Edgy MD

The band playing CBGB in Hannah and Her Sisters was called The 39 Steps.

A .457? That would be big. Harry carried a .44 though.

Too hard. How big is that gun pointed at my head?

That's a pretty good analogy in that both made the second ones seem better than they were. Of course, Bad News Bears is the sort of high quality that the Karate Kid only occasionally sniffs.

Really almost nothing to it. I figured I had to fill in the gap in my KK awareness, but now I'm blue and almost kind of angry that I watched.

Daniel and Miyagi come home from Okinawa (with neither of the women whose hearts they won and whose village they saved) and walk right into a revenge trap set up by Kreese, his rich karate buddy from the Vietnam days, and some guy named Mike Barnes.

The woman raised her kids with pet lions, people. That's sort of crazy.

16) Mostly forgotten early dramatic adaptations: * The Skin Game (1931) * Juno and the Paycock (1930)

A side issue: The Birds is a really great film... until you become an adult. Discuss.

Truth. This got nominated for best picture. In retrospect, it looks like a weak year, but not everything wrong with it is the script --- hammy special effects (which were also nominated), a monotonous one-theme score (which won!), and gooofy crap with the actors talking straight to the camera as they delve into their neuroses. Side splittingly hilarious stuff. I'd like to say that the 'Cock wasn't on his game yet, but this is 11 years after The 39 Steps and that was great. Only the cinematography is worthy of the name on the marquee.

Icy-cold analyst played by Ingrid Bergman falls for a fellow practioner (Gergory Peck) of the modern science of "psychology," and when he turns out to be not what he seems, and wanted for murder, runs off with him until her badass Freudian techniques can get to the bottom of his mysterious past. Alfred Hitchcock directs, paints a landscape of cryptic shadows, and --- when we get into the dreamscape of the subconscious --- turns the wheel over Salvador Dali. Oh, yeah.

I did that once --- the test audience thingie. I wrote and and wrote and wrote and wrote. The survey form was filled and I turned it over and wrote in the margins. We were was the last guys in the theater and my brother was pissed at me. He said the movie's representatives in the back of the theater were getting depressed watching me, but not everything I wrote was bad. Anyhow, the film was worse by the time it came out to general release.

In the final game of the playoffs, Ceciliani went 3-4 with a 2B, a run, and a caught stealing. After flirting with .400 and winning the batting title, he hit .474 in the playoffs. He even starred in the New York Penn League All-Star game. A completely excellent season for an excellent team.

I certainly am not requesting that they should hve tried to make it seem like all indie film-makers were pure and good and right. I'm suggesting that my sympathies didn't tend to fall where they seem to be steering them towards. Where do you rate it on the 1-5 scale?

See, I thought their sense of humor was mean, bitter, un-funny, and self-congratulatory. And so I didn't want to see the film they were shopping at all. There's a scene where two guys are running around Park City, Utah --- home of Sundance and a half dozen other satellite festivals that run concurrently --- papering information kiosks with posters for their film, and covering up all the posters already there. And when a filmmaker who had a single poster taped up whines at their scorched Earth tactics, they reply with this supposedly realist argument that somebody else is going to come by in 20 minutes and cover all their posters up anyhow. My sympathy was sort of totally supposed to be with them, but it was with the whiney one. I watched it until the end, because it exposed a lot of hypocrisy and shady dealing --- and the same deck stacking I run up against selling songs --- but man, my main takeaway was that indy filmmakers can be a pack of annoying dorks with inflated egos. And the worst part is, because Kevin Smith is a funny raconteur, these bunch of guys (almost invariaby guys) seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the key to sellig your indy film is being a hip, wry, sniggling, detached dude flinging the insouciance. And almost all of them simply come across as garden-variety jerks.

Couple of guys with a camera make a movie, apply to a bunch of festivals, make the rounds, then make a seond movie --- this one --- about applying to festivals, making the rounds, and the politics and backscratching and egos and corporate interests that govern the film festival circuit.

There's already editorials out there crying for the Mets to not call him up lest he be damaged by the losing atmosphere.

You can find a handful who did all that and contributed songs to his or her films, but very few who contributed underscoring. The closest matches I can come up with are pop stars who merely dabbled in filmmaking --- Paul Simon, John Mellancamp, David Byrne. Nonetheless, I imagine his scoring was tinkling themes out on a piano and leaving it to a pro to orchestrate the full arrangements. I don't know if I'd guess same about Chaplin. Quincy Jones, maybe, but only a handful of thrown-off acting credits, and a mostly poor history as a filmmaker.

I'm glad to see Josey Wales there. I'm a fan. I think it's an American Seventh Seal, but I didn't think too many others took it seriously.

I think we need to divide these films into three categories --- Good, Bad, Fugly

Yeah, this is dumber, more insulting, and less ably rendered than the standard fare in which he appears. I promise. Not making that list is Winter Passing (2005), which I think you'll like.

metirish wrote: A return to form I'm reading for Will Ferrell , his best since Ricky Bobby said another. Yes or no.....I remember you liking Ricky Booby. I don't recall having seen any films recently with the word "Booby" in the title.

This was dumber than a box of dumb. It was so dumb, it should have been called The Eighth-Inning Guys. I was offended that it was this dumb so close to Ground Zero. Seriously, I was embarrassed for all involved. I was additionally sympathetically embarassed for men, women, cops, old people, and the homeless, among others. And I don't mean any of this in a good way. There was a dumb action movie called The Hard Way set in New York, and released in 1991. Comic buddy cop bullshit with Michael J. Fox and James Woods. Few think about that film from day to day. It was released, it was dumb, it sucked, and it was forgotten. This film will additionally slide down that same continuum of public awareness, but I thought of The Hard Way on my way home, thinking, "Man, The Other Guys sucked so much that The Hard Way would really make a nice palate cleanser right now." Maybe if you're kinda drunk or high or have the giggles going in this movie will reward any foggy good will you bring to it, but there was a scene where an old lady crossing the street with a walker is forced to be a go-between in sex talk between two other characters. Now, you may think OLD LADY + WALKER + SEX TALK = GOLDMINE OF COMIC GENIUS, but I was reduced to the sort of embarassed mortifications that I used to get watching Three's Company when I was 11. But that's me, right? No, I was in a theater filled with half-stoned, half-witted Baltimore teens, and I turned around and they were all kind of waiting for the scene to mercifully end. Three or four joined me in eventually putting their damn fingers in their stupid ears. If the rest of your day is a homerun, this is the film that will reach out and interfere with it while it's still in play, leading to a review, with your day eventually being sent back out the to base paths, where you still may have hopes for it, but instead find it disappointingly stranded on third, with Marky Mark chasing three jive-assed hanging sliders out of the strike zone.

Will Ferrell and Marky Mark are a mismatched pair of detectives. One is dying for more action and the other is doing all he can to avoid it. Action comes calling, and so do hyjinx, mayhem, romance, and those things popcorn films are made of.

You know who's still in the system? John Holdzkom, that's who. Maybe I should adopt that big maniac.