Shameless Self Expression

Clint Eastwood stars as an ‘old-school’ baseball scout who is going blind and all-round not in the best of health. His long-time buddy and fellow scout John Goodman (who once played Babe Ruth in a movie) tries to convince Eastwood’s estranged, work-oriented lawyer daughter Amy Adams to help him in his work, or else the higher-ups (principally Robert Patrick) will opt for a younger, more tech-savvy replacement (a slimy Matthew Lillard). Eastwood doesn’t want any help, and Adams is extremely reticent to help out a father who frankly has been borderline absentee over the years, but Eastwood just can’t let this young punk beat him, and it’s all going to come down to the assessment of high school prospect Joe Mssingill, a boorish oaf of a hitter, whom Lillard is already singing the praises of. Meanwhile, Adams gains the attention of Justin Timberlake, an ex-baseball player turned scout for a rival team. Ed Lauter and Chelcie Ross turn up as a couple of crotchety old baseball fans and bu...

Weary-looking, borderline monosyllabic cop Walter Matthau is called in to investigate the massacre of a busload of passengers in San Francisco. One of the deceased just so happened to be Matthau’s partner, who was supposed to be on sick leave, something his girlfriend protests, saying he had gone off to work every day. Matthau knows this to not be true, so just what was the guy up to and how did he end up on the bus and among the dead? It’s up to Matthau and his abrasive, smart-arse new partner Bruce Dern (in one of his best roles to date) to find out, but it may be somehow connected to a case Matthau and the deceased worked on a few years back. They might just solve the case...if they don’t kill each other first. Matt Clark plays a coroner, Clifton James and Lou Gossett Jr. play cops (the former with the bomb squad), Anthony Zerbe plays the no-nonsense superior officer, Joanna Cassidy plays a nurse important to the case, Paul Koslo plays a scummy drug-dealer with stringy blond hair, M...