Exhibit 8.26

The NFL Draft is coming up this weekend, and I'm writing a preview for Carlin's football blog The Realness Hurts.

Believe me, it's better this way.

The first piece is right here. I'll be posting more pieces as the week goes on so be sure to check them out if you're A) Bored or B) Bill Parcells.

Exhibit 2.14

I can't make it as I'll be somewhere between crying and drinking while attending a wedding, but don't miss this Saturday's Clean Part. 7pm at the Sheldon Art Gallery. It's free. It's awesome. I won't be there. What's not to love?

Exhibit 1.25

Watched a Humphrey Bogart movie over the weekend. It's probably idiotic to say it as he's arguably the most famous American actor of all time, but he's good. Real good. In a Lonely Place is a pretty typical noir about murder, dames, and all the rest, but it would be half the movie without Bogart slouching around looking to punch somebody. He spends a fair portion of the movie with his elbows against his chest with one arm bent up to take his cigarette from his mouth while the other holds a drink somewhere by his navel. Coiled up like that, he slithers through a crowd, but when pushed he strikes out and suddenly he's all arms and wild eyes.

It's a great performance, and I'm not sure the movie is quite as good though it's certainly worthy of being called a classic. Bogart is Dixon Steele, a screenwriter with a reputation for violence who finds himself the target of a murder investigation after a girl he (somewhat) innocently took home winds up dead. His story is corroborated at the police station by a beautiful neighbor (Gloria Grahame), and the two fall madly in love until his violent outbursts and the police pressure cause her suspicions that he actually committed the murder to come between them. The lesson here is that it's probably not a good idea to date someone you met while serving as an alibi for them in a murder investigation.

All of the posters and the film's trailer make prominent mention of the film's "Surprise Finish," and maybe it's just my post Usual Suspects/Fight Club/The Sixth Sense blues that has me thankful the ending is actually predictable, devastating, and entirely perfect for the movie. Had we gotten some kind of post-modern twist ending those taglines led me to suspect, I would have been pretty disappointed. Top ending possibilities if this movie had come out in 1998:

1. It is all a screenplay Humphrey is writing and/or he finds his actions predicted by the book he's adapting.


2. Gloria Grahame is somehow have been the neighbor and the murdered girl, but Humphrey Bogart is the only one who knows it and no one else believes him.


3. Humphrey Bogart is actually the one murdered but he doesn't know it. Or he's Keyzer Soze. Or actually there is no neighbor and it's only his imagination. Or whatever the hell.


4. While punching someone, Humphrey Bogart realizes he isn't a screenwriter, but is actually a man named Humphrey Bogart. He goes to the mall and buys a t-shirt with his picture on it and the collection of his greatest movies. The film ends with him watching the ending of the film.

Really makes you think. Doesn't it? No? You're right, it doesn't because those endings are dumb and dishonest upon reflection.

In any case, the real ending of the movie is great though IMDb leads me to believe there was actually a darker ending in mind which would have been great too. They are actually the same ending for all it matters which is why it's such a good ending. (Bizarrely, the trailer actually features an entirely different ending which you would only know after seeing the movie. That ending is awful but apparently makes for good trailer filler).

All and all a great movie experience. I'd be curious to read the reportedly very different book the movie was based on which is reissued by a feminist series for a university press (the author was a woman and apparently it is a somewhat unusual book for the time). The book is apparently a proto-Mr. Ripley wherein Humphrey Bogart's character is a first person narrator who kills someone and takes their identity. This, um, isn't what the movie is about.