Sunday, February 3, 2008

I hate stadium naming rights

Does it bother anyone else that the Arizona Cardinals stadium - site of this year's Super Bowl - is University of Phoenix Stadium? No, they don't share it with a college named University of Phoenix - the naming rights sponsor is University of Phoenix - that online university! That is dumb. I am opposed in general to naming rights - Candlestick should have stayed Candlestick, Comiskey Comiskey, etc. - but this is the worst. It is an amorphous distance learning institution and it makes it sound like the stadium belongs to a real school! It is like renaming the new Yankee Stadium Chicago Bears Stadium - after some Chicago zoo exhibit!

In other news, can you believe that Super Bowl? Or at least that 4th quarter? I wonder if this is karmic retribution for all of that Spygate jazz. Either way, I missed history being made in the way of a perfect season, but at least got to see a huge upset.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Gives a new meaning to "balling"...

Has anyone seen Ron Jeremy and Stan Van Gundy in the same room at the same time? Do you even know which is which below? Amber got it wrong - and who could blame her? Just get it right when you invite someone in as a motivational speaker...


Monday, January 14, 2008

Running Diary of Shoot 'Em Up

Trying something different - a running diary of Shoot 'Em Up (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/)

00:00:25 - Closeup of Clive Owen eating a carrot. At a bus stop. Rock on.

00:01:20 - Some pregnant lady is about to - you guessed it, get shot up. I'll take this moment to say there will be a "gorgeous streetwalker" somewhere along the way.

00:02:11 - The pregnant lady is the one to shoot 'em up, and Clive Owen saves the day by shoving the carrot through the assailant's head with the line, "Eat your vegetables." You can't make this stuff up. Well I guess someone did.

00:03:18 - Clive Owen is delivering the baby - all the "push push" stuff - while shooting 'em up. The casings from the bullets are falling on the pregnant lady's belly. I misspoke earlier - I should have said you shouldn't make this stuff up.

00:04:55 - Baby delivered as Paul Giamatti makes his first appearance. Clive Owen subsequently shoots the umbilical cord up.

00:06:27 - Mom is dead, but hit man w/a heart takes the baby and makes a run for it. This is shaping up to be the over the top movie the box claimed.

00:07:37 - Clive Owen - "Fuck you you fucking fuckers" - line of the movie so far. And I still don't know what's going on.

00:08:11 - Ooh, plot elements. Let's see where this goes.

00:09:18 - Paul Giamatti just shot someone in the butt, followed by the guy screaming (predictably) ,"Oh, my ass!"

00:10:15 - Clive Owen just went into a dirty men's room. How dirty? It still has one of those never-ending cloth towels where you just wipe your hands on someone else's dirty towel spot. Gross. And he is eating another carrot.

00:11:00 - Use number two for the diaper changing table - cleaning out your gun after you dropped it in the toilet while you were eating your carrot. And the bathroom has a heated hand dryer in addition to the gross cloth. That's forward thinking. Clive Owen uses it to dry out his toilet gun. Ingenuity. Probably wouldn't have chosen to lay the baby underneath the urinal, but to each his own.

00:12:55 - Clive Owen, on the bus, just took his sock off to put it on the baby's head as a hat. Selfless, yet gross.

00:13:26 - Paul Giamatti - "Do you know why a gun is better than a wife? You can put a silencer on a gun." Shameful, sexist comment. I am dumber for hearing it.

00:14:45 - Clive Owen leaves the baby on a park's merry-go-round for someone to find, but Paul Giamatti gets there and tries to shoot it w/an assassin's rifle. Then - you'll never believe it - Clive Owen is able to shoot the merry-go-round such that it rotates to fast Paul Giamatti can't shoot the baby. This movie is nothing if not realistic. I know people who would stop right now and figure out the physics associated with such an act.

00:16:45 - Clive Owen has the creative name of "Smith." I knew this from the movie box, but I am acting surprised.

00:17:30 - First appearance of the gorgeous streetwalker. Eh. Owen describes himself as a "British nanny." Giamatti is riding around with the naked mom, whose shirt is still open from the short lived breast feeding. Gross out moment - Giamatti feels her up. That is dead wrong. Get it? That line was perfect for this movie.

00:19:25 - Giamatti - "Find me every wet nurse, lactating hooker, and mammary on tap in the city." How else would you find where a baby could eat? I wonder if he still can't stand "fucking Merlot." Thomas Hayden Church should be in this movie.

00:21:33 - Giamatti and Owen are pointing their guns at each other with the lactating streetwalker looking on.

00:22:36 - Giamatti and his men all have thumbprint readers on their guns as safety devices. Does that really exist? I think it is a good idea, much better than those little flip switches. Owen gets around it by cutting off a dude's hand.

00:23:44 - Owen - "What's the difference between a luxury car and a porcupine? With the car the prick is on the inside." I think I could just record the cheesy jokes/lines and be done with it.

00:24:37 - Owen hates guys who change lanes without signalling. Good man.

00:25:17 - I just placed Giamatti's accent in this movie. He used the same one as the cop in The Illusionist (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443543/). I think I would try to re-use characters if I was an actor.

00:26:41 - Owen tries to buy bullets with food stamps. Just like Mellencamp's incessant commercials say, "This is ouuuuuuuuur country!"

00:27:32 - Hooker giving head while the baby is in a cardboard box. But she's a hooker w/a heart - she was only doing it to afford to buy the baby a camouflage bullet proof vest. Who greenlit this picture anyway? I really hope these writers are not on strike right now so they can write the sequel - Shoot 'Em Upper Even More 2.

00:29:50 - Owen grows his own carrots. Of course - why wouldn't he?

00:30:30 - Giamatti, on going through the door first - "The leader who stays in the rear takes it in the rear."

00:31:25 - Side plot revealed - Giamatti is trying to get home to his 8 year old son's birthday party. Also, the baby is comforted by heavy metal on MTV but cries when a politician is on TV.

00:32:50 - More shooting 'em up. How do the heroes never get shot and always kill w/only one shot? Also why do attackers insist on going in one at a time so the attackee never has to face more than one gunman?

00:34:15 - The only time this is contradicted just happened - when gunmen are running at someone from either side. If this was a cartoon, they would have shot each other. Instead, Owen just flipped a stainless steel table over to deflect the bullets back.

00:36:51 - Owen thinks that the dead mother lived near a heavy metal club, explaining the baby's love for heavy metal. Makes the most sense of anything in this movie.

00:41:15 - Okay, "plot" points - there were 3 moms (all now dead) with 3 babies (2 dead) all conceived to generate donor blood and bone marrow for some mystery man. Someone didn't want him to get the transplant, so they tried to kill everyone. Also Owen killed someone else with a carrot.

00:44:36 - Orphan baby is laying in the bathtub and Owen is teaching him how to use a gun. Never too early. I think he is a member of the NRA. Let me check the credits for Charlton Heston.

00:46:07 - This baby never cries. From experience, a new born would never give anyone the time to strip, let alone have sex. Okay, right on cue, as the action started, the baby starts to cry - which leads to a scene with Owen and lactating hooker (LH) having sex while Owen kills a bunch of would-be hit men. Nothing like a mid-coitus killing spree.

00:48:45 - Owen has devised a plan. He wants LH and the baby to hide in a tank in a museum so they can be safe. This plan is crazy enough to work.

00:53:01 - I think Giamatti's accent is gone. Maybe he was filming both movies at the same time and forgot which one he was in.

00:56:20 - Owen, in a gun warehouse, has it all set up and acts as a puppeteer, pulling strings while watching monitors to shoot guys. My description doesn't do it justice - it is pretty cool.

00:57:27 - Back in the tank, Owen and LH are using newspapers as diapers. That would save me soooooo much money. If it works for wrapping paper, it would work for diapers.

00:58:30 - "Plot" point revealed - the father of the babies is a senator. Damn those bone marrow seeking anti-gun legislating senators. If they aren't the root of all evil, they have to be the root of 90% of evil.

01:00:37 - Owen's stolen BMW flips over but the baby falls out. So Owen purposely unbuckles and flies out of the car into an oncoming van, sticking the landing that would make a gymnast jealous. But Giamatti shows up and aims to run the baby over. I don't want to ruin any surprises here, but let's just say the baby is important to the movie and the movie isn't over yet.

01:03:35 - Owen, with one phone call, gets a meeting and a flight with the dirty senator. And why wouldn't he? If Barack Obama has time for anything, it's taking flights with crazy gun toting Brits.

01:06:10 - Turns out all the bad guys are in it together. Giamatti is on the plane, everyone is in on it, and Owen is forced to kill the senator and jump out of the plane and shoot some guys while falling through the air. Don't worry, he has a parachute - what do you take this for, some unrealistic romp through wonderland?

01:08:50 - Neat death - thrusting someone into the blades of a helicopter. Wouldn't the helicopter crash too though? Man, I KNEW I'd find a hole in the plot somewhere.

01:10:10 - Giamatti's boss has a stuffed dog, as in, stuffed by a taxidermist. Only slightly less disturbing than Giamatti breaking individual fingers on Owen's hand.

01:14:50 - Owen gets free but can't hold a gun, so he kills everyone but Giamatti with a scalpel. It's no carrot, but it works. Necessity, though, is the mother of invention. Owen sticks bullets between his fingers and holds his hand up to a fire, and before you know it, Giamatti has bitten the dust.

01:17:28 - Baby and LH are long gone and Owen is left to wander and track them down - which he does, somehow, at a Dairy Queen, where LH is a waitress and leaves the baby on a table while she works.

01:19:00 - It couldn't end with them making out, could it? Nope! Some dudes come in to rob the DQ, but Owen has something else in mind. Aren't his fingers broken, you ask? Yes, but you're forgetting one important, orange fact - he loves carrots. So he uses a carrot as a trigger finger, shoots a couple of dudes, and everyone lives happily, bloodily after. Well, except for the people who already died.

And that does it. Final thoughts? Well, it did make me want to eat more carrots - you never know when they might come in handy. Now that was cheesy and not even remotely realistic - kind of like this movie. (I actually do like carrots, but that fact doesn't support my line, so ignore it.) This movie did one thing well - shoot outs. So you have to give it that. There was a lot of cheese, plenty of gun fights, and some creative ways to get into said gun fights. I gasped at some of the gruesomeness and said "no way!" a couple of times. It is what it is - sensationalistic violence. And since I've recapped it here, no one else needs to watch it! 2.5/5


Saturday, January 12, 2008

How the west was won - by a couple of foreigners

3:10 to Yuma (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381849/)

Like clockwork, every 50 years they make a movie titled 3:10 to Yuma. Yep, it is a remake. Haven't seen the original, but this one was pretty darn good. I haven't seen many Westerns recently, but maybe the new wave is to cast non-Americans for the lead roles in this traditional American genre. This movie saw Russell Crowe (New Zealand) and Christian Bale (Wales) as the lead characters. In another Western I saw on the shelf at Blockbuster, Serafim Falls, Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neason (both Irish) played the lead characters. For me it is not that the Old West should be an exclusive genre - after all, Sergio Leone and Louis Lamore are classic Western guys. I am just impressed by their spot-on accents. I once heard it is easier for someone with an accent to speak with another accent - like a speaker with an English accent can more easily speak with a southern accent than with no accent whatsoever. Whatever - I ramble. The movie. It was good. Really good. Great story, lively action, multi-layered characters. It made me feel like a woman in this sense - I knew the guy was bad, but I liked him anyway. The DVD extras were good too - I learned some stuff about the Old West gangs and how the famous outlaws met their respective ends. One fun fact was that during the filming, 3 feet of snow fell on the set of the Western town that was supposed to be having a drought, so they had to bring in literally tons of dirt to cover it up. They made their sets mostly from scratch, built buildings and all that. You'd think that those resources would be better used to build homes for the needy or rebuild New Orleans or something, but hopefully it didn't all go to waste. Despite the waste of resources, I still give 3:10 to Yuma 4/5.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Friday Hotstove: the Tiger's offseason to date

Everybody needs a gimmick, right? Mine for Fridays will be hotstove baseball talk. (I don't exactly know why they call it "hotstove," but they do.)

The Tigers had the most active offseason of any team so far - so active, in fact, that a HUGE move (trading for Gold Glove SS Edgar Renteria) pales in comparison to the blockbuster that brought two All Stars (Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis) on board. Some would say that the Tigers mortgaged their future in these moves, but that is only partly true. I would say that the Renteria move was more in that vein than the Cabrera/Willis trade - those two guys are still in the mid to early 20s, while Renteria is 30+ and was traded for a couple of top notch prospects (Jair Jurjens and Gorkys Hernandez). Just like every stock announcement, minor league players should come with the old "past performance is no indication of future results" - just because someone is a stud in the minors doesn't mean they will pan out in the majors. Just look at Ryan Leaf and pretty much half of the quarterbacks drafted in the first round of the NFL draft. And that is after they have to stay in college for at least 3 years! Imagine if the NFL had the same draft rules that the NBA has - only one year required in college, which just changed a couple years ago and before high schoolers could go straight to the NBA (see James, LeBron and Garnett, Kevin). How would Peyton Manning have done going straight from his varsity high school team to the NFL? But I digress. Basically I'm trying to say that the Tigers got some proven All Start caliber players for some potential future All Stars. I don't think there should be any doubt about the favorite in the AL. No other team has fewer question marks, and the most stable teams have done nothing to improve themselves. Cleveland has not done anything, Boston has not done anything, and the Yankees lost their manager. This all could change if/when Santana gets traded, but moving Santana out of the Central division only helps. The White Sox are an enigma, and I think Kenny Williams sometimes makes moves just to make moves. Living in Kansas City, I have a first hand view of the Royals, and I have to say that they remind me a lot of the Tigers of a few years ago. There is hope in KC - unfortunately, they are in a division where 3rd place would be a huge accomplishment and something they should shoot for in a year or two. 3rd place also means no playoffs. (Side note: the Royals failure to move to the NL Central a few years ago [Milwaukee moved instead] could prove to be the worst decision ever in franchise history - which says a lot about the team that paid Juan Gonzalez more than $2 and who chose Mike Sweeney over Carlos Beltran. They could have been competitive in the NL Central whereas they are perennial bottom feeders in the AL Central.) I am just excited to see the Tigers in their current incarnation. Just imagine this lineup:

Granderson, CF
Polanco, 2B
Sheffield, DH
Ordonez, RF
Cabrera, 3B
Guillen, 1B
Renteria, SS
Thames/Jacque Jones, LF
Rodriguez, C

All Star/Gold Glove catcher Pudge Rodriguez batting 9th?? And how about this rotation:

Verlander
Rogers
Bonderman
Willis
Robertson

Joel Zumaya is hurt again (damn California wild fires) and the bullpen might be thin, but I'm more than encouraged by their chances. (I had to desperately fight off the urge to say "we" about 10 times. I can say "we," right?)

I wish Spring Training was more indicative of what the team will be like once the season starts, but at least there will be baseball played soon. Some things to watch out for: complacency, injuries, blown leads by the bullpen. Our hitters will eventually hit; our pitchers will keep us in most every game. This team will be a good one to watch.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Why couldn't the writers have gone on strike for this one?

Not the finest example of cinema, but it had its moments:


Balls of Fury (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424823/)

What Blades of Glory did for figure skating, Ball of Fury did for ping pong. Which is to say, not much. Christopher Walken had some good lines - nothing the likes of "more cowbell" but he had his B+ game at least. Most of it was pretty cheesy, but from watching the extras I guess it was supposed to be like a kung fu movie - which, to me, is pretty cheesy, so they hit the mark. Some Reno 911 guys were responsible for this, and maybe they should have stuck to the 30 minute format (22 factoring in commercials). I think that would have been enough for me, but 90 minutes was more than enough. It is good for some laughs, no more, no less. 2.5/5.


I also played some Guitar Hero III on the Wii. (I have learned saying "I played my Wii last night" is not a good conversation opener. FYI.) It used to be that when I heard songs that were songs on the game in every day life (like on the radio or the Muzak in the grocery store), it made me want to play the song on the game. Now I hear songs on the radio and can convince myself that it is either a GHIII song or, more often, that it WOULD make a good song and that I wished I could play it. Maybe I should get a real guitar - but that would lead to a sad realization that I can only play fake guitar. Kind of like all of the Madden I have played over the years, but I don't need to put on shoulder pads to know I would get crushed on the football field. There is something about GH that makes me think I could do the real thing. I guess that is the appeal of the game - that and rocking out to Barracuda.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Another movie...

...when the wife's away...the husband will watch a bunch of movies, I guess.


Naomi Watts (The Ring; a look-alike for Nicole Kidman from some angles, if you ask me) is an English midwife who stumbles into the world of Russian mobsters in London. Viggo Mortensen (All three Lord of the Rings [Aragorn]) is a mobster who seems nice enough, but there is more beneath the surface to him. I liked the ensemble cast and everyone did well playing their part - the Russian was realistic (like I know) and there were enough twists to keep you interested, though some people would probably figure everything out easily if they wanted. I do not have the most iron of stomachs, so there were plenty of moments that made me queasy - not the least of which was Viggo calmly (with a smirk even) cutting off the fingertips of a frozen dead guy. "Very nice. High five! Oh, sorry, forgot about your fingers." Anyway, if there was one scene you shouldn't miss, it was the naked fight between Viggo and two mobsters in a steam room. I cringed through most of it, realizing how much it would hurt to get slashed while being naked and just how awkward it would be to fight without any clothes on. Overall, pretty decent, Viggo Mortensen is good and Naomi Watts is decent. 3.5/5.