Sports Post and Poll

It's been a tough couple weeks for baseball managers - John McLaren in Seattle, John Gibbons in Toronto, Willie Randolph of the Mets were all fired in the last couple weeks - and the trade rumors are starting: whither CC Sabathia? Matt Holliday? Jason Bay? And so Im putting u another poll, for you baseball fans: which of the dreadful underachievers are most likely to turn things around in the second half?

There have been some dreadful underachievers: The Mets, at least compared to their image of themselves; the Tigers and Indians, by pretty much any standard, have been huge disappointments; The Mariners wanted to think they were contenders, and acted like it,trading prospects for Eric Bedard; both the Rockies and Padres have been awful, after being in the playoffs last year... The Blue Jays, Dodgers, etc., all had dreams of contention, which aren't very likely now.

But - if I had posted this a couple weeks ago - I could have included the Yankees: a winning streak later, they're over .500 and only 5 out; The Brewers were mediocre for a long time - now - 6 1/2 out, but moving up on the Cubs; good lord - even the Orioles are over .500! So - who else can turn it around? I'm going to limit the choice to the teams that both have a shot at the post-season - so no Mariners, they won't come back from 18.5 out, and were supposed to be good, and were good last year, but have been lousy this year. Those teams are:

Detroit and Cleveland - both very good last year, supposed to fight for the top of their division, if not the league, this year - both very bad this year. Though lately the Tigers are hot - and both are still within range of contention, and both have bunches of established players who have not been performing - they are prime candidates to make a run.

Rockies and Padres - playoff teams (sort of) last year, awful this year - but close enough to make a run, and - maybe...

Throw the Dodgers in there too, since they fit the bill pretty well.

And finally - the NYMets - they're the ones getting the attention, of these sad underachievers. The joys and perils of being in one f the big media cities. And of spending a ton of money and playing to the tabloids every offseason - which seems to me to be a big part of their problem. They have been making the big splash almost every year of the Minaya era - signing Beltran, Martinez, trading for Santana and so on - all fine and good, except they haven't bothered to put a team around the stars. Take away Wright, Reyes and Beltran, and that is one sorry lineup. It's interesting to compare them to the Phils - what's the difference? comes down to this - the Phils' stars are playing at or above expectations (except for Rollins), while the Mets stars, while doing okay, have not been up to their standards; and the rest of the Phillies lineup is competent major leaguers who stat on the field - Victorino, Werth and Jenkins, Feliz - nothing special, but they give you something. The Mets? not so much...

Anyway: we'll see how this goes... maybe next we can ask about which of the overachievers (Tampa, Florida, the Pale Hose, those over .500 Orioles, etc.) can keep it up.

Four Fathers

I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)


The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)


A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983)


The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)

Shared Items

This is an experiment. I don't know if anyone else cares about my Google Shared Items page - but I think it might be interesting to have a post with a bunch of these. So - if anyone else wants to link to shared posts - it looks like you just have to add the script here.

Indiana Jones and the Umpteenth Jokey Title

Spoilers? Probably...

The glowing review that Keith Uhlich posted on Sunday at The House Next Door for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is still generating comments. As I type this, the latest are focused on the scene in which Marion drives herself, Indy, Mutt and Dr. Oxley off a high cliff and onto a sturdy tree branch, which bends far enough to allow the jeep/boat hybrid a safe landing into the river below.

Commenter Chris P, reacting to the assertion that this scene is equivalent to Indy’s leap of faith towards the end of Last Crusade, says:

“Before his leap of faith, Indy's scared. He's nervous and not sure it'll work. And when it does, he's even more amazed than the audience. He feels for us. We feel more a part of the adventure because of his emotional reaction to it.

By contrast, Marion has it all planned out, it works exactly as she expected -- nothing goes wrong, there's not even a moment where she thinks "uh oh, maybe this was a bad idea" -- and we don't get a woop of unmitigated joy, or even a sense that maybe her feigned bravura was just that, when something so amazing does work.

Simply: that short scene sums up everything that was wrong with the movie.”

Uhlich later responded:

“To which I say that we do get that sense of unmitigated joy in Karen Allen's smile after the stunt works, a visual cue that rhymes with her beatific reaction to Indy's "none of them [the other women in my life] were you" and with her mad "are we still alive?" laughter after they go over the three waterfalls.”

What this exchange boils down to is a round of “No it’s not!”/”Yes it is!”, and I suppose we can simplistically say that either the film worked for you or it didn’t. Though Uhlich is a good enough writer to make me wonder if I might be wrong, I do side with the camp that’s emphatically anti-Crystal Skull. And I think Chris P is on to something.

That particular scene makes use of the dreaded three letters: CGI. Though Karen Allen’s smile is winning, it’s not precisely enough to convince me of the adrenaline rush likely to accompany such a daredevil stunt. I wonder if Allen was ever shown the equivalent of the cliff in question, or the waterfalls she survived. Some highly-skilled digital artists created a nice-looking picture of a large tree whipping itself against the cliff, knocking several Russian digi-soldiers to their deaths. But Spielberg never provides a shot to convince, nor do the flesh-and-blood actors react in a way that suggests such a spectacle really happened. Mayhaps this wouldn’t be so jarring a letdown if Spielberg hadn’t already pulled off a virtuoso cliffside sequence in Temple of Doom, where none of the problems I mentioned exist. Because there was no CGI. That was a real, flimsy bridge over a really frigging high drop.

I get the supporters’ argument that it’s unfair to judge the movie based on what you expected, rather than what was presented -- though plenty that’s presented is worthy of derision, but this post isn’t about reaction shots of gophers and Shia LaBeouf’s injured testicles, so I’ll move on. Isn’t it fair for longtime fans who’ve invested in a franchise that employed innovative camerawork, on-site special effects and stuntmen (plus, as one commenter at HND put it, “a crisper, more ‘analog’ look”) in three previous installments to expect the same of the fourth? Rather than cartoonish, unconvincing CGI to cover up for most every daring feat? The excitement of the narrow escape doesn’t exist in this movie. The characters simply disappear behind the computer graphics, then appear again, safe and sound.

I appreciate Uhlich’s analysis of Spielberg’s imagery and the thematic content, but he expounds on it far more elegantly than the film ever does. After the movie, I told my friends, “I want to weep, it was so bad.” I grew up watching the Indy movies with my father, wondering at the movie magic on display. What do kids today have to wonder about? It’s all computers. I take my entertainment seriously, and Crystal Skull felt mostly like a bunch of clowning around.

Cannes Results

This year's Cannes film festival is done: winners are up - Greencine has them all, competition and otherwise Un Certain Regard ; Critics Week; FIPRESCHI.

And now we wait for distribution. I've put up a poll - which of the award winners are you looking forward to seeing most? Or are you looking forward to films that didn't win awards - A Christmas Tale (Desplechins)? The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel)? 24 Cty (Jia Jiang-ke)? Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax & Bong Joon-ho)? Kung Fu Panda?

Let me update with a link to Glenn Kenny's roundup of award winners.

Sport

I've been thinking of putting up a baseball post lately - seeing Joseph's Rangers within a game of .500, that sort of thing. I have more concrete inspiration now - I come home from seeing J'Entends Plus la Guitare (a rare and precious Philippe Garrel screening at Harvard) - in time to watch Jon Lester finish off a no-hitter. The sentimental among us should be pleased. The cynics among us should become a bit sentimental. The Red Sox fans among us can think we have 2 starters with a combined 48 starts and 2 no-hitters.

Academy of the Underrated: Godzilla (1998): The short version

Okay, I've gone and written up my defense of the much-disliked American GODZILLA movie, and posted it over on Club Parnassus. I was going to post it here, but it may be even larger than the SPEED RACER post and I don't want to monopolize the blog. (Note: This might be a good time to implement a script that'll let you put long material behind a cut.)

So, if you're interested in reading it, the review is here. You can comment on that post or this one, or just ignore it. I figured I should post it today because it's the ten-year anniversary or nearabouts.