Edgy MD

What the fuck? I pulled the plug. Did anybody die making this film?

That's not particularly hard for me to believe. It's your tools that get you to A-Ball, but it's your bat, your bat, your bat that gets you to the bigs.

Even all drapey?

Yeah, I should have mentioned how well the birds come through as individual characters.

I seem to remember the Bucket liking Royal Tennebaums under another handle back in the day.

Yeah. (Sperlers coming.) How does a guy end a multi-state killing spree with an act of shocking vigilantism and draw the attention and multiple visits from out-of-state mobsters before killing said mobsters and then getting a call from a rival gang from out of state who he goes to visit and splatter, while the only law involved is the fat genial sherrif saying, "Consarn it, something here doesn't add up."? I expect that sort of hands-off silliness in, say, Gremlins. In this, I would think there'd be 100 FBI officers crawling around town. Plus, Viggo. With that big fucking chin... how are you expecting to go underground and pretend you're somebody else, lying right to your old associates' faces?

Damien Magnifico "If someone met me on a game day, he wouldn't like me. The days in between, I'm the goodest guy you can find." -- Roger Clemens 17 minutes ago � Comment �LikeUnlike Edgy DC Bull. about a minute ago �

History of Violence --- I mean it's all cool when a freak like Bill Hurt gets to play a mobster, but there are huge swaths of this that make no sense.

Anyhow, even though I chose this, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. Enjoyed it from the opening scene, in which our harmless square peg of a protagonist patiently explains his relationship to the flock to a crowd of insuffereable San Franciscans. You tend to keep your guard up against him --- a jobless failed musician drifter friend of nature. But it becomes clear soon enough that he's on the level, and his stewardship of the flock is responsible and honorable and not some sort Californian self-glorifying eccentricity. But there's a strange parallel --- they're wild birds, but non native, like him (he drifted down from Oregon), and subject to a naturalist criticism. And, like the birds, he's simultaneously fending for himself and depending on the kindness of others. Like the parrots in the flock that have been bred in the wild (against the odds), he may need a little kick to get out of the nest, despite the hawks circling overhead. In the end, he confesses that he's as cynical as the rest of us, but will testify to the meaningfulness of his relationship to the flock despite knowing how stupid it makes him sound. Four stars out of five from me. Beautiful bunch of birds.

ADVENTURELAND UP THE SOLOIST I LOVE YOU, MAN

A documentary that follows a flock of wild parrots --- some escapees, some throwaways, and some natively hatched --- living in San Francisco, and the eccentric who looks after them.

My wife is more of a re-renter than I am, and we just saw this again. Please be reassured that this is still a wonderful film. Turned out McCarthy was also used as a writer on Up. Disney buys up the talent like the Yankees.

Yeah, I figured Ashie was overstating it. I expected it was loaded with allegory about our imperialist selves. Still not particularly interested.

Nah. We have a right to look for meaning.

Maybe. I don't think the existence of decent-sized-but-disengaged-crowds at minor league parks is a direct consequence of sideshow antics. I just think the reality of affiliated ball keeps people from getting emotionally involved in the game. If it's all for the glory of a team representing a city we may never visit, and any successful player is busting his ass not for the glory of the town on his jersey, but to get the hell out of that town, well, I might be more interested in the antics of the costumed litter patrol guy, too. My wife enjoys me bringing her to minor league parks much more than major league ones.

Notice how the only ones paying attention to the game are the ones in uniform.

I would re-submit the poll. The old polls give you one vote, final and forever. The new polls allow people to switch, which I'm sure they would after frequent and vicious beatings.

Hmm... I don't want to act as if I'm unaware of their tastes, just that I have a much broader palate...

His few departures were all released under alternative pen names.

Maybe. I just threw them out there. Based mostly on my dad's shelf of water-logged mass-markets.

It's been going on a while. The name is a brand and, to be sure, many of those brand-name authors probably stop doing the writing well before they die. But yeah, it's kinda creepy. And I didn't mean to suggest that the books were aimed at seniors. But rather at adult males across a broad range of ages. But in their heyday, they were huge among 47-year-olds and if you didn't get started by the time you were fifty, AARP would sign you up. The heavy hitters in the category of Beach Reading for Dads: Robert Ludlum Ken Follett Martin Cruz-Smith Dan Fuckin-Brown I guess you can call the broad genre Conspiracy Thrillers (though I like my name better). Grahame Greene and other literary figures wrote books that could fit in this category, but Richard Condon turned it into a new publishing area with The Manchurian Candidate. After that, every major publishing house had to have one of these guys telling you about the secret Cold War web being woven all around you have NO FUCKING IDEA ABOUT. His ill gimmick was to title all his novels as The [surname] [Noun]. The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971) The Osterman Weekend (1972) The Matlock Paper (1973) The Rhinemann Exchange (1974) The Gemini Contenders (1976) The Chancellor Manuscript (1977) The Holcroft Covenant (1978) The Matarese Circle (1979) The Bourne Identity (1980) The Parsifal Mosaic (1982) The Aquitaine Progression (1984) The Bourne Supremacy (1986) The Icarus Agenda (1988) The Bourne Ultimatum (1990) The Scorpio Illusion (1993) The Apocalypse Watch (1995) The Matarese Countdown (1997) The Prometheus Deception (2000) Most of these guys, along with the genre, faded as the Cold War ended and they got too old to keep feeding the beast. The idea that Dan Brown survived and escaped the genre fiction shelves to be read seriously by a vast cross-section of the reading (and sometimes the otherwise non-reading) public just makes my head explode on a daily basis.

Ludlum has always been beach reading for your dad (and, specifically, my dad). I guess I'm glad those movies got made, because almost no films come out of Hollywood aimed at mature men (though I'm sure they're more youth-oriented than the books). Nonethless, I had zero interest in seeing them.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker wasn't very Hollywood happy this decade: 1. Eloge de l�amour (�In Praise of Love�) (2001, Jean-Luc Godard, France): Lives up to the promise of its title: one of the most unusual, tremulous, and understated of love stories, as well as the story of love itself; a depiction of history in the present tense, as well as a virtual thesis on the filming of history; a work of art, as well as the story of the work at the origin of art; Godard�s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema. You'll notice that none of his descriptions will include a plot summary. 2. The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson, United States): As ever with the films of Wes Anderson�the best new American director of the last twenty years�love and death, comedy and tragedy, comfort and adventure, understanding and opacity, style and substance fuse in a modernism of personal and reflexive cinema and a classicism of grand and subtle literary emotion. It's a certain brand of modernism though. I'd sum up his themes as the alienation of white privilege, and a desire to go back to the seventies before we found out how empty it was. But congrats to Anderson for making the list. U-S-A! U-S-A! 3. The World (2005, Jia Zhangke, China): The best new non-American director of the last twenty years, here revealing, at great risk, China�s, and his own, painfully ambiguous place in the world. Fuck the Zhangkes! 4. A Talking Picture (2003, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal): The great September 11th movie, from a spry ninety-five-year-old who sees not only the century�s long view but seemingly encompasses Homer�s. Dude is still living and allegedly film-making at 101. 5. �Regular Lovers� (2005, Philippe Garrel, France): The events of 1968, depicted by one of its cinematic heroes as an intimate epic�and, with a self-deprecating fury, as a lovely but unsustainable burst of youthful lyricism. Did Valadius write that blurb? 6. Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. (2001, Claude Lanzmann, France): This discussion with Yehuda Lerner, who took part in the uprising against the extermination camp�s guards, is as profound a dialogue on the morality of violence as the cinema has seen. A Nazi documentary built around a single interview. Yikey. 7. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2009, Wang Bing, China): From one of the decade�s two best new directors, as well as its best new nonfiction filmmaker. If I had seen Wang�s �West of the Tracks� in its entirety, I�d have put it here instead; I saw only about a third of its nine hours, but this feature, converging recent Chinese history with the sufferings endured, at the hands of the regime, by one free-thinking couple, does quite as well. Wang Bing sounds like a mashup of "Everybody Have Fun Tonight and "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby." Anyhow, can you tell I haven't seen any of these? 8. Knocked Up (2008, Judd Apatow, USA): Suddenly, all contemporary comedy seemed old-fashioned. From Lubitsch through the Farrelly brothers, the funniest guys in the room were behind the camera; Judd Apatow discovered, or rediscovered, the trick of the great silent clowns�to put funny people on screen�and to make it personal. (If Eddie Murphy had, say, directed �Norbit� in addition to starring in it, it would likely find a place on this list too.) I liked it too, and I think Apatow is on to something, but, of all the American film-makers... 9. Moolaad (2005, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal): Women, resistance, and centuries of oppressive tradition, seen with the fiercely clarifying wisdom of age. The subject is genital mutilation; the phalanx of respected women eager to do the dirty work is truly frightening. Bloody hell. 10. The Other Half (2007, Ying Liang, China): The other of the decade�s two best new filmmakers, the one who does dramas, bringing a laser-like analytical eye to the crossroads of private life and oppressive authority. His anger builds to an apocalyptic outpouring with few parallels in the history of cinema. Score it: China: 3 France: 3 United States: 2 Portugal: 1 Sengal: 1

Would have guessed Almost Famous was from 1998 or 1999. That's got to be on my list, as it's almost perfect. Hard to rank the three Lord of the Rings Films. They all hit pretty equally for me. I guess the more Christopher Lee, the better. The less Sean Bean, also.

Going with ten, reviewing this forum (which covers, at best, half of the decade), I've got: 1) Wall-E 2) The Station Agent 3) Gran Torino 4) The Wonder Boys 5) Superbad 6) Sideways 7) Adventureland 8) The Incredibles 9) Once 10) Um, Hitch, I guess Given half a chance, I'm sure I'd pull half of those, but that's where I am right now.