Thursday fun, of "Walking Dead," Bill Buckner and more

If you're not a Baltimore Orioles fan, I should first say you're rather lucky, but also that you can be excused for thinking the celebration after last night's season-ending game was a bit much for a team that, once again, finished in last place in the American League East.

Except for it wasn't. When all you can enjoy with a team is schadenfreude, you have to take what you can get, and since the O's aren't headed to the World Series anytime soon, there is at least pleasure in knowing the Boston Red Sox won't be this year either. Especially when your team had everything to do with it.

And in honor of that, and since my father reminded me of it this morning via the New York Times, I give you a scene from easily the funniest half-hour of TV to appear this fall, the return of Bill Buckner on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Coincidental timing? I think not, but either way, seeing him be dressed down by the extremely foul (I warned you) Susie Essman just adds to the pleasure of this glorious day. Enjoy.



If you don't get HBO, you can watch much more of Buckner's stuff on "Curb" at Youtube, and it's all really funny. And moving on, before we get to all kinds of zombie stuff, Twitch, which is very rarely wrong, has the goods on a remake that's quickly shaping up to be potentially worthwhile (and no, I'm not talking about "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," for once.)

The news that Mandate has hired Spike Lee to direct an English-language remake of the rather fantastic Korean revenge saga "Oldboy" is old news by now, but still welcome since it means the return of the often-great and never boring Mr. Lee to feature films. The perhaps even better news now is the cast that might be coming together for this.

Josh Brolin has definitely signed on to play the lead, a man who is mysteriously locked away in a hotel room for 15 years and then methodically takes his revenge after being just as mysteriously released. I could tell you more, but you really need to see this Chan Wook Park gem for yourself, which you can watch on Netflix streaming right away, if you haven't given up on them completely yet.

And in the fairly solid rumor mill, Christian Bale is apparently being sought for the role of Oh Dae-su's (in the Korean version) tormenter, and perhaps even better, Rooney Mara, aka the new "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (ack, I just can't get away from it) is being eyed for the female lead, a waitress who helps Dae-su (again, at least in the original version.) This is quickly coming together as one remake I'm definitely in for.

And after that today, it's all about zombies, because, let's face it, they're just o much fun. And though "The Walking Dead" should really today apply to the Boston Red Sox (ha!), it's also the name of AMC's sophomore series formerly led by Frank Darabont and set to return Oct. 16.

If you watched the short but seriously entertaining season one, you saw the closest that mainstream TV has come to real horror in as long as I can remember, plus a show that almost perfectly combines genuine humanity and suspense. The former may suffer a bit with the departure of Darabont, but I'm still betting the second season will be great.

In the meantime, AMC is filling the gap with a series of short webisodes, which will all appear starting Monday. They will tell the story of Hannah, a.k.a "Bicycle Girl," the legless zombie taken down by Rick Grimes in the first episode. It will tell the backstory of her pre-zombie life and how she tried to save her family before becoming one of "The Walking Dead" herself.

Look for them beginning Monday at 2 p.m. at AMCTV.com, and in the meantime, enjoy this new promo for season two, and then stick around for something that really needs no explanation beyond its title, "Zombinladen."



Finally today, and courtesy of Iwatchstuff.com, comes a grindhouse trailer that, well, you really have to watch because no words from me will really do it justice. Enjoy, "Zombinladen," and have a perfectly pleasant Thursday. Peace out.

ZOMBINLADEN The Axis Of Evil Dead

Bring on baseball, and with it the perfect summer soundtrack

Baseball season is almost here again, and even for someone who still cheers rabidly for the perpetually suffering (and almost all deserved, unfortunately) Baltimore Orioles, it's the best reason all year of every single year to celebrate.

And what could make the 2010 baseball season even better than it's sure to be? How about a month-by-month soundtrack updating the state of the season from some of alt-rock's (or whatever the hell you want to call it) best singer/songwriters.

In 2007, appropriately enough at a communal stadium urinal, fuzz guitar man extraordinaire Steve Wynn (if I had to pick just one, probably my favorite rocker around) and Young Fresh Fellows/Minus 5 vet Scott McCaughey met, and from that soon was born, thankfully, the Baseball Project.

So, what in the world is that? Well, it's just two really talented dudes, along with longtime Wynn drummer Linda Pitmon, getting together to write and perform really fun, totally fuzzed out odes to the world's greatest sport (with all apologies to the runner-up, soccer.) In July of 2008 they put out their first album, "Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Qualls," which I just bought this morning (after the head's up from mi hermano, who luckily has an actual good team, the Twinnies, to cheer for along with the O's.) It's just full of all kinds of fun songs about baseball, including odes to Curt Flood,Satchel Paige, Sandy Koufax and others, including a great Spanish ditty about Fernando, and even tracks called "Ted F***ing Williams" and "The Yankee Flipper."

If you've never heard of Steve Wynn, I really probably can't do justice to how great he is in writing, so why not listen to a bit of the Baseball Project yourself? The group has just released the first of its monthly ditties for this season, appropriately enough titled "All Future and No Past." In the perfect spirit of eternal hope that greets each new season, it's a tribute to the league's most long-suffering teams, so the Pirates, Royals and, of course, Orioles all get prominent play. I'm not sure they're right that "The Orioles' recent woes are deceiving," but it's a new season, and that means that for one day at least, the Orioles will be in first place in the American League East by sheer force of alphabetical order.

Click the widget below to listen to "All Future and No Past," and keep a look out on ESPN's The Life for the tracks to come once a month throughout this season (and yes, I can almost guarantee I'll post them all here, too.) Enjoy, have a great rest of the weekend, and unless you somehow cheer for the Red Sox or Yankees, keep hope alive!

A Cool Coens gathering in Macon, and the bizarro future of "Scrubs"

I don't think I'll ever be particularly good at social networking or understand the real use of Facebook beyond an amusing diversion, but it finally came through at least slightly last night.

Sitting at home on a Friday night watching the Braves blow out the BoSox (fairly pathetic I know, but entertaining all the same), I decided to check the facebook, blog, etc., and got this interesting post from my friend and boss Stephanie Hartley.

It seems that some group in Macon called the College Hill Corridor Commission, while being far from the most organized folks in town, are fans both of great (or at least extremely funny) movies and showing them outside, hence a rather cool happening Sunday night less than a mile from my house.

The original plan, which would have made me just say meh, was to show some version of "Shrek" this Sunday night. Well, thankfully, but with little notice, they've changed both the movie, "Raising Arizona" (huzzah!), and the venue, to Tattnall Square Park. There are few better communal movie viewing experiences than watching a very funny flick with a hopefully large group of people, so come and check it out this Sunday starting at 8 p.m.

But here today it's largely about a deliriously silly comedy that might appeal to people who might just not live within 20 minutes or so of my house, "Scrubs," which is somehow headed for a ninth season on ABC, but apparently in radically different form.

Before I launch into it, credit for all this goes to the seriously TV-obsessed Michael Ausiello of Entertainment Weekly, who got the goods in an interview with "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence.

Now, we already know that the core stars, Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke, will be back for very limited runs at best (and worst of all, Neil Flynn's delightfully deranged janitor will not be back at all), so to fill this void, Lawrence has come up a change of venue of sorts.

When the show returns next winter, John C. McGinley and Donald Faison will be the principal stars (in no way at all a bad thing), and they will now become med-school professors rather than active doctors. Take that in for a moment.

Actually, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Since you have to start with a whole new crop of players, why not make them students and shake things much more than a bit? Anyone who tuned in for the truncated eighth season earlier this year will probably agree with me that the new crop of doctors shared only one trait: They were uniformly unfunny. So I guess they realized it's time for at least a gallon of new blood.

And besides, for classroom comedies, Lawrence at least seems to have his source material right. As he told Ausiello:

"It'll be a lot like Paper Chase as a comedy, It's going to be a different show. It'll still be life-and-death stakes, but if the show is just Scrubs again in the hospital with a different person's voiceover, it would be a disaster and people would be mad."

He said Sacred Heart wouldn't go away completely, since it will still be the show's base of operations and allow familiar faces to return from time to time, but it's still almost a complete change of course, and since "Scrubs" has defied death many times now, it's certainly not of me to doubt its creators.

And with that, I'll simply leave you with the trailer for the October flick "Zombieland," because what Saturday morning isn't at least a little bit better with a funny dose of zombies? Enjoy, and have a great weekend. Peace out.