I wish I knew how to quit you, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu.

I'm generally not big on the idea of "giving up" on filmmakers. For one thing, it seems like kind of an empty gesture, like when I was younger and I'd tell everyone I was "boycotting" certain movies that I didn't want to see instead of just keeping my mouth shut and seeing something else like a grown-up. For another, you never know when a director might surprise you. After all, if I gave up on every director who hit a cold spell, I would've missed out on great movies like Tetro, Goodbye to Language, and The Hurt Locker (Bigelow's Weight of Water/K-19: The Widowmaker seems like ancient history now, eh?).

That said, it's somewhat easier with directors I never cared for all that much in the first place. To cite two obvious examples, I haven't bothered with Marc Forster ever since he managed to make a dirt-boring Bond movie, and I'm not looking to partake of another Matthew Barney filmed thingamajig now that he's made a movie involving him and Bjork having sex, chopping off each other's limbs, and morphing into whales, only wayyyyyyyy less interesting than that synopsis would suggest.

Then there are the in-between cases. For instance, take the strange case of M. Night Shyamalan. Conventional wisdom states that he's been more or less in free-fall ever since Signs, but I can't quite cut the cord. Sixth Sense is pretty awesome, both Unbreakable and Signs are tense as hell, and his subsequent (original) works have had some great moments in between the goofball digressions and jarring tonal dissonances. Even The Happening had that great scene with the handgun.

That's also how I feel about Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. I can't write off the guy, because he's clearly talented. That's been clear ever since he made Amores Perros, which shares some of the miserablistic tendencies of his later work but is so propulsive, so thrumming with energy, that it never comes across as a wallow. Sadly, the films that followed didn't really capitalize on that potential. 21 Grams is well-acted but suffers from a overly-deterministic plotting and a needlessly jumbled chronology. I sort of hated Babel, which in addition to coming across as a globalized version of Crash (which I also hated) but boasted one of the worst throw-my-drink-at-the-screen moments in recent memory- the scene involving the Moroccan boy spying on his sister, in case you're playing at home.

So after getting burned twice in a row, I felt pretty comfortable skipping Biutiful, especially when I heard it was the sort of wallow that Amores Perros somehow managed to avoid becoming. And I was ready to do the same for Birdman until the buzz began to generate. Had AGI turned over a new leaf? Well... yes and no. "Yes" in the sense that he was no longer engaging in grief porn in order to come across as a serious storyteller; "no" in the sense that his work was as wanky and show-offy as ever, with the jagged editing and shuffled chronologies traded in for a faux-single shot gambit that was as attention-grabbing as it was pointless (Scott Tobias did a great job explaining a lot of my issues with the movie in his review for the late, much-missed Dissolve). More and more, it seems like the guy is the sort of talented filmmaker whose talented is deployed in ways that rub me the wrong way, like a gifted impersonator who spends his entire routine doing pitch-perfect impressions of Jerry Lewis and Gilbert Gottfried. There's no denying the skill, but you can only watch for so long.

So I've decided to give Gonzalez Iñarritu one more shot with the upcoming The Revenant. Once again, he's doing the single-shot thing, but I hold out hope that maybe this time it'll serve a purpose- say, to allow the audience to experience the hero's ordeal through his eyes, or at least at his side. But if I don't like this one either, I don't know how many more chances I'll give him. But then, you never know with talented filmmakers. I mean, I stuck with Woody Allen through Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, AND Scoop, right? I can handle damn near anything at this point.

White Elephant 2015: Did you know your last name is an adverb?

Here is my contribution to this year’s White Elephant Blogathon, hosted once again by Philip Tatler over at Diary of a Country Pickpocket. To the person to suggested this- if you love this movie, sorry I didn’t enjoy it more. And if you hate this movie, sorry I didn’t dislike it more. Anyway…

What can one say about a movie so resolutely mediocre as Amy Heckerling’s Johnny Dangerously? I realize this question may come off as a cutesy lead-in to a dismissive review, but I’m honestly at a loss for what to say about a movie this run-of-the-mill. That’s not to say it’s unpleasant, but it’s the sort of movie meant to stumbled upon on basic cable in the mid-afternoon, and which you’ll watch for a few minutes while you wait for a phone call you’re expecting or for guests to arrive. It’s not terrible by any means, but it practically evaporates on contact.

Johnny Dangerously was one of a rash of gag-based comedies cranked out by Hollywood in the wake of Airplane!, hoping to replicate that film’s success. Here, Heckerling and her team of writers (the movie credits four), took on gangster movies, particularly the classic Warner Bros. cops-and-robbers pictures of the 1930s. Granted, this wasn’t a particularly fresh genre to spoof, but the movie’s lack of timeliness isn’t the issue. The real issue is that it’s not particularly funny.

That’s not to say it isn’t at least fitfully amusing. One of the movie’s best-remembered gags involves gangster Roman Moronie (Richard Dimitri), who spouts off phony curse words in a cartoonish, foreign-sounding accent. When he starts fuming and calling his enemies a bunch of “farging iceholes” and the like, it’s genuinely funny, and it’s even funnier when he’s called upon to deliver a prepared deposition before the District Attorney, and while it’s still full of faux obscenities (“the mouth on that guy!” exclaims his chief rival), it’s delivered in a perfectly flat voice.

But for every joke that hits, there are roughly a half-dozen that don’t quite reach the mark. Part of the problem is that Heckerling and her writers mistake “zany” for funny, as in a scene where the titular gangster (Michael Keaton) shows his law-student kid brother Tommy (Griffin Dunne) an educational film called “Your Testicles and You” in an attempt to steer him towards clean living. The shots of men walking around with freakishly bulging crotches (due to misuse, of course) is sort of amusing, but the movie doesn’t really do anything with this. It’s a one-off gag, and the payoff- an aghast Tommy proclaiming “I’m going back to law school!”- is weak.

Bits like this are typical of the movie’s approach to humor. Johnny Dangerously goes for obvious laughs, but doesn’t really go to the effort of making them really funny. Johnny’s chief rival Danny Vermin (Joe Piscopo, best remembered as the guy who “wasn’t that bad- really!” on early-1980s SNL) has an oft-repeated catchphrase in which he responds to a perceived slight by saying that one of his family members did it to him “… once.” And that’s it. It’s not a bad idea for a running joke, but it feels like the first draft of the joke, not the final version. A lot of the movie’s humor feels like that, like the writers should have worked on their ideas a little more in order to make them sharper and funnier.

There are a few things I enjoyed. First off, the cast is good. Peter Boyle is solid as Johnny’s mentor, the benevolent crime boss Jocko Dundee, and Maureen Stapleton gets some good bits as Johnny and Tommy’s beloved Ma. At the time Stapleton was only a few years removed from her Oscar-winning performance in Reds, but she was enough of a consummate professional that she gave just the right comedic spin to the character, even in wackier moments like when she blurts out that she “swings both ways.” Though not even Stapleton could pull off the moment in which she dismisses Tommy’s do-gooder impulses by telling him he “sounds like a fag choir boy.” Jokes at the expense of homosexuals were an unfortunate tendency of 1980s-era comedy, and Johnny Dangerously falls into that trap, most egregiously with a District Attorney played by Danny DeVito, who gets a little too hands-on with Tommy and coos with delight over the gift of a red smoking jacket. And speaking of dating poorly, Vermin’s line that his custom made .88 Magnum “shoots through schools” would cause audiences to wince nowadays.

However, if Johnny Dangerously works at all, it’s because of Michael Keaton. Three decades, two Batman movies, and one talking snowman later, it’s easy to forget a time when Keaton was best known for being Hollywood’s funniest smirking wiseass, but he’s sort of perfect here. The character of Johnny Dangerously was inspired primarily by James Cagney, and Keaton captures Cagney’s puckish energy and cocky strut without resorting to impersonation or parody. Birdman be damned- THIS is the Keaton I miss, and seeing him in Johnny Dangerously, I despaired that he wasn’t given better material by the filmmakers. It’s an inspired performance, and if only the filmmakers had been working on that level of inspiration, this could’ve been a comedy classic instead of the largely forgettable time-waster it ended up being.

New WHO Essentials, Part 1: The Russell T. Davies Years

Not long ago, I posted a short remark on Facebook referencing a (then purely hypothetical) list of favorite Doctor Who episodes. But as tends to happen with me, the goal of the list changed while I was making it. Eventually I decided that rather than rattle of a list of my favorites, I’d try to include lots of different kinds of episodes on this list, in the interest of picking titles that represent as many of the different stripes of modern-day Who episodes as I thought worthy of inclusion. In the process, I decided the only way to really do this would be to split the list in two, with the first devoted to the four seasons executive produced by Russell T Davies, and second (which is still in the conception stage) to focus on the Stephen Moffat years.

This list is presented in chronological order of air date. Additionally, I've decided to count two-parters as a single episode for the purposes of this list. As always, feel free to disagree in the comments.

“The Empty Child” / “The Doctor Dances” (season 1) – written by Stephen Moffat As tends to be the case with many TV shows, reboot or not, series 1 of Doctor Who got off to something of a rough start, with some questionable effects and an overreliance on the flatulent but not particularly frightening enemies the Slitheen. However, Christopher Eccleston’s sole season in the TARDIS did produce one stone-cold classic, this two-parter set during the London Blitz. Fans of the series and its spinoffs remember this episode fondly as our introduction to the dashing omnisexual con man Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), to say nothing of the comedy inherent in Billie Piper’s Rose hanging from a barrage balloon in the middle of an air raid, sporting a Union Jack t-shirt. But it also produced one of the Davies years’ most lingering images, that of a little boy wearing a gas mask and asking, “are you my mummy?” The solution to the mystery of the little boy is first haunting, then poignant. The first sign that the new Who was set for the long haul.

“New Earth” (season 2) – written by Davies With the first season of Doctor Who behind him, Davies set forth in season 2 to expand the possibilities of the show’s universe, and this began with its premiere episode, in which the Doctor takes Rose further into the future than she’s ever traveled, to the city of New New York on the titular planet after the original Earth has been destroyed. After arriving, they encounter a number of characters they met during the first season, namely the ancient Face of Boe and the last “pure” human, Cassandra, who is little more than a face in the middle of a sheet of tightly-stretched skin. However, she doesn’t stay that way, having formulated a system for transplanting her consciousness into others- in this case, Rose. Davies resolved in season 2 to write Billie Piper an episode that would allow her to be funny, and she’s a hoot here, with her lower-class wardrobe contrasting nicely with the snobbish, bitchy lines coming from Cassandra’s brain (it’s particularly funny listening to her attempt Cockney rhyming slang). The Doctor would return to New New York the following season with Martha in the similarly good episode “Gridlock,” but if I’m forced to choose only one New Earth episode, this is it.

“The Girl in the Fireplace” (season 2) – written by Moffat One of the original edicts mandated by the BBC during the first years of the original series was that Doctor Who should serve as an educational show, with storylines set against the backdrop of history alternating with the monster storylines. This mandate eventually fell by the wayside when audiences responded more to the creepy-crawlies than to the educational episodes, but even in its new incarnation the producers include the occasional historical adventure, and this one may be the best. Taking a page from the best-selling The Time-Traveler’s Wife, the storyline finds the Tenth Doctor popping in and out of the life of Reinette Poisson (the fragrant Sophia Myles), later to become Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Henry V. The primary threat comes from some nifty-looking clockwork maintenance droids, who are stalking Reinette through time for their own (icky) purposes, but the real highlight is the chemistry between Myles and David Tennant, who demonstrates enough wit, charm, and dashing romantic spirit to cement himself as one of the great “boyfriend doctors.”

“Rise of the Cybermen” / “The Age of Steel” (season 2) – written by Tom MacRae One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between the Davies years and the seasons exec-produced by Stephen Moffat is that the Davies years seemed to place a stronger emphasis on character. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the frequency we see the families of the Doctor’s companions and other associates. Whereas in the Moffat seasons family members would occasionally turn up then disappear with scarcely a thought given to their whereabouts, Davies and his writers would often give his characters complicated family dynamics off which they could bounce the main storylines involving the Doctor. This was done to particularly good effect in this two-part episode, which presents an alternate-universe version of Rose’s family, in which Rose’s father is not only still alive but a successful business man, her blue-collar mum is a nouveau-riche snob, and Rose has been replaced by a dog (also named Rose). Meanwhile, the alternate version of Rose’s off-and-on boyfriend Mickey (Noel Clarke, who was never better than he was here) is a revolutionary, and the Cybermen, one of the Doctor’s oldest adversaries, are the brainchild of a dying inventor. MacRae brings these plot strands together capably, but what makes the episode really effective is how it illustrates the idea that, even in a universe full of unlimited possibilities, you still have to choose what’s most important.

“Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood” (season 3) – written by Paul Cornell In most of his adventures, the Doctor comes off as an intergalactic superhero, landing in a perilous situation and clearing it up through cleverness, an encyclopedic knowledge of the universe, and technological savvy. But in this two-part episode he’s far more human, literally- in response to a threat, he actually becomes human, in the process losing his memories and his identity. Here we see him as a teacher in a boys’ boarding school, even embarking on a sweet romance with the school’s nurse. Eventually, a group of sinister aliens sniff him out and launches an attack on the school. But most of the story’s drama has less to do with the alien threat than with companion Martha’s (Freema Agyeman, in perhaps her finest performance on the series) perspective on the event, as the Doctor to whom she’s sworn loyalty not only can’t remember who he really is- or who she is, for that matter- but also is powerless to stop the threat. In the end, the Doctor we all know returns, but not without some sacrifice.

“Blink” (season 3) – written by Moffat With a series called Doctor Who, you would think that the producers would put the Doctor front and center, and in most cases you’d be right. But on a number of occasions, producer Russell T Davies shook up the formula in order to serve up a story in which the Doctor’s involvement was more tangential. Season 2’s “Love & Monsters” told the story of a group of Doctor fanboys and –girls, while Season 4’s “Turn Left” imagined an alternate reality in which then-companion Donna (Catherine Tate) had never met the Doctor. But best of all- and one of the overall highlights of latter-day Who- is this episode, which introduced audiences to perhaps the eeriest of modern-day Who baddies, the Weeping Angels. The focus of the story is Sally Sparrow (future Oscar nominee Carrie Mulligan), who happens upon the Angels and soon finds herself having to contend with repeated threats from them, with little more than oblique hints from the Doctor (a message written on a wall, a one-sided conversation included as a DVD Easter Egg) to get her out of the jam. Clever, impeccably performed, and above all, seriously spooky.

“Voyage of the Damned” (special episode) – written by Moffat One of the hallmarks of the Davies years is that, unlike the more neurotic incarnations that followed, Davies’ Doctors genuinely liked people as a whole. This was most apparent in the episodes when the Doctor was without his usual companions and had to enlist people on the fly to help him save the day. Given the frequent turnover of the Tenth Doctor’s companions, this happened quite a bit, and one of the temporary companions (Donna) ended up a full-season companion later on. “Planet of the Dead,” in which Doctor #10 teams up with rich-girl-turned-jewel-thief Lady Christina De Souza, is a lot of fun, I’m giving the edge to “Voyage of the Damned” for three reasons: (1) the fact that the story is set on a space-edge version of the Titanic, which at one point ends up in free-fall and headed right for Buckingham Palace, (2) the introduction of Donna’s ornery old grandpa, Wilf, and especially (3) because the episode’s single-serving companion is played by Kylie Minogue, who would have been an awesome companion if somehow Catherine Tate hadn’t been available.

“The Fires of Pompeii” (season 4) – written by James Moran and Davies Of all the Tenth Doctor’s companions, Catherine Tate’s Donna was the most three-dimensional, mostly because she wasn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with her centuries-old Time Lord traveling partner, which made her a welcome change from Rose and Martha, both of whom nursed crushes on the Doctor. But with so many classic Donna moments, which am I to choose? I’m tempted to pick “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which provided the funniest Doctor/Donna scene of the series. But instead, I’ll give the edge to “The Fires of Pompeii,” in which she gets plenty of comedic moments while also displaying her other great strength, which was to provide an empathetic sounding board for the Doctor, encouraging him to follow his better (non-Weeping) angel. Throw in appearances not only by a future companion (Karen Gillen) but also a future Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and you’ve got yourself a damn fine hour of Doctor Who.

“Silence in the Library” / “Forest of the Dead” (season 4) – written by Moffat For sheer horror, it’s hard to top the Weeping Angels, but the Vashta Nerada come close. In this episode, the Doctor and Donna land in a planet-sized library that contains copies of all the books in the universe, but which is totally uninhabited except for the Vashta Nerada, a race of microscopic and highly carnivorous creatures referred to as “the piranhas of the air.” Or is it all the dream of a troubled little girl? Doesn’t matter- this two-parter is full of unnerving moments, not least during the “ghosting” scenes, in which the consciousness of a recently-deceased person continues to converse with those around him. In terms of pure inventiveness, this storyline is hard to top. All that plus the introduction of River Song, of whom we’d be seeing much more during the Moffat years.

“The Stolen Earth” / “Journey’s End” (season 4) – written by Davies Whether this is best Tennant/Davies episode is a debate for another time. But in many ways this is the ultimate Tennant/Davies episode, to which the entire series up to that point had been building. The baddies are the Daleks, naturally, unleashing perhaps their boldest scheme yet, pulling the Earth (and 26 other planets) out of their normal places in the universe into a formation in order to create a “reality bomb.” But never mind the details. This episode has everything one would want from a Tennant episode – Daleks a-plenty (including their creator Davros and the crazed Dalek Caan), multiple Tennants, and Donna finally fulfilling her destiny as a companion. Plus there are guest appearances galore, including a scene in which the Tenth Doctor’s companions past and present all fly the TARDIS together. Tennant would continue as the Doctor in a handful of subsequent specials, but this feels like the climax to which the Davies years had been building all along.

“The Next Doctor” (special episode) – written by Davies The Christmas episode was a new Doctor Who tradition that began with Tennant’s first full episode. These episodes, which have rarely involved the current companions, are generally stand-alone stories meant to tide viewers over until the beginning of the next season. A number of these episodes have been noteworthy (including the aforementioned “Voyage of the Damned”), and I have a soft spot for the Matt Smith-starring “A Christmas Carol,” in which the Eleventh Doctor softens the heart of grinchy industrialist Michael Gambon. But I’m going with “The Next Doctor” here, largely for the ingenious touch of bringing the Doctor face to face with himself (in a manner of speaking) by placing him in the path of another man who claims to be the Doctor and does the Doctor’s work, after his own fashion. Part of the novelty of this episode was that Davies paired Tennant with David Morrissey, who at the time was rumored to be the frontrunner to succeed Tennant at the TARDIS controls. Alas, it wasn’t to be- which is kind of too bad, because Morrissey’s “Doctor” cuts a similar sort of courtly swashbuckling figure to Doctor #3. But what I enjoy most about this is that it gives Tennant the chance to do a victory lap, the first in a series of them culminating with…

“The End of Time” (Parts One and Two) (special episode) – written by Davies The Doctor’s most famous adversaries are The Daleks, but no enemy has made the fight more personal than The Master. After turning up periodically on the show’s original incarnation, The Master (played here by John Simm) first appeared on the new version during season 3, making life hellish for the Doctor in particular and the world in general. After being vanquished during season 3’s finale, the Master (a Time Lord himself) was resurrected again for Tennant’s final two-part episode. The Master’s plan is an especially crafty one, in which he invades the body of nearly every person on Earth, from the President of the United States to the head of NATO command- and the only thing standing between him and total world domination is that pesky Doctor, with the occasional clumsy but always loyal assistance of good ol’ Wilf. Does the Master prevail? You can probably guess. But what really puts this episode over the edge into classic status is the denouement, in which the Doctor (who to be fair takes FOREVER to regenerate) pays one last visit to his old friends before stumbling into the TARDIS and proclaiming, with a tear in his voice, “I don’t want to go.” We know the feeling, Doctor #10. We hated to see you go, but we loved to watch you leave.

The Forgotten One-Season Wonder

One of the best ways to achieve a cult status among TV aficionados is to be an awesome show that gets canceled after one season or less. After all, if a show doesn't last very long, it doesn't get a chance to jump the shark (or whatever we're calling it these days). Rather than bemoaning how it lost its luster over time, we get to sit around and talk about how it never got the chance to reach its full potential.

Yet among devotees of "brilliant but canceled" television, there's one classic show that rarely gets mentioned- ProStars, which debuted in September 1991 and was yanked unceremonious after one 13-episode season. Maybe it's just snobbery that causes them to overlook a show that was originally broadcast as Saturday-morning animated fare, but that shortchanges one of the greatest shows of its day. Therefore, in an effort to rehabilitate the show's critical rep and rescue it from the dustbin of pop-culture history, I hereby present...

TEN REASONS WHY PROSTARS WAS/IS AWESOME

1. Because, well, it's about Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky solving international crimes. It's like James Bond meets CAPTAIN PLANET, only with world-famous professional athletes, which makes at least 20% more awesome right there.

2. That theme song. It's "We Will Rock You," but with new lyrics - "We are / We are / PROSTARS!" Of course, it seems like the lyricist ran out of inspiration about Michael - "Jordan jams, in your face / gonna put them in their place" - but why nitpick? This was actually the first exposure I ever had to "We Will Rock You," and I remember one time when I was at a baseball game with a friend and they started playing the original version over the PA system. I turned to my friend's dad and asked him why they were playing the ProStars theme song, and he told me to shut and drink my beer so he could get back to watching the game. Ah, memories.

3. Because this was 1991, they made an effort to work a "Bo Knows" joke into every episode. That's what you call topical humor, folks.

4. One of the show's recurring villains was named Clockwork Delorange. For those of you playing at home, that's a Kubrick reference. JUST LIKE ON "THE SIMPSONS."

5. More topical humor: in one episode, the ProStars take on a gang of basketball-playing goons called the Pontiac Hoods. Anyone who remembers the Bad Boy Pistons of the era should appreciate that reference, I'd think.

6. The ProStars team was made up of three members, which is a dramatically clean number. Think of most good jokes you've heard involving a group of people- more often than not, there are three people in that group. One person to introduce the idea, one person to cause the rising action or complicate things, and the third to lead to a resolution. I'm pretty sure Aristotle came up with that. Anyway, there were three ProStars, but they represented all four of the "major" sports. Michael played basketball, Bo played both baseball and football, and Wayne represented hockey, which after Gretzky got traded to the L.A. Kings in the late 80s was a sport Americans were forced to acknowledge was played more than every four years at the Winter Olympics. Today, in our more inclusive times, the ProStars would have to welcome all kinds of other members just so there could be a hero for everyone in the audience. There would be at least one female ProStar (maybe one or both of the Williams sisters, I dunno). There would no doubt be a futbol-playing ProStar for the Latin audience. Who knows, they might even find a way to squeeze in an Asian-American. Meanwhile, ProStars' idea of diversity was that THEY INCLUDED A WHITE GUY.

7. And yet... if there was a third wheel on ProStars (and considering how many members were on the team there would kind of have to be) it was Gretzky. Which is sort of mind-boggling when you consider that America was still struggling with the idea of political correctness and racial sensitivity, and some major-media commenters were still questioning, for example, how successful a black quarterback could be in the NFL (overlooking the fact that Doug Williams had recently led the Redskins to the Super Bowl and Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham were also doing just fine, thank you very much). But on ProStars, the team's most vital members- Michael and Bo- were the African-American ones. Michael was the leader and the brains of the outfit, and Bo was super-strong. Wayne was just kind of there to help out when needed, like if something required skating and/or smacking an object with a stick. A pretty limited skill set compared with the other two. Wayne wasn't just the white guy on the team - he was the TOKEN white guy.

8. So the writers, in an attempt to justify the Wayne character's presence on the show, turned him into the primary source of comic relief. Considering we were just coming out of the 1980s, a golden age for the cliché of the wacky black sidekick, that was a risky enough move. But look at how much of Wayne's comic relief stems from his appetite (seriously, the dude talks about food, like, all the time) and the show becomes downright subversive. That's right, kids - at the height of the War on Drugs and the era of Just Say No, the creators of ProStars were selling kids on the idea that one of the world's most celebrated athletes was HIGH AS A KITE. Suck it, Nancy Reagan!

9. This being the early 90s, they couldn't have a show aimed at kids without including a lesson at the end. But there's something about having the lesson delivered by Wayne Gretzky and Bo Jackson (and less frequently, Michael Jordan) goofing around on soundstages while pretending to talk to each other that makes it go down somewhat easier. Plus there's one episode that doesn't really have a moral, so Wayne just ends up talking about the history of the Stanley Cup. Because he could do that, y'know. His name was engraved on it four times (at the time, anyway).

10. And finally... because after one season, the producers of ProStars already felt like they had enough awesome material for a clip show. That takes some serious cast-iron balls, folks.

So anyway, where's our deluxe-edition ProStars Blu-Ray, Criterion? I hereby volunteer to write the essay.