Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

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Honor.

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Obit watch: John Finn, the last of the 15 Navy men who were at Pearl Harbor and received the Medal of Honor for their actions on that day, and the oldest living Medal of Honor recipient.

When Chief Finn arrived at the hangars, many of the planes had already been hit. He recalled that he grabbed a .30-caliber machine gun on a makeshift tripod, carried it to an exposed area near a runway and began firing. For the next two and a half hours, he blazed away, although peppered by shrapnel as the Japanese planes strafed the runways with cannon fire.

While I hate to say anything negative about a Medal of Honor recipient, his taste in movies left something to be desired:

In 1999, Mr. Finn was among Pearl Harbor veterans invited to Hawaii for the premiere of the Hollywood movie “Pearl Harbor.” “It was a damned good movie,” he told The Boston Herald in 2001. “It’s helped educate people who didn’t know about Pearl Harbor and what happened there.”

“I liked it especially,” he said, “because I got to kiss all those pretty little movie actresses.”

At the same time, the NYT also has an article asking why so few Medals of Honor have been awarded for service in Iraq or Afghanistan. The article is tied to the case of Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who may (or may not) have thrown himself on a grenade after taking a bullet in the head.

Sgt. Peralta was recommended for the MoH, but that was downgraded to a Navy Cross; however, his family has refused to accept the award and is campaigning to have him awarded the MoH. It seems to me that they have a strong case; yet, it also seems to me (as an outside observer) that refusing the Navy Cross looks bad.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Have you seen me?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

No, not Kyle.

Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar, which appears to be gone with the wind. (Sorry.)

Continuing our regular “Crimewatch” community service feature, here’s what to look out for:

Oscar

Little metal guy, on a stand, about yeah high. If you see something that resembles this, please contact The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Edited to add: Lawrence has pointed out that Ms. McDaniel’s Oscar is actually a plaque, not a statue, as the supporting actor and actress didn’t get statues in 1943. In my hurry to make a cheap joke, I overlooked that minor detail. My apologies; unfortunately, I am unable to find a photo of the plaque anywhere online.

Posted in Clippings, Movies | Comments Closed

Iron Crossed.

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

For the record: the lawsuit against Variety by the producers of “Iron Cross”, previously noted in this space, has been dismissed.

(Hattip: Jimbo.)

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 6, 2010.

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

OMG! Faisal Shahzad had a Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000 in his car!

…all along he possessed a weapon that could have easily done extreme damage, one rapidly fired round at a time.

Later:

It is, in effect, a low-powered rifle. Unlike those of some rifles, its bullets probably would not penetrate a police officer’s bullet-resistant vest, a law enforcement official said.

And:

Unlike the Tec-9, it is not frequently used by criminals, the official said.

Meanwhile, Dana Milbank in the WP asks the musical question:

Is the NRA a terrorist organization?

What prompts this? The NRA’s opposition to barring people on the notoriously unreliable terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.

In other news: Houston rapper that nobody’s ever heard of files lawsuit against local radio station for not playing his “music”.

Trae is suing for general damages to his reputation, character, standing in the community, mental suffering, loss of professional opportunities, performance revenue and record royalties.

I’m looking forward to seeing what legal precedent his lawyer sites that requires a radio station to play someone’s music. Could I sue KGSR for not playing Jonathan Coulton? Even better, could I sue KGSR for playing Kasey Chambers?

Edited to add: “Washington Post puts Newsweek up for sale. Do I hear $1? Anyone?”

Provider 1 bids 300 quatloos on the newcomers.

Edited to add 2: I have been in the practice of noting Roger Ebert’s better negative reviews, especially the one-star and zero-star reviews. A zero-star review from Ebert is pretty rare; he’s stated in the past that for a film to get no stars, it not only has to be bad, but morally reprehensible in some way.

Accordingly, I am going to link to this zero-star Ebert review. I am not going to name the film. I do not encourage you to click on the link. I had heard about this film previously on FARK, and wish I had not.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Hysteria, Law, Media, Movies, Music, Stupid, Thanks | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: March 25, 2010.

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Robert Culp.

“At the Movies“. I gave up on the show when Roper and his rotating cast of guest hosts left; there was no way I was going to watch the pulsating ball of suck that was The Bens. I’d heard that Phillips and Scott were a vast improvement, but I couldn’t bring myself to start watching it again. It didn’t help that the show was usually on in the early early morning here, and was frequently postponed due to sporting events.

I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but Ebert’s been hinting at a new television project: I do look forward to that.

Edited to add: Ebert’s latest blog post does more than hint.

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

Sensei.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

When I was a teenager in the suburbs of Houston, there were three people who, more than anyone else (except my parents, who I’m excluding from this list), influenced the development of my taste in movies:

  • Jeff Millar, the long-time movie critic and columnist for the Houston Chronicle (and the guy who writes “Tank McNamara“). The HouChron hasn’t had a better critic since he retired; Mr. Millar, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you’re having a wonderful life.
  • the late Gene Siskel.
  • and Roger Ebert.

This was in the days long before the Internet. Actually, it was mostly in the days before I had a personal computer. My exposure to Rog and Gene was from “Sneak Previews” on our local PBS station (and, later on, “At the Movies” in syndication).

This was also in the days before home video changed everything. We had VHS tapes, but access to foreign and obscure stuff was iffy; that kind of thing wasn’t well stocked in our local video stores, and NetFlix didn’t exist yet. Rog and Gene were pretty good about including those movies on their show (and my mother used to gripe every time they did) but the art film theaters in Houston were a good drive away.

(more…)

Posted in Movies | 1 Comment »

“I’m Peter Graves, and I was wondering if you could direct me to the natatorium, as I am attending a swim meet.”

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Obit watch. I’ll link to full obits when they go up. (Edited to add: NYT obit. LAT obit.)

I still think Mission: Impossible was one of the great TV series of the 1970s. (You can find M:I openings on YouTube, but oddly, pretty much all the ones I found did not include Peter Graves, or were from the later incarnations of M:I.)

And I will confess that I’ve actually sat through Red Planet Mars.

(Hattip. Yes, I chose to go with the more obscure reference. You were expecting gladiator movies?)

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 10, 2010.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The NYT, in the person of John T. Edge, covers the breakfast taco scene in Austin.

The NYT also gives us a short piece on The Gastronomica Reader. I’m somewhat excited about this collection, as I’m a semi-regular reader of Gastronomica.

The Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood has lost its lease! Everything must go! Seriously, this is an interesting story, with overtones of “Don’t tick off the Mouse.”

Shocked, shocked I am, that movie theaters don’t want to book a movie that’s already out on DVD, even if it did win the Academy Award.

The producers of “Iron Cross” sued Variety on Tuesday, claiming the trade lured the indie film into a $400,000 promotion campaign with promises of Oscar attention that would lead to a major distribution deal — then trashing it all with a scathing review.

Edited to add: This hasn’t gotten quite the attention I expected, so I’ll throw in a couple of links to LA Observed on the whale sushi scandal. I particularly like the Jonathan Gold quote: “Restaurants resort to gimmicks generally because their chefs just aren’t very good.” You don’t say?

It is unclear if the trial will continue without Brown’s presence, because under Texas law, he may be found to have “voluntarily absenced” himself, Gotro said.

This is for values of “voluntarily absenced himself” that include shooting himself in the head, in the front yard of a witness.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Movies | 2 Comments »

Random notes: March 9, 2010.

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

H.L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Apparently, this applies to New Zealand as well.

The WP has a brief review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, which actually sounds like a fun book. I do wonder if it mentions “Drowning Mona“. (Edited to add: Yes. Yes, it does.) (Edited to add 2: Also reviewed in Slate. Hattip: Lawrence.)

The papers of David Foster Wallace are going to the Ransom Center at UT.

Obit watch: Malcolm Glover. Yeah, you probably never heard of him, unless you lived in San Francisco. Glover spent 56 years working for the Examiner and the Chronicle, most of those as a police reporter. This is a guy who was hired personally by William Randolph Hearst at the age of 12 (he didn’t start working for the papers until he was 16). Glover must have had some amazing stories. I hope someone wrote some of them down. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

Houston’s Clear Thinkers links to an article from Spiegel Online about the crash of Air France Flight 447. The current theory of the crash (they haven’t recovered the black boxes yet) seems to be that the pitot tubes iced up; those tubes are a major component of the system that drives the airspeed indicators, so when they iced up, the airspeed indicators started giving bad readings. Worse yet, the airspeed indicators were feeding bad information to the Airbus flight computer; this may have resulted in a loss of control which led to the crash.

This is the kind of accident that chills me. There’s very little even an experienced pilot can do to get out of this type of failure, especially at night, over water, with almost no visual references. For me, the most disturbing segment of Charlie Victor Romeo is the Aeroperú 603 crash, which happened under similar (but not identical) circumstances. If you read the CVR transcript, or hear it performed live, the crew’s confusion and desperation comes across pretty clearly. (The same incident was also used for an early episode of the Air Emergency series, which goes by several other names as well.)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 21, 2010.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Was the death of Haing S. Ngor a murder by a group of gangbangers? That’s the official theory of the case, and three men are doing time for his murder. However, there’s still speculation that his murder was actually a revenge hit by the Khmer Rouge.

I remember being angry and upset when I heard about the murder; that a man who had been through so much would be killed on the street by scumbags for a watch and locket enraged me. But there’s a natural human tendency to see patterns and conspiracies even where none are present; we use this as a tool to try and make sense of the world.  (Stingray has a wonderful post on this at the Atomic Nerds site.) As much as I’d like to believe Ngor’s death was part of a conspiracy by the Khmer Rouge, I’d need to see more evidence than what’s in the LAT article.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 11th, 2010.

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Obit watch: French New Wave director Eric Rohmer. I’ll update this space with the NYT obit and anything Roger Ebert has to say, once those are posted.

Edited to add: NYT obit. Ebert appreciation.

Jayson Williams has apparently decided to plead out to an aggravated assault charge, instead of going through a retrial for killing Costas Christofi.

his personal life in shambles

I’ll have to contact some of my friends at IBM and see how that project to build a tiny violin out of xenon atoms is going.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Loser, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 5, 2010.

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

By way of Roger Ebert, we learn of Matthew Dessem, a man with a goal; to watch every single movie in the Criterion Collection, and write about them.

Understand that Dessem’s essays are advanced and ambitious. These aren’t three-paragraph plot summaries. He watches the extras, reads the literature, provides detailed analysis, find still photos and grabs individual shots from a computer screen.

I had a chance to read some of the essays on Dessem’s site, and I agree with Roger; these are serious essays, not hack work.

Best quote from the article:

“My absolute favorite commentary track on any Criterion title so far,” he said, “is the one with NASA consultant Dr. Joe Allen and asteroid consultant Ivan Bekey (as well as the cinematographer, Joe Schwartzman) talking about ‘Armageddon.’ It’s basically two-and-a-half hours of these guys saying, over and over again, ‘We told Michael Bay that this scene was completely scientifically inaccurate, but he went ahead and did it anyway’.”

If you’re going to read just one of Dessem’s reviews, I recommend the Armageddon one. The movie’s an easy target, but I think he does a good job of trying to engage with it, while at the same time not neglecting the movie’s many stupid moments.

Yesterday’s WP had a nice article about Betsey Apple, wife of the late NYT writer and bon vivant R.W. Apple. She’s preparing to auction off his wine collection:

And yes, Betsey says, they all belonged to her husband and not to his employer, an important distinction given that he was a legendary expense account artist who may or may not have buried a fur coat on one of his expense reports when he was posted in Moscow.

and also promoting his new book.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the legendary Mr. Apple, Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker profile is available online, and well worth reading.

Posted in Clippings, Movies | Comments Closed

Warren Beatty dies at the end.

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Obit watch: Loren Singer, author of The Parallax View, which was adapted into an Alan J. Pakula directed movie.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Random notes: December 16, 2009.

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Things have been kind of slow the past few days, but I did want to throw up a few notes:

Your NYT obit for Oral Roberts here. While looking that up, I discovered that the NYT has also just posted an obit for Milorad Pavic, of Dictionary of the Khazars fame.

Regret the Error has their year-end roundup of errors and corrections posted. I can’t argue with the correction of the year (which, surprisingly, is not the corrections to Alessandra Stanley’s Cronkite obit; that is, however, highlighted).

Edited to add: But wait, there’s more! The Onion A.V. Club list of the 19+ worst movies of 2009! I miss Ebert and Siskel’s  (and Ebert and Roper’s) yearly worst movies show; the A.V. Club list is the closest I’ve found to a substitute for that.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Loser, Media, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Notes towards a loser update.

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

The New Jersey Nets (who, by the way, are 0-16, and two games away from setting an NBA record for most consecutive losses to start a season; and they play the Lakers tonight) fired coach Lawrence Frank. Who says Bruce Ratner cares more about his real estate ventures than the Nets?

(By the way, that is not the firing I was expecting today. I was also not expecting Al Groh to be fired at Virginia quite yet, but when you go 3-9, and can’t beat your arch rival, your days are numbered. Groh apparently has pro experience with the Jets; could he go to the Bills? Or could he possibly be considered for the Notre Dame job?)

I see that the Texans once again managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This doesn’t really qualify as a “loser” update per se, but last night I was able to have a very nice dinner at my sister’s place and watch the Baylor – Texas Tech game. I’m glad Tech pulled the game out, but it sure seems to me that there were a lot of missed and dropped passes. This victory strikes me as being one for the defense; and, as we all know, you can’t rely on defense to win games.

And the more Avatar commercials I see, the more I root for the movie to be an enormous flop.

Posted in Firings, Loser, Movies, NFL | Comments Closed

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