{ 2008 07 04 }
Don’t Forget Your Bat
- According to PTI (B-team this week. Boo!), 3 July 2008 marks the 7th anniversary of one of two strategic innovations in baseball for which I’d called for some time. Yes, on this day 7 years ago, Izzy Alcantrara kicked the catcher before storming the mound, thus ensuring he got a clean shot on the pitcher.
What’s the other innovation I await? Well, let’s just say that, if I were on my way to attack someone, I wouldn’t drop my cudgel first.
- I see ads for Greatest American Dog. It’s hard to see a concept applied in earnest when it has such immense satirical potential.
- Am I the only one who refuses to watch Hopkins on moral grounds? While the idea of a Gray’s Anatomy-esque reality show may sound like a good one, the Heisenberg Uncertainty (well, really, the Observer Effect) implications should give producers pause. Some will say I’m transgressing my flimsy moral standards by this judgment, as the show doesn’t clearly violate any of the 8 I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts, but prioritizing health care over television seems like a no-brainer.
- Is Ed “Cookie” Jarvis really not competing in this year’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition? We’ll find out in a few hours. Either way, he’s not listed in the field, which contains such names as Eric “Badlands” Booker, The Black Widow (Sonya Thomas), Eric “The Red” Denmark, Crazy Legs Conti, Eater X (Tim Janus), and The Locust (Rich Lefevre) - all of whom are destined to be dusted by the duel between world-renowned Takeru Kobayashi and reigning champ Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. Set your DVR for ESPN…and look for post-game commentary right here.
- Review - Otis: Funny, slightly disturbing, and unobtrusively didactic, Otis well exceeds Funny Games the similarly-minded film before which I saw the preview for Otis. I also found it preferable to The Chumscrubber, which was done in a similar psuedo-campy post-modern style. My only criticism is that it took me a few minutes to realize that one of the main characters was Chrissie Seaver, all grown up.
- The blatant New England-ness of the Shamwow shill amuses me. “If you call in the next 20 minutes - because we can’t be doin’ this awl day…”
- Review - Georgia Rule: Perhaps, having already viewed Saw and Saw 3 (for class, I swear) that morning, I was somewhat inured to disbelief by the time Georgia Rule popped up on HBO. Nonetheless, I found myself disarmingly affected by this exclusively female-centric flick. Sure, the ending is trite crap, and, yes, the transparency of the plot twists makes Georgia Rule fairly predictable from about minute 7. (ex: Refusing to show Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) in the sunlight during the first half of the movie struck me as an abuse of filmic visual context devices.) Lindsay Lohan (The Parent Trap), Felicity Huffman (half of Willicity H. Muffman), and Jane Fonda (Babarella) are all spot-on, and the Idaho scenery is quite pleasant.
Then again, it’s entirely possible that I spent much of the film in a guilty struggle between my reptilian and mammalian brains. The synopsis of that struggle is this: Taking advantage of young girls is a damaging, morally reprehensible abuse of power, but Lindsay Lohan is highly sexualized in the context of Georgia Rule. My only defense is that, were the issue a concrete one involving an actual person, rather than an abstract one concerning an image object, the question of whether to sympathize or exploit would be a non-starter. Were I still young enough to be in that peer group, of course, the idea of a bright, attractive, highly literate girl who uses sex as a means of validation would be quite attractive. Sure, she’s bound to have issues, but you can’t expect a unicorn to take to the bit. Oh dear…please try to understand that all this conjecture is done in the most abstracted humor. If you don’t get that, then how about this: Exploitation=Bad. Are we good? Cool. I’m glad. I’d hate to have you thinking I’m some kind of narcissistic pervert.
burnham | 04-Jul-08 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
I think anything would be better than the The Chumscrubber. I got stuck watching that on HBO one Saturday morning. I should have just read the ending online than watching the rest of it.