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Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps said, "I used this book as an inspiration for the biggest win of my career when we ended UCLA's all-time 88-game winning streak in 1974." Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban. Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. |
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Observe and Report (0/10) by Tony Medley Run time 86 minutes. Where does integrity fit into creative arts? Smut sells. So does that mean that smut is OK, so long as it makes money? If you were the head of a studio and someone came to you with a movie that was full of profanity, nudity, and had a disgraceful moral tone, a movie that offended you personally, would you give it the green light if it looked as if it would make money? Is that your highest value, making money? Or should you have some obligation to art and society to publish material that raised the level of society?
I ask this question because for several years I have played
bridge against a lady at the Beverly Hills Bridge Club. She is a lady in
the true sense of the word. She is very proud of her son who happens to
run Warner Bros. studio. I wonder if she would be proud of him if she
saw that he gave the green light to this film. I wonder if he rushed
over to her house with a This movie is an obscenity. It is obscene using any standard. It has full frontal male nudity (an old fat flasher), but that’s the least of it. It appeals to the lowest standards of language and morality. Since the star is Seth Rogen, it should come as no surprise that it is loaded with F bombs. Rogen has never been in a film I’ve seen that had him speaking in any scene without uttering a plethora of F bombs. This man is apparently incapable of speaking without using the word. He uses F bombs prolifically and obviously the purpose of his usage is to substitute for humor, the sense of which he clearly lacks. If there is no F bomb in anything he says, there is no reaction from the audience. It is only when he populates his sentences with “F” that he gets a reaction from the audience This movie insults its audience. I’ve seen disgusting, horrible films in my time, but this is the worst. It disgraces everyone associated with it, especially the studio that made it and distributed it, Warner Bros. This film is in such astonishingly poor taste that it labels the taste of the people involved as pathetic purveyors of pornography. If Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (who, when ruling on pornography, said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it”) saw this, he’d know what he was seeing without need for a second's evaluation. The flimsy plot is that Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen), who suffers from bipolar disease, is chief cop at a mall and he’s trying to catch a flasher. His antagonist in trying to catch the flasher is a real cop, Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta). What’s surprising about this film is that Liotta usually drops lots of F bombs. He doesn’t do it much in this film, maybe because Rogen uses all that were available. Anna Faris is the cheap tart, Brandi, to whom Ronnie is attracted and Collette Wolfe plays Nell, a truly ridiculous character, beautiful, sweet, and soft-spoken. Writer-director Jody Hill manipulates the audience’s sympathy about her because he has her apparently disabled and unable to walk. Turns out she just had a temporary bad leg. She seems a normal person, but Hill has her with a crush on Ronnie. Nobody in his or her right mind could have any kind of affection for Ronnie, who acts like an unappealing vulgarian. Her attraction to him is totally without credibility. Just as an example of the degradation to which this exposes its unsuspecting audience, Brandi gets horribly drunk and vomits. Ronnie promptly kisses her. That’s not funny; it’s stomach-turningly disgusting. I had anticipated that “Paul Blair Mall Cop” was going to be dreary, but it turned out to be surprisingly entertaining. I anticipated that this was going to be terrible, but it is worse than terrible. There is not one second of entertainment in it. There is not one character of even the remotest interest. The ending is shocking, trivializing violence to a degree rarely seen in a movie. The filmmakers manipulate the ending into trying to make the audience believe that Ronnie, who has acted as an imbecile throughout, is some sort of hero. I saw it at a regular showing, so I tarried after and asked a few people if they had ever seen a worse movie. None had. This is the kind of movie that could have never been made during the years of the code. The code has been decried by left-wingers, but when there was no nudity in films, when there was no graphic sex, when there was no graphic violence, when there was no profanity, movies were much better. Who can deny that many more entertaining, memorable movies were made in the 34 years of the code between 1934 and 1968 than have been made in the 41 years since? There is one word that captures the essence of this movie and everyone involved in its making and distribution: despicable.
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