Garden State, the drug-addled coming of age film written, directed, and starring Zach Braff, struck a chord with a sizeable chunk of my demographic. Part of that was due to the quirky charm of Braff and costar Natalie Portman and part was due to the brilliant soundtrack, but a bigger reason for its popularity was the way Braff captured the mindset of his character’s age group, with lives in flux and uncertainty around every corner. Though not everybody was pumped full of prescriptions like Andrew Largeman, many of us felt the same cloudy confusion that he did. Braff’s newest star vehicle, The Last Kiss, finds him capturing that same feeling of personal confusion, this time a few years removed from the quarter-life crisis to focus on the minds of those about to turn the big three-oh. And while the execution isn’t as fresh as Garden State’s, the film is equally as impressive.

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It was a pitcher’s duel in Houston Saturday night, and looked like it would remain that way until number six stepped to the plate. The behemoth with biceps as big as the trees from which his massive bats were carved was sitting on 56 home runs, six short of the steroid-free single season record. Howard took a massive cut at an offering from Astros pitcher Jason Hirsch and sent it deep to left field, where it was caught, and subsequently dropped, by a 10-year-old.

The kid doing his best Jeffrey Maier (right) impression was Brandon Hilgedick, a young Houston fan who wanted the meatball as a souvenir of his time at Minute Maid Park. And who could blame him? It was hit by baseball’s most scintillating swinger at the moment, and could become a piece of baseball history. Instead, it was incorrectly ruled a ground rule double because Hilgedick couldn’t wait for the ball to land in his lap and tried to catch it.

Brandon Hilgedick, you are on temporary notice. If Howard manages to break the home-run record, and if the Phillies manage to make the playoffs (your indiscretion wasn’t enough to stop the Phils from losing the game), you might find yourself back in my good graces. But tread carefully, young man. The On Notice Board is a slippery slope to infamy.

“You give too many things three stars,” my brother tells me. I take that to mean “certainly that many things aren’t that good.” I’ve never been able to verbalize what three stars means to me, or what five stars does, for that matter. Then, when I joined blogcritics.org, I came across their scoring system, and I realized that their determinations for star ratings are the same as the ones I’ve been using since I switched from the ten-point scale.

Three stars doesn’t mean something is good; in fact, it means that it’s just barely good enough. Two-and-a-half or three stars means that, if you come across the movie on cable one day, or somebody’s listening to the CD in their car, you should enjoy it. It’s decent. Anything below * * 1/2 isn’t really worth your time. Anything above * * * is recommended. At present, there are 18 movies rated above three stars, and by the time my next two reviews are written, that number will be at 20. Is that too many films rated “above average?” I don’t think so - they were all good enough to recommend. There are no movies ranked at five stars, and I’ll start being more liberal with that. Five stars, after all, doesn’t mean perfection. It just means that it’s a superb film. When the calendar year turns, I’ll change the numbered movie listings into a group according to star rating, taking some of the pressure off of weighing the films against each other.

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I once asked a history professor and pop culture expert where I work if it was really “too soon” for Hollywood to start releasing movies about 9/11. He told me that films like United 93 and World Trade Center “are different, because so many Americans watched the attacks happen in ‘real time,’ in all their harrowing, uncensored intensity. In a way, we’ve already seen the ultimate 9/11 movie - on the day itself. Many Americans may simply feel that a film couldn’t add anything to their own emotional understanding of 9/11 - and that, in fact, a film might actually alter or detract from that understanding. That’s what’s driving the criticism of 9/11 movies…that they threaten to revise the public memory of [the day].” When I settled into my seat to take in World Trade Center, then, I was prepared for a Hollywoodized, less-than-the-truth departure from what really happened five years ago. And, thanks in large part to the efforts of director Oliver Stone, I saw exactly that, and it’s far from what I wanted.

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Though the Barenaked Ladies have garnered the majority of their stateside success on the laurels of their goofy, radio-friendly pop tracks, true fans of the eclectic Canadian rockers know enough to appreciate the quieter songs like “Call and Answer” and “What a Good Boy” while still remaining ever-ready to rock out to “One Week.” The Ladies’ newest effort, Barenaked Ladies Are Me, offers more of those introspective moments, and while most of it is a pleasure for longtime followers, there isn’t enough rock left over to pull the individually decent songs into a cohesive album.

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A moment of silence in remembrance of what happened five years ago right at the moment this is posted. I remember walking into my Physics class and the projector was on, and I had no idea what was being shown on the screen. Naturally, nobody could imagine how much it would change our world. The Internets will be full of rhetoric today about heroism, war, tragedy, and so on. I’m opting to take the blogging day off. I recommend you look around my blogroll and see what some of the finer sites around have to say, if they choose to write something.

Though I am a huge fan of Garden State - it opened my eyes to indie music and reaffirmed my love of Natalie Portman - I can’t really say that I’m excited about Zach Braff’s newest project, The Last Kiss. I’m going to see it, of course…that’s what I do after all…but it’s not necessarily on my list of must-see films.

One Braff project that I’m excited about after catching up on the entire series over the summer is the sixth season of Scrubs. During a Q&A for The Last Kiss, Braff confirmed that David Cross would be appearing as a guest star on Scrubs and, if all legalities are worked out, he’d be doing so as Dr. Tobias Fünke, the character he played on Arrested Development.

Two of my (newest) favorite shows, rolled into one. Of course, if this happens, you know that J.D. will have read The Man Inside Me.

Every morning, as I approach a certain intersection on my way to work, I face a dead end and try to turn left. Unfortunately, there’s always a steady stream of cars coming from the left, most of which end up turning right, leaving me room to turn. But how am I to know this if they don’t use their nice, convenient turn signals? Without them activated, I wind up sitting in non-existent traffic, angering the motorists behind me.

This is not a problem localized to that confusing corner. Everywhere you look, people are making turns without signaling. How hard can it be? Your car is built with more signal lights than ever, the act of signaling is as simple as reaching your hand from its rested position on the window’s ledge to the lever something like 7 inches away. You’re not supposed to be holding your cell phone in your hand, your coffee is nestled in a cup holder near the other hand…how difficult is it? A non-blinker is as annoying as the over-blinking grandma who turned on her signal three miles back for a lane change and hasn’t turned it off yet.

Motorists of the world, please use your turn signal. It’s there for a reason. Until you agree to make use of the shiny, attractive lights on the sides of your car, I’m afraid I’m forced to put you on notice.

A bit of exciting news on the Movie Hawk front: I’ve been brought on as a contributing member of the very large, very diverse staff over at Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics is a destination site for commentary on music, movies, sports, television, politics…you name it, they write about it. And with more than 1,500 writers in the “sinister cabal,” you’re likely to see dozens of new articles each day.

Of course, everything I wind up publishing over at Blogcritics will be seen here as well, but I still encourage you to go visit the site and see some of the other interesting writing going on.

There are no great surprises in the execution of Accepted, the slacker underdog comedy about the education system. The plot is so paint-by-numbers, in fact, that you can telegraph Bartleby Gaines’ (Justin Long) rallying speech in the third act from a mile away. But somewhere along the line, somebody put enough fresh ingredients into the same old formula to make the movie memorable.

Inundated by queries about what he’s doing with his life after high school graduation and bereft of an acceptance letter from any of the half dozen colleges he applied to, Bartleby decides to make up his own school, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, just to get his parents off his back for a while. He has best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) create a website for the fake alma mater, just to make it all seem legitimate, and leases and reoutfits an abandoned mental hospital to get away from the pressure of home life. The plan hits a bump in the road, though, when hundreds of kids from around the country, also rejected from all their collegiate options, find the website and are accepted to the phony school. Along the way dealing with these unwanted freshmen, Bartleby and his friends learn what they really want out of a college education.

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