Kiss on My List

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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On Notice: Brandon Hilgedick

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.

An Explanation of the Five-Star Scale

“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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Not Too Soon, Just Too Much

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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Overly ‘Easy’ Listening

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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