Blogs on Film, part deux

My friend Cunado's wildly misleading blog post got me thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off again. It's been on my mind quite a bit lately. I caught it on cable early this summer. Then John Hughes died. Then ESPN's Bill Simmons discussed the movie in a recent mailbag (near the bottom, if you're actually interested). After cataloging everything Ferris & Co. manage to squeeze into their day, Mr. Simmons concludes:

clipped from sports.espn.go.com

Seems improbable, right? No way all of that stuff happens in less than 10 hours unless they basically made a two-inning cameo at the Cubs game and left. (Conceivable, by the way. How can you top catching a foul ball? And if Sloane hated baseball and pushed for them to leave after 2-3 innings, wouldn't the logical next stop for them -- if a girl who hated sports was running the show -- be that art museum?)

Not conceivable. Let's not forget a tiny detail, one that escaped my attention until this summer: at the Cubs game, Sloane Peterson is keeping score. Don't underestimate this. You'll find ten leopard-spotted teenagers lip-syncing atop hijacked parade floats in downtown Chicago before you'll find someone who bothers keeping a scorecard leaving the game after three innings.

But you know, maybe verisimilitude isn't what exactly Hughes was aiming for. Hard as it is to believe the guy who directed Weird Science would ever ask his audience to suspend disbelief, I guess we'll just have to try.

There's something new in the fridge!

Today marks one year since David Foster Wallace passed away. I wanted to write something nice about him but it's just not going to happen today.

Instead, here's something about Bull Durham, the greatest baseball movie of all time:

(1) Danny Gans, the legendary, recently deceased Las Vegas entertainer, plays the Bulls' 3rd baseman. It was the only big screen movie he was ever in.

(2) You get to see one of Susan Sarandon's boobs near the end. It's a really quick shot, as she's cleaning the kitchen after a long night of lovemaking and pauses to light a cigarette butt she finds on the floor.

Now I've probably watched Bull Durham 30 times over the last 21 years, and I'd never once noticed this before. Every single time I've wished I could see her boobs, and now, after countless viewings, I finally get to see one of them. It's kind of like that thing about people opening the refrigerator over and over again and hoping something new has magically appeared since the last time they checked. Except this time, THERE'S ACTUALLY SOMETHING NEW IN THE FRIDGE! A great big bucket of fried chicken!

There's no way to describe how much this discovery pleases me.

Blogs on Film

I recently watched Ghost Busters for the first time in years. I was amazed by how much everyone smoked (as a kid, I was vehemently anti-smoking; in retrospect, I'm certain this is why Egon was my favorite character). Also the special effects are hilarious. But what really struck me was how heavily the Dudley Heinsbergen-Raleigh St. Clair relationship in The Royal Tenenbaums borrowed from the interaction between The Key Master (Rick Moranis) and Egon.

I probably won't win a Pulitzer for this.