The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Roger Ebert has passed away.
Their servers appear to be overwhelmed at the moment, and I have not seen this reported elsewhere. I’m going to give this a bit of time, and will probably have more to say later on.
I missed this one the other day, because of reasons. I also missed this story when it happened, because I was 5 at the time.
Mr. Rose was convicted of murdering Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government’s minister of labor. Mr. Laporte was kidnapped by Mr. Rose’s F.L.Q. cell on October 10, 1970, and was found strangled in the trunk of a car on October 18th. Mr. Rose made statements implicating himself in the kidnapping, but “an investigation by a Montreal prosecutor concluded in 1980 that Mr. Rose could not have been present at the killing”. Mr. Rose served 11 years in prison.
Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.
(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)
Here’s your obit for Herbert Streicher, aka “Harry Reems”, the male star of “Deep Throat”: NYT. A/V Club.
Oh, look! New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is re-thinking his hastily passed and poorly thought out gun control measures! It couldn’t have anything to do with his declining popularity, could it?
But gun control works!
I have not had time to go through all of it yet, but the NYT special section on “Museums” looks interesting. Call this a bookmark.
Here’s the LAT‘s second day article on the Bell convictions.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the national recording registry…
(Also: The Ramones first album! “Einstein on the Beach”! “South Pacific”! “Sounds of Silence”! The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack?)
Last night, we watched The Killing at the home of my friends who shall remain nameless.
I bow to no man in my admiration for Stanley Kubrick. I will happily engage in physical combat with John Gruber and Jim Coudal simultaneously to determine which of us is the greater Kubrick fan, if it comes to that.
I realize The Killing is early Kubrick. I expected it to be a little rough around the edges, and I think it is an important work to watch, Kubrick fan or non-fan. (The Killing pioneered some tricks that you see in more modern movies, such as the non-linear timeline.)
But there’s one big huge problem with the movie: Marie Windsor.
I feel bad about saying this. I’m sure Ms. Windsor was a very nice woman, and she certainly had a long career. But she sucks the life out of The Killing in Every. Single. Scene. She’s. In. Every moment she was on screen, we were thinking “Get this woman off the screen!” The setup and execution of the racetrack robbery is compelling, but Ms. Windsor’s scenes with Elisha Cook drove me bugnuts crazy. They don’t work well as a couple, and Ms. Windsor’s dialogue in particular is just awful; it shoot for smart and clever, and misses by a mile.
This may not have been entirely Ms. Windsor’s plot: Jim Thompson co-wrote the dialogue, and I can easily believe he was drunk off his hind end the entire time he was writing it. But even if the writing is bad, Ms. Windsor’s delivery of it still sets my teeth on edge. I think Lawrence came very close to pulling the pin on this one, solely because Ms. Windsor was driving him crazy as well.
Spoiler space:
This has come up in conversation twice in the past seven days. I believe that is a sign that I have to make a blog post out of it.
“Django Unchained” is currently number 41 on the IMDB list of top 250 movies.
Here are some movies that the IMDB top 250 voters think “Django Unchained” is better than:
Feel free to go through the list and post your own “Django Unchained is better than…WTF?” moments in the comments. I, personally, promise not to refer to you as Grandpa Simpson, though I can’t say the same for other people.
Continuing our N.C.A.A. coverage:
Meanwhile, Joel Bauman is a wrestler on scholarship at the University of Minnesota. He’s also a musician, and wants to inspire people through his music.
So?
(I wonder: if he wasn’t selling the video on iTunes, would the N.C.A.A. still have an issue?)
In other news: your dog wants steak. Your dog does not want rodent poison. Your dog does not want people feeding it rodent poison, especially if it is in competition at Westminster.
(It strikes me as odd that a necropsy wasn’t done. “[Lynette] Blue [one of the owners] declined for Cruz to have a necropsy because she was confident that he swallowed poison, she said.” But wouldn’t it be better to have a necropsy done and to be sure, as well as having evidence for a possible criminal case?)
(Gee, wouldn’t this make a good episode of “Law and Order”, if that show was still on the air.)
Obit watch: Van Cliburn. LAT account of his 1994 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. A/V Club.
Dale Robertson. No A/V Club obit yet.
Obit watch: C. Everett Koop. (True story: I used to live a stone’s throw away from the DrKoop.com headquarters. I didn’t move; DrKoop.com did.)
The NYT has discovered NFA trusts.
Ever notice how the NYT, LAT, and other media outlets refer to things they don’t like as a “loophole”?
Frankly, I don’t believe the NYT‘s claims here. I suspect they’re being dishonest with the readers. However, I haven’t looked into NFA trusts; I’m not at the point in my life where I’m ready to purchase automatic weapons. (However, my brother and I had a discussion last night, prompted by the existence of “The Sliencer Store” near the movie theater I went to. A silencer for some of my .22LR guns is becoming more tempting.) Are there any readers out there who know more about NFA trusts and are willing to comment?
The LAT, meanwhile, is pre-occupied with the non-existant “gun show loophole”.
Speaking of movies, I considered live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday, but I figured my live blog would go something like this:
7:30 PM: Ceremony finally starts.
7.45 PM: First call by a celebrity for “reasonable gun control”. Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to bed.
The one nice thing to come out of the Oscars, in my humble opinion, was that “Argo” started playing at the Alamo Drafthouses again, and at reasonable times. I ended up seeing a matinee showing yesterday.
Yes, it is very much a “Hollywood saves the world” movie, as well as a “heroic Federal employees” movie. Yes, “based on a true story” means that some of the facts have been fudged.
And I don’t care: “Argo” is a good story, well acted, well directed, and just the right length. Of the nominees I’ve seen, I liked it more than “Django Unchained” and (sorry, Mom) “Lincoln”. (I still want to see “Zero Dark Thirty”, but haven’t gotten to it yet. The other movie from last year I was excited about and didn’t get to see is “The Master”, which I think is going to have to wait for DVD.)
We must ban the deadly killer backboards!
I don’t have much to offer as a Bell trial update. I am assuming the court took Monday off, and there doesn’t seem to have been any reported activity on Tuesday. The LAT does have a story datelined today, but it is just a summary of the past week of testimony, focusing on the whole “it was all Rizzo!” defense strategy.
Obit watch: Donald Richie, “prominent American critic and writer on Japan who helped introduce much of the English-speaking world to the golden age of Japanese cinema in 1959”. Among Richie’s works was The Films of Akira Kurosawa
Over a number of years, Raymond Rohauer, a producer and distributor, accumulated prints of a number of films. His collection became known as the Rohauer Library, and contains “more than 700 titles”, according to the LAT.
Mr. Rohauer died in 1987. The collection was purchased in 2011 by a man named Charles S. Cohen, who has aggressive plans to get the collection back into circulation.
Why does this matter? Here are some of the things in the collection:
” blu-ray on Amazon, but they show it as being released February 19th, not today as the LAT states.)And the list goes on. This could be the best thing to happen to movies since the Criterion Collection.
This post over at Andy Ihnatko’s site reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to blog about. I’m going to put that after a jump, and politely suggest that you read Mr. Ihnatko’s post first, because what I’m going to discuss will ruin his elaborately set up punch line.
S’awright? S’awright?. S’awright? S’okay.
(You know, as a kid, I didn’t get Señor Wences. As an adult, I miss him.)
I want to throw Lawrence some linky-love for his review of Django Unchained. If I don’t, I’ll hear from him.
And, more to the point, he says a lot of what I wanted to say. My comments are more in the form of notes on his review than an actual review.
I disagree with Lawrence on this. Specifically, I found what I’ll refer to as “the third act” (people who have seen the movie should understand what I’m talking about) to be kind of draggy. I think that entire sequence could have been tightened up considerably; I was ready for the movie to be over long before it was over.
Dear Quentin Tarantino:
You’re a good director. Really. Please stop trying to act as well. Thank you.
I was glad to see Zoë Bell in the credits, though I honestly missed her in the movie itself. Maybe one of these days Tarantino will give her the role she deserves.
There is a scene where Django and Schultz have hunted down a wanted man; Django balks at shooting the man in front of his child until Schultz has him read the wanted poster. I thought this was a very clever scene, more clever than I actually expected from Tarantino, for two reasons:
Generally: yeah, I liked it, but I would have liked it a little more at 2:15 or possibly 2:30, not 2:45.
Edited to add: For some reason, Lawrence’s comments about this film self-selecting its audience, and comments I expect to get from certain other people, remind me of ham. Don’t know why.
We were busy most of the morning, all afternoon, and on into the evening. But hey! Today is still Tuesday, and we all know what that means! Girl Scout cookies!
(munches another Caramel deLite)
Damn, these are good.
(has another)
(puts up the rest of the box before we eat our way through it)
Oh, yeah, we also have this week’s TMQ to deal with after the jump…
Lawrence sent me a heads-up that Michael Winner had died, but I wasn’t able to find independent confirmation until now. Here’s the A/V Club obit.
His filmography is interesting: he directed Death Wish, Death Wish 2, Death Wish 3, and the original version of The Mechanic. (I kind of liked both Death Wish and The Mechanic, though I haven’t seen either one in ages.)
He also directed Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, a version of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe and set in England instead of L.A., and (the reason Lawrence brought him up), The Sentinal.
In addition to the 2013 “stupid statement” and “best article” of the year awards, I think I’m also going to have to set up the Prometheus Memorial Stupid Behavior For A Professional Award this year.
That isn’t original to me; it comes from an article on the A/V Club site. But having seen Prometheus, I like the idea so much I want to take it and run with it.
Before I link to the A/V Club article (credit where credit is due), I want to note that it is from their “Spoiler Space” section and does give spoilers for a movie being released this week. (I’d name the movie, but I think the combination of that and the award name is, in and of itself, a spoiler.) If you don’t give a flying fark, here’s the link.
Nagisa Oshima, noted Japanese film director. NYT. A/V Club.
Oddly enough, I’ve never seen an Oshima film. I have the Criterion In The Realm Of The Senses
