You know, you ought to be able to comment on Google search results. Hm.
Author: Bryant
David Pinto comments on the Beckett trade here and here. Both times he notes that the Red Sox are going for “win now” rather than rebuilding — but it doesn’t seem to me like that’s a wildly goofy thing to do. The Red Sox are one year off from a World Series victory and they have three postseason appearances in a row; in theory, at least, it makes sense to try and keep the streak going rather than rebuild.
I personally like the trade. The Sox had an abundance of minor league pitching, some of which will contribute next year. Lowell and Youklis between them should solve first and third base. The rotation is something like Beckett, Clement, Schilling, Wakefield, Papelbon, and Arroyo as the backup — shuffle that as you see fit, but it’s about right. The kids plus Timlin could be a good bullpen.
The big problems are in the outfield. Manny’s probably gone. Damon’s almost certainly gone. Trot Nixon will miss half the year again. I think you really need three outfielders who can start and play reliably and that’s a tough set of holes to fill.
I finished A Feast for Crows last night. It’s quite a book; slow through much of the first half and picking up in the end. My favorite character doesn’t appear at all, since he’s off in the section of the world that will be handled in the next book. Things happen. We see a lot of Dorne; I liked that a lot.
I’ll touch on some spoilers in the extended entry, but before that: I also have the Guardians of Order A Game of Thrones RPG in hand. (Put it together with The World’s Largest Dungeon and Hero Fifth Edition Revised, which I happen to be able to do at the moment, and you’ve got a hefty chunk of book.) So, campaign:
Three players; one’s a cousin of Ned Stark, one’s a cousin of Tywin Lannister, and one’s a cousin of Mace Tyrell. Possibly once-removed in any of those cases. Also possibly bastards, but if so, recognized. Either gender works. All of them are between the ages of 13 and 16; they’ve all been fostered down to Dorne a year or two before the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire.
I’d run for a few sessions focusing on childhood concerns, letting the characters develop, letting them bond. Then I’d start running the events leading up to the War of Five Kings, without any particular expectations as to the reactions of the characters. At the start, they’d be fairly fringe. By the time the fourth book rolls around, there are enough dead people so that their place in the lines of succession might be important.
OK, spoilers follow.
The Brattle Theatre Watch-A-Thon is pretty tempting. I could see a lot of movies between November 11th and December 4th.
HEY. YOU. Would you sponsor me?
Not that I’ve got a bootleg copy of Good vs. Evil or anything, but if I did it’d be medium quality video recorded from the Sci-Fi Channel with the Sci-Fi logo in the upper right hand corner and all. But it’d be the whole schmear on three DVDs, both the first season on USA and the second season on Sci-Fi. So it’d be totally worth it.
There might be an email address — dvd@timlarock.com — on the amateurish menu screen. Or this might all be a complex sting operation on my part. I dunno.
There’s a void in the blogging world. Or at least, there was up until now.
The Panda Assassin. Truth in advertising. Just what it sounds like.
All credit to michele blue, who found it.
So Tom DeLay had to appear at the courthouse for a mug shot last week. Now, let’s say you’re a politician in some degree of trouble, and you gotta have your mug shot taken. I’m thinking it’s not too much of a leap of brilliance to say “I better not look like a criminal in the photograph.”
Or maybe that takes “a freaking political genius”. And maybe taking care to look good in your mug shot completely disarms one’s adversaries. I mean, that’s it — he looked good in his mug shot, so the trial might as well be over now.
This is an awfully low bar for political excellence, if you ask me.
Note to self:
iTunes videocasting plus Lisa Rein’s Daily Show clips implies things.
NBC bought the new Sorkin show. They paid a hunka hunka burning money, it’s a show about a live comedy show (c.f. SNL), and that’s most of the informational content of the article I just linked to.
Anticipatory.
Creep is pretty much your standard nouveau horror flick (see also Cabin Fever, Cube, etc.). Franka Potente is trapped in the London Underground late at night, and must flee a scary homicidal creature who kills and eats for reasons never exactly explained. It’s pared down, tense throughout, self-aware, and so forth. I left feeling sort of apathetic, though.
I was scared — Christopher Smith is a dab hand with the jump scare. He’s also really good at using the well-lit Underground in contrast with dank side tunnels for effect; light is not a significator for “safe” in this movie. Perhaps in accordance with this, the monster is fully revealed about two thirds of the way through — no shadows. That worked fairly well, I thought. It means the movie was working without a net, however.
Tension-wise, that was fine. Smith got tension even when we knew exactly what the thing looked like. On the other hand, he veered into Grand Guignol territory with at least one scene that I found gratuitous; it didn’t raise the tension, it didn’t make the monster scarier, it didn’t raise the threat level for the protagonist, and it didn’t reveal a whole lot about the backstory.
What you had, I think, is a bad script. (Smith both directed and wrote.) This shows in a few places. The mythology of the monster is somewhat muddled. There’s a nice bit where the monster’s presence is signified by the arrival of rats, but there’s no reason why that would happen — he’s probably not a supernatural evil — and the rats are more or less dropped after a couple of scenes.
Further, and probably the most damning, Potente’s character is not sympathetic. She’s kinda shallow, she’s distinctly bitchy, and she’s too dumb for words. Yeah, dumber than your usual slasher movie hero. The first time she failed to do the smart thing, I lived with it. The second time I got a little grumpy. The third time I considered rooting for the monster. She wasn’t just dumb, she was obtrusively dumb. Also not sympathetic. In fact, she was kind of wimpy.
So about middle of the road, all in all. The directing was really good; Smith probably just needs to not direct his own scripts. And Potente was excellent, unsurprisingly.
OK, so, now, Izo…
I got nothing. I walked out of the theater completely baffled. I can’t say good, I can’t say bad. Izo, who was a real historical figure, is executed in the 1800s and returns to cut his way through everything that stands between him and… something. The Emperor? He’s the irrational, we’re told, expelled by a perfect rational system. His karma is so horrible that he’s made to suffer in this way. There’s a folk singer who shows up from time to time to advance those themes. He dies, he comes back, he kills more people. He is the embodiment of rage. Towards the end, he meets up with a woman who says she’s part of his spirit, and that she was supposed to meet him but hasn’t. She’s the compassionate part. The mysterious council of rulers explain that they’ve created an illusion in order to maintain perfect control. (They do wind up dying, yes.) Izo reaches the Emperor, worn out from his struggles — kills the guards, one of whom then transmutes into a caterpillar — and…
Is blown over by a single breath from the Emperor. Then, over the credits, the folk singer explains that “You are free to go anywhere.”
I got nothing. Maybe it’s about rejecting control, but Izo loses, so who knows? The historical Izo was an assassin who killed supporters of the Shogunate. Seriously, I got nothing, and I can usually engage with Miike movies. Or Lynch movies. But this was beyond me.