From the Rental Vault: Cops and Robbers

By 1986, the "bickering buddy cop" movie had worn thin and was well into being an overused trope, headed towards the land of the tired cliché. But that didn't stop them from being produced, so Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal teamed up as Chicago police detectives who want to try to solve one last case before retiring to a life of ease and safety in Running Scared.

The pair are naturally unorthodox in their methods and skirt the letter of the law on a regular basis, providing heartburn for their captain and fodder for lawsuits. Hines is an unattached bachelor with a not-very-serious relationship with a woman who has a wealthy boyfriend, and Crystal is officially divorced but still attached to his ex-wife -- who now plans to marry a dentist. When they arrest up-and-coming drug dealer and kingpin wannabe Jimmy Smits, they almost get killed because of sloppy decisions and their captain enforces a vacation on them. Their sojourn in Key West convinces them to put in for retirement and buy a bar on the islands as soon as their final 30 days are up, but Smits was released and they vow to return him to jail before leaving for good. Unsurprisingly, it's not that simple.

The highlight of the movie is the Hines-Crystal relationship; they light up the screen whether kvetching, arresting, chasing or shooting the bull with each other. Other than an el-track car chase, the action pieces are so-so and probably do more to make a viewer wish they would end so we could get back to the snappy patter of the two leads. None of the other roles matter all that much except for Dan Hedaya as the pair's beleaguered captain; Joe Pantoliano's screen time is too brief and none of the women do much more than decorate the scenes they're in. That, plus about a half-hour too much of movie, make Running Scared an amusing nostalgia piece that can offer a lot of fodder for YouTube clips but isn't worth enduring much more than once. 

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Fiercely independent crews of master thieves need to lay low from their respective home bases after pulling large-scale jobs. So Hong Kong jewel thief Chen and his crew, along with South Korean safecracker and con man Popie and his crew, will join with master thief Macao Park to rob a multimilion-dollar-value diamond from the mistress of top Chinese gangster Wei Hong in 2012's South Korean heist film The Thieves.

The job will be tough enough in one of the city of Macau's highest-security casinos, but complicating the caper are some murky interpersonal relationships on the two teams and Macao Park's history with Popie. Since everyone involved is by definition a criminal, the trust level between the two teams is not high, and neither is either team's trust in Macao Park. As it turns out, several players have their own separate agendas that could put them all in Wei Hong's crosshairs as well as draw attention from the police.

The theft itself is about three-fifths of the way through the movie, offering plenty of time to watch the meticulous planning and the gamesmanship of the post-caper maneuvering. The large cast -- there are close to a dozen major players -- means there's not a lot of time to flesh out our characters, but director and co-writer Choi Dong-hoon uses flashbacks and brief onscreen interactions to establish as much about them as his story needs us to know.

The Thieves is some excellent escapist fun with a surprising amount of depth in its story as the drama plays out. It's one of the top box-office movies in South Korean history and while it doesn't do quite as well on a small screen as it probably did in theaters, it's definitely worth the look.

Bag O' Anything

-- A scientist reports on his work for a paper that suggests a whole lot of nutrition research has had problems and may need to be re-thought. That made today's French fries at lunch taste that much better and I feel a whole lot less guilty about the sausage egg biscuit for breakfast a couple of days ago.

-- The "coldest place in the universe" is apparently the "Boomerang Nebula," a pre-planetary nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth. Pre-planetary nebulae, of course, are stars at the end of their life cycle but are not gaseous clouds about ready to become planets. Sometimes science's descriptive capabilities could use a little tune-up. The Boomerang is actually colder than the look given the project's lead researcher when he forgot his anniversary; something heretofore believed scientifically impossible.

-- If you are a male toadfish, you have problems attracting the ladies. Not because you are ugly -- after all, you're trying to land a female toadfish, who is herself no great easiness on the eyes. But because your particular brand of booty call -- a "bellowing, foghorn-like" one, to be precise -- may be blocked by your toadfish bro's series of short grunts design to reduce your appeal. Which just goes to show you that while pimpin' may not be easy, being a toadfish is even tougher.

-- ...photons and electrons, living together...mass hysteria!

bellowing, foghorn-like call

bellowing, foghorn-like call

bellowing, foghorn-like call

bellowing, foghorn-like call

bellowing, foghorn-like call

History? What History?

Actor Sean Penn, speaking last night with Piers Morgan and seen by what must be at least tens of people, suggested that some of the folks in the United States Congress are a bit short-handed on the reality cruise and need some professional help.

Penn suggested that these people -- who seem, incredibly, to be only those who disagree with his own political opinions -- should perhaps be committed involuntarily to a mental health facility by executive order.

By so doing, Penn offers substantial evidence for those who would like to claim he is an utter fool (line forms to the right. Please, no shoving; we're experiencing the usual heavy demand at this time and your claim will be heard in the order it was received). Government-sponsored psychiatric imprisonment was a feature of the old Soviet regime that was criticized even by governments that thought Ronald Reagan a bomb-happy Armageddon junkie.

Penn's choice to cloak his suggestion in rhetoric of concern offers even more evidence for those who would claim he is an arrogant jerk unable to believe that any idea opposed to the two or three dusty bulbs rattling around his vacant skull could come from principle, reason or even blindly-held conviction. So smart, so wise is he that the only possibility that he can entertain for holding a position different from his own is that the holder can't process reality. Morgan offered more than a little proof of his own simpleton leanings by not laughing the pompous windbag off his set.

It also betrays his inability to see the implications and consequences of his own ideas. Should the precedent be established of psychiatric committal of those who differ from the ideas of those in power, what does he think would happen to him in the event of a GOP presidential victory? Nothing, of course, because no one could think of Sean Penn as a threat, no matter how wide the gap between their opinions and his. He's a fountain of narcissistic ideas no principled leftist would accept, scraped from the shallowest end of the thought pool because it's as deep as his vanity allows him to go.

On the other hand, the largest group of people who think that everyone disagrees with them is insane are...the insane. So Penn may be in more danger of an invitation to a soothing white room than he knows.

Bud the Dud

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig continues to demonstrate why he should be fired as soon as possible and ignored at all times.

ETA: I originally typed "Bug Selig," because my fingers are smarter than my brain.

The Science Is Solid

Not all scientific and mathematical investigation is used to find out new things. Sometimes it's used to test things everyone knows to be true, either to prove whether or not they are in fact true (such as Mythbusters) or to test out a procedure or theory. If a theory or process comes to a known conclusion, but does so independently of any previously known methods, then it stands on pretty solid grounds.

This may be why some folks with Wired and The Food Network teamed up to run a statistical analysis on things that make food better, and which ingredients did that work with the most number of foods.

At least, that's the reason I figure. Because anyone who doesn't know that bacon is in fact a "miracle food" that makes everything better is just hiding from the truth.

Walking on the Really Wild Side

A song from the Velvet Underground, by the late Lou Reed. Reed was one of the performers at the Great Jubilee Concert in Rome in 2000, appearing with several other artists before Pope John Paul II as a way to raise funds for debt relief for poor nations.

Reed died today at 71.

Say It's So, Joe

Sports columnist Joe Posnanski riffs on some of the weirdness of Game 3 of the World Series, won by the St. Louis Cardinals on an obstructed basepaths call in the bottom of the ninth.

Posnanski offers a more-than-complete explanation of some of the managing decisions and miscues that led up to that call, as well as the playing errors that brought about Allen Craig's awarded base when he tangled up with Red Sox third baseman Will Middlebrooks.

He says mostly everything that needs to be said, and the whining about a World Series game ending on an umpire's call should probably just go away. There's no section in the rule book about which rules should or shouldn't be enforced in big games, or shouldn't be enforced if they will end a game, or shouldn't be enforced because they don't take intent into account and it's a big game, and so on. This isn't basketball, where a superstar has to be found with an opponent's wallet in his own pocket before being charged with a foul. This is baseball, in which the rule book is the rule book. I say that as a Kansas City Royals fan who knows that my team's lone World Series title owes a lot to a blown call and my favorite player was indeed out on the pine-tar call.

Boston catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, whose ill-advised and errant throw set up the call, had he best words about it all: "If the rulebook says obstruction, you tip your cap and walk off the field and take it like a man."

His teammate, Boston's Game 3 starting pitcher Jake Peavy -- who seemed to be living up to the homonym of his name -- could do well to listen to Saltalamacchia's words. Instead, he by said he hoped plate umpire Dana DeMuth could rest well that night after his call, adducing to an earlier disputed call by DeMuth as well. Of course, third base umpire Jim Joyce made the call, not DeMuth, who only confirmed it by not overruling Joyce.

Maybe the Sox pitcher needs a pair of glasses, as well as a copy of the rule book.