Starting Four (In Honor of The Big Lewandowski)

Early steak morning, so this will be brief. Sorry.

1. Hey, Did You Happen To See The Most Beautiful Girl In The World?

Well, People magazine thinks it did and thinks that it is Gwyneth Paltrow. Seriously. Comely? Yes. Pulchritudinous? We suppose. But you can bet this morning Sophia Vegara, Diana Kruger and Julianna Hough (among others) are phoning –or firing –their agents. Heck, Gwynnie has not even been asked to appear on “Splash!”.

2. Deutschlansd Uber Alles!

Spain has ruled soccer since 200 (Euro Cup winners that summer, World Cup champions in 2010, Messi/Ronaldo, etc.) but in the last two days a pair of clubs from Germany have outscored the world’s two premier clubs, FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, by a combined score or 8-1. Yesterday Robert Lewandowski scored four goals to lead Borussia Dortmund over Real Madrid, 4-1. It’s almost a lock that Dortmund and Bayern Munich, which defeated FC Barcelona 4-0 on Tuesday, will meet in an all-German Champions League final in May.

If you ever find yourself in a German pub in a Tarantino film with an SS agent, that is the proper way to signify “four more beers.”

3. “Close the window; I feel a draft.”

The NFL Draft commences tonight –just one block north of the steakateria. Last night at said steakateria we spoke to a representative from an AFC team who described the draft as “99% boring and 1% terror.” Did you know, by the way, that team reps simply print the name of their pick on a card and hand it to an NFL rep, who then hands it to Roger Goodell? What if you spell the name wrong by one letter and there is another pick in the draft with that name? See, this is why it is wise to name your child Barkevious Mingo. Here is one of our favorite scribes, Matt Taibbi, on “Decoding the NFL Draft.”

Mingo! Mingo! Mingo!

4. I have not yet read this Grantland story on the Iditarod, but I will. Why? Because from a design perspective, it’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever come across on the internet. If MH conformed to such high aesthetic qualities, we’d have at least three different people who commented on our entries.

5.

Medium Happy’s own Chris Corbellini, a film geek and a former producer on HBO’s “Hard Knocks”, sometimes graces us with his thoughts on films. Here’s his review of “42”, the Jackie Bradley, Jr., Robinson biopic.

Watch enough DVD commentaries of films that involve touchy and historical subject matter and you pick up how sly a director can be when the studios come sniffing around the edit bay looking to make changes so the movie becomes more palatable for mass consumption. In some cases a filmmaker will plop in an over-the-top scene as a sacrificial lamb – executives will feel they’ve done their duty by removing it – to save another moment they really want in the picture. That practice occurred to me as I watched actor Chadwick Boseman channel a seething, raw Jackie Robinson in a dugout tunnel after absorbing racist taunts in the baseball biopic “42.” It may not have happened, but it occurred to me.

You do have to see it to fully appreciate its weight, but the title character howls like a wounded beast and turns his bat into kindling against a wall, and when supportive, grandfatherly Brooklyn Dodgers man Branch Rickey approaches, Boseman as Robinson hisses at him: “I swear if another white man opens his mouth I’ll …” before the elder figure urges him back into the light – literally up the steps into the sunshine of Ebbets Field and, of course, baseball immortality. There were two masters this flick needed to serve before release – marketing executives armed  to the bow ties with focus-group notes, and Major League Baseball itself. It’s not difficult to imagine someone from either camp suggesting the scene be softened and re-cut to only show Rickey consoling him (played by screen icon Harrison Ford with tumbleweed eyebrows, his best moment of the picture) before Robinson steeled himself. But I’m sure writer-director Brian Helgeland was willing to do battle by any means necessary to keep the one take where his chief character went low and stayed there. The entire take. Even if it meant a take had to go from someplace else .

It’s a small victory of real feelings. Because we are not, absolutely not, under any circumstances NOPE NO WAY NO HOW, getting a complicated movie on Jackie Robinson for mass consumption. You’re not getting a complicated portrait of Hank Aaron and his slow, scary trot through hillbilly-boy-hate-mail-ville as he chased Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, either. Not unless you want baseball to back out. The Show trades on nostalgia more than any other American sport, and number 42 has been retired forever. You don’t pitch inside on the legacy of a baseball iconoclast, even if the story demands you plunk the man over and over at the plate. The legend should be up there on the silver screen with a syrupy score. The human being? That’s debatable. A director has got to squeeze it through the cracks when he can.

With those parameters in place — Scotch on-the-rocks storytelling instead of neat from the bottle — “42” was the best version of itself it could be. It’s a two-and-three-quarters-star movie that projects Robinson’s nobility in every frame. After the age-appropriate opening narration and based on a true story title card, the talented ballplayer is hand-picked by Rickey from the Negro Leagues to be the first to integrate baseball because he can handle the inevitable poop storm that follows. Once the Dodgers man utters the line (retort really) “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough to NOT fight back,” Robinson does exactly that in spring training, the minor leagues, and finally in Brooklyn during his Rookie of the Year season. The one bit of soul-stirring imagery plays out exactly when it should: following a climactic home run as #42 is rounding third in slow-motion, the pennant in hand as a Rockwellian coach waves him home. It’s intercut with his beaming wife Rachel and his baby son in a carriage on a Brooklyn sidewalk as an entire neighborhood celebrates. And it’s just beautiful to look at. No other adjective for it.

That snapshot aside, I thought the casting department did the finest job of the entire production, giving the main character all dem racist-looking racists he needed to overcome. How exactly do you start to find extras who can play appropriately ass-backward and ignorant? Yet there they were – boozy residents of Sanford, and a nightstick-wielding cop – resembling chain-gang guards from “Cool Hand Luke” or real-life versions of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. There’s a heaping helping of southern inhospitality going on here, so much so they used one to go against type and provide a little balance, approaching Robinson and his wife menacingly before saying, and I’m paraphrasing: “If you deserve it, more power to you.” Smarmy-looking performers filled out the disapproving teammate roles. Character man Alan Tudyk played the most despicable figure of all – the n-word spewing Philadelphia manager, Ben Chapman, who pushed Robinson to the precipice.

Then there are the Robinsons. Boseman looks like a rookie cornerback in the NFL (that’s about right, Robinson was 5-foot-11 and 195 pounds of lean and mean at that age), and in that one moment the script allowed him to emote something beyond a brave heart, he smashed the scene to splinters. With a haircut styled to a point on his forehead, there’s no denying his resemblance to Jackie. The same goes for the actress who plays his wife Rachel, Nicole Beharie, who didn’t have much to do except smile or fret in the stands. I wondered, wasn’t the stress involved so great that a fight at home becomes inevitable? Or must every sports hero look out longingly at the New York City skyline at night, followed in a few beats by the love interest, who gently hugs him from behind with total understanding?

Obviously this is a period piece, so you expect a timeless quality to it. Still, I’m guessing some of the CGI stuff involved here will look dated in about 10 years. The panoramic shots of Ebbets Field and the spring training diamond in Panama (with a tanker cruising through the canal off in the distance) looked a little hazy around the edges. A ballpark that seats at least 50,000, which by the way no longer exists, is obviously is a great challenge to recreate no matter the budget. So they hoped for the best from their computer folks (and it’s fine by today’s standards), and cut to closeups of the supporting characters in the seats with about 50-60 people around them. But consider the final possession of a truly timeless sports film “Hoosiers,” when Jimmy gets the ball and looks over at Gene Hackman (“Take your time! Take your time!”) before his final, fateful jump shot. Behind them are hundreds of extras the movie-makers went to great lengths to find, real flesh-and-blood extras dressed like they belong at a 1950s dance, and it’s an electric atmosphere. You can’t fake that, and I wondered if the talents behind “42” could have rounded up thousands of extras for that final at-bat, and let the crowd shake it up and take us back to September of 1947.

A ground-breaking time, a somewhat-scrubbed story. Maybe baseball will allow Ron Shelton to produce a motion picture about a great like Pete Rose that has humor and real anger and real f-ck-ups and yes, real joy behind it. Maybe Spike Lee gets a shot at Aaron’s pursuit of Ruth. Until then, we have Wynona Carr’s heavenly “Life is a Ballgame” warbling during the final frames of “42,” a montage when the players are actually enjoying the great, goofy game. We don’t get to see the sunny side of Jackie Robinson here, he was too busy and exhausted being so important to everyone else. If that’s the true Jackie, Jackie the guy not the legendary figure, boy, did he get the shaft once again. It must be hard looking at yourself being looked at all the time.

Starting Five

1. “You down with ‘CFP’?’ ‘No, you know me.”

“We decided to call the playoff what it is — the College Football Playoff,” said Bill Hancock, director of the Bowl Championship Series. The peripatetic Brett McMurphy has all the details righcheer. Naming the college football playoff the College Football Playoff proves that middle-aged white guys were behind this decision (Did no one suggest “Pass the Heinz?”).  The best part, as Pat Forde notes, is that an outside consulting group, Premier Sports Management of Overland Park, K.C., was actually retained by the BCS to help with the name (consulting is where it’s at, kids*). Patrick Finley of the Arizona Daily Star suggested “Football Four”, but that will look awkward when the playoff expands to eight teams in a few years.

2. “Are you guys as excited as I am about The Obesity Epidemic?”

Jimmy Kimmel Live sends a camera crew to Coachella to ask music fans about bands “that are so obscure they don’t even exist.” Classic idea, classic execution. Straight out of the Carson/Letterman playbook. By the way, the dude answers (about a non-existent band), “I just like their whole style, their whole genre…is great.”

Bands with names such as Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine (above) leave us empathetic toward Kimmel’s victims.

3. We are not even four weeks into the baseball season, so take this list of the worst E.R.A.’s in the Major Leagues at face value. Still, worth noting: Three of the nine worst E.R.A.’s in the game belong to pitchers who have hurled perfect games (a feat that has been performed just 23 times in baseball history): Matt Cain, San Francisco, 6.59 (6th-worst); Roy Halladay, Philadelphia, 6.04 (7th); and Mark Buehrle, Toronto, 5.87 (9th). Also, your reigning Cy Young Award winners are at 14th-worst (David Price, Tampa Bay, 5.52) and 32nd-worst (R.A. Dickey, Toronto, 4.66) out of 107 pitchers. The Rays are 0-5 in games in which Price has started this season.

Matt Harvey: 4-0, with baseball’s best WHIP and 2nd-best E.R.A. We called this more than 2 weeks ago. Pitches today at Citi.

4. “I know people say I saw blood on the boat… not true.” Watertown’s “incidental hero”, David Henneberry, clarifies the tale of how he happened upon Dzhokhar Tsarnaev last Friday evening. In short, he is not as clueless as the news reports –and I — assumed him to be.

The hiding place

5. Who’s hot? J.R.

The Knicks’ J.R. Smith edges out the Clippers’ Jamal Crawford for the NBA’s Sixth Man Award (a month or two ago I proffered that these are the league’s two best long-range gunners). Last night Smith ended the first quarter of the Knicks’ win over Boston with a 36-foot jumper that swished through the net, three of his 19 points. Smith never starts, but he is the second-leading scorer (17 ppg) on a team whose star is more averse to passing than the Navy football team. New York can seriously challenge the Heat if Smith maintains this level of play –and if Ama’re Stoudemire remains injured. Honestly, Bill Simmons is going to have to add an “Ama’re Clause” to his Ewing Theory. How delightful that the two men play the same position for the same franchise some two decades apart.

J.R. Smith: In dire need of a skintervention.

Reserves

In Champions League, Bayern Munich obliterates what had been the premier football club on the globe, FC Barcelona, 4-0, in the first leg of the semifinals (“SCHWEINSTEIGER!”). In fairness, the world’s top striker, Lionel Messi, is nursing a tender hamstring and should not have been on the pitch. Still, Barca will need at least a 4-0 shutout or to win by five goals next Wednesday at Camp Nou if it hopes to advance to the final. That ain’t happening. Oddly enough, the coach who led Barca to brilliance the past half decade, Pep Guardiola, stepped down last summer, is on a one-year sabbatical, and will return next season to manage…Bayern Munich.

Bayern in red. We don’t have any context here, we just like the photo.

Apple beats earnings forecasts. The tech monolith announces that it will double the dividend payout it is returning to investors. And yet the stock actually dips. Apple stock has become Jennifer Aniston, going from sharing a home with Brad Pitt and making the cover of “People’s Most Beautiful” to dating Justin Theroux and a minor role in “Horrible Bosses” without any visible drop off in production/appearance. It’s just that, well, we’re all so used to them both by now (by the way, if you have a better analogy, please send it our way).

I culled eight different Mock Drafters, including Todd McShay at ESPN, Don Banks at SI.com, and Charlie Casserly and Gil Brandt (both former NFL GMs) at NFL.com. The consensus is that these five names will, in some order, be the first five players selected in tomorrow night’s NFL Draft: Luke Joeckel, OT, Texas A&M; Eric Fisher, OT, Central Michigan; Shariff (don’t like it) Floyd, DT, Florida; Dion Jordan, LB, Oregon; and Lane Johnson, OT, Oklahoma.

Joeckel (I’d pair him in the future with Ohio State RB Carlos Hyde)

Take it for what it’s worth, but only one of those five names (Joeckel) appears on the first two non-hacked AP All-America teams from last season. Two more names, Floyd and Fisher, are on the third team. Now, obviously, everyone on an All-America team is not entering this year’s draft (if they were then Jadeveon Clowney would be the first pick) but isn’t it always funny how NFL experts seem so unimpressed with how AP voters evaluate college football talent? Andy Staples over at SI.com wonders whether they may sometimes be too smart for their own good. Does this make Andy a Mock Draft Mocker?

Game Of Thrones Wiliness Rankings

I never thought I’d see the day when Tyrion Lannister wasn’t atop the Wily board, but he suddenly finds himself holding precariously onto the bronze spot.

1. Daenerys Taryargen, alias “Khaleesi”, alias “Mother of Dragons”: Add “Commander of the Unsullied” to her list of sobriquets. Oh, and by the way, she does speak Valyrian.

2. Margaery: If I could play guitar as well as she’s playing King Joffrey, I’d be touring with The Obesity Epidemic right about now.

3. Tyrian Lannister: It was sort of a bye week for Tyrion in terms of wiliness, but he held ground by not losing ground.

Westeros’ Least Wily: Again, Theon. Watching him make poor decision after poor decision is as much torture for us as his actual torture is and will be for him. I won’t be surprised if he releases a double album in the near future and marries a Kardashian.

Daddy issues

* My Consulting Story: So, last summer I’m driving through Utah with three high school buddies, the most successful of whom is a partner in a major international consulting group. He is on a conference call in which the partners are discussing hiring an outside person in which to provide assistance for a project they are doing. So, that you are up to speed, a consulting group is hiring an outside consultant. I broach this point to him and he tells me, “It’s okay, the guy we’re hiring used to work for the company for whom we are consulting.” At which point I ask him, “So why doesn’t the company just hire him directly to lend his expertise?” At which point my friend looks at me with a stare that says, “You have no idea how the world really works, do you?” That, kids, is what you call an epiphany.

“This is Genesis. She likes her men completely hairless…and, no, she doesn’t think that’s weird.” Genesis: “I don’t.” Hey, Genesis: you’re a freaky freak girl. And I dig that! Question: Does “completely hairless” include bald? Like, would Genesis prefer Varys from “Game of Thrones?”  Or is she already mackin’ on Charlie Villenueva?

Varys: No hair… and a lot, lot less.

 Starting Five

1. Love, Actuary

As you have probably seen by now, the Wall Street Journal released a ranking of 200 jobs, Best to Worst, and actuary, a person who uses mathematical skills to perform risk analysis, finished first (personally, I consider “Being The Rock” the best job, and Steve the best Jobs, but what do I know? ). Also, “newspaper reporter”  finished 200th, or last. That must have done wonders for the WSJ staffers who helped put it together. As a person currently holding down the 185th-best job, I’m calling b.s. on this list. Why? Because “dishwasher” finished 187th, or 13 spots above reporter, and trust me, there is no worse job –particularly in a busy restaurant –than dishwasher. None. And podiatrist finished 23rd? Do you want to live in a country where more than 85% of the people have worse jobs than being a podiatrist? I don’t.

This is Mr. February from the “Sexiest Actuaries” calendar.

2. Meet Seventh Woods. Yesterday, Matt Norlander of CBSSports.com (Matt is a “Senior Blogger!” Geez, CBS, can you give this diligent reporter a real title?) introduced us to him and made the obligatory George Costanza reference regarding his given name. Woods is only 14 years old and six-foot-one but he must be on anti-gravity pills. His entire game reminds us of this classic Cheech & Chong tune. Woods’ MJ-ness is alluring, but I counted at least seven palming violations in the first 63 seconds of the video before I grew queasy. I then went outside and practiced my underhanded Rick Barry-style free throws.

“Basketball Jones/I got a Basketball Jones/I got a Basketball Jones/Oh baby, ooh-ooh-ooh!”

3. NBA Playoffs Opening Round: Miami, New York, Indiana, Chicago in the East. OKC, San Antonio, LAC and Denver out west. At worst I’ll be wrong on one of them (Brooklyn?). We can pretend to be intrigued, but I’m honestly more interested in the mini-Olympics that will transpire between Shaq and Sir Charles. Can we just proceed to the second round and pronto?

This is Genesis: “I could hair less about the first round of the NBA playoffs.”

4. “I’ll take ‘Famous A.J. Profanities for $200, Alex”

“This young man reacted to the news that his grandmother would be a no-show at the family barbecue with, “So, what? No (bleepin’) ziti now?”

–Who is A.J. Soprano? Correct!

“A.J.’s for $300.”

“This bastion of blogging sent a resignation letter to his staff in January that read, in part, ‘As for 2014, who the (bleep) knows?'”

–Who is A.J. Daulerio? Correct!

“A.J.’s for $400.”

“This neophyte newscaster opened his very first newscast on KFYR in Bismarck, N.D., earlier this week by uttering, “(Bleepin’ Bleep).”

–Who is A.J. Clemente? Correct!

My favorite part of the A.J. Clemente clip is not the profanity, but instead his meathead self-introduction that follows: “Thanks, Van. I graduated from West Virginia University and I’m used to, um, you know, from being in the East Coast.” That right there was grounds for termination. If you did not know, Clemente was fired from KFYR, located in the nation’s 151st-largest TV market, and handled his pink-slipping with grace.

Stay classy, Bismarck.

“Rookie mistake. I’m a free agent,” Clemente tweeted. “Can’t help but laugh at myself and stay positive. Wish I didn’t trip over my ‘Freaking Shoes’ out of the gate.”

5. House of Ca$h

Netflix (NFLX) was up 25% in after-hours trading yesterday afternoon, from $174 to $223, after it announced its first-quarter earnings. This is a tremendous comeback tale. Two years ago NFLX was approaching the $300 mark when it announced that it was splitting it subscription service, in terms of how customers would pay, in two. The move was universally criticized and NFLX stock plummeted. Flash forward to last summer (August 3, to be exact) when the stock price was down to $52.

But then NFLX copied the HBO model and introduced original programming. “House of Cards“, a political drama starring Verbil Kint and Princess Buttercup, premiered on February 1 and has drawn rave reviews. Coming up next: a new season of “Arrested Development.” (No touching! And no sharing of your Netflix password!).

One degree of Kevin Spacey

Now Netflix has 29.2 million subscribers, or more than HBO does (28.7 million), and the stock price is up more than 400% from where it was nine months ago (it’s the most successful company in terms of stock price on the S&P 500 this year thus far). If you are an investment neophyte, that’s once-in-a-lifetime type profit (Personally, I think at least 25% of Netflix’s success has to do with people thinking its ticker symbol of NFLX means that it is the National Football League).

The good news if you missed out on NFLX? Apple (AAPL) is announcing earnings after the bell today. The stock is hovering at $400 after being as high as $705 last September. Are you ready to take a chance on AAPL making an NFLX-ian rebound?

Reserves

Someone on Twitter asked yesterday how come there were no good photos from police cruisers of the shootout in Watertown in the first hour of last Friday morning? I don’t have an answer for that, but Andy Kitzenberg shot some historic photos from his apartment window and has posted them on his site, getonhand.com. You have to click on that link. As faithful reader @Okerland points out, some of the most invaluable reporting from both the Bin Laden raid and this disaster was done by men sitting at home, minding their own business, who just happened to find themselves within 100 yards of history.

The shooters (allegedly). I don’t believe anything any more unless I hear it from Pete Williams. photo by Andy Kitzenberg

Hustle. That’s what The New York Times did in being the first to bring us this story. I’ll use the “H” word again: historic.

It’s funny how much NBC’s Pete Williams’ star has risen in the past week. Williams has the look of someone who was too square to even be cast in Network, or should be the news director at a station that might hire –and fire–the likes of A.J. Clemente. And yet all week long his reports have been the most credible. And last Wednesday, when everyone else was informing us that there had been an arrest in the Boston bombing case, he held fast and said, “No no no.” Kudos to Williams. If he didn’t look like someone you’d run into at the Cedar Rapids Elks Club meeting, someone at NBC would be making bigger plans for him. As it is, Williams has a good gig. And he knows it. People trust him. That’s worth something.

In Pete We Trust

Final thoughts (for today) on the Boston bombing case, with a heavy assist by reader Susie B. (whom I’ve never met and have no idea who she is), who made some salient points in a recent comment:

1) From the very beginning I assumed that the bombers were A) local and B) college students and/or college-aged students. Turns out I was correct about that. If you look at the mass murders in April from Columbine to OKC to Blacksburg, etc., your suspect is a male between the ages of 15 and 25.

2) As Susie B. points out, it is remarkable, if these suspects are the correct ones, that the brothers went through all the trouble of manufacturing these bombs and yet had no getaway strategy. That they were car-jacking an SUV and forcing the driver to withdraw money from an ATM at gunpoint less than seven miles from where the bombing occurred, and a full three days after the incident, illustrates that their plan was crude at best. What authorities should be concerned about is that some future nihilist will not be so short-sighted. How difficult is it to already map out an escape route and have funds on hand with which to do it? Movie villains really are more savvy than almost all real-life ones.

3) How is it –again, credit to Susie B.– that a pair of locals were identified on camera on a Thursday afternoon and nobody phoned the authorities to identify them? No one? That’s correct, no? How does that happen?

4) Sunil Tripathi: Still missing.

5) And finally… a Watertown resident spends an entire Friday in lockdown, and he knows why. When the lockdown is lifted, he steps outside for a smoke (putting his life at risk in two ways simultaneously). He notices that the tarp on his boat parked in the driveway is torn and also notices blood. And his first thought is, I’ll go check this out, unarmed, myself. Really??? Really??? That’s about 17 degrees of stupid. He is lucky to be alive today. Also, notice that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev chose the same hiding spot as Gianni Versace’s murderer, Andrew Cunanan: an unoccupied boat.

Mad Men

Upon further review, is not the theme that Don Draper is suddenly finding the women in his life turning the tables on him? He meets his paramour-or-less in the elevator, dressed up and clearly headed out –alone– and she fails to tell him the particulars (she’s got to be headed to the same club where Joan and her friend wound up, no?). He happens across Peggy ambushing his Heinz campaign. And there’s Zou Bisou Bisou, the Lovely and Faithful Megan, kissing the leading man in her soap opera. So what if was in the script? And so what if Ted McGinley wrote the scene?

Turnabout is not fair play. Not for Don Draper it isn’t.

Don’t worry, baby: the drinks are on the louse.

So, now what? Would it be so inconceivable that Don turns to the one woman who has yet to double-cross him? Who as we saw in this episode is a little lonely herself? And who has resolved to leave behind the menial tasks at SCDP and become a true partner herself? And if you’re a partner, who better to partner with than a fellow partner?

Also, stay tuned: Historically, we’re approaching the most turbulent moment of the decade outside of the JFK assassination in 1963. Within a two-month span both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy will be assassinated. I expect those events to influence either next week’s episode or the next two episodes. There’s a lot of meat on the bone for show runner Matthew Weiner.

Remote Patrol

Game 2: Boston Celtics at New York Knicks

TNT 8 p.m.

Yes, I’ve already said that I don’t care too much about the opening round. And these two teams are so veteran-laden that there will be uncalled fouls on every possession. First team to 85 wins. Ugly hoops, in other words. The redeeming quality is that Carmelo Anthony appears to want the mantle of NBA’s Best Player. Yeah, you heard me. Everyone knows who LeBron is, but Carmelo has similar size and –dare I say –superior scoring ability. All LeBron is is a better athlete. Watch Carmelo. This is HIS time.

There is a “me” in Carmelo, but no one seems to care as long as the Knicks win.

XXX