For Thursday, no laughing matter in baseball, great movie news and a cache of funny clips

I suppose I would actually get a few people to read this if I ever bothered to make it single entries rather than a fairly free-flowing outpouring of whatever enters my mind at 6 in the morning, but than it would stop being fun, so what then would be the point?

But I, like many people, was watching baseball on ESPN last night (actually out of the corner of my eye while watching something else on Netflix, about the most multitasking I can actually do) when Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers was absolutely robbed and jobbed out of a perfect game.

That was the lead story on NPR when I woke up this morning, so it's obviously already a lot bigger than baseball, which it should be. For me, however, as angry as it initially made me, it was Galarraga's classy reaction to the obviously blown umpiring call that sticks with me: "No one is perfect."

He's certainly right there, and it is, in my own warped way, while I'll always be opposed to the introduction of replay in baseball (though I'd be willing to bet Galarraga would vote for in an instant.) Baseball is and always be a sport with as many opportunities for error as grace, and that all goes into what makes it the world's second-most beautiful game (second to, only of course, soccer.) It's far preferable that these errors be committed by the players than the umpires charged with regulating the game, but even in extreme cases like this one, think about it for a second.

Do we really want the game to be stopped every time there's a close call on the base path or anywhere in the field? That slippery slope will eventually lead to recalls on balls and strikes, and games that could easily go on for five hours or more. It would simply disrupt the natural flow of the game, which often, yes, does involve the extremely human act of umpiring, and would be a disaster.

OK, enough about baseball in what is supposed to be a movie site, especially since it's a day full of good news about directors I really like.

To start, does anyone remember Whit Stillman? He made his debut with what lingers as one of my favorite movies in "Metropolitan," a very dryly witty look at the lives of wealthy young NYC socialites (it's a lot better than I'm making it sound here, and rather amazingly, you can watch in on Hulu.) He followed that up with two movies that were not quite as good but still entertaining, "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco," and then pretty much disappeared, at least until now.

He tried to make a comeback a couple of years ago with an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's satirical novel "Little Green Men," but like many ventures in our brave new world, that fizzled fast. Now, however, it seems like he's actually going to be able to make a movie, and it will be called "Damsels in Distress." Here's a synopsis:

[The picture] centers on a group of college girls who take in a new student and teach her their own misguided ways of helping people. Lily, a new student at Seven Oaks University, winds up filling in with a dynamic and highly individualistic group of girls, addicted to the elegance of the past: Heather, Violet and Rose all volunteer at the campus Suicide Prevention Center, convinced that musical dance, sharp clothes and good hygiene — the Dior perfume “Diorissimo” is their trademark — can all contribute to staving off the inevitable self-destructive impulses that follow hard on the heels of failed college romances. Despite their sophisticated talk and savvy use of perfume, the girls are plagued by Cupid’s arrows and must adjust their psyches to the onset of amour.

That all sounds really funny to me already, and casting is apparently going on now, with eyes set on a five-week July shoot in NYC, so it looks like, yes, we will actually get another movie out of Whit Stillman.

In other news, I didn't know that Spike Lee was working on a sequel to his sensational Katrina documentary "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," but it certainly makes sense, especially since those same poor folks could find their land covered in oil any day now. Never being one for half-measures, however, it now seems that Lee is also now filming in Haiti, to draw obvious parallels between what happened there and in N'awlins.

The fate of Haiti is worthy of a Spike Lee documentary on its own, but whatever he comes up with here should be as painful to watch as it should be thoroughly engaging (and frankly, thank God that he keeps doing things like this as the attention of the rest of us understandably turns elsewhere.)

And, in a final bit before we get to the, I promise, extremely silly clips, it seems that director Sam Mendes has very, very wisely turned his back on some kind of "Wizard of Oz" prequel, sequel or whatever the hell it might be called "Oz the Great and Powerful" to instead direct a movie based on the Ian McEwan short novel "On Chesil Beach," a minor McEwan work but one of my favorites, and even better, "An Education" star Carey Mulligan will apparently star in it (even with Robert Downey Jr. as the wizard, there's just no way you could have gotten me to watch that "Oz" crap.)

As for "On Chesil Beach," it's about a couple on their honeymoon on the titular beach in the 1960s, and like Mendes' best movies so far, it explores the psychological barriers to and burdens of intimacy. Again, I'm surely not summing that up very well, but trust me, it's great stuff, and Mulligan as one half of the couple at its center will surely be fantastic.

OK, you have my solemn promise that from here on out today, it will be nothing but silly in the clips. First up comes something that needs absolutely no more description from me: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert vs. Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter in a fatal danceoff. Enjoy.



I was already convinced that "Get Him to the Greek" is gonna be exactly my kind of raunchy funny with just enough heart, but just in case anyone else needs some convincing here, courtesy of Funny or Die (I'll take the former with this) are the movie's first five minutes. As were the best parts of Nicholas Stoller's "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," it's a pretty spot-on hit on our celebrity culture, and I think that even if you can't stand Russell Brand (which I can, because he's just friggin' funny), this is still gonna be a winner. Enjoy.

Get Him To The Greek Opening - watch more funny videos

Next up comes the second trailer for one I'm not as sure about, Jay Roach's remake of the sublime French farce "Diner de Cons," which is now called "Dinner for Schmucks" and stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd (and as you'll see from the trailer, Zach Galifianakis too.) This has a high hurdle to jump in being compared to the original flick by Francis Veber, but it at least looks like Carell will be in full geek mode when this comes out July 23. Enjoy.



Well, these last two are probably more silly than funny, but Ben Kingsley trying out for a part in "Transformers 3"? Why not? (Sorry to break it to you, Sir Ben, but I'm afraid you somehow missed out on this to Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely - say what you want about Michael Bay, but the man does certainly at least have a type.) Enjoy the clip and compare it to Heidi Montag's apparently earnest "Transformers" audition tape he's spoofing, and have a perfectly pleasant Thursday. Peace out.

Sir Ben Kingsley Shows Up Heidi Montag - watch more funny videos

Keep your dirty mitts off of "Rosemary's Baby"!

Be warned at the outset: All the news today has something, good or really, really bad, to do with Michael Bay. As my only other warning, I'll just say I promised myself a few months ago I would stop writing about thoroughly unnecessary remakes both because there's just so damn many of them and because it can't do anything good for my blood pressure.

But thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Bay and his company, Platinum Dunes (even that name sucks!), I now have to break that promise. I didn't realize until this morning that it isn't just a company, but instead some kind of vast conspiracy out to ruin many of the things cinematic that I hold dear.

So, before I get consumed with rage, let me just lay it out there: Thanks to the enterprising folks at Shock Till You Drop, I woke up this morning to this new possible spawn of Satan: A remake of "Rosemary's Baby."

I'll give you a second to mull that over. Swear if you want to. Virtually nothing offends me at this point.

Platinum Dunes has staked its still-declining reputation (if you can even call it that) on such horror remakes ("Friday the 13th," "Nightmare of Elm Street" and, yes, even "The Birds" are all in the pipeline, and they've already taken down "Amityville Horror," "The Hitcher" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - remember I'm just the messenger.) I could dismiss just about all of those except "The Birds" with a shrug, but when it comes to "Rosemary's Baby," well, now it's personal.

I realize I'm probably far from alone here, but Roman Polanski's fun flick really represents for me two things: Both my single favorite horror movie of all time and a crash course in what used to be great about horror flicks (atmosphere, suspense and an actually riveting storyline, imagine that.)

What has replaced those ingredients of late? Well, first there was the slew of torture chic flicks, which apparently (and thankfully) seems to have bottomed out with "Captivity." If the next trend is simply to steal every idea you can find, I can only call that a lateral move at best.

There has been one nearly sensational horror movie I've seen of late, J.A. Bayona's "The Orphanage." I obviously fear, however, that this one pure drop can do little to stop the rapidly filling bucket of bad blood.

And now in better news ...

Whew! Let me make sure all the bile's out of my system before continuing.

Another thing that makes the above story so sad is that, when they actually bother, Bay and company can still come up with projects that don't make me vomit in my own mouth. (And for the record, I really thought "Transformers" was a heck of a lot of fun.)

I found the first mention this morning of a horror flick of a different sort (meaning at least from an original concept) that Platinum Dunes is producing for writer/director David S. Goyer. In what could be described as an odd twist on "The Exorcist," Goyer's "Unborn" tells the tale of a Jewish girl tormented by the soul of a boy who died in the Holocaust.

Should the Holocaust be off limits for such fare? Perhaps, but I'm relatively confident that Goyer, who co-wrote both "Batman Begins" and the upcoming "Dark Knight," can come up with something at least slightly tasteful and thoroughly entertaining. And besides, it's rapidly attracting a four-star cast.

Odette Yustman (Beth McIntyre for anyone who saw "Cloverfield") will play the tormented youth, and it just gets better from there. Carla Gugino. who I'd probably enjoy watch eating crackers, will play her mother, and, believe it not, Gary Oldman as a rabbi and "The Wire" alum Idris Elba as a priest will be performing the exorcism.

So, is there still hope out there for horror? Not much, but projects like "Unborn" make me think there just might be a glimmer. Peace out.

Transformers: I just have three questions

The following is an actual transcript from the Telegraph newsroom:

Travis Fain (author of the often-insane Lucid Idiocy blog): So, I saw "Transformers."
Me: What did you think?
T-Fain: "F***in awesome."

Now, we do sometimes have conservations with more heft and less profanity, but I really don't think there's any other way to sum up quite what Michael Bay has accomplished here. It might just be the loudest movie I've ever seen, and quite possibly the perfect summer blockbuster.

I was beginning to think that that was a dead art. Look at what we've been subjected to so far this summer; Spidey 3: boring and, much worse, wussy; Pirates 3: boring, boring and more boring until the final hour of battling pirates; Shrek 3: Meh. Bay, however, has managed to craft a movie that was surprisingly funny, never boring and just a whole lot of mindless fun.

Even if I wanted to criticize him, which I don't, he's pretty much rendered all such efforts moot by having a character in his movie declare: "This is a hundred times cooler than Armageddon." Now that's chutzpah.

But, even if I can't bring myself to critique this work of high art, I did have three questions that maybe the few people who bother to read this can help me out with.

1. Does it make me either sexist or racist if I can't bring myself to believe that the future of the Earth depends on the computer-hacking skills of Rachel Taylor and Anthony Anderson?

I might be more willing to believe that Taylor's blond bombshell was indeed a scientist of this caliber if they didn't take the time to so perfectly moisten her lips before each scene (and don't even try to tell me I'm the only person who noticed that!) As for Anthony Anderson, I love the guy. Ever since "Hustle and Flow" I've just smiled every time he's appeared on screen, and he's very funny here. But Mr. Anderson has made his trademark being a big goof, not exactly the kind of guy you'd call when the world was about to end.

2. (OK, from here on out I have to concede that I know next to nothing about Transformers, the toys or the TV series. I'm certainly not mocking anyone who did or still does; it just wasn't my thing.)

Did anyone else think, when John Turturro first appeared, that he was going to turn into a giant Decepticon? There was just this look in his eyes that made me think, even though he was clearly having fun, that he was more than a little robotic.

3. And finally, only one question of logic, which should really have no place in a movie like this and will probably just manage to make me look stupid. But bear with me anyway.

If both the Autobots and the Decepticons are from space, how is it that the Decepticons all seem to speak in something that vaguely resembles Chinese? There's surely an answer to this in all the Transformers lore I have somehow managed to miss out on.

But really, does it matter anyway? Michael Bay has crafted a nearly perfect ball of popcorn, and for that I can really only say thanks.