Geoffrey H Wood

Michael Sheen image from Tsar Kasim on Flickr.com

Against my proper judgment, I watched a soccer movie. I had recently been wading through a bunch of old episodes of “At The Movies” on TiVo and caught the two critics praising The Damned United as a great sports movie. I was apprehensive, since I have no understanding nor care for soccer, but I went for it anyway since it starred Michael Sheen (pictured above) who I’ve enjoyed in past roles as famous Brits (Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon).

Leeds United jerseyI’m glad I went for it because the film was excellent. It’s a sports-themed movie but the plot is much more about Brian Clough, the man (Sheen’s character), than his sport. Clough was a soccer club manager who built his squad (Derby County) from a low level all the way up to champions of England. A few years later he took over the manager’s slot at his rival club (Leeds United), a dynastic champion, and lasted all of 44 days before being fired. He then went on to coach another underdog squad to the championship of both England and Europe, twice, which is an accomplishment never matched. The movie cites him as "the greatest manager never to manage the England [national] team."

The story is true but seems crazy when you put it in American sports parlance.

As ESPN’s Bill Simmons wrote about the movie:

“It's a famous English soccer saga that means nothing in America, but imagine [New England Patriots coach] Belichick taking over the Colts from Dungy this past summer and then getting fired in Week 6, and you have an idea of how loony this episode was.”

The English soccer system is completely foreign (pun intended) to American sports fans and I had to consult Wikipedia.com a couple times to research the importance of certain events but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment.

The actors are great, the characters interesting, the plot compelling, and story moves well. I watch a lot of movies and a lot of them are junk, however, this one is great. If you’re looking for a great sports movie you’ve never seen – this is probably it.

My personal Twitter stream erupted, yesterday, with references to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody(1) and The Muppets. The Muppets, of course, are known primarily for their broadcast television hits The Muppet Show and Sesame Street from a time before we all had cable and from Fraggle Rock (the HBO show that we would catch whenever we would be at that rare friends house who not only had cable but also pay-movie channels). That, and they also had some sweet movies in 1980s.

However, they've been largely irrelevant to me for the past couple of decades with two notable exceptions: the irreverent and hilarious musical Avenue Q and their appearance in the story-within-the-story(2) Dracula puppet musical in the underrated Jason Segel movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

After the fifth or sixth tweet on the subject, I followed a link to Kt McBratney's blog and was blessed by this new creation from The Muppet Studio:

I'm not sure why they put this together but it's a lot of fun, especially for those of us who remember the original Queen video.

In related news, the aforementioned Jason Segel (who can do no wrong in my eyes) is writing a new Muppet movie: The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made (due out in 2012).

(1)As middle school aged kids at the time of it's release, we didn't necessarily understand Wayne's World but we sure loved that movie and this song. (2)Or more appropriately, the musical-within-the-movie

As previously mentioned, we're doing without satellite for a few months but I've decided that won't stop me from watching the TV. Netflix is a big part of my ability to accomplish this and today nearly-4-month-old Graham and I sat down to watch the 1983 classic technology film: WarGames.

It stars (a pre-Ferris Bueller) Matthew Broderick and (a pre-Breakfast Club) Ally Sheedy as crazy kids who utilize a PC (black screen with green text) and a landline phone handset to call other computers and accidentally stumble into NORAD's missile defense system and trigger events that all but lead to World War III with what was then the Soviet Union.

I'd remember seeing the movie in the early 1990s and thinking the technology looked antiquated then, but, as I write this on the netbook I purchased for a mere couple hundred dollars this year, it's almost comical now. Speaking of comical, at one point my wife walked in and literally though the movie was a comedy (rather than the "action adventure" and "espionage thriller" descriptors assigned to it by Netflix).

As an MBA candidate, I did appreciate the underlying theme of the movie which is really just a long form story playing out game theory. It even ends with the antagonist proving it's learned its lesson by saying "the only winning move is not to play."

Another great MBA lesson from WarGames was an entire scene in the beginning on organizational design theory as the Air Force debates whether it's better for America to allow the officers on the ground (in this movie played by a young John Spencer - known better for his role as Leo McGarry in The West Wing 16 years later) to have the last say in launching Nukes at the Ruskies or if everything should be automated from the Executive level.

As for the boy, he didn't pay much attention, concerning himself more with his exersaucer and his ability to get the toys on it into his mouth. His loss.

Update on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 10:45PM by Geoff Wood

I mentioned that John Spencer was one of the Air Force staffers on-the-ground that had to make the decision to turn the key and launch the nuclear weapons in the opening scene of WarGames. In a completely random coincidence, as I was writing that post I was listening to a podcast from HowStuffWorks.com that brought up WarGames and specifically that scene! However, they didn't mention John, instead they mentioned the other staffer in the scene, who apparently was a very young Michael Madsen.

Declan GiggsI was watching the second season of Showtime's drama "Brotherhood" recently on Netflix and realized the actor Ethan Embry doesn't get enough credit.

He's a cast member in a surprising number of movies in our DVD collection such as "Can't Hardly Wait"(1), "Sweet Home Alabama", and "That Thing You Do!"(2). He's in several movies that should be in my DVD collection but for whatever reason I have never purchased, like "Empire Records" and "National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation".(3)

He's in several others that I loved when I was young, like "Dutch" and "All I Want for Christmas". 

He typically plays the cute kid, or the lovable but slightly flawed outsider, or similar role. However, his role in Brotherhood is certainly not typical. This character, Declan Giggs, is a tattooed, coke-snorting, state police detective that has a hard time sorting out which side of the law he should be on. He's good as "Deco" but it's hard to think that this is the same guy who played the kid in Dutch. My wife, who thinks Ethan Embry is adorable as an actor, walked in the room the other day when an unpleasant scene was playing where Deco was being lectured by a prostitute about the adverse affects of certain street drugs on one's digestive system. She gave me one of those "what are you watching?" looks and was thrown for a loop when I told her the man in the compromising position was her very own Mr. Embry.

I know it's a testimate to an actor's ability to be able to pull off different characters (as opposed to playing the same one or two in every movie, like Ben Stiller) so I'm sure the Deco role is a great one for the actor, however, in scenes like the one above, it's hard to reconcile internally that this was also the last guy to play Rusty Griswold.

 The Griswold Family, surprisinglly, on vacation.

(1) A movie that features a slew of actors who went on to have at the very least a modicum of success in some other film or TV series. (2) An all-time classic, one of my favorites (3) "Right this way, Mr. Pappagiorgio" is one of my favorite, most random movie lines to threw out in conversation. Other contenders are "I'm right on top of that, Rose", and "What do you mean, 'Too High'?"

We put our DirecTV subscription on hiatus for a few months(1) with the move to Iowa and as a result I've been watching most of my TV online this fall. I hooked up an old laptop to the VGA input on the TV, bought a remote keyboard/mouse and now stream, rather than TiVo, from my couch.

Most networks not named or affiliated with CBS participate in Hulu.com, a joint venture to bring programming produced for air to the web. It's a great service, owned jointly by ABC, NBC & FOX (or their parent companies), which has both a wealth of classic programming as well as recent episodes of current shows. Typically, if a showed aired last night, they have it available today. Access to the site is free. The shows have ads integrated in the stream and by co-locating top content all in one place they've made a move to set the market for online broadcast.

However, the streaming can get pretty choppy during peak hours and it doesn't seem like they have the bandwidth to make this a viable alternative to broadcast/cable/satellite - maybe that's their plan. 

One of the tech podcasts that I often listen to is "This Week in Tech" and this week they mentioned that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had recently predicted that in two years, only 50% of their distribution would be by DVD media. Apparently he didn't say how it would be delivered, since they have they now offer some movies and TV shows on BluRay disc as well as through streaming (either through a web browser, through a Netflix set-top box, or through an Xbox).

This caused me to take a closer look at Netflix streaming, which I had really only had occasion to use when I wanted to watch something and had access to a laptop but no DVD player in whatever room I'm in.

The good news is that the streaming quality is great (far superior to Hulu) but part of that may be due to less demand on their bandwidth. The bad news is that finding streamable titles is pretty hit and miss. I have a ton of TV shows loaded into my queue and very few are available to stream. The BBC's "MI-5" and Showtime's "Brotherhood" are both shows that I was interested in and I've had the chance to watch. There are no ads, but I pay for my Netflix subscription. Most shows are not current, or at least not the current season of the show, which makes sense since most shows are probably digitized after they go to DVD (months after the season airs). I did notice that "Heroes", a show currently airing on NBC, is showing episodes from the current season, which is interesting since NBC is own of the co-owners of Hulu.

The afore-linked article by Christopher Null states that he's personally seen the number of online titles in his queue grow from 8% to 20% in the last year and hopefully that means that more are on the way.

(1)Great idea during football season, I assure you.

Flickr image courtesy of autowitch

Update on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 3:51PM by Geoff Wood

As mentioned, I was pretty impressed and enthused that NBC was offering the current season Heroes as stream-able content on Netflix. 

Unfortunately, 6 episodes in they throw this message up: "Some episodes of this series are available only on disc."

The episode in question, "Strange Attractors" is available on Hulu.com, so it's not a complete loss. However, it will be interesting to see if episode 7 will be on Netflix. Thanks to Hulu, DVD box-sets, and TiVo, I no longer tolerate the idea of missing an episode of a TV show mid-season, and this hiccup at Netflix makes me doubt it's ability to become a dependable resource for streaming television.

 

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