The Out-of-Focus Guy’s blog

Well, after tonight's game, the New York Yankees have the World Series pretty much locked up.  Amazing what over $200 million of talent can buy you...  To me, the Yankees are emblematic of what is wrong with baseball: It's not a level playing field.  Teams like the Oakland A's, the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates are basically farm teams for the rich teams.  Poorer teams like the Minnesota Twins can sneak into the playoffs (and sometimes the World Series), but they can never win.  The last five years have the following teams as champions: 2009 - New York Yankees (more than likely), 2008 - Philadelphia Phillies, 2007 - Boston Red Sox, 2006 - St. Louis Cardinals, 2005 - Chicago White Sox.  None of these teams are among the bottom of the league in terms of salaries and most are backed by wealthy owners.  The season is over before it begins for most teams.  The Yankees bought one of the best pitchers in baseball (C.C. Sabathia) and one of the best hitters (Mark Teixeira).  They already had an all-star team on the left side of the infield (Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter) and now they have the right mix of veteran players to win the World Series finally after trying to buy it for the last decade.  If they don't win it, another wealthy team will.

Some thoughts on College Football at about the midway point:

• My alma mater, Cal, is having a good season (record-wise), if a bit disappointing.  Our record (5-2) is more reflective of playing weaker opponents at the beginning of the season than true excellence.  Our two losses were blowouts to Oregon and USC, arguably the two best teams in the conference. Our true tests are against teams at about the same level as Cal: Oregon State, Arizona, Stanford and Washington. If we can beat some of these teams, it will be a good season.
• The Pac-10 title will likely go to Oregon.  After laying an egg against Boise State, Oregon has looked especially dominant when Jeremiah Masoli is their quarterback.  When Nate Costa is their quarterback, they are mediocre.  USC is very good, but they look beatable.  I don't believe in Arizona yet.
  
• I don't know who the best team in the country is, but I want to see BCS-buster Cincinnati in the mix.  They look better and better every week.  Florida and Alabama look vulnerable, but Texas seems to be improving its play.
• The Heisman Trophy looks like it might be coming down to Florida QB Tim Tebow or Alabama RB Mark Ingram.  I'm not sold on any of the other candidates.  Ingram might be leading, as people see Tebow stumbling a bit or just tire of his constant media overload.
• I still want a college football playoff, but would like it limited to 4 teams in the beginning.  Right now, I would have Alabama, Florida, Texas and Cincinnati in the mix.  I think if you start there, you can get people excited about expanding the field later.
  

The LeBron James high school documentary, "More Than A Game" was pretty good.  Overall, I would rate it as a B. This film details the high school basketball career of LeBron James and his teammates at Saint Vincent-Saint Mary's High School in Akron, Ohio.  It's similar, in some respects, to "Hoop Dreams", but this film focuses mainly on the players and coaches on the team rather than just the lives of two players.  LeBron is an equal co-star with all of the other players on the team, even though he clearly outshines everyone in talent.  This is also a story about the friendship between the players as well as the relationship between the coach and his son, a guard on the team.  It's interesting to watch the players grow up and I'm glad the story mainly focuses on the basketball and less on the life stories of the players.  Too often, documentaries like these want to portray a "warts-and-all" aspect of the players, which tends to make them less sympathetic.  This movie does not dig too deep, so it doesn't detract from the kids' accomplishments. Because the film incorporates some home movies, some of the cinematography is not great.  I think the director (Kristopher Belman) did a fine job.

Unfortunately, "Couples Retreat"is only a mildly humorous film, where star and co-writer Vince Vaughn gets all of the good lines.  I would rate this movie as a C.  Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman and Faizon Love play four friends who go with their wives to a tropical island for a "Couples Retreat" that is intended to be a therapy session for struggling marriages.  The movie fails to explain why these four men are all friends or even what these people do for a living (save for Vaughn's character, who sells video games).  There are a few laughs here and there, with one scene with a yoga instructor being the highlight of the movie.  Malin Akerman (as Vaughn's wife), Kristen Bell (as Bateman's wife), Kristin Davis (as Favreau's wife) and Kali Hawk as Love's new, much younger girlfriend round out the cast.  The various therapy sessions are somewhat funny, but more laughs could have been milked out of the situations.  Another problem with the movie is that the female characters are thinly drawn and don't do much to contribute to the humor. Former child actor Peter Billingsley (Ralphie Parker in "A Christmas Story") does an adequate job directing, but the script needed a lot more work.  Overall, only a trifle of a film.

Director Michael Moore strikes again.  This time, his target is Wall Street and the whole system of capitalism.  "Capitalism: A Love Story" is not a bad movie, but Moore is a bit scatter shot in his criticism of capitalism.  I would rate it as a B-.  My biggest problem with this movie is that I don't believe that he is correct.  The system of capitalism is not by itself corrupt; the people running the system are corrupt. His thesis seems to state that capitalism needs to be abandoned and that socialism needs to be adopted in its stead.  Fundamentally, I think the biggest problem with capitalism is a lack of business ethics and the idea of fairness in competition.  Moore has some good stories, in particular one about Franklin Roosevelt and the proposed second Bill of Rights. His targets range from the large investment banks to insurance companies to George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan to Christopher Dodd.  As usual, he effectively uses humor to illustrate some inflammatory points.  As a liberal, I agree with the message, even if it isn't always effectively delivered.

"Zombieland" is one of the few horror comedies.  The movie touted as one of the best, "Shaun of the Dead", was okay.  So is "Zombieland".  Overall, I would rate it as a B.  It's fun, the characters are all acceptable, and the directing is fine.  Unfortunately, it never really rises above being just okay.  In this film, a virus has broken out and spread throughout the country, leaving the infected as zombies who want to eat the remaining humans.  Jesse Eisenberg is Columbus (all of the characters are named after their hometowns, so they don't feel badly about having to kill someone they don't know as well), who has developed a list of rules he uses to survive.  The rules are visually shown and it's a lot of fun.  Along the way, he meets Tallahassee (played by Woody Harrelson), a redneck who takes pleasure in killing zombies in creative ways.  The two of them find con artist sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who keep robbing Columbus and Tallahassee throughout the movie. Columbus is a loner by nature, which has helped him to survive.  Naturally, meeting these people will help him get out of his shell and develop a sort of extended family.  There's a cute sequence where they go to Hollywood and meet a celebrity who is one of the few surviving actors.  It could have been a funnier satire than it was. To me, this film was better than "Shaun of the Dead", but it still doesn't become an instant classic.

"The Informant!" is a cute, little movie, but it doesn't register as well as it could have.  I would grade it as a B-.  Matt Damon is good as the compulsive liar turned whistle-blower, but there were some comedic moments that were missed throughout the story.  The story is about Mark Whitacre (played by Damon), an executive at Archer Daniels Midland (an agro-business corporation), who decides to tell FBI agents about a price fixing scheme his company is involved in with all of the major corporations all over the world.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Whitacre is lying about a lot of his accusations, and even more about his role in wrong-doing at his company.  Whitacre is exasperating, especially for the FBI agents played by Scott Bakula and Joel McHale.  When Whitacre gets caught with all his lies, he tries to bring others down around him.  I don't understand why everyone's reaction to Whitacre seemed so muted.  I have never been much of a fan of Steven Soderbergh, as I find much of his work to be technically competent but emotionally uninvolving.  This movie seems to be more of the same.

Not to jinx our football teams in the Bay Area, but so far, so good.  For the college teams, Stanford is 2-1 and Cal is 3-0.  For the pro teams, the 49ers are 2-0 and the Raiders are 1-1.  It's been a desert for the Bay Area for the last five years or so.  Cal has been good during this time, but they seem to fail to reach the next level each time.  When they were #2 in 2007, they were playing Oregon State when the #1 team lost.  Unfortunately, Cal lost that game and went into a slump for the remainder of the season.  Stanford has been down the last five years, but they have improved since Jim Harbaugh was hired as their coach last year.  Meanwhile, the pro teams have been awful for awhile.  The 49ers have beaten their two division rivals (the Cardinals and the Seahawks) to open the season, while the Raiders barely lost to the Chargers and barely beat the Chiefs.  It's been enjoyable so far, but Cal is the only entertaining team in the Bay Area.  The pro teams win ugly (when they win), while Stanford is more grind it out in style (with running back Toby Gerhart).  Cal is great offensively and defensively, with running back Jahvid Best being possibly the best back in the country.  Quarterback Kevin Riley is highly improved over last year.  The special teams are suspicious (especially the poor kickoffs), so that could lead to potential losses for Cal.  Regardless, this has been a good month of September for Bay Area football.

Shane Acker's new animated film, "9", is based on the short film he directed a few years earlier.  Visually, it's a beautiful movie, but the story is a bit confusing.  Overall, it rates as a B.  The film is about rag-doll beings brought to life by a scientist after an apocalyptic conflict between humans and robots, in which the humans are destroyed.  One rag doll, named 9, is just brought to life as the movie begins.  The beginning of the movie deals with 9 trying to discover his purpose in life.  The voice acting is good, with Elijah Wood as 9 and Christopher Plummer as 1 being exceptional.  Also in the cast are John C. Reilly as 5, Jennifer Connelly as 7, Martin Landau as 2, and Crispin Glover as 6.  The story is reminiscent of "The Matrix" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow".  The story was fascinating, but the ending did not seem very special.  Some of the art design was too familiar, like the robots that resembled the squids in the "Matrix" world.  My biggest problem with the story was that the explanation of what happened to make this world was too much like other post-apocalyptic stories.  It's not original, but it's still interesting.

Some various thoughts about the start of College Football this week:

• The punishment of Oregon RB LeGarrette Blount was too harsh.  Blount overreacted to a taunt from Boise State player Byron Hout and sucker-punched him.  If he was given a 6 game suspension, I could understand.  But the whole season?  That would be for committing a crime, like Michael Vick did.  It was clearly wrong, but it was a heat-of-the-moment reaction.
• Oregon, by the way, looked really bad.  I don't think new coach Chip Kelly is working just yet.
• USC looks good, as usual.  They're still the favorite to win the Pac-10 title until they lose.
• Cal looks really good, too.  RB Jahvid Best and QB Kevin Riley played terrific and the defense was pretty good.  But their special teams needs to play better.  Right now, Cal and Oregon State look to be contendors for the Pac-10 title, along with USC.
• As everyone predicted, the favorites for the so-called National Championship are Texas and Florida.  Both teams wiped out their overmatched opponents (Division I-AA teams).  It's a shame that they're allowed to schedule these games and still play for the National Championship.
• Oklahoma will probably still contend for the National Championship, even with their loss to BYU.  The system is set up so early losses to ranked teams don't hurt you in the end as long as everyone loses at least one game.  We'll see how dependent they are on QB Sam Bradford while he's out with his shoulder injury.
• Next week's big game is Ohio State vs. USC.  I suspect it will end the same as last year, when USC killed Ohio State.  This week, USC destroyed San Jose State, while Ohio State barely won over Navy.