I used to visit Castle Batting Cages with my son Jett back in the early aughts. I could tag the 40 mph fastball but only if I tried to pull it to the left, like I was trying to hit the left-field bleachers but in foul territory. But if I tried to hit it straight-on I’d always whiff. Jett could hit a few but not I. And I totally failed when I upped the fastball speed to 50 or 60 mph. Pitch after pitch after pitch…embarassing. I would try to force myself to swing early and just meet it…nope.

I used to feel about Elijah Wood the way I now feel about Aaron Paul. I used to despise those big eyes that seemed to say “oh, my emotional pores are so open…I need love…please understand me!” I decided when I saw the first Lord of the Rings installment (almost 15 years ago!) that Frodo Baggins needed to suffer for at least ten years. But now…it’s hard to explain but Wood has an adult vibe in The Trust (Direct TV on 4.14, theatrically on 5.13) that just seems “right” on some level. The Baggins virus is completely out of his system. And the tone seems right — loose, cloddish, unforced. Cage has become such a self-directed meta joke that it’s hard know how to respond any more, but even it seems as if even he might be on to something here. Maybe. Directed by Alex and Ben Brewer, and co-written by Ben and Adam Hirsch.

The following piece, originally posted on 2.2.06, is worth a re-read: “Too much love and success can be kind of a bad thing for movie directors. It can lead to recklessness and ruin. Well, not necessarily, but there’s always the threat of this.

“Look at the hopelessly over-worshipped Peter Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy (Oscars, millions, obsequious studio execs) led to the mad-royalty decision to transform King Kong into a three-hour film with a sluggish, borderline deadly 70-minute opening.

“Quentin Tarantino was psychologically done in, I feel, by the huge success of Pulp Fiction in ’94-’95. He stopped hustling, became a party animal, succumbed to some manner of intimidation over the expectations everyone had for his next film, all of which led to the respectable but underwhelming Jackie Brown in ’97.

“Michael Cimino surely went mad after the huge success of The Deer Hunter in 1978-79, and from this the gross indulgence that was Heaven’s Gate, his very next film, almost certainly arose.

“At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies,” Pauline Kael observed in a review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 when it opened in the States in 1977.

“They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world.”

As previously noted, Gavin Hood‘s Eye in The Sky (Bleecker Street, 3.11 NY & LA, 4.1 wide) was well reviewed at last September’s Toronto film Festival — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, 70% on Metacritic. But the trailer suggested that this high-tech thriller, a study of the strategic tensions and moral determinations behind a lethal drone attack upon African terrorists, might be on the flat and simplistic side.

Or at least it seemed that way to me. Plus the trailer indicated too many CUs and MCUs of military and government types staring at video screens, I felt. Worst of all I wasn’t looking forward to another oppressively sincere performance by HE nemesis Aaron Paul.

Helen Mirren in Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky (Bleecker Street, 3.11 — 4.1 wide).

Well, the trailer misled. Eye in the Sky is anything but pat or simplistic. It’s a gripping, disciplined, morally complex nail-biter — smart and focused and tight as a drum. It’s well augmented by a concise, well-written screenplay (the author is Guy Hibbert), and by direction and editing that gets right down to business and doesn’t fool around. The whole thing held me start to finish. The intrigue and tension levels never ebb.

Best of all it ends with a suspense sequence that Alfred Hitchcock himself would give a standing ovation to. He’d actually forget about the nearby tray of gourmet delicacies, I mean, and get out of his cushy easy chair and stand up and applaud.

Plus it delivers dead-on performances from almost everyone in the cast but particularly from Helen Mirren as a military intelligence officer who spends most of the film requesting an official okay to kill a team of suicide bombers with a drone strike, and from Alan Rickman as a British General who tries to persuade several anxious British politicians to stop equivocating and give the order already. Jeremy Northam, Iain Glen and Monica Dolan portray three of those equivocators with skill and conviction. And Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) is highly engaging as a sympathetic field agent who operates a flying bug-cam that delivers video of the terrorists as things progress.

The ethical crux boils down to which is preferable or worse — sparing the life of a little girl who happens to be near a small home where terrorists are preparing a suicide mission by not firing a drone missile at the target, or not sparing her life by blasting the terrorists, who may kill dozens of innocents if their suicide plot isn’t stopped, to smithereens before they leave the abode.

Some of the most significant and lasting musical passages of my young life were finessed or half-created or arranged by the great George Martin, who died yesterday at age 90. His passing is sad but hardly tragic — we should all have nine good decades. And of course his life and career were about a good deal more than just his Beatles collaborations. But c’mon — that’s all anyone’s talking about this morning.

Martin’s contributions as the Beatles producer (i.e., recording-studio confidante & collaborator, instrumental performer-arranger, “fifth Beatle”) and all-around side man were wondrously rich and innovative and influential beyond measure, particularly during the group’s epic ’65 to ’67 period — Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. I’m not a lordly Beatles historian. I don’t know who composed this or that instrumental bridge or performed what instrument on each and every track in the making of those albums, but I’ve always heard and/or believed Martin was largely responsible for the more elegant and sophisticated elements.

“In My Life’s” speeded-up piano that sounded like a harpsichord — I know that was Martin. I’m not certain if it’s Martin playing piano on “Good Day Sunshine” but I’d like to think so. I’m not sure if he composed Alan Civil‘s French horn solo on “For No One” but I’ve read it was his idea to repeat the solo as Paul McCartney sang the final verse.

I know Martin composed and handled the whole “Eleanor Rigby” string accompaniment (which was inspired by Bernard Herrmann‘s Psycho score), and that he and recording engineer Geoff Emerick had much to do with mixing the trippy elements into what finally became “Strawberry Fields Forever.”