hecklongtree

Well, the Midsummer Classic is over and, once again, the American League won. And, since Baseball Commissioner Selig decided that the All-Star Game winner gets home field advantage in the World Series, that means that, once again, home field advange will go to an American League team.

Bud Selig implemented that rule after the 2002 All-Star Game, when, to please the fans, both mangers used...
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"Broken Trail," the Walter Hill-directed AMC Western miniseries with Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church is a cross between "Deadwood," "Open Range" and "Ride the High Country." It combines the slowness and talkiness of the first two with the plot of the third. In Sam Peckinpah's "Ride the High Country," Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), Gil Westrum (Randolf Scott) and Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) are transporting...
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In Ingmar Bergman's "Winter Light (1961)," a pastor counsels a parishioner who's disturbed by a newspaper article on how the Chinese are raised to hate and that they're about to acquire nuclear weapons. Watching this film, I couldn't help but be reminded of the scene from "Annie Hall" where the mother takes young Alvy to the doctor because the boy is disturbed after reading that...
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I just watched "How the West Was Won" (1962), the story of Western migration from one family's viewpoint. The film is divided into three segments, directed by John Ford, George Marshall ("Destry Rides Again," "When the Daltons Rode"), and Henry Hathaway respectively. The segments explore various tensions in Western history: (1) mountain men vs. permanent settlers, (2) Indians vs. railroad builders (and the townsfolk who...
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The Mets did it again, with Endy Chavez driving in the winning run in the bottom of the 13th to give the Mets a 1-0 win!

It's just too bad Pedro Martinez didn't get the win, after pitching 8 scoreless innings.

Anyone see Tuesday night's Mets game? After 5 hours and 22 minutes, the Mets finally pulled it out, with Beltran hitting a walk-off homer in the bottom of the16th.

The Mets have played 44 games this season and most of them have been nail-biters. I just wish they could just win one by a comfortable margin and in 9 innings!

I have a new favorite exploitation/ porn director, and his name is Radley Metzger.

According to the dvd extras, Metzger started as a film editor, editing the trailers for art-house distributor Janus films. I just learned from the imdb, he also edited one of my favorite B sci fi movies, 1964's "The Flesh Eaters."

The picture I just saw, "The Dirty Girls," also from '64,...
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Just watched "King Creole," which is definitetly one of Elvis' best pictures. Unlike a lot of the bad Elvis movies, it doesn't have many scenes that are just excuses for Elvis to sing. It actually has a pretty compelling story.

Elvis' character, Danny Fisher, is a young hustler from the wrong side of the tracks trying to find a career for himself while avoiding getting...
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I finally decided what to do in the second act of my screenplay "Bordetown." The script's main plot: A private detective working out of La Frontera, a US/Mexican border hamlet, gets to the bottom of a Mexican version of the JFK assassination.

As the second act begins, it is the the eve of the US drug certification/decertification and Mexican drug csar/drug trafficker General Osorio is...
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I just watched "Seven Days in May," John Frankenheimer's film version of the Fletcher Knebel, Charles W. Bailey bestseller about an attempted military coup in the United States. The Kennedy administration cooperated fully with the producers, permitting the cast and crew, among other things, to stage a riot outside the White House gates. It seems, the administration was so cooperative because JFK was a big...
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