Edgy MD

And so incredibly credible. In a world of five billion folks, but only 200 or so superdudes, one of the them gets frozen in ice, sunk in the ocean inadvertantly freed by another one, and spotted by a team of them. Of course, it's no more far-fetched than Superman's inadvertant freeing of General Zod. Far less fetched, in fact.

Clint Eastwood, still in the afterglow of Unforgiven, directs this David Baldacci adaptation that opens as a heist movie and quickly turns into a political thriller. It was available to watch instantly, so I did.

Best I could find was "violation of team conduct and rules" supposedly not following Uncle Fonzie's orders.

He's a kid who makes trouble. Mets sign him as 17-year-old secondbaseman out of La Ciudad de Shortstops in 2007, and he puts up pedestrian numbers in the Dominican Summer League. A .707 OPS. He heads to rookie ball with the Gulf Coast Mets and again is neither a sensation nor a disappointment. A .760 OPS. You figure that he's due for short-season ball in Brooklyn or Kingsport, but no, the Mets have enough faith to send him to Savannah. Does he respond? Yes he does! He absolutely pounds the ball in April, to the tune of .385 / .406 / .615 // 1.021. Big times coming, then the punk pulls an Alhaji and gets suspended for "conduct detrimental to his team." Fortunately, it only lasted a week, but it seems Met prospects tend to get suspended in Savannah. I'm still looking to find out what happened there, but he cooled off for two weeks upon his return before smoking it again the last week (five doubles).

I'd like 'em both in the rotation.

The dots connect after repeat viewings of The Maltese Falcon. This one, I suspect I'd still be confused.

I'll be honest. I can't follow the convoluted plots of a lot of noir mystery films without re-winding a half a dozen times. It would be easier if the characters all wore numbers.

She does a pretty good job tolerating them up until that point. As for the sister and her husband, subplots don't need deep attention, but plot gaps there are also annoying.

I also want to note that this is the first time I've ever seen a popular film depict a woman in a hormonal rage and not play it for slapstick.

I don't think it was meant to suggest that nobody he cared about ever died.

I'm agreing with Vic here, not about the abortion issue per se (though that's certainly a big part of it), but just a bunch of times they get from point A to point C and leave out some of the B-stuff. There's plenty of reasons I could speculate why she didn't abort. Her mother's a monster who can't not euphemise about it, which is sobering. But you just have to arrive at C and play such guessing games about how they got there. There's plenty there like that. We never see the sister and her husband reconcile. I have no idea how she can stand his douchebag friends and their algae-infested pool. I think there was probably a lot of scenes with different tones and it was a hell of an editing job --- and the editor had to make tough choices among funny scenes, plot coherence, and consistency of tone.

Farmer Ted wrote: Duchovny is fantastic in this show. Does not compute.

The funny thing is how many of the scenes in this film you may have seen in other Clint Eastwood films. Old Clint tinkering around his garage? Space Cowboys. Clint staring down punks? Dirty Harry. Clint walking masoquistically and coolly into a showdown even though he's hopelessly outgunned? Pick a western. The Outlaw Josey Wales, for instance. Clint walking masocquistically and coolly into a showdown even though he's hopelessly too old? Unforgiven, baby. Clint having a big enough pair of balls to spit in God's face? True Crime. Clint ominously coughing shit up? Honky Tonk Man. Clint abusing an ethnic minority while begrudgingly growing in affection for them? The Dirty Harry films again. Clint being disgusted by the younger generations? Where do you start? He even tinkles the piano and croaks out a melody at the end. Whatever, but somehow he tinkers around his cinematic garage and puts the familiar pieces together and makes a vehicle thats new enough to be compelling, and tells a very American story that's subtley almost as much about our shame and glory as a country as it is about Walt's success and failure as a person.

Clint Eastwood plays a grumpy old veteran, chasing immigrant neighbors off his lawn and away from his prized 1972 Gran Torino, until a lack of beer and other circumstances conspire to bring their lives together.

congrats. As long as he is not neglected. (Merged from Adopted: Josh Thole, 5/1/2009)

I missed the hijinx. Choppy is short on dialogue and long on theme. Hustlin' little Alejandro didn't sleep much did he?

Didn't get through it. Cliches, man.

He's OBPing at .462 for Binghamton. Got to give him the love and attention. Thole and Juan Nieve were ejected last week for having a mound chat that went too long. I assume the ump tagged them for delaying the game to allow a reliever to warm up, but that's pretty cool. (Merged from Adopted: Josh Thole, 5/1/2009)

Plus they have an even higher ranked prospect at shortstop who might end up at second. No reason to scramble the eggs now.

Recent history suggests that the Mets will keep a guy at his most challenging position until the end of his development.

That's great Dock. Now, how many fingers do you see?

Yeah, he's fallen below Dillon Gee on the rankings of New Dylans. You should interview him.

A posse of the young and supple play out their traumas in a day at work at their indy record store, while grappling with the looming sale of the place to a corporate owner.

The thing about the huge asshole brillo protagonist is that you slowly --- yeah, too slowly perhaps --- see how much his bullshit is a fa�ade covering up teenage self-loathing, and what kind of friend his buddy must be to see through that and continue to tolerate him. There's co-dependence there, but something more. And it gives a male version of what's going on in Ghost World --- two teenagers who've been constant companions since childhood coming painfully to terms with realizing that they'll have to find adult indentities on their own. Yeah, his constant degrading sex talk and abuse of his only friends is repellant, but I can't look back at my teenage friends and say that I didn't know that guy. A director has to be real careful to direct a movie like this --- but defensible it is. They portray the teenage sex obsession/awkwardness hand-in-hand with the reckless booziness, but make more particularly clear than most other movies how the latter is used explicitly to anaestsize kids through the former, and hints at just how tragic that is. My main problem was the cops. They were funny as heck, but so surreal that they seemed to be out of a different movie.

She likes me, Bub.