Day: January 24, 2014

Last Monday night I saw Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, and soon after wrote that it could and should be adapted as a feature film. The doc is about a scrappy-ass minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks, which was owned and managed by the late character actor Bing Russell from ’73 to ’77. Actor Kurt Russell, Bing’s son and in his early 20s at the time, served as co-manager and an occasional designated hitter. Russell is an impassioned and entertaining talking head in the doc.

Headline for Kevin Jagernauth’s incorrectly reported story that was posted earlier today.

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I was going to tough it out at the Sundance Film Festival until Saturday, but there’s almost no energy here…nothing. Every year it thrives and throbs for six days (Thursday to Tuesday) and then dies on Wednesday. Why did I decide to ignore this and plan to remain until Saturday? Last night I saw James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp (good doc but not now). Variety ‘s Peter Debruge had urged me to see Steven Knight‘s Locke (Tom Hardy on a cell phone, in a car) but I guess not. My plane leaves at 11-something..later.

Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco has been announced as the opening night film of the 67th Cannes Film Festival (May 14 thru 25). Okay but honestly? If I was Thierry Fremaux I would have held out for a film that doesn’t seem like damaged goods. The Weinstein Co. release never looked that great, especially with Tim Roth as Prince Rainer. It was going to open, remember, on 11.27.13. Then it was bumped into March 2014. And now this.

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Now that The Blaze has made me richer than ever before and I don’t have to jump through ratings hoops to please Roger Ailes, I’d like to be candid about something. I’ve enriched myself enormously over the last several years by exploiting the fears and prejudices of aging rural white idiots, but I’d like to tone it down just a bit and maybe share my warmer, more compassionate side. Because…well, I don’t know exactly but possibly because I have concerns that when I die a pack of growling wolverine gremlins will take me down to hell.