By Julie Buehler
I’m a simple girl. Give me football and some beer and I’m happier than the late Chris Farley at a Chinese Buffet. If it’s Niners football, I’m likely to karate kick the air.
I’m not into “Oscar-worthy” fluff movies. Don’t really need Hollywood to try and depict a reality that is more interesting than the actual reality of everyday life.
Instead, I love comedies, dumb ones, like Anchorman, Dumb and Dumber and Tommy Boy and I love super hero movies. Some good humor, solid action and a couple explosions and I’m happy. Simple.
Where all this goes terribly wrong is when Hollywood sees the money it makes on one simple movie and tries to make more off a sequel. Most of the time, the storylines are regurgitated, stale, stiff and the viewer is left wondering how they can get those brain cells and 2 hours of life back.
You can’t. It’s like the Raiders’ season, just call it a wash and move on.
And in honor of Dumb And Dumber To looking too Dumb to consider watching, I am publicly protesting sequels in sports as well.
The NBA Finals this summer were a sequel of the previous year between the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs. And sure enough, the series was equally unimpressive in quality of basketball played.
Good news is Bron Bron took off to Cleveland so it might be LBJ vs the Spurs, which would be annoying, but like Anchorman 2, I might make an exception because the change of venue for the lead characters can change the story lines enough to make it worth seeing. Not likely to like it, but at least you’d be hopeful for some new one-liners.
Before the NFL season, a lot of prognosticators predicted Super Bowl 49 would be played by the same teams in Super Bowl 48, you might remember, the curb-stomping of the Broncos at the hands of the Seahawks.
Who wants to see that?? (The correct answer is nobody, although every Seahawks fan just put the newspaper down and said, “Uh. Me. Duh.”)
It won’t happen.
Sure, the Broncos look pretty strong right now, their lone loss coming in overtime at the hands of the Seahawks IN Seattle. And while NFL analysts proclaim the Broncos to be unstoppable, consider their 6 wins: They beat the Colts and Chiefs by 7 points each, allowing 4th-quarter comebacks and narrowly pulled those wins out at home. The win over the Arizona Cardinals came against the second and third string quarterbacks as injuries were piling up for the Cards.
The game they played against the Niners was fielded by a JV San Fran team that will look very different in weeks 9 and 10 as they get healthy and the Broncos Thursday Night win over the Chargers was again, a team who’s starters were out and the secondary looked like Lloyd Christmas running “at incredible rates”.
Oh, and they beat the Jets. That, and $2 will buy you a slurpee, or Big Gulp. Welp, Broncos fans could be saying “See you later” after the first round of the playoffs if they play a healthy team with a pass rush (see Ravens, Patriots, Chiefs).
And the Seahawks can’t decide if they want to be a pass-happy team or a downhill running team. The team that won a championship last year with a stubborn adherence to its personality is now barely above .500.
While retreaded plots can get sports fans talking about the familiar matchups and revenge rules the conversation, originality will always win the day.
And if you haven’t been watching the World Series, a fresh, lively and fascinating showdown between a budding dynasty and a franchise that’s waited nearly 3 decades to play in the Fall Classic, you’re missing the best entertainment baseball’s offered in more than a decade!
We’ve never seen this matchup before and this World Series is why we don’t want sequels. I don’t care about the ratings, or lack thereof, if you’re a sports fan, you have to love this action!
I can appreciate the Giants’ every-two-years championship push and it makes for great theatre when the villain is as good as the hero, but what the Royals have accomplished this post season is the stuff legends are made of!
They escaped the Oakland Athletics in extra innings after trailing 7-3 going into the 8th inning! Then they beat the 2 best teams in the American League, scratch that, they scorched the Angels and Orioles and became the first team ever to win their first 8 postseason games.
They have a manager no one believes in and some young talent no one knew about coming into this season.
We know them now and I’m glad it’s a team we haven’t seen in the post season in a long time.
While Hollywood can never come close to the entertainment of sports, it can teach us a valuable lesson: Sequels rarely eclipse the first version and usually fall far short.
Stick with original content and let’s see some different teams in the Super Bowl, College Football National Title and beyond.
Julie Buehler hosts the Coachella Valley’s most popular sports talk radio show, “Buehler’s Day Off” every day from 3-6 on 1010 KXPS, the valley’s all sports station. She can also be seen every morning between 6-7am on KMIR sharing the coolest stories in sports. She’s an avid gym rat, slightly sarcastic and more likely to recite Steve Young’s career passing stats than American Idol winners. Tune in M-F 3-6 pst at www.team1010.com or watch “Buehler’s Day Off” on Ustream and KMIR.com for her sports reports.
