Wednesday, December 12, 2012
2013 Results: Bonds, Clemens, Piazza and Biggio are elected to the Hall of Merit!
(bbtf)
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza and Craig Biggio have been elected to the Hall of Merit!
The timing for our first year electing 4 candidates could not have worked out better, since class of 2013 is the strongest in terms of electees that we’ve ever had. The top of the 1934 ballot included Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Pop Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams and Cristobal Torriente, but only 2 were elected.
Bonds and Clemens were each unanimous at 1 and 2. I believe that’s the first ...
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< 1 2 3 >Ban Johnson. As Bill James said (or something like that), any one day in the life of Johnson would make a great movie
Heh. Entertaining, sure. In terms of actual accuracy, well, the less said the better. Flynn's hair couldn't hold a candle to the original's.
You could actually make some very interesting films about the lives of several of the elite prizefighters from that era, many of whom were as colorful and boisterous and Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali.
Yeah, it's forgotten now, but Jack Dempsey was fully the equal of Babe Ruth as a celebrity in the '20s.
And Paul Newman's biopic of Graziano is actually pretty good; if all too typical '50s fair, it's a superior example thereof.
Wasn't there a short-lived series loosely based on Ball Four back in the 70s or am I thinking of something else...
Yeah, a kick ass Branch Rickey.
I see fewer movies than just about anyone, but I'd see that. I find Sam, and his story, to be truly fascinating. He's probably my favorite ballplayer of all-time.
Has Ryan Reynolds ever been in anything good or even made money. He seems to be the next Matthew McConaughey, a really good looking guy who gets cast in a lot of movies, but not a real good actor and none of the movies are any good (Dazed and Confused as an exception)
It helps - it helped me, anyway - that it's about a New Zealand author; I didn't know anything about her before I saw the movie.
He was in Adventureland, which is a really great, heartfelt coming-of-age movie. He was really good in it, too.
Reynolds has his strengths. He might not be the right pick for a romantic comedy where the guy basically stands around bemusedly while Julia/Sandra/Cameron/whoever attempts to radiate cute n' lovable. And if Green Lantern isn't (intentionally) funny, he probably wasn't right for that either. But I think he has charisma and is a good comic actor.
There are some outstanding movies on that list. The Passion of Joan of Arc and Andrei Rublev are both in my all-time top 10, and Alexander Nevsky and A Man For All Seasons are in my top 50 (though AMFAS probably doesn't deserve its place). I'd have a hard time calling the first two biopics in any conventional way. The Passion of Joan of Arc especially -- it's a movie entirely about Maria Falconetti's eyes rather than any historical person.
To everyone who actually found it AWFUL, I'm curious what you would have done differently?
Edit: Not "the writing", or " it sucked", or "the acting", but specifics.
Wait, something is overrated on your own list? I wouldn't think that possible.
Yeah, that doesn't make sense the way I wrote it. I meant that it's on my personal top 50, but I acknowledge that it's not really one of the best 50 movies ever made.
A true biopic is really a movie biography: that is, it spans an entire life, or most of it. A Beautiful Mind, The Aviator, J. Edgar are recent high profile examples.
A lesser biopic isn't really a movie biography, it's just a true story that focuses on a single historical character and a more limited series of events. I think this format is a lot easier to pull off, and so it has most of the really good biopics: Ed Wood, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia.
I can absolutely see this, spun as a kind of Mad Men in baseball.
I do like Nevsky quite a bit -- I happened to take a Russian history course in college right about the time restored versions with re-recorded score were being released in the early 90s, and being exposed to the film and Eisenstein was a highlight even in a very good class.
The equal? Dempsey surpassed the Babe as a sports icon during the 1920s. Babe Ruth's peak salary was $80,000 for a season, which he reached in 1931. A full 10 years earlier Jack Dempsey's manager turned down a $500,000 guarantee for the champ's fight with French war hero Georges Carpentier in favor of a 36% cut of the gate, which ended up being worth a tidy $600,000. Check out the crowd. Now admittedly Carpentier sold lots of those tickets himself, but this fight really cemented Dempsey's status as America's preeminent athletic icon, so much so that he hardly fought afterwards, instead raking in fat checks by starring in a series of awful action serials.
Dempsey 1926 title defense against Gene Tunney drew a crowd of 120,000 for which Jack took home $711,000 in a losing effort. The 1927 rematch earned Tunney a winner's purse of $990,000, a figure so far beyond what any athlete had ever earned that it was surpassed for decades, and Dempsey was the draw, not Tunney (as evidenced by any of Tunney's non-Dempsey purses).
There were other big sports stars in the 1920s, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, the Babe, but Dempsey was above 'em all.
If you look you can see "Nucky" Thompson in the lower right hand corner.
Heh. The guy they have playing Dempsey on that show fairly looks the part, but he sure doesn't sound it (Jack had a squeaky voice, which undoubtedly made it easy for him to get mining town toughs into the ring with him during his hobo days) and obviously he bears no resemblance in the ring.
What Hollywood did to Bang The Drum Slowly was criminal. That was a fabulous novel by Mark Harris that was turned to a garbage on film.
Robert De Niro's swing in the movie is what is really criminal. One of the worst baseball movies for the portrayal of actual play.
Give this man a year's supply of ProVasic.
Check out Buried. Tiny theatrical run, but it's almost all him and some amazingly good cinematography for a film set entirely in a coffin-sized box.
To everyone who actually found [Green Lantern] AWFUL, I'm curious what you would have done differently?
Given it to Stephen Sommers and let him go nuts. Sommers's need to fill every inch of the screen with CGI would have been an asset in that movie, and for all his faults, he is pretty good at creating an atmosphere of big, fun adventure. The folks involved seemed to have no idea that things like "the green energy of will and the yellow energy of fear" cannot be said with a straight face. I'd also have kept Geoff Johns the hell away from the script and set, cast Loretta Devine as Amanda Waller, and resisted whatever blackmail material Blake Lively's agent has that keeps her getting cast in movies.
As for Cowboys & Aliens, hey, Ford was the best part of that movie. It's criminal that he hasn't really been in a straight Western since appearing on an episode or two of Gunsmoke when he was young (The Frisco Kid basically being a Gene Wilder comedy). Supposedly he's signed to play Wyatt Earp in a thing about him during his latter days in Hollywood, but somebody really needs to cast him in a real Western while it's still possible.
Someone stole my idea! I was going to write a screenplay based on this subject for a competition. Then I realized that I have no ability to write screenplays.
If we're going to get all high-tone arsty-fartsy foreign filmy here, Abel Gance's Napoleon is right up there, too.
not as bad as Tony Perkins throwing in Fear Strikes Out.
Robert De Niro's swing in the movie is what is really criminal. One of the worst baseball movies for the portrayal of actual play.
Not to mention that 225 mile pop fly that rose in Shea Stadium and was caught in RFK Stadium. That was straight out of a Satchel Paige story. When Hollywood wants to do a sports movie, it should just stick to boxing and wrestling.
not as bad as Tony Perkins throwing in Fear Strikes Out.
Or any worse than Paul Newman or Tom Cruise trying to look like pool players. Though Newman played his characters very well in both The Hustler and The Color of Money---until he got down over the table and looked like John Kruk against Randy Johnson, and Cruise was even more clueless.
Hey zonk, if you're in Chicago, the Gene Siskel Film Center has an Eisenstein series in January, with 35mm prints, live accompaniment for the silents, etc. Definitely figures to be awesome.
yeah, well--sometimes that's hard. Now that I think about, Tony Perkins hits the exacta because he was also woefully inept-looking as a basketball player in Tall Story. (But he sure looks good in a dress)
I always tend to think "suspension of belief" is the filmmakers' responsibility, not the audience's. But, if you're making a movie and the point of a scene is to show how good a character is at baseball, you might want to see what you can do about doubling if the guy you hired to act isn't up to it. Especially now, when it's not exactly uncommon to composite an actor's face onto a stuntman's body.
Thanks much for that -- I think I just might to have chuck any NFL plans for the Nevsky/Potemkin double bill and perhaps Ivan I & II as well.
Potemkin might be the only one I skip. I have the Blu-ray (which is excellent) and I've even seen it theatrically, in fact at the Film Center with (I believe) the same accompanist.
I've never seen Strike or October, though, so those are big priorities. It's been a few years since I've seen Nevsky and Ivan, so I'll get to those if I can as well, especially Ivan.
Bound for Glory
The Lion in Winter
A Man for All Seasons
Hotel Rwanda
Amadeus
The Last Emperor
The problem for me is that some actors are just so miserably miscast as athletes that I can't stop laughing every time they swing like the proverbial girl, or even better, start going into some triple-pump windmill windup with runners on base. This is why I reach for my revolver when I read that "this is a baseball movie for people who don't have to like baseball." Thanks but no thanks.
Shine
Gandhi (great at least until Candice Bergen shows up)
My Left Foot
Out of Africa is kinda, sorta autobiographical
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