Monday, February 07, 2005

Jose Can You See

Get ready for a spectacle. Jose Canseco's book, "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big," is scheduled for release on Feb. 21. In the book, Jose writes that he personally injected Mark McGwire with steroids and that he saw McGwire and Jason Giambi inject each other. Does that make anyone else queasy? That is a visual I just don't need. How is Jose gonna do a book tour if he's still under house arrest?

Oh yeah, congrats to the New England Patriots on three titles in four years. Very impressive. Perhaps next year they will face a real QB and Coach in the big game. For a guy who claimed to be "loose" all week, Donovan McNabb looked like Joel Sherman after 12 mini-thins. And it was nice of Andy Reid to borrow Dick Curl, the Jets clock management consultant, for the game.

I gave American Dad a shot last night. It needs to be 69 times better for me to give it a shot next time. Memo to Fox: Family Guy is great. I love Family Guy. Don't throw a watered down version of Family Guy at me and expect me to accept it. A fish that talks with a German accent? An alien who sounds alot like Andy Dick? Come on, I need more.
(Oh, who the hell am I kidding, I'll be watching the next episode)

Illinois is finishing the regular season undefeated. Lock it up. Boston College will lose not once, but twice, before the regular season is over. Neither of these teams will win the NCAA title. And Seth Davis annoyed me on CBS' halftime show yesterday.

Flipping around in the hours before the game, I stumbled upon three god awful movies:
-Is Ghostbusters 2 the worst sequel of all time? Discuss.
-When greenlighting Bulletproof Monk, was there actually a moment where someone said, "You know what, I bet casting Stiffler as the buddy to Chow Yun-Fat guarantees us a smash?"
-That Johnny Depp movie, Secret Window, where he's the writer being harassed by John Turturro? I mean, not only was it trash, but the folks who made the Shining and Fight Club should seriously sue.

My vote for best commercial (in case you care): the FedEx Burt Reynolds/Bear commercial, followed closely by those CareerBuilder.com ads featuring office monkeys (an idea I've been pushing unsuccessfully for years). Question - that really was MC Hammer in those Lay's ads right?

5 comments:

Whitney said...

A repeat comment, TJ.
From last May over at Misery Loves Company (a supposed baseball blog that Rob Russell was roundly thrashed for putting this on):

"...Avid (only?) reader T.J. Doyle from Arlington, VA chimes in with the first-ever MLC mailbag entry:
'Worst sequel, Ghostbusters 2 or Another 48 hours?' "

And Rob's answer:
"The answer, unequivocally and without question, is Highlander 2, The Quickening. To steal unabashedly from the once and future Boston Sports Guy, I will not argue this. The original Highlander was simply a terrific film, with an intriguing (assuming willing suspension of belief) time-twisting plot, a chilling, pitch-perfect villain (I defy you to watch the scene where the Kurgan describes killing Ramirez and raping Connor MacLeod's woman without the hair standing straight up on the back of your neck), and a bunch of cool swordfighting scenes.

I will admit that Highlander resonates all the more with me for the fact that I've seen it literally dozens of times. It, along with Fletch and Spinal Tap, served as the videotrack for my college years, playing over and over again on the television in my fraternity house living room.

So when the sequel came out in 1991, the brotherhood of Pi Lambda Phi rose as one to attend opening night at the Carmike Cinemas in downtown Williamsburg, VA, anticipating the continuation of the legacy of the One. We knew within the film's first 10 minutes that the sequel was an unredeemable pile of stinking monkey shit. The filmmakers took an epic fantasy, nuanced and clever, and turned it into a hackneyed futuristic cliche. We were laughing at ostensibly serious dialogue less than halfway through the movie, and openly rooting for the bad guys (aliens, as it turns out, fucking aliens) to destroy the earth and with it the screenwriters.

The Quickening? We dubbed it the Sickening. And it's the worst sequel ever even contemplated. Next question, please."

My 2 cents is that Caddyshack, The Sting, and Batman all had sequels that fell further from the original. And I opted not to go to Highlander II that night, making me the wise one indeed.

Geoff said...

And yes, it was Hammer.

You know, that War of the Worlds preview was strong to quite strong. And seriously, is Dakota Fanning working 350 days a year? Child labor laws?

T.J. said...

That girl is going to be WAY more fucked up than Drew Barrymore.

Geoff said...

She's already been in 18 movies...although one was in 1988, when she was negative six years old...which is very impressive.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0266824/

T.J. said...

I'm pretty sure she noticed the difference in acting ability when switching from Kurt Russell to Tom Cruise. By the way, during that Batman promo, weren't you just waiting for Batman to scream TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARD! YOU, FUCKING BASTARD! I know I was.