Tag: movies

Robin Williams has died. SHAZBOT!

It’s damn disconcerting that the comedic mask hid such despair.

public domain
public domain

I had heard that Robin Williams had passed away while I was hanging out with some Times Union bloggers Monday night, Chuck Miller and Don Rittner and David Kalish. My first thought that maybe it was a hoax, which says a lot about the news these days. But it wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that he had apparently committed suicide.

The FIRST person I thought of was Amy Biancolli, who I’ve met, whose husband – I have a signed copy of one of his books about faith – was a very public suicide. I wondered how she would react to the news. Unsurprisingly, she dropped her phone “onto the kitchen counter and wept. Really wept.” And at that moment reading that, so did I.

A friend of mine of 20 years wrote a lengthy piece that began: “My grandfather, aunt, and father committed suicide… Clearly, we must be more connected in a true, loving, helpful, connected way; we must reach to those who are struggling.” I had had no idea; I was slack-jawed.

SamuraiFrog was “rather surprised by the depth of the emotional reaction” he was having to the news. Me too, actually. (Here’s his follow-up.) It’s damn disconcerting that the comedic mask hid such despair.

I have few words. He was a comic genius, sometimes too “on”, as Evanier mentioned, but brilliant nonetheless. Dustbury noted that “seemingly everyone in my tweet stream posted a favorite comedy or dramatic bit — and in a full hour, there were no duplicates.” Here are a bunch of tributes. Even President Obama noted his passing. Got to read a story of his kindness.

I saw him in a LOT of things. His last TV show, The Crazy Ones, I caught only about 15 minutes of.
2008 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (TV series – episode) Not a show I tend to watch, but he did well.

2006 Night at the Museum – as Teddy Roosevelt

2006 Happy Feet (voice)
2002 One Hour Photo – good in a serious role

1998 Patch Adams – cloying, but that seemed to be what was called for. CLIP.
1998 What Dreams May Come – for the life of me, I don’t remember how this ended.
1997 Good Will Hunting – liked him in this a lot. CLIP.
1997 Deconstructing Harry – a small role.
1996 The Birdcage – actually played the more straightlaced part against Nathan Lane; liked that.
1995 Jumanji – I bought into the schtick

1994 Homicide: Life on the Street (TV Series – episode) Here’s an interesting remembrance.
1993 Mrs. Doubtfire – I totally related to this, a desperate situation required desperate measures. CLIP.
1992 Aladdin – brilliantly wacky as the genie. CLIP. Plus the Williams-Disney fight.
1991 The Fisher King – plays a person trying to find his way back quite convincingly. CLIP.

1990 Awakenings – he plays a doctor convincingly. CLIP.
1989 Dead Poets Society – I liked him as the inspirational teacher. Hear some music from the film. PLUS this CLIP.
1987 Good Morning, Vietnam – he was great as the crazy DJ; I have the soundtrack on LP, I just recalled. CLIP.
1984 Moscow on the Hudson – a tad hokey, but I enjoyed it anyway.
1982 The World According to Garp – strange film, as I recall, but I liked him.

1978-1982 Mork & Mindy (TV Series) – was there ever a better season of comedy than the first season of Mork and Mindy? Got strange later, especially Jonathan Winters as their son, but before that, quite entertaining
1980 Popeye – don’t think it worked
1978-1979 Happy Days (TV Series, as Mork) – funny stuff

More CLIPS.

Read this 2010 interview.

A very serious piece from CRACKED: Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves

 

MOVIE REVIEW: Words and Pictures

As a teacher, The Wife appreciated the non-traditional ways both main characters in Words and Pictures attempted to engage their students.

wordsandpicturesAt some point in July, the Wife and I saw Words and Pictures at the Spectrum 8 Theatre. I forgot to write a review straight on, partly because I was busy, but also because I don’t particularly enjoy scribing negative reviews. ESPECIALLY when I REALLY wanted to like the film.

The premise is that prep school English teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen), once an acclaimed writer himself, is a burned-out, functional alcoholic. He tries to motivate his students to value the written word.

He starts this contrived competition with the new teacher Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), a well-regarded abstract painter now struggling with rheumatoid arthritis, about whether…well, read the title… are more important.

Some of it is mildly inspirational in the teacher-motivates-students plot in a number of better movies. Some of it is hokey, such as a scene in which she struggles to paint with nice classical music, while he drinks to excess while raucous David Bowie is the soundtrack. But the ending of this movie I didn’t believe AT ALL.

The Wife liked this quite a bit more than I. As a teacher, I think she appreciated the non-traditional ways both characters attempted to engage their students. And I did as well, but it wasn’t enough to ignore its failings.

I loved Binoche in Chocolat, and apparently, she does her own painting here, credibly. I think the failure of Words and Pictures is not with her. It’s not with Owen, either, though his character is never as charming as we’re supposed to believe. The real issue is the somewhat hackneyed script.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Grand Seduction

Taylor Kitsch is best known for the acclaimed TV series Friday Night Lights.

grand-seductionThe Wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre on a recent Saturday night. I knew little about any of the movies, so we opted for the film down from four showings per day to two, The Grand Seduction.

From the IMDB description:
“The small harbor of Tickle Cove [probably Newfoundland, Canada] is in dire need of a doctor so that the town can land a contract to secure a factory which will save the town from financial ruin. Village resident Murray French (Brandon Gleeson) leads the search, and when he finds Dr. Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) he employs – along with the whole town – tactics to seduce the doctor to stay permanently.”

This film is an English language remake of the French-Canadian Seducing Doctor Lewis (2003), originally called “La grande séduction”. Here’s a trailer of the current movie.

It takes a bit to set up the premise, but eventually, there are lots of laughs, coming from these folks who are looking for meaning in their life that work used to provide. We enjoyed it quite a bit and related to many of the characters. It also provided an interesting parallel about the value of honesty.

Gleeson is a versatile actor who often plays the heavy. Kitsch is best known for the acclaimed TV series Friday Night Lights. The last movie in which I saw Gordon Pinsent, who played Simon, Murray’s aide de camp, was in the very different Away from Her (2006).

The reviewers were mixed on this, 61% positive in Rotten Tomatoes. One of the negative reviews read, “Loved Local Hero? Charmed by Waking Ned Devine? Then go watch Local Hero and Waking Ned Devine.” Funny that, because right as the movie ended, this woman sitting right behind us said, “It was good but not as good as Ned Devine.” I did see that quirky film 15 years ago, and liked it fine, but don’t remember it well enough to make the comparison.

Don’t know that you need to run out to your local theater to see it – if you can even find it – but it’s worth at least a rental. Here’s a video review that doesn’t reveal too much.

NSFW video: Earl Butz and “Loose Shoes”

About an hour into the film Loose Shoes was a short musical sketch based on Earl Butz’s joke that also gave the movie its title.

ButzA3622-19Earl Butz, who was born 105 years ago today, was one of the worst US government officials ever. He was Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinets of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “His policies favored large-scale corporate farming” which has damaged the family farm to this day, and arguably “led directly to overproduction of corn and a subsequent rise of obesity in the United States.” But “he is best remembered for a series of verbal gaffes that eventually cost him his job.”

Butz resigned his cabinet post on October 4, 1976… News outlets revealed a racist remark he made in front of entertainer Pat Boone and former White House counsel John Dean while aboard a commercial flight to California following the 1976 Republican National Convention. The October 18, 1976 issue of Time reported the comment while obscuring its vulgarity [which I will only mildly do so here]:

…When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded… “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight p****; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to s***.”
After some indecision, Dean used the line in Rolling Stone, attributing it to an unnamed Cabinet officer. But New Times magazine enterprisingly sleuthed out Butz’s identity by checking the itineraries of all Cabinet members.

Butz was later convicted of tax evasion. He died in 2008 at the age of 98. As Arlo Guthrie said: “But that’s not what I came to tell you about.”

There was a 1980 movie called Loose Shoes, a/k/a Coming Attractions, which was probably filmed two or three years earlier. The premise was rather intriguing, to make a series of trailers for films that actually did not exist. The movie did not fare particularly well critically. It featured author Kinky Friedman, Buddy Hackett, Howard Hesseman (WKRP), Jaye P. Morgan, songwriter Van Dyke Parks, Avery Schreiber, Betty Thomas (Hill Street Blues), and Mark Volman of the singing group The Turtles, with voiceovers by, among others, Gary Owens and Harry Shearer. The reason it probably got released at all was the ascendant star power of Bill Murray, who had starred in Meatballs and Caddyshack, plus his tenure on Saturday Night Live.

But there was one segment of the comedy that was almost universally praised. From HERE: “A sketch movie along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie, it was racially and sexually offensive and mostly unfunny, except…about an hour into the film was a short musical sketch based on Earl Butz’s joke that also gave the movie its title. This sketch is pure offensive genius. I can’t/won’t describe it, but its effect is on the order of the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ scene in The Producers.”

The reason I found it at all humorous, in its vulgar sort of way, was, in skewering the bigot Butz, that it is an almost letter-perfect take on jazz great Cab Calloway’s band. It was SO good, in fact, that Internet references ask whether the song was some lost Calloway ditty; it was not.

OK, if you like it, fine. If you’re offended, don’t say you weren’t warned. Watch Darktown After Dark HERE or HERE.

Teevee; remembering Dee, Gwynn, Kasem, Noll

I always regretted the 1994 baseball strike, in part because I wanted to know if Tony Gwynn would hit .400.

televisionI was watching JEOPARDY! per usual. But this was strange: in the six days between June 6 and June 13, inclusive, none of the contestants got the Final correct in five of them, whereas I KNEW four of them, and guessed correctly on the fifth. The one question I got wrong, two of them got right.

These are the six final answers:

20th CENTURY AMERICANS: In 1911 Glenn Curtiss received this document Number 1.
THE MEDITERRANEAN: It’s the only U.N. member country in the Mediterranean where English is an official national language.
SCIENTISTS: As a humorous tribute, an astronomical term equivalent to at least 4 billion has been named for him.
CAPITAL CITY WORDPLAY: Ending in the same 2 letters, these 2 are capitals of a nation that covers a continent & of a nation reaching onto 2 continents.
CURRENT TELEVISION: George Romero declined to direct a few episodes of this series, calling it “basically…just a soap opera”
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: William Sullivan retired from the Foreign Service in 1979; he was the last U.S. Ambassador to this country.

Which one did I get wrong? If you guessed CURRENT TV, you’d be right. Not only don’t I watch that much TV, even when I read about it, it generally doesn’t stick. Even though I knew who George Romero was – creator of Night of the Living Dead – I had no recollection of what the TV show was called.

This is not a complaint. It’s just an observation that, for someone who used to be able to quickly fill out the TV Guide crossword puzzle, I doubt I’d get it half-finished, especially since I’m not reading TV Guide (pretty much since it changed the size to standard magazine format) or Entertainment Weekly (in the last 18 months), I’m pretty much out of the loop unless it’s a big story.

The truth of the matter is that the stuff that’s REALLY interesting to me shows up on YouTube. I don’t even seek it out; it’s either in a newsfeed or occasionally, on someone’s Facebook.

For instance, John Oliver’s show is on HBO. I don’t have HBO, and I don’t WANT HBO; don’t have time to watch it, even if it weren’t an extra charge. But I get to see him bash the owner of the Washington, DC American football team and note the importance of net neutrality.

Jaquandor was ranting about a current Apple commercial. I fully understand his sentiment; as the fat kid who couldn’t climb the rope or do a chin-up, I found gym a humiliating experience, and Mr. Lewis, my gym teacher for five years, a sadistic schmuck. What surprises me is that, somehow, I managed to miss the original Chicken Fat campaign from the 1960s, when I watched LOTS of TV.
***
How does one develop sports rooting interests, or antipathy? Beyond geographic proximity, it can be a number of factors. I was rooting for the New York Rangers to beat the LA Kings for the Stanley Cup (NHL hockey), but it was not to be; NYC is only 150 miles away. My rooting for the San Antonio Spurs over the Miami Heat in the NBA (basketball), who had won the previous two years, was based more on disdain for Miami, who stacked the deck pretty much the way the New York Yankees did in when George Steinbrenner owned the team. Yet, I never hated the Yankees; proximity, and the fact that the very first major league baseball game I saw was at Yankee Stadium (NYY beat the Washington Senators, 4-3), won out.

One of my favorite American football teams not playing in New York or New Jersey was/is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Even when they won four Super Bowls in the 1970s, I still liked them. It couldn’t have been because two of their players, Franco Harris (1950) and Lynn Swann (1952) shared my birthday, as I didn’t know that at the time. Maybe it was because they were rather mediocre before that run. I was sorry to read that Chuck Noll, coach of those SB wins, died last Friday at the age of 82.
Gwynn-SI-HOF-cover

But I was REALLY sad to read that baseball player Tony Gwynn died Monday of salivary gland cancer at the age of only 54. He was a class act, playing his whole career with one club, the San Diego Padres. He was a model of consistency as a hitter, which got him into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot and was apparently a terrific guy. I actually saw him play a few times when I would visit my sister in San Diego, and we would catch a game; I’ve been to the San Diego stadium more times than any other major league facility. I always regretted the 1994 baseball strike, in part because I wanted to know if Tony would hit .400; he ended the shortened season at .394. Here’s Ken Levine’s great tribute to Tony Gwynn.

I listened to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 radio program/Top 10 TV show, on and off, for decades. It was fun because he really seemed to enjoy his work. I think I actually got subscriptions to Billboard in the 1980s partly because of him. Another Ken Levine tribute.

I loved Ruby Dee in the movies A Raisin in the Sun and Do The Right Thing, the TV miniseries Roots, and a whole lot more. But it was also the leadership of Ruby and her late husband Ossie Davis in the civil rights struggle that had a great impact on me. They both received Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
Here’s Ruby Dee on the Psyche of Black America. Also, a PBS program called With Ossie and Ruby, an episode featuring the late Gil Scott-Heron (circa 1981) – Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.

Oh, those JEOPARDY! solutions:
A pilot’s license
Malta
Carl Sagan
Canberra (Australia) and Ankara (Turkey)
The Walking Dead – that one I got wrong
Iran

Ramblin' with Roger
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