500 / .962 // 1.462 in 29 plate appearances. Of his 12 hits, four have been doubles and three have been homers. In other words, that ".962" isn't an OPS. It's a slugging percentage. That's the way you do it! And yeah, it's a small sample size. But you know what else is small? YOUR FACE!

“Slowly, he’s opening everybody’s eyes as one of the better outfield prospects in our organization.” — Mets Farm Director Kevin Howard “We had a great talk in spring training about his injury history. When he was healthy enough to play in the past, he did a lot of things right. He didn’t chase, he didn’t swing and miss in the zone. A lot of the metrics that you look at you go man, he’s got a lot of things going. Really work on the approach. Then, just understanding how good he can be. I think he’s done a good job of building as he has gone up.” — Rumble Ponies Hitting Coach Darin Everson “He’s had an incredibly hot start, but it’s not just the hot start. His at-bats look more controlled. He’s just a really tough, pesky out. He’s got a knack for the barrel, and he doesn’t swing and miss, which is typically the trait that you see out of guys that do get up to the big leagues and have success.” — Also Mets Farm Director Kevin Howard “He’s great on defense. He’s great on the bases. He’s just a really good player that doesn’t start to stand out until you start watching him play every day. So he’s been the biggest pleasant surprise at the upper levels.” — That again is Kevin Howard, speaking of me I blasted this homer the other day, which I stood and watched to see if I could hit some poor kid in a pool. [TWEET] [/TWEET]

... and I'm batting .297 / .441 / .514 // .955 in 51 games at AA. And I'm 5'6". That on-base percentage, again, is .441.

=batmagadanleadoff post_id=127018 time=1685531992 user_id=68] I'm totally with FK here. They're trying to make a tight two hour movie, like always. If the story could be told without the 9/11 tragedy, it should. The Chad Bradford factual alteration makes perfect sense from a movie storytelling perspective because Bradford epitomizes the sabermetrics philosophy adopted by the A's: the unorthodox looking pitcher who is nevertheless, extremely effective stat-wise. So the scriptwriters had Oakland acquire Bradford for 2002 to better demonstrate the A's philosophy shift. Very few true story movies are 100% accurate. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody last week and Queen was performing Fat Bottomed Girls years before the song was actually written. This week I saw Black Mass, which absolves practically the whole Boston FBI other than two agents, of complicity in the Bulger scandal and ignores entirely that rogue agent Connoly was also on the take. Makes you wonder what Connoly's motivation was. Moneyball is about 20 years old and I've never heard anybody mention the missing 9/11 angle. It would've needlessly cluttered the movie.

No, I am certainly not suggesting scenes should be there, only the notion of, as in the case of Art Howe, getting character right, whether that be a person or the character of the season. I thought I remembered a spring training delay. If I'm wrong, shame on me.

Frayed Knot wrote: It didn't cover the growing troubles in Iraq either, but maybe because that's not what the movie was about. Well, yes, but I mean the delayed opening to the season the patriotic pimping out of the uniforms and stadiums. It was an unavoidable and constant element in baseball. Chad Bradford also played with the team the previous season. What deserves a movie treatment from the 2001 post-season is Jeter's shovel pass play. Almost none of it makes any sense.

There's certainly that. And while Met fans have few good memories of Howe or his era, even beyond the gut, Hoffman's character doesn't really resemble Art at all. Somebody decided it would be fun to get an aged Yogi Berra to do film reviews, and one of the first things he pointed out was how they got Howe wrong. Also, it would have been hard to nod to reality without it becoming a distraction, but the story begins at the end of the 2001 season, and covers the delayed-starting 2002 season, but makes no mention of or not to 9/11.

An odd film in that it deserves every bit of criticism it gets (see the pitching issue above) and yet it's hard to feel uncharitable toward it. Even thought they get some real-life stuff wrong, and some baseball wrong, it feels like real-life baseball. I'm just a little bit caught in the middle. Life is a maze, and love is a riddle

I'm not sure I do, either. In fact, I probably never would have suspected such a thing, and wouldn't have started wondering about Ford doing some sort of back-door financing deal, if it wasn't for all the icky marketing of this latter film that's been seemingly targeted directly between my eyes.

I'm just disturbed that Damon and his top-shelf Q-rating are being deployed for corporate propaganda disguised as commercial films. On top of Ford vs. Ferrari, that's a pattern. And I'm wondering if this is where high-end films are going to be headed whole-hog. The marketing budget on this thingie seems to be enormous.

Wow, good calls! That's a club to stay out of. And Alec Baldwin is the all-time hosting leader and, while the law might not call him a murderer, probably more than a few folks would.

=batmagadanleadoff post_id=123918 time=1682949881 user_id=68]Also, this is one of my all-time favorite SNL skits: [media=youtube]8g5mD5C5X_I[/media]