Beltmann

When he kicked the grandmother in the face, my wife laughed so hard she embarrassed both of us.

Today: Hold Steady, Dr. Dog, Sloan. It's been a good day.

Agreed. The movie asks sophisticated questions about heroism, justice, and ethics but the niftiest thing is that it doesn't provide easy, neat answers.

Gotcha... I should have put that together.

It does when ineptitude on the field is largely related to size of market. Milwaukee will never have access to resources and revenue comparable to New York or Chicago. Right now we're in a good stretch, but once these young players are due the big payday, things will most likely unravel. In a market like Milwaukee, success is very difficult to sustain for any length of time. The comparison to the Cubs is ridiculous. The Cubs have the ability to be among baseball's top spenders year in and year out; Milwaukee does not.

As a lifelong Brewers fan, I snort at the idea that rooting for the Mets or Red Sox, two teams that are usually competitive, has an underdog appeal. If the Red Sox are underdogs, then what do we call the Brewers after 25 years of total ineptitude? Lepers?

Little Fugitive / Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin / 1953 Tricked into believing he has killed his older brother, a young boy takes off and for two days wanders around Coney Island. Part of the movie's beauty is its childlike point-of-view--here is a movie that understands the magic of cotton candy--but since the filmmakers focus on capturing the ambience and rhythms of Brooklyn and Coney Island, the movie also feels like a vital recording of a bygone era.

Ouch. The last Levinson film I saw in the theater was Bandits--although I should have thrown in the towel after Jimmy Hollywood. (Liberty Heights was decent, I guess.) There was a time when Levinson represented quality screenwriting in Hollywood, and his 1982-1991 career was a pretty good run. Diner and Avalon are two of my favorite movies.

I almost watched that over the weekend. What the heck happened to Barry Levinson?

Mad Detective / Johnny To and Wai Ka-Fai / Hong Kong How mad is the detective? In the opening sequence, he orders himself zipped into a suitcase and tossed down a staircase, and also presents his own severed ear, sliced on the spot, to a fellow officer as a retirement gift. Eventually we learn that this lunatic has the ability to see the "inner personalities" of people, which enables him to envision the truth of any crime scene. The central mystery concerns a murdered cop and missing pistols, but the film focuses instead on issues of identity, weakness, and delusion. It's all very fast,

Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights is no Chungking Express, but still much better than its reputation suggests. It takes awhile to realize that Norah Jones

I laughed more than once.

Although she had a very social childhood, as an adult Emily Dickinson basically withdrew from social contact because she found it draining. But she maintained many relationships via letters; perhaps she would have loved message boards.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Absolutely.

The Mist is one of the best "genre" flicks I've seen in ages. Truly unsettling. A lot of people disliked how the movie makes its social criticism explicit, but that's exactly what I loved about it. And I think I could lead an entire class on what this film says about fear, desperation, and fanaticism. What it condemns and endorses isn't always obvious. SPOILER: .

As I said in my PM, reading your post was like looking into the mirror. Here's an article from early January that made me feel the same way: Happy Introvert Day!

Control is an excellent biopic about Ian Curtis.

The Great Debaters. I'm a bit of a sucker for glossy, crowdpleasing social-message movies.

They kicked him out for being an extremist.

I think the cover is a nifty piece of satire, but I'm undecided about the wisdom of putting the image out there in the atmosphere. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert once wrote: "That's the danger with satire: To ridicule something, you have to show it, and if what you're attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it."

His FAQ section is fun, too.

But he did play a janitor in Reggie's Prayer (and we can't forget about his turn in There's Something About Mary).