Tag Archive: baseball cards
The Catcher Was a Spy–Paul Rudd stars as baseball player Moe Berg in new espionage thriller
Filed under: Movies — Leave a comment
Actor and Kansas City Royals baseball fan Paul Rudd stars in a new World War II movie premiering next month. He plays real-life professional baseball Morris "Moe" Berg in this espionage thriller from director Ben Lewin (Please Stand By). The movie adapts the true story of the catcher who became a World War II spy. The Boston Red Sox player was a private figure when, in 1944, the U.S. government's wartime intelligence agency enlisted his services. His mission: To go behind enemy lines in Europe to assassinate the Nazi's chief nuclear scientist before the Germans develop an atomic bomb. IFC Films is marketing the film as a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.
The film stars Rudd along with Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man, The Illusionist, The Amazing Spider-man 2), Mark Strong (The Imitation Game, Kingsman, Shazam!), Jeff Daniels (Good Night, Good Luck, Radio Days), Sienna Miller (G.I. Joe: The Rise of COBRA, Layer Cake), Tom Wilkinson (Valkyrie), Guy Pearce (Alien: Covenant, Iron Man 3), and Wonder Woman's Queen Hippolyta, Connie Nielsen. Adapted from a book The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, by Nicholas Dawidoff, with a script by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan, Thor: The Dark World), the film has a similar look and feel to other recent World War II espionage thrillers, like Tom Cruise's Valkyrie and Benedict Cumberbatch's The Imitation Game.
Production design is by Academy Award-winning designer Luciana Arrighi (Howard's End, Remains of the Day). Costumes were designed by Joan Bergin (The Prestige, In the Name of the Father, My Left Foot, Vikings). Three-time Oscar winning composer Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit) created the musical score.
Here's Paul Rudd starring in the trailer for The Catcher Was a Spy:
Tags: baseball cards, baseball movies, Ben Lewin, Boston Red Sox, espionage thriller, Guy Pearce, Howard Shore, IFC Films, Jeff Daniels, Joan Bergin, Kansas City Royals, Luciana Arrighi, Mark Strong, Nicholas Dawidoff, Paul Giamatti, Paul Rudd, Robert Rodat, Sienna Miller, The Catcher Was a Spy, The Catcher Was a Spy trailer, The Imitation Game, Tom Wilkinson, Valkyrie, war movies
Cubs take the World Series and other science fiction predictions
Filed under: Con Culture, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, TV — Leave a comment
As predicted by Bob Gale in his script for Back to the Future II, it was the destiny of the Chicago Cubs to be playing–in fact sweeping–last year's World Series. As we sat in Kauffman Stadium last year and watched the Kansas City Royals beat the New York Mets we were disappointed the Cubs weren't there. Science fiction never seems to get it right, but Gale–and the Cubs–were so close last year, much like the Royals were the prior year. Science fiction rarely even comes close, as you'll discover especially if you read many classic sci-fi novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. Just look how far off course in date predictions forward thinkers were, like Arthur C. Clarke (we're still waiting for much of his 2001), Philip K. Dick (the novel inspiring Blade Runner takes place in 1992), and Gene Roddenberry (Khan controlled much of Earth during the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s).
But history was made last night when the Cubs broke their 108 year gap between Series wins. Would 1908 Cubs stars Mordecai Brown, Frank Chance, Johnny Evers, or Joe Tinker have believed it if you told them their team would be on the outs so long? How about contemporary science fiction visionaries George Melies, Thomas Edison, Charles Urban, H.G. Wells, or Mark Twain?
1908 baseball cards were tiny, weren't they?
Just how long ago is 108 years anyway? In 1908 Shackleton was heading to New Zealand, and explorers finally made it to the North Pole, Wilbur Wright was demonstrating this new flying vehicle called the airplane in Europe, and Henry Ford created his first Model T, Teddy Roosevelt declined to run for a third presidential term paving the way for the election of William Howard Taft (who would go on to become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in Bolivia, and Albert Einstein had just introduced his special theory of relativity. 1908 was a very different world and plenty of history has filled the gap, with countless millions of fans–an entire generation born, living and dying–watching the Cubs games without the big win, many from 1914 onward at the site of the baseball field that would carry chewing gum's William Wrigley's famous name. It is "just a game," yet the game itself survived plenty just as its fans survived plenty.
Tags: 1908 events in history, Arthur C. Clarke, Back to the Future II, baseball cards, Ben Zobrist, Bob Gale, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Charles Urban, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, Frank Chance, Gene Roddenberry, George Melies, H.G. Wells, Henry Ford, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Mark Twain, Model T, Mordecai Brown, Philip K. Dick, science fiction predictions, Thomas Edison, William Wrigley, World Series 2016, Wright Brothers
In the Game–Sand castles, original art, and rare baseball cards
Filed under: Con Culture — Leave a comment
What could be more amazing than those oceanside beach competitions where artists work feverishly to create gigantic, elaborate palaces made only of sand, only to be judged, and be obliterated by the tide–the artistic masterpiece never to be seen again. The same effort and brief life is shared by ice sculptures and the butter cows each year at the Iowa State Fair.
Some art is created to stay the test of time. Michelangelo's ceiling paintings. The Pyramids. The Statue of Liberty. Mount Rushmore.
Then there is the surprising. An ancient bronze coin depicting the new emperor and that emperor's symbol of his reign, still firmly stamped and present more than 2,000 years later, accessible to anyone today for less than thirty dollars. Cheaper yet, Victor D. Brenner's sculpt for the 1909 Lincoln penny, the most reproduced–and small-sized–three-dimensional work of art ever created, several scattered throughout every U.S. household for more than 100 years.
In trading card collecting you can find more pocket-sized art, and not just duplicate prints, but one-of-a-kind original artwork. Like the sand castles, sketch cards are sprinkled across mass produced box sets of both sports and non-sports trading card sets. Often limited in availability, a sketch card if commission by an artist, it is then randomly placed in a pack or box, and if that box remains sealed forever, no one will ever see that one-of-a-kind artwork. A sketch card is as rare as it gets and in a new baseball card deck produced by In the Game, Inc., sketch card artists Nathen Reinke and Keven Reinke have produced a limited edition of 150 sketch cards featuring baseball legends. All that detail in less than two inches of space. The images are simply brilliant.
Tags: baseball cards, In the Game, Keven Reinke, Nathen Reinke, original art, sketch cards, trading cards