John Adams courtesy HBO
So, if you have a dad like mine, this weekend is a cause for alarm. I’m a little too old to be giving him a can of cashews again, he has every book on the Civil War known to man, and I’ve probably stolen every tool he’s been given over the last 10 years. See? The man is impossible to buy for!To take a little pressure off myself (and hopefully inspire some of you equally desperate ACOIFs...Adult Children of Impossible Fathers), I offer a cheat sheet of DVD sets perfect for every daddy-o…For the Jock — The Major League bigwigs have released these spectacular Esssential Games collections celebrating baseball at its best, played in the best parks. So far, Fenway Park and Shea Stadium have gotten the love, but when Philadelphia’s beloved (now leveled) Veteran’s Stadium makes the cut, yours truly is going to be a very happy man.Buy Esssential Games on Amazon.comFor the Historian — Hello? HBO’s fantastic John Adams miniseries just hit the shelve...
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Per the Hollywood Reporter, Deadwood's Timothy Olyphant has been tapped to play Bruce Willis' nemesis in Live Free or Die Hard. Also new to the cast is Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destination 3) as McClane's daughter.... Kelly Preston and Michelle "the next Scarlett Johansson?" Trachtenberg are a single mom and her eldest daughter in The Possibility of Fireflies, an adaptation of director Dominique Paul's novel.... Per Variety, the Jim Henson Co. has enlisted Ahmet Zappa to pen a big-screen outing for the '80s kids' show Fraggle Rock.
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Now that the relationship between Paramount and Tom Cruise has soured, might the Mission: Impossible franchise be turned over to another of Hollywood's biggest stars? A rep for Brad Pitt tells the New York Daily News that rumblings of the fair-haired hunk heading up the next Mission are "totally made up".... Justin Long and Maggie Q are joining Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard, playing a sidekick for McClane and a world-class hacker, respectively.... Charlize Theron and Tommy Lee Jones are in talks to play a police detective and a father searching for his supposedly AWOL (but perhaps murdered) Iraq War-vet son in Crash director Paul Haggis' next project.
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Battlestar Galactica
OK, I know it's Dana Delany, but I think that given her obsessive collecting of files and other tin-foil-hat doings, we're not dealing with the compassionate Colleen McMurphy here. But before I'm proved right (with the hostage taking) and wrong (about the conspiracy-nut angle — she was actually correct about Adama having a Cylon onboard), we get to see poor Billy proposing to Dee, only to have his heart ripped out. It obviously tears her up inside, though, since she immediately dolls up and tells Apollo all about it over a romantic dinner on Cloud Nine.
Then everything goes Die Hard, with Delany's bitter widow, Sesha
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Question: There's a movie about a burglar who breaks into a house on Christmas Eve; the house belongs to a couple who bicker constantly. Their son lives there, too, and a bunch of awful relatives are on their way over for Christmas. In the end the dad and son help the burglar out. Can you tell me what it is?
Answer: It's the mean-spirited The Ref (1994), which stars Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey as the squabbling parents, Dennis Leary as the burglar who takes them hostage in their own home, and the incomparable Christine Baranski as the bitchy sister-in-law who can make the word "slip
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