Broken and Beautiful, Sunday Offseason Etc. Etc.

Hello hello. Lately, gotta admit: it has been very mood-swinging down here in this Caribbean Paradise. So, for comfort, I’ve turned on to several of my favorite disasters. Starting with, in my opinion, the most awesome album recorded:

First of all, what a cover. “Who’s Next” was released a coupla years after “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Los Who pee on a monolith. Punk as fuck, thoroughly. Of course, the nine songs on the album were “salvaged” from the Lifehouse project, a rock opera and communal art project so ambitious and fartsy that I started to feel kinda right-wing revulsion as I read the Wiki article about it. No matter. “Who’s Next” needs no context. Just play it. The songs have plenty of energy and snarl. And the drums on “Going Mobile” are incredible: total abandon by a madman. I could go on.

Next one, the Carson Palmer / Bruce Arians Cardinals (2013-2017). I’d stump for a 30 for 30 documentary on that team. I remember that team being an inevitable watch because those Cards were flexed a lot for prime time. Plus injuries wrecking very promising seasons. I also remember the media love given to Palmer, since he was denied playoff glory in Cincinatti on account of a gruesome injury after years and years of classic Bengalsing.

And when Palmer did make it to the playoffs for the Cards, he was awful. (Checks pro football reference, yep.) Great watch, as long as it wasn’t your team.

NFL NEWS

-Per espen: Remember back in 2022 when QBs Kyler, DangeRuss and Lamar! were negotiating their contracts and there was talk about teams colluding to NOT give them all the guaranteed money like the Browns did with Toxic Watson? Well, the case went to an arbitrator in January 2025, and he ruled that there was no collusion. The NFLPA appealed and last Friday, a three-judge panel upheld the ruling:

While the panel found that teams “were being invited to participate in collusion” by the NFL and called the effort “improper,” it ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove teams took part in the collusion.

Not enough evidence… Pft. Bears noting that real journalist Pablo Torre covered fully the story last year on his podcast. He was the one who discovered that the NFL and the players’ union agreed to keep the case confidential. I still don’t understand why it would be in the union’s interest to agree to that. USA Today had a nice summary when the story broke last summer.

Speaking of messy and muddled, there’s “Dune”, the 1984 David Lynch film.

I remember Roger Ebert called it the worst film of the year, but I liked it a lot. I didn’t know about the novel or anything before my teen brain was exposed to mutant navigators, scheming space nuns and crude Harkonnens going over the top with the violence and groping. But yeah, it was confusing and hard to follow. After watching the Villeneuve movies (which I love, especially the second), I watched “Dune” again and it was pretty, pretty, pretty good—janky effects notwithstanding. Plus José Ferrer as the emperor, peeps, a legend.

But more interesting for me was “Jodorowski’s Dune”, a documentary about one of the most famous failures in moviemaking. Alejandro Jodorowski, a well-known incoherent who makes films that fall between the batshit-to-compelling range, started to work on an adaptation during the 70s. Salvador Dalí was going to play the emperor; Mick Jagger, Feyd Rautha. Artists Moebius and H.R. Giger developed thousands of storyboards, and much of that work was repurposed for the xenomorphs in “Alien”. Jodorowski wanted his son Brontis, 12 at the time, to play Paul Atreides and the kid spent years training in martial arts for the role. It was going to be a 14-hour movie and with an insane ending that had nothing to do with the novels. Jodorowski explained his methodical approach to the adaptation:

FINALLY,

I am a Kids in the Hall stan. I think those five fellas are funny and brilliant and unique. So I watched “Brain Candy” again. Correction; I bought “Brain Candy”, KITH’s disaster flop, and watched it again. It is bleak and sick, so of course I loved it. But yeah, it’s pretty uneven.

Filming was a disaster. Dave Foley did not want to be in the movie, was not on speaking terms with most of the others, made many demands (one of them was not doing female characters, KITH’s best lady wtf?!), and is barely in the film. It’s an absence that is hard to avoid, and the movie does suffer for it.

Scott Thompson does blackface in a scene, and that is my sole complaint of the movie. Cancer Boy did not bother me. Hell, doing extreme stuff is what KITH does. And, hand to my heart, I am sure that Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor is a riff-off of this scientist:

And Kevin McDonald asking his dutiful son “Did you give the gun a good cleaning?” might be the funniest thing I’ve seen on film. Fully endorse, will watch again.

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