"I tell ya, sometimes I don't know whether I'm on foot or horseback."

I saw Knocked Up today. Apatow still has that smidgen of mushiness that won't let him keep Rogen and Heigel apart despite all plausibility, but otherwise his work keeps getting stronger and funnier. Harold Ramis' cameo here is fitting, since Apatow is pretty much the new king of smart slob comedy and also taking it into relatively uncharted territory. I wouldn't be surprised if Leslie Mann gets a supporting actress Oscar nomination. Also, hooray for so many Freaks & Geeks cast members popping up in this and for Rogen beoming a star, especially after the film's early casting problems. I should probably check out Undeclared already.

I also watched the second episode of John From Cincinnati OnDemand today. I'm leaning more toward the "whoo boy, that's terrible" camp. Usually I like to get an insightful narrative glimpse at a world like surfing that I never gave a second thought about. Unfortunately, in this case it entails putting up with a poor man's Chauncey Gardner in the title role; a bunch of ersatz supernaturalism; and a couple of terrible key performances, among other problems. On the plus side, I like Ed O'Neill a lot in this, plus Bruce Greenwood is nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not quite ready to pack it in yet as Milch might still surprise me. Oh by the way, diehard Bicameral Mind fans - like the one who writes the fan fiction where me and Daily Kos team up to fight Hamas dressed as Lucha Libre wrestlers - may remember my crack about this show's promos being so terrible that they're what's killing all the bees. Well, turns out the show's theme song by Joe Strummer features a refrain about "killing all the bees!" Gadzooks! Maybe I've got some sort of tv theme song sixth sense. I'm gonna try to keep the streak going and predict that King Uszniewicz does the next version of "Way Down in the Hole" in The Wire season five.

Ah but it wasn't all Surfin' Jesus and pregnancy jokes today. I forgot to get Beastie Boys NYC tickets right at noon and missed out by a good 20 minutes. There goes that vacation, since I don't feel like paying the scumbag scalping pros on eBay. Also, I was going to go to a documentary concert film about the Ex at the Silverdocs festival tonight but fell asleep on the couch for a good hour and a half instead. Two bush league errors for sure. Maybe it's time for me to start practicing that Robert Downey Jr. "get it together" scene from Two Girls and a Guy, which unfortunately for me, since I'm probably the only one who saw that movie (with good reason), doesn't appear to be on YouTube.

I'll leave you for now with trailers for two movies I'm anticipating more than any others in recent memory. The first is for the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which won almost uniform raves at Cannes and certainly looks like a return to form for them, to put it mildly. The Coens had an excellent starting point as this was the only McCarthy book I've read that practically read like a movie script, although I'll be curious to see how they handle the elegiac ending.


Then there's Paul Thomas Anderson's suddenly very promising There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! and starring Daniel Day Lewis as a Texas oil tycoon. The cinematography looks stunning, almost like a Terrence Malick film.