Posts filed under 'Movies'
The NYT review of Carrie Fisher’s memoir, Wishful Drinking, is just chock full o’ fascinating tidbits - f’rinstance, did you know that you can’t wear underwear in space?
Drinking seems to have been the least of her problems. Pills were more her thing, and for a while hallucinogens. As a teenager, she dropped so much acid that her parents called in the greatest LSD expert they knew: Cary Grant.
(…)
When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short out her pacemaker. Some years later, perhaps taking the inbreeding principle to extreme, Ms. Reynolds suggested that her daughter ought to have children with Richard Hamlett, Ms. Reynold’s last husband.
(…)
“George Lucas ruined my life,” Ms. Fisher says, which doesn’t seem entirely fair. On the other hand, in a book full of weirdos, he emerges as possibly the strangest of all. He wouldn’t let Ms. Fisher wear a bra under her Princess Leia shift because, as he patiently explained to her, there is no underwear in space: according to Lucas-physics, if you were to wear a bra in a weightless environment, your bra would strangle you.
Wow. The Star Wars universe must have seemed tame compared to real life.
January 2nd, 2009 at 05:47pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Books,
Coolness,
Movies,
Weirdness
The IMDb (Internet Move Database) description of a Hungarian film called Taxidermia:
Gyorgy Palfi’s grotesque tale of three generations of men, including an obese speed eater, an embalmer of gigantic cats, and a man who shoots fire out of his penis.
I. Must. See. This.
(from the shadowy & mysterious Codename M2, by way of the shadowy & mysterious Codename V)
November 19th, 2008 at 03:09pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Weirdness
A day without a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie is like a day without sunshine. But this one sounds a bit… different:
It might be odd to think of Mr. Van Damme, a veteran of steroidal exploitation cinema and a virtuoso of the bone-crunching split kick, as an old softie, but it is also perfectly consistent with the image overhaul implicit in his latest vehicle, “JCVD,” which opened on Friday. Directed by the French filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri, it allows its namesake to reveal new facets to his screen persona basically by playing himself. A jokey hall-of-mirrors movie with a melancholic streak, it stars Mr. Van Damme — who turned 48 last month and whose last film to open theatrically in the United States was the 1998 flop “Knock Off,” — as Jean-Claude Van Damme, a washed-up middle-aged movie star.
Thanks in part to a widely circulating online trailer “JCVD” has garnered more attention for Mr. Van Damme than he has received in years. (The last time he made even a remote impact on pop-culture consciousness was when he appeared on “Friends” as himself in 1996 and boasted that he could crush a walnut with his buttocks.) “JCVD” was a word-of-mouth hit at Cannes, and it had its North American premiere at a raucous midnight screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.
(…)
It opens with an over-the-top action set piece from a film-within-the-film, complete with gunplay, knife fights and exploding grenades that was shot in a single take and that visibly pushed the star to his limits. “I was completely out of breath to the point of anxiety,” he said.
Mr. Van Damme’s more sensitive side is on jaw-dropping display in the movie’s pièce de résistance, a soul-baring six-minute monologue with more emoting than in all his other roles put together. His eyes tearing up and his voice quavering, he reflects on his dreams and failures, and effectively head-butts the fourth wall. (“I truly believe it’s not a movie.”)
(…)
When he watched it for the first time, he remembers thinking, “I didn’t lie.” He added, “It was scary for me to do it in French.” French is his native language, but this is his first French-speaking lead role, and he has been mercilessly mocked for spouting Zenlike aphorisms in Franglais on French television. (“Je suis aware.”)
Filled with whiplash digressions and weirdly poetic grace notes, the show-stopping speech is actually a fair approximation of how he really speaks. On his disillusionment with celebrity, he said: “I was so hungry for fame — not for fame, no — well, let’s be honest, hungry for fame, hungry for love. But then fame came, and it was not existing.”
On being engaged with his movies: “I want to be involved in that nine-month process. It’s like making a baby. You make love, and it’s the full way to delivery. How can I be mentally pregnant with the film all the way?”
I think I may actually need to see this…
November 7th, 2008 at 11:51am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies,
Weirdness
From the NYT’s review of The Duchess:
A big-boned beauty who leads with her jaw, Ms. Knightley looks pretty as a Gainsborough picture in and out of her silks and satins, but she’s not a remotely composed one.
Keira Knightley, big-boned. Wow.
September 19th, 2008 at 07:16pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies,
Quotes,
Weirdness
It’s a Terminator head DVD player. I… have no words.
(From Toxel.com, by way of Engadget)
August 15th, 2008 at 07:52pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Technology
Okay, Pat Leahy is officially one of my favorite senators now:
The senator steps forward. “We’re not intimidated by you thugs,” he says. The man, saying, “You remind me of my father — I hated my father,” grabs the senator’s head, and thrusts a knife to his face. The senator freezes, eyes wide.
Not your typical Capitol Hill brouhaha. No, this scene is pure Hollywood, straight out of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.” But that really is the senior senator from Vermont: Patrick J. Leahy — Democrat, Judiciary Committee chairman and lifelong Batman fan — has a cameo in the film and gets to be held at knifepoint by Heath Ledger’s Joker.
(…)
Batman became his favorite superhero because “he has no superpowers,” Mr. Leahy said. “He had to use his own brains and his own knowledge. He could have had an entirely different life. As a billionaire, he could have done anything.”
Mr. Leahy had a nonspeaking cameo in the 1997 film “Batman and Robin,” did a voice-over for the part of a governor in a Batman cartoon, and wrote the prefaces for a “Batman” anthology and a Batman comic book about the danger of land mines. Once he was spotted doing wheelies on his grandson’s toy Batmobile down the long marble hall outside his Senate office.
(…)
The filming of Mr. Leahy’s scene in a Chicago restaurant last summer took “all night long,” he said. Mr. Ledger would “punch or throw me halfway across the room,” and Mr. Leahy was propped up by another actor “with an arm like an oak tree” who was “brandishing a gun in my face.”
It took the senator a couple dozen tries before he got his line right.
“We tried it two different ways — one was authoritative, the other one was with a lot of fear in my voice,” Mr. Leahy said. Ultimately, he was directed to act like the prosecutor he once was, with a take-charge attitude.
So how did Mr. Leahy manage to find his character’s motivation? Was he thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2004 used profanity to curse Mr. Leahy on the Senate floor?
“No, I wasn’t visualizing Dick Cheney,” Mr. Leahy said. “They can’t use that dialogue in a PG-13 movie.”
I think we need more Batman fans in Congress. Maybe even the White House.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:36am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Comics,
Coolness,
Democrats,
Movies
Well, since I already did a post on Richard Burton’s rugby reminiscences, I think it’s only fair that Peter O’Toole should get a post as well. (Hey, if the LAT can write about the candidates’ handwriting, I can write about Peter O’Toole reattaching his own finger.) I was perhaps most surprised to realized that he was 75 - every time I’ve seen him in the past few years, I thought he was much older. Maybe it was all that drinking.
This was a man who travelled the world yet never wore a watch or carried a wallet. Nor, on leaving his house, did he ever take his keys with him.
“I just hope some bastard’s in,” he’d say.
More than once, when someone was not in, O’Toole found himself having to explain to the police why he was breaking into his own property.
(…)
The neighbourhood where O’Toole grew up was rough, and three of his playmates were later hanged for murder. “I’m not from the working class,” O’Toole liked to say. “I’m from the criminal class.”
Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled in O’Toole a strong sense of literature, by far the biggest influence in his young life was his father, Patrick, a bookie who was often drunk.
One day, Patrick stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: “Jump, boy. I’ll catch you. Trust me.”
When O’Toole jumped, his father withdrew his arms, leaving the boy splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was “never trust any bastard”.
(…)
In 1959, O’Toole was cast as a Cockney sergeant in the play The Long And The Short And The Tall at the Royal Court Theatre.
His understudy was a young Michael Caine, and one Saturday night after the show O’Toole invited him to a restaurant he knew.
Eating a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered, until he woke up in broad daylight in a strange flat.
“What time is it?” he inquired. “Never mind what time it is,” said O’Toole. “What f***ing day is it?”
It turned out that it was five o’clock in the afternoon two days later. Curtain-up was at eight.
Back at the theatre, the stage manager was waiting for them with the news that the restaurant owner had been in and banned them from his establishment for life.
Caine was about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered: “Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.”
Most evenings after the show, O’Toole would enjoy a long walk around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood, he’d scale the wall of Lloyds bank.
The first time he took his future wife, the actress Sian Phillips, on one of these nocturnal jaunts, she was startled when he began his ascent of the north face of the building.
But after a few nights she came to accept that, by O’Toole’s standards anyway, it was quite normal.
(…)
At one after-show party O’Toole held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other containing hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop two pint mugs.
(…)
Lawrence Of Arabia occupied O’Toole for two years, filming in seven different countries.
By the end of it, he’d lost 2st, received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles, torn ligaments in both his hip and thigh, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, sprained his neck and been concussed twice.
But his extraordinary performance made him a star. Lawrence Of Arabia was a world-wide smash when it opened in 1962 and was hailed as one of cinema’s true masterpieces.
“I woke up one morning to find I was famous,” he said. “I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.
“Nobody took any f***ing notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
(…)
The filming of the 1968 historical drama The Lion In Winter, in which O’Toole starred with Katharine Hepburn, was notable for a series of bizarre incidents.
Shooting a scene on a lake one day, O’Toole trapped his finger between two boats. “Bloody agony it was,” he said. “Took the top right off.”
O’Toole carried the tip of his finger back to shore, dipped it into a glass of brandy to sterilise it and then pushed it back on, wrapping it in a poultice.
Three weeks later he unwrapped it and there it was, all crooked and bent.
“I’d put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank,” explained O’Toole.
Another time, he awoke at 4am to discover that his bed was on fire.
“At first I tried to put the thing out myself, but I couldn’t read the small print on the fire extinguisher,” he said.
“By the time the first fireman arrived, I was so glad to see him I kissed him.”
O’Toole didn’t have much luck with fires. During a cottage holiday in Wales with Sian, he had decided to cook, although she had never seen him do so before.
“I can make the best French toast,” he told her. Minutes later the stove exploded into flames.
They tried to extinguish the fire, but it was impossible, and they were driven out into the garden, where they watched in the rain as the kitchen burnt down.
Awesome. If even half this stuff is true, he’s a complete madman.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:37am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Weirdness
Zombie Strippers!!!
During George W. Bush’s fourth term as president, the administration’s desire for crises and predisposition toward fuck-ups leads to the creation of a zombie virus that the government hopes will help replenish troops for its various overseas conflicts. Infected women become super-strong and maintain their intelligence, but the men remain your typical, shambling, mindless undead. So when the virus leaks into a strip club, the place becomes the most popular illegal joint in town. All too often with horror/cult movies, a catchy title masks a low budget and an even lower level of talent, but director Jay Lee (The Slaughter) delivers absolutely everything you could possibly hope for in a film called Zombie Strippers, with a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of Return of the Living Dead and Showgirls that actually beats out Mark Pirro’s Nudist Colony of the Dead for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever. He even manages some George Romero–style social commentary, with zombie-dom as a metaphor for plastic surgery—that star Jenna Jameson’s plasticized, pre-zombie face is actually scarier than the final monstrous version only proves the point.
I can’t imagine how any movie could possibly be more awesome than this. The premise is even kind of plausible!
Well, okay - it could be Zombie Strippers On A Plane, but that would be so incredibly super-awesome that you couldn’t watch it without special goggles.
April 19th, 2008 at 06:48pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies
Okay, so I went to the MyHeritage face recognition page to see which celebrity I look like. In the past, I have been compared to Jan-Michael Vincent, the creepy burnt-hand Nazi in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Leonard Nimoy, ET, and both Blues Brothers.
So I really didn’t know what to expect when I submitted this picture for comparison…
…But it sure as hell wasn’t Clive Owen.
Must be the glasses. Yeah, that’s it.
Oh, and the second-closest match was… Wesley Snipes. Go figure.
April 6th, 2008 at 03:56pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Weirdness
This is surprisingly hilarious:
…I knew people like a one-armed inside half – he’d lost an arm in the First World War - who played with murderous brilliance for Cwmavon for years when I was a boy. He was particularly adept, this one, at stopping a forward bursting through from the line-out with a shattering iron-hard thrust from his stump as he pulled him on to it with the other. He also used the misplaced sympathy of innocent visiting players who didn’t go at him with the same delivery as they would against a two-armed man, as a ploy to lure them on to concussion and other organic damage. They learned quickly, or were told after the match when they had recovered sufficiently from Jimmy’s ministrations to be able to understand the spoken word, that going easy on Jimmy-One-Arm was first cousin to stepping into a grave and waiting for the shovels to start. A great many people who played unwarily against Jimmy died unexpectedly in their early forties. They were lowered solemnly into the grave with all match honours to the slow version of Sospan Fach. They say that the conductor at these sad affairs was noticeably one-armed but that could be exaggeration again.
As I said, it’s difficult for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I’ll tell you about the last match I ever played in.
I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face….
Apart from wanting to preserve my natural beauty, it would affect continuity, they said, if my nose was straight on Friday in the medium shot and was bent towards my left ear on Monday for the close-up…. So to this day there is a clause in my contracts that forbids me from flying my own plane, skiing and playing the game of rugby football, the inference being that it would be all right to wrestle with a Bengal tiger five thousand miles away, but not to play against, shall we say, Pontypool at home. I decided that they had some valid arguments after my last game.
It was played against a village whose name is known only to its inhabitants and crippled masochists drooling quietly in kitchen corners, a mining village with all the natural beauty of the valleys of the moon.. and just as welcoming, with a team composed almost entirely of colliers. I hadn’t played for four or five years but was fairly fit, I thought, and the opposition was bottom of the third class and reasonably beatable. Except, of course on their home ground. I should have thought of that…
…Though I was working like a dog at the Vic playing Hamlet, Coriolanus, Caliban, The Bastard in King John, and Toby Belch, it wasn’t the right kind of training for these great knotted gnarled things from the burning bowels of the earth. In my teens I had lived precariously on the lip of first-class rugby by virtue of knowing every trick in the canon, evil and otherwise, by being a bad bad loser, but chiefly, and perhaps only because I was very nippy off the mark…. Genuine class of course doesn’t need size though sometimes I forgot this. Once I played rather condescendingly against a Cambridge college and noted that my opposite number seemed to be shorter than I was and in rugby togs looked like a schoolboy… However this blond stripling gave me a terrible time. He was faster and harder and wordlessly ruthless and it was no consolation to find out his name afterwards because it meant nothing at the time…. This anonymity was called Steele-Bodger and a more onomatopoeic name for its owner would be hard to find. He was, I promise you, steel and he did, I give you my word, bodger. Say his name through clenched teeth and you’ll see what I mean….
In this match, this last match played against troglodytes, burned to the bone by the fury of their work, bow-legged and embittered because they weren’t playing for or hadn’t played for and would never play for Cardiff or Swansea or Neath or Aberavon, men who smiled seldom and when they did it was like scalpels, trained to the last ounce by slashing and hacking away neurotically at the frightened coal face for 7 ½ hours a day, stalactitic, tree-rooted, curved out or granite by a rough and ready sledge hammer and clinker, against these hard volumes of which I was the soft cover paper-back edition. I discovered some truths very soon. I discovered just after the first scrum for instance that it was time I ran for the bus and not for their outside-half. He had red hair, a blue-white face and no chin. Standing up straight his hands were loosely on a level with his calves and when the ball and I arrived exultantly together at his stock-still body, a perfect set-up you would say, and when I realized that I was supine and he was lazily kicking the ball into touch I realized that I had forgotten that trying to intimidate a feller like that was like trying a cow a mandrill, and that he had all the graceful willowy-give and sapling-bend of stressed concrete.
That was only the outside-half.
From then on I was elbowed, gouged, dug, planted, raked, hoed, kicked a great deal, sandwiched, and once humiliatingly taken from behind with nobody in front of me when I had nothing to do but run fifteen yards to score….
(…)
…After being gardened, mown and rolled a little more, I gave that up, asked the Captain of our team if he didn’t think it would be a better idea to hide me deeper in the pack. I had often, I reminded him, played right prop, my neck was strong and my right arm had held its own with most. He gave me a long look, a trifle pitying perhaps but orders were given and in I went to the maelstrom and now the real suffering began. Their prop with whom I was to share cheek and jowl for the next eternity, didn’t believe in razor blades since he grew them on his chin and shaved me thoroughly for the rest of the game taking most of my skin in the process, delicacy not being his strong point. He used his prodigious left arm to paralyze mine and pull my head within an inch or two of the earth, then rolled my head around his, first taking my ear between his fore-finger and thumb, humming “Rock of Ages” under his breath.
(…)
I drank more than my share of beer in the home team’s pub, joined in the singing and found that the enemies were curiously shy and withdrawn until the beer had hit the proper spot. Nobody mentioned my performance on the field.
There was only one moment of wild expectation on my part when a particularly grim sullen and taciturn member of the other side said suddenly with what passed shockingly for a smile splitting the slag heap of his face like an earth tremor,
“Come outside with us will ‘ew?” There was another beauty with him.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Never ‘ew mind,” he said, “you’ll be awright. Jest come with us.”
“O.K.”
We went out into the cruel February night and made our way to the outside Gents - black-painted concrete with one black pipe for flushing, wet to the open sky. We stood side by side in silence. They began to void. So did I. There had been beer enough for all. I waited for a possible compliment on my game that afternoon - I had after all done one or two good things if only by accident. I waited. But there was nothing but the sound of wind and water. I waited and silently followed them back into the bar.
Finally I said: “What did you want to tell me?”
“Nothing,” the talkative one said.
“Well, what did you ask me out there for then?’”
“Well,” the orator said, “Well… us two is brothers and we wanted to tell our mam that we’d ‘ad a…”
…“Well, we jest wanted to tell our mam that we had passed water with Richard Burton” he said with triumphant care.
Great stuff. I have nothing to add, really…
(h/t Cap’n Goto)
April 6th, 2008 at 01:40pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Sports
March 24: Vice President Dick Cheney says of the 4,000 dead American troops, “we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”
March 27: The movie Stop-Loss comes out.
Oops.
March 27th, 2008 at 07:18pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Cheney,
Iraq,
Movies,
Wankers,
War
Giallo Pudding Pops.
The ad campaign would feature Bill Cosby in the throes of a bizarre psychosexual rage, using the product to slaughter people in a variety of lurid and creative ways, his trademark impish grin frozen into a Joker-like rictus of doom.
I don’t see how it could possibly miss.
(Artist’s conception by the shadowy and phenomenally talented Codename V.)
March 26th, 2008 at 06:20pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Favorites,
Movies,
Puns
For any fans of cheesy sci-fi movies out there, tomorrow (okay, today) is truly a banner day.
1PM - King Cobra. Giant cobra/rattlesnake hybrid named Seth. Cast includes Hoyt Axton as the complacent mayor (he also sings the movie’s brilliant theme song, “Seth Is The Devil”), Erik Estrada in a brief and incredibly swishy cameo, and Pat Morita as the snake expert who ends up talking smack to the giant snake. Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite is one of the snake’s victims.
3PM - Snake King. Giant five-headed snake in the Amazon jungle. Stephen Baldwin as a tough, virtuous guide and helicopter pilot. ‘Nuff said.
5PM - Grendel. Before Beowulf, there was… this. With Ben Cross as King Hrothgar and Marina Sirtis as Queen Wealhtheow. Bad CGI.
7PM - Gryphon. Gryphon summoned by evil sorceror Larry Drake (Dr. Giggles, Benny from LA Law). Also features Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy The Vampire Slayer) as the least convincing warrior princess ever, and Sarah Douglas actually playing a good witch. Bad CGI and Anthony LaPaglia’s little brother.
9PM - Ogre. Premiering tonight. All I know is: John Schneider, bad CGI. W00t!
(Note: Absence of “Bad CGI” notation does not necessarily imply presence of good CGI)
March 8th, 2008 at 01:07am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies
From Neil Best’s blog at Newsday, which is typically about sports. But since “Mike and the Mad Dog” (Mike Francesa and Chris Russo) decided to talk about the Oscars on their very popular sports talk radio show…
Mike just said he thought “Gentleman’s Agreement” was about Quakers.
I have no idea where that came from, but I found it very amusing.
And Chris just called Emile Zola “Emily” Zola.
I love this job.
(…)
(UPDATE: I think they just mixed up “Three Faces of Eve” and “All About Eve” and a movie that doesn’t exist called “Five Faces of Eve” but I just don’t know anymore. It’s all a blur now. I have to stop.)
(ANOTHER UPDATE: Chris called “Patton” a George C. Scott “farce” and “Gone With the Wind” a Vivien Leigh “farce.” Did he mean “tour de force?” I don’t know.)
They should probably stick to sports, where they are a farce to be reckoned with.
February 25th, 2008 at 09:12pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies,
Sports
For once, I’m not disgusted with any of the major Oscar winners. No Country For Old Men was excellent, as were Javier Bardem and Daniel Day-Lewis.
My biggest complaint is that Juno got nominated for Best Picture and Eastern Promises didn’t. Reminds me a bit of the travesty in ‘88 when Working Girl was nominated and Eight Men Out wasn’t. Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with these people.
February 25th, 2008 at 07:01am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies
1) Heath Ledger ODs on sleeping pills. Sure does sound like suicide - it’s always baffling when someone who seems to have everything going for them decides to end it all.
2) Oliver Stone working on Dubya biopic. Gah. Right now it’s looking like Josh Brolin in the title role, but I agree with Xan Cooper that Timothy Bottoms, Anthony La Paglia, or Chris Cooper would probably make more sense. La Paglia actually kinda looks like him, and Bottoms and Cooper would both be good at capturing Dubya’s spiteful essence.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:54pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies
Absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to do with the New Hampshire primary (Hillary & McCain are back; Rudy’s about on par with Ron Paul; Fred Thompson trails the write-ins), but this is ridiculously funny despite being almost three years old:
…I was walking past my friendly dvd salesperson and decided to check out Revenge of the Sith. I was assured the quality was good and for 7rmb why not give it a shot.
Aside from the counters on the top of the screen and a distorted perspective it was ok- not high quality but watchable. The captions were a hilarious surprise- a direct English translation of the Chinese interpretation of what the script was saying. It varied from being somewhat close to the script to being ‘far far away’…
amazingly enough, the beginning scroll is mistranslated even though the words are right there on the screen.
(…)
Obi Wan: “Let them pass between us”
(…)
Obi Wan grows impatient with R2.
(…)
that’s Chancellor Palpatine speaking, talking about Obi Wan.
(…)
this seemed completely random until I figured out that ‘Jedi Council’ was being translated into Chinese then back to English as ‘the Presbyterian Church’.
(…)
Anakin bargains for the life of his cuckoldry. Cuckoldry?
(…)
i love this translation. Darth Vader is actually shouting, “Nooooooooooooo…”
Yes, that’s right, this is the actual origin of the expression “DO NOT WANT.” Be sure to click on the link for the whole thing - I omitted much hilarity for the sake of brevity.
I’m not sure if it makes me a lot less cool or a lot more cool that I did not know about this until Wired mentioned it…
January 8th, 2008 at 11:03pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Quotes,
Weirdness
Woohoo!!!
The creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is returning to the movie-mocking business as captain of the Cinematic Titanic.
Joel Hodgson is reuniting with J. Elvis Weinstein (the original Tom Servo) and Trace Beaulieu (Crow T. Robot) to sink any B movies remaining afloat in the long-running cult TV show’s wake. The celluloid target of their inaugural Dec. 10 release: 1972 horror debacle Brain of Blood.
Hodgson and crew plan to mine the depths of the sci-fi and horror genres for movies that bear the special MST3K level of delightful god-awfulness. Rather than call the reunion a “show,” Hodgson described Cinematic Titanic as “a movie-riffing delivery system” that will keep loyal MST3K enthusiasts stocked with fresh laughs.
I don’t really have anything to add to this, other than to say that it’s pretty awesome.
December 7th, 2007 at 09:15pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
TV
There’s a feature-length documentary about the Helvetica font.
And it doesn’t suck.
September 12th, 2007 at 11:32am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies,
Weirdness
I have been terribly remiss in overlooking this NYT story - or, more to the point, its slideshow - for an entire week, as it has two of the Greatest Pictures Ever. Observe:
Elvis Stormtrooper!
Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Green Lantern’s one weakness is the color yellow.
Well, unless you’re talking about the Golden Age Green Lantern, whose only weakness is, um, wood. I should probably just stop now.
(Photos by Sandy Huffaker for the NYT)
August 8th, 2007 at 08:56pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Comics,
Coolness,
Movies
Yes, that’s right, the Bratz live-action movie is finally here.
You can say that your entire life has not been leading up to this one perfect moment, but you’d be, like, totally lying OMG.
There really is no need for anyone to make another movie ever again.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:50am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3803584387889303730
Brilliant 1968 parody of Bergman films, with Madeleine Kahn in a small role.
(h/t to the shadowy and mysterious Codename V)
MST3K version. (h/t Atttarios)
SCTV version. Bergman makes an ill-fated appearance on Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre. “I cannot laugh. The dwarfs make me feel old.”
July 30th, 2007 at 08:33pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Monday Media Blogging,
Movies
This was rather surprising and refreshing to read in the A.O. Scott (already one of my favorite movie reviewers) review of Sicko:
[Michael Moore's] polemical, left-populist manner seems calculated to drive guardians of conventional wisdom bananas. That is because conventional wisdom seems to hold, against much available evidence, that liberalism is an elite ideology, and that the authentic vox populi always comes from the right. Mr. Moore, therefore, must be an oxymoron or a hypocrite of some kind.
Someone’s been reading the liberal blogs… or should start writing one.
Also from the same review:
Mr. Moore is less interested in tracing the history of American exceptionalism than in opposing it. He wants us to be more like everybody else. When he plaintively asks, “Who are we?,” he is not really wondering why our traditions of neighborliness and generosity have not found political expression in an expansive system of social welfare. He is insisting that such a system should exist, and also, rather ingeniously, daring his critics to explain why it shouldn’t.
If America is a country of both can-do awesomeness and compassionate generosity, then there really is no good reason why we can’t pull off universal health care. Which is not to say that there isn’t any reason at all…
June 22nd, 2007 at 07:21am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Media,
Movies,
Politics
News flash: Asian-American guys don’t get great roles on TV or in movies. Film at 10:30.
As an Asian American man — Filipino, to be exact — there’s a game I like to play called WTAG: Where’s the Asian guy?
The number of Asian American men on MTV, Bravo, CBS, et al.? Not many, though there’s Daniel Dae Kim, co-star of ABC’s “Lost.” Never mind that he speaks only Korean on the show. The number of Asian American guys in recent films? Think. Hard. And no, Jackie Chan and what’s-his-face — the name is Chow Yun-Fat (no, it’s not a Hunan dish) — don’t count. They’re from Hong Kong.
This relative invisibility — and the stereotypical characters that Asian American men often portray in films and television — is the subject of “The Slanted Screen,” a sometimes meandering but highly researched and essential documentary, the Asian American counterpart to the gay-themed “Celluloid Closet.” It airs on PBS tonight, the last show of the Friday prime-time lineup, near the end of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Ouch.
Narrated by Kim, the one-hour doc uses film and TV clips, in addition to insightful, emotional interviews with old and young actors, to trace the history of Asian American men on the big and small screens….
(…)
[W]ith the history come ugly, overlooked truths. Mako recalls a studio executive’s reaction when asked about featuring a non-Asian in the lead of “Kung Fu,” the classic 1970s TV show: “I remember one of the vice presidents — in charge of production, I suppose — who said, ‘If we put a yellow man up on the tube, the audience will turn the switch off in less than five minutes.’ ” James Shigeta, the star of “Flower Drum Song,” remembers a movie musical producer telling him, “If you were white, you’d be a hell of a big star.”
…The original ending [of "Romeo Must Die"] had Aaliyah kissing [Jet] Li, a scenario that didn’t test well with an “urban audience.” So the studio changed it. The new ending had Aaliyah giving Li a tight hug. Says [Filipino-American director Gene] Cajayon, “Mainstream America, for the most part, gets uncomfortable with seeing an Asian man portrayed in a sexual light.”
(…)
Stereotypes abound in [the] documentary: The Asian man as kung fu master. Think Bruce Lee in the classic film “Enter the Dragon” and the TV show “The Green Hornet.” The Asian man played by a non-Asian, among them Mickey Rooney as the bucktoothed Japanese neighbor in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The Asian man as supergeek. No amount of soap can wash off the stench of the Long Duk Dong character in the 1984 cult classic “Sixteen Candles.” The Asian man as the mysterious enemy, or the stiff-faced store owner, or the barely English-speaking waiter . . . you get the point.
(…)
In the past few years, a new generation of actors and directors, in ways more liberated, more in control, than their predecessors, are making some headway. The 2002 film “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a critical darling, was co-written and directed by Justin Lin, who tells the story of Asian American overachievers in a wealthy Orange Countywealthy Orange County, Calif., suburb who, beside being straight-A students and athletes, have thriving sidelines selling cheat sheets and drugs. Yes, they’re good students, as Asians are believed to be. But they have complicated lives like others, too. Comedian Bobby Lee, on the regular cast of the Fox show “Mad TV,” took his own life experiences and created a regular sketch called “Average Asian.” A jingle at the beginning of one sketch goes: “He’s an Average Asian / Eastern medicine is not his occupation / Can’t fix your back if it goes wrong / . . . He’s an Average Asian.”
“I wanted to confront the stereotype,” Lee says. “I didn’t want to be the stereotype.”
In the WTAG game, that’s a victory in itself.
Check your PBS listings for tonight for an exact airtime (might be 10:30).
I’ll be curious to see just what it covers. Does it really limit itself to Asian-American men, or Asians in general? Why only men? Does “Asian” include Indian or Pakistani? Does it cover, say, The Karate Kid (martial arts master!) or The Last Samurai (more martial arts!) or Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (one mostly nerd stereotype, one the exact opposite), or even The Simpsons (Apu, the fecund Hindu convenience store owner).
I will also be interested in how the documentary explains the scarcity of Asian characters as compared to black or (I think) latino and gay characters. Apparently it’s more acceptable for scriptwriters and directors to ignore or stereotype Asians than other minorities, but why? I can think of a few possible reasons, but I’m not really comfortable with any of them - they’re either half-baked or just plain icky. The latter are probably closest to the truth, unfortunately…
UPDATE: D’oh! It’s already come and gone on my local affiliate. Rats.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:43am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Media,
Movies,
Racism,
TV
From a WaPo online chat with director David Lynch, who, it turns out, is really into transcendental meditation:
Los Angeles: This is non-book related… but thanks Mr. Lynch for bringing us some of the greatest, most creative, entertaining and thought-provoking films of our time. I was 9 years old when my mom brought home “Blue Velvet” from the video store when she was supposed to be bringing home “International Velvet.” Not quite the same movie.
Awk-ward…
May 2nd, 2007 at 06:19pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies
And you dig bizarre movies, I urge you to check out Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, playing at the IFC Theater.
If you’ve never seen a Jodorowsky movie, there’s nothing else like it - he makes David Lynch look tame (and coherent).
April 18th, 2007 at 11:23am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Weirdness
Goddammit.
Film director Robert Clark, best known for the holiday classic ”A Christmas Story,” was killed with his son Wednesday in a head-on crash with a vehicle steered into the wrong lane by a drunken driver, police and the filmmaker’s assistant said.
Clark, 67, and son Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, were killed in the accident in Pacific Palisades, said Lyne Leavy, Clark’s personal assistant.
The two men were in an Infiniti that collided head-on with a GMC Yukon around 2:30 a.m. PDT, said Lt. Paul Vernon, a police spokesman. The driver of the other car was under the influence of alcohol and was driving without a license, Vernon said.
(…)
In Clark’s most famous film, all 9-year-old Ralphie Parker wants for Christmas is an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle.
His mother, teacher and Santa Claus all warn: ”You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.”
A school bully named Scut Farkus, a leg lamp, a freezing flagpole mishap and some four-letter defiance helped the movie become a seasonal fixture with ”It’s A Wonderful Life” and ”Miracle on 34th Street.”
Scott Schwartz, who played Flick in ”A Christmas Story” and kept in touch with Clark, called Clark one of the ”nicest, sweetest guys that you’d ever want to come in contact with.”
”It’s a tragic day for all of us who knew and loved Bob Clark,” Schwartz said. ”Bob was a fun-loving, jelly-roll kind of guy who will be sorely missed.”
Clark specialized in horror movies and thrillers early in his career, directing such 1970s flicks as ”Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things,” ”Murder by Decree,” ”Breaking Point” and ”Black Christmas,” which was remade last year.
His breakout success came with 1981’s sex farce ”Porky’s,” a coming-of-age romp that he followed two years later with ”Porky’s II: The Next Day.”
We’ll just overlook that last part…
April 4th, 2007 at 09:25pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies
From NYT’s review of Firehouse Dog, a movie I will never watch:
[I]t’s easy for Dewey to capture the boy’s heart by defecating in his lunch and passing gas on his bed. Lifelong marriages have been based on less.
Box. Office. Gold.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:03pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Movies,
Quotes
Once again, I have vanquished the Filmwise Invisibles Quiz! And in record time!
Huzzah!
If you haven’t played it, and you’re a movie buff, then I must emphatically and hyperbolically recommend that you check it out.
April 1st, 2007 at 03:46pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies
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