Stephen Drew just flew out to J.D Drew.

Boston may be winning the title's, but L.A will always hold the broadcasting trump card.

1 Beckett vs Haren in that one.

2 Bob is probably looking as many different ways to use bulldog for the first game of CWS so I'll answer this question myself. Assuming that the Angels did not play the Nationals at RFK, the last time the Angels played in DC was August 15, 1971 when they completed their last 3 game set against the Senators. The Angels won in 10l, as they scored a run in the 9th to tie and then another in the 10th to win, 5-4.

http://tinyurl.com/5evvxr

Dave LaRoche pitched for the Angels that day. Sandy Alomar and Ken Berry was also in the Angels lineup.

I have yet to see Titanic as well, but I don't know if that is as grievous an offense.

Giant is bloated.

I remember checking my watch as the ship hits the iceberg and thinking to myself, I wonder how they are going to fill the remaining hours left of this movie. Apparently you can never have enough Leo.

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It's no longer an "interesting" game for Felix Hernandez but with his at bat it shall always remain interesting literally.

http://tinyurl.com/5e9t6d

To me it's just...confusing...

The first one was filled with all the introductions and the last one, well it has to wrap everything up plus there wasn't a lot in the last book anyway.

If the battle with Shelob had been in the second film (as it is in the book), it might be no contest.

but of course I'm no Wikipedia so your rules may vary. I would say some of those films would qualify as either quasi-Westerns, neo-Westerns, or at least with some Western elements. But I don't think of Bonnie and Clyde, frinstance, as a Western; it's a Gangster picture, really. The Last Picture Show is a wonderful film, an elegy to dying towns, a coming of age drama, but not a Western.

Even though Giant was bloated I liked it.

Lowe is a veteran in the last year of his contract and according to reports was not told about the change in his schedule until after he done work he usually does the day before.

And last year, I believe he got out of his routine when Grady used him as a reliever against the Mets.

1. Shane
2. Red River
3. Tombstone
4. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
5. The Wild Bunch

Honorable mention: 3:10 to Yuma (the new one), Open Range, Dances with Wolves

If Hud actually does count then it would probably be #1, but it doesn't really seem like a western to me.

Westerns I thought were overrated:
High Noon
Stagecoach
Unforgiven (good but not great)

I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but I believe I at least covered all the one's I've seen that were mentioned in the last thread.

Will Chan Ho Park win Comeback Player of the Year Award?
How does the current Dodgers youth movement compare ...
How would you rate the Dodgers' starting rotation?
With all the attention given to Clayton Kershaw, how has someone with much less fanfare like Cory Wade ...
With two starters on the disabled list, why isn't Hong-Chih Kuo in the rotation?

http://tinyurl.com/4grltb

With Star Wars, my feeling (then and now) was that Lucas did a good job with the first movie, giving it its own (Western-style) story arc, with set up and payoff. He didn't know how successful it was going to be, and it wouldn't have been as successful without the payoff. Once he got around to Empire, he could do whatever he wanted, and so Empire and Jedi are really just two parts of a single idea. Empire didn't really end - it just left us hanging. Seems to me there's about 1 movie worth of stuff in those two combined, but Lucas knew he could stretch it out and add an hour of Forest Muppets and laugh all the way to the bank.

The Prequels were awful. Really an insult to millions of fans - especially Phantom Menace.

>> Having just been signed by the Dodgers, Jerome Williams decided to give the Armada one last effort. <<

http://www.presstelegram.com/sports/ci_9669569

Kevin Youkilis took a ball off his right eye on a ball in the dirt in between innings and had to be removed from the game. It was black and blue immediately and his eye was almost completely shut. Bad.

In one supreme starburst of energy, commitment, and focus, Peckinpah captures the decidedly dark, dark heart of 1968-1969 in a genre picture. Raw, chaotic, and brutal, but also shot through with romantic fatalism, this is not only to my mind the greatest Western of all time, but also one of the two or three greatest American films, period.

2) Once Upon a Time in the West

The yin to Peckinpah's Wild Bunch yang, this is a profoundly langorous and poetic statement from a maestro filmmaker who had never even spent any time in the West. Absolutely impossible to describe, it boasts some of the finest casting in the history of the genre a for-the-ages soundtrack -- it doesn't look like any other Leone movie ever made -- hell, it doesn't look like any other movie ever made

Wow! John Wayne vs. Montgomery Clift in what is quite possibly the greatest of all classical Westerns! (I have always preferred it to the John Ford films, with the possible exception of Stagecoach.) John Wayne plays as unsympathetic a bastard as he plays in The Searchers (thank goodness John Wayne was generally a Good Guy, because grungier roles like these suggest that he would have been a truly terrifying Bad Guy.) His antagonist is Montgomery Clift, in his audacious and ultracool screen debut -- it's like the Old Guard of Hollywood Acting is meeting the New Guard (with the conflict deeply rooted in the film's story as well) and is certainly one of the great matchups in the history of Hollywood movies. Clift really holds his own against the icon, Wayne – and the result is pretty much a masterpiece. The script is jaw-droppingly quotable, with one classic sequence after another (watch closely as Coleen Gray almost manages to steal the whole show in her three minutes of screen time at the beginning of the movie); the B&W cinematography is unbelievably lustrous and beautiful; and the sparks that fly between Clift and Wayne need to be seen to be believed. There is a good reason that this was in fact the Last Picture Show.

4) McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Some people think it's the worst Western ever made, many people think it's one of the very greatest American films of all, but I don't think anybody who has seen McCabe & Mrs. Miller has really ever forgotten it. Robert Altman's singular masterpiece is truly like no other movie you have ever seen. It's a passionate, timeless reverie about what the West was like precisely at the moment that it was becoming civilization as we know it – it occupies an exalted, unique crossroads position in America's history (and in film history). As a dense, elliptical, hard-to-hear work of frontier poetry that nonetheless tells a deceptively straightforward story, it is unparalleled. Every element of the production works toward a common goal, and it is all of a piece. Even catching a chopped-up, censored, pan-and-scan version of it on television as a teenager, I knew immediately that this film was something special – something pulled deeply from the troubled, mystical, mythical subconscious of the American experience for all of those who have chosen to go west to make our fortune.

Altman was on a tremendous roll between 1970 and 1975, cranking out no fewer than eight fascinating films from M*A*S*H to Nashville in that short span of time – a run that represents an amazing gambler's winning streak in American movies. McCabe & Mrs. Miller may well be the best of these great works. The early 1970's were indisputably one of the golden ages of American cinema, and you would be hard-pressed to find too many more films from that bygone era that are more perfectly conceived and executed than this one.

I am generally shaded several degrees cooler towards Ford's work than Howard Hawks's, for example. I'm no particular fan of the much-beloved Searchers, for examples -- not so much because of the cloudy, ambiguous racial attitudes, but rather because I find so much of the film clumsy and ham-fisted.

I do think that Stagecoach, however, is one of the all-time greats -- a genre picture that clicks right into place at every turn. I can see why Welles (claimed to have) watched it 40 times while prepping Citizen Kane. The push-in to John Wayne as he wields his rifle and stops the stagecoach is one of my all-time favority movie intros -- right up there with the aforementioned Welles's snap-CU as Harry Lime when Joseph Cotten yells at him outside Alida Valle's apartment in The Third Man.

5) Ride the High Country (TIE)

I know, another Peckinpah. But while The Wild Bunch is assuredly the First Great Modern Western, this small flick might have been the last of the Great Classic Westerns. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea may give the best performances of their careers as two aging former gunslingers trekking a cash payload across the Sierras, and the whole thing comes across as achingly poignant. Really great stuff.

Honorable Mention: Shane (of course), Winchester '73, GBU and also For A Few Dollars More, Unforgiven, Man of the West, The Tall T -- heck, any of those Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann classics from the 1950s. How about Johnny Guitar?

So many riches -- an endless adaptable genre.

(Sorry about the long posts.)

At the height of their powers, it's a five-man gang. Beatty, Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons.

(They almost manage to recruit Evans Evans and a young Gene Wilder, to boot.)

http://www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/

1) Mind-bending New Hollywood Us vs. Them movie that helped to bring down the Old Guard.

2) Floodgate-opener to new forms of violent expression in cinema.

3) Radically original flick embraced by the burgeoning youth culture as emblematic of their lives.

4) Revisionist gangster flick.

Peckinpah was born in Fresno. And today is going well for the good people of Fresno.

The star of "Ride the High Country" is South Pasadena's most famous native son, Joel McCrea.

At University and Shattuck?

The old Stanford Theater, no? They had terrific programming.

(I'm spoiled, since I live in LA, and there's lots of options for old-school movie geeks here. Nothing like seeing a classic [or even a disreputable classic] in a theater. Ah, film!)

skyblue your Westerns list rocks, but of course I'd say that because we share at least three films on our top list.

I am of course rooting against the DBacks, and yet finding it hard to root for a Boston team these days. So I may just turn the channel, to save myself any further psychological distress.

Funny, I never quite made a connection between Hawks and Anderson. But now that you've mentioned it, it makes a lot of sense. The latter's most immediately identifiable movie is, I think, Boogie Nights -- which, intriguingly, does feel like it owes something to Hawks (despite the subject matter, and despite the obvious debt to Altman and Scorsese).

Very cool! (Though I'll be more impressed when Mr. Anderson is able to come up with such a staggeringly cool body of work in all those different genres as Mr. Hawks -- "The Big Sleep," "Red River," "Bringing up Baby," "His Girl Friday," "The Thing (from Another World)," "His Girl Friday," "Scarface" -- these are all just about the tiptop points of their respective genres.)

Good stuff!

Ah, Beat the Devil. One wacked-out minor classic, for sure.

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In some ways, I used to think of John Sayles as a Hawks progeny, in the number of genres he's jumped around in, and in his love of talky scripts. But maybe that's stretching it.

http://6-4-2.blogspot.com/2007/02/ot-reconsidering-star-wars.html

One and the same. :-) Are there any ex-Giants still out there that Ned hasn't signed yet? Oh wait, there is one guy. And he's been known to hit a homer or two so Ned may be closing in on him.

Kirk Reuter?

They're gonna paint their wagon,
gonna paint it good,
they ain't braggin',
they're gonna coat the wood.

Ah, here comes Lee Marvin, he's always drunk and violent!

My definition of a Western is a movie like Stagecoach. . . one with a strong-willed self-reliant protagonist that seeks redemption by battling authority/the elements/bad guys and in the process tests ideals/principles on the rocks of reality. But that's probably way too general. I mean, by that def, Bladerunner could be a western. Maybe that's why I like it so much. Maybe it is all that stuff set against the frontier (traditionally american).

Another couple to remember, Tumbleweeds and Bend of the River. I love westerns and really enjoyed everyones thoughts and comments.

I've seen it -- I've even seen the "full" UCLA version, which was drawn from Martin Scorsese's personal print for the deleted sequences. By now I hope they've found the whole thing!

It's marvelous. I love the chemistry between Wayne and Kirk Douglas -- though they were said to be at complete odds politically, they really liked each other personally and made maybe four or five movies together because they enjoyed each other's personality!

I thought that was super-cool when I first heard it...Granted, The War Wagon, for example, is no masterpiece, but they have such an obvious and easygoing screen camaraderie that you forgive lots of things. (None of those movies is as good as The Big Sky, though. Blame -- or credit -- Hawks. :-))

I'm so glad Kirk is still around and kicking. I can't think of too many actors of his generation who are still around (Out of the Past was 60 years ago, for pete's sake!) Stroke or not, he rocks.