Hollywood must have guys (and some girls as well) in mind this week.  Knowing that a vast majority of sports fanatics are going to be way too busy this weekend watching the NCAA Tournament...often spending over eight hours each day doing so, there was absolutely no reason to release any decent movies this week.

Believe me; they aren’t.  So who is releasing more losers this week: Hollywood or the Cleveland Browns? (my wife, the diehard Brady Quinn fan, is going to get me for that one).

On the positive side, when you are ready to take a break from basketball Sunday night, there will be the next episode of “The Pacific” waiting for you.  As I had hoped, the first episode was nothing short of brilliant.  “Band of Brothers” had set such a high bar that I was afraid that this one might fail to meet such lofty expectations.  Another concern was they would take the exact same approach and tone as was done for Band of Brothers.  No worry on either account.

This is going to be a classic.

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Withholding information from Jack Bauer is now classified as a suicide attempt.

So THIS is episode that we were breathlessly told last week would “change everything”?

Something else I just realized.  M. Night Shyamalan MUST have been hired to right the Dana/Cole/KevinBob/Milton subplot.  That is the only explanation I can have for something that started out badly, and has steadily got worse Every. Stinking. Episode. 

Recap

Right away, we have another reminder that there is a “twist that will change everything” coming tonight.  Oh, my!  I wonder what it could be?  Any chance that it will be something we’ve not seen before?  Any chance that ESPN won’t mention Tiger Woods in the next week?

They start off with Bubba talking about how Tarin is “planning to disable our defense systems”.  Really?  He’s the (former) head of security for the president of a foreign country, so I’m not exactly seeing how his job duties and previous places visited would allow him to do that, but perhaps I’m missing something here like a triple PhD in nuclear physics, computer science, and quantum mechanics.

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The set up is excellent.  In Victorian London, the bold and imaginative Charles Kingsleigh is interrupted in mid pitch to potential investors by his six year old daughter Alice talking about her disturbing dreams of impossible events such as a talking rabbit in a waist-coat.  “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”, responds her father.

Flash forward thirteen years, where Alice is still morose upon the loss of her beloved father, going to a fancy party where her mother expects her to accept an engagement proposal from the foppish son of a Lord.  Of course, the young man named Hamish is a total loser.  Not a bad person, per se, but a clueless, wimpy sop with “intestinal problems”.  He proposes at the gazebo with hundreds of people watching, fully expecting Alice to accept.  But having just seen what she thought was a White Rabbit in a waist-coat  a few minutes earlier, Alice says that she needs a minute, and runs off to find the rabbit…and finding the infamous Rabbit Hole once again.

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Quite an Oscar Night for “The Hurt Locker”, as the little movie that could shocked the world by becoming the lowest (relative) grossing movie ever to win Best Picture, with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman ever to win Best Director.

My predictions were spot on for the acting and directing awards, but the anticipated split vote between “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” that would have allowed “Inglourious Basterds” to sneak in didn’t happen.  I also missed on both writing awards as “Up in the Air” was upset by “Precious”, and Tarantino lost out to “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal.

I was 7 right and 4 wrong for the lesser categories…not that anyone (including me) cares.

On to this week.  Forget the movies coming out today…there is only one release that has my attention this weekend, and that is the first episode of HBO’s “The Pacific”.  Made by the same people who created what many (myself included) consider the Greatest Mini Series of All Time, “Band of Brothers”, Episode One debuts this Sunday at 9 PM.  From everything I’ve seen, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have done it again, as it looks as if they have spared no expense in creating as magnificent of a story of the Pacific battles of WWII as was shown of the European Theater efforts in Band of Brothers.

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