2008 Playoffs

This was the first postseason in a long time that my team didn't participate in, but that didn't stop me from watching it. Unfortunately, overall it was still a bit of a letdown. The ALCS was great, but it was the only exciting series of the seven that were played.

The divisional series were more balanced than last year, with only one sweep by the Dodgers of the hapless Cubs (are they EVER going to win?) instead of three, but still none went to game 5. I guessed wrong on both NL series, and really expected, or maybe just hoped, for more competition all around. I'm getting seriously annoyed with the Angels, always somehow beating the Yankees but playing like crap whenever they face the Red Sox in the postseason. They could have won the series if they fielded, hit, and managed like they weren't a AA team.

The Rays were really the stars of the playoffs, regardless of the final result. They pretty convincingly beat the White Sox, and finally bucked the highly irritating trend of the Red Sox coming back from a big series deficit to win it all. They came close, but Matt Garza pitched a great game and David price finished them off, getting to their first World Series. It really is a good story, a team with a history of failure finally puts it together with a young, exciting ballclub and makes it to the playoffs one year removed from being last in the league. So good that it swayed many of my fellow fans into rooting for them despite they're being a division rival, which is something you don't usually see.

But the Phillies swept the Dodgers aside pretty handily (again, I have nothing against Joe Torre, but I'm relieved that I don't have to hear as many stories about how great he is without the Yankees) and treated the Rays the same way. They really were pretty impressive, only losing three games in the entire playoffs and overcoming a bizarre delay in game 5 that lasted almost two days to finish the victory. Cole Hamels was dominant, and solidified himself as one of the game's best young aces.

A couple things became clear this October. One: Bud Selig is bad at his job. I've complained before about his moronic changes to the game, and he's the one ultimately to blame for the game 5 to fiasco. They knew weather was coming, but they tried to get the game in and it could have become a giant mess. Two: Instant Replay works and should be expanded. Multiple obvious errors were made that could have been game changers, and the quality of umpiring is clearly getting worse and not better. Allowing challenges on home run calls hasn't disrupted anything and works, so there's no reason it shouldn't be applicable on more sorts of plays. Unfortunately, number one might make this take a while. Three: Lazy sports "experts" can stop automatically predicting that the American League team will win the World Series. Including 2008, National League teams have won four titles just this decade, and despite the obvious disparity in talent between the two leagues, it shouldn't be surprising for the best of the NL to win four games against the best of the AL, especially with the crazy things that we know can happen in such a small sample. The quality of baseball discussion in major papers and websites is pretty dire, and it's time these guys learned how to actually analyze the game.

Y: The Last Man, Book 6: Girl on Girl

Girl on Girl is one of the shortest volumes so far and not much happens in it, but that doesn't make it not as entertaining as the rest of the book. The story jumps forward in time quite a bit, skipping periods of travel to show the important confrontations that happen in between. But the main story here happens while the characters are traveling across the ocean by freighter, and quite a few things occur on the way to keep it exciting.

I like how Y plays to a lot of the cliches of the action genre, either playing it straight or subverting them, like when a character shoots an explosive tank, causing it to blow up of course, and another asking her incredulously how she managed to hit such a small primer charge. Yorick's willingness to get physical with people he meets bothers me a bit, since his whole motivation for going on this journey is to find his girlfriend, but given the circumstances it's understandable and it's clear they're setting up something with some teases at what could happen. There's another bit of backstory to his relationship, and I often find the flashbacks to be the most interesting part of the story. The writing and great art continue to drive me towards the conclusion. Did you know Vaughan has been a writer on Lost since late in season 3? That's pretty cool.

The Dark Crystal

The Dark Crystal is something you will never see these days; a fantasy film with all of the characters played by puppets. Every kid knows Jim Henson and Frank Oz from the Muppets, but they did some pretty radically different stuff like this. It's pretty strange, with an odd tone that lasts through the whole thing, but I came off enjoying it. It took me some time to really grasp what was happening, maybe because I might have missed part of the opening narration. There's a group of ten elders and another of ten evil looking things, and each elder is directly connected to one of the evil guys in some way. The evil guys want to use the dark crystal to gain immortality or something, but the hero, a small guy who's obviously body doubled by a real child whenever he needs to move rapidly, can stop this by returning a missing shard of the crystal to its source. Anyway, he goes on a journey to do just that and sees some strange things.

It's kind of hard to describe what makes the movie enjoyable. It's fairly slowly paced despite the short running time and it's a bit hard to care about what happens to puppets. But it was pretty funny at times, especially the bickering and infighting among the bad guys. The noises they make, the awkward feats of strength. There are some pretty visually interesting moments, lots of unique creatures and architecture. The two main characters are likable enough, and there's really nothing in the movie that would bother anyone too much. Definitely see it if you're in the mood for something a bit more genuine than the latest CGI-fest.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

Return of the Jedi is what made me like Star Wars and will always be special to me, even if I can see how the predecessor was superior as a film. I like stories with good endings, and Jedi puts a nice bow on the series, with the destruction of the bad guys and redemption of the most important character. A lot of people hated the Ewoks, and I can see why, but at least they had the balls to show them getting killed. From the opening on Tatooine to the speeder bike chase to the final battle in three locations, Jedi is packed with some of the series' best action scenes, which are better than a lot of the vastly more technically complex and visually busy ones in the prequels. The emperor's also a much more effective villain when he's sitting in a chair and pressing every button the good guy has than when he's cackling and spinning around with a lightsaber. He really knows how to twist the knife.

To be honest, I'm about tapped out on things to say about the Star Wars movies. Marquand seems like an okay director, but he never really did much else. Seeing all the hanging threads get resolved was good. I really hope the children of the future don't watch all the movies in chronological order, because the prequels really just ruin all the great moments from the sequels, including one of the best twists ever. Will people even really want to show them to their kids, after so many claimed that the new ones raped their childhoods? Maybe not. That catfish guy who flies in the Millenium Falcon with Lando is pretty weird. I now find it weird that Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar just show up and act all important in this one. Why haven't we seen or heard of them before? Carrie Fisher used to look really good in a bikini. The redone musical number in Jabba's palace for the special edition is completely moronic. I checked out the original ending on Youtube, and I'm not bothered that they replaced the Yub Nub song. I think I did a pretty good job of padding this out. I'm done now.