Edgy MD

As a Mets completionist, sure. Otherwise, not so much. The timeline is skewed, jumping from the past to the present randomly, and big chapters in the knuckleball's history get overlooked and played down. They don't talk to executives about why knucklers aren't taken seriously. How only bad teams give the Phil Niekros of the world a chance. They don't mention that watershed R.A. Dickey start in 2006 where he gave up six homers and got banished to the minors for two years. They don't mention Joe Niekro's suspension for the emory board. They talk to the catchers, but they don't go into how Mirabelli and Thole and others owe their careers to their ability to catch the knuckler. It's sort of slow with synthy new age music too. What I really missed is the whole damn adventurousness of it all. Charlie Hough's all star appearance where the ball was dancing all over the place and he had a catcher who'd never caught the knuckler. That was great drama! Absent from this narrative. The 2004 game five against the Yankees, Wakefield was heroic, but they never mention the real drama was Francona's dangerous decision to stick with Varitek behind the plate, hoping he could win the game with one swing, but leaving him to chase balls to the backstop while baserunners with potential season-ending runs were dancing around the bases. But Aaron Boone's homer off of him in 2003? They couldn't get enough of that shit. Most of the best Dickey stuff is told better in Dickey's autobiography. Best part is the round table of Dickey, Wakefield, Hough, and Niekro, but even that is achingly brief. Was Tom Candiotti busy or they only wanted a foursome so they could play golf? And Bouton only appears briefly once or twice. One of the best storytellers in baseball history and he threw the knuckleball, but he was woefully underutilized.

RA and Tim are accomplished big-league starting pitchers. Only one problem—they can't get any respect! You see, these two lovable slackers didn't make their names in the big leagues with blazing speed or a devastating breaking pitch. They made it with the knuckleball—a gimmick pitch. Will they be able to convince the world that their pitch, their accomplishments, and their big league legacies are as viable as anybody's? [fimg=475:1niz8al0]http://www.impawards.com/2012/posters/knuckleball_xlg.jpg[/fimg:1niz8al0]

A glum down-and-outer takes a job as a professional caregiver to a young adult crippled by muscular dystrophy. His job made more difficult by the fact that his charge is mouthy, British brat, he nonetheless suggests a road trip to, you know, advance the plot, provide space for the soundtrack, and allow hyjinx to ensue.

I bet he ends up with a 25-year managing career.

Ha! ceetar and Zvon are MIA, but we get the first dgw post in six months. Welcome Bomback.

I found this to be a slog. For all the criticisms about George Lucas' storyboard-quality scripts, his stories had coherence and arc and motive and stuff. The rebels come off as a real bunch of moral cynics and worse here, which really rewrites a lot of the foundation. But there wasn't one verbal exchange that I felt had meaning for me outside of the movie. Not a lot had meaning within the movie. Sometimes they tried, and really awkward things fell out of people's mouths. The orchestral cues seemed to be a satire of John Williams Star Wars canon.

No, I've done some of the old research, and I've found agreement about the CinéBistro sound system. Check beforehand and make sure your theater has the sonic juice to take care of you.

Give him a break. It's not like he was supposed to be some kind of rocket scientist.

Supposedly, though, that Glenn scene is one of the more accurate moments of the film. At least, by some accounts.

I also have old-guy ears.

I saw this film in a luxury theater-bistro. The cuisine was chef-quality, the service was solicitous, the seats were plush and roomy, the music and video before the preview trailers and feature ... were kind of creepy. But what killed me was ... with no expense spared for luxury, the sound really stunk. All the warmth of that seventies music that was embodied in the original GotG, and here I was getting a sequel with carefully Disney-curated 70's pop rock masterpieces, and it sounded like it was coming through laptop speakers. Passing strange. It ruined, like, 87% of the film for me. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going to see this, make sure your theater has high-quality sound, because whatever warmth their was in the earlier installment was almost all absent for me. I'd still say a large chunk of the spirit of the former GotG was lost, lost in underwriting and forced moments, but I came ready to sacrifice myself nonetheless, but it wouldn't take me. And a little Surround SoundTM might have taken me.

One of two 4-0 pitchers for the Fireflies. Someone adopt Jordan Humphreys NOW!!!!

Merandy kills it again, pitching 7 2/3 scoreless in a 5-0 win over the Asheville Tourists. He's now 4-0 and he is THE MAN WITHOUT AN ERA! Sixth shoutout of the year for the Fireflies.

Discovered! Rainy is pitching for the Bridgeport Bluefish of the Atlantic League! Only seven innings so far, but them's seven shutout innings! The Mets will be wanting you back soon enough, Rainy!

No pitcher has been more dominant than Class A Columbia's Merandy Gonzalez to begin the season. That trend continued on Friday night, as the Mets' No. 14 prospect extended his scoreless innings streak to 20 2/3 by tossing seven frames in a win against Lexington. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/225794220/mets-merandy-gonzalez-extends-scoreless-streak/

Hi, I'm Merandy Gonzalez. How many games have I appeared in this season for the Columbia Fireflies? Three. How many wins do I have? Three. How many innings have I pitched? 20 and 2/3. How many runzzz have I allowed? Zero. What's a run? How many dudes have I struck out? Eighteen. Alice Cooper sings about the number of dudes I've struck out. That's how many. And how many have I walked? One. Combine that with 10 hits allowed, and no hit batsmen, and I'm walking around the Sally League with a 0.532 WHIP. What's a Tebow? Are you serious? There's some guy named "Tebow" on my team? Never heard of him.

He's a rapid climber. A "quickie," as Branch Rickey would say. I'm seeing a mid-season callup to Vegas and his second straight season of rocking two levels.

I was hoping this was a dramatization of the Elton John story, at the peak of his glamour god stardom. How could it not be?

That's leapfrogging Columbia. While we at Roster Central anticipated that, it's still a pretty notable feat.

I haven't read the story, but I enjoyed the film. One issue was that although he's hammering the Pabst, he generally only gets himself half drunk through most of the film. He's surly and says inappropriate stuff, but his balance and speech don't betray him.

Film comes twenty years after Owen Wilson's breakthrough in Bottle Rocket, playing the demented leader of a ragtag gang o' robbers.

Big shot corporate vice president of sales (Will Ferrell) gets himself in trouble with his drinking and gets fired, then comes home to find that his wife has locked him out and put all his stuff out on the front lawn. He plops himself in the easy chair parked in the middle of the lawn and goes on the PBR binge to end all PBR binges, pretending he's having a yard sale, but really just sitting there and drinking for like a week. I mean, some small stuff happens and he meets a few people, but that's pretty much the elevator pitch. [fimg=500:2s3p8k0q]http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/everything-must-go-movie-poster-01.jpg[/fimg:2s3p8k0q]

Just went up on Amazon. Directed by Opie Cunningham. New interview footage by Caleb Deschanel. Music remastering by Giles Martin. Coolest thing was hearing somebody talking about going to one of the Hollywood Bowl shows as footage of the crowd rolls, describing how she did everything she could to get tickets, and ended up a half mile from the stage. And then they cut to a shot of the speaker, and it's none other than (famous Baby Boomer actress), telling how, no matter how far away she was, she dressed and did her hair carefully to get noticed. And you're thinking, oh yeah, you were there, maybe, but your memory is probably embellishing. And then, somehow, they get 10 seconds of a crowd shot, and there's this 13-ish-year-old, a little taller than then others, and it's (that very same famous Baby Boomer fucking actress). You can tell by her dimples and chin and stuff. I don't know if they found her in a wide shot and zoomed and digitally enhanced it or what. But it was pretty cool. Stuff like that is cool. But what made it best is how they were able to reconstruct and master the music, and you find out that, contrary to testimony, including and especially their own, they were actually singing and playing pretty damn good for the most part.

Four irrepressible lads from Liverpool take the world by storm with their music. Story told in impressively digitally remastered sound and digitally restored film, effectively synched together even as they often come from different sources. Some colorizing. [fimg=500:1mz7e3mb]https://www.cineworld.co.uk/xmedia-cw/repo/feats/posters/HO00003726.jpg[/fimg:1mz7e3mb]

That's crazy. There's no rabbit. Hey, Universal, did you pay the rabbit?