Edgy MD

We were reviewing LeBlanc's career working with simians during the movie. Ms. Edgy was also recalling a pre-Friends show that she seemed to remember had him doing chimp business, but I had nothing.

Well surely you remember the... there was the... um... There was a giant fucking spider --- I'll tell you that!

Interesting trivia: this film became known and celebrated in Hollywood circles as "The Iceberg," for being the film that finally knocked Titanic out of first place in the weekly box office rankings. Sadly, if you're of a mind to care, it's known and celebrated for little else, but somehow became holiday viewing for me this Independence Day.

Got an 8.3 out of 10 on IMDB, and 94% fresh from Rotten Tomatoes. I'm afraid we're gonna need a poll after all.

Is this the same as Moonrise Kingdom?

This strikes me as not so much Pixar, but a Disney initiative executed by Pixar.

In a strange tour that I seem to be going through of eighties youth oriented movies that I missed the first time around (often with good reason, but you be the judge of you, and I'll be the judge of me), we stumbled into Hiding Out, in which Jon Cryer plays a tax-advising, investment counselor, or an investment-counseling tax adviser. It doesn't matter, because it's the eighties, and those suit wearing yuppies are all the same. The care about money. They're not keeping it real. Anyhow, Cryer and some of his colleagues are star witnesses in some government probe of a Boston thug, and when one of his friends is killed and the mob is coming after him, he decides it's time to... hide out --- in high school! So, you know, that's sort of a double fantasy there --- for high school loozas to pretend that they're really some big shot laying low and if only these assholes knew, HAH!, and also for young adult loozas who dream about going back to high school knowing what they now know, fully filled-out frames, and showing those assholes whatfor. Of course, if you're still walking around with those hangups years later, who's the real asshole? How is that redemption? Flourish here in the now! So, of course, Cryer has to man up and return to the real world, and face his demons? But when? And how does he extract himself from this elaborate fiction he's created? And what will he learn along the way? And should the relationship he develops in the meantime with pert high schooler Annabeth Gish be termed as (a) sweet? ( troubling? or © screamingly icky? Hiding Out --- look for it in video stores today on the "They Actually Bothered Converting This to DVD" shelf.

"I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken."

Got to ask him to scan in that Fonzie photo.

During an international fleet convoy in Hawaii, aliens come and things get scary. The battle to protect mankind from extinction, however, is conveniently contained, when the aliens place a force field around Hawaii, somehow leaving only one ship in there --- radar and sonar jammed, mind you --- to take potshots at several alien vessels floating about the islands. O ragtag crew of the crippled USS John Paul Jones, don't let us down. Actors act and effects take effect. Boom! Pow! Was that AC/DC I heard? I think it was! Somewhere, writers are hammering out such knockout screenplays as Risk!, Stratego, and Connect Four.

Just made a leaping grab at the warning track.

That boy ain't right.

'Nudder homer for DD today. Up to .261 / .308 / .652 // .960. Gotta be happy with that.

I was thinking about this this morning as I'm staying at a place that is practically a bird sanctuary. I think what this was missing was a narrative structure that places it one of the more traditional film genres. There's this friendly but desperate rivalry at the center of it, but it never descends into the physical degradations and come-uppances of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for instance. There's a fe romantic subplots, but all lack the narrative arc of a romantic comedy. What it most resembles is a race film (score is even kept on screen at a few junctures), but without the brilliant mid-stream re-strategizing and desperate gambits that make those films work. What you're left with is the birds, and there's some cheating there, as the better wildlife photography is augmented by CGI, but as they cheat technically, they sort of wimp out narratively. The birds naturally become metaphors for the characters, but never at any profound or central level, And if you're not deriving a useful meaning from it, then you're doing what the more casual birders dismiss the competitive birders for being --- missing the more transcendent experience in favor of filling out a checklist.

Stinky. In a good way.

Bizarre the way his hand doesn't seem to have followed through.

Glad to hear it, but I imagine something close to half the guys on a mid-season AA roster will get at least a taste of the majors. Reese Havens, Mark Cohoon, Adrian Rosario, Armando Rodriguez --- all these guys should get at least a crack. Heck, Rob Carson's already been there.

Pretty much dead on. Not so much in the way of stereotype rastamem (though there's some overbroad stuff there). And more plot and fewer set pieces than your standard Police Academy film. What struck me is what a wet blanket it was on some hot careers. Harold Ramis had done big hits Caddyshack and National Lampoon's Vacation by then, but wouldn't come back until 1993 with Groundhog Day. With Bob Marley dead and Peter Tosh in a sort of professional exile, Jimmy Cliff was poised for a breakthrough. (Springsteen had just included a version of Cliff's "Trapped" on the megaselling USA for Africa album.) Even as he played a character in the film resenting being sanitized for the masses, he was reggae's biggest hope for a market in Babylon America. The film failed and he hasn't appeared as an actor since, and his singing profile in the US continued to wane even after Tosh was killed.

Collin tackles the age-old question, and begs you to stop asking it. Good use of the word "volatile." While fans can listen to the these claims and enjoy the drama of the minor league soap operas, the players cannot (for our own sanity) get caught up in it. If we gave validity to every claim that was made about our careers, most of us would cry ourselves to sleep at night from the brutality of people's words. The rest of us would be eternally bitter at our stagnate progress. Either way it ends up hindering our careers. Needs a hug, he does. Anyway, Collin had something of a rough go his last time out at Harrisburg, but has generally been real effective (2.39 ERA in 11 starts), and I'd be wondering when the phone was gonna ring if I was him.

And Dustin Martin farmed out to Bingo.

Yeah, the narrative held together well, but it led on mostly pointlessly, save that this strange obsessive hobby led to increases in some people's lives, and deteriorations in others. I imagine Steve Martin and Jack Black had a sitdown on the subject of what's left when you're no longer playing it for laughs. With Black, when he's not playing the ham, there's usually this amorality that's left over, like in King Kong, and it's in fact creepier when he's a straight guy without a broken moral compass. But (to the extent that's a good thing), he didn't even bring that to the table, and Wilson emerges as the obsessed villain figure. But seeing him as the broken guy is a tough sell also, in light of his depression-induced suicide attempt. Clearly the studio had high hopes for this film, enlisting heavy hitters for supporting parts (Anjelica Huston, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Pollack, and Rashida Jones), plus filming in many an exotic North American location. And I guess any fun derived in it comes in part from being daytrippers along for the ride in this strange hobby that certainly makes for a pleasant few hours diversion but takes a rare breed to make a true avocation of. So, no, you won't get deeply engaged, but the birds are pretty, though your disengagement may leave you with a disappointing tendency to play at guessing which shots are CGI enhanced. A shot on a frigid mountainside, for instance, won't have the characters breathing vapor or red-nosed. This stuff breaks the old suspension of disbelief, even if subconsciously. So, yeah, I agree with you, but I still retained some good will for it.

A bird hater.

There's a cringe-able moment or two --- zany resort satire hijinks like Andrea Martin riding on a parasail that snaps free and flies her away, and Rick Moranis climbing on a windsurfer and sailing miles out to sea --- but more keep-worthy moments than you might expect. And great music. Cliff composed like eight new songs for the film, and the opening and closing credits are set to "Seven Day Weekend" --- Cliff's duet with Elvis Costello and the Attractions. They also pull a track from "The Rhythmatist" --- Stewart Copeland's ambitious but forgotten anthropology rock album.

Three ambitious birders (Steve Martin, Jack Black, Owen Wilson) compete to see who can spot the most species of bird in a single year. It's a film, also, with a lot of birds.

Robin Williams is a Chicago firefighter who invests his disability money in a small-time beach resort on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Nicholas. Jimmy Cliff, in the role that ended his viability as a movie star, is his reggae-playing local partner. Harold Ramis directs and half the Second City company plays supporting roles, in addition to Peter O'Toole, Twiggy, and Adolph Caesar, in his last film role as the corrupt small-time prime minister trying to take over the club.