In which I try not to come off like a dick

Let's talk pools. First of all, the big one: the 2006 BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge. Let me start here by saying that I'm glad to see the interest, especially from a new corner or two. However, the way things have played out in the last three years of the Challenge, and the fact that I'm probably only going to see one of the contestants during the tournament's run, compels me to add the following regulations this year.

If you plan on entering the pool, please e-mail me at this address ASAP. Further, please make sure that I have your entry fee (the customary $5) no later than the first day of the tournament. That's more than two weeks away, so it should be plenty of time. I may be able to grant exceptions with a doctor's note, but I'd rather not have to. This isn't for me, you understand; those who have done this for years know that I don't keep cent one (unless I win). The last two years, however, I've had to keep the winners waiting on their prizes for some time due to certain people not getting their entry fees in on time, and eventually at all - the last three years I've had to make up the difference when at least one person (and, at least once, two people) didn't pay up. Needless to say, this isn't something I look forward to doing again. While I hate to rule people out because I always want more contestants, you're not doing anyone any good if you're not paying to enter. Therefore, at the risk of sounding like a total bastard, I have to insist that the money is in on time, however you manage to do it. Otherwise you will be out, unless perhaps there is sufficient groveling. I assure you, however, that I am not paying more than five bucks myself this year.

I realize, of course, that a good many of you are entered in the iTunes Shuffle Challenge, which may well not have a resolution for weeks. If the winner elects for the free Tournament Challenge entry, they will receive a refund; however, I still must require people to send in the money originally, because otherwise we could have eight people sitting on it for weeks, and that's just not going to work.

Well, this probably wasn't the best way to start... but those of you who have been in the Challenge before know that it's a good time. And what's not fun about filling out tournament brackets? I'm thinking of everyone here, after all. Just ask Craig or Tyler how fun it was waiting until August to collect their winnings.

With that, here's your update on the iTunes Shuffle Challenge, which actually is moving right along at the moment, defying the odds.

Still in Play

The B-52s, "Love Shack"
The Beatles, "No Reply" - Jan
Ben Folds Five, "Don't Change Your Plans" - Drew
Collective Soul, "December" - Ryan
Dave Matthews Band, "Satellite" - Brian H.
Five for Fighting, "Boat Parade" - Rudnik
John Ottman, "I Work for Keyser Soze" (from The Usual Suspects score) - Nemo
Led Zeppelin, "In the Light"
Pearl Jam, "Alive" - Craig
Snow Patrol, "Ways and Means"
Snow Patrol, "One Hundred Things You Should Have Done in Bed"
U2, "Beautiful Day"

Eliminated

The Beatles, "Can't Buy Me Love" - played 2/28/06 at 7:05 PM
Cheap Trick, "I Want You to Want Me" - Greg - played 3/3/06 at 2:55 PM
Fastball, Better Than It Was - played 3/3/06 at 9:38 AM
Guster, "Medicine" - played 2/27/06 at 12:17 PM
Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, "Suite No. 3 in D Major BWV 1068" (from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos) - played 3/3/06 at 4:50 PM
Idlewild, "Quiet Crown" - Stan - played 2/28/06 at 5:59 PM
Jurassic Park, "Six Inch Claw" (movie dialogue) - Alma - played 2/28/06 at 3:39 PM
Marc Shaiman, "The Slow Down Plan" (from The American President score) - played 2/28/06 at 7:03 PM
Mitch Hedberg, "Saved by the Buoyancy of Citrus" - Tyler - played 3/3/06 at 11:42 AM
The Police, "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" - JQ - played 3/1/06 at 9:58 AM
The Romantics, "What I Like About You" - played 2/27/06 at 6:27 PM
Weezer, "Butterfly" - played 3/1/06 at 12:18 AM
Weird Al Yankovic, "The Night Santa Went Crazy" - Justin - played 3/4/06 at 6:48 PM

Those in bold are contest entries. I imagine that two questions might come to mind here:

1) What if the song played last isn't one that anyone picked?
2) Two never-previously-played songs were played within two minutes of each other tonight?

The answer to #2 is, astonishingly, yes. I did a double-take when I saw the count. The answer to #1 is, the winner will be whoever's song was played last, because although technically I left myself the loophole of not awarding a prize if no one's song won, that would be really shitty of me, especially when I'm asking for rigorous compliance on the tourney challenge. Since the field is now closed, the 11 of you still in it are now playing against each other only. The chances are better than 50/50 that someone will legitimately win, and I hope it comes down to two songs that people have picked, but I'm not rigging this thing, so we won't know until we do.

Last iTune Standing

Well, the field has been whittled down to 25 tracks that have never been played by my iPod or iTunes on shuffle mode. The list appears below; pick your horse in the comments section. Only one person per song, since there's no way 25 people are going to do this. Thus I can only accept picks submitted in the comments form, so that you can see if someone took the one you were going to go with. (I'll also try and mark off the already-chosen ones as they come up, but don't assume the list you see is the most up-to-date one.) First come, first serve. Of course, I'll be interested to see how many people even bother. Prize to be determined.

EDIT: Because I'm neatly cross-promotional, the winner gets their choice of either (a) free entry into the BigFlax.com 2006 NCAA Tournament Challenge or, if that doesn't interest them, (b) a mix CD with some of my recent favorites. If neither interests you... well, TFB, I guess.

The B-52s, Love Shack
The Beatles, Can't Buy Me Love
The Beatles, No Reply
Ben Folds Five, Don't Change Your Plans - Drew
Cheap Trick, I Want You to Want Me - Greg
Collective Soul, December - Ryan
Dave Matthews Band, Satellite - Brian H.
Fastball, Better Than It Was
Five for Fighting, Boat Parade - Rudnik
Guster, Medicine - played 2/27/06 at 12:17 PM
Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, Suite No. 3 in D Major BWV 1068 (from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos)
Idlewild, Quiet Crown - Stan
John Ottman, "I Work for Keyser Soze" (from The Usual Suspects score) - Nemo
Jurassic Park, Six Inch Claw (movie dialogue) - Alma
Led Zeppelin, In the Light
Marc Shaiman, The Slow Down Plan (from The American President score)
Mitch Hedberg, Saved by the Buoyancy of Citrus - Tyler
Pearl Jam, Alive - Craig
The Police, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic - JQ
The Romantics, What I Like About You - played 2/27/06 at 6:27 PM
Snow Patrol, Ways and Means
Snow Patrol, One Hundred Things You Should Have Done in Bed
U2, Beautiful Day
Weezer, Butterfly
Weird Al Yankovic, The Night Santa Went Crazy - Justin

No more mouth strain with Fluffy Puff Nibblers

It has been suggested to me that the recent trend towards long-form updates discourages reading the entire thing and thus discourages commenting. I think the updates just look longer because of the Blogger format and that on the old Bigflax pages they wouldn't seem as bad. That said, I'll grant that some of the recent updates have indeed been fairly long. So here's a couple of morsels that I could have added to the last post, but didna:

*I saw something on ESPN.com the other day that asked the question, "Can a complete unknown win Bassmasters 2006?" My answer: "Necessarily!"

*I'm a little worried about the NCAA Tournament changing the rules so that teams from the same conference can meet as early as the second round. They claim it's a reaction to the large number of teams from the Big East - but do you think the committee really wants to match teams from one of its marquee conferences that early? Anyway, even with ten Big East teams in the tournament, there's no need to match them or anyone else up that early. If they have to fudge a couple seed lines like they do every year, what's the difference? The point is, I watch the tournament to see teams from different conferences play each other. If I wanted a bunch of rematches from February, I'd just watch the conference tournaments. (Oh, wait, I do that too. Still, you know what I'm saying here.)

Competitive violence, that's why you're here

Astonishingly, I haven't talked sports in this space since January 15, or well over a month. That, of course, was the Bears' loss to the Panthers, which was seriously depressing but not so much of a letdown that it should have kept me from any sports discussion for five weeks. I suppose the larger point here is that there is very little on the sports radar screen to occupy me between the end of football and the start of the college basketball conference tournaments (which, by the way, begin this coming Tuesday), especially since I already have a separate blog to talk about soccer results that no one reads anyway.

Still, it seems kind of strange that someone who cares as much about sports as I do would go that long without discussing them at all. So here, in quick-hit format, are a number of things that I've been thinking about or consider worth discussing:

*First of all, the shameless plug: the 2006 BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge is looking for entrants. So far I think I only have two or three confirmed interests, and one of those is me. It would really be a shame if after five consecutive years I had to cancel the thing due to lack of interest, as though it were a college elective.

*What is Shaun White doing on the cover of Sports Illustrated for two consecutive weeks? I realize that the U.S. isn't exactly racking up the high-profile wins at the Winter Olympics, but can't we do a little better than snowboarding, a "sport" that was clearly only added to the Olympics to boost the American medal count? If I wanted to watch the Winter X Games, I would - but I don't. White Sox fans across the country were complaining about SI's failure to put the Sox on the cover after winning the World Series, which I thought was stupid because the Sox were on the cover (just not the featured picture) that week, and anyway they'd been on the cover after winning the first two games the previous week. But seeing Shaun White on the cover two weeks in a row has caused me to re-evaluate. A World Series champion can't make the cover two weeks running, but a snowboarder can? Come on. In addition, everyone I know agrees that "The Flying Tomato" is an idiotic nickname. You know it's one of those cases where it was given to him derogatorily at first, and he wasn't cool enough to escape from the shadow of the teasing nickname, so he just accepted it. To sum up, is there a single moment in this Winter Olympics you can imagine telling your kids about? Forget the Miracle on Ice, this doesn't even have the enjoyable controversy of the 2002 judging scandal or Sarah Hughes' come-from-behind win. You think there are going to be parents telling their kids about the gold-medal exploits of the Flying Tomato in twenty years?

*One other Olympic note: this whole Shani Davis thing is rapidly turning into the most overplayed and obnoxious sports story in recent memory. If it weren't for the fact that Davis has managed to be successful, his mom would be challenging Todd Marinovich's dad and Jim Pierce for the "Worst Sports Parent" lifetime achievement award. As it is, she's just giving Richard Williams a run for "Most Annoyingly Visible." And can't we just agree that Davis and Chad Hedrick are both douchebags? I love that Hedrick got mad that Davis refused to skate the team pursuit and made it seem like he was angry that Davis was turning his back on his country, when the obvious if unspoken real reason was because Hedrick knew the U.S. couldn't win the team pursuit without Davis and thus Hedrick himself couldn't challenge Eric Heiden for the record of five gold medals from Lake Placid. At least Davis was up-front about being in it only for himself.

*This could either be the best NCAA Tournament in a long time or one of the worst ever. The bubble appears to be quite weak this year, meaning either that we'll finally get the slew of talented mid-majors for which people have been agitating for years now (current projections actually have five teams from the Missouri Valley qualifying, along with small-conference leaders whose at-large hopes would have been considered unthinkable in years past like Bucknell and George Mason) or we'll get a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel major conference crap. I mean, who would you rather see in the tournament, a 22-7 Northern Iowa or a 17-9 Nebraska? Me too.

*The other thing is that the list of teams that jump out as "likely or even possible winners" seems really short. I mean, besides Duke, UConn, Villanova, and I guess Texas, which teams leap out? I have a hard time buying teams like Memphis and Gonzaga as national champions, ranked in the top five or not, and other teams hovering in the four-to-six-loss range are little more inspiring. (Ohio State? Florida? Pitt? Tennessee?) If Duke and UConn stay on pace, Villanova does enough to stay ahead of Memphis, and Texas wins the Big 12 Tournament, we could be looking at the first tournament ever to have four #1 seeds in the Final Four - I wouldn't trust Memphis, but it's hard to look at the others and say that a team from the rest of the pack would obviously knock them off. On the other hand, if a couple high seeds (and I mean #1s and #2s here) go down before the Elite Eight, we could be looking at a really crazy second weekend in terms of teams still playing. A lot of the major programs have struggled this year while a few less-than-traditional powers have shown up on the map - who knows, maybe we end up with a Duke, UConn, Ohio State, Tennessee Final Four. What is this, the women's tournament?

*The World Baseball Classic: Baseball is still my favorite sport, and probably always will be as long as I live in this country, but I'm not sure I care about this. It just reeks of "stunt," a flailing attempt to stay relevant internationally - if it were a real World Cup, there would have been qualifying rounds. The WBC appears to have been invitation-only, and I'm not even sure how some of these teams got the call - South Africa? Italy, that hotbed of baseball and ancestral home to Mike Piazza? Plus, national pride forbids me from rooting against the U.S., but how can I be gung-ho for a team starting Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez? At least Derrek Lee will likely be the starting first baseman.

*There's nothing like looking at the WBC rosters to make you feel kind of weird about how global the game has become, though. I'm not saying that's bad - just interesting. During a recent Champions League soccer game, Derek Rae (the play-by-play man) noted how interesting it was to see Real Madrid, a Spanish side, starting two Englishmen (David Beckham and Jonathan Woodgate), while Arsenal, an English side, wasn't starting any (UEFA formerly had a rule that a club was not allowed to have more than five players from outside its home nation on the pitch at any one time, but this was deemed illegal in 1995). Things aren't quite that dramatic in baseball, and certainly the ability of players to beg out of the WBC affects this a bit, but the U.S. roster has a distinct "That's it?" feel about it in most places, whereas, in particular, the Dominican team will likely be starting Albert Pujols, Miguel Tejada, David Ortiz, Adrian Beltre, Vladimir Guerrero, and Alfonso Soriano, a potent offensive lineup if nothing else. (This doesn't even include Manny Ramirez, as the latest rumors have him not playing.) You can see why A-Rod ended up picking the U.S. - much less to overshadow him from a hitters' perspective.

But the point here is this - 20 years ago, just as you would have seen mostly English players playing soccer in England, you would have seen mostly American players on baseball teams in America. The Latin American influx had certainly begun long before, but it was nothing like it is today in terms of percentages, especially at the top of the sport. Look at the leaderboards from 1986, for example - the only foreign-born players to crack the NL top five in any important statistical category were Juan Samuel (Dominican Republic; #2 in triples, #5 in doubles, t-#5 in stolen bases); Chili Davis (Jamaica; #3 in walks); Mariano Duncan (Dominican Republic; #4 in stolen bases); and Fernando Valenzuela (Mexico; #1 in wins and #2 in strikeouts). The AL was about the same - George Bell, Tony Fernandez, Jose Canseco, Ruben Sierra, Teddy Higuera, Bert Blyleven (and of course the latter was not Latino, but from Holland). You'd have to go to more useless categories like "total games played" to add a couple more to the list - but basically it was about a dozen top-shelf foreign-born players in Major League Baseball. Almost none led their categories, additionally.

Now look at the 2005 leaderboard. Looking just at hits, runs, RBI, average, SLG, OBP, doubles, triples, and homers, we find Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, and Alfonso Soriano; Ortiz and Ramirez were 1-2 in RBI and Tejada led in doubles. Meanwhile, Johan Santana and Bartolo Colon were among the best pitchers in the league, leading in Ks and wins respectively, while three of the top five closers - Francisco Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera, and Danys Baez - were from abroad. Carlos Silva even slipped into the ERA top five. That's 13 foreign-born players among the five best players in the game in a number of major categories. Oh, and I forgot to mention - that's just the AL. The NL adds another seven and could even add a couple more if you stretched to slightly more obscure categories or counted Dave Roberts, who was born in Japan and is half-Japanese, though he was raised in the U.S.

Sure, the numbers aren't overwhelming, but then again we're not talking about pre- and post-integration here. There's an obvious increase, and more importantly an obvious increase in the number of major stars. People didn't stop what they were doing to see Tony Fernandez or Juan Samuel hit; tickets were not scalped like crazy when Teddy Higuera came to town. But if you hear that Manny Ramirez or Albert Pujols is at the plate? Pedro Martinez is starting against your team? These are guys people know, guys they want to see, guys who are quantifiably among both the best and most talked-about players in the league. That's the difference. And that's why when you see a WBC roster for the U.S., and it doesn't have nearly as many guys of that caliber as you'd expect from the home of the game, it makes you feel a little weird inside. In the mid-80s, it would have been unthinkable for the U.S. not to have far and away the best roster in any such event. Today - well, at least from an offensive perspective, we don't.

If there was nothing there all along

Reminder! The 2006 BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge is right around the corner. Don't make me come up there.

Time for what seems at this point like the obligatory bi-weekly music post. Those of you who know me and have some sense for the kind of stuff I listen to will understand that my "taste" in music is pretty simple: If it sounds good to me, then I like it, and if it doesn't, I don't. There are some artists who didn't sound great at first but grew on me later, but there are certainly plenty I didn't even bother with a second time as well, and it's like movies - I don't have the time to give second chances to everything I didn't like the first time, no matter how many good reviews I may hear. That said, there are still a number of artists I'm a little annoyed I didn't give more of a chance sooner, with Death Cab for Cutie heading the list - I bought Transatlanticism in 2003, yet didn't listen to or appreciate more than a couple of tracks until just a few months ago (by which point Plans was already out, for crying out loud - but we'll talk Plans anon).

Anyway. I don't know if I'm exactly qualified to be the sort of guy who gives out recommendations because my tastes are so varied (with multiple tracks on my iPod from artists as divergent as ABBA, Miles Davis, Blink 182, Keith Urban, and Ludwig van Beethoven), but here's some stuff I've been into lately, in the hopes of keeping you from passing by music that you might end up hearing three years from now and wondering why you didn't get into it sooner.

The Long Winters, "The Commander Thinks Aloud"
I've already sung the praises of their last LP, When I Pretend to Fall, in this space. The Ultimatum EP, which came out at the end of 2005, is not the same level of awesome - five of the six tracks (two of which are live) are relatively disposable, though certainly none are bad. But if you ask me, it's worth the price alone for the opening track, a solemn yet strangely uplifting six-plus-minute song told from the perspective of the captain of a crashing, or possibly exploding, space shuttle. I seem to have a perverse sort of interest in these minutes-to-live scenarios (like the time when I read the Wikipedia entries for about twenty different famous air disasters in a row), though I'm not sure I could say why exactly that is. Either way, Roderick's captain delivers sublimely poetic observations on his surroundings before suddenly declaring, "The crew compartment's breaking up," a line which hit me like a punch to the gut the first time I heard the song, not knowing its subject material ahead of time. (Sorry for ruining it, but it's hard to explain why I like the song otherwise and who's ever swayed by "Just go listen to it?") On multiple occasions, different parts of the song have actually caused tears to form in my eyes, which I'm pretty sure is the only time a song has done that to me. Just go listen to it.

The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
Everyone and his dad, including my own, has been talking about this one for a while now, but while I've had it and enjoyed it for some time already, I reintroduced myself to it a few days ago and I've practically had to force myself not to just put it on repeat. If you haven't already gotten into this album, you've got about six months before the next one comes out. For my money, it's better than Oh, Inverted World - sure, "Caring is Creepy" and "New Slang" are great, but fully three of the tracks - "Weird Divide," "The Celibate Life," and "Your Algebra" - feel a bit more like filler, especially the latter. At under 34 minutes, Chutes Too Narrow is far too short for my liking, but on the other hand, how often does an album contain ten songs where not only can I say "I like all ten of the songs," but "I would like to listen to every single one of these songs 100 times in the next week?" I'm not even sure I can choose favorites... I guess my personal favorites would be "Gone for Good," "Pink Bullets," "Young Pilgrims," "So Says I," "Kissing the Lipless"... but see, that's half the album right there. If you aren't a fan already, give it a shot.

Ben Lee, Awake is the New Sleep
Lee's collaboration with Ben Folds on The Bens EP put his name in my memory bank, but despite being tempted to buy it because of the amusement value of the name alone as though I were someone's grandmother at the video store, I didn't pick up Awake is the New Sleep until after it had been recommended by none other than Folds himself on Amazon.com. Lee himself is perhaps a bit too into Taoist New Age wankery, but it rarely bleeds through into the music in any obtrusive way. Instead, it's 14 tracks of mostly light guitar pop, with some good lyrics but even more enjoyable tunes. My personal favorites are "Whatever It Is" (the opener, which contains the surprisingly inspirational titular lyric), "Begin," "Catch My Disease," "Into the Dark," "Close I've Come," and "The Debt Collectors," in that track order. This is one I'm fairly confident most of my regular readership will not have touched before, so check it out.

Jack's Mannequin, Everything in Transit
And my ridiculously populist side comes out for all to see. I think I'm just a big-time sucker for piano pop/rock - witness my Folds fandom, in particular - and Andrew McMahon does have a way with the ivories. I first mentioned Something Corporate on BigFlax on February 26, 2003, but after their second LP wasn't nearly as good as the first, they dropped off my radar screen. Then, shortly after the new year, I idly checked up on them and found that McMahon, the frontman, had put out a solo album in late 2005. I don't even remember if I listened to more than a brief hint of the sound clips before I ended up buying it during a time-killing perusal of the music section at Best Buy. (Their selection is surprisingly robust, it should be noted.) Anyway, this album more than any other on this list is certainly an illustration of how I won't turn down things that sound good. McMahon seems to write from that post-high-school mentality that I'm legally young enough to still have but just don't because... well, I never had the type of high school or college experience that early-20s songwriters extol. So why I seem to identify with it so much, I don't know - maybe it's a vicarious thing. (McMahon is only five days younger than I am, it bears noting.) Either way, this may not be earth-shattering stuff - the second track is about making a mix tape that's so good it "could burn a hole in anyone" - but it's more lyrically mature than earlier Something Corporate work, I've liked McMahon's singing voice since Leaving Through the Window, and the music here is as solid as anything he's done. Particular favorite tracks are "The Mixed Tape," "Bruised," "La La Lie," "Kill the Messenger," "Rescued," and my favorite, the album closer "Into the Airwaves," which actually has more plays than any other song on my iTunes right now thanks to my playing this album several times on the iPod and enough shuffle hits to pass its compatriots and everyone else. Knowing my audience, I doubt there's anyone who'd really be interested in this one, but if you ever got into Something Corporate, or if you wonder what it might sound like if Ben Folds was a member of Jimmy Eat World, or something like that, it might be worth a try.

Death Cab for Cutie, Plans
We close with a review as much as a recommendation. I've only seriously listened to this album a couple times, but both were in the past few days, and I feel ready to at least give my first impressions. First off: it's not Transatlanticism. Of course, that would have been tough. I might suggest that it's more tonally unified, though; where Transatlanticism bounces around a little bit - not to its detriment, but it just does - Plans maintains a pretty even keel, though this keel is something of a downer at times. As with earlier work, Gibbard writes mostly about girls, even if he does so in much more erudite fashion than other artists - but then, at least 75% of pop/rock music is about girls in some form anyway. The opening two tracks, "Marching Bands of Manhattan" and "Soul Meets Body," are both solid and at least not downers. The middle of the album tapers off into the latter category, not that they're bad songs - "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" is a sweet love song, though its content makes it more creepily sweet (sweetly creepy?), while "What Sarah Said" and "Someday You Will Be Loved" are both enough to make a person heavily depressed. At least those two are broken up by "Crooked Teeth," which is probably the best track on the album - it's enjoyably upbeat, actually has a singable chorus, and was good enough to make the #2 slot when the band played SNL.

All told, I like listening to the whole album just fine. Curiously for a major label debut, it may actually be a bit more ambitious than Transatlanticism. I'm no A&R man, but it seems to me that that album had a number of potential singles - virtually any song except the 7:55 title track, really. I'm not sure Plans has as many songs with that kind of potential appeal, though I guess I could see as many as five with the possibility for it. Either way, the new album should play to all the old fans and could garner some new ones, though I honestly think DCFC neophytes would be better served starting with the older album. Gibbard's meditations on death are a little odd for a guy who turns 30 this year, but more importantly they're just not quite as immediately embracing as the comfortable breakup-song confines of Transatlanticism. Still, you could do much worse than starting here.

It'll certainly be my pleasure, Mr. Nuff

Despite my supposed movie-buff status, I never really engaged in that staple of childhood movie fans everywhere, "watching all manner of absolute crap from the time period." So until very recently I was unfamiliar with a lot of the anti-classics of 80s cinema - the Breakin' films, Rad, Gymkata, and, of course, The Last Dragon (excuse me - Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon). One of the perks, if you'd call it that, of dating Alma is that she eats up all this crap (I suspect there is a small part of her that even enjoys it not just for how hilariously bad it is but actually as nostalgia), and so I have an excuse to watch it and laugh myself silly.

If this entry is going to mean anything to you, you probably have to have seen the film already, so I won't bother with any direct plot summary - besides, any attempt to describe this film by simply running down the plot could never do it justice. The Last Dragon is so insane it practically makes Breakin' 2 look like Raging Bull.

First of all, what's up with all the black guys thinking they're Asian and all the Asian guys thinking they're black? If I had a dollar for every ethnic stereotype in this movie, I could pay my rent for the next two months. The main character (Leroy)'s younger brother - by the way, one of the most obnoxious "wise-cracking kid" characters in a decade rife with them - refers to him using just about every "word or phrase associated with Chinese people" you can think of, including the classic line "chocolate-covered yellow peril," which could not make less sense if it was delivered by a talking unicorn.

On the other hand, what are we supposed to expect from a director who in his DVD commentary track (oh yes there is) brags about working on Krush Groove with its sizable minority cast, and then calls Ernie Reyes Jr. a Latino? (As Alma noted, there's an excellent chance he could not remember anything about Ernie Reyes Jr. and just guessed based on the last name, which is never a safe bet with Filipinos.) Maybe it's not a coincidence that in Taimak's first scene I was reminded slightly of C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man.

There is some intentional comedy, of course - "Mr. Nuff" alone cracks me up - but too much of the movie is too insane to be intentional, and Michael Schultz is far too sober in his commentary track. The Sho'Nuff character and his goons alone stalk around like rejects from The Warriors, and the villain Eddie Arcadian - because he owns video game arcades! - is preposterous. In one particularly memorable scene, his response to Leroy's kicking in his door is "We didn't order out!"

The musical numbers, or whatever you'd call them, are completely ridiculous - Vanity's clearly-talking-about-erections song, with attached crazy dance, is priceless. It's also funny because the movie supposedly had to be trimmed at one point because of a lack of money, and yet no one thought, "Hey, these musical sequences add literally nothing to the plot - maybe we could take them out!"

The movie is also notable for featuring the debut of Chazz Palminteri - as a hilarious goon wearing Keith Hernandez's mustache - and an early role for William H. Macy, here credited as W.H. Macy. (Me: "That looks like William H. Macy!" Alma: "It probably just looks like him." Me: "Well, it looks exactly like him and sounds exactly like him!" Except here he has blonde hair and a tremendously stupid jacket. Hard to believe he was already 34 years old when they made this.)

My other favorite part is how even though the movie takes place in New York, there's never more than about ten people anywhere. Somehow when Laura/Vanity gets kidnapped the first time, and Leroy/Taimak shows up to beat up the bad guys, there's no one within two blocks even though they're on a busy street. And even though no one is around during the climactic fight sequence in 7th Heaven or the abandoned warehouse next door, all of a sudden right after Leroy wins, the cops and the entire crew of Laura's show rush in. (And their first concern is, "Her hair will never be ready in time for tonight's show!" If the first show scene is anything to go by, she's only going to be on for five minutes - just fake it!)

Leroy seeks the enlightenment to light up with bad special effects, so that when he hits Sho'Nuff it can look like they're fighting in a steel mill or something. His master sends him to look up a fortune cookie maker which turns out to be a computer, and then it turns out that basically he just needed to look inside himself all along. A couple questions here: couldn't his master have just told him that in the first place, rather than sending him on a wild goose chase? And then why, even when his master specifically taps his head and tells him there is one place he has not looked, does it still take Leroy nearly being whipped by Sho'Nuff and then seeing a bunch of flashbacks in a water tank to realize, "Oh, he meant inside me!"

Perhaps the craziest part was that Alma - who had not seen the movie in nearly 15 years - remembered portions of the lyrics from the crappy, crappy songs, yet could not remember large chunks of the plot. Ah, the things the brain files away. Then again, I correctly foresaw pretty much every single plot detail before they happened, so why waste space remembering it? (The first time Leroy and Laura lock eyes, I said, "Let me guess - she gets kidnapped and he has to rescue her." Then it happened literally 30 seconds later! And of course it could not be any more obvious at the end that Leroy is going to catch Arcadian's bullet in his teeth, despite Schultz's description of that scene on the commentary as "a surprise.")

In other hilarious news, Taimak claimed in an online interview within the last couple years that he has been working on a script that he hopes to turn into a sequel for this film. Awesome though that would be, can you ever see it happening? This is one of those films that is just irrevocably stuck in the decade in which it was made - Vanity's huge teased-out hair, the awful outfits, the ridiculous dancing, the pervasive racist "humor." You couldn't get away with half this stuff today, and anyway I have to think that a lot of the humor comes from the fact that it was made more than 20 years ago - there's something about that 80s level of crazy that even the most unintentionally hilarious films of today could never truly provide, especially since so many mediocre filmmakers today are so self-aware. Gigli is one of the few real comparisons I would make - like The Last Dragon, it has a handful of moments that actually work as legit intentional comedy, but mostly it's a goldmine of insane, unintentionally hysterical shit. There are even clearly scenes in it - as here - where the actors seem to be trying so hard to be serious, but even at their best (and here that really isn't saying much) there's no way they can sell the material.

Simply put, The Last Dragon is a laugh riot from front to back. Alma always apologizes to me when we watch a movie like this, but I'm fairly sure I enjoy them as much as she does, if not always for exactly the same reasons.

Monkeys with typewriters

What I would do if I had infinite time, aka what I would do if I won the Powerball, aka stuff that I would like to be doing in the near future but may not have time to do because how on earth do I fit all this stuff in?

1. Get the hell in shape.
I'm trying to ease myself in a little bit by taking the bus to Irving Park instead of right to Cornelia and walking back from there most days. Add even the most direct bus route in the morning and that gets me about two miles of walking a day, which is hardly a ton but is at least something. When the weather gets a little nicer (and it starts staying light later), I'll try and turn that into longer walks, which could then hopefully turn into running. I just don't see myself pulling off dieting, but there comes a point where you can eat nearly anything if you're running enough. Anyway, this one takes precedence over the others and as far as I'm concerned will happen over the next few months and beyond.

2. Take the guitar back up.
When I stopped playing the guitar after sophomore year of college, I didn't really feel anything pulling me back to it for a long time. But recently I've had this odd itch to start writing songs again, as though I was ever much of a "songwriter," and you can't really do that unless you play music. I'd probably get an acoustic this time. But what would I do? Would I try to be serious about it and take actual lessons? Would I get some book and try and teach myself? (I seem to recall that my uncle taught himself the guitar, and he was pretty bad-ass at it in his day.) Would I make a half-hearted attempt at caring about actual learning, and then just give up and write a bunch of four-chorders? (Put your hands down.) One of the bigger regrets of my life at this point is not seriously playing (or ever having seriously played) an instrument, and it's pretty much now or never to change that, I think.

3. Learn Tagalog.
Or, for that matter, any other language besides English. Tagalog is the best candidate because I already have the book/CDs for it and because I actually know people fluent in it, and it is pretty hard to get good at a language without having conversations; books only take you so far in this area. But again, this requires time that I don't necessarily have a lot of, especially if I come home from work, walk/run several miles, and then dick around on the guitar for two hours. Maybe I could try and make the language a weekend thing - it would be like having a regular class, and it would be easier to commit to something like that a "let's try and do this every day" scenario.

Making this interactive, what are some things you'd like to do if you had more free time?

Pardon the blog eruption

While my dearth of entries during blog down periods is usually attributable to not having anything I want to say or worth saying (there's an argument there about the blog as a whole, of course, but shut up), sometimes it's just because I don't really get around to it. So here comes a blast of entries - both here and a couple in the theme blogs - that I've been mulling over recently. We'll start here with a brief Valentine's Day recap.

Following my tuxedo-clad adventures at the "Dance for Diabetes," Alma and I had talked idly about having another dinner out while dressed nicely. So for Valentine's Day, I put on a dress shirt and blazer and drove up to get her. At the last second, it occurred to me that maybe I should mention that I was dressed nicely, in case she was going to come down in sweatpants or something (we don't take Valentine's Day all that seriously, blazer notwithstanding), which resulted in my hearing one of those "...o-kay" responses on the other end of the phone that always make me feel bad. But then that's what happens when you've just sprung on someone "Hey, we're getting dressed up!" and you leave them ten minutes or so to put on makeup and do other things that only women do. She looked great despite the rush, though.

We went for Indian food, but our Lake County hotspot of choice - basically because it's the only classy Indian joint within 30 miles (seriously, if you do a search on the online yellow pages, you get two or three hits up north, and the next two dozen are all on Devon, not exactly a short trip) - had a "special Valentine's Day menu," which basically means "rather than ordering the way you usually would, we're going to force you to get theme dinners which cost twice what you might usually expect to pay." The choices were listed in "platter" form, which had the prices right there - the cheapest was 25 bucks, and the most expensive was 40. Now, you got an appetizer, drink, and dessert with that, but you can see how at those prices, with the number of entrees (three to four) listed under each, and the fact that oh hey, this is a Valentine's Day - i.e. couples? - theme, Alma and I might have assumed that each platter was intended for two people to share. But oh no. One person! Even with the appetizer and dessert, 25-40 bucks for one person's dinner? I am not, by nature, a cheap person, but I'm more or less of the opinion that there's no reason ever to spend more than about 20 bucks on a single person's meal. It's food, for crying out loud. Let's face, Valentine's Day to a restaurant means "guys will be trying to impress women and aren't going to complain about prices, so let's jack them as high as we can without seeming preposterous."

Anyway. The food was good, though I honestly think you could legitimately claim to have gotten less for your buck than on a normal day. (Note to self: Next year, it's Valentine's Day at White Castle.) We went back to Alma's apartment where she had prepared chocolate-dipped strawberries - one of each of them was iced with "I," a heart, "Y," "O," "U," and "Rob." Which was really, really sweet of her. They were hard to eat because she had kept them in the freezer, though - I ate the chocolate off one, then got stymied by the freezing strawberry and eventually gave up because my teeth got cold. But it was a very nice thought. She also cracked me up when, after we had started by eating the heart and the U, she said that if we ate the I we could pretend that the remainder were strawberries from my dad.

So that was Valentine's Day in a nutshell. Alma is amazing, of course - but we all know this. I'll spare you the sappy displays of emotion for one post.

Birthday girl

It's a momentous day! Alma and I celebrate 25 months together!

Just kidding. Really what we celebrated was 26 years, because one month after our anniversary is her birthday. We had Italian food and I got her the seventh season of the Simpsons on DVD.

Baby, I say this because it's true: you may not like getting older, but every day is another day I love you more. And you're never more beautiful than the next time I see you. Happy birthday to the best girlfriend ever, and the sweetest girl on the planet.

Oscar run-up, part one

As with recent years, this year (by which I mean films which first saw domestic release in 2005) I tried to see as many films nominated for the main Oscar categories as I could. Or rather, I am trying, because I'm certainly not done. My usual Oscar preview will eventually appear in this space, maybe even before the show itself. Even if I don't see everything - and I can guarantee you I won't, because there's no way I could ever tolerate the behavior of one gender of characters in North Country - I will still do the preview, but I'd like to be as educated as possible, which only makes sense. That and I'm woefully behind on movies for the year; I didn't see anything in the theater between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Syriana, for crying out loud, a gulf of about two months right at what is usually a big viewing time for me.

On the other hand, it's hard to see too many movies theatrically while on a full work schedule, and anyway this hasn't been the greatest year for me. It was only Monday night that I finally saw an A+ film - last year I saw fully eight, and five of those were in the theater. This one was on DVD and it wasn't even in English - it's a Hungarian film called Kontroll, and I suggest you check it out.

More recent catching up, review-wise:

Syriana: 88
Review here.

Munich: 66
Review here.

Mrs. Henderson Presents: 61
Review here.

Transamerica: 43
Review here.

I had to really talk myself into Mrs. Henderson Presents - I only saw it because Judi Dench got an Oscar nomination (because she's Judi Dench, really), but even then I only saw it because it was the only thing playing within two hours when I got there. And even then I stood there for several minutes before deciding not to go home. Naturally, it was not the worst of the two movies I saw that particular day; that honor goes to Transamerica, which is not unwatchable but has a really repulsive deus ex machina near the ending. Also, it's kind of boring. Well, you can read the review.

Upcoming: Brokeback Mountain and Capote in the theater, and Crash, Hustle and Flow, and The Constant Gardener (plus a number of other 2005 movies that aren't Oscar-nominated). I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, here's my top ten for the year so far - that's a huge SO FAR on that one - which should give you some idea of how mediocre a year it's been so far. For comparison's sake, my lowest-rated film in last year's eventual final top ten (which no one has actually ever seen because a couple Netflix films made it in) was The Incredibles at 93/100.

1. Kontroll - 95
2. Murderball - 94
3. Syriana - 88
4. Good Night, and Good Luck. - 88
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - 84
6. March of the Penguins - 73
7. Kung Fu Hustle - 72
8. Layer Cake - 72
9. Munich - 66
10. Star Wars - Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith - 64

When you've got a B- movie in your top ten, that's not a very strong year. It's worth noting that two screeners I saw through eFilmCritic, The Outsider and The Garth Method, would actually crack the top ten as it stands (at 9 and 10), but I'm not including anything that didn't see domestic release, especially since I'd be really depressed with this year's quality if the 9 and 10 spots don't change (so why bother putting something there now that no one else has seen).