Edgy MD

Yeah, the deep well of archival material is mos' def' the mos' redeeming part of it. Most of the talking heads they bring in are interesting, but they don't get a very broad population of them, ultimately giving us a solid but unremarkable telling. With all the great footage, they don't really cover the down spots very well. And we know there's good footage of most of those, because they often take place in films, such as Cucumber Castle and Sgt. Pepper's LHCB. Both are treated as if they don't exist. They don't even mention the title song they contributed to Grease, which is silly, considering the film was a global phenomenon and Frankie Valli took the song to number one. It's almost like they run out of money after telling the story of the anti-disco backlash (which was again, well told, but limited to only a few witnesses, but could be a movie all to itself). Really, from Saturday Night Fever onward, they just step on the gas and zoom into the current day. Post peak BeeGees is still a fascinating story that deserves telling. I hadn't known this, but the Beatles were inadvertently very important in their genesis. When Brian Epstein died, Robert Stigwood was pissed that he didn't get to become the band's new manager, so he quit the Epstein organization and took the BeeGees and Eric Clapton with him, building an empire around them. In fact there's a lot of big names (Otis Redding, Eric Clapton, Ahmet Ertugun) who appear in the BeeGees story briefly, but make a major contribution. Also, amazingly, not a single reference to "Lonely Days, Lonely Nights." Come on!

Manx family emigrates to Australia, learns to harmonize, and their three sons dream of going back to England and doing what the Beatles did. Improbably, they kind of pull it off, only differently. Now available on HBO. https://pics.filmaffinity.com/The_Bee_Gees_How_Can_You_Mend_a_Broken_Heart-649698281-mmed.jpg>

That's certainly touched on. The filmmaker is supposed to meet his subject in San Francisco, and Paul is a no-show. He has a film crew assembled, and Paul's in town for a show, so he walks around the neighborhood asking folks about him, and they generally have no clue until he starts humming a few bars of "Rainbow Connection," and almost invariably, they practically know the whole lyric to the song, with some claiming to own the record. Who else gets honorary Muppet status? John Denver certainly. Maybe Rita Moreno? Eddie Van Halen never worked with the Muppets, but he always seemed like one. http://hensonblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/williamstrio.jpg>

What made it interesting was that movie was very much about the filmmaker being unsure what kind of film he wanted to make. Williams seems to waver several times on whether he trusts the guy, but is never that comfortable rehashing his life. As a remarkably short guy who got to become famous, his stage persona was to come across absurdly as being the swingingest dude in the room, and nobody could take him down for being short and pudgy because he'd be the first in line to make fun of himself. But clearly that guy was masking a world of pain. A good interviewer/documentarian would know how to explore that, but documentary isn't this guy's forte, and so he backs off when Williams pushes back, as he's sort of insecurely covering up his own shortcomings as well. As a recovering addict and counselor, Williams realizes that it's part of recovery to dig through the mistakes of your life, but he's mortified discussing on a camera what a jackass he became, and doubly mortified that there is all this footage out there on TV, where booze and drugs have turned his cornball act of the early and mid-seventies into kind of a jackass act of the late seventies, and later into an asshole act in the eighties. The slippage was subtle in real time but it's jarring to see it compressed. And it's more jarring for Williams than anybody. The storyteller becomes half the story, which is typically a no-no in a documentary, but meaningful here. Weird and surprising. Unprofessional but worthwhile.

Veteran Queens-born commercial director with some hints of larger success (two features) is surprised to get a chance to take in a Paul Williams gig in Winnipeg. Raised on 1970s TV, he's fascinated in trying to reconcile this hugely successful songwriter (his constant theme: loneliness) with the ubiquitous TV ham he turned into, and then with the ghost he ultimately became, and he starts hanging out with Williams trying to document his life. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71QR-eIAYhL._SY445_.jpg>

I'm not recommending it, only sharing information. Nothing I've written in any way — and I'm certain no marketing claim the film's producers would make — would suggest that it is trying to "teach" you the "history of India."

This film was a massive international hit based in part on India's surprising win in the 2002 women's field hockey tournament at the Commonwealth Games. What makes it interesting is also kind of what makes it uneven — the lead actor seems to have been told that he's in a samurai film. He arcs through his fall from grace and his redemption with a Zen impassiveness — breaking down his team where they need breaking and building them up where they need building, and slowly molding them into a winning unit that sacrifices for one another, like a weary, code-loyal samurai training a Japanese town to defend themselves from bandits. This detachment has its entertaining side, but is more than a little annoying, as it makes the film longer than it probably should be and it drains some of the life out of the real burning themes touched on — intra-Indian bigotry, Caste system mindsets, the country's rape culture and the denigrating attitudes that feed it, male privilege, the India-Pakistan partition, yada-yada. The most satisfying scene occurs when the young women rumble with a bunch of pushy men at a food court, but it feels more gratifying than it should, because the pace had been so slow to that point. Events pick up when the team travels to Australia for the international championships, and even though a cornucopia of sports movie cliches spills out from there, it's a somewhat tastier salad when they get tossed together with a choice selection of samurai movie chiches.

Largely disgraced former captain of India's men's field hockey team attempts to make a comeback by coaching the women's team. His ragtag unit goes up against opponents with better funding and support. Let's do that hockey! [FIMG=450]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTUzODMyNzk4NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTk1NTYyNTM@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg[/FIMG]

I would guess it's massively improbable to see a AA team — even a 2-15 one — that doesn't have at least one player with a big league future of some sort ahead of him.

That'll put him, Baty, and Mauricio in the same lineup.

Alvarez went 2-6 with a three-run homer as the designated hitter this afternoon. This, amazingly, brought all his numbers ... down — most of them anyhow — with a slashy line that now sits at .417 / .567 / .646 // 1.213 through 63 plate appearances.

Andres was released during camp back in March.

I tell you, I'd watch the hell out of a two-hour documentary about Cathy Smith. That story fascinates me.

And no discussion of our hobbit-named balladeer is complete without Rick Moranis' finest moment. [YOUTUBE]kZlrrwUIwcE[/YOUTUBE]

I dunno. I'm halfway through this, and I'm finding it to be really sycophantic. They seemingly aren't sure of how they want to tell the story. For a time, it's a story about the songs, but then it tries to be biographical, so it jumps back, but not to the beginning. We're one hour in before we get to his childhood, and they have an amazing clip of him singing in church, but they only play two lines from it. They also jump around the Canadian geography, which is challenging for a non-native, but I think it's really important, because if there's any thesis that really works with Lightie, it's that he and his fucking train song helped give the spread out country a unifying national identity. He's clearly been through some health challenges, and the revenant he has become is hard to reconcile with the fullback he was back in the day, but he always looked kind of middle-aged. There's a subtext running through it that's hard to ignore about how smoking fucks you up. A lot of the old scenesters (him, Ian Tyson, Ronnie Hawkins) look like living ghosts, but Randy Bachman looks better than ever. Joni Mitchell, who was never not smoking, looms large in her absence from the proceedings. It's interesting how the road to the United States for Canadian artists, both eastern and western, ran through the midwest, and instead of taking their act from Toronto to Boston or Vancouver to Seattle, they tried to break through in places like Detroit and Cleveland. But mostly it's the authorized quality of it that undermines it. In order to get Lightfoot's cooperation, ex-wives, ex-partners, ex-groupies, and his long shit-list of enemies has to be uninvited. And what fun is that? Also ... Alec Baldwin? Anyhow, the parts where they just focus on a song for a while, ask folks what that song meant to them, and show two dozen artists covering the same song — is fun, and really underscores the times when he absolutely struck a vein of gold.

Wait. Alvarez is "missing a couple of years to covid"?

I began watching this one this evening and hope to finish it tomorrow. So far, it has some interesting parallels with Soul — a protagonist who is born to be a musician, but isn't supported by his family, despite apparently inheriting the gift from a late family member, along with a passage between the worlds of the living and the dead. [fimg=450]https://i.pinimg.com/originals/77/8f/94/778f941173148749031fd78b190f426f.jpg[/fimg]

I was less overwhelmed than you, I think. I liked the real-world NYC they created more than the cosmic world. Also, and this may speak to my comprehension, some of the epiphanies, while rendered inspiringly, were ambiguous in meaning. I would have liked a little epilogue to find out how the stories of the two main characters continued.

Yeah, Coco is totally the one I'd go out of my way for. Man, you just used the word "filligreed." I feel like that's a forum first.

Pixar films I have never seen: A Bug's Life Cars (I think I bailed at about the half-hour mark on this.) Cars 2 Monsters University Cars 3 The Good Dinosaur Coco Onward

Gosh, terrific. We haven't sampled yet. Ranking is over-rated, and I guess rating is over-ranked, but I tried to think of what I would consider my top-five Pixar films, and that's some pretty hard-to penetrate territory.

A music teacher dreams of a life as a jazz performer, but when he dies on the way to his first gig, he tries to convince a fellow disembodied soul to join him as he attempts to return to earth. [FIMG=300]https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/WdwAAOSwvwFeMcTF/s-l1600.jpg[/FIMG]

It seems Alvarez' season down unda is also ending before it begins. Having been unable to get home to Venezuela in 2020 due to COVID restrictions, the Mets were able to get him a visa to see his family for the holidays. Whatever wisdom such a move does or doesn't have, that keeps him ineligible to visit Australia for a long enough duration that the Blue Sox have announced he wont be playing for them after all. Still want to follow some Met prospect action in the Southern Hemisphere? You can still follow the Blue Sox who are deploying Carlos Cortes, a secondbaseman who is about the 15th-ranked prospect; and Manny Rodriguez, a shortstop most recently in St. Loo, among others.

Alvarez has not appeared in the first two games between Sydney and Melbourne, and it looks like the third game (and more?) are going to be scrapped due to COVID-19 concerns. Additionally, the Blue Sox have announced that Manny Ramirez will not be appearing for the team after all, due to un-named medical concerns, which are not deemed to be life-threatening and are not COVID-related.

Yeah, it was, but I agree with Frayed. It was about selling the cast. Outside of trying to elicit a fist-pumping Oh yeah! when Helen Mirren coolly confessed she was an assassin, it didn't really engage. It didn't engage me, anyhow. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Rule stipulates that films aimed at the sympathies of older audiences are well-cast, stylish, and embarrassingly stupid.