Endnotes and digressions from
the latest show:
* For people not familiar with what Eagles fans do when there’s snow, here’s just
one recent scene from the Linc.
* Vic mentions Eddie Murphy’s fantastic bit on how Italian guys act after seeing Rocky in the theater. It is fall-over funny. It is also
entirely nsfw.
* I can’t believe I remembered that Dolph Lundgren’s degree was in chemical engineering. He’s got the
most improbable biography of any action hero, ever.
* Sonny mentions Matt Zoller Seitz’s book on Oliver Stone—it’s called
The Oliver Stone Experience.
* If you can find a better monologue in a sports movie than Al Pacino’s locker room speech in Any Given Sunday, I’d like to see it. It’s amazing, and moving, and most of all, true. Life really is a game of inches.
And the inches we need are everywhere around us.
* Sonny mentioned Dodgeball, which is a minor classic. And it may contain the greatest performance of Jason Bateman’s career.
“Cotton!”
* The problem with doing an episode about sports movies is that audience reaction generally boils down to, “Hey! You never mentioned my favorite movie! This blows!” And there’s pretty much no way to avoid that except if we spent the show reading a list of every sports movie ever made. Which wouldn’t be a ton of fun for either of us.
So going into this sort of exercise, you have to make your peace with the idea that there are going to be omissions. I don’t know about you, but I’m generally fine with us not having talked about The Bad News Bears or Pride of the Yankees or Kingpin.
The one movie I feel genuinely guilty about not mentioning at all is Chariots of Fire. The reasons I feel guilty are that: (a) It’s a running movie, which puts it squarely within my wheelhouse. (b) As a kid, I loved the main theme song. I think it was the first piece of sheet music I ever bought. And (c) My buddy Meir Soloveichik wrote a
fantastic piece about the film last summer during the Olympics.
Check that: There are two movies I feel guilty about not including. The other is The Rookie, the movie about old guy rookie pitcher Jim Morris. I love the movie almost as much as
I love the book, which was co-written by another buddy of mine, the great Joel Engel.
* As always, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play.
And you should go give us a five-star rating. It’ll help Vic with status when he goes inside.
