It’s time for World Series baseball! The 162 game long baseball season has concluded and we’ve wandered our way through 3 weeks of post season play to arrive at the Fall Classic. This year we’ve got the Tampay Bay Rays from the American League versus the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League. The Rays have never before had a winning season, have about 4000 to 7000 fans nationwide, and last year changed their name from Devil Rays to avoid offending Christians. The Phillies are one of the oldest teams in baseball, have lost more games over this time than any other sports franchise in history, and their logo is a P. The Phillies and Rays beat out the Dodgers and Red Sox, teams that people actually care about, for their spots in the World Series to the chagrin of Fox, because the ratings will be in the toilet.

 

Announcers have become a mainstay of broadcast sports. So much so that at any given game you will often find a drunken fool pretending to be one in the seat behind you. The World Series is the biggest week of baseball all season and displays this even with it’s announcing staff. Let’s meet them.

 

Katie (Kat) the Woman. Katie is a pregame announcer who doesn’t get to talk about the actual game events. Her job is to be an interviewer for other pregame talking heads and to represent the existence of female fans. Unfortunately, Katie has a face like a catcher’s mitt. Everyone calls her Kat because they’re not used to multi-syllabic names.

 

Mark the washed up hitter. Mark has a wildness in his eyes brought on by lasting withdrawl from steroids and amphetamines. He’s too big for the suit he wears and his expressions make him look like a train crazy. He’s supposed to tell you about the game from a player’s perspective but he can’t remember and he never makes sense.

 

Dennis the former pitcher. Dennis used to be an important name in pitching. He tells the listeners all about the pitcher’s perspective while carefully making it clear that nothing is ever the pitcher’s fault. He rarely says anything worth listening to. He has a mustache.

 

Joe with the good voice. Joe Good Voice has been talking about baseball his whole life. With a really good voice. He does “color” announcing during the game and post game and has more to say about the game than the pregame buffoons who actually played professional baseball.

 

Tim the old man. Tim’s job is to announce the play by play of the game. He is usually telling stories and helping Joe add some color. Tim is supposed to be doing play by play because he’s been grandfathered in to the job and has lovable catch phrases for home runs like “It’s outta here!”
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Editor’s Note: This article is a little late in coming. I actually saw Alien: Director’s Cut a little before my birthday. But as we all know, I was required by law not to post any articles for so long, it came out now instead of then.
This evening I went to the movie theatre to see Alien: Director’s Cut, a great movie I’d been told was terrifying when it was first released to theatres. The movie has a great appeal to me; I don’t find it terrifying, but I do enjoy it’s creepiness and atmosphere. Movies have changed since Alien originally came out. The atmosphere of the movie is so great and not taylored to play into certain genres and fads. In addition, they create fear through that atmosphere and through psychological tension. I’ve referred in the past to what passes for a “scary” movie and how they use sudden motion and loud noise to jolt you rather than instill real fear. Some of my friends have taken to calling it the balloon popping effect in reference to my comparison in my Signs review.
But aside from a decline in quality movies, the movie going experience has changed. Prices climb ever higher and advertisements show up more and more, either to counterbalance the number of flops produced every year, or to simply squeeze every last penny from each production. On-screen advertisements benefit the movie’s producers while pre-movie commercials (which can run much longer than TV commercials due to a captive audience) benefit the theatre. Even though most of the pre-movie commercials are packaged along with the film when they arrive at the theatre. What I’m really getting at here, though, are the anti-piracy commercials that seem to have usurped the L.A. Times reels.
I’m baffled by the placement of these. First and foremost, these are almost exclusively shown in movie theatres. The irony of this is nearly unbearable. A commercial aimed at making sure you don’t “steal” the movie is shown to you after you’ve already paid to see it. Not only have you paid to get in, but you’ve just endured images and sounds that compel you to go buy some overpriced popcorn and soda, or maybe a hotdog that will give you diarrhea. Don’t worry about being gone too long, for all the rushing you did to make it to the theatre on time, there’s still 10-20 minutes of extended television commercials to be shown. Finally, after you’ve been urged to buy concessions, subliminally bombarded with coca cola imagery, and told which brand of electronics is best it’s time to sit back and relax while a sob story about a set designer or a stunt man tells you that you’re a very bad person. Why? Well you stole this movie. Except that you didn’t. You paid for a service once with cash, then paid again by watching advertisements, but they still feel the need to remind you not to steal the movie.
What is the aim of these announcements? Perhaps it’s not to make you feel guilty, but instead to deter the guy in the theatre with the video camera who will tape it and go home to upload it to the internet. The only problem is he’s already there with the camera. The initial rush of getting that camera into the theatre and setting it up is over. And he’s probably already been doing it for a while, so any chance of guilting him out of it are gone. In addition, the pirated movies that the general public truly covets are not video camera footage from the theatre, they’re direct copies from the highest quality source. Most of those copies are probably separate from the reel carrying the anti-piracy message and if they’re not, the message is chopped off as soon as possible, to reduce the size of the file for internet distribution. I doubt that these messages are intended for the actual pirates then.
The other side is the would-be downloader. But we’ve already established that if you’ve paid to see the movie, and therefore paid to be told not to pirate the movie, that you haven’t stolen it. Unless of course, you go home and download the movie afterwards. This does happen, it probably happens a great deal. But the ads are still only reaching people who have given some amount of money to see the movie. To think that millions of dollars in revenue are being lost because the repeat viewings of the movie are done via pirated downloads seems like flawed thinking to me. If I saw a movie and had an excellent theatre experience and wanted to recapture that experience– I would go back to the theatre. Why? Because the theatre has a bigger screen and better audio than my PC. And that is why people go to the theatre at all in the first place. If this was not a point of value, direct to video releases would be much more common. Granted, there are people who will download the movie rather than go see it again. But who is to say that these people wouldn’t just wait for the rental when faced with paying another 10 dollars to get in, 4 dollars for popcorn, and 20 minutes of their lives watching commercials?
I’ve got it. Maybe those ads are there to make people feel sorry for that stunt man or that key grip in the anti-piracy ads. Who, by the way, isn’t making gobs of money from being in that ad. After you feel good and sad for them, you go home and you harass all your friends who download movies. Then they stop downloading movies, right? Well, actually they probably tell you to shut up. Then they call you a tool for harassing your friends because a movie told you to.
I’ve concluded then, that the ads are either pointless or offensive, or both. Not to mention that they are ads, and I didn’t pay to see them. And I hate ads. In addition to all this, they probably wouldn’t bother me very much, except that I see so many movies that I’m a little sick of them on top of my original annoyance. So to the person who’s idea it was to make these ads and put them on my movies: I hate you, go to hell.

I don’t consider myself to be a person who sees a lot of movies. This is partly because I have more than one friend who takes off a day of every week to go and see every new movie that came out and the movies that they liked from the previous week a second time. Without that extreme to much up the statistics however, I actually do see a lot of movies, most of them not too long after they have come out. I’ve also read a lot of articles about movies just sucking butt in general this year. I wasn’t sure I agreed. Until I saw Signs that is.

First of all, let me say that Signs is bad. Not only is it bad, but it’s also really bad. In addition, it’s quite horrible and bad as well. Not a good movie. With that out of the way I’ll give you something a little more coherant on why I wish I’d never seen anything even relating to Signs.

I originally hadn’t planned on seeing Signs any time close to it’s release. A few people I knew were sort of excited about it, probably falling into the hype from their trailers. Generally though, I wasn’t really interested in it. I was asked to go see it though and since I couldn’t think of anything better, we planned to go catch it one evening shortly after it’s release. During that day, though I mentioned that I was going to see it to my friend Ben. The conversation went something like this:

Me: So I think I’m going to see Signs tonight.
Ben: haha
Me: What’s so funny?
Ben: Oh you’re serious?
Me: Yeah, why? Have you seen it?
Ben: Yes, it was bad.
Me: Bad as in “I wish this was The English Patient, where are my tea and crumpets?” or bad as in actually bad?
Ben: It had way too much to do with God.

Ohh I thought, the signs are from god, that’s lame. I was told that was not the case, so I asked if the ‘aliens’ were angels. Again I was wrong. I eventually gave up trying to guess the obvious god/aliens/crop circles tie in and accepted that this movie might not be so good. I had already confirmed my plans to see it though, and there was no backing out now.

As it turns out, Ben was right (CNN will be covering that sometime soon I’m sure). The movie starts out introducing us to good old Mel Gibson. Mel was a preacher, which is so nicely spelled out to us by the obvious visual ques such as a dirt ring in the shape of a cross on the wall. “Hrmm… someone had a cross hanging here but they removed it. I hope the movie goes into long detail explaining why.” Other characters include a little girl, a little boy played by Macaulay Culkin’s little brother, and Mel’s character’s brother. Mel finds out soon enough that the corn field on his farm has some crop circles in it. After calling the cops they decide it’s a prank done by locals and forget about it. When Mel and his brother hear noises outside the house though they run out to try to scare away the trouble making youths they believe are responsible, only to find nothing except for possible footstep sounds on the roof and then some rustling cornstalks. They report this to the police again, who suggest maybe it was a strange woman in town that was responsible. This isn’t really followed up on at all because they see on television that crop circles have shown up over the entire world all in the last few nights. Mel decides to take his family to town for pizza where everyone insists on calling him father (He was a priest, remember?) and he tells them all not to. He’s got some unresolved issues with God. The little boy buys a book about aliens that was meant for “city folk”, they all eat pizza, and then return home.

At this point we start getting to the alien stuff. They all stay up late watching alien stuff on TV, and when the kids have fallen asleep, Mel and his brother have a conversation about what if the aliens are hostile and want to kill everyone. Mel, who used to be a priest by the way, says of two types of people one believes god will save them and that the other people realize they’re going to die. Then he says pretty plainly that people who think god is going to save them are dumb. This is a vital point in the movie. When he’s giving his speech, he recants the story of how his wife died, which we later found out is what made him stop believing in god. Her last words were: “See. Swing away” he says. He chalks this up to random thoughts escaping from her dying brain. The other important thing about this is reintroducing an item from a short scene in town, where we find out Mel’s brother was a minor league baseball player. The movie continues with Mel’s family all becoming obsessed with aliens and Mel trying to pretend he doesn’t believe. The phone rings and the person on the other end is cut off after a few words, so Mel decides to go see if he’s okay. This guy is no ordinary farmer though, he is the one who killed Mel’s wife in a car accident. The two barely exchange words after we see he is completely fine except for a spot of blood on his shirt. When he’s talking to Mel he tells him the aliens are real and that he thinks for some reason they don’t like water. He doesn’t give a real reason, just says he’s going to the lake, and not to open his pantry door because he has one of them trapped in there. Okay, we have aliens. They make crop circles, they can be invisible and fast and can jump up to your roof, but lock them in a pantry and boy are they fucked. Like a dummy Mel goes to see the alien, he looks under the door, it tries to attack him, and he cuts it’s finger off with a knife. Then he goes home.

When he gets home though, actual footage of the alien is on the news. Some mexicans were having a birthday party and all their kids started screaming. So we see the footage that they captured on home video of something scary about to happen and then a man in the most cliche’d rubber costume walks from behind a bush and looks at the cameraman and walks away. Holy shit, the aliens are made of rubber, anything we say to them bounces off them and sticks to us. The family decides that they aren’t going to run away to the lake in this time of crisis, and that instead they are going to board up their house and wait out the alien invasion. Mel, who was a priest before his wife died, won’t let them pray at dinner though, and gets really mad when his family wants to. They all have a good cry and then watch some more TV. Finally, the aliens show up. They try to get into the house but can’t because things are boarded up, until Mel’s brother realizes they can break into the attic and open up the door there. They all run into the basement and slam the door shut on unseen aliens close on their heels. They block off the door for a while to hear aliens making a big mess outside for a while, then they remember that the basement used to have a coal chute. They start to look for it and find it just in time to see the Culkin boy standing in front of it and then get groped by some guy wearing a rubber monster glove. The lights go out for suspense because someone dropped a flashlight in the scuffle and when they come back on we see that the boy was not taken but he is breathing hard. You see I didn’t mention that the boy has asthma up until now. Why? Because up until this point in the movie there is no mention of it. So it looks like this kid’s going to die from asthma instead of aliens, but lo and behold, Mel (the guy that used to be a priest) starts talking to god. The night goes on with him praying to and cursing god until it fades out.

In the morning the boy is alive and Mel wakes up to find his brother with the radio on. The broadcast says the aliens were just here to pick up some humans to eat and that they spray poison gas to kill people but now they’re gone. The radio also tells them that someone somewhere in the Middle East used some ancient method to somehow fend off the aliens. Somehow. So they leave the basement. Asthma boy gets laid down on the couch while they get him the TV to watch during his recovery. When they come back though, there’s an alien in their living room holding the kid. The two sides are at a standoff. The alien is going to gas the kid, who is also having another asthma attack, and Mel and his Brother are trying to think of what to do. Mel flashes back to when his wife died now for the full story. Her actual last words were more like “See blah blah blah, tell your brother to swing away”. Snapping out of it, Mel tells his brother to swing away several times before the guy sees his baseball bat conveniently hung on the wall and picks it up to attack the alien. The alien gases the kid and Mel races him out of the room in his arms after his brother starts beating on the alien with the bat. In the process water spills on the downed alien, melting it like it was made of cotton candy, which is eventually how they kill it. Outside though asthma boy is weezing his little life away and this time we see Mel (he was a priest!) praying. When you’re having an asthma attack, your lungs close off, meaning none of the poison the kid was sprayed with got in and he didn’t die. That’s god’s work right there. You kids with asthma, you’re blessed by god. The movie ends shortly afterwards where we are shocked to see that Mel has once again become a priest and he believes in god again. Good for you Mel.

Having recounted nearly the entire plot to you, I wanted to cover a few things I may not have made completely clear. First of all, Mel Gibson’s character used to be a priest. This is key to the movie, because it’s not actually at all about aliens crop signs or anything that’s more sci fi than a guy in a rubber costume. This movie is about a farmer who used to believe in god but doesn’t anymore. Second of all, the aliens looked like total butt. I exaggerate sometimes but I am 100% not kidding when I say the aliens were just guys in rubber suits. And they were damn shitty rubber suits too. Finally, this movie is not scary. It uses a little trick called “make a big sound when there was previously silence” to simulate being scary. Under that same theory, balloons popping is scary. Hey, it freaks out babies! In addition to this, throughout the movie, there is constant tension buildup that leads to absolutely nothing. This is seen with tense music rising as Mel approaches a cupboard only to find there’s cereal inside. Things like this, which are not at all scary, are almost as common as points in the plot that remind us that Mel is no longer a priest.

Personally, if I wanted to see a crappy story about someone finding god, I would read a Chick Tract. But if you want to see a movie about a guy who used to be a priest turning back to god, this is the movie for you. One final thing on the movie though:

IT WAS SO BAD!