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10/11/2006
THE SPORTING LIFE
Atlanta Rollergirls have been playing nothing but local teams for their first
few seasons, but Sunday they put together an all-start team to play a visiting
city for the first time. You can watch Las Vegas’ Sin City Neanderdolls vs.
Atlanta Rollergirls via their web site, since the entire match was filmed by
some folks over at Turner:
www.atlantarollergirls.com
Spoiler alert – read no further if you want to watch the match and don’t want to
know the results!
The Neanderdolls impressed me from the moment they skated onto the rink for
their introduction – they’re big girls, and not just big-boned. Some of our
biggest girls were out due to injuries or not participating in the match for
other reasons, so I worried that size might be a factor.
By the end of the first period, my fears were justified, and then some.
Despite their size, the Neaderdolls were nimble on the course. They also played
well as a team, setting up a defense that shut down ARG. We were already 20
points down at first intermission, despite the Neaderdolls griping about the job
the refs were doing. By the end of the game they had skated right over the local
ladies, trouncing them by some 50 or 60 points.
It was educational seeing what a team from another town could do with the sport
and if I’m ever in Vegas again I’ll have to catch a match on their home rink.
FILM FLAM
A couple of degenerates and myself caught Martin Scorsese's latest, The
Departed, on Tuesday.
*Not good.*
I wondered if it was a bad omen that there was overuse of lighting effects right
off the bat. Jack Nicholson spends a full minute chatting away with his face
obscured in shadow. But eventually he leans into the light and about 5 minutes
of movie later, the opening credits roll - another omen.
This is going to be a long, heavy-handed affair.
Sure, it's packed full of male stars, but honestly it could do with one or two
LESS. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg play essentially the same over-the-top
character (heck, Jack Nicholson is pretty similar as well.) The lone female
character feels like an afterthought, "Wait, we need a chick.
How about one that gets entangled in both major characters, yet does not
interfere with the plot we've got going?"
Half the film feels like it's on the brink of satire of the entire cops and
gangsters genre. And holy crap is it long! 151 minutes, but it feels like half
the night goes by before you're released from the theater, exhausted - and not
in a good way.
"Rated R for strong brutal violence, pervasive language, some strong sexual
content and drug material." Strong, brutal violence indeed. I've seen fewer
fountains of blood in a Rob Zombie flick. By the end of the film pretty much
everyone has been shot, many of them multiple times.
But neither the excessive length or excessive violence bothered me nearly as
much as the gratuitous cinematography. If it were any heavier handed old Marty
couldn't lift his arms off the floor. It feels like one of his lectures on film
brought to life, "Here you can see where the use of shadow and the steam rising
from the streets conceals the actor, symbolizing the character's concealment of
his identity." It's like one long montage homage to noir without enough light to
make the dark seem dark in contrast. At the end of the story, all about rats
within the police and rats within the mafia, Marty even has the gall to focus on
an actual rat crawling along as the final shot before the credits roll. "Holy
cow, you have GOT to be kidding me!" I thought.
Degenerate DAC said, "Well I loved it! I'm sick of subtle movies." It should be
noted he has skipped the drive in the last few weeks when we saw Jackass
2 and School for Scoundrels. I don’t know what subtle films he has been seeing,
but I'm sure The Departed has sledgehammered those memories away.
If you need 151 minutes (that feels more like 3 hours) of sheer testosterone,
check it out.
BLASPHEMY
I had to skip the end of blaspemy because it was depressing the hell out of me,
but then, luckily, I caught the
www.ihavefeltballs.com bit. I love it!
Thanks for sharing it.
degenerate BH
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