Edgy MD

Looking forward to it.

He's played a couple. And, of course, before boxing started paying off, Rocky paid the bills by being a lower-level mob enforcer. This may be his first time playing a capo-type, though.

The 39 Steps is pretty close to my Hitchcock fave. It's certainly my favorite of his British films and/or his black-and-whities.

Oh, they were, but two of the three of them are gone by the end of Act I. Whatever else you can say about Alfred, his movies weren't exactly packed with likable and relatable young women.

As you see from that poster, it apparently has Comedy! Chills! Chuckles! And if you can get all of that from your DVD purchase, that's money well spent!

As Europe braces for war, a British socialite in a fictional country heads home on a train to be married. After receiving an untimely blow to the head, she's befriended and looked after by a fellow traveler — an older fellow citizen who is also traveling alone. When she awakens from a brief nap, her companion is gone (!!) and the other passengers deny having ever seen her. A Hitchcock film that shares several elements and actors with 1940's Carol Reed-directed Night Train to Munich. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/The_Lady_Vanishes_1938_Poster.jpg>

I think it's more that you want the guy at the most difficult position he can play because (a) you don't know what position will be available by the time he reaches the big leagues, and ( it's easier to move a guy from the harder position to the easier one than it is to move him back again.

Good job adopting. Ronny will probably see time at other positions this season. Teams tend to delay moving a guy off of shortstop until the issue is forced.

My wife's position was that the film could have used more of the titular cat. But I was all, "Baby, there's only so much you can train a kitten to do!"

Mild-mannered down-on-his-luck dork gets his beloved kitten kidnapped by gangstas, and his dorkier, mild-mannered cousin joins him in infiltrating lowlife LA gang to secure the kitten's return. The jinks that ensue are of the hi variety. [fimg=450]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTUwODA0NzQxMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUyMjY3ODE@._V1_.jpg[/fimg]

This turned out to be a really impressive film, for a feature debut by the director, or for any film. It's also a heckuva showcase for Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall as well. As noted above, the story is followed by a documentary crew, but it's not always clear when you're watching the principals through the lens of the documentarian or whether you're seeing something else outside that footage. But while the self-delusion of figures flailing in their careers as they insist they're flourishing immediately calls to mind the absurd joys of This is Spinal Tap*, and these are funny, the film doesn't just wash itself in the easy pleasures of satirical sendups. While there's something you might like about these two horrible people — their devotion to a each other and to a faith that seems to be genuine despite it's horrible theology and open use as a vehicle for exploitation — the filmmakers don't flinch from showing you the real wages of this enterprise. You get to be a fly on the wall as the minister attempts to groom a potential victim, and you get to see the wife degrade herself time and time again, even as her whole brand seems to be about self-realization and dignity, ultimately choosing her self-interested path back to queenship of a tiny kingdom over the dignity of one her husband's victims. This moments were awkward, gross, and cringey, but you feel you feel morally compelled to bear witness anyhow. I did, at any rate. The film's greatest flaw is an unresolved ending, but for a story aimed at forcing hard conversations about The Evangelical Church, the Black Evangelical Church in particular, and Prosperity Gospel theology, the open ending forced our household, for what its worth, to keep talking about this for several days afterward. And as the fallout so many of the real American tragedies this film draws parallel to** is still happening, any resolution could feel dishonest. And anyhow, while the ending is open, it is still quite powerful. * I have yet to figure out how to type an umlaut over an N, as Spinal Tap's standard style indicates I should do. ** The main parallel seems to be to the story of Atlanta-based pastor Eddie Long, who had a church with 25,000 members before a similar downfall in 2010.

It would be nice.

It was, in a David Mamet-y kind of way. Stagey, in that every scene is in the confines of his two-room haberdashery. Most of the characters are male and bound to fates they can't escape despite a generally constant willingness to betray each other. Very Mamet-y. They grab at their own strings and don't know if they're playing someone or being played. Plots turn! Wounds burn! Hearts yearn! The gun that's in the first act is waiting to to go off in the third! Streaming now on Slamazon.

Meek, elderly, mannerly British haberdasher has set up a nice little shop in 1950s Chicago. Unfortunately, the neighborhood is ruled by a small-time organized crime outfit that hopes to graduate to the big leagues. Beyond ignoring what goes on as he makes all the scumbag gunsels look classy, he's expected to allow his shop to be used as dropbox for communications and payments. He tries to remain uninvolved and keep his nose straight, until one December night when the boss' son stumbles through the front door with a bullet in his gut. [FIMG=350]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMGI1Yzk5N2UtZjYyMi00ZGNjLTg5ZmUtYzk3MDk2ZDE0Y2NhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTA2MDU0NjM5._V1_.jpg[/FIMG]

A scumdiculously corrupt Evangelical Prosperity Gospel pastor plans his comeback following a scandalous downfall that dare not speak its name. He and his wife, billed as the church's "first lady," invite a documentary crew to follow their path back to prominence, leading to some awkward strains as they grin with the love of Jesus and try to brush past the realities of the their downfall and their abandonment by their large congregation. Streaming now on Peacock. In theaters too, and possibly on Amazon. [FIMG=400]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWUwZjNiMzQtNzZiOC00YjdjLWFiMTctOGNlMWI3ZDZkN2MxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDA4NzMyOA@@._V1_.jpg[/FIMG]

He came out of his slump with violence last night. I have to say that I have some pause, worrying about his legs. He not only carries extra weight, but he has that Wilmer Flores way of coming down heavy on his feet, like there's no shock absorption or stored energy down there at all. I fear he may be a full-time DH by 25.

That's not an entirely unfair thought. That you can still give an audience thrills and suspense with a true-story adventure movie we already was proven by Ron Howard himself with Apollo 13, and subsequently by Ben Affleck with Argo, but that guarantees nothing. And indeed Howard isn't seemingly going for thrills here, instead building a tone that is more like a police procedural, where the viewer satisfaction, I guess, is the reassurance that competent people are in charge and things therefore should work out. I don't watch those shows, and in fact, nothing about my experience of the world in recent times tells me that this is a particularly healthy worldview. And if even scratching just a little below the surface of what Howard is presenting here tells me a story beneath the story that Howard seems to not want to frame — the organization around the rescue effort seems like a clusterfuck. The governor of the region is federally appointed, and he's supposed to be transferred out of the position that week, but he's left in charge so the government has an easy fall-guy. Thai SEAL divers butt up against the foreign volunteers as a point of pride, and the most experienced volunteer is kinda pissed when he finds the kids alive, because he thought he was called in to recover corpses. It's odd, because the world remembers Viggo as the very soul of resolution from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, keeping heart even when Legolas and Gandalf waver, but he's the embodiment of doom and gloom here, basically sucking morale out of everybody he encounters, and the audience too, for my part. When they arrive at a plan, the guys pitching it have no confidence it will work, the governor shrugs, having no better ideas, the SEALS are all, whatever, and the rescue begins, with everybody assuming that even partial success would be a victory. It has the scale of a feature film, but the content mostly suggests made-for-TV fare (only twice as long), and tone is little more than a re-enactment for an educational film. They don't even subtitle most of Thai dialogue. The real story, to me is that the effort was actually three concurrent efforts that had little or no contact depicted in the film. The first is the divers, the main heroes of the film, but the second are engineers and local volunteers who go up on the mountain above the cave to rechannel all the constant rainwater that has been pouring into sinkholes and flooding the caverns below. Lastly come the team of water engineers pumping the caverns out, who don't get any play at all. Their only mention is when someone dismisses how futile their work is because that cave floods completely every year during monsoon season. But they and the workers above the mountain are the ones who bought the rescue divers the time they needed. And the divers seemed to need every second of it. I'm not sure what I missed. Ron Howard is a hit-and-miss director with me, but I usually think of him as a pro. Either he just mailed this one in, or I'm just a robot, which I guess is possible.

A dozen young Thai boys and their soccer coach explore a cave, getting trapped miles in by rising waters when a sudden monsoon strikes a month early. Two British cave divers, mostly skilled in recovering dead bodies, join an international team desperate to get the trapped spelunkers out before the cave floods completely. [fimg=550]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzI4YzkyMTYtYmQ1MC00NjYwLThkMDgtY2E1Njg1MTAzZWJhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDM2NDM2MQ@@._V1_.jpg[/fimg]

I never gave a fuller account of this but this was a surprisingly good find. Apparently it's part of a rising genre of Japanese filmmaking that attempts to edit films like Hitchcock in Rope, telling the story in real time and making it look like it's all one shot. These are generally done on the cheap but by ambitious young filmmakers, but this one came out right as COVID was shutting everything down, so it was one of the few films in distribution at the time and really caught on. We were on a roll with seeing a lot of time-loop movies at the time but this one kind of stood out in it's insane premise, and seeing the same scene play out from different perspectives four, eight, and 12 minutes apart can create an interesting type of tension as characters try to elude fates they are warned about by increasingly frenetic future versions of themselves. There's a little rom-com, a little stupid-young-adults-get-mixed-up-with-the-mafia, more than a little brain-breaking time concepts, and a lot of handheld cameras. Thumbs up.

This is what Francisco Álvarez did last night. What did you do? What even happened to that ball? Does it even technically exist anymore?

Or, hopefully, he gets offered a late scholarship to take the place of Jett or some other draftee who "committed" to a school but took the money instead.

Somehow managed to appear in five different seasons for Arkansas.

I look forward to him joining Vida Blue and Kevin Brown on the All-Color Team.

Yeah, it was just a maybe. Certainly not advocating.