by John Walters

Starting Five

Final Snore

A 44-point loss in the Final Four and we’re not talking about the UConn women? No, that was Villanova ova’ Oklahoma, 95-51. The 44-point beatdown set the tone for the weekend, as North Carolina knocked out Syracuse by 17, the UConn “bad for basketball” women defeated Oregon State by 29, and Syracuse downed Washington by 21.

Take away Villanova’s 11 for 18 effort, and the other three Final Four teams in Houston shot 26.7% from beyond the arc because you can’t expect shooters to adjust to playing on an elevated court inside a football stadium when they only get about an hour of practice on it total before the opening tip off.

By the way, I’m not going to call this year’s Big Dance a bore, even if both of Saturday’s games were. Yale over Baylor, Middle Tennessee over Michigan State….the NIU half-courter, the NIU meltdown…the Notre Dame tip-in, the Notre Dame comeback…the Syracuse comeback versus Virginia? Villanova-Kansas? Too many great moments, nay, shimmering moments, for us to pronounce it a bore. We are all just too spoiled by things we get for free.

2. The Weekend Streaks Died

Golden State’s 54-game home win streak, the longest in NBA history, died at the lively defensive hands of the Boston Celtics Friday night. Stephen Curry missed a good-look potential game-tying three with about four seconds left and the Celtics held on to win, 109-106. This also killed the Warriors’ shot at becoming the first team in NBA history to go 41-0 at home in a season (something the Spurs still have a shot at).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKrZjiWoOuM

One day later FC Barcelona’s 39-game home win streak at Camp Nou died, fittingly, at the lively leg of Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid in El Clasico. Ronaldo scored the game-winner in the 85th minute for the 2-1 margin off a beautiful feed from Christian Gareth Bale (I mean, I assume he’s a Christian). Madrid was actually playing with just 10 men when Ronaldo scored the game-winner.

So, two of the longest home win streaks in sport, each held by the two prettiest teams to watch play their respective sports, the Dubs and Barca, die within a 24-hour time span. Yes, coincidence.

Three Things To Keep An Eye in NBA’s Final Week-Plus:

1. Golden State is 69-8. They must go 4-1 to better the ’96 Chicago Bulls record record of 72-10, with two of those remaining games against the Spurs.

2. San Antonio is 39-0 at home. As I mentioned, no team has ever finished 41-0 at home. The ’85-86 Celtics went 40-1 at home. It’s not gonna be easy, as the final two games at the AT&T Center will be against Golden State (Sunday) and Oklahoma City (Tuesday), two of the three other best squads in the NBA. The thing is, all three are locked in to their playoff spots, so how much will Pop’s pride play a role? All we know for sure is that Pop never does anything to please the league office.

3. Kobe Watch: The Mamba scored 34 last night to give him a career total of 33,498 points through 1,340 games. One more basket and he’d have 33,500 and an even 25.00 points per game career scoring average. As it stands, he’s at 24.9985 points per game and the LOLakers have six games remaining. If he were to play all six games, he’d need to score a total of 152 points to average 25 for his career.

3. Pardon The Interruptions

Sunday night’s 90-minute season finale of that zombie show might as well have been called The Walking Ad. Did anyone put a clock on just how many minutes were devoted to commercials?

The season ends when Rick and his posse finally have to come to grips with the fact that, not for the first time, there’s a new sheriff in town. We’ve heard the name Negan all season, but it turns out to be the patient with the weak heart from Grey’s Anatomy.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not really cheering for Rick and the gang any more (only one-eyed Carl is more annoying). And when Carol asked Morgan rhetorically midway through the episode, “You think I’m being dramatic here?” well, I laughed. As the show’s quality deteriorates, the best acting anyone involved with it may be doing is Chris Hardwick, who acts as if he loves every plot twist while hosting The Talking Dead immediately after. What choice does he have, though?

So my question is this: Who gets the credit for baseball bats as weapons of cranial destruction in movies/shows (because that’s how Season 6 ends, though we don’t know who the victim is: I’m guessing it’s Hardcore Henry). Is it Quentin Tarantino for this scene in Inglourious Basterds, or is it Brian De Palma for the Al Capone (DeNiro) scene in The Untouchables? Or do we go back further, to 1979, to the Baseball Furies in Warriors?

Here’s Sepinwall’s review, titled “The Walking Dead Ends It’s Season On a Hilariously Stupid Cliffhanger”. In it he resolves that he has now quit watching the show (and that, oh by the way, if they stay true to the comic book, Glenn is the batting practice ball; I guess you can only go under the dumpster one so many times), so Negan sort of knocked him out, too.

4. Whirled Cups

This is 11 year-old Chan Keng Ian of Malaysia, who won the male division at the World Sport Stacking Championships in Speichersdorf, Germany, this weekend. World-record holder William Orrell of the USA finished a disappointing 34th. Get a glimpse below to see what this all entails.

It’s like Superbad meets Becca’s audition for the Bellas.

5. Cannibal Holocaust

So I noticed that one of New York’s coolest movie theaters, the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, was screening a 1980 horror film titled Cannibal Holocaust. And I’d never heard of it. And while I didn’t go see it at the theater, you can easily find it online (I’ll leave the work to you if you want to find it) and view it in its entirety.

I’ll warn you: the dialogue and script is cheesy, like barely better than what you’d hear in a porn film (from what friends tell me). But, oh my God: this movie is SO WRONG. Just a short list of things you’ll see: impaling, amputations, decapitations, sexual mutilations, gang rapes, animals being killed onscreen, a 70s mustache and, oh yes, cannibalism.

It’s as if someone said, “Let’s make a movie and just go for all of it. Let’s see if we can make a film so vile, so disturbing, so repugnant and so grisly that there will be no one left in the theater when it’s over.” They may have succeeded.

The film was actually made by an Italian film crew and after its premiere, it was banned in Italy and director Ruggero Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges. The film has since been banned in 50 countries. I didn’t recognize a single actor in this film, maybe because appearing in this movie was career suicide. It makes The Hills Have Eyes and Hostel look like Kung Fu Panda.

Now here’s the crazy thing about Cannibal Holocaust: it’s skillful and in terms of structure, way ahead of its time. The set-up: an anthropologist heads into the Amazon to discover what has become of a four-person documentary crew (all young and sexy Americans) who themselves went in to film a primitive cannibal tribe and have not returned. During our anthropologist’s journey, we come across items or events that don’t make too much sense at first, but will later.

When? Well, the anthropologist does return with the “found footage” (hello, Blair Witch Project) from the documentary filmmakers’ excursion. And we slowly learn why so many earlier inscrutable moments took place, as well as the fate of our film crew. So it’s a pretty ingenious idea for 1980. But so much of what you see here is just, like, well, a product of the most warped of imaginations.

I love what this reviewer did: he posted photos of kittens, adding  in the captions, “I refuse to subject you to any images from Cannibal Holocaust. You know how to use Google Image Search, scar your own damn minds.” His lede, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is, “If you really, I mean really buy into the idea that all art is protected speech, and nothing should be obscene, Cannibal Holocaust is what you should be prepared to live with.”

So, yeah, it’s a movie you’ll never forget having seen. But that may very well be the problem: You cannot unsee this movie.

Music 101

Hooked on a Feeling

“Ooga-chaka ooga-ooga, ooga-chaka ooga-ooga….” You’ve probably never heard of Blue Swede, the Swedish band that took this song to No. 1 in 1974. Theirs is a cover of the B.J. Thomas (“Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”) original, which only rose to No. 5 in 1969. But B.J. did not include the “ooga-chaka…” opening. That was done by English musician Jonathan King in 1971 (his version never made a splash in the states).

If you watched the most the March 27 episode of Vinyl (set in 1973) an L.A. record company owner tells Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) that he just laid down a cover of “Hooked On A Feeling” and Richie asks, “You mean the B.J. Thomas song?” It’s a good reference for the show to make, since who remembers Blue Swede? Favorite moment from the scene is when Ray Romano’s character tells Richie that he’s going to hit the buffet line “before you-know-who does” and then nods in the direction of Mama Cass, who is only referred to earlier as “Mama” (characters depicting Graham Parsons, Steven Stills, David Crosby and Neil Young are also depicted in the Malibu beach party scene).
Here’s the B.J. Thomas version. No horns, no ooga-chaka, but richer vocals:

Remote Patrol

Better Call Saul

10 p.m. AMC

Villanova-UConn

TBS 8ish

Tune in to UNC and the Kitty Cats and hope it’s close, then switch over to see if Jimmy said “Yes” to Kim.