What’s the classic movie line one cowboy says to another as they sit around their encampment wondering when all hell is going to break loose?
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Money-bags Oliveira tantalizes on social media, CFL eyes kickoff rules
That’s a bit what it feels like on the Winnipeg Blue Bombers front. Specifically where it pertains to their two big-name pending free agents.
Neither running back Brady Oliveira nor receiver Dalton Schoen have been seen at an NFL workout so far this off-season.
Since both will be without contracts next month, they don’t have an immediate deadline.
The problem, as Blue Bombers GM Kyle Walters so aptly put it this week, is the Bombers can’t do much of anything until they know if either or both are going to be on the payroll next year — and at what dollar figure.
Walters can’t know what to offer the Stanley Bryants, Jermacus Hardricks and Jackson Jeffcoats of the world, to name just a few, until he knows what he’ll be paying his two skill-position stars.
After an historic season, Oliveira deserves to be paid, and he acknowledged as much on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter on Wednesday.
“Hmmm so where will I end up!?” he posted, along with an emoji of a bag of cash.
That bag of cash probably needs to be stuffed with around $200,000, or double what Oliveira earned last year. That would make him the CFL’s highest-paid back, which is what he deserves.
Of course, players don’t always get exactly what they deserve. Some take less to help keep their team together.
For football players, though, it’s usually a short window to earn some money. And that’s the line Oliveira must straddle.
His mysterious, tantalizing social-media post is in stark contrast to his no-holds-barred approach to running the ball, which produced 1,500-plus yards and a Most Outstanding Canadian Award, leaving dozens of bruised would-be tacklers along the way.
While more and more Canadians are making it in the NFL, it remains a long shot.
The question is, how long are the Bombers prepared to wait?
We assume a contract offer is already on the table.
One for Schoen, too.
This has to be resolved by the time CFL free agency opens in a month.
At least, you’d think it would.
NEW COACH, NEW RULES?
Mike Miller may have retired at just the right time.
The Bombers special-teamer and all-time CFL leader in kick-return tackles was unfortunately forced from the game due to a neck issue, becoming Winnipeg’s special-teams coordinator this week.
Noise emanating from the winter meetings in Nashville has the league considering changes that would cut down on the number of kickoff returns.
The concern is injuries. Research shows concussions are more likely to occur on those plays than any other.
The NFL already has taken steps, moving kickoffs up to the kicking team’s 35-yard-line and instituting a fair-catch option anywhere inside the receiving team’s 25, where that team would next scrimmage the ball.
The change bothers most purists as the majority of kickoffs now result in touchbacks, removing one of the most exciting plays in the game.
We’d hate to see the three-down game get more American, but we’re not going to argue to keep a dangerous play around, either.
Perhaps a version of the XFL kickoff would work, where teams lined up five yards apart on the receiving side of mid-field — at the 30- and 35-yard lines — and the only players who can move before the ball is caught are the kicker and the returner.
That cuts down on high-speed collisions.
The CFL could also allow teams who get scored on to scrimmage at their 40-yard line instead of receiving a kickoff, an option they already get after field goals.
We’d see far fewer kick returns with that option.
We know which way Miller would vote on these. He never saw a blocking wedge he didn’t like to try to break.
WHEELER STEPS UP
Good on the NHL Players Association for coming up with the First Line program, designed to get more players discussing their mental health.
“The pressures and the stresses of being a professional hockey player have led to some ups and downs in my career and challenges with mental health,” Wheeler said in a video promoting the initiative. “The more willingness I had to get help and to talk to people … the better my relationship with it became, the more I was able to be the person, the player, the teammate that I wanted to be. We’re opening a door that hasn’t been opened before. If something pops up in your life, if you need a little bit of support … you don’t have to struggle.”
The goal is to make mental health a regular part of dressing-room talk.
The NHL is believed to be the first major pro league to implement a program like this.
For hockey culture, it’s a step in the right direction.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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