I was watching the Cavs-Nuggets game last night (quick take: the Cavs pooped the bed on this one…that happens from time to time and I’m not sure there’s too much more to be taken away from the game itself; weird night, too, as the Celtics, Lakers and Magic all lost, as well) and I was struck by something: there’s an awful lot of guys on this Denver team that look like they smoke pot. Chris Anderson, JR Smith, Kenyon Martin, Renaldo Balkman, Carmelo Anthony – through appearance and reputation that seems like a group of tokers. And it got me thinking: marijuana is the drug of choice for NBA players, but what team has the highest concentration of users? Obviously I have no real way of knowing the answer to this question, but I thought it would be a lot of fun trying to make an educated guess. What follows is my attempt to do just that. I’ve broken down the rosters of every team in the league (as of January 9, 2010) and assigned a point value to each player based on the following scale:
0 Points: Does not smoke pot.
1 Point: Not an active smoker, but will partake given the right circumstances. Because of the NBA’s rep, this is the default category. If there’s the slightest chance that you’ll light up, you’re a 1.
2 Points: Active smoker. These guys are probably holding and certainly have someone in their entourage to take care of obtaining new product.
Highest total score takes the cake.
Now, to be clear, I have zero inside knowledge here. My guesses are based on the public record and my own subjective opinions. I will engage in pretty aggressive stereo-typing (if you’ve got a tattoo on your neck, you’re being labelled a 2), but it’s all in good fun and I don’t want anyone to be offended. It seems like we’re getting more mature about this as a country, so David Stern’s probably the only stick-in-the-mud who wouldn’t have fun with it.
I’m going to give each team its own post and we’ll go by conference and division (I’m betting a little compare and contrast will be interesting at some point in the future). Let’s get started.
I don’t mean that exclamation point. The Cavs have had problems all year long getting up for mediocre opponents (although the FSN gang tried to slip Memphis in as one of those opponents – as John Hollinger pointed out today, the Grizzlies are not mediocre), so it’s easy to fall into the trap of being impressed with a game like this. And if you are, well, as Chris Rock might say, you’re a low-expectation-having mother-f*&^$r. The Cavs should be destroying teams like this and while I’m happy to see them exerting real effort, I will not take exceptional joy in it. Solid win, with nice production from Shaq and the bench (were Jawad’s minutes of the “showing of for other teams” variety?) and that awesome Bird shot from Lebron. But we’ve got bigger aspirations than this.
Having said that, I’m always happy to beat the crap out of this Wizards team. They get my blood a-boilin’. Word on the street is they’re looking to blow it up, possibly making Butler and Jamison available. I don’t think Butler fits in on the Cavs, but Jamison would look mighty fine in the wine&gold.
A quick word about Gilbert Arenas: I’d like everyone to get off their soap-boxes. Agent Zero didn’t help himself by showing zero contrition (although, I sort of respect that decision, dumb as it may be), which I think is the main reason Stern decided to suspend him now. But come on, no one was hurt or close to hurt. He shouldn’t have guns in the arena, but they weren’t loaded and couldn’t have hurt anyone, unless he bashed someone over the head with them. He should be punished by the law for having an unloaded firearm in DC and suspended by the NBA for a period comparable to other offenders (Stephen Jackson, Jamaal Tinsley, Delonte West soon). Talk about him getting suspended for the year or expelled is outrageous. Let’s chill out.
This thing is currently sitting at #223 on IMDB’s Top 250 and I understand why. It’s got a cool soundtrack, plays around with time, and does some clever things (I’m thinking of the dance number and the animation). It’s also got two VERY likable stars.
I enjoyed it, but not as much as the internet voting populace. I thought it dragged through the middle act and the “love is fated, but now I’m disillusioned until I’m not” thing doesn’t do it for me. Maybe I’m getting old.
But those stars are winners. My girlfriend took me to a She & Him show last summer (that’s Zooey Deschanel’s musical group with M Ward) and it was outstanding. Much like her character in this movie, Ms. Deschanel has a winning quality that is more than the sum of her parts. I think she’s outstanding. She’s missed on a couple movies recently (The Happening, Yes Man), but she’ll bust loose some time, I think. (Maybe this movie was it and I’m missing the boat)
The guy who’s really growing on me is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I liked Brick A LOT, he’s excellent in The Look-out and he was just a bundle of energy on Saturday Night Live (not a great episode, but not for his lack of effort). I did not see this coming during his 3rd Rock from the Sun days. I had a bachelor week in the middle December and chose Wolverine over G.I. Joe (featuring Gordon-Levitt in the Cobra Commander role) for my Crappy Movie Afternoon. I regret that decision. I expect more good stuff from him in the future and this is a promising, promising start.
Alright, alright, alright. That’s four enjoyable, hard-fought victories in a row. So much more fun to root for a team that can put together a solid win and I will confess this is about the last thing I expected a month ago. And while I’m happy about the win streak, I’m conflicted about what it says about the team. I was ready to fire Mangini after the first Baltimore loss, but it seems like he really got the guys to play for him. On the other hand, the team was so beat up that it had to field a team full of guys playing for contracts and maybe that provided the motivation we saw. These games suggest that he deserves another year, but I cannot forget about the first 3/4 of the season and I’d rather cut bait too soon than too late. It seems like he might blanche at coaching under Holmgren and if so I think that tells us everything we need to know: he hasn’t done anything to earn that kind of ego. But it will mean another year of changes and if there’s a sure-fire coaching candidate out there, I haven’t heard about him. Not as clear cut as if they’d just gone completely down the toilet.
The win streak, too, is a bit mis-leading. Three of the games were at home in brutal conditions. We caught Pittsburgh in the middle of their swoon, needed two Cribbs kick-off returns to get by KC, and beat a Raiders team playing Charlie Frye at quarterback. A win is a win, but these only impress because of tremendously lowered expectations.
I’m happy to let Holmgren make the decision about the coach and GM (I hope he outsources both jobs and keeps himself at 50,000 feet) and I’ll trust his choices, whatever they are. It seems like there is reason to be confident about our O-line and runningbacks moving forward, as well as special teams. We have a couple nice players on D, but I think that needs to be our investment this off-season. We haven’t had a real playmaker at linebacker or in the secondary in forever. ‘
Wherever they’re at as a team, I do feel like the worst days are behind the Browns. It ain’t much, but I’m thankful for it.
If you like movies at all, I think you have to go see it. In 3-D. The visuals were worth the price of admission ($13 tickets in Columbus) and the evening felt like an experience in a way that the average trip to the theater does not. It was novel enough that I found myself lifting up my glasses a few times during the movie just to see what the screen looked like to the naked eye. I mean, I knew what it would look like (a blurry mess), but the special effects were impressive enough to make me curious. That’s pretty cool. I haven’t seen any of the recent entries in the 3-D genre, but it seems like Avatar is the watershed film for the medium. Go see it.
Outside of the visuals, it delivered at about the level I expected, which is to say mediocre. The story, dialogue and acting all slid between passable and laughable (the name of the mystery substance that drives the story – Unobtainium – got a shocked chuckle out of me) – but you know what? I don’t know that it matters. Much like crackers are just a delivery system for delicious cheese, Avatar’s plot and the rest should be viewed as merely a necessary means of conveyance.
I did feel like James Cameron was channeling Aliens pretty heavily. Sigourney Weaver, the robotic exoskeleton, an evil corporation and Giovani Ribisi in the Paul Reiser white-collar a-hole role. Nothing wrong with that, either – I love Aliens.
Finally, I spent about 3/4 of the movie trying to figure out what else I knew Stephen Lang from (he plays the hard-bitten general with the wicked cat-scratch along the side of his head) before realizing he played Ike in Tombstone. IMDB also revealed he played Freddie Lounds in Manhunter (the reporter from the Tattler that the Tooth Fairy sets on fire, portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Red Dragon), which I knew once upon a time but couldn’t recall in the theater. All small roles, but I like him and I’m especially impressed that he managed to get so jacked as a man of nearly 60. I hope he went the natural route rather than using the Sly Stallone plan.
Now, this is one of the best movies I saw in 2009. I cannot recommend it highly enough. A documentary that has some of the pace and intrigue of a thriller (one of the main players correctly references Ocean’s 11), The Cove got me on several levels. The hero is Rick O’Barry, the man who trained the dolphins on Flipper and who blames the success of the show (and hence himself) for the proliferation of dolphin shows (like Sea World) around the world. After realizing how poorly dolphins fare in captivity, he dedicates the rest of his life to redeeming his sins and freeing dolphins. His latest area of interest is Taijii, Japan, where every year dolphins are rounded up and the most malleable captured to be sold to dolphin shows around the world (for up to $150,000 each). Mr. O’Barry has a big problem with this, but an even bigger problem with what happens to the dolphins deemed un-trainable, who are herded into a small, hidden bay (the cove from the title) and slaughtered. The movie follows a crack team of environmentalists, free divers and special effects experts who set out to capture the killing on film. Along the way they combat the local Taijii government, the fishermen who profit from the practice and the powerful Japanese whaling lobby (the scenes at the International Whaling Commission conference are among my favorites).
I walked away with two main thoughts:
1) Rick O’Barry is on my list of heroes. I’m sure reputable people might have some rough things to say about him, but I found him to be a genuine guy and I am a total sucker for his kind of Saul-to-Paul transformations.
2) This serves as another helpful data point in my belief that the biggest moral change we’ll undergo in the next 100 years will involve our relationship with animals. Dolphins are amazing creatures and I think most people are rightly horrified by the idea of slaughtering them, but as this great South Park episode points out, we turn a blind eye to that kind of treatment for a host of other animals. I’m a meat eater, and a pretty thoughtless one at that. But I bet I move away from it as I grow older and wiser and that’s the bet I’d make for us as a species, too. Part of that will be environmental and economic considerations, but I think part of it will be moral – it’s just wrong to treat other living beings the way we do, especially when we have better alternatives. My timeline is probably too aggresive, but I’m confident that history will inevitably slide in that direction.
This is one of the best movies of 2009?
I went in ready to be impressed. I really enjoyed Reitman’s previous two films – Thank You for Smoking and Juno – and I’m as big a fan of Clooney as the next guy (hell, I’m probably a bigger fan than the next guy). My brother and his girlfriend were extremely skeptical when we chose Up in the Air for our trip to the theater and I was confident enough to bet them they’d both like it (cost of their tickets if I was wrong, their promise to never question my judgment again if I was correct). I came away $13 in debt (matinee!), with an even-more impudent little brother and a mild case of the blahs.
The movie was not bad. Absent heightened expectations, I liked it. But this is not an award-winner, is it? As a statement on our troubled economic times and the value of relationships it felt trite and I was never particularly moved nor did I gain some insight into the human/American condition circa fall 2009. It was trapped somewhere between a character study about one man who has blocked himself off from the people in his life and the beginning of my previous sentence. Did it have to be this way?
After thinking about it for a couple days, I wonder if the casting of George Clooney was ultimately problematic. The trouble with putting a “movie star” in your picture is that it’s tough to stop thinking about them as “Movie Star.” It doesn’t seem so crazy to spend your life on the road when your “George Clooney” – that might even be awesome. But if you put Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman in this role (and probably replace Vera Farmiga with someone less foxy), then I start to think about the character’s choices and their consequences in a very different way. And a more interesting way, I believe.
It’s a perfectly OK movie, but not much more.
There are a lot of different reasons to see and enjoy a film. A great perfomance. A moving story. Innovative camera work. Beautiful scenery. Clever dialogue. Occassionally, the creative team behind the production manages to put a few of these elements together and you get a great movie. Milk, in my estimation, comes up short.
My beef is almost entirely with the format: I really don’t like biopics. They are, almost by definition, formulaic. I think that was part of the point they were trying to make in Walk Hard, but the format is so burdensome it bogged down the whole enterprise. These things generally come out to good reviews and they are money come award season (Reese Witherspoon and Forest Whitaker, just in the last few years), but I don’t think they stand the test of time. Take a look at AFI’s most recent Top 100 Movies list. How many of these are biopics? Citizen Kane, even though it’s fictional, but it’s presence has more to do with revoluationary camera work than story (confession: I find it to be something of a bore). Raging Bull, I guess, though that’s more of a psychological study. That’s it. It’s a genre that just doesn’t allow for great film-making.
Now, that being said, Milk is totally worth seeing. First, because I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with the historical figure and he deserves attention. I’d rather everybody just see this tremendous documentary (a much more effective way to tell these kinds of stories), but if this is how you’re introduced to Harvey Milk, well, I’ll live. Second, Sean Penn is really good. He deserves the Oscar nomination he’ll get. The rest of the cast, particularly the suddenly unstoppable Josh Brolin, holds up their end of the bargain, although it was too bad to see James Franco stuck in the lame duck/jilted lover role that would have gone to Diane Lane or Kathleen Quinlan if this were a hetero-joint. I recently blitzed through Freeks and Geeks on DVD and Franco deserves some good roles in the future (and not just as a stoner).
Mr. Penn has caught some flack recently for his visits to Venezuela and Cuba and his seemingly chummy relationships with Hugo Chavez and Castro. In particular, some people in the gay community were unhappy with him for championing a gay-rights hero like Harvey Milk, while supporting dictators who flagrantly violate human rights (gay and straight). I don’t have a strong opinion here yet, though I certainly understand why people would be upset. It will be interesting to see if Penn’s politics, perhaps like Tom Cruise’s religious views, ends up negatively affecting his film career.
Little prescient on my post about loser sports teams, huh?
I actually don’t think Eddie Jordan got a fair deal with that Wizards crew, but he was gonna have to go in the dismantling process at some point, so why not now? He’ll catch on somewhere else and I’d bet on him being successful. He probably got out while the getting was good.
Speaking of which, can I cut bait on the Browns now? Who do I root for on this team? Josh Cribbs? Phil Dawson? Shaun Rogers is probably the right answer here – he’s been about the only bright spot this year and you’ve gotta feel for the guy. Finally escapes Detroit and ends up in the middle of this unholy mess. We can all take comfort in the fact that the NFL allows for the quickest turn-arounds in pro sports, but that’s pretty cold. New coach (and I don’t think they’ll get Cowher), maybe a new GM (and the current GM seems to be cracking at the seams), unsettled QB situation, Winslow on the way out the door, Edwards playing his way out of the league, Lewis a season closer to retirement……I am not optimistic.
On a final bright note, Cavs looked great in their bounce back game against Atlanta. I’m incredibly pleased with the team so far. I think they need to turn Wally into something very productive at the trade deadline, but they’re deep in the hunt right now.
And, for the record, I don’t think LeBron’s going anywhere. I’ll have a long post on this at some point, but the Knicks’ recent moves forced me to get something on paper.
The Pistons (especially when they play in Auburn Hills in front of the classiest fans in the NBA) really get my blood boiling. And it looked like the Cavs had this one in control through the first couple minutes of the third quarter. Which means I should be apoplectic right now.
But I think the Cavs have a really good team this year and I’m going to try to keep perspective through the lumps a team must inevitably take. The Cavs energy lapsed through the third and fourth quarters (which showed in their slow defensive rotations and 2005-2008-style offense) and the Pistons got very hot for a stretch. It happens. Assuming they bounce back with a strong game Saturday night against Atlanta, I’m not going to sweat it.
What Piston do I hate the most, you ask? ‘Sheed is the easy answer, but I think it’s Rip Hamilton now. He cries as much as any of them, his hair is running as fast as it can from his ugly mug and he’s still sporting that mask. It’s not rational, but then hate rarely is.
FSN Ohio did a poll during the game that asked this question, but the options were Wallace and a bunch of the bad boys. The notion that any of the current cast matches up with those guys is laughable. I attended a Cavs-Pistons game in the late ’80s at the Coliseum where a guy spent the entire game holding up a sign that read: “Isiah is a homo.”
1. Can you imagine what would happen if someone tried to pull that stunt in this day and age? We’ve made some progress in the last 20 years.
2. That was a bunch of guys you could really hate. Laimbeer, Mahorn, Rodman, Thomas? Terrible. Plus, the NBA hadn’t gone completely corporate at that point and we got to see some fisticuffs every once in a while. You can’t go back (and that gentleman’s sign is plenty of reason to be thankful for that), but there’s lots I miss.