Edgy MD

Good enough to win, certainly, but in our offensive-challenged times, it took 14 innings for the Saints to knock off Palm Beach. They did in dramatic (if passive) style, though, with PB scoring a run in the 14th, and St. Loo scoring two in the bottom of the inning ... on a pair of bases-loaded walks.

And just like that, P.J. is promoted to St. Lucie. My investment is paying off IMMEDIATELY!

He's as Irish as Kelsey's goat, and as successful as Noah Syndergaard. Meet P.J. Conlon, currently leading the South Atlantic League in wins; second in ERA (by 0.01) and innings, third in WHIP. He walks a Colóniano 1.15 per nine and he's a handsome, rakish little divil also. Just ask Debbie or Courtney or whoever. Her name (or her social media handle) might actually be "Peach." I'm not sure. P.J.'s all about pitchability. Scouts don't talk about his arsenal, but how he uses it. He'll be using it in Flushing before you know it.

That's some hurtin' copy, my friends. I hope they're scouting pitchers better than writers.

Then there's the story of the lady who ordered the VCR tape (remember those kids?) of that movie for her and her grandson to watch but wound up with 'THE ARISTOCRATS' instead. [fimg=200]http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f26/SweetHenrietta/Blogger/The_Aristocrats_92250c.jpg[/fimg] I rented a box that said Henry V and came home with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. I shrugged and walked off to entertain myself otherwise, but before I returned it, I came back to the living room and ... "Hey Dad, how's it goi... oh, dear, Jesus, what are you watching?!" "I'm just perusing my sick-minded weirdo son's movie selections."

It strikes me that Mr. Young and Dumb has plenty of room to park on that block, but instead dropped his ride right next to the fire plug.

Yeah, the outing doesn't have the weight, largely because secret identities aren't really a big deal in the MCU. Spidey really has a low-cool-quotient, comic-colored set of pajamas — even after he works with Tony Stark on an upgrade — doesn't he?

They can claim copyright protection while blatantly ripping off DC and Led Zeppelin?

In hardscrabble mid-eighties Dublin, a schoolboy with a crush, and little in the way of musical training, rallies his mates to start a band, mainly for the purpose of impressing the girl. Hyjinx ensue as the band learns playing and songwriting on the fly, changing styles in cycles that parallel the MTV rotation. John Carney, latter-day auteur of music-creation stories, directs. I'm heading in tonight. Support your local theaters that are not showing Captain 'Merica! [fimg=380]http://dl9fvu4r30qs1.cloudfront.net/b6/f8/45ba491b4c9db3775afaaedef4b7/sing-street-poster.jpeg[/fimg]

Well, Oliver Stone's fevered dreams of what goes on in a Turkish prison, anyhow.

Burned out NYPD detective with a drinking problem (Bruce of the Willis Clan), gets a lousy detail transporting a loudmouth witness (Mos Def) from lockup to the courthouse. It seems like hump duty, but then folks come out hunting for his witness. New York shoot-em-up!

Gosh, you Superior Sammys might want to get some tee shirts made. I found it surprisingly OK. Tolerable. Is that a rating? It's like, a clearly inferior remake of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I mean, very similar plot and themes and stuff, only, you know, with a LOT more gay subtext. It's not particularly canonical with PWBA (or it's little-loved sequel Big-Top Pee-Wee), but it again features the hero living the dream of an adult child, prancing about a dream house operating by Goldberg machines, fending off the advances of his would-be sweetheart, surrounded by a town that's perfectly trapped in his mid-century ascetic. Forces conspire to send him out on the road, and the characters he encounters seem to pop right out of mid-century genre pulp novels. Just like with the new Star Wars, right now you're thinking, "Well I've already seen that. Can't anybody think of anything new?" I'm right there with you. B'LIEVE me. But what redeems it, to the extent that it is redeemed or redeemable, is low expectations (see above); a handful of new gags from a creative act that's had a few decades to come up with a nu idea or two; and... I guess the joy of just seeing this old, disgraced guy having the gall to go out there and give it a whirl. John Lee ain't Tim Burton. Paul Rust ain't Phil Hartman. And Mark Mothersbaugh ain't Danny Elfman, as much as I'd totally prefer to see Devo over Oingo-Boingo. It's an off-brand, knockoff candy bar, but maybe you need a sugar rush one of these nights. And at least the nut at the center is authentic.

Paul Rubens, approaching retirement age, somehow brings back his career-defining manchild character back for another feature 30 years after his big-screen debut. Produced by and exclusively found at Netflix.

That's a gsood adoption. Gso for it.

I gave it three stars. I was put off by a little extra nastiness and winking product placement, but I'm sure I owe it at least a half star more for having a moral that, while heavy-handed, speaks right to the heart of our current political situation. I like how they have a lot of fun with the all these mammals sharing a society despite their disparate sizes, forcing them to come up with adaptive and duplicative infrastructure that serves multiple sizes at once.

In an alternative universe peopled by intelligent mammals, where predators and prey have learned to live in a modest harmony — coexisting despite their relative sizes — a country bunny dreams of moving to the big city and joining the police force, where she quickly stumbles into a mystery that threatens the city's uneasy tranquility. [fimg=350:21mgs247]http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/zootopia-movie-poster.jpg[/fimg:21mgs247]

cooby wrote: Can someone tell me the reason for the recent surge of movies about single girls who want to sleep around? Or is it just this particular actress? It's actually a big problem with the romantic comedy genre that studios are struggling to deal with. The flip but very useful dramatic definition is that a tragedy ends with a funeral and a comedy with a wedding. This has held true through most of cinematic history, as long as you're willing to redefine wedding in a more symbolic sense — a big, magical redemptive first kiss, or a proposal. If it's to be sex, it should be the first time, and a clear implication (or explicit statement) that it is to be forever. A marriage, in other words. In the age of almost indifferently casual sex, and less faith in marriage, it's become much more of a challenge for the screenwriter to get us to a meaningful payoff. Frequently they have to go through a relatively meaningless sexual encounter and then build meaning to their relationship beyond that, even as that brass ring of coupling is gone. Sometimes it works (Knocked Up), sometimes not so much (most of everything else, particularly if Natalie Portman or Dakota Johnson are in it). It was somewhat more doable when the convention suggested the man had the casual attitude toward sex and not the woman. Therefore the pre-coupling sexual encounter (When Harry Met Sally) becomes a plot device forcing the reconciliation of their attitudes. Now that both genders are happily giving it away for free, the magic of romance has become a harder sell. One thing that has worked in latter years (and Knocked Up is again an example), is the romantic comedy where the man is the real protagonist. That's been mostly the exception through Hollywood history, but is seemingly less rare.

So, anybody?

A story previously dramatized by Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet in 1990's The Krays:

Ashie is the first to toss the last guy over and the first to designate the next guy as the answer. It's his thing.

For a while, this film was trailer'd before everything I saw. The themes seemed appealing, but the music and the digital feel of the cinematography kind of made it feel inauthentic to me. It seems to me, a film about cobbling some shit together and roughing it should feel a little more cobbled together and rough. That's my review of the trailer, anyhow.

You didn't make it to Bad Seed Rising?

On a London commuter train, a widowed doctor meets a pretty young woman. The doctors' young son provides the icebreaking and they flirt before both dozing off to sleep. They wake up further down the line and slowly realize that the train is missing stops, and the driver and conductor have disappeared. It's a runaway! The emergency brakes aren't working and only three other passengers remain to share their apparent doom — a priggy businessman, a hostile young Russian immigrant laborer, and a stylish, classy grandmother. Can this Gilligan's Island band thrown together by fate stop the bloody train before it gets them and a whole bunch of others killed?! Watch and find out! [fimg=400:uena5zd9]http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/ngzYTFU6iZim3tswGaowDaWvHfe.jpg[/fimg:uena5zd9]

I thought we already had a L&M thread. Anywhich, I thought it looked good and all, but was two different movies that were sort of forced into one. The young Beach Boys in the California modern sixties were cool to look at. But the uglier eighties was where the real story was. And only barely. Older Brian Wilson, apart from being a bigger (and better coiffed) guy than John Cusack, wasn't just weird. He was messed up — his face partially paralyzed, his vocal chords barely functional, his eyes unable to fix on one point for more than a beat or two. The weird part about the sixties stuff is that I found myself agreeing with Mike F. Love. Why does Paul Dran-O always end up playing wounded geniuses? I voted 3 1/2 but meant to vote 2 1/2.

There's definitely some dramatic license. There's certainly some people who are crying that they've been painted wrongly (with some support), who are getting the talk to our lawyers response from the studio, which is unfortunately something akin to what the Archdiocese of Boston was too long offering the victims of the pedophile priests. Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer appear to have created Peter Brand-type composite characters, but unfortunately put their words in the mouths of real people. I note that while believing that Tom McCarthy has been in recent years about the best thing going these days in the dying field of screenwriting. It's interesting that McCarthy played the plagiarizing Jason Blair figure in the last season of The Wire and now has a chance to be remembered for writing and directing a story about journalistic heroism.