Shallow | Center

About Face

Faced with 12 tough games over the last couple of weeks, the Phillies are taking solace in their 7-5 performance and seeing it as a harbinger of good things to come. They're feeling good about returning to Philadelphia, where they open a 13-game homestand tonight against the Giants and where they'll play 35 of their next 48.

Never mind that the Phils are playing just .500 baseball at Citizens Bank Park this season. Never mind that seven wins in 12 tries is hardly awe-inspiring. Never mind that for all of that "success," they're still in last place, albeit just 4-1/2 games out.

Hell, even the usually clear-eyed Bill Conlin all but gushes today, noting that the Phillies are within striking of distance of first in a competitive but weak division:

Still last, yes, but they are back in the wind shadow of the East Division, in a position where even a modest move by them and further faltering by the Marlins and Braves could put their hot breaths close to the most treasured symbol in regular-season typography: the precious long dash under the letters GB. ...

It is turning into a fascinating mix, and right now it would be a mistake to write these Phillies all the way off. All they have to do to win 90 games now is go 66-45.

I'd like to get excited -- I really would. But it just feels as if we've been down this road before, last year and the year before that. It's going to take more than just two weeks of just-over-.500 baseball to make me a true believer.

Destruction Manuel

The Phillies' latest must-win series begins tonight in Atlanta. The reason that that sentence, and others like it, have been written every few weeks for the last three seasons is that the Phils have proven themselves incapable of stringing together any semblance of sustained success. Even four or five wins in a row would be a stretch for these guys. Having taken four of six from a couple of first-place teams last week, they looked poised to make some kind of run, until tripping up, as usual, in Florida earlier this week. And so they grimly declare, again, that they're confident of putting it all together, playing to their potential, and rising to a place among the contenders. And it just never happens.

Todd Zolecki sits today with Charlie Manuel, who at least says all the right things about wanting to win and understanding why fans are upset. Manual, of course, has been barbecued by Phillies City-State almost since Opening Day. Larry Bowa, a walking disaster of a manager, at least knew what the deluge of losing has meant to Phillies fans over the decades; it's one reason he remained so popular even while making a mess of his own clubhouse. Manuel, and Ed Wade and David Montgomery, for that matter, preach patience, not realizing that after more than 120 years of competition, if you can call it that, and just one championship, we are less inclined to wait out the bad times than other teams' fans might be.

Tom Goodman sums it up perfectly (and eloquently) in Swing and a Miss:

Had Manuel come to the Phillies after a series of successful seasons by the club no doubt he would have been granted a little more leeway in his inaugural season, but chronic underachieving precluded such a luxury. In the minds of nearly everyone, the ever-dimming future is now for this particular collection of Phillies.

Bingo.

Pop the Rourke

Numbed by two hours of the most graphic on-screen violence I'd seen in years, I wobbled out of the theater after last night's showing of Sin City trying to determine whether I liked the movie. The last time I recall experiencing such film-related ambivalence was after the similarly in-your-face, over-the-top gore of Natural Born Killers. But whereas NBK was Oliver Stone's smarmy attempt to say something important about the convergence of death, celebrity, and the media in contemporary culture, City plays things straight. Adapted by Robert Rodriguez from graphic novels by Frank Miller, the movie offers overlapping storylines about the cops, thugs, hookers, and corrupt politicians who hang around the fringes of Basin City. These are men steeped in misogyny and misanthropy and occasional rough-hewn heroism, and women of uncommon rage, tough broads who give as good as they get. And they all take it out on each other. Hence, well, the nonstop violence.

Tecnically, Sin City is breathtaking. Just about all of the action takes place at night, and the film is shot in black and white, with only the occasional facet of color bursting through from among all of the grays. All of the backgrounds were added digitally after the actors were filmed. The dialogue is hard-boiled pulp all the way, but cell phones show up among the tail-finned convertibles, giving the movie a kind of unsettling timeless quality. An interesting and diverse cast -- Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Michael Madsen, Rosario Dawson, Nick Stahl, Josh Hartnett, Alexis Bledel, and a very, very hot Carla Gugino are among the familiar faces -- wink their way through the picture, but it's an unlikely and fun turn by Mickey Rourke, as the scarred anti-hero Marv, that steals the movie. Sometimes, apparently, you really do just gotta roll the potato.

There's a reason so much of the violence -- hacked limbs, castration, grisly shootings -- seems comic; the source material, after all, is comics. But it's not Coyote-and-Roadrunner comic. It's so graphic, so overwhelming, so all-consuming, that it threatens to drown out whatever point Miller is trying to make about redemption and perseverance. Sin City is a fun movie to watch, but ultimately it doesn't have much to say. I wish there had been some substance to go with its considerable style.

Rating: *** (of 5)

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin' ...

The blogroll at left has been updated with new links. These include blogs from a pair of friends, Bill Avington's It Moves Me! and Jeff Martin's Minutiae, and three new Phils additions, Midway Phillies, by a Chicgo-area fan; the 700 Level, by a boobird known only as Enrico; and the Crossbow Project, by Tim from Boothwyn, Pa.

Peter Handrinos posts thoughtful essays on the state of the game at the United States of Baseball.

Locally, I've linked to Inky writer Dan Rubin's Blinq and and DN scribe Will Bunch's Attytood; Philadelphia novelist and former Inquirer staffer Jennifer Weiner's SnarkSpot; A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, by a gaggle of folks including Weiner's husband, Adam Bonin; and possibly the blogosphere's best-titled effort, Good Grief! Does this blog make my butt look big?, by a Lancaster County transplant named Becky.

Chances are I'll be tweaking the design at some point, so do check back and, as always, let me know what you think.

No Mo

Just when you thought it was safe to start rooting for the Phillies again ... .

South Florida has been the team's Waterloo over the past few seasons, and the current series against the Marlins is proving to be no different; once again the Phils are staging their own revival of Miami Vice. There's no shame in losing to Dontrelle Willis, as they did Monday, but last night's bullpen disaster is inexcusable. The Phils have skidded to 7-1/2 games back, and have been bumped off of talk radio and the sports pages by the equally dysfunctional 76ers, who can't go a lunar cycle without changing coaches. The momentum generated by good series against the Cardinals and Orioles has dissipated, leaving in its place the usual head-scratching about what's gone wrong and the usual marginal personnel moves, this time the demotion and eventual release of Terry Adams, meaning the Phillies now have the honor of dumping Adams twice. Somebody call Crockett and Tubbs.

Blinq and You'll Miss It

Last Sunday, Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett announced that the paper's movie writers would begin reviewing talkies, that its sportswriters would begin covering games played at night, and that its TV writers would begin publishing pieces about shows filmed in color. "As these media evolve, so must our coverage," Bennett wrote. "Inquirer readers need to know about their 21st century world as it changes around them; our responsibility is to explain those changes."

Ah, just kidding. What Bennett did say last Sunday was that her paper, finally, would begin paying more attention to the blogosphere, by assigning longtime reporter Dan Rubin to launch the Inky's first true, Blinq. Bennett claimed that the Q&As with the paper's beat writers represent an entry into the blogosphere, but I think that's stretching it. Similarly, the gossip-watching Spilled Inq is less true blog than a hastily compiled aggregation of headlines. In other words, it's high time the Inquirer came on board. (The Daily News has been in the blogosphere for a while now with Will Bunch's Attytood. Nice to see the DN keep that chip on its shoulder as it jumps into the online world.) Bennett wrote:

Blinq will be a one-stop shopping place for bloggers to meet up. A place for both experienced and novice bloggers to find each other. A quick way for all readers to learn what other readers are talking to each other about every day in cyberspace. Dan will be working online every day and writing as often as possible in The Inquirer.

I think of it as taking the newspaper three-dimensional.

Bennett proceeded to huff and puff about fact-checking and sources and other journalistic stuff, and about the Inky's longstanding mission to inform and entertain, and anybody under the age of 30 then immediately fell asleep in their bowls of Frosted Flakes. As for Blinq, Rubin is off to a nice start, with a cleanly designed site and a healthy collection of posts on a variety of topics. More significantly, he's doing a lot of linking to local bloggers -- it's great to see the paper pay attention to the talent in its own backyard. Here's hoping he and the Inquirer keep up the good work.

A New Hope?

Two of three from the Cardinals and now two of three from the Orioles, and suddenly the flesh and blood Phillies resemble the on-paper Phillies over whom we have salivated for the last three seasons. What to make of the newfound spark? Each of the city dailies sent a columnist to Camden Yards yesterday to find out. The Daily News's John Smallwood see similarities between the expensive Phils and the high-priced O's, and says the hometown nine should look beyond the more-pervasive-than-usual booing raining down on them at Citizens Bank Park in recent weeks:

As crazy as it seems after last week's hissing match, it's not too late for the Phillies to win back their fans.

There were 41,614 at Camden Yards yesterday and judging by the number of fans applauding as Cory Lidle struck out Jay Gibbons to net the complete-game victory, a good percentage of them had come to cheer the Phillies.

Despite their anger, Phillies fans want to believe. All the Phillies have to do is give them some hope to ride with.

The Inquirer's Phil Sheridan notes the Phils are midway through a critical 12-game stretch whose outcome could decide the season:

A baseball team's psyche is a mysterious and fragile thing, as prone to change as the wind and nearly as difficult to see. The Phillies looked like sleepwalkers for the first month or so of the season. They seemed to wake up during their last homestand. They haven't put together any sustained winning streaks, but they finally look like a competitive team. ...

Their poor start left the Phillies with a decidedly uphill climb back to respectability. It's impossible to get excited about one good week of baseball, especially when it includes stinkeroos like Saturday's 7-0 loss to the O's. The Phillies are going to have to chip away, at the teams ahead of them and at the perception they are underachievers, by showing some consistency.

We've been teased before, so I'm not getting my hopes up. Optimism is hard to locate when you're still three games below .500 and chained in the cellar, regardless of recent success. This group has a history of adding up to something less than the sum of its parts, so until they give me really compelling reasons to think otherwise, I'll continue to watch and enjoy, but from a bit of a distance. Sure, that's it. I'm sure that if they get within sniffing distance of first, I won't go all in again ... .

Sith for Brains

The dialogue is still laughably awkward, tumbling painfully out of the characters' mouths and clanging throughout the theater.

The direction is still amateurish, as if it were a neophyte, unsure of his influences, at the helm instead of one of Hollywood's wealthiest and most veteran filmmakers.

The actors still, for the most part, slouch uneasily through each scene, as if even they can't believe they're being made to regurgitate such cliched dreck.

And yet, it all works. Finally, after a pair of plodding, tiresome Star Wars prequels, George Lucas puts it all together and delivers a deeply satisfying piece of entertainment with Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith. It's hardly great moviemaking, but, then again, it really didn't need to be. With three films set chronologically after Episode III, there aren't any surprises left to reveal. So you're there for two things -- the spectacle and Anakin's transformation to Darth Vader.

Lucas delivers the goods, mostly, on both counts. It probably goes without saying that Episode III is visually dazzling. Soaring cityscapes take your breath away; a diversity of foreign planets are rendered so well they seem like real places; and the CGI aliens are animated seamlessly. Yoda seems more lifelike than some of the human actors, though that may be damning with faint praise.

As for the plot, ignore the heavyhanded political overtones and the painfully unnatural interaction between Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman). (You wonder how Lucas ever dated, let alone married, if that's how he talked while making the scene.) Watching Anakin be manipulated into making a choice that has tragic consequences is a fascinating fulfillment of nearly 30 years of pop culture history. We finally see the critical how to go with the awful what. Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi makes a valient but doomed attempt to save his friend, and you feel his heartbreak as he realizes his failure. Lucas finally turns McGregor loose -- something he should have done in the first two movies -- and he delivers an ebullient, dynamic, and vitally necessary performance that gives Episode III its heart and soul.

And so the circle is complete, and as you watch Lucas sketch in the final details in his historic achievement, you feel a touch of sadness while reveling in the entertainment. For this is surely not to be repeated, right? The most recent successful film series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter movies, all have well regarded and beloved books as their source material. It seems unlikely that any original films will develop into the phenomenon that Star Wars became. Then again, absolutely no one foresaw the Lucas legacy, so who knows?

Rating: ***1/2 (of five)

Best Brett

Just when you're ready to write off the Phillies and scale back your emotional investment, they go and do something that makes you reconsider. Like, for example, following up an uninspiring split with the dreadful Reds by taking two of three from the National League's best team, the Cardinals.

On a postcard-perfect day at Citizens Bank Park, the Phils bled St. Louis dry with paper cuts, scoring single runs in every inning except the fifth to secure a 7-4 win. Brett Myers again was really, really solid, going seven strong innings and fanning nine. Ryan Madson was perfect in the eighth, and Billy Wagner gave up a meaningless run in the ninth before nailing it down. Bobby Abreu drew three walks and had another hit, Pat Burrell had three hits, and Chase Utley collected a pair -- play the kid more, Charlie! Even the much-maligned (and deservedly so) Jose Offerman tagged a pinch-hit homer to right in the seventh. As for super-genius Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, he inexplicably allowed starter Jason Marquis to hit in the top of the fifth, then tapped his bullpen to start the bottom of the inning.

Yesterday's crowd, a shade under 39,000, soaked up the game with leisurely interest. When they play like this, the Phillies actually look like a real baseball team, but I sensed a wariness in everyone, as if we were afraid to see this as a sign that they might finally be turning things around. Rather, we seemed merely to enjoy a nicely played win on a sparkling spring day. Dare we hope for something more?

I Scream "Clone!"

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. After the three-ring circus that resulted when my brother-in-law and I tried to secure a copy of Attack of the Clones last night so that we could be properly prepared for Revenge of the Sith tonight, I ended up falling asleep during the latter half of the movie. It was a combination, I think, of the late hour and the rampant mediocrity of the film. George Lucas is a big-picture guy; he should leave the details -- things like plot points and dialogue -- to people who actually know how to write. There's a reason why The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi felt like real movies wrapped around technological marvels, while The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones play like Saturday-morning cartoons, and not in a good way. Anyway, at some point I'll try to squeeze in that last half-hour so when I get home from work. For now, then:

Grade: Incomplete