Edgy MD

His motion reminds me of Neil Allen's.

Film reviews by Fonzie would be a big internet hit.

Well, then, I recommend.

Rocket's been a tweeting fool of late.

How appropriate that the highlight of this flick was a gigantic trainwreck? It wasn't enough to be a science fiction story, or a disaster movie, it also had to be a Romeo & Juliet story, and a story about the director's childhood, and a story about losing a parent, and a story about the late 70s, and an homage to Close Encounters, E.T. and Stand By Me, among others etc etc etc. Some Twister and Superbad action in there as well. J.J. is a funny dude. I'll say he makes a nice batch of candy. I like his casting. I like his cuts. I like his relationships. I like how he builds action. But afterwards, just like with Star Trek, I'm thinking, "Wow, there were some big dumb holes in that movie that just didn't have to be there." ___ Spoiler: Like, who drives head on into a train and survives to make a dying speech? Like, even after what you thought was surely a dying speech, he survives and gets taken into custody. Like, who gets drummed out of a military intelligence job with the biggest military secret on earth in his head and gets to live a life as a middle school bio teacher? And he actually knew more than any of the guys he walked away from. And a train, carrying that top secret project he was working on just happens to be passing through the outskirts of their town? C'mon. _________ Aside from that, as per Spielberg's signature films, the kids are all perfect. Prematurely tall kid and pyro kid were like Bad News Bears leftovers. Who didn't recognize pyro kid? The lead kid even looked like the girl from Jurassic Park. My wife instantly recognized lead girl as somehow related to Dakota Fanning. Creeps me out when she does that. I'm all "Who's Dakota Fanning?"

What a soundtrack.

Yeah, I think "available data" is a good standard by which to pick your adoptees.

Had a good season for Bingo, and followed that up with a pretty lousy showing in the AFL. But no matter. It was all part of his strategy of getting teams to pass on him in the Rule V draft and getting him returned to the loving bosom of Wally Backman with a trip to Buffalo. Collin's a righthander, gets more than his share of strikeouts, does OK in the walk front, and gives up as many flies as grounders. He's a southerner drafted out of Braves territory who went to Berry College (??). He throws hard stuff in the low to mid 90s and a curve and change, but got the cutter working real nice for himself this year. Collin has a boss blog, a buzzy bride, a balladeer brother, and suddenly a real good chance to make it to the show, after making the tough jump from A+ to AA and making it with panache.

I haven't seen it. (Wifey is resistant.) It's interesting to get two threes here. This movie with these themes should be right in Seven Spielberg's sweet spot. And to get ratings of merely good, or not get a hit out of it, suggests he's really losing his touch. Or his self-awareness. Which I think is something he's always had to wrestle with at least a little.

Bernard survives!

Likeable. Definitely an engaging story with characters you don't see often. Issues are out there, though. The main character spends the first half of the movie screaming at everybody without provocation. You start wincing whenever she comes on screen. And when a troubled black American family is portrayed in a German film as transformed by a German woman stumbling into their lives and restoring their sense of wonder, well, if I'm black (and I'm not), I might have my guard way up. Aside from those quibbles, and some overly studied artistic shots, I liked it. It had Jack Palance playing a freak, and that's always good stuff.

Great work. Amazin' to see Bay knocking on the door of the top 100 while we're still waiting for him to perform.

Change is set in motion at a family run mohave desert truck stop when a mysterious Bavarian woman stumbles out of the heat and asks for a room.

Short Cuts is a good reference, because a Robert Altman could have made something of this kind of material --- dark ensemble comedy, drenched in American pathos, featuring game performances by musicians Huey Lewis (and scenes by forgotten players like Angie Dickinson). That's where Altman lived and he was probably Paltrow's model. But where Altman gives us hard to swallow realism, you just get distasteful gag lines. Where Altman cuts deftly between various interweaving story lines --- extending a film to three hours if necessarily, here we get ham-fisted editing leading to incoherent unseen jumps in character development. Sober characters become addicts offscreen. Estranged characters reconcile offscreen. Characters on a hateful course find their inner decency without that all-important Rocky scene where they look in the mirror and wonder what they've made of themselves. You're most common exclamation during this movie will be "When did that happen?" Most offensive part is that Andre Braugher --- and when I say he's the only minority character in this film, I may have missed somebody, but I'm counting walk-ons and cameos and extras --- turns out to be the noblest of noble savages.

He's game, playing against his genial type as a real jerk. It's a real disaster. If this film was a karaoke performance, it would be drunk sorority girls screeching out "Brown-Eyed Girl." Bruce Paltrow, who had spent most of his career as a TV director, gets the big chair here by bringing his star of a daughter along for the ride. She was 27 at this point, but appears to be playing a teenager. He should have shot a White Shadow cast reunion movie instead.

Six loozas travel cross-country in accidental pairs stublign toward their destny --- a high-stakes karaoke championship in Tulsa, Oklahoma. [list:905dbpaz][*:905dbpaz]An ex-con (Andre Braugher) doing a bad job reintegrating into honest society, travelling with[/*:m:905dbpaz] [*:905dbpaz]A burned-out commercial real-estate developer (Paul Giammatti), looking for new life in the thrill of pills and bright lights of karaoke.[/*:m:905dbpaz] [*:905dbpaz]A tramp (Maria Bello) trading her body for meals, beds, and rides, travelling with[/*:m:905dbpaz] [*:905dbpaz]A failed priest (Scott Speedman) turned cuckolded cabby, brokenhearted by the brokenness of this broken world.[/*:m:905dbpaz] [*:905dbpaz]A lone-wolf karaoke hustler (Huey Lewis), making a living on the big-stakes sidebets he suckers lounge lizards into, travelling against his will with[/*:m:905dbpaz] [*:905dbpaz]The daughter he never knew (Gwyneth Paltrow),a Vegas casino worker thrown together with him after her Vegas casino worker mother dies of a sudden aneurysm.[/*:m:905dbpaz][/list:u:905dbpaz] See, karaoke songs are sometimes performed as duets, and they're travelling in pairs, sort of like duets. The title has a double meaning that way.

I kinda like the early-nineties post-Jim Treasure Island and Christmas Carol movies more than the last two Jim-era ones: The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan. I agree that a more evolving muppet pantheon would be a good idea. But Disney is all about the rehashing.

A half a star? Sheesh, it was messy, but it wasn't' sadistic or hateful.

Not to mention the Gilliam tendency to be undercut by a mid-shoot disaster. Wonderful visual thoughts haphazardly assembled, leading to appealing peeks into an inarticulate vision of an unclear pantheon. It gets an almost from me. Heath Bell's disappearance wasn't even the real problem, so much as too much seemingly conceived on storyboards and in the editing room. The presumed script that underlied it all was almost invisible.

An ancient monk (Christopher Plummer), rumbling through London in sideshow gypsy caravan, duels with the Devil (Tom Waits) for high stakes. High stakes indeed!

Larry Crowne is Tom Hanks' second feature as a director, following 1996's That Thing You Do, and unlike that effort --- which, whatever you say about it, it held together as a more-or-less tight affair --- this one is a sad sorry mess. Hanks plays the title character, a genial working stiff, a 20-year navy man happily embracing the grind on the sales floor of in a big box store, teaching trainees corporate policy as if he believes in the virtues of it himself, when wham-bam, he gets axed for not having any higher ed pursuits whatesover. Getting the point of the boot in his ass, he enrolls in a local community college, and his ordinary-guy virtues bless the lives of his new companions --- including: the neighbors who watch his life fall apart and reassemble; a bunch of 13th-graders of varying levels of stonedness in his speechifying class; his comely but sauced speechifying teacher (Julia Roberts) mourning her eroding marriage; and a gang of young, texting scooter enthusiasts who adopt him (yeah, I know). Hanks, who turned his Apollo 13 and Saving Private Ryan roles into HBO miniseries about the real American heroes behind those parts, apparently thinks his middle-aged ordinary guyness is a trait Americans are obviously quick to embrace. We're all getting axed. Tom Hanks, fine American, tell us what to do. Then there's the whole semi-aware virtuous savant thing --- like his lead characters from Forrest Gump and The Terminal --- here's another Tom Hanks guy that filmmakers think can just stumble into a situation, breathe the fresh air of old-fashioned decency, and stumble out with the benediction complete and the air cleansed and everybody just redeemed by the decency of it all. I don't want to be too cynical here --- I love decency (I am, in fact, crazy about it) --- but when the guy just goes from playing these paragons to casting himself as them, I get real nervous. As Mel Gibson will tell you, it's a slippery slope from casting and directing yourself in self-aggrandizing roles to becoming the biggest douchebag in Hollywood, and I don't think any of us want that from Tom. But if Tom wants to be loved, his movie wants to be loved more. And that's a big problem here. To the extent that the film is a romantic comedy, that genre's formula demands colorful side characters, and this sucker forces them on you like a bouquet pushed in your face by a crazy aunt --- the sassy black neighbors, the sunny young bohemian who recruits him into the scooter gang (yeah, I know), the array of corporate tools who smile at him condescendingly as they fire him, the classroom of mitfits, Julia's girl-get-yo'self-together officemate. Ugh. The movie is so busy throwing colorful side characters at the wall that they forget to draw up any depth in the alleged leads. Double ugh. (Not enough color for you? It's also got George Takei hamming his way to kingdom come. OK?) So you know, it hints at things it could have been. It could have been about people responding to our financial malaise by downsizing their lives and, ultimately, realizing they're rightsizing them. It hints at that. It could have been a movie about the culture shock of being destroyed and adrift and setting foot on a college campus for the first time in your fifties. Somehow regaining your equilibrium. Hints at that too. How about a movie about what kind of astounding personal transformation it takes for a toothsome if lushy college professor (OK, junior college, but still) to ditch her layabout writer husband and take up with a former navy cook with no academic experience recently laid off from a big box store. Julia, with her fan-tas-tic hair and haggard face, kind of maybe thinks she's in that movie, but it really goes unexplored. The movie thinks it's all of these things, but it's none. It's a sad little mess is what it is. So you know, some time in the next few weeks you may be walking around the video store, and stumble across Larry Crowne, and think to yourself, "Here's a film starring two A-list big shots, a handful of Oscars between them, who have proven in Charlie Wilson's War that they can work together, how come I don't recall this getting much of a push when it was in theaters?" As will often be the answer in those situations, the marketers knew what they were doing.

Sorry to be an hour late. Oh, yeah.

Tom Hanks directs and stars as the title character in this film, a tale of a middle-aged man laid off from his retail job and enrolling in junior college to improve his employment prospects. As decent, down-to-earth Larry is transformed, he too transforms the lives of those around him, including that of literature/communications professor Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts). At least that's the way they drew it up.

Our local "arthouse" cinema is showing This Is Spinal Tap this weekend, to coincide with a release date of 11/11/11. It's such a publicist's dream that it's too bad they didn't use it as an excuse to give the film a general re-release. Turns out, Nigel Tufnel Day is, like, a thing.

Takin' Yogi to Moneyball.