HERE TO BE RECRUITED: Milk is certainly a fine film, with darn fine performances throughout, and by its nature, it's hard to talk about it without getting political, but three points that in my view weaken the film:

1. The film owes a significant (and acknowledged at length in the credits) debt to Oscar winning doc The Times of Harvey Milk, and already, more people have probably seen the biopic than saw the documentary. That said, the biopic doesn't add a lot that wasn't in the documentary. Sure, there's a bit about Milk's tumultous personal life and a couple of miscellaneous points here and there (some of which may be the result of dramatic license), that aren't cribbed straight from the documentary, but the film doesn't really add to what's already out there.
2. Obviously, California's passage of Prop 8 in November is important context to how viewers react, and the film was completed before the passage of Prop 8. To the extent we now read it as a response to Prop 8, it seems misguided. It's entirely possible there would have been a substantial number of people who'd oppose Prop 6 (the 70s California prop calling for homosexuals to be fired as teachers) but support Prop 8. It all reads just a little too on-the-nose and generalized. (Though that's not the fault of the filmmakers.)
3. The most interesting part of the film is the part that explores the relationship between Milk and his assassin, Dan White. I wish there'd been more of that and the filmmakers showed us more of White, which would have helped limit the extent to which the biopic becomes a hagiography.

It's still a very well-done and moving film, especially for those not familiar with the Milk story already, but certainly isn't dislodging Slumdog Millionaire and Tell No One from the top of my list thus far this year.

AND WHEN I SEE HOW SAD YOU ARE IT SORTA MAKES ME ... HAPPY! Having witnessed first-hand a stadium-closing NFC Championship Game loss at Veterans Stadium,** I've got to say my heart just grew three sizes watching the Baltimore Ravens close Texas Stadium tonight by running right through the Dallas defense.

In a year with so many exhilarating sports moments -- Wimbledon, the 4x100 men's freestyle relay, Bissinger v. Leitch and so many others we need to review at some point -- this is a relatively minor one, but I'm grinning ear-to-ear right now.

** Yes, the Phillies still played their season thereafter, but it was the last football game at the Vet.

ESPN - Former major league pitcher Dock Ellis dies at 63

TAKE A TRIP ONE SUMMER'S DAY/DON'T FORGET YOU HAVE TO PLAY: Dock Ellis, the journeyman pitcher who in 1970 threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid, has passed away at the age of 63. Said Ellis, "The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't." Where does that rank in the list of extraordinary single-game achievements?

MONIER? We haven't blogged about Dirty Sexy Money in a while, but hasn't this season been a disappointment? Sure, there's still been some great stuff--Glenn Fitzgerald and Donald Sutherland have both been darn fine--but story points have just become incredibly ludicrous. Dumb story calls include, but are not limited to:

• Pretty much everything to do with the Nola Lyons plot. including her ludicrous affair with Jeremy, the Nola-Simon "who's zooming who?" plot, and the like.
• Brian's new wife is magically cured of cancer as his previous wife and kids just disappear.
• The decision to break up Nick and his wife and make Nick less of the "one sane man in a crazy world" than he was last season. This makes him far less of a sympathetic character.
  
• Having Leticia basically disappear for much of the season--seriously, I hope Jill Clayburgh is being paid well for her few lines, and I don't think she's had a single really substantive scene with Sutherland this year.
  
• Certain plotlines this week at least bordered on shark jumpage--Patrick becoming a malicious murderer? Dutch George may not actually be dead?

This was a pretty damn great show last season. Too bad it's going out on a low note.

TIME FOR ANOTHER TRIP TO REHAB? In addition to whatever other addictions she's battling, The Sun reports that Amy Winehouse is addicted to UK game show Hole In The Wall and playing Rock Band.

AND HE CARRIES THE REMINDERS OF EVERY GLOVE THAT LAID HIM DOWN OR CUT HIM, 'TIL HE CRIED OUT IN HIS ANGER AND HIS SHAME: It helps to have a SAG member in the family, and especially one who travels with screeners. So thank you, Molly, for bringing The Wrestler east on this trip.

So here's the thing: Mickey Rourke? Pretty much everything you heard -- a charm and decency one can't fake, and obvious and moving parallels to his real-life woes. He does some really nice things with what he's given, and the film does an exceptional job of capturing life at the bottom of the professional wrestling world. The physical universe of this film feels deeply authentic.

What Rourke's given, unfortunately, is a thuddingly obvious melodrama, with anvil-laden speeches that make sure you never miss the point. I mean, really, did he need to say to his estranged daughter, “Now I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat, and I’m alone and I deserve to be alone. I just don’t want you to hate me"? This film doesn't seem to have learned the difference of show v. tell. It's got all the subtlety of being punctured by a staple gun.

That said, Rourke's charisma does carry you a pretty long way through this, and there are little moments -- at a deli counter, by the boardwalk, playing a twenty-year-old Nintendo wrestling game in which he appears -- that do get to you. So lower your expectations, and enjoy the Rourke.

WHEN YOU REALLY THINK ABOUT IT, "I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU'LL JOIN US AND THE WORLD WILL LIVE AS ONE" CAN TAKE ON A PRETTY OMINOUS TONE: "X of the year" is a weird and slippery concept, like "most valuable player." It could mean best X, most popular X, or most influential X. In the hands of a different blog, we might put our heads together and try to isolate the best music of the year, or the most popular among the best music, or the best among the most popular music. But this is not a different blog, and so I am hereby awarding the 2008 ALOTT5MA Song of the Year to David Archuleta's "Imagine."

But it is depressing where the original was hopeful, you may object. It is boring filler, pandering to the least common denominator. It is sung by the hollowest of human beings, a husk of a boy shriveling as his dreams of a day without obligations to prepubescent girls, postmenopausal cat lovers, and pedophiles drift away. Hey, I hear you. But it makes no difference.

By my count, Archuleta wheeled out his "Imagine" one hundred and seventeen times during the twelve episodes of last season's AI finals, give or take. In any event, he flogged that horse every chance he got. It sounded as if he took Lennon's sheet music as the merest suggestion without ever hearing the simple, straightforward original, or at least as if he were offended by Lennon's failure to pack in enough vocal runs to make the girls squeal. He gave it a comic emphasis:

no need for greed or hungerrrrrrr
a BROTHERHOOOOOOD! of MAAAAAAAAAAAAN
Imagine all THE! peoplllllle …

Allow me this heresy, please: this was never that great a song to begin with. It is a bit obvious, right? Too on-the-nose? I mean, at some point people figured out that a good pop love song can't just whisper "I love you I love you" in reverent tones, so there has to be a better way of conveying "I want world peace" than saying "world peace, please." Yet if the original was a bit adolescent, a bit McCartneyesque, in presentation, at least it had content. Archuleta, however, manages to separate the words from their literal meaning, so that they are just a string of hummable syllables arranged in a melodic order intended to suggest not any kind of specific complaint (religion, commercialism, human imperfection) but rather a generic, abstract unease and a concomitant hope that by really caring about it it will go away. And by separating the words from their literal meaning, Archuleta doesn't alleviate the triteness; he amplifies it. Everything is stickier, slower, more dour, and, paradoxically, more conspicuously, facetiously earnest.

And that's the best thing about the song, the truly impressive part of it -- its lavish, epic cynicism. I've read a lot about Archuleta's quiet paring away of an important part of the song's thesis ("imagine there's no heaven … no religion too"), ostensibly because it's at odds with his own beliefs, but isn't it more likely that the verse was cut because it might offend significant portions of his fan base -- of the aforementioned prepubescent girls and postmenopausal cat lovers, if not the pedophiles? After all, we can't really take seriously the notion that Archuleta agrees with any part of the song at all. It takes a pair of giant, diamond-encrusted balls to sit through the Seacrest dramatic open, the giant spaceship and computerized metallic vocalist and montage of triumphant belters credits, the ads for iPods and talking-dog movies, the Ford skits, the Coke product placement, the SYTYCD and X-Factor cross-promotion, and a series of lectures by Simon Cowell about what will and won't mint money, and then submit, as one's stage-parent-certified entry in the competition for the right to a record contract, a featured spot on the national tour, and the official title of "Idol," the statement that we should "imagine no possessions." The fine print, if you will: No possessions other than David Archuleta CDs, mugs, sparkly pencils, sticker books, and t-shirts (with holes where the dead, dead eyes should be). One must be a special kind of genius, a kind of commercialist-savant, to pull this off and still come out the other end looking more like Benji than Billy Mack.

So what if Archuleta's "Imagine" was more industry than craft (the opposite of, say, my favorite pop song of the year, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin's "Think I Wanna Die")? So what if he didn't beat that ecumenical music-lover and Daughtry tag-along David Cook? AI is just a battle, and when the key battle comes down to Cook vs. The Archuleta, Archuleta's side has already won the war. And it's muscular displays of mock-earnest sentiment like Archuleta's "Imagine" that prove it.