A pre-game ramble By Warren Bluhm News-Chronicle Now that it's a half-hour to game time Sunday night, it's time I admitted I don't have any interest in producing a thought-provoking, in-depth column this weekend; so what else is on my mind? * I hear the Neil Young retrospective box set of CDs keeps getting postponed because Young just won't stop making incredible new music. It's hard to make a retrospective when there's a chance the artist will yet create a few more pieces that belong in any self-respecting retrospective of his work. Case in point: "Greendale," Young's latest album, a collection of 10 songs about life, and an incident that changes lives, in a small town called, yep, Greendale. Neil Young has made a pile of really great albums, so it's hard to say this is his best album yet, but it sure stands up next to "After the Gold Rush," "Harvest," "Rust Never Sleeps," "Freedom," "Ragged Glory" and "Mirror Ball." And it's reassuring to us folks who have past 50 to see artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan who are still producing vital work as they approach 60 and head for the home stretch. * I can't imagine anyone really cares about the Milwaukee Bucks anymore, but I do want to throw in a wild prediction: They will do a lot better than anybody in the National Basketball Association expects this year, maybe even make the playoffs. Every intelligent observer is calling the Bucks one of the worst teams in the league this year, because they've basically thrown out their old coach and stars and are starting over from scratch. The wild card to me is Dick Bennett, the greatest basketball coach of our era. No, the Bucks didn't hire Bennett - he signed up to rebuild Washington State, which won only seven games last year, but they did hire Terry Porter as head coach. Porter is the most successful player Bennett ever coached in terms of how he did in the NBA. Bennett, and those he taught, have always done a lot better than anyone expected. So don't be surprised if magical teamwork turns the Milwaukee Bucks into something special, if not this year, within a year or two. * Ang Lee is a pretty great movie director - "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" may be my favorite movie of the last five years or so - so I was surprised not only that he agreed to direct the "Hulk" movie but that the film bombed. Now that I've seen the movie, I understand what went wrong. For the first two hours, it's a great movie but anything but a typical comic book movie - the big green guy doesn't even show up for 43 minutes, for one thing. And then, just after it hits an emotional peak, the film falls apart in an extraneous finale that feels to me like "Ohmygosh, this is a comic book movie, we'd better end it with a big comic-book fight." And to make things worse, it's really hard to understand what's happening during the big fight. Lee almost made the greatest comic book movie of all time by not treating it like a comic book movie, but he threw in a comic book ending that kind of spoils everything. I'm guessing some suits at the studio had something to do with that. * I'm really glad they're putting out "Let It Be ... Naked," which purports to be the album that Paul McCartney really hoped the Beatles would make when they got together to make some music in the winter of 1968-69. John Lennon and producer Phil Spector assembled the tapes into the most disappointing album of the band's later years - still some pretty great stuff, but lame next to "Abbey Road," "Sgt. Pepper" or the white album. It'll be interesting to see what McCartney will do with the same core material. * Speaking of older fellas who keep on going and going, Ray Bradbury's short-story collection "One More for the Road" is wonderful. If you've avoided Bradbury because you're not into science fiction and fantasy, you've missed some of the best short stories written in the last 50 years. "Heart Transplant" in this collection, for example, is a heartbreakingly real love story. * OK, time to sit down and see the Packers thrash the Vikings in one of the most surprising upsets in recent years. Who would have thought Green Bay could beat Minnesota by three touchdowns on the Vikes' home field? Hey, that's the best thing about five minutes before game time - Anything is possible! Bluhm is editor of the Door County Advocate and former managing editor of The News-Chroncile. His column appears Tuesdays. Contact him via e-mail at [email protected] or call 920-743-3321