Edgy MD

What seems like an oblique injury to McCannister may offer itself as a pretext to call Francisco's name.

I'm glad youse enjoyed it. It didn't work at all for me. There's a end-credits scene that's supposed to be comic. It's a minor spoiler to describe it so I'll put it in small type, but a character who was placed under a spell early in the film, compelled to squirt condiments on himself, slap himself, and eventually punch himself in the face again and again, finally stopped. Realizing the spell had worn off, he looked at the camera and said in relief, "It's over!" This seemed to me to be an amazingly honest statement by the director about his own film, that continuing to watch it 'til the end felt like punching myself in the face repeatedly, non-stop, and feeling neither satisfaction nor catharsis, but only blessed relief at the end. Roger Ebert once described a film as seemingly created during a Hollywood shopping spree, and that's what this was here — like the filmmakers had a limited amount of time to run around Hollywood and grab stuff off the shelves from other, better movies. It opens with an action sequence, in a metaphysical setting where you don't really know how physics works, so you're not sure who is actually in danger and or even who the non-Dr. Strange characters are. That's OK. A lot of good action movies (and seemingly every Bond film) opens with an extra-contextual action sequence. Then they cut to opening the credits, and the context begins. You meet characters, you are given exposition and backstory, you slowly begin to feel a connection and an emotional stake. I got none of that here. We jump to a new action sequence, and then another and another, cool stuff happens, little dialogue passes, and we bolt from universe to universe. But even though we're told that these are real people in these alternate universes with real lives, nobody seems to give a shit. The filmmaker doesn't care, and when all these alternative universe versions of popular heroes and characters die, it's all good, because we're cutting out of this universe as soon as we can jump to another one. Disposable people. It made me feel like a jerky spoiled kid who doesn't take care of his toys, because his parents will get him new ones anyway. Action sequence piles upon action sequence, but none of it matters. There's a shot out of Lord of the Rings, there's another from Carrie, there's a shot from The Ring, and a shot from Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell, another LotR set piece, and there's Rami self-referencing his own zombie movies. All are grabbed from the shelf of the Better Movie Supermarket — but rather than being clever, it just reminds you that this film has so little at its own core. You go back and watch the prior Strange film, and you appreciate an actual story arc that is absent here. You remember that Wong and Mordo were fleshed-out characters and not just comic relief. Marvel is creating a generation of young adult, mostly female heroes for their next generation of films, and America, the new hero here, certainly seems like someone I'd like. But I ended up meeting her on a punishing, herky-jerky amusement park ride, and that's a tough way to get to know anybody. But it did help me enjoy the earlier Dr. Strange film on rewatch.

Also notable about that debut is that Alvarez threw out his first would-be base-stealer. I still don't know what the formula is for developing a starting catcher, but MLB pipeline has named him baseball's second-best prospect.

The keyboard line sounds like Serge is lifting his reggae from Henry Mancini. We're part of a group of friends who have been meeting through the lockdown to watch films remotely together, and by something less than pure coincidence, everything we pick is great, and everything everybody else picks is awful.

Francisco 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI so far in his Syracuse debut.

Which platform did you get this off of?

Plus, he lasted long enough in Binghamton to eat on Scherzer's dime.

Meeting a young woman jumping from universe to universe, pursued by a demon, Dr. Steven Strange joins her in search of The Book of Vishanti. Realizing that witchcraft has initiated this youngster's plight, he turns to Wanda Maximov for advice. Things go sideways. [FIMG=400]https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/final-1.png?ssl=1[/FIMG]

A café owner retires to his apartment upstairs from his establishment. He sits down to practice guitar for a gig he has later that evening, but when he can't find his pick, his face appears on his computer/tv monitor, speaking from the café, telling him that he is himself two minutes in the future, and to come back downstairs, so he can tell himself where his pick is. Hy. Jinx. Ensue. [fimg=500]https://images.bonanzastatic.com/afu/images/5ef9/5608/4261_10971250718/W_1981_.jpg[/fimg]

Alvarez can do more than clobber homers, as he garnered two singles a double on Friday. He left the game in the 10th with what appeared to be an injury. This appeared to be confirmed on Saturday as he sat out. He nonetheless returned to the lineup in the DH slot yesterday and ... clobbered a three-run homer. Fortunately for the Rumble Ponies, Francisco's downtime comes while they have rehab patient James McCann with them to help out with the catching.

I would guess that he gets a mid-season promotion, perhaps after the All-Star Break. Since, like, 1990, only two catchers have stuck after debuting before their 21st birthday, I think. More have failed. It's just hard to establish starting catchers at any age. Easier to come up as a backup, and learn to hit while somebody else plays the heavy. My first thought when it comes to catchers coming up at 20 is John Gibbons. Doesn't mean it can't be done, of course.

You can call Francisco "Lionel Richie," because he can't slow down. Hit homer #13 in the first for Bingo today. Jordal Yamamoto picked up the win with two innings in relief.

Is Cooter's now a Scores? I feel ike everything is going Scoresward.

I've never been much of a mimic, but I'm starting to realize that I can spend the whole day talking like Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

Since his hot start, Alvarez has sort of decended in chumpitude. Coaches are trying to tell him that he's the best hitter in the league and the pitchers are expanding the strike zone to avoid him. He's got to learn restraint, and if that happens in Bingo rather than Queens, that would be just terrific. His 1-for-5 with two strikeouts this evening dropped his average to .238.

Mets do little against Whatshisname the Nats pitche.r

I think it'll be OK.

Curious that Rock presented this award, having appeared briefly in the film.

I'm not sure how to read "poverty" in that sentence, but I was indeed curious about this film.

Before last night's exhibition game against the Marlins was over, this happened. [media=youtube]gcX0cfVspWA[/media]

You may appreciate the film, but it won't be hi-jinx you experience. It's more of a cautionary tale. Dostoyevsky-esque. You see from the posters that this film has more than a little bit of Reservoir Dogs in its mindset. But it's based on a real story. (Actually, at the beginning of the film, they make the distinction that it isn't based on a real story; it is a real story.) It's also a quasi-documentary in that the film regularly pulls back from the dramatization of the story to include commentary from the actual young men involved, as well as their family members, and eventually, their victims. The four guys who perpetrate the heist have very little in common, apart from apparently coming from the same suburb, and don't even like each other very much, but they're all disillusioned by college life and affluenza. They plan the heist by watching as many heist DVDs as they can. The young man who first comes up with the plan is a really talented artist, but feels his life needs a transformative experience in order for his art to come alive. He pitches the idea to his doobie brother, narcissistic soccer turd Warren, and once once he gets involved, he becomes the alpha, and any time one of the others thinks that they're taking this too far and want out, he either bullies them back in, or they make their consciences go away with copious weed usage. Even as things go sideways, a part of them (and all of Warren) just can't resist the need to see what's on the other side of the criminal line. Something about the young male brain compels them to put their hands on the hot stove. The best thing about it, and it's odd to say it, is the violence. In most white-boys-get-mixed-up-in-some-hinky-shit stories, you either get the cool sanitized violence of a spy flick, or the fetishized violence of a Tarantino film. The violence in this is brief and light, but as ugly and unsettling as violence really is when perhaps-otherwise-good people are disgusted by what they are doing even as they are doing it.

Four bored college students of privilege conspire to rip off one of their university's libraries of a handful of exceedingly rare volumes. Nobody is quite sure why they're doing it, but the judgment of young men being what it is, the caper takes on a life of its own. https://artwisher.com/files/products/5c461887de69f_445773b.1400x1400.jpg?b1b92c6083716c2419b3923d0951abf4>

The pluses and minuses of reboots is a big part of why this exists. Hugely divergent opinions about the last attempt to jumpstart the franchise is a big part of why this film exists. Reportage about opposition to the 2016 Ghostbusters was all about misogyny. And while I have no doubt that some haters just resent women, that's not the reason the film didn't gain the hoped-for traction. In making it a reboot, instead of a sequel, the viewer couldn't engage with the new film without letting the old film go. The two didn't (and apparently couldn't) exist in the same universe. Lost in all the goofy controversy was that the film was kind of good, had the tone almost perfect, and it wouldn't have taken a great effort in terms of adjusting on the fly to make it more sequel-y and less reboot-y. So this film exists as almost an apology, returning us to the timeline in which Egon, Peter, Ray, and Winston long ago vanquished a spectral assault on New York in the eighties. Unfortunately, despite bending over backwards to re-attain the audience's good will, even bringing in Ivan Reitman's son to direct, the original tone is what they fail to find. Instead, we get a Disney-ish Escape from Witch Mountain kind of soft-core juvenile supernatural horror in which the unsupervised kids take up the fight right under parents' noses, as parents are off concerning themselves with God knows what. It's a joyous fantasy to a tweenage mind, but in the age of 24-hour supervision, the plausibility of such stories becomes tougher to pull off. The thing is, as far a science and supernatural speculation go, the Ghostubsters franchise is about as stupid as possible. If you don't get the comic tone right, you kind of don't really have a movie. And they don't. The re-use of The Sta-Puff Marshmallow Guy has all the joy of suits sitting around a boardroom table insisting that the money won't be there if they don't work the Marshmallow into the script. It's really unsettling garbage and has nothing to do with the rest of the alleged plot. Including the wonderfully named young actor Finn Wolfhard also feels like a corporate synergy move, with Finn already linked to the brand by him and his co-stars dressing as Ghostbusters in Stranger Things' season two. What this attempt at redeeming the franchise seems to not have realized is that they also needed to redeem the joyous but misbegotten 2016 installment as well. And if they cared enough, they'd have found a way to retroactively incorporate the apparently separate timelines into one story. If they did, they would have gotten the kaching! they longed for. But they bypassed that, going straight for the kaching! without doing the deeper thinking and the emotional reasoning. And they, and we, and the GB brand are all poorer for it.

A single mom at the end of her rope takes her high school-aged son and middle school-aged daughter to live in a rundown farmhouse she has just inherited from the father she never knew. When the two kids start finding old ghostbusting shit in the basement and shed, things get freaky, and busting ensues. [FIMG=450]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmZiMjdlN2UtYzdiZS00YjgxLTgyZGMtYzE4ZGU5NTlkNjhhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTEyMjM2NDc2._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg[/FIMG]

=JohnFromAlbany post_id=86038 time=1645309008 user_id=123] Thanks for news on Andres Regnault. He played 3 games in the Venezuelan league this winter. 5 at bats - 1 hit, 1 walk, 2 RBIs - .200/.333/.200