And They Are Indisputable

These are the facts:

• I was hoping for a lazy weekend, but when my car died on the way to work on what should have been a day off to begin with, I was out of luck. All signs point to buying a new car tomorrow. From a dealership in Virginia, no less. I just hope it doesn't smell like smoke and Republicans.
• Watched all of Lost up to before the fifth season finale. I'll do more on that tomorrow.
• Is there any twosome of television I'd rather watch less than the Grammys and the Pro Bowl?
• Dwight Freeney is going to be either out or severely hampered for the Super Bowl. Don't think that changes my pick at all.
• Montgomery County should be ashamed at the road conditions during the snow storm yesterday. Nothing was plowed or treated. There were cars sliding all over major roads and on-ramps to the highways were blocked by vehicles that were stuck.
• One of Uwe Boll's movies came available on Netflix Watch Instantly this past week. I was very disciplined in not watching it for this week. It's tough, though. Of the now twenty-one of the worst movie list that I've watched, Boll's Bloodrayne is by far my favorite. This one, Alone In The Dark (#15), stars Christian Slater and Tara Reid. Temptation.

Worst of the Worst: #95, Lost Souls

Nobody's ever heard of this movie and that's just fine. It's one of those lame demonic possession movies that come out by the handful. "I'm a troubled kid who used to be possessed and/or my parents were Satanists. I just helped out on an exorcism and the demon said your body was going to be inhabited by Satan himself." "Oh, well, that can't be possible, right? I mean, I don't really know who my real father is... Oh, and I suppose I dreamed of 666 in Greek numbers and I just found a pentacle under my bed. Crap, how do we stop this?" "We can't really." "Oh, darn, I guess you'll have to try to kill me before the random appointed time that Satan fully takes over my body and you'll either succeed or not."

Not much more to say than that. It's a boilerplate story with no scares and no imagination, so it attemps to exorcise any anticipation out of you by screaming: "The power of Christ will bore the s*** out of you! The power of Christ will bore the s*** out of you!" In this case, Wynona Ryder plays the good guy in a frighteningly unenergetic performance. The thing that really jumps out is how brutally over-directed the movie is. It's one of three films ever directed by Janusz Kaminski, who is much more famous for having been Stephen Spielberg's Director of Photography since Schindler's List, winning Oscars for Cinematography in that movie and Saving Private Ryan. In Lost Souls, Kaminski shoots everything from weird angles with strange hues and way too many shadows. It's actually pretty interesting, after having seen the movie, to read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (which I always do for these movies) and see how many critics talk about how beautifully-shot this was. Not all of them do, though, and it's the others that I respect. A forty-five-degree turn of the camera while shooting straight dialogue does not a respectable art film make. The film is quite mediocre, befitting its ranking near the bottom of the list. My one joy about it is that, since it is about Christ and the Anti-Christ, us Jews don't have much to do with anything in the plot. All Catholics. Mel Gibson may have gone after us in The Passion but, sorry, guys, I'm putting this one on you.

***

In case I forget tomorrow, a side note to talk about Julie & Julia, which I also saw tonight. Really, really liked it. The Amy Adams part is pretty good. The Meryl Streep part is exceptional. It's funnier and less a conventional romantic comedy than I thought it would be. It's not really a romantic comedy at all, I suppose. Of all the things about the movies that came out in 2009, there aren't many that I enjoyed as much as Streep's performance in this one. Off the top of my head? My top five most enjoyable things in 2009 cinema may look like this:

• 5. Ed Helms brushing the chicken off the counter in The Hangover.
• 4. Brad Pitt trying to talk Italian with a southern accent in Inglourious Basterds.
• 3. Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia.
• 2. Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.
• 1. The last thirty minutes or so of Inglourious Basterds.

Sure, there's a trend there, but Streep is amazing. I don't think Sandra Bullock deserves Best Actress, because you can't judge her performance in The Blind Side relative to her performance in All About Steve, so it's not fair to say she was that good in the better movie, but she has a real shot. Carey Mulligan was a revelation (I say snootily) in An Education and deserves major consideration. If you're talking about an even playing field though, Streep deserves Best Actress every time she has a movie out. I guess they must handicap it a bit.

As I Tip A 40 Of 5W-30

What a long day that was highlighted by the untimely death of my car. I like to think that somewhere, perhaps in the clouds, JD Salinger has gotten over being a recluse and is joyriding through heaven in a 2000 Toyota Corolla. In the meantime, I'm going to crash, so here's a sleepy song:

All God's Children -- Go Into The Light!

• The Monologue:
• Shaun White, as if he had a choice, doesn't like his "Flying Tomato" nickname anymore. He's suggesting people call him "The Animal". He doesn't get to pick, but the Rob Schneider theme is cool, so his Delta Tau Chi name will heretofore be "The Hot Chick".
• This headline made me think about how unfair it is that Salami played in the food poisoning era. Yes, I totally stole that joke's concept.
• Analysis: Is this headline as stupid as I think it is?
• Random Pop Culture:
• This has been the worst audition season of American Idol that I can remember. They're showing almost no real talent and they're spending half the show with sob stories about contestants. I counted two people this week that I thought could actually sing at a level befitting the show. Also, Kara's tan is horrifying.
• Neil Patrick Harris was great as a guest judge and Katy Perry was pretty good. The other two? Why did Avril Lavigne wear a hoodie that had horns on it and has she sold any albums in the last ten years? And Joe Jonas? He seems like a bright kid with a winning personality!
• In the pantheon of bad side plots, where does the Dana Walsh/ Jenny Scott one on this year's 24 rank? They're wasting Starbuck! If they wanted to fill time that badly, they could just run a test pattern or something and pretend that the cameras broke for a few minutes every hour.
• I'm really getting excited for Lost. Five days to go.
• Random Movie Scene:
• Even though he was a recluse and every kept forgetting that he was actually alive, people are going to mourn the death of J.D. Salinger. Of course, Catcher in the Rye was not only a seminal book in many people's (including my own) development but, without it, we would never have had Bob Uecker's Catcher in the Wry. However, I'm going to dodge Salinger and instead mourn the death of Zelda Rubinstein. Who? Four words: "This house is clean." Man, I love this movie.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm...

I could write about my continued watching of Lost and how I think the fate of Rousseau's science team was a big portent of the season finale. I could write about what everyone will agree was, at the very least, the best-delivered State of the Union address in the last ten years. Instead, I'm going to ask you to read this piece from former NBA player and, as of today, former ESPN contributor Paul Shirley and discuss. If there are no comments, I'll just give my thoughts tomorrow.

January Madness

With six or seven weeks to go until Selection Sunday, I spent my evening watching college basketball for the first this season:

• One of my three favorites to win it all, Michigan State (the others are Kansas and Villanova), took their undefeated Big Ten record on the road and into Ann Arbor to face a Michigan team coached by John Beilein. Michigan played Beilein's style of defense and outside shots and took the Spartans to the wire, but Michigan State is too deep. Their best player, point guard Kalin Lucas, had a bad game until the very end when he took over and hit a jumper with three seconds left to win (after Michigan missed a short bank shot at the buzzer). This is how Michigan State made it to the final game last year and I expect the same kind of toughness come March.
• Maryland leads the ACC and ran a pretty bad Miami team off the floor tonight. The Terps were not good early in the year, but they've caught fire. Maybe they'll actually prove worthy of the top-twenty preseason ranking.
• How is John Calipari allowed to coach? He has had two teams have to vacate Final Four runs, UMass because Marcus Camby took money and Memphis because Derrick Rose had his SATs taken for him. Now, Calipari has the best freshman class in the country, including the best player in the country, John Wall. The Wildcats went into tonight ranked #1 as the only undefeated team left. It's fishy.
• Except that #1 ranking lasted all of one day before Kentucky became the last team to lose a game. South Carolina had never before beaten a top-ranked team and they seemed severely outmanned, but SC had my new favorite player in the nation, Devan Downey. Downey, a 5'8" guard, was simply unguardable. He badly outplayed Wall and scored thirty points, including some crazy circus shots in traffic down the stretch. It takes SC to .500 in the SEC, so they'll have some work to do to get into the tourney. Beating #1 can't hurt. No embeddable highlights as of yet, but here is the link.

March is right around the corner.

The Monologue

• Tonight, it's just jokes and jokes and jokes and jokes:
• Diddy gave his son a $360,000 Maybach for his sixteenth birthday. In the spirit of giving, he also presented one of his rappers with a $1,000,000 life insurance policy and a contract to record an album called "What It Might Be Like If I Were A Ghost And Rapping This".
• A couple found a letter from Thomas Jefferson in the file cabinet of an office in Old Town Alexandria. The letter begins: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a man to get freaky..."
• A couple found a letter from Thomas Jefferson. It is addressed to an "SH" and ends, "Huge. Quickly."
• For one night, the Charlotte Bobcats were wearing NASCAR-inspired uniforms. It's the most unexpected union since Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.