Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

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Brief notes on film.

Monday, September 5th, 2022

Lawrence posted a review of “The Beast” (aka “The Beast of War”) which we watched Saturday night.

I have very little to add to what he said: I liked the movie, and I encourage folks to seek it out. My only two notes are:

1. It was interesting to see George Dzundza in a non-LawnOrder role. (In a curious coincidence, one of the low-rent broadcast channels was re-running those first season episodes that Saturday morning as well, so I got a double shot of George.)

2. I also wanted to link to the Internet Movie Firearms Database entry, which I found quite fascinating. Especially the parts about the AK-47s and the Israeli Blank Firing Adapters and the fake Hind. The tank stuff is interesting, too.

(I remember, back when I was reading Soldier of Fortune, they made a big deal about getting 5.45 rounds and (I think) an AK-74 out of Afghanistan. I wonder, with the benefit of historical perspective, how much of that was true. “The head of the Afghan bureau of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the official intelligence agency of Pakistan, claimed that America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid $5,000 for the first AK-74 captured by the Afghan mujahideen during the Afghan-Soviet War.”)

(Speaking of SOF, it looks like they’ve been sold to a new publisher. Dare my inner 13-year-old hope for a resurgence?)

Posted in Bagatelle, Guns, History, Movies | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 31, 2022.

Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

Richard Roat, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Columbo” and “McMillan & Wife” (he missed “McCloud” for the trifecta, but also did “Hec Ramsey” and “Banacek”), and “Westworld” (1973).

William Reynolds. Where is my “The F.B.I.” box set, darn it? Other credits include “Dragnet 1967”, “Pete Kelly’s Blues” (the TV series), “All That Heaven Allows”, “Francis Goes to West Point”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Roland Mesnier, former White House pastry chef.

The French-born Mr. Mesnier served as a member of the chief executive’s kitchen cabinet for nearly 25 years. He catered to the idiosyncratic tastes of five presidents, their wives and their guests, an experience he chronicled in several books.
Mr. Mesnier was hired in 1979 by the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, and served until he retired in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. He worked from a modest space in the East Wing, armed with about 300 original pastry molds and an eclectic set of tools, including an ice pick, a coat hanger and a tire-pressure gauge.
Despite the president’s background as a legume farmer, he reported, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter disdained peanuts and sweets in their family’s recipe for a sticky cheese ring — a recipe, Mr. Mesnier said, “that no one tried to steal.” He rated it on a par with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “atrocious concoction of Coca-Cola-flavored jelly served with black glacé cherries.”
Nancy Reagan often skipped meals but partook of dessert. (She routinely denied her husband chocolate, but Mr. Mesnier smuggled mousse to President Reagan when the first lady was out of town.)

…

In 2001, Mr. Mesnier took three weeks and 80 pounds of gingerbread, 30 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of marzipan to construct a replica of the 1800 White House for the Christmas holiday.
He sometimes served flaming desserts — but, he said, he gave that up after a woman’s fox shawl caught fire when she leaned across the table at a holiday reception.

(Obligatory.)

Posted in 1970s, Food, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Short gun crankery update.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2022

The Han Solo blaster went for $1,057,500.

It isn’t clear to me if that includes the bidder’s premium.

Posted in Guns, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 30, 2022.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2022

It was already a semi-busy day, but I thought I’d hold obits until tonight just in case something big happened.

Narrator: Something big happened.

Mikhail Gorbachev. NYT. Alt link. Oddly, I can’t find anything about this on the English language Pravda site.

In other news, a lot of young or relatively young people have been passing away.

Ralph Eggleston, noted Pixar animator.

Eggleston was hired by Pixar in 1992 during the development of the first computer-animated feature that was to become Toy Story, beginning what was to become a long and hugely successful career at the animation studio. He worked as an art director on Toy Story, which was released to universal acclaim and great box office success in 1995. Eggleston went on to win his first Annie Award, for best art direction for his work on the film.
Pixar enjoyed a historical run of success in the 1990s and early 2000s and Eggleston, known affectionately as Eggman at the company, was a key player in the films the studio produced for nearly three decades. He worked as an art director on A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006) and Up (2009). He was a storywriter and visual developer on Monsters, Inc. (2001), a production designer on Finding Nemo (2003) and WALL-E (2008) and a character designer on Ratatouille (2007).

He was 56. Pancreatic cancer got him.

Charlbi Dean, actress. She was in “Black Lightning” and the forthcoming “Triangle of Sadness”. She was 32: according to reports, she died of an “unexpected sudden illness”.

Luke Bell, musician. He was also 32: friends said he had been missing for a week before his body was found.

Neena Pacholke, morning news anchor for WAOW in Wisconsin. She was 27 and engaged.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 25, 2022.

Thursday, August 25th, 2022

Jerry Allison, drummer with the Crickets.

Mr. Allison was still a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, when he began playing with Mr. Holly, who was three years older and had already made a tentative start on a music career, releasing a few records in Nashville that did not do well. Back in Lubbock, he, Mr. Allison, Niki Sullivan on guitar (soon replaced by Sonny Curtis, Tommy Allsup and others) and Joe B. Mauldin on bass began honing a sound that drew on Elvis Presley and on country and, especially, Black music.

…

Then, in May 1956, he and Mr. Holly went to see a new John Wayne movie, “The Searchers,” in which one of Mr. Wayne’s most memorable lines was “That’ll be the day.”
Days later, according to an account written for the Library of Congress, Mr. Holly suggested that he and Mr. Allison write a song together, and Mr. Allison, imitating the Wayne line, said, “That’ll be the day.”
“Right away, Buddy starts fiddling around with it,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing newspaper. “In about a half-hour, we had it.”
Mr. Holly cut a country version of the song in Nashville that was unloved (a producer there is said to have called it “the worst song I’ve ever heard”), but in 1957 he and the Crickets, as his Lubbock group was called, recorded a rock ’n’ roll version that became a national hit and remained in Billboard’s Top 30 for three months. Mr. Holly, Mr. Allison and the producer who recorded that version, Norman Petty, got the songwriting credit, and in 2005 the record was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Gerald Potterton. He directed the 1981 “Heavy Metal”. Other credits include some work on “Yellow Submarine” and “The Railrodder“. (I have previously covered that Buster Keaton film in this space, but the videos are no longer available on the ‘Tube. There is a version that’s not from the Canadian NFB, but I can’t vouch for it.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 23, 2022.

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

Gary Gaines, former football coach at Odessa Permian.

His record from 1986-89 was 47-6-1.
Gaines led Permian to the fifth of the program’s six state championships with a perfect season in 1989, then left to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech.

Yes, this is the coach from “Friday Night Lights”, the book (affiliate link) and movie (ditto).

“I just can’t find the words to pay respects,” Ron King, a former Permian assistant, told the Odessa American. “It’s a big loss for the coaching profession. There are a lot of coaches he took under his wing and mentored.”
Gaines, who was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 2004 movie, said he never read the book and felt betrayed by Bissinger after the author spent the entire 1988 season with the team.

Vincent Gil, Australian actor. Credits include “Chopper Squad”, “Riptide” (the 1969 series), “Cop Shop”, “A Cry in the Dark”, and “Nightrider” in the first “Mad Max” movie. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Boats, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Brief belated historical note.

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

I had a day off yesterday and did a lot of running around, so I missed this:

50 years ago yesterday, on August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz, Robert Westenberg, and Salvatore Naturile tried to hold up a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn.

Things did not go well. They expected to take between $150,000 and $200,000, but when they got to the bank, an armored truck had taken most of the money away. They got a total of $29,000 and tried to get away: Westenberg escaped, but Wojtowicz and Naturile didn’t manage to get away before the police showed up. The attempted bank robbery turned into a hostage situation…

…and if all this sounds familiar, yes, this was the famous “Dog Day Afternoon” robbery.

50th anniversary retrospective from the NYT.

Posted in History, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 22, 2022.

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

Virginia Patton, actress. She had a short career: most notably, she was apparently the last surviving adult member of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” cast. (Karolyn Grimes, who played “Zuzu”, is still alive, as is Jimmy Hawkins, who played “Tommy”.)

Josephine Tewson. She did a lot of British TV, some of which made it to PBS here. Most notably to my people, she was “Elizabeth”, the neighbor of “Hyacinth Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”.

By way of Lawrence: Alexi Panshin, SF author.

Tom Weiskopf, noted golfer.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 17, 2022.

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022

Wolfgang Petersen. THR.

In America, Petersen was all about action. He made eight films in the U.S. and enjoyed a string of five straight box office hits: the political thriller In the Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent; Outbreak; Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford as the U.S. president; The Perfect Storm (2000), with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as ill-fated seamen; and the epic Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.

Was “Troy” really a “hit”? Wikipedia says:

Troy grossed $133.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $364 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $497.4 million, making the film one of the highest grossing films of 2004, alongside The Passion of the Christ, Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2.

But it cost $185 million to make. If you use the rule of thumb of three times budget to make a profit, “Troy” falls short. Using the 2.5X rule, it may have made a relatively small profit. And do you hear anybody talking about “Troy” these days?

I don’t have a dog in this fight: I haven’t seen “Troy”, but would not mind seeing it. The only Peterson film I have seen is “Das Boot”, but I’d actually like to see almost all of his others…

…except “Poseidon”, which I think everyone agrees was a bad idea that pretty much killed his career. (He has one credit in IMDB as a director and producer after that, and that was a German film in 2016. Which, to be honest, does sound good.)

Posted in Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 15, 2022.

Monday, August 15th, 2022

Anne Heche, for the record. THR.

On an administrative note, this has been an unusual situation that I didn’t know how to handle. Various outlets were reporting her death, in the sense that she had been declared brain-dead, which qualifies as legal death under California law. However, those outlets were reporting that she was still on life support while the hospital looked for a compatible recipient for her organs. I made the administrative decision that I would not run an obit watch for her until the NYT ran an obit. Unfortunately, the NYT sometimes takes a day or three or more to run obits: in this case, they didn’t take that long.

I’m still not sure I made the right call in this case. Between Ms. Heche and Tony Dow, it’s been kind of a weird time for the obit watch.

Robyn Griggs, actress. She was a regular on “Another World” and “One Life To Live”, but really didn’t have a lot of credits other than those.

Denise Dowse. Other credits include “Seinfeld”, “Starship Troopers”, the 2003 “Dragnet” series, and “A Stone Cold Christmas”.

Posted in Admin, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 10, 2022.

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

Taiki Yanagida, Japanese jockey. He was trampled during a race a week ago, and had been hospitalized since.

Ryan Fellows. He was on a show called “Street Outlaws”, which airs on Discovery, and seems to involve drag races on closed public roads.

Citing “a source connected with the show,” TMZ says Fellows crashed during the eighth out of nine races scheduled for the night and that Fellows was driving a “gold Nissan 240Z.” It’s unclear whether this is actually the orange “Scooby Doo” Nissan documented extensively on social media and described as a 280Z by Fellows on YouTube or a different Z altogether. The Street Outlaws star reportedly lost control near the finish line causing the car to roll and catch fire. Onlookers apparently attempted to get him out but could not do so in time.

Gene LeBell, noted stuntman. 252 credits in IMDB.

During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”

If that rings a bell, yeah, Quentin Tarantino says that Mr. LeBell influenced the Cliff Booth character in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Apparently in more ways than just the Bruce Lee bit.

Booth also had an accusation of murder hovering over his head, which might have been a veiled reference to LeBell being charged in the murder of private investigator Robert Duke Hall in 1976. LeBell was acquitted of that charge, and his conviction as an accessory to the crime was later overturned.

Here’s a PDF of a vintage NYT article about the Hall murder, if you want to start down that rabbit hole.

Posted in Cars, Horses, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 9, 2022.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

I’m thinking about no longer posting obits.

Recently, it seems like as soon as I post one obit watch, two or three or more people die. Clearly, correlation implies causality: my posting obits is making people die, therefore, if I stop posting, people will stop passing away. Right?

Well, it’s a theory, anyway.

David McCullough, historian and author. It is an odd thing: I enjoy history, but I mostly haven’t read any of McCullough’s work, and I don’t know why. (I say “mostly” because we did have some of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volumes around the house when I was very young, and one of them had The Johnstown Flood in it. I remember being fascinated, but more for the account of the actual flood itself than the human and engineering factors leading up to it. I should probably grab a copy of the real book somewhere and read it.)

Olivia Newton-John.

In 1970, she was asked to join a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, formed by the American producer Don Kirshner in an attempt to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction film written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both projects tanked.
“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later told The New York Times.

The name of the film is also “Toomorrow“, as best as I can tell. There’s a PAL DVD listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable”, but you can get the soundtrack on vinyl.

Lawrence emailed the obit for Lamont Dozier.

In collaboration with the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Mr. Dozier wrote songs for dozens of musical acts, but the trio worked most often with Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack”), the Four Tops (“Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) and especially the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love”). Between 1963 and 1972, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for more than 80 singles that hit the Top 40 of the pop or R&B charts, including 15 songs that reached No. 1. “It was as if we were playing the lottery and winning every time,” Mr. Dozier wrote in his autobiography, “How Sweet It Is” (2019, written with Scott B. Bomar).

…

Sometimes he would have an idea for a song’s feel: He wrote the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” thinking about Bob Dylan’s phrasing on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Sometimes he concocted an attention-grabbing gimmick, like the staccato guitars at the beginning of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” that evoked a radio news bulletin.
And sometimes Mr. Dozier uttered a real-life sentence that worked in song, as he did one night when he was in a Detroit motel with a girlfriend and a different girlfriend started pounding on the door. He pleaded with the interloper, “Stop, in the name of love” — and then realized the potency of what he had said. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly hammered the sentence into a three-minute single, the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Music, Obits | 3 Comments »

Short observation on film.

Monday, August 8th, 2022

The Saturday Night Movie Group watched “The Last Emperor” over the weekend.

“The Last Emperor” is a beautiful looking movie. Wikipedia claims the budget was $23.8 million in 1987 dollars and every penny of that shows on the screen. Of course, the production had a lot of help from the Communist Chinese government, so I’m sure they were able to stretch their budget quite a bit…

(IMDB says £23,000,000. I’m not sure what the conversion factor between 1987 pounds and US dollars is.)

Here’s my quick point: $23.8 million in 1987 dollars translates to $62,079,241.20 in 2022 dollars.

The “unspekable” “Batgirl” movie that is allegedly so bad Warner Brothers won’t release it cost $90 to $100 million (sources vary).

I guess talent will out. Helped, of course, by the Commies.

Posted in History, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 8, 2022.

Monday, August 8th, 2022

Clu Gulager, long time character actor. THR.

165 acting credits in IMDB. Man was in everything, from “The Virginian” to “The F.B.I” to “The Last Picture Show” to “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood”, with lots of stops along the way…

…including “Mannix”. (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”, season 6, episode 16.)

Roger E. Mosley. Credits beyond “Magnum, P.I.” include “The Rockford Files”, “McCloud”, “McQ” (which Clu Gulager was also in), “The Mack”, and “The Sixth Sense” (the 1972 TV series).

As Mosley remembered it, his agent told him: ” ‘It’s starring this guy Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck has made about five pilot shows … and none of them has sold. So here’s what you do, Roger: Sign up for the show, go over to Hawaii, they’ll treat you good for the 20 days it will take to shoot the [pilot], you’ll get a lot of money, and then you come home. A show with Tom Selleck always fails, and you’ll be fine.’
“Well, 8 1/2 years later … “
Mosley in real life was a licensed private helicopter pilot (something the producers discovered after he was hired, he said) but not allowed to fly on the series.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 4, 2022.

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

Private First Class Robert E. Simanek (USMC – ret.). Alt link.

Private Simanek received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. From his Medal of Honor citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with Company F, in action against enemy aggressor forces. While accompanying a patrol en route to occupy a combat outpost forward of friendly lines, Private First Class Simanek exhibited a high degree of courage and a resolute spirit of self-sacrifice in protecting the lives of his fellow marines. With his unit ambushed by an intense concentration of enemy mortar and small-arms fire, and suffering heavy casualties, he was forced to seek cover with the remaining members of the patrol in a nearby trench line. Determined to save his comrades when a hostile grenade was hurled into their midst, he unhesitatingly threw himself on the deadly missile absorbing the shattering violence of the exploding charge in his body and shielding his fellow marines from serious injury or death. Gravely wounded as a result of his heroic action, Private First Class Simanek, by his daring initiative and great personal valor in the face of almost certain death, served to inspire all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

I kind of liked this quote:

“I had been to the outpost before and thought of it as a somewhat vacation because no action had ever been there all the time I’d been on that particular part of the line,” Mr. Simanek recalled in an interview with the government website Department of Defense News in 2020. “So I took an old Reader’s Digest and a can of precious beer in my big back pocket and thought I was really going to have a relaxing situation. It didn’t turn out that way.”

He was 92. His death (according to the NYT) leaves two surviving MoH recipients from the Korean War: Hiroshi Miyamura, who is 96, and Ralph Puckett Jr., who is 95.

Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) was killed in a car accident yesterday. Two of her aides, district director Zachery Potts and communications director Emma Thomson, were also killed.

Lawrence sent over an obit for British actor John Steiner, who died in a car accident on Sunday. Credits include “Caligula”, “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”, and “The .44 Specialist”.

Richard Tait, co-inventor of “Cranium”. He was 58, and died of COVID complications.

Dallas Edeburn, deputy with the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota. He was found dead in his car after his shift. In March of 2021, he was in a serious accident when his patrol car was hit by a stolen car fleeing from the police. Other officers pulled him from his burning car, and he sustained pretty serious injuries. It isn’t clear if his death is related to the previous incident.

Johnny Famechon, former featherweight champion of the world.

The Australian boxer’s most memorable world title victory was his decision win against Cuban Jose Legra for the WBC title at London’s Albert Hall in 1969. Famechon boxed professionally for more than 20 years and had a record of 56 wins (20 by knockout), five losses and six draws.

Posted in Cops, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | 4 Comments »

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