Edgy MD

I thought it had more layers than that (but average can be a pretty flexible bar, depending on what romcoms you've endured). Ambiguities, dinosaurs, the foundations of morality, nihilism. In fact, I think the protagonist dude was named Niles for symbolic reasons.

Pair of wedding guests get trapped in an infinite time loop, but instead of reliving Groundhog Day over and over, they relive a wedding reception. The ensuing of hyjinks follows. Also, the designated hitter rule is bullshit. [fimg=500]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjk0MTgzMmQtZmY2My00NmE5LWExNGUtYjZkNTA3ZDkyMTJiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTkxNjUyNQ@@._V1_.jpg[/fimg]

One of the many facts I've learned in light of this story is that New York's Department of Parks and Recreation used to be the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs. Who knew? I guess I the connection, in that cultural affairs often happen in parks, but it kind of feels like a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Native Hawaiian Relations.

I'm giving this a 4/5 stars. The music was great, and it's a gift to posterity by those who finally assembled this footage, but for too many of the acts, we get to see their opening number — which often is more about getting a groove going — and miss out on the rest of their sets. Fortunately, they circled back later and provided additional Stevie Wonder and Family Stone and Staples footage. We only got about 20 seconds of Moms Mabley, but it was a pretty cool 20. The ones at the peak of their powers here are Sly and the Family Stone, which, if I'm correctly recalling, is the only act who also played Woodstock, and Nina Simone. Nina doesn't even get into her sweet spot, opening with a blues song, following with a Sesame Street-ish sing-song type of children's anthem that took it's title from Lorraine Hansberry's To Be Young Gifted and Black, and then reciting a poem, that's not even hers, but she delivers with more flow than a lot of rappers of today can muster. None of that was really her sweet spot, but she makes it so.

Banjo-plucking Brooklyn troubadour gets a regular crowd at his gig with a gimmick — a backstory that he's really a visitor from another planet that had come to Earth to destroy the population, in preparation for colonization by his race, but ultimately spared us after falling in love with the beauty of music. It's a fun and goofy fantasy to join in as you enjoy a few songs over beers on date night, but what if it's all true? [fimg=500]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzA3MDI3MzAxMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDY2Mjc0OQ@@._V1_.jpg[/fimg]

Agreed that your angle would have been better.

There actually is a second film, The Spy Behind Home Plate, a documentary by Aviva Kempner. And perhaps I should check that out. This one is, well it's not awful, but it does some real superimposing. Dawidoff's bio digs deeply into Berg's rep as an enigma and aloof and a lifelong bachelor. This is the sort of thing biographers make hay out of, because if you can't find enough biographical material on a subject, you fill the space by writing about how frustrating it is. Sometimes he really is a mysterious guy, but sometimes he's just a mystery, because you haven't been able to find the source material. So yeah, he was an aloof figure. That's not surprising for a Princeton graduate who mastered at least eight languages and continued to miss Spring Training while pursuing graduate degrees. But the film takes one speculative passage about Berg's possible sexuality from the book and RUNS WITH IT. So we have Berg presented as either a bisexual, or an outright gay guy hiding in a relationship with a woman he can't give himself to. The worst part is that it is never explicitly said or shown, but presented in a 100 looks and touches and implications and visits to clubs in questionable parts of town, as if they wanted plausible deniability after the fact. Perhaps the film was spurred by the success of The Imitation Game, and somebody in Hollywood wanted to show that, hey, the US owed her wartime success to a tormented gay guy too. But it's really an unfair leap to make based on no real evidence. (Most accounts present Berg as a real ladies' man.) With that selected as the main theme, some real themes from Berg's story get little or no traction. While Jewish families were fleeing Lithuania because of pogroms, Berg's family was more secular, and left for the United States because they found living in an all-Jewish village to be oppressive. Interesting! Berg was a career bench player, but always had a job because most teams wanted at least one Jewish player on the roster for the swelling urban Jewish populations to root for. Interesting! He only became a catcher halfway through his big league career because three catchers in a row were injured and one of the other players pointed to him and said they had seen him warming pitchers up. His first start was catching a knuckleballer! While he still continued to hit like a sucker, he became a top defensive catcher, despite his lack of experience. Interesting! But his wartime service is the real story. The team assigned to pursue Heisenberg is left to wrestle over whether he can make an atomic bomb, and whether he would. They actually make some poetry in that the author of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is the subject of so much uncertainty. But the real interesting part of the dilemma that they miss is whether Heisenberg was ever the right person at all. As the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle attests, he was a brilliant theorist, but applied science and engineering was not his game at all, and neither was group management. At least some in American intelligence were of the opinion that they shouldn't interfere with Heisenberg leading the Nazi A-Bomb project because he reputedly didn't know how to change the battery in his car, and kidnapping or killing him might lead the Nazis to replace him with someone more competent. Interesting! But Heisenberg, sort of a textbook version of the rumpled, absent-minded professor with the hair askew, is presented here as handsome, impeccably tailored, engaged, and present-minded. The Heisenberg mission was a big part of Berg's spy life, but not all of it. But that's the story they want to tell, and while they don't quite get it right, it's a lot closer to the established narrative (and much of Berg's story has been declassified since Dawidoff's book was published, than the gay thing. They don't even have him on the right team when he made his trip to Japan (which was actually his second trip), and when they show him in Boston's clubhouse, he's surrounded by well known historical baseball figures, but the homophobic rookie who follows him through the city to confirm his suspicions is named "Bill Dalton," a name that appears nowhere on the baseball register. Cop. Out. So, yeah, if you liked Bridge of Spies or The Imitation Game, it's a good-enough film. But if you actually are interested in the actual Moe Berg story, this probably will disappoint. But you know, as Katheen Madigan said, that's what you get for reading.

Then I may have to expand my Didney bundle.

Where might this be streaming?

Don't forget The Sparks Brothers, man!

Moe is a major league backup catcher in the twilight of his career. He likes staying in the game even though he's expendable, and his singularness and intellectual heft make for good (if distorted) copy for the local columnists. When an All-Star goodwill tour of Japan is planned by the Major Leagues, the team includes Ruth and Gehrig and Averill, but then as now, they have to stretch the meaning of "star" in order to get a complete roster, so Berg is invited. While there, he takes the initiative to take aerial footage of Tokyo with his personal movie camera. When the war starts, this footage becomes his ticket into the O.S.S., where he's assigned to a small squad tasked with finding and (if deemed necessary) killing Werner Heisenberg. Intrigue ensues. Adapted from the book of the same title by Nicholas Dawidoff, but narrower in focus. [FIMG=450]https://posterbe.com/files/products/catcher_was_a_spy_xlg.800x800.jpg?a0bb5444e838bc3a88980179457e19f4[/FIMG]

That's mostly fair. I was referring to the secretly recorded conversation between John and Paul, in which John, after having a more productive conversation at George's house, brings George's terms to Paul, but is more interested in trying to get across how George is feeling. It isn't particularly clear from the outside, but because these guys seem to mostly understand each other's ambiguous language, Paul seems to get it. The four-songs-per-album thing, with two more for Ringo, would have been great, but it would have had to have been a soft rule, rather than a hard one, or else inspired initiatives like the Abbey Road medley would have been undercut by the focus on equity. But the trust wasn't there.

=smg58 post_id=83949 time=1641229666 user_id=62]The most memorable scene in the Let It Be movie for me was when Paul took John aside (I'm going to guess a day or two farther than I've gotten so far in Get Back) to discuss George, suggesting that they needed to push him like they did at Hamburg (apparently Paul saw some equivalence between the Beatles' situations in Hamburg and in early 1969).

Yes, but ratios matter. This one was summat overlong. And the setup:punch proportion didn't quite work for me. Ferrell's unself-aware semi-famous guys with shamelessly off-the-rack personas (Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, Chazz Michael Michaels), are usually of the American variety. He gets a wig, he comes up with a name, and the part almost plays itself. You recognize folks you know, folks on TV, folks so maddeningly shallow that you want to tear down the whole American apparatus. And perhaps just a little, you recognize yourself, or at least, somebody you kind of might have been like 20 years ago, and the bullshit you perhaps bought. And that's good satire. Eurovision music culture certainly has parallels in America — somewhere between American Idol, Vegas, and Super Bowl halftime bullshit — and as fascinatingly insane as it might be to an outsider, it's still very foreign, and so you don't really get the punch in the face satire should give you. Somebody else with a funny name across the ocean is getting punched, so it feels kind of bullying to enjoy it too much. I gave it 2.5/5 My wife is charitable to anything that puts Ferrell in a good wig (and this does), and so might have liked it a little more. Side-plot about Icelandic belief in elves also enhances the proceedings.

Icelandic boy grows up dreaming of writing and performing the winning song in the titular Eurovision Song Contest. Most of the town thinks he's an idiot, but a local mute girl is so taken in by his dream that she learns to sing and join him on his quest. Overdramatized production numbers ensue. https://s29288.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/eurovision-poster-750x419-1.jpg>

There's a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise. And I think not a small amount of evidence can be found here. Lennon was harsh and headstrong, but he was also mercurial. And he clearly loved the others. They had another (great) album and more still to come following this. John just got pissed at Paul at a time when they weren't in a position to square it, and drugs and alcohol and moving to different cities and new romances had them all in a position where squaring it just wasn't a priority.

They don't, but MRC expects him to open in Binghamton in 2022, which suggests a 2023 arrival date to be reasonable.

CBS Sports is under the impression that Francisco Alvarez is Major League Baseball's seventh-best prospect. Their top prospect — Baltimore's Adley Rutschman — is also a catcher, but Alvey is three and a half years younger than Adley.

I don't know how you let this happen.

I think "I Me Mine" is pretty great. Really short (short enough that it could have been on Beatles for Sale), but searing and dramatic, complete and cathartic. I like how it's in 3/4, perfectly containing the three-syllable title, and then when they switch to the 4/4 blues progression for the refrain, the title line expands to four syllables.

It was a little grieving that we'd listen to 21 breakdown takes of a song, and when they finally get to a take where the subtitle reads "This was the take used on the Album Let It Be," they cut the shot after a single verse. If they have the time for Ringo announcing his farts, surely they have enough time for the full final version of "I Me Mine" or "Two of Us." I had always had a disappointment that the rooftop concert featured no George Harrison songs, and John gets the lead and he and Billy Preston get the solos on "Get Back," leaving George's (high-quality) solo on "One After 909" as his only chance to shine in that concert. But the multiple takes in this version of the film really gave me a chance to appreciate the impressive non-solo leads George gets to contribute — sublimated but lovely stuff that really contributes to the essence of the songs.

I just farted. I just thought I should say something.

Yeah, sure if none of you have yet fallen for the film, let me save you the trouble. It has the same problem as a lot of Amazon programming in that they have the money for big-name stars and quality production values, but the direction seems tone deaf and unsure of what tone to put forward. In fact, it seems utterly unaware that there is such a thing as tone. This guy is a celebrated illustrator of cats. His life is full of tragedy and mental illness — both his own and his family's but since he's a Cumberbatch character, he has no coping mechanisms, and really no social skills at all. I'd go further to say that he has no life skills whatsoever, and no guile, but hey, he's a rapid-fire ambidextrous illustrator, and that's not nothing. He uses his modest skill to take care of a family full of unmarried sisters, and makes terrible business decisions as the family's social class tumbles down decade by decade, followed by their reputations, health, and wellness. His scandalous marriage is to a family governess 10 years his senior, but she's of course played by a woman 10 years his junior. So they can bowdlerize that, but they can't hit you enough with the mental breakdowns and cancer. Also, they do something I'm afraid we'll see more of in the coming years — in that they feature actors from racially diverse backgrounds (Black, South Asian, Oriental), happily and unremarkably integrated as equals into the late Victorian/early Edwardian society as if that's the way it had always been. We can't acknowledge that the people of different backgrounds did not live easily as social equals, but ... cancer-cancer-schizophrenia-schizophrenia. That's all good. With extra helpings of cancer and schizophrenia. Weird, but not in a good way. But ... cats. Sort of. The marketing will promise you whimsy, but I never felt the whim.

Start of PART THREE this evening. George Martin reasserting himself is great. The marginalization of Michael Lindsay-Hogg seems complete as he's nowhere to be seen. Most songs have reached something like the shape they will be in when they reach the album (even if lyrics aren't complete), and in some cases, we hear what we can recognize as the take they would eventually keep, but not yet mixed for the record, so we hear of George on guitar and John on six-string bass on "The Long and Winding Road" that is either removed from the master mix or pulled so far back as to be sublimated under the orchestrations. That's fine because it doesn't really add much and John's dynamics on the bass are off. But Ringo's adding some good cymbal stuff that you might otherwise miss. When Linda's daughter Heather See Not-Yet-McCartney enters the scene, she brings what Lindsay-Hogg might have recognized as a female lead. John and Ringo and Glyn all play with her and she plays the hi-hat during a few rehearsals and Rings seems happy to have her along for the ride. Linda is clearly exhaused as Heather spins for what seems like a half hour as the band does what now seems like their daily warmup of fifties rock 'n' roll chestnuts, but the better side of all the musicians takes over. And George Martin, again, is in charge, so process and form build off of one another. Just as actual takes seem to be going down, Yoko grabs John and lays a big wet one on him, followed by John announcing that the occasion is that her divorce is final. It's fascinating that John and Paul are bonding just as they are going through such similar experiences — both falling for older women exiting a prior marriage and bringing seven-year-old daughters with them. But while Paul adopted Heather, Yoko's ex would flee with his daughter and change her name to hide her from John and Yoko.

Multinationals conglomerating our media is an awful thing. Disney even getting near the Beatles is a big problem.