That fake soccer fandom in the Pac-NW is one of the most annoying things in the Western Hemisphere. People who turn their nose up at just-add-water food and drink have a lot of damn gall to profess such an instant emotional interest in such a thing as soccer, complete with the fucking scarves and songs and shit.

One thing I hate about Major League is that it was guilty of the egregious sin of showing something great in the previews that never made it into the movie*.  It was the scene where some of the guys were trying to cheer Wild Thing up about a bad performance, and one said, "Hey, that ball wouldn't have been out of a…

[surprised] "Cleveland still has a baseball team?"
"Yep.  We got uniforms and everything!"

@avclub-29501df08e5d9ae59e432e4f188d3735:disqus , I haven't seen Moneyball yet*, but your mention of Giambi alone means that attention to statistics and drafting probably played second-fiddle to the chemical additives whose introduction to baseball was pioneered by a 40-40 man in Oakland…

I agree that The Natural is one of the best baseball movies ever, because it captures the magic and tragedy the surrounds that mythological era of baseball.  But it's hard to pick a "best-ever" baseball movie, because the game has so many facets, and has been so important to our national culture, that no one movie can…

@avclub-90248d0a98105fa534cf2b0696ddd12f:disqus , hey, they had to spend a lot of money to make ten times as much money!

Major League is great, and it preserves in amber something that has been lost in baseball since that time: the eccentric personalities with weird and divergent backgrounds who have to somehow come together as a team and win some games.  I'm sure there are still goof-balls in Major League Baseball, but at least in the…

The late-1980s were a great time for baseball movies.  Bull Durham, 8 Men Out, and Major League all captured different facets of the game on film, both in contemporary and "ancient" contexts.  You have to take the good with the bad, I suppose, and Field of Dreams was in that mix, too.  That movie has some good moments…

If you want to see Costner's all-time best performance, watch Fandango.  In fact, watch Fandango even if you don't give a shit about Kevin Costner, because it's a great, funny, wistful, criminally unknown movie.

"Well, I do like tater-tots."

Naming a son John Wayne Lastname is also asking for trouble.  How many of those guys ever turn out right?

Lector is kind of like Jaws (the shark) in that way; it's better when other people talk about him and let your imagination go wild with what horrifying shit he's done.

Manhunter also wasn't saddled with being a Hannibal Lector story, and all the fan service that came with that after the success of the film version of Silence of the Lambs.

They're tough and stringy.  Braising is really all you can do with them, and that gets so boring after a while.  Boring.  Like this cell without windows.  Do you like my artwork?  I draw these pictures from memory, and they serve as my windows…

Ebert, more than any other movie reviewer, brought an insistence on great art to the cineplex without being a fop, a snob, or a caricature of elitism.  And, yes, Ebert's conversational style was wonderfully informal, but also very informative.  In that way, he perfectly represented all that is great about Chicago. …

It probably helps the "Good-Bye Blue Sky" sequence that the animator, I learned from this article, was a political cartoonist. 

It's a cool name.  I liked it as a kid, long before I ever knew about Pink Floyd or even rock music, because it was name of the bassist in the Electric Mayhem.

"That one looks Jewish
and that one's a coon!
Who let all this riff-raff
into the room?
There's one smoking a joint
and another with spots.
If I had my way,
I'd have all of you shot!"

Wow, I had to re-read your first sentence several times, because I kept reading it as being about your mother, and not your wife.  No fault of yours; entirely my neurons malfunctioning.  How's THAT for a Freudian dissonance with regard to The Wall?

Rabies.  That explains his unwashed look.