Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Running behind.

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

TMQ Watch will probably be up…later.

In the meantime, Lawrence has a review of “The Sentinel” up at his place. I watched it with him and some other folks (thanks for hosting, people whose identities I wish to protect) along with “The Mummy“. Some random thoughts:

  • “The Mummy” is actually more erotic, at least in my opinion, than “The Sentinel”. “Mummy” has no nudity, but damn Zita Johann looks hot in that outfit. “The Sentinel” has nudity, but not from the right people; Cristina Raines is attractive, to be sure, but she never gets naked. And the people who do get naked…are not people you want to see naked.
  • Zita Johann sure had an interesting life. She was basically in the movies for three years, then quit to work in theater with people like John Houseman (yes, that one: she was also married to him at one point) and Orson Welles, lived to the age of 89, and made her last film appearance at the age of 82.
  • “The Sentinel” also has an uncredited, nonspeaking appearance by Richard Dreyfuss. You watch that scene and you can’t fail to recognize him; we were all, “Yeah, that’s Dreyfuss, all right.”
  • Someone should do a documentary about Richard Dreyfuss and his career. I even have a title for it: “The Dreyfuss Affair”.
  • Did you know that “The Mummy” is only one hour and thirteen minutes long? (Edited to add: “It’s Pat” is only five minutes longer.)
  • Which is interesting, because stuff happens in “The Mummy”. Really. There’s not a whole lot of drag, although Sir Basil Exposition (or his grandfather) does appear quite a bit in the movie. But stuff happens, and it happens relatively fast. Karl Freund was no foot-dragger. Some of today’s directors could take lessons from him.
  • Cheese louise, Jerry Orbach circa 1977 is weird to look at. Not in a “he’s ugly” way, but in a “hard to associate with Lennie Briscoe” way. (Yes, I’m fully aware that Jerry had a long and colorful career before “LawnOrder”. I’m just saying Lennie is such an icon that it is hard to see him any other way.) (Edited to add: Thank you, “CygnusDarius”, for this.)
  • And as a reward for reading all the way to the end of this:

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Mongo no longer pawn in game of life.

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

The LAT is reporting the death of Alex Karras. More later.

Posted in Horses, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: October 2, 2012.

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Before we jump into this week’s column, here’s a totally inappropriate 80’s flashback for you.

You’re welcome. After the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Clippings, Movies, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

Random notes: September 27, 2012.

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

Sorry, folks. My normal schedule has been disrupted by a (thankfully not serious) personal matter.

“Who’s a good boy? Yes, you are. You’re a good boy. You sniff out drugs. Yes you do. And you don’t steal guns from the city and sell them. No, you don’t. And you don’t owe tens of thousands of dollars in child support in Texas. Good boy! Go catch the ball!”

(Hattip: Balko.)

The guy APD shot Tuesday night? Died in the hospital. (Linked article contains more details on the shooting.)

Obit watches: The WP is reporting the death of Herbert Lom.

John Silber, former Boston University president.

Andy Williams. (A/V Club. NYT. LAT.)

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

TMQ watch: September 25, 2012.

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Let’s cut to the chase.

(more…)

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

Score!

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

This weekend was the grand opening for the new Half-Price Books in Round Rock.

As they usually do, Half-Price was distributing coupons: 40% off one item on Thursday, 30% off on Friday, 20% off on Saturday, and 50% off on Sunday. (I heard one clerk complain that those coupons were only supposed to apply to the Round Rock store, but they made them valid for all the stores in error. I think that clerk was full of it, but that’s just my opinion.)

Anyway, I picked up a few interesting things Thursday through Saturday, including a copy of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (at 40% off of half cover price) and Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (which I didn’t burn a coupon on, as the copy I found was marked down to $4.99).

Today was 50% off day. I had some things I was thinking about picking up, but then I got lucky. Fortunately, I had two coupons…

The new (2010) of Bill Warren’s magnificent book, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition, complete with Howard Waldrop introduction. Cover is $99, so take half of that, and then take 50% off of that with the coupon…

Hoglegs, Hipshots and Jalapenos, the other collection of Skeeter Skelton’s work from Shooting Times. Some of you may remember me mentioning I found a copy of Good Friends, Good Guns, Good Whisky in a Las Vegas bookstore last year and paid (mumble mumble) for it. This was in a locked glass case at HPB and I nearly walked past it; I’m glad I didn’t. I won’t say how much I paid, but with the coupon, it was about half of the (mumble mumble) price I paid for volume one in Vegas, and nowhere near the asking prices on Amazon.

Squee!

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies | 5 Comments »

Morning random notes: September 4, 2012.

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Would you pay $18 for a 40-minute vinyl record of previously unreleased Charles Manson songs?

Yeah, I wouldn’t, either.

The album’s title, a vulgarity that means wasting time…

I want to come back to this later and elaborate on the idea some, but I’m getting more than a little tired of the mass media being coy in their reporting. (See also: Russian punk bands.)

Vasquez turned to the funding website Kickstarter to raise several thousand dollars to pay to have the album cover printed and 500 copies of the record pressed.

This kind of bothers me, too, but I’m not sure I can articulate why.

Headline in the NYT:

Gotham: A Summer of Easy Guns and Dead Children

First paragraph:

In Harlem, Paula Shaw-Leary talks of her youngest, Matt, who got his college degree in May and was accepted to graduate school…

Matt’s death is tragic, but a 21-year-old man who has been accepted to grad school is not a child.

(Gee, doesn’t NYC have strict gun control laws?)

I don’t think I ever saw anything Michael Clarke Duncan was in, and I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work. But 54 is just too young. (NYT. LAT. A/V Club.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright archive is moving to New York City. This sounds like a very good thing:

The models will live at MoMA, which has extensive conservation and exhibition experience. The museum will display them in periodic presentations and special exhibitions. The papers will be housed at Avery, whose librarians will make them available to researchers and educators starting at the end of next year.

(Well, a very good thing for everyone except Mike the Musicologist, who hates NYC.)

Headline from something called “The Root”, linked from the WP site:

Few African Americans at Burning Man

“Word Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Hondo Harrelson, call your office, please.

Monday, August 27th, 2012

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating whether members of its elite SWAT unit took advantage of their assignments to purchase large numbers of specially-made handguns and resell the weapons for steep profits, according to a report released Friday by the independent watchdog overseeing the department.

The LAT suggests that this “could be a violation of federal firearm laws and city ethics regulations”. I am unfamiliar with ethics regulations in LA, so I will refrain from comment on that. I am not sure what federal firearm laws would have been violated, since private sales between individuals are not illegal under federal law. (They may be under California law; I am also not an expert on California gun laws.) The LAT is also apparently unclear on what regulations and federal firearms laws were violated:

Regardless of whether the LAPD has a policy governing gun sales by officers, [Inspector General Alex] Bustamante noted that “the purchase of firearms with the intent to immediately transfer the weapon to a third party may violate city ethics regulations and federal firearm laws.” The report did not specify which regulations and laws may have been violated.

But getting back to the story, this isn’t the first go-around at this particular rodeo.

Suspicion about the guns first arose in 2010, when the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Metropolitan Division, which includes SWAT, ordered an inventory of the division’s firearms, the report said. The officer responsible for conducting the count discovered that SWAT members had purchased between 51 and 324 pistols from the gun manufacturer Kimber and were “possibly reselling them to third parties for large profits,” according to the report.

“between 51 and 324”? Could you be a little more vague in your count? In any case, LAPD SWAT, according to the LAT, only had about 60 members.

Kimber sold the guns, which bore a special “LAPD SWAT” insignia, to members of the unit for about $600 each — a steep discount from their resale value of between $1,600 and $3,500, the report said. The unique SWAT gun branding was first made several years earlier, when the department contracted with Kimber for a one-time purchase of 144 of the pistols.

$600? Daymn! I know Kimber’s had issues in the past few years, but you offer me one for $600, and I’ll be on that biatch like an anaconda on blood orchid serum.

(We watched that over the weekend. Two word review: annoyingly competent.)

(Also: “between $1,600 and $3,500”? That’s a $1,900 difference there, Sparky. If the comments in the LAT and Kimber’s website are to be believed, the pistol in question is the Custom TLE II, which has an MSRP of $1,054 without the LAPD SWAT markings.)

Neither the officer relieved of duty, the others suspected of being involved, nor the person who conducted the inventory were interviewed for the investigation, and no attempt was made to determine how many guns had been purchased from Kimber, Bustamante wrote. In the end, the department concluded that it had no policy governing such activity, and so closed its investigation, according to the inspector general report.

So that’s the first investigation, which the LAT makes sound half-assed. Bustamante’s investigation is the second one:

Because the initial investigation was so lacking, little is known about the gun sales. Bustamante’s report, which will be presented to the L.A. Police Commission on Tuesday, was based on the initial, substandard inquiry and so could not answer basic questions about the allegations, including how many officers were involved, the number of guns sold and when the sales were carried out. 

And:

The department’s poor job investigating the alleged SWAT gun sales was all the more notable, Bustamante wrote, because of the way it treated the officer who uncovered the gun purchases during the inventory. When one of the SWAT team members under suspicion accused him of improperly discussing the investigation with others, the department opened a separate inquiry into the claim, producing a 257-page report that dwarfed the 39-page file on the gun sales. The officer was suspended for five days.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cops, Guns, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Random roundup: August 22, 2012.

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012

40 years ago today, John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Natuarale tried to hold up a Chase Manhattan bank branch in Brooklyn. I believe this is what that location looks like today:

View Larger Map

Wojtowicz and Natuarale botched the robbery, and ended up in a 14 hour long standoff with police. The NYT has a retrospective.

And why does this matter, other than it being kind of a big deal at the time? Well, the robbery inspired a Sidney Lumet film:

Obit watch: Victor Poor, an influential early chip designer for Intel.

Noted:

Mr. Poor retired in 1984 and pursued a passion for sailing. Looking for a way to communicate while he was at sea, he developed a wireless data communications system, initially called Aplink, for Amtor packet link, and later Winlink. The system was widely adopted by radio amateurs, the United States military, and state and local emergency preparedness teams. It was credited with being one of the few communications systems that worked in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Edited to add: Thanks to Borepatch for reminding us it is also the 20th anniversary of the shooting of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: August 21, 2012.

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Joe Ely’s classic song “Fighting For My Life” contains the lyric:

I don’t mean to crash the cymbals, I don’t mean to beat the drum

I don’t want to waste your time, I’d rather save you some.

TMQ’s favorite Batman film is “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm“. You can now skip the first 335 words of this week’s column. And if that’s all you were looking for, you can skip everything after the jump, too.

(more…)

Posted in Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 20, 2012.

Monday, August 20th, 2012

Yesterday was a bad day for Hollywood.

Noted actor William Windom passed away at the age of 88. (NYT. LAT.) You know, I’d love to see “My World and Welcome to It” finally make it to DVD.

And director Tony Scott (“Top Gun”, “Crimson Tide”, “Man on Fire”, etc.) committed suicide yesterday. (LAT. A/V Club.)

Kevin Caruso’s Suicide.org website. For what ever it may be worth.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: August 14, 2012.

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

We were expecting TMQ to start up again soonish, and actually noticed that the first TMQ of the season went up last Tuesday. Unfortunately, some personal issues kept us from getting back into the swing of things until now. Future TMQ Watches will be posted on the same Tuesday as the TMQ, barring unusual and unforeseen circumstances.

And with that, let’s fill the chainsaw’s gas tank with two-stroke mix, pull the starter cord, and get going. Winter will be here sooner than we think.

(more…)

Posted in Movies, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

And even more things I did not know….

Friday, August 17th, 2012

An office discussion led to the misguided The Legend of the Lone Ranger movie from 1981. (Not to be confused with the misguided Lone Ranger movie currently in production.)

You remember that one, don’t you? The one where the Wrather Company went after Clayton Moore for making public appearances in a mask? The one starring Klinton Spilsbury?

I’m sure you haven’t been wondering, “Hey, what ever happened to Klinton Spilsbury?” But: what ever happened to Klinton Spilsbury?

Answer: he’s never worked again.

Kind of makes me go “Wow”. I mean, surely he could have gotten a part in some direct to video/DVD piece of crap? Or if they were really desperate, a part in a SyFy channel movie? “Anaconda 5: Anaconda vs. Bigfoot”?

Posted in Movies, Wondering | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 7, 2012.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Noted art critic Robert Hughes.

A/V Club obit for Marvin Hamlisch. I expect fuller obits in the daily papers tomorrow. (I did not know, until I read it in one of the current obits, that Hamlisch was an EGOT recipient, and one of only two people to receive a Pulitzer Prize in addition to the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. Richard Rodgers was the other one.)

The NYT is also reporting the passing of noted film critic Judith Crist.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 31, 2012.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Chris Marker, filmmaker perhaps best known for his short “La Jetée”.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »