Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
Wednesday, December 17th, 2014
The latest batch of movies added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry has been announced.
Quick takes:
- There’s a good representation of historical stuff on here; I’m interested in seeing “Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day” and “The Dragon Painter”.
- Also a good representation of horror, with “Rosemary’s Baby” and the 1953 “House of Wax”.
- “Ruggles of Red Gap” sounds like a whole lot of fun. I’d love to see that, too.
- You know, I liked “The Big Lebowski” okay when I saw it. I still think it’s a good movie, and I often quote lines from it, but I really don’t get what seems to be the passionate worship of it. In terms of just Coen Brothers films, I think “True Grit”, “No Country For Old Men”, “Fargo”, and “Miller’s Crossing” are all better movies. (“Fargo” is already on the list, of course.)
- I kind of want to see “Down Argentine Way” for one reason: Carmen Miranda. Same with “The Gang’s All Here”. Maybe we should have a Carmen Miranda movie night one night. (If we do, I’ll try to let everyone know in advance. You might even say I’ll give folks a Miranda warning.)
- Yes, I will be here all week. Try the veal and remember to tip your waitress.
- I’d also really like to see “Rio Bravo” and “Little Big Man”. I saw parts of the latter on TV when I was a child, but I’ve never seen either one start to finish.
- Other things I’d like to see: “Unmasked”, “The Power And The Glory”.
Posted in Movies | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2014
Authentic games. Voting. Space: not a frontier, at least for man. All this and more in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
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Posted in Geek, Mixology, Movies, NFL, Politics, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed
Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Not really feeling it this week. Sorry. Let’s just get started and see where this goes. This week’s TMQ, after the jump…
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Posted in Geek, Guns, Movies, Music, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed
Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Obit watch: Elizabeth Pena. The name may not ring a bell at first, but she was in John Sayles’ “Lone Star”, “La Bamba”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, and was the voice of Mirage in “The Incredibles”, among a whole bunch of other credits. And I have to give a shot-out to this bit of trivia:
She also starred in I Married Dora, a sitcom about a green card marriage between an architect and his El Salvadoran housekeeper that aired for 13 episodes in 1987. The show is remembered by fans of obscure and weird TV for the conclusion of its final episode, when the actors announced on camera that the story cliffhanger they’d been building toward had been “resolved” by the series’ cancellation.
(Video at the link.)
People who know me are aware that I’m kind of a map geek. The very small handful of people I’ve let into my apartment can attest to this; my decorating theme is “maps”.
So I think this is kind of cool, for obvious reasons: free downloadable USGS topographic maps.
Posted in Clippings, Geek, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014
Now that we’ve finished banging our heads against the wall (for reasons that will become apparent shortly), let’s jump into this week’s TMQ…
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Posted in Beef, Books, Clippings, Food, Guns, Movies, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed
Wednesday, October 1st, 2014
Oddly, this week’s TMQ gets a link on the FARK sports tab. We can’t remember the last time FARK bothered to link to TMQ.
And what does the collective hive mind of the Daily Kos FARK have to say? That, and this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
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Posted in Clippings, Food, Mixology, Movies, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed
Thursday, September 11th, 2014
Colonel Bernard F. Fisher (USAF – ret) passed away on August 16th, though his death does not appear to have been widely reported until today.
Col. Fisher (he was a major at the time) received the Medal of Honor for pulling off one of the greatest rescue missions in the history of the Vietnam War.
(I swear that I read this story in Reader’s Digest when I was a child, maybe as a “Drama In Real Life”.)
The paper of record does not seem to have deigned to note the passing of Richard “Jaws” Kiel, but the LATimes and the A/V Club have.
Edited to add: now the NYT gets around to it.
Posted in Clippings, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed
Friday, August 1st, 2014
There’s a nice story in today’s NYT. And I wonder why I’m reading it there, rather than in the Statesman.
Background: Gary Lavergne wrote what is widely considered the definitive book on Charles Whitman, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders
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Claire Wilson was one of Whitman’s victims. She was walking with her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman, when Whitman shot her in the belly. He then shot and killed Eckman. Ms. Wilson survived, but she was eight months pregnant; Whitman’s bullet killed the baby.
Ms. Wilson (now Ms. Jones) got in touch with Mr. Lavergne after the book was published (he was unable to find her previously) and they became friends. Sometime later, Mr. Lavergne began researching a question, and found the answer last year.
In November 2013, he was preparing the materials from his most recent work, “Before Brown,” a history of Heman Marion Sweatt’s efforts to integrate the university beginning in the 1940s. Mr. Lavergne revisited a database of nearly 23,000 graves at Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, where Theophilus S. Painter, the university president of that era, is buried.
The end result is that Ms. Jones now knows where her baby was buried. And the grave has a headstone, paid for by Mr. Lavergne.
Pretty much everyone has acknowledged this, but: Dick Smith. A/V Club.
Posted in Clippings, History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed
Tuesday, July 29th, 2014
James Shigeta passed away yesterday. I wasn’t sure if I was going to note this, but the A/V Club ran an excellent obit for him that I believe deserves attention.
He was the lead in the film version of “Flower Drum Song”. If you look at his IMDB page, he had bit parts in basically everything during the 1970’s: the original “Mission: Impossible”, “Rockford”, “SWAT”, “Kung Fu”, “Emergency”, “Ironside”, the original “Hawaii 5-0”, etc.
He was perhaps best known (at least to my brother) as Joseph Takagi in the first “Die Hard”.
Also, the NYT is reporting the passing of Theodore VanKirk, the last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay.
Posted in 1970s, Clippings, History, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed
“. And yes, you can buy FlFoJenk in MP3 format from Amazon.)