REDBELT is an unusual little flick – a samurai/noir/fight film with turn-of-the-screw plotting, some enjoyable martial arts scrapping, trademark Mametian masculinity throughout (for better and for worse), and, yes, a somewhat dopey ending. But I dug it. Every scene contains both surprise and a sense of inevitability, and the characters and themes resonate with a singular, uncomplicated understanding of decency – a notion usually ignored, upstaged, or over-sentimentalized in movies. Here, despite all the twist and turns, decency remains the simple principle on which all the action pivots, and by the end, it becomes a virtue raised almost to the level of nobility.

EBERT LOBS BON MOTS on cinematic bombs:

No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out. (Armageddon)

And a lovely existential one:

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I've seen that doesn't improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. It is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

MIDTOWN HOLIDAYS

Humans
hobbling
along
the
sidewalks —

Some
drunks,
who
fell over
once
too often,
now perpetually stumble
even sober.

Some
just
shopping
and
looking around
but
not at where they're
going.

Bastards!

THE HOT STOVE AIN'T SO HOT these days, as everyone sits around waiting for someone else to blink.

MAN ALLEGEDLY ASSAULTS GIRLFRIEND WITH BURGER, as reported by the Onion. Sorry, I mean, the New York Times.

THERE'S LEX LUTHOR, Auric Goldfinger, Danny Ocean, Bernie Madoff, and Cobra Commander. And then there's Jack Handey:

The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen:

—The door to the vault must have accidentally been left open by the cleaning woman.

—The guard must bend over to tie his shoes and somehow he gets all the shoelaces tied together. He can’t get them apart, so he takes out his gun and shoots all his bullets at the knot. But he misses. Then he just lies down on the floor and goes to sleep.

—Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone. . . .

More criminal genius here.

LET'S WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER — er, I mean, the black dude! Salon takes a peek at the wacky world of "Racists for Obama" – just a little light reading to distract you on the day the nation attempts to save its soul:

Sean Quinn, of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, respected for its obsessiveness and eerie prescience, recently posted a hair-raising story about a pair of Barack Obama supporters. Quinn seems ready to verify its source, but only after the election. At any rate, it goes like this: A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, "We're voting for the nigger!" At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband's declaration.

Ah, racism. It's always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read "Some Black Dude". . . .

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is the kind of weird, mind-bending and heartbreaking movie where you walk out of the movie theatre and don't feel quite right. Like, maybe the sky is the wrong color, or that person across the street can read your mind, or nothing is real and you're actually dead. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Solaris were a little like this for me, too.) It's like Borges, Fellini, Dalí and Willy Loman made a movie together – bizarro, great and kind of a fantastic bummer.

A HIGH-SCHOOL BOY carrying a picture of his crush is badly burned in a fire, and doctors use her photo to reconstruct his face. Now identical to his crush, he moves in with her by pretending to be her long-lost twin sister.

- Plot summary of the manga series Pretty Face (via Comic Foundry)

NINE INNINGS AND THREE DAYS LATER, there's revelry on the streets of Philadelphia:

All around the city and suburbs, fireworks exploded, horns honked and pots and pans banged as if it were New Year's Eve. . . . In Northeast Philadelphia, thousands more gathered at the intersection of Frankford and Cottman Avenues, where city workers had greased the light poles to keep fans from dangerous, inebriated ascents.

There's a city that really knows its fans.

A SWING AND A MISS on ball four turns into a strike 'em out-throw 'em out double play. A take-out slide into second base would have done more good as a regular slide. A check-swing third strike ends the inning with bases loaded. And nearly every player was served at least one fat pitch which escaped unharmed. After all the missed opportunities, time eventually runs out on you. Ms. Benjamin handles the post-mortem for the Globe, and YFSF looks back on a good ride.

ASHES OF TIME (REDUX) is a weird bird, even for Wong Kar Wai. Veering from silly and melodramatic to simple and affecting – almost moment to moment and shot to shot – the movie has over-stylized camera work, preposterous sword-fighting, stirring heroics, over-the-top emotion, specious logic, a scene with a girl getting all sensual with her horse and many more scenes of a different girl standing around with a very sad donkey. Eventually the impulse to guffaw is overcome by the desire to weep, and the movie builds toward an unlikely and surprisingly emotional ending. As the review in the Village Voice puts it:

Wong has a bit of a wink with all of the deadpan death threats and grand allusions — women rake their cheeks along tree bark, limestone, and a horse's neck in fits of longing — before turning mannerism into the very stuff of transcendence, as with Maggie Cheung's penultimate lament. It's a knowing end-run around cliché that seeks to assert the damnable truth of cliché itself. In a move that would become his trademark, Wong rejects the happy ending for the almost ecstatically sad, making your heart soar even as he tells you, essentially, that it's impossible, all of it — that it'll never work.

SURELY, ALL OF THIS EXTRA BASEBALL IS GRAVY, as YFSF puts it. Nevertheless, hopes are high for a final game 7 (which should have been a final game 5), because we've been here before and it usually works out pretty well. But before we lose ourselves too much in anticipation, let's also remember where we came from, and how good it's been since:

It was on the bus the other day, heading from Fenway Park to the airport after their miraculous Game 5 win, that Kevin Youkilis reflected on all that he's been a part of - three comebacks from the depths of elimination - to Varitek, sitting next to him.

"I said, 'We're so spoiled,' " Youkilis said. "It's amazing. It's really amazing the games we play, and how much fun it's been. When we're all old and our children are all grown up, we'll sit around and meet up and talk about games like the game the other day. It's a wild ride, and we're very spoiled."

THE BEST BASEBALL STATISTICS CHART EVER tracks the win probability during the best elimination-game comeback ever. Sure, it seems like the cold, calculated view of a Sabermetrics-loving number cruncher. But when you look at it another way, it's an emotional barometer, as well – illustrating precisely how we felt at each point in the game, from sofa-slumping despair to furtive hopefulness and, finally, the bewildering heights of improbable, undeserved joy.

BEFORE GAME 5 OF THE 2008 ALCS BECAME A MAGIC ACT, while the Rays were still doing the pummeling and the Red Sox were the only ones at Fenway who didn't know the season was over, I averted my eyes from the grim disaster unfolding on TV by reading Bill Simmons thoughts on the season's other great loss:

I still miss Manny. I can't lie. It took me four solid weeks to accept that he was really gone. Three weeks after the trade happened, I flicked on NESN for the opening pitch of a Sox game, noticed the SkyDome and thought, "Yes, Manny loves hitting in the SkyDome!" A second passed. A lightbulb went on. My shoulders slumped. Manny was gone.

All 9,000 words of his story are worth reading (and he even includes one of my favorite Manny anecdotes in a footnote), but here I'll skip to the end:

So, how will this play out? I see Manny leading the Dodgers to the 2008 World Series, breaking their hearts and donning pinstripes next season. He won't feel bad, because he's Manny. The L.A. fans will feel bad. I will feel worse. It will be the single most painful sports transaction of my lifetime. It will make me question why I follow sports at all, why we spend so much time caring about people who don't care about us. I don't want to hear Manny booed at Fenway. I don't want to root against him. I don't want to hold a grudge. I don't want to hear the "Mah-knee! Mah-knee!" chant echoing through the new Stadium. I am not ready for any of it. You love sports most when you're 16, then you love it a little bit less every year. And it happens because of things like this. Like Manny breaking the hearts of everyone in Boston because his agent wanted to get paid, then Manny landing in New York because the Yanks offered the most money.

PHILADELPHIA IS AN EVEN MORE UNFORGIVING baseball town than Boston? I guess, take it from one who knows. Terry Francona managed the Phillies from 1997–2000, with a 285-363 record:

So he was "genuinely happy" to see [the Phillies] experience success of their own. He may not have shared that sentiment for a city that didn't show him a lot of love. In explaining the differences between the fans in the two cities, Francona said, "I think there's more love for their players here. They want [them] to do good so bad that when they don't, it just kills them. In Philadelphia, it turned to hatred in a hurry. Like ball one."

"FENWAY PARK, IN BOSTON, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." The magic of tilt shift photography (click link above) brings to mind John Updike's description of Fenway in his farewell to Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu":

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. . . .

WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and it always feels this horrible. Amalie Benjamin (the shining jewel of the Boston Globe sports section, by the way) assesses the situation:

They have been in this spot before. A tight spot, and an unforgiving one. The Red Sox have been down and have made it out, as recently as last year's American League Championship Series, when they yielded three of the first four games to the Indians, and in the 2004 ALCS, when they lost the first three games to the Yankees. At those points, it did not seem as if the Sox were on the brink of a comeback.

Nor does it seem that way today.

In other words, every time this happens, it feels completely and utterly hopeless.

So that should be comforting, right? Right?

TITO GETS HIGH PRAISE from the media, if not from the fans. First, there's this column on ESPN.com, and then there's this defense by Bill Simmons in his mailbag:

Q: How many more times are we going to be subjected to Tito Francona's bonehead decisions? He is great at managing players' egos and building relationships with them, but please get him a coach to do the X's and O's before he kills us. We can't keep overcoming his major screwups, can we? I've said it since 2004 and it is still true … just amazing we keep winning despite him. I set the over/under of his ALCS miscues at four!

- Randy, Derry, N.H.

SG: You can read more of Randy's work at his "Mr. Ungrateful" blog. Here's my take on Tito: He has never been outmanaged in a playoff series; his players love him and play hard for him; he handles the media as deftly as anyone this side of Doc Rivers; and by all accounts, he's a genuinely good person. You're never going to find a perfect manager or coach. That person just doesn't exist. So if you had your druthers (love that word), you'd want your manager's biggest weakness to be, "makes some occasionally boneheaded decisions that rarely come back to haunt the team because of the horseshoe that was surgically inserted into his rear end during the '04 playoffs." He's certainly the best Red Sox manager of my lifetime. And beyond that, nobody spits sunflower seeds with more grace and precision.

Meanwhile, Tony Massarotti profiles Terry Francona and offers this fun little tidbit to illustrate why he may have the toughest job in baseball:

How in god's name can you justify that??? You are being paid millions of dollars and even my 9 year old son can do a better job than [a] sleep on the wheel manager like you.

- E-mail sent to Francona from Chembur, Mumbai (India)

IS EVERYONE'S FAVORITE DREADLOCKED GOOFBALL actually a bonafide genius? Joe Posnanski of SI.com makes the case:

The following column is dedicated to the admittedly bizarre proposition that one Manuel Aristides (Onelcida) Ramirez, sometimes known as Man-Ram or Manny Being Manny or just plain Manny, is a genius. Now, it's not an easy case to make that a man who tries to run to third on a ground rule double, who sometimes disappeared into the Green Monster during pitching changes, who gets pulled over by police for having overly tinted car windows is a genius.

And he's got some people who might back the theory:

Bill James, a baseball writer (and Boston Red Sox advisor) who has spent much of his life knocking down baseball myths, believes that Manny Ramirez is such a good hitter, he will purposely get into full-counts when there is a runner on first base. The reason? With a full-count, that runner will be running on the pitch and, as such, will become an RBI when Ramirez hits a double into the gap.

"I've seen it too many times to doubt it," Bill says.

Allard Baird, a longtime baseball scout and executive (and Boston Red Sox advisor) believes Manny Ramirez is such a good hitter, he will sometimes swing and miss at a pitch in April so that the pitcher will throw him that same pitch in September. The idea being: He won't miss that pitch in September.

"When it comes to hitting, the guy's mind works on a whole other level," Allard says.

REALLY GREAT COLLECTION OF BASEBALL PARK PICTURES from some famous graffiti artist guy I've never heard of.

DUSTIN PEDROIA IS A MONSTER and no one can stop him. Batting cleanup tonight (protecting Big Papi!), he went 4-for-4 with an intentional walk, scored three times, stole two bases (one with a slick headfirst slide into second) and made a bunch of crazy plays, including a giant leaping grab on a liner.

"A lot of people talk about Manny leaving," Chicago manager Ozzie Guillen said before the game. "I wish Pedroia was leaving."

The gamer at YFSF said it all:

Yes, a four-foot thireen-inch second baseman who weighs about a buck-thirty-five soaking wet is bringing his laser show to the four-slot for Beantown.

UPDATE: Pedroia left a few stranded in yesterday's game, but the romance with Guillen continued:

When Pedroia, who leads the AL in hitting at .326, made his first out of the series with a tapper back to the mound in the third inning, Guillen asked for the ball and held it out for Pedroia motioning like he wanted the All-Star second baseman's autograph. He then gestured to Pedroia again as Pedroia took the field before putting the ball in his back pocket. Eventually, Guillen flipped the ball to a kid in the stands.

Much more on the budding love affair between Ozzie and Pedey.

A WEIRDLY HOMOEROTIC POETRY MASH-UP in which every instance of the word "love" is replaced with "Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Player Carlton Fisk" in this poem:

"And know you not," says Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

(Via kottke)

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Yankees' loss in "The First Game of the Final Series Between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium Ever!!!!", the Boston Globe rounds up the reaction in the New York media. With A-Rod going 0-5 with two strikeouts and two double play balls, including one with the bases loaded, there's this zinger from the New York Post:

We will remember Rodriguez dallied with Boston, didn't go there, came to the Yankees instead in 2004, and in his time here the nature of the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry has reversed to Red Sox champs, Yankees chumps. Rodriguez is the face of that historic flip-flop. He has bought into that role twice now, first when he forced his trade here, then last offseason when he accepted the largest financial package ever to return through the backdoor. He is all outsized. His greed. His lust for attention. His insecurities.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MANNY RAMIREZ, as chronicled in the Boston Globe's blog, includes a bet between Joe Torre and Los Angeles Times columnist T.J. Simers on whether Manny will cut his hair:

As you know, Joe Torre asked Manny Ramirez to cut his hair, but I have this hunch it will never happen.

Torre disagrees, so now one of us will be making a charitable donation.

If Ramirez returns to Dodger Stadium a week from today to open the team's next home stand with all his hair, Torre said he would make a donation to Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA.

As part of the deal, Torre agrees he will say nothing more to Ramirez about his hair, believing Ramirez heard him the first time they talked.

If Ramirez shows up to Dodger Stadium without the dreads, Page 2 will make a donation to the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation.

As part of the deal, of course, I will say nothing more to Ramirez about his hair.

But just between you and me, who is Torre kidding?

You think he's going to bench Ramirez because the guy doesn't get his hair cut?

You think if he fines him it will make a difference, Ramirez knowing he's not getting paid by the Dodgers, so there's no money to take out of his pay?

You think the Red Sox are going to take it out of his pay, and do a favor for the former Yankees manager?

TOM WAITS INTERVIEWS HIMSELF, which is predictably a bit self-involved, but at least it's more interesting than your usual music magazine article.

Q: What's wrong with the world?

A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year . . . and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

IT AIN'T OVER UNTIL IT'S OVER, and then sometimes it's not over even after that. The last two games against the Toronto Blue Jays each had do-overs. The first one featured a walkoff win, complete with dress rehearsal:

Few things are more embarrassing than premature exhilaration. That's what the Red Sox were guilty of last night at the Fens when they came storming out of their dugout to celebrate another apparent walkoff win, only to have plate umpire Sam Holbrook stop them short when he signaled that Jed Lowrie was out at home, the left leg of Toronto catcher Rod Barajas blocking Lowrie from his destination in the bottom of the ninth.

Instead of being in the vortex of a swirling bunch of delirious teammates, Lowrie was staring at a monitor in the runway behind the Sox dugout, watching a replay of the throw from Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells that deprived Brandon Moss of a game-winning hit.

"I got done with my clip, and on live TV [Jason] Varitek was hitting the ball," the Sox rookie said.

The following night was less dramatic, but just as silly:

No ninth-inning thunder last night. . . . But there were fireworks - after an apparent game-ending fly ball by Coco Crisp was nullified by second base umpire Bruce Dreckman, who called a balk on closer B.J. Ryan before he threw the pitch. The umpire ruled that Ryan had not come to a stop before throwing plateward.

"We saw it," Sox manager Terry Francona said of Dreckman's call. "He threw his arms up and we knew it was going to take a second."

With the crowd already headed for the exits and the Jays lining up for postgame high-fives, Jays manager John Gibbons, who had already begun strolling onto the field to slap some hands, flew into a rage when informed of Dreckman's call. He confronted the umpire, and was ejected.

"Their whole team was on the field," Sox catcher Kevin Cash said. "It was kind of like us [Wednesday] night, when we all ran out and Jed [Lowrie] was thrown out at the plate."

AND, OH YEAH, can we have more of these, please?:

The start of the game was delayed 15 minutes by rain but it lasted just two hours, 18 minutes, Boston's shortest game of the year.

"Great pitching on both sides is what it came down to," Toronto manager John Gibbons said.

AS MUCH HARD LUCK AS THE RED SOX recently had with great pitching but tough losses, Roy Halladay had worse:

It was Halladay's fourth straight complete game. He's lost the last three.

But then again, Pedroia was there to make sure everyone knew the Sox earned the win:

Lester allowed just one hit in eight innings, a clean single on Lyle Overbay's liner in the fifth over second baseman Pedroia's head. But Pedroia kept the game scoreless in the ninth when he dove to his right and nabbed Wells' grounder after Scott Rolen had doubled off Jonathan Papelbon (1-0) with two outs.

Pedroia gloved the ball and threw out Wells.

"Anybody's diving for any balls in that situation," Pedroia said. "It definitely got the crowd involved. It's a little bit of momentum. They could have had a run and it gets taken away."

Wells wanted to hit the ball up the middle.

"I saw it get by the mound," he said, "and I saw Superman at second base."

That play also earned Pedroia Baseball Tonight's number one Web Gem, by the way.

THE SCIENCE OF BASEBALL sometimes includes mad scientists. Sure, there's the famous shift – often employed against Big Papi – where the field is stacked on the right, leaving the entire third base side wide open. But then there's craziness like this:

Braves manager Bobby Cox was desperate, and he was plotting an ingenious plan. He was nearly out of right-handed pitchers, and players can't re-enter a game after they've been removed. If Mr. Resop, a righty, could play the outfield, that would allow Mr. Cox to replace him on the mound temporarily — and use a lefty specialist to pitch to Adam LaRoche — without losing him entirely. So after Mr. Resop pitched to three batters in the top of the 10th inning, Mr. Cox had him go to left field. When Mr. Resop returned to the pitcher's mound one batter later, it marked the first time a pitcher had pitched, played the field and pitched again in the same game since Jeff Nelson of the Seattle Mariners in 1993, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

But if Mr. Melvin had his way, the Brewers organization might be even more progressive. He has another counterintuitive idea: using relievers to start the game, and delaying the "starting" pitcher's entrance until the third inning or so. The thinking is that starters are typically among a team's best pitchers, yet nowadays they often pitch only through the fifth or sixth inning, well before many games are decided. By having them pitch later, they'd be around for the higher-leverage innings.

The idea would need to be tested first in the minor leagues, Mr. Melvin says. The only problem, it appears, is that it's too unconventional. "I can't get anybody to do it," he says.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A THEME DEVELOPING on ESPN.com's baseball widget. Today's headline: "Gagne blows save, but Kapler lifts Brewers in 12th." Good news for Gabe, at least.

ON A NIGHT WHEN BECKETT, VARITEK, LOWELL, CORA AND CRISP are all unavailable, this is a pretty great sentence to be able to read:

Jacoby Ellsbury hit two solo homers and Kevin Youkilis added a two-run shot for Boston, while Pedroia went 4-for-5 with three doubles and a single.

It's their sixth straight win and third late-inning comeback.

ESPN.COM WIDGET HEADLINE: "Reds rally off closer Gagne in 10th, stun Brewers." Isn't it more shocking that the Brewers were stunned?

TURNS OUT THE HEX WASN'T A HOAX, but did it actually become a pox on the Sox, and not a prank on the Yanks? It may have seemed like a great idea to bury a Red Sox jersey underneath the new Yankee Stadium as a curse on the Yankees, but the symbolism never really made sense to me. Turns out the jersey buried in concrete bore the name of one Mr. David Ortiz, whose .070 average and 3 for 43 slump definitely borders on the supernatural, but in a bad way. Looks like the construction worker's well-meaning curse may have backfired. Oops. Now that the Yanks have excavated the jersey, let's see if Papi gets his mojo back.