The Shitty Sequel

Who knew that the second born child would have posted the 'blog' about the shitty sequel dilemma.  Are we talking about 'Return of the Jedi' of 'Godfather 3'?  No... not at all.  Those are golden, untouchables compared to the movies I am mentioning.

First and foremost I need you, the reader, to trust me on this journey of bad movies.

The first franchise I would like to venture to is the Police Academy movies.  How can we explain the awesomeness other than: Lets stay in Metro City for hella years and work our way to giving a blow job to the 'dean' of the academy, stop a motorbykle gang, recruit the leader of the gang to be a cop, travel to Miami and stop the mob's jewel thieves, then make it back home in less then seven movies?  Well, after all that... lets go to Russia!  Number seven take place in Moscow.

Enough said.  They didn't even give it a number... Shame, Shame...

So since Moscow is a short jump... especially in the early 90's, I will take you on a few short journeys closer to home.  First is to the jungle (very close to everywhere in California...).  I love the hell out of some Predator.  Arnold, alien, weird Chinese languages... all there.  Then, as sequels go... Danny Glover shows up.  Sure, sounds good, right?  I would love to kick some ass with Danny Glover...  Only problem is that, with all action movies in the 90's they need to start a war on DRUGS. If you have had the pleasure of this movie... then you remember the addition of the Colombian druggies.  Fucking really?  Below picture has nothing to do with Predator 2... only as a joke against Arnold the the movie...

For the drugs!!!!

Enough of making fun of Arnold.  How about Sly?  If you were to sit down and really, really watch the first Rambo movie, you'd probably enjoy it.  A nice romp of man vs. asshole sheriff.  In all actuality this is a pretty good movie of Vietnam vet vs. assholes.  Assholes being Brian Dennehey and that cop that can't keep his glasses on in CSI Miami.

My glasses just fall off...

But no... that first one was, of course, awesome.  But the sequels got fucking shitty.  Almost like a time warp, back in time, as the story goes to Sly fighting Asian captors, and all sorts of bad guys.  By the way... a bow that shoots grenade tipped arrows?  Badass.  Like something out of a child's mind.

Just like GI Joe fights.

  Army of... YOUR MIND.

 

Ramses!

I interrupt my regularly programmed long post to exalt the New York Football Giants' wide receiver Ramses Barden.

In his first start of his career, a career in its fourth season, Ramses used his 6'6" frame and helped destroy the Carolina Panthers, catching nine passes for 138 yards. I've been talking about this kid ever since he got drafted. He was finally given the chance to shine, and took hold.

Why should I care this much? He's a Mustang, a Cal Poly kid. Go Ramses!

And, sorry guys for maybe monopolizing this blog. I don't really try to, it just kinda happens.

Question: Aren't Rick Blaine and Han Solo the Same Guy?

Short answer: pretty much.

So, I finally got around to watching Casablanca the other day. For a while, when I was younger, after 1994 and seeing Pulp Fiction, I got on a kick to seek out the old "classics" and give them a look. It makes sense to me that it was Tarantino's non-linear Travolta vehicle that got me interested in the history of the form, and five years later, in 1999, a different movie got me interested in a different subject (The Matrix and philosophy).

In between '94 and '97, I watched On the Waterfront, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, both Godfathers, Citizen Kane and Bullit, and those are ones I can remember. I've watched them all since, and they remain as good as my memory told me they were back then. In fact, Kane, ...Waterfront, and Chinatown are on my Top 5 All-Time Favorite list (good luck guessing the other two). Norm and I even went to Tower Theater in '96 and saw Taxi Driver for the twentieth anniversary showing.

Later I discovered Kurosawa and Melville, Cool Hand Luke and Bonnie and Clyde and The Long Goodbye.

For some reason neither Casablanca, nor Gone with the Wind were ever on my must-see list. I mean, I went out of my way to find the Peter Lorre German-language M (by Fritz Lang), as well as the older Fritz Lang classic, Metropolis, and have even watched Sherlock Jr, a classic early surrealistic/sci-fi film shot around Culver City (thanks Dan for making that possible, with the Buster Keaton DVD set).

But I was reading something about Casablanca after having a talk with Uncle Dan about it and older films versus newer films, about the demands that older films put on their audience. I went and found a DVD copy on Amazon for less than the shipping cost, and snatched it up.

During that period of the Hollywood system the studios were making 50 movies a year, basically a movie a week. A freaking movie a week. Some day job, right? Casablanca was just supposed to be one of the others, one of the fifty. Based on an unproduced play, the actors were coming in everyday to the studio and getting that day's pages of the script. On top of it, the female lead, Ingrid Bergman, a young and beautiful Swede, didn't know which of the two leading men she was supposed to be in love with, and was more interested in her next role, phoning everyday after the filming to get updates on the negotiations for that role's contract.

Casablanca has probably the most international cast of any film, and the chaos and tension on the set (Paul Henreid, the other male lead (not Bogey) thought Bogey was a hack, and the script left him very little with which to shine) led to the palatable tension and sense of chaos that permeates the movie. Many of the actors are actual refugees from Nazi occupied territory. This movie was filmed and released in 1942. It was set, though, in 1941, before the Pearl Harbor attack, to keep Bogart's Rick mostly believable.

A film about escape, and love, and sacrifice, it hits home still. It may be dated, but it's timeless in its sense of honesty.

The dueling anthem scene? One of the most powerful things put to film (and then to video disc).

I thought it was good, and filmed well, with the smoke and shadows and kinetic camera movements--not quite Kane with the camera, but compared to any other '40s era movie, it's quite dynamic. The only real complaint I would make is that it's overscored. The score is nice, classic even, but it never goes away.

Afterwards, I was thinking about the reluctant hero archetype, and the two most famous reluctant heroes in American cinema are Bogart's Rick Blaine from Casablanca, and Han Solo.

They're both wise-cracking, self-interested rogues, dashing men who are in control--mostly--of their own fates, or at least believe they're in some sort of control, and in the end, do the right thing.

So, long answer, both Blaine and Solo are the same archetype.

Pretty good movie. Probably has earned the reputation, and shouldn't disappoint.

Reflections on Murakami's "1Q84"

I wrote a little piece over on a different blog about the feelings I was having about Haruki Murakami's newest novel, 1Q84. I finished it yesterday, but if the third section had maintained the momentum of the first two, I would have finished it already.

I'm happy to report that the last hundred pages were pretty damn good, and got close enough to the frenzied urgency to make the whole thing pleasant and recommendable.

So who really cares that 150 pages, give or take, of a 900 page book are some of the must sedentary, slow-mo mud crawl pages put to paper. It's those other 750 pages that make it one of his most accomplished works. That was a quote from a critic: "His most accomplished work."

To me, what Murakami does that's significantly different is in his ending. He has the courage here to let certain loose ends remain that way. The ending is satisfying enough that he needn't explain every last thing. Not that he does that anyway, but, those long blocks of fill-in exposition are gone. Maybe it wasn't right of me to go from A Wild Sheep Chase--written in the 70s and the first of his works to be published in the States--to 1Q84--his newest and possibly most advanced story, and storytelling yet.

The difference in skill level is apparent even as they are obviously the same voice.

I would certainly recommend it.

Seven Directors and Super Hero Influence

Originally I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with this post. I thought about looking at the directors of super-hero movies, and then only discussing their other work. Then I thought as a way of keeping my head wrapped around so much data to limit it to directors who only directed multiple movies in the same franchise.

Doing that was kinda cool, guys, as that list has plenty to work with, with both super-hero genre and regular films. It started with one guy in 1978, and his influence is still being teased out in different directions.

The super-hero genre seems today to have taken the place of yesterday's western, or WWII movie; they are America's most popular form of mass entertainment: it has easy to recognize and clearly defined roles of good and evil; it has spectacle; and in the end, good triumphs and reassures the audience.

There is justice and fairness in the world.

So, back to 1978, and Richard Donner's release of Superman changed the way America looked at super-hero films. His serious look at the genre--what a world with bumbling Clark Kent could look like, how the suave Superman would fool people into not recognizing Kent, how a large city might react to a flying man in a cape. The camp has been removed, that silly, pun-filled Bat-tastic world from the '60s television show of Batman has been wiped clean. Could the movie work?

It did. Box office receipts say as much, anyway. Another thing Richard Donner did was to film the first two movies together. Now I know that Superman II was hijacked by the studio, and it was only recently that there was a release of "Richard Donner's Superman II", the cut I guess he wanted to make, but at least there was a continuity of tone between the two films.

I love Richard Pryor, but that's all I can say about the third and fourth films in the series.

The influence of Richard Donner on the Superman movies alone is seen with Superman Returns, the most recent Superman movie, which uses the same John Williams score and contorts itself to be mostly a sequel to Superman II (right?).

The next super hero film franchise that executed the material well enough to be called a success would be Tim Burton's Batman.

Dan, you should remember this, but we were at the Cabin when mom and dad went to go see Batman at the theater without us, just to make sure it wasn't going to be too intense for us. Summer of '89. Is that right, dad?

In any case, the realism that Donner brought was splashed in black paint and darkened up darker than even Christopher Nolan can handle. Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton turned in performances where at least they'd bought into the characters and story, and the franchise was set.

Batman Returns was an event as well. Batman eventually went into some strange territory, and came back, and we'll take a look later.

As the super-hero genre was trying to recover (Thanks Joel), 2000 saw Bryan Singer's "X-Men". Joel Schumacher's expanding the dark realism that Tim Burton materialized into shiny gadgetry for his two Batman movies seemed like a dangerous meld between realism and camp. In any case, the colorful world of his Batman films at least hearken back to Donner, so the influence chain wasn't broken.

Bryan Singer added onto that world successfully.

Here, an America with rhetoric on both sides about civil rights and mutants is Singer's realistic look at how the country would react to randomly powered individuals. The film did well because it was well made and it had that deeper tone that Marvel comics always had and DC didn't--substance of story.

This movie and the next, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), both show the inherent differences between the Big Pictures in Marvel and DC. I was always a DC guy, oddly enough considering my affinity for story and literature...

Superman: alien comes to Earth, somehow finds earthlings not-contemptible assholes, decides to protect them. Batman: parents gunned down, becomes ninja and fights crime in costume. What are those super hero stories about? Mostly fighting crime, right?

The X-Men has always been about prejudice and segregation, about being an outsider, a weirdo, somebody who just doesn't fit in, alienation. Spider-Man was about the day-to-day struggle, getting bills paid, trying to get the girl, trying to keep a job while also trying to save lives wearing a costume.

And what a costume, right? Spider-Man's costume may be the greatest costume in comics. And seeing him fly through the air on webbing, like Tarzan in the urban jungle, is so much fun that we don't care that there is realistically only ten square blocks he could ever really get around like that in all of New York City. He's just another alienated dork who gets powers and decides to do well with them.

For me X-Men and X-Men 2 did what the Schumacher Batmen tried: made technology a semless part of their world, and the Raimi Spidermen brought the color and life to a small story, and edged on the side of camp, while playing it straight.

Christopher Nolan never sniffed camp, let alone edging near it. Batman Begins, from 2005, was a reboot of the Batman franchise that, as far as Bat-fans were concerned, absolutely needed it. Here, the realism is in every aspect of the trilogy, even within the existential framework of "is the existence of the Batman a good thing" argument. An argument, by the way, that is a one of the Nolan trilogy's thematic pillars.

What Bryan Singer brought to his two X-men movies, Jon Favreau brought to the 2008 Iron Man movie and it's sequels.

X3 didn't really have it together, and Spider-Man 3 was widely rejected (although I'd like to see it), but Favreau brought audiences some excitement and humor, and something genuinely fun to watch. It was a return to colorful and shiny realism.

Donner, Burton, Singer, Raimi, Nolan, and Favreau.

I think between those six guys we can find six awesome non-super hero movies. Maybe even with this guy, but you never know:

This is just a wasted post, isn't it? I didn't even do anything here...

The "Sherwood Number" in Baseball

I'm sure, dad, we can come up with a better number than I've got. I'm calling this thing the Sherwood Number because I couldn't think of anything else, but it may just be too...it may not be important enough to learn anything from studying it.

It's barely even a calculation: (Runs Created) + (Total Bases).

[For the record, I'm using: (Runs Created) = RBI + Runs - HR.]

I started looking at that combination because to me, that afternoon I was thinking about it, it seemed like a good measure of how much a player was on the bases and/or involved in scoring runs, how much they were contributing to the games in a variety of ways. I then divided out their total number of games to get a sense of a sherwood number per game score.

I first waned to make sure it made sense with the top players, since it seems to heavily favor guys with high slugging percentages (duh, lotsa total bases). The only player with over 10k was Hank Aaron, and then the only players over 9k were:

Hank Aaron: 10572
Ty Cobb: 9921
Stan Musial: 9559
Babe Ruth: 9466
Barry Bonds: 9436
Willie Mays: 9371
Pete Rose: 9071

Not a bad list. I do think it's exhaustive of the 9k+ s-number players in baseball. I say that because my list of 8k+ players is pretty long, likely not exhaustive, and has most other players you'd think could be on the 9k+ list:

Alex Rodriguez: 8572
Cap Anson: 8569
Lou Gehrig: 8450
Eddie Murray: 8437
Frank Robinson: 8438
Rafael Palmeiro: 8317
Dave Winfield: 8258
Honus Wagner: 8241
Ken Griffey Jr: 8139
Jimmie Foxx: 8095
Cal Ripken Jr: 8079
Ted Williams: 8000

Those two lists have some of the greatest players who graced the diamond, but what about averages. How does Raffy compare to Cap Anson, or Rickey Henderson, or Joe DiMaggio?

Well, Rickey Henderson, an obvious Hall of Famer and one of the best players ever, scored 7701 on the s-number score, for a 2.500 per game career score.

The highest three values all spent time in the Bronx:

Lou Gehrig: 3.905
Babe Ruth: 3.782
Joe DiMaggio: 3.752

I don't even know what this signifies: combined runs and bases per game averaged over an entire career, apparently.

Rounding out the top ten that I have calculated so far:

Albert Pujols: 3.533
Jimmie Foxx: 3.494
Ted Wiliams: 3.490
Alex Rodriguez: 3.425
Cap Anson: 3.395
Ty Cobb: 3.270
Hank Aaron: 3.206

After that, everyone is under 3.2. This list may not be exhaustive. I may have missed people. I do have more notes on the subject, like Mike Schmidt (6959, 2.895), possibly the greatest third basemen ever (I have a soft spot for Schmitty ever since I was a Phillie in Little League).

Whether or not this actually can help understand the game better is up for debate. And, like I said earlier, we should be able to come up with a better calc to be called the sherwood-number, shouldn't we?

I mean, doing that isn't just a weekend excursion, coming up with a stat all our own. We shouldn't take it for granted...sometimes I just get wrapped up in numbers for a hour or two, and build lists...mostly meaningless, unless you're a baseball fan.

Sequel Contest Over; and in Other Notes: Yankees Fading

The Sequel contest over on Grantland's website is over, and the votes are in. In the final The Empire Strikes Back beat out The Godfather Part II for the title. That's a result I don't really agree with, but the voting was very close, not that that's much consolation.

I posted a few days back about the contest, and had a few remarks about sequels then. I've been thinking about it since: I may have low-balled Aliens and the Nolan-Batman sequels. Also since then Corrie and I watched the 1966 Batman: the Movie, the same cast and crew as the campy television show, and was designed to be a commercial for the show in Europe. For my Caps playing fellas, I snapped this picture of Batman fighting Joker:

Sploosh, baby! (That's a scoring play in a game of Caps.)

Dad, I'm glad you had a happy and successful trip to Missouri. I think the only time I was in Missouri was on the drive Corrie and I made from SLO to New York. We passed through under cover of darkness, and I remember taking a picture of the Arch in St. Louis. On the college football tip, the Missouri Tigers make a mistake and join the SEC.

Ahh...the Yankees, dammit.

The slow fade has been both hard and easy to follow. Hard in the sense that it's always hard to watch your team blow a ten game lead over three months, but easy in the sense that we're living 3000 miles away, and living through it back in Brooklyn would have been a little more agonizing. Sports in the City is so much more  in your face.

One of the bad things about team collapses, especially in baseball, is that the length of time is such that hope is still there, and that hope is what'll have the ending, if things continue like this, hurting so bad.

But there're reasons hope exists in fans, always reasons. Like the Yankees this year: CC Sabbathia should be back strong, and Pettitte will be back soon, along with A-Rod and Teixeira, and the hitters won't be as shitty as they've been in the recent past. It's an old team, certainly, but they're accomplished, and we'll see.

That's that confounded hope again. With the Orioles, A's and Yankees all with the same record at this moment, these last few weeks will be interesting.

See Dan, when you care about a team, there's a lot more suffering than celebrations.

At least  the Red Sox suck even worse this year, but when you suck the entire time, it's almost easier to go with it.

I'm still thinking about that big comic movie post, having just watched that Batman movie as well as the Captain America movie recently. Also, there's a new After Hours video up, one in which they discuss how all Pixar movies are one big movie about the post-apocalyptic world where the machines have taken over. An essay in the comments section is a necessary gem that accentuates the video like crazy. It's all pretty interesting.

Font Changes

I went ahead and changed the font all over the blog to Georgia. The sans serif font isn't for me (or us?), but it does look kinda funny for everything. We'll see how it looks long term.