Category Archives: Film & TV
Juli Crockett
I really enjoyed the movie Million Dollar Baby… right up until I realized it was not going have a happy ending. I spent the last 15 or 20 minutes of the film in the lobby, watching some brats play air hockey. I didn’t watch the ending of Old Yeller either. I bring it up because I just discovered a connection between Maggie Fitzgerald (the Hillary Swank character) and Juli Crockett, the lead singer of the Evangenitals who dropped us a comment last week.
“Boxing trainer Jerry Boyd had never met Juli Crockett when he wrote the stories on which the film Million Dollar Baby is based. But when he did–at a bout in San Diego–he was convinced she was Maggie Fitzgerald, the tough and driven fighter of his fiction (played by Hilary Swank in the movie) come to life. Like Fitzgerald, Crockett came from the South, grew up without a father (but found one in the ring), and had a brief but stunning pro career (3-0, with 2 knockouts) cut short by injuries (though not nearly as severe as Fitzgerald’s). Other parallels: ambition, boxing style, that smile. Crockett, now 29 and a grad student, saw Million Dollar Baby for the first time last week.” [Interview in USNews]
Turns out Ms. Crockett is much more than a humble singer/songwriter.
I’ll take geo-political history for 500, Chris
This segment on last night’s MSNBC Hardball is one of the things I most dislike about cable news (yes, I did watch it).
“Chris Matthews, convinced that LA radio talk show guy Kevin James wasn’t real strong in his knowledge of geo-political history, asking James if he knew what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in 1938. If you answered, “He signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to the Nazi regime,” you are right. If you answered, “He talked to Hitler, and caused 9/11 to happen, just like Barack Hussein bin Laden wants to!” then you are Kevin James.”
When did it become okay to just shout the other guy down? No wonder the rest of the world thinks were a bunch of assholes.
Bridge scene from Sorcerer
If you haven’t seen Sorcerer, I highly recommend it. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider. Another good scene from earlier in the film.
Rendition
“After a terrorist bombing kills an American envoy in a foreign country. An investigation leads to an Egyptian who has been living in the United States for years and who is married to an American. He is apprehended when he’s on his way home. The U.S. sends him to the country where the incident occurs for interrogation which includes torture. An American CIA operative observes the interrogation and is at odds whether to keep it going or to stop it.”
Back in the day when people debated the death penalty, you’d sometimes hear the question:
Would it be preferable to execute 100 guilty men, knowing that one of them was innocent… or to let 100 innocent men go free, knowing that one of them was guilty?
In the movie Rendition, Meryl Streep’s character does a spin on that. Something along the lines of it would be worth torturing an innocent man if the use of torture produced intelligence that saved 7,000 lives (in London?).
Popular Christian TV host comes out
From Out & About: “Local Nashvillian and host of The Remix, a popular Christian youth show, Azariah Southworth, announced today that he has come out.
“This has been a long time coming. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with my faith, friends, family and more importantly myself. I know this will end my career in Christian television, but I must now live my life openly and honestly with everyone. This is my reason for doing this,” Southworth says.
Southworth has been hosting and producing the popular Christian TV show, The Remix for a year and a half. It is in syndication and can be seen in more than 128 million homes worldwide. It averages more than 200,000 viewers weekly on one of three networks.”
As I read this I recalled my recent exchanges with anonymous (ok, pseudonymous) political bloggers who justified blogging from behind the curtain with concerns for their jobs. Props to Mr. Southworth. That takes courage.
Tarzan the Ape Man (Pygmy scene)
When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies. I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.
If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I’d go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.
“Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins.”
“What the fuck is a munchkin?”
“World’s Most Dangerous Hike”
Famed as the “World’s Most Dangerous Hike”, El Caminito Del Rey (The King’s Little Pathway) is a one-meter wide walkway traversing a gorge, over 100 meters above the torrents below. Malaga, Spain. Another (more recent) video.
Howard Beale: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad”
I love the movie Network. I went back to a post in September of 2006 to review the prophetic words of Paddy Chayefsky:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.”
Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Tommy Lee Jones, then and now
We watched In the Valley of Elah last night (rented from iTunes). I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a murder mystery (sort of). Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon all gave powerful performances.
For me the story was about how war can change the people we send to fight it. And I was reminded of one of Tommy Lee Jones’ earlier movies, Rolling Thunder (1977).
It was a so-so movie starring William Devane but Jones owned every scene he was in. He played Cpl. Johnny Vohden, a soldier who had served under Devane’s character in Viet Nam. Johnny is back, but he’s not “back.”
So, when Devane asks him to go down to Mexico to avenge Devane’s murdered family, Tommy Lee gets up, walks into his bedroom, picks up a little gym bag and walks out the door. See the movie.
In In the Valley of Elah, Jones’ son, who is serving in Iraq, is that same burned out soldier with the thousand-yard stare.
TLJ was great in No Country for Old Men, but I thought his performance in Valley of Elah was even better.