Baseball Movies
With a new baseball season underway you may want to a way to satisfy your jones for the national pastime during rain delays and off days with a movie. Here are the ten best ones out there and why they’re worth watching even if you’re not that into the grand old game.
1-Bull Durham – Kevin Costner’s first baseball movie, the best one ever. Written and directed by former minor leaguer Ron Shelton it captures the day in – day out spirit of the game. Baseball groupie/player life coach Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), pitching wunderkind Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) along with Costner’s “Crash Davis” are the leading characters in a movie full of great ones. The score is dreadful but you can pretty much ignore it.
2-Bang the Drum Slowly – A tearjerker for guys. Great pre-expansion baseball ethos in an early film for Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro. Moriarty, whose grandfather George Moriarty was a teammate of Ty Cobb, is Henry “Author” Wiggin the star pitcher on the New York Mammoths and the best friend of 2nd or 3rd string catcher Bruce Pearson. Pearson is “too dumb to play a joke on” and he’s dying.
3-Field of Dreams – Costner’s a fan this time, not a player. It’s hard to believe you could be in America since 1989 and not know what this is about. “Hey Dad?...You wanna have a catch?” Nice score by James Horner – the “Titanic” guy.
4- Eight Men Out – The story of the Black Sox scandal. In 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox allegedly conspired to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. John Cusack is George “Buck” Weaver the White Sox 3rd baseman and the central figure in this telling of the story. He knew about the fix but kept quiet about it. He and the seven who were in on it were banned from baseball when it was uncovered.
5- The Natural – Robert Redford is the title character “Roy Hobbs.” A lot of people rank this as number one but it’s a mystical tale and those don’t have much appeal to me. Randy Newman’s score is on of the best ever for a sports movie.
6-A League of Their Own – During World War II Phil Wrigley, heir to the chewing gum company and Chicago Cubs owner, decided to start up a league for women. It took me a while to see this one but it is a good movie. Tom Hanks has the classic line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Anybody whose team has lost the 7th game of the World Series knows that’s not true.
7-Soul of the Game – Another fact based tale. This one’s about Jackie Robinson (Blair Brown), Satchell Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson), all playing in black baseball in 1945. Satch and Josh are the greatest players, but Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey (Edward Herrmann) chooses Jack to be the first African American to play in the white Major Leagues. Good choice.
8-61* - Billy Crystal made a movie for HBO about the 1961 baseball season and the duel between New York Yankees Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) to break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season. Billy Crystal made a VERY good movie.
9 – For Love of the Game – Kevin Costner’s third (and so far final) baseball movie. This time he’s Billy Chapel, a Hall of Fame bound pitcher at the end of his career on a dreary Detroit Tigers team. Billy’s relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) is half the movie. The other half is what may be his last game. The athlete’s concentration is represented better than in any other movie albeit very simply. It’s based on a novel by Michael Shaara who also wrote the brilliant novel “The Killer Angels.” Shaara’s book is better than the movie but the movie is worth seeing. The score by Basil Poledouris may be the best ever for a sports film…either that or Jerry Goldsmith’s score for “Rudy”.
10-Cobb – Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones) was a great ballplayer, maybe the greatest ever, but he was also a racist (even for that time), more than a little nuts and in general one enormous asshole. He doesn’t come off any better in Ron Shelton’s other (after Bull Durham) baseball movie.
Extra innings to mention a few more. The original Bad News Bears would be in many people’s top 10. On another day it might be in mine.
In “It Happens Every Spring” Ray Milland is a chemistry professor and a baseball fan who develops a substance that repels wood. (He may have passed the formula on to my first wife but I’m just guessing) Ray Milland looks as much like a ballplayer as I look like a show girl. Paul Douglas – one of his three appearances in baseball movies of this era (circa 1950) which makes him a kind of lesser Kevin Costner.
The biopics “Pride of St. Louis” (about Dizzy Dean), “Pride of the Yankees” (about Lou Gehrig), “The Jackie Robinson Story” (Jackie plays himself), “The Stratton Story”(about 30s pitcher Monty Stratton who blew his leg off in a hunting accident) and “The Rookie” are all worth seeing. Ronald Reagan as Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander in “The Winning Team” isn’t any worse than Gary Cooper as Gehrig but the film overall is infinitely sappier.
Worst
The one thing most of the above movies have in common is that they are populated by people who are able to look like ballplayers. Some really good actors (see Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out”) aren’t the least bit athletic and in a baseball movie you should at least LOOK like you’ve played the game … at least once.
1-The Babe Ruth Story – William Bendix plays The Bambino in an absolutely dreadful movie. For long shots they got former big leaguer Babe Herman to play Ruth but the close-up stuff has to be Bendix and is so bad you’re embarrassed for him, his family, his church, his bartender, just everybody.
2- Fever Pitch – Drew Barrymore meets Jimmy Fallon during the off season and he seems pretty cool until opening day when she finds out he’s a typically obsessive Red Sox fan. As a spokesman for the obsessive Red Sox fan community this thing is so full of holes it makes swiss cheese seem solid as granite. Trust me, she would have known right away because he would have been counting the days till Spring Training like the rest of us.
If you want to see a good movie called “Fever Pitch” see the original. Based on a Nick Hornby novel it’s about an equally obsessive British football fan who roots for Arsenal. Everything about it is better except it’s about soccer.
3-Fear Strikes Out – Based on Jim Piersall’s autobiography (with Boston sportswriter Al Hirshberg). Jim was a Red Sox outfielder in the 50s who had what we now call bi-polar disorder. His disruptiveness eventually led to his being sent to a mental hospital but he came back to have a fairly long successful career in baseball. Anthony Perkins plays Jimmy in the movie and it’s obvious he had never played a game of baseball in his life until they began filming. Karl Malden plays his father who would have driven any of us over the edge.
4-The Fan – Robert DeNiro is the obsessed title character who decides to stalk and, he hopes, kill San Francisco Giants star, hotdog and egomaniac Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes). This film has a really good cast with Benicio Del Toro, Ellen Barkin and John Leguizamo (and a cameo by John Kruck) it just doesn’t add up to much.
5 - Damn Yankees – based on a Faustian novel by Douglas Wallop about a fan of the Washington Senators who sells his soul to the Devil, herein known as Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston the best part of the film), to become the player who can lead his team to the pennant. Some great songs but Gwen Verdon as Applegate’s temptress, Lola, is at most oddly sexy. You‘re way better off to read the book originally titled “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” Fortunately there have been a lot of those lately.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Visitor (PG-13) Movie Review
Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) teaches economics at a college in Connecticut. He’s been pretty much sleepwalking through his life since his wife died and maybe for a while before that. The late Mrs. Vale had been a concert pianist and taught piano as well. As the film opens Walter is trying to learn to play his wife’s instrument although, as his fourth would-be teacher tells him, he has no aptitude for it.
Whatever enthusiasm he had for teaching economics, hard to imagine given that it’s known as “the dismal science,” has long since left him and he’s seen creating this semester’s syllabus by taking white out to last year’s. When called upon to give a paper he co-authored with a younger colleague he tries to avoid it by admitting that he hadn’t really done any of the work, just put his name on it to lend his prestige to the work. Boxed in, he has to go. It’s no large imposition though. He has an apartment in New York, where the conference is being held, although he hasn’t been there in a long time.
Arriving at the apartment he finds a young couple, squatters, who’ve been paying someone named “Ivan” to rent the place. Walter doesn’t know Ivan from Adam’s off ox and squatters, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), quickly pack up their belongings and agree to leave. But Walter offers to let them stay for a few days till they can find a place of their own. A lot can happen in a few days.
Tarek, who plays a drum in a jazz combo, finds that Walter has more aptitude for the drum than he did the piano. Truth be told, Tarek – a warm, engaging young man – is a better teacher than the piano professional. He’s encouraging and reinforcing and Walter quickly gains a measure of confidence with the instrument. Enough that he joins Tarek in playing in an ad hoc drum band in Central Park. On the way home Tarek is caught in the subway turnstile with the drum and police wrongly pull him aside for jumping the fare. It’s all a small understanding that would have been cleared up in a few minutes, a few hours at most, but for the fact that Tarek is an illegal alien.
I’ve read that writer/director Thomas McCarthy says he was making a story about people, but so much of the plot is focused on America’s massively screwed up immigration system that what I saw was a film that centered on that. The only time Walter Vale’s displays any degree of emotion is when he’s gone to visit Tarek in one of immigration’s detention facilities.
I was a little uncomfortable with what appeared to me as Vale as the heroic Anglo figure but you can decide about that for yourself. The film is well acted and the story is engaging and worth seeing.
Whatever enthusiasm he had for teaching economics, hard to imagine given that it’s known as “the dismal science,” has long since left him and he’s seen creating this semester’s syllabus by taking white out to last year’s. When called upon to give a paper he co-authored with a younger colleague he tries to avoid it by admitting that he hadn’t really done any of the work, just put his name on it to lend his prestige to the work. Boxed in, he has to go. It’s no large imposition though. He has an apartment in New York, where the conference is being held, although he hasn’t been there in a long time.
Arriving at the apartment he finds a young couple, squatters, who’ve been paying someone named “Ivan” to rent the place. Walter doesn’t know Ivan from Adam’s off ox and squatters, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), quickly pack up their belongings and agree to leave. But Walter offers to let them stay for a few days till they can find a place of their own. A lot can happen in a few days.
Tarek, who plays a drum in a jazz combo, finds that Walter has more aptitude for the drum than he did the piano. Truth be told, Tarek – a warm, engaging young man – is a better teacher than the piano professional. He’s encouraging and reinforcing and Walter quickly gains a measure of confidence with the instrument. Enough that he joins Tarek in playing in an ad hoc drum band in Central Park. On the way home Tarek is caught in the subway turnstile with the drum and police wrongly pull him aside for jumping the fare. It’s all a small understanding that would have been cleared up in a few minutes, a few hours at most, but for the fact that Tarek is an illegal alien.
I’ve read that writer/director Thomas McCarthy says he was making a story about people, but so much of the plot is focused on America’s massively screwed up immigration system that what I saw was a film that centered on that. The only time Walter Vale’s displays any degree of emotion is when he’s gone to visit Tarek in one of immigration’s detention facilities.
I was a little uncomfortable with what appeared to me as Vale as the heroic Anglo figure but you can decide about that for yourself. The film is well acted and the story is engaging and worth seeing.
Charlie Wilson's War - Movie review
Charlie Wilson’s War (R)
If they used this film to teach government in high school every student, make that every straight male student, would enthusiastically seek political office as soon as he became able. This is a film based on a true story about a congressman who makes his mind up to help the Afghans kick the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Sounds pretty simple when you boil it down to that, probably somewhat wonkish, more than likely more than a little bit boring. Trust me, boring it ain’t.
Even if you can’t tell your three branches of government from your bicameral legislature you can enjoy this congressman at work. Charlie (Tom Hanks) is a great character in the spirit of Harry Gondorf. He gets people to buy things they don’t really understand for people they don’t genuinely care about and like that they’re doing it.
Charlie is a womanizing, drinking, at least occasional cocaine using and very effective congressman. His congressional office staff is made up of attractive young women, nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels,” and one can reasonably conclude that Charlie interviewed each one personally. As one of the Angels explains to a constituent, “Congressman Wilson, he has an expression. He says uhh, ‘You can teach them to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits.’" He summons his staff with one word, “Jailbait!”
Charlie’s allies are Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the sixth richest woman in Texas and a right-wing Christian, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a CIA veteran who has been pushed aside because he doesn’t fit the ivy-league self image of the agency at the time, circa 1980. Joanne prompts Charlie to visit Pakistan to see the plight of the Afghan refugees. When he gets back, he is energized and over the course of the film (a spritely 97 minutes) he gets congress to raise the appropriation for the Afghans from $5-million to $500-million. How does he do it? Two ways.
First, Charlie’s style diverts attention. As Gust put it, “As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one’s gonna fuckin’ notice.”
Second, Charlie holds more I-O-U’s than anyone else in congress. He votes for other people’s bills because they ask him to. They vote for his bills because they owe him. And your civics lesson for today is that you can get a lot done on Capitol Hill if people owe you something. The sad part is that once the Afghans drove the Russians out Charlie couldn’t get congress to fund much lesser amounts to rebuild Afghanistan. That allowed the Taliban to take over and we don’t yet know how that all will turn out.
Gust tells the story this way: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't ‘cause his leg’s all messed up, and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful." Now the Zen master says, "We'll see."
See the movie because it’s a good one and fun to watch. Whether you’ll learn something from it, “we’ll see.”
If they used this film to teach government in high school every student, make that every straight male student, would enthusiastically seek political office as soon as he became able. This is a film based on a true story about a congressman who makes his mind up to help the Afghans kick the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Sounds pretty simple when you boil it down to that, probably somewhat wonkish, more than likely more than a little bit boring. Trust me, boring it ain’t.
Even if you can’t tell your three branches of government from your bicameral legislature you can enjoy this congressman at work. Charlie (Tom Hanks) is a great character in the spirit of Harry Gondorf. He gets people to buy things they don’t really understand for people they don’t genuinely care about and like that they’re doing it.
Charlie is a womanizing, drinking, at least occasional cocaine using and very effective congressman. His congressional office staff is made up of attractive young women, nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels,” and one can reasonably conclude that Charlie interviewed each one personally. As one of the Angels explains to a constituent, “Congressman Wilson, he has an expression. He says uhh, ‘You can teach them to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits.’" He summons his staff with one word, “Jailbait!”
Charlie’s allies are Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the sixth richest woman in Texas and a right-wing Christian, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a CIA veteran who has been pushed aside because he doesn’t fit the ivy-league self image of the agency at the time, circa 1980. Joanne prompts Charlie to visit Pakistan to see the plight of the Afghan refugees. When he gets back, he is energized and over the course of the film (a spritely 97 minutes) he gets congress to raise the appropriation for the Afghans from $5-million to $500-million. How does he do it? Two ways.
First, Charlie’s style diverts attention. As Gust put it, “As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one’s gonna fuckin’ notice.”
Second, Charlie holds more I-O-U’s than anyone else in congress. He votes for other people’s bills because they ask him to. They vote for his bills because they owe him. And your civics lesson for today is that you can get a lot done on Capitol Hill if people owe you something. The sad part is that once the Afghans drove the Russians out Charlie couldn’t get congress to fund much lesser amounts to rebuild Afghanistan. That allowed the Taliban to take over and we don’t yet know how that all will turn out.
Gust tells the story this way: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't ‘cause his leg’s all messed up, and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful." Now the Zen master says, "We'll see."
See the movie because it’s a good one and fun to watch. Whether you’ll learn something from it, “we’ll see.”
Monday, March 30, 2009
Some Bad Ideas
Sometimes you see something and you recognize immediately that it’s not a good idea. This happened to me the other day when I was watching a Cleveland Indians exhibition game on television. Yes, I really do that.
When Cleveland was at bat somebody got the bright idea to play an audio clip of a bugle call to which the crowd in attendance was supposed to respond by shouting, “Charge!” The actual response was, to say the least, uninspired and the announcer allowed that maybe the spring training crowd wasn’t as into it as the crowd would be in the regular season, but I don’t think that was the problem.
I think it’s a bad idea to play a bugle call for a cavalry charge at an INDIANS game. Whose side did you think the crowd would be on anyway? They’re Cleveland fans, they’re for the Indians. You don’t play a bugle call to inspire the Indians, do you? See what I mean? That was a bad idea right from the get go.
Here’s another one. I’m driving down the road last Saturday on a comparatively warm, officially spring day. Out on the sidewalk is a man with a white cane out for a walk. Good idea. But he’s wearing earphones. Bad idea. I’m not trying to dump on the visually challenged community and I never go for one of my walks without my iPod but if your vision is already bad enough to merit a white cane don’t you think you ought to be paying attention to the sounds of a busy street? Another one that should have been identified as a bad idea right away.
Sometimes something seems like a good idea until you realize that the law of unintended consequences has come into play. Or as we put it here, “nothing causes problems like solutions.” The 18th amendment to the constitution was to control the influence of demon rum. While almost everyone has some story about a funny thing that happened to someone while drunk, we’re finally learning that there’s not much funny that can happen when you put a drunk behind the wheel. And, truth be told, people who are drunk are a lot less funny to people who aren’t drunk than they like to think.
So, okay, the creation of prohibition seemed like a good idea at the time. Ratification began with Mississippi in January of 1918 and was certified before the end of January, 1919. Probably the only time since the Civil War that Mississippi has been ahead of anybody about anything. Rhode Island, to its eternal credit, was the only state to reject the amendment. This bright idea brought us such things as “bathtub gin” and “near beer,” artificially concocted substitutes which were about as good an idea as your average home meth lab is today, maybe with less quality control. It was said at the time that whoever named it “near beer” was a lousy judge of distance. My mother theorized once that it was bad home-made booze that killed her father.
The other problem caused by this solution was the growth of organized crime. Outlawing alcohol didn’t make the demand for it go away, it just made the supply go underground. Whenever there’s a demand for a product or a service somebody will find a way to meet it, and probably at a profit if they have any business sense at all. So America practically handed a cash cow to people willing to engage in illegal activity and said, “Here you go. Milk it for all it’s worth.”
Did you know that of the 27 amendments to the constitution that have been ratified ONLY the 18th was repealed? And once we got around to it we did it pretty quickly too. The 21st amendment repealed the 18th and was ratified in less than 10 months. South Carolina was the only state to outright reject the 21st amendment by the way.
All of this came to mind when I heard on the news that New Hampshire’s House of Representatives has passed a law to allow medical marijuana in the Granite State. It goes to the Senate next and if it passes there it’s on to the Governor. John Lynch is a very popular guy in these parts because, as a friend of mine pointed out, he’s the best darn high school principal we’ve ever had.
Which is a lot of what the Governor does in New Hampshire. He shows up at the smile-and-wave events, looks stern when there’s something involving the law, and is always appropriately somber at an important funeral or disaster. He’s a good barometer of the public sentiment on the issues and he does it without getting caught looking at polls.
Not because I use it, I don’t - I’m flaky enough already, but we need to legalize marijuana and probably some other drugs because it’s obvious that the whole drug war is a disaster along the lines of the 18th amendment. We’re legislating against an activity that an awful lot of people want to participate in that doesn’t really harm anyone but the user.
Protecting us from ourselves never really works. Part of freedom is the right to make bad choices and then having to live with them … unless she changes the locks and throws your stuff into the street.
When Cleveland was at bat somebody got the bright idea to play an audio clip of a bugle call to which the crowd in attendance was supposed to respond by shouting, “Charge!” The actual response was, to say the least, uninspired and the announcer allowed that maybe the spring training crowd wasn’t as into it as the crowd would be in the regular season, but I don’t think that was the problem.
I think it’s a bad idea to play a bugle call for a cavalry charge at an INDIANS game. Whose side did you think the crowd would be on anyway? They’re Cleveland fans, they’re for the Indians. You don’t play a bugle call to inspire the Indians, do you? See what I mean? That was a bad idea right from the get go.
Here’s another one. I’m driving down the road last Saturday on a comparatively warm, officially spring day. Out on the sidewalk is a man with a white cane out for a walk. Good idea. But he’s wearing earphones. Bad idea. I’m not trying to dump on the visually challenged community and I never go for one of my walks without my iPod but if your vision is already bad enough to merit a white cane don’t you think you ought to be paying attention to the sounds of a busy street? Another one that should have been identified as a bad idea right away.
Sometimes something seems like a good idea until you realize that the law of unintended consequences has come into play. Or as we put it here, “nothing causes problems like solutions.” The 18th amendment to the constitution was to control the influence of demon rum. While almost everyone has some story about a funny thing that happened to someone while drunk, we’re finally learning that there’s not much funny that can happen when you put a drunk behind the wheel. And, truth be told, people who are drunk are a lot less funny to people who aren’t drunk than they like to think.
So, okay, the creation of prohibition seemed like a good idea at the time. Ratification began with Mississippi in January of 1918 and was certified before the end of January, 1919. Probably the only time since the Civil War that Mississippi has been ahead of anybody about anything. Rhode Island, to its eternal credit, was the only state to reject the amendment. This bright idea brought us such things as “bathtub gin” and “near beer,” artificially concocted substitutes which were about as good an idea as your average home meth lab is today, maybe with less quality control. It was said at the time that whoever named it “near beer” was a lousy judge of distance. My mother theorized once that it was bad home-made booze that killed her father.
The other problem caused by this solution was the growth of organized crime. Outlawing alcohol didn’t make the demand for it go away, it just made the supply go underground. Whenever there’s a demand for a product or a service somebody will find a way to meet it, and probably at a profit if they have any business sense at all. So America practically handed a cash cow to people willing to engage in illegal activity and said, “Here you go. Milk it for all it’s worth.”
Did you know that of the 27 amendments to the constitution that have been ratified ONLY the 18th was repealed? And once we got around to it we did it pretty quickly too. The 21st amendment repealed the 18th and was ratified in less than 10 months. South Carolina was the only state to outright reject the 21st amendment by the way.
All of this came to mind when I heard on the news that New Hampshire’s House of Representatives has passed a law to allow medical marijuana in the Granite State. It goes to the Senate next and if it passes there it’s on to the Governor. John Lynch is a very popular guy in these parts because, as a friend of mine pointed out, he’s the best darn high school principal we’ve ever had.
Which is a lot of what the Governor does in New Hampshire. He shows up at the smile-and-wave events, looks stern when there’s something involving the law, and is always appropriately somber at an important funeral or disaster. He’s a good barometer of the public sentiment on the issues and he does it without getting caught looking at polls.
Not because I use it, I don’t - I’m flaky enough already, but we need to legalize marijuana and probably some other drugs because it’s obvious that the whole drug war is a disaster along the lines of the 18th amendment. We’re legislating against an activity that an awful lot of people want to participate in that doesn’t really harm anyone but the user.
Protecting us from ourselves never really works. Part of freedom is the right to make bad choices and then having to live with them … unless she changes the locks and throws your stuff into the street.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Review: "Ghost Town"
Ghost Town (PG-13)
This is one we can sum up in one line: W.C. Fields meets Ebenezer Scrooge and hold the Holiday part. The tag line for the film is, “He sees dead people…and they annoy him.” And by the way, the living annoy him too.
Greg Kinnear is Frank our combination Jacob Marley/Ghost of Christmas Present. Frank’s been caught cheating on his wife but before he knows how much she knows, Frank catches a bus…or you could more accurately say the bus catches Frank. This is how we meet Frank’s ghost.
Ricky Gervais is a dentist named Bertram Pincus who chose his profession because, “90% of the people I come in contact with have cotton wool stuffed in their mouth.” Bertram also died, while having a colonoscopy or something equally enchanting, but for just under seven minutes. As a result, he sees dead people. Turns out New York, where the film is set, is lousy with ghosts who are there because of unfinished business. Suddenly Bertram can see them, hear them and, they hope, help them.
Frank’s ghost manages to get more or less exclusive access to Bertram so that he can torpedo the engagement of Frank’s widow Gwen (Tea Leoni). Bertram, once he notices Gwen, is quite taken with her although she plans to marry Richard (Bill Campbell) an attorney so righteous you want to him to lose the girl.
Although Gwen’s familiar with Bertram from his not holding elevators for her, stealing cabs she has hailed and generally being a Fieldsian misanthropic jerk, she does find that he makes her laugh and she likes that. But there’s lingering tension for a couple of reasons. One, first impressions (Bertram really is a jerk remember) never really go away. Two, Frank never really goes away either although Gwen doesn’t know he’s there.
The moment of Christmas Future comes from Bertram’s associate in the Dental Office. Dr. Prashar (Aasif Mandvi) tries to get along with Pincus because Prashar’s a nice guy but after exchanges like one where Bertram asks him, “How would you extract information from a hostile?” even the patient dentist from India loses patience. He advises Pincus, “…this business of being such a fucking prick, what is it getting [you].”
Gervais is a delightfully consistent cur and his eventual transformation does make sense in a way that Scrooge’s never did for me. Maybe because Tea Leoni is cuter than any of Dickens’s ghosts and Bertram’s desolate smallness is worth giving up for her. Greg Kinnear is charmingly and unapologetically smarmy. You can see where this particular brand of low-life would be appealing.
Co-writer and director David Koepp has some impressively varied screenplays to his credit but brought a nice touch with some interesting twists to a romantic comedy that really is a comedy without having to resort to slapstick. Maybe he should team up again with Ricky and remake Fields’s classic, “Mississippi.” He’d make an interesting Commodore Jackson.
This is one we can sum up in one line: W.C. Fields meets Ebenezer Scrooge and hold the Holiday part. The tag line for the film is, “He sees dead people…and they annoy him.” And by the way, the living annoy him too.
Greg Kinnear is Frank our combination Jacob Marley/Ghost of Christmas Present. Frank’s been caught cheating on his wife but before he knows how much she knows, Frank catches a bus…or you could more accurately say the bus catches Frank. This is how we meet Frank’s ghost.
Ricky Gervais is a dentist named Bertram Pincus who chose his profession because, “90% of the people I come in contact with have cotton wool stuffed in their mouth.” Bertram also died, while having a colonoscopy or something equally enchanting, but for just under seven minutes. As a result, he sees dead people. Turns out New York, where the film is set, is lousy with ghosts who are there because of unfinished business. Suddenly Bertram can see them, hear them and, they hope, help them.
Frank’s ghost manages to get more or less exclusive access to Bertram so that he can torpedo the engagement of Frank’s widow Gwen (Tea Leoni). Bertram, once he notices Gwen, is quite taken with her although she plans to marry Richard (Bill Campbell) an attorney so righteous you want to him to lose the girl.
Although Gwen’s familiar with Bertram from his not holding elevators for her, stealing cabs she has hailed and generally being a Fieldsian misanthropic jerk, she does find that he makes her laugh and she likes that. But there’s lingering tension for a couple of reasons. One, first impressions (Bertram really is a jerk remember) never really go away. Two, Frank never really goes away either although Gwen doesn’t know he’s there.
The moment of Christmas Future comes from Bertram’s associate in the Dental Office. Dr. Prashar (Aasif Mandvi) tries to get along with Pincus because Prashar’s a nice guy but after exchanges like one where Bertram asks him, “How would you extract information from a hostile?” even the patient dentist from India loses patience. He advises Pincus, “…this business of being such a fucking prick, what is it getting [you].”
Gervais is a delightfully consistent cur and his eventual transformation does make sense in a way that Scrooge’s never did for me. Maybe because Tea Leoni is cuter than any of Dickens’s ghosts and Bertram’s desolate smallness is worth giving up for her. Greg Kinnear is charmingly and unapologetically smarmy. You can see where this particular brand of low-life would be appealing.
Co-writer and director David Koepp has some impressively varied screenplays to his credit but brought a nice touch with some interesting twists to a romantic comedy that really is a comedy without having to resort to slapstick. Maybe he should team up again with Ricky and remake Fields’s classic, “Mississippi.” He’d make an interesting Commodore Jackson.
And The Award Goes To...
Andy Warhol notwithstanding, we may not all get our 15 minutes of fame. Chances are we will get a trophy though. Whether you live in Calais, Maine, New Canaan, Connecticut, or Sheep Dip, South Dakota you’re going to win an award at some time in your life. And it’ll probably even be on television.
I know this because while I was scanning the T-V listings last week I found the notation that the “World Magic Awards” would be presented one night from 8 to 10 on “MyNetwork TV”. I mean no disrespect to the practitioners of prestidigitation but do we really need to broadcast their awards show?
Alright I guess the first argument is, if it’s on “MyNetwork TV” it’s probably still only seen by a small circle of family, friends and a few old classmates wondering whatever happened to the kid who wore the white tie and tails to school all the time. But this is really a symptom of a larger problem. As with most well intended nonsense it starts when we’re very young.
If you’re 5 or 6 years old it’s pretty neat to get a trophy for being on the t-ball team or for participating in Ms. Overbearing’s Dance Recital but by the time you hit 10 you probably know that you’re being patronized. If the kid who hit .600 and led your little league in everything and I got the same trophy I would have learned two things. First, the trophy doesn’t really mean much and second that the kid who hit .600 got screwed. He deserves more recognition than I got because he did more or did it so much better than I did that there should be some distinction for that.
But we all want recognition for something so the tendency is to slice the baloney so thin that everybody gets a piece...but it’s utterly worthless. So that’s bad enough but there’s something even worse. No matter how silly the award is, no matter how thinly we’ve sliced the baloney to give everybody a chance to win, somebody thinks it has to be televised.
“Live from Wilmington, Vermont it’s the first annual Small Market Tenor-Voiced New England Disc Jockeys Awards. Good evening and welcome to the White House Inn in Wilmington, Vermont where tonight we’ve gathered some of the most talented young to middle age non-descript announcers from communities all over New England who make as much in one night doing a club gig as they make in a week on the air. But they crave recognition and tonight at least one of them will get it.”
I will admit that there are a couple of awards shows that I do watch. I watch the Oscars every year because I’m generally interested in movies and because I hope each year that composer Thomas Newman, who is becoming the Susan Lucci of the Academy Awards, will get the trophy he’s deserved several times over. And my wife and I make an annual trip to Cooperstown, New York for the baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony. So I am not without responsibility for the proliferation of these things although I consider it a limited liability.
I don’t watch the Emmys because I don’t watch enough television to have a rooting interest. The Grammys were always just phony. In 1965 when the Beatles were at the height of their popularity the Grammy for best song went to Louis Armstrong for “Hello Dolly.” Great for Louie but totally out of touch with the reality of pop music. Although I’ve always found it amusing that for the first several years they handed out the same trophies year after year. They’d just go over to Henry Mancini’s house and borrow his from previous years and hand those to the winners so the winners would have something to accept. The Tonys, the Espys, The Golden Globes (unless Newman is nominated), the MTV awards, the Peoples Choice Awards, you name the award – I give it a miss.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Recession and weight loss solved!
It’s time once again for us to take a jaundiced look at the weekend news coverage in our little corner of New England. Local broadcast news on the weekends tends to be an especially disaster and crime driven endeavor.
Politicians mostly keep their mouths shut on Friday afternoon because if they say anything stupid it will be on the news, in the papers and in the blogosphere for at least two days before anyone can catch up with it on the Sunday morning talk shows. One of the first rules of politics is, or should be, don’t screw up on a slow news day.
So with that being the case the next staple of news, disasters, tend to get more play on weekend. That mudslide in the Italian Alps might not make the content cut on Wednesday when Congressman Slapjaw (R-Mississippi) is busy telling us why we should let AIG go belly up, while righteously ignoring that it will take the economies of half of the world with it. But on Saturday the Italian mudslide definitely runs, even though it sounds more like a cocktail than a news item. Disasters, though, are unreliable things. You can’t book them and have your staff prepped in advance.
Crime stories, however, are pretty reliable fodder for content because, lets face it, the people pulling crimes aren’t doing it while they wait to move up on the depth chart in the admissions department at M.I.T. No, they’re doing it either because it’s their best shot this side of a class action lawsuit to make a lot of money or because they think it’s their best opportunity just to make a living.
Here’s my favorite example from this past weekend as described by local media. A 23 year old Bronx, New York, man allegedly drove his BMW with New York license plates out of the I-95 toll booth in Hampton, New Hampshire at 80 miles per hour. State Police stopped the man and found he was driving on a suspended license.
That’s bad.
Police also found that he had a small amount of what they believe is marijuana. That’s not good either.
And seven ounces of what they believe is cocaine. That’s worse, isn’t it.
Maybe I was just raised too conservatively to be any fun or have any real vision. I don’t see the wisdom of driving around with cocaine and marijuana when my license has been suspended. But let’s be generous. These are hard times.
Let’s say that economic circumstances dictated that this young man had to take the risk associated with this activity because he has a child, certainly no more than a toddler, who needs a treatment for a medical condition. These days if that amounts to anything more than a loose tooth we’re talking a substantial amount of money. Well then you might think that this transaction would be lucrative enough to make the risk marginally acceptable. Of course that doesn’t account for the Beamer he’s driving but we’ll overlook that.
Doing 80 exiting the toll booth? Here’s where I have trouble making a case for the defendant. This is where we get to another line from “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”. The appropriate line here is “This life is hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
But one man’s folly can be another man’s opportunity. And from this I have created an idea that can lift you out of financial hardship and help you lose weight at the same time. Ready?
Become a drug mule for a Mexican drug lord! You’ll be visiting glamorous places in some of North Americas busiest cities, meeting exciting people and making money, and lots of it, at the same time! And if taking off that extra 20 pounds is going to make you feel better about yourself remember this: you won’t have much of an appetite after you’ve swallowed 30 condoms stuffed with cocaine. It’s a money making, weight loss system that can’t miss. All you need is the wisdom to recognize an opportunity when it’s presented to you.
Now I just have to figure out how I make money on the deal. Watch for my infomercial though, I’ll have it up and running as soon as I can iron out that little wrinkle.
Politicians mostly keep their mouths shut on Friday afternoon because if they say anything stupid it will be on the news, in the papers and in the blogosphere for at least two days before anyone can catch up with it on the Sunday morning talk shows. One of the first rules of politics is, or should be, don’t screw up on a slow news day.
So with that being the case the next staple of news, disasters, tend to get more play on weekend. That mudslide in the Italian Alps might not make the content cut on Wednesday when Congressman Slapjaw (R-Mississippi) is busy telling us why we should let AIG go belly up, while righteously ignoring that it will take the economies of half of the world with it. But on Saturday the Italian mudslide definitely runs, even though it sounds more like a cocktail than a news item. Disasters, though, are unreliable things. You can’t book them and have your staff prepped in advance.
Crime stories, however, are pretty reliable fodder for content because, lets face it, the people pulling crimes aren’t doing it while they wait to move up on the depth chart in the admissions department at M.I.T. No, they’re doing it either because it’s their best shot this side of a class action lawsuit to make a lot of money or because they think it’s their best opportunity just to make a living.
Here’s my favorite example from this past weekend as described by local media. A 23 year old Bronx, New York, man allegedly drove his BMW with New York license plates out of the I-95 toll booth in Hampton, New Hampshire at 80 miles per hour. State Police stopped the man and found he was driving on a suspended license.
That’s bad.
Police also found that he had a small amount of what they believe is marijuana. That’s not good either.
And seven ounces of what they believe is cocaine. That’s worse, isn’t it.
Maybe I was just raised too conservatively to be any fun or have any real vision. I don’t see the wisdom of driving around with cocaine and marijuana when my license has been suspended. But let’s be generous. These are hard times.
Let’s say that economic circumstances dictated that this young man had to take the risk associated with this activity because he has a child, certainly no more than a toddler, who needs a treatment for a medical condition. These days if that amounts to anything more than a loose tooth we’re talking a substantial amount of money. Well then you might think that this transaction would be lucrative enough to make the risk marginally acceptable. Of course that doesn’t account for the Beamer he’s driving but we’ll overlook that.
Doing 80 exiting the toll booth? Here’s where I have trouble making a case for the defendant. This is where we get to another line from “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”. The appropriate line here is “This life is hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
But one man’s folly can be another man’s opportunity. And from this I have created an idea that can lift you out of financial hardship and help you lose weight at the same time. Ready?
Become a drug mule for a Mexican drug lord! You’ll be visiting glamorous places in some of North Americas busiest cities, meeting exciting people and making money, and lots of it, at the same time! And if taking off that extra 20 pounds is going to make you feel better about yourself remember this: you won’t have much of an appetite after you’ve swallowed 30 condoms stuffed with cocaine. It’s a money making, weight loss system that can’t miss. All you need is the wisdom to recognize an opportunity when it’s presented to you.
Now I just have to figure out how I make money on the deal. Watch for my infomercial though, I’ll have it up and running as soon as I can iron out that little wrinkle.
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