Netflix cont'd

A little more than two weeks ago, I wrote my first entry about Netflix. At that point, I had 145 movies in my queue and 579 rated movies, both of which seem like a lot.

Uh, not so much. These days I'm up to 193 movies in the queue and 769 rated movies. This would seem like showing off if it wasn't actually saying that I clearly spend way too much time watching movies (769 movies, assuming I've only watched them all once, which I definitely haven't, translates to more than 64 straight days).

Anyhow, as last time, I thought I would review a few of the movies that I've been working my way through.

#1 Shoot the Piano Player (1964, Francois Truffaut) tells the story of Charlie, a once famous concert pianist (played by 5'3" Charles Aznavour, looking amazingly like a water rat) who, driven to depression after his wife's suicide, has been reduced to playing in a parisian bar under a pseudonym.

Now, the movie's description says that "when his brothers get in trouble with gangsters, Charlie inadvertently gets dragged into the chaos and is forced to rejoin the family he once fled."

And that's the part that grabbed me. Sadly, however, the movie wasn't really like that, choosing to spend most of it's 84 minute running time focusing on Charlie's past and his budding romance with a waitress in the bar, who fortunately doesn't look at all like a water rat.

But once I got over my disappointment, I found Shoot the Piano Player pretty enjoyable. It switches back a forth a bit between comedic and noir touches. But, aside from the end, where Charlie's son gets kidnapped by mobsters who are looking for his brother and Charlie is forced to go after them, the movie is mostly a portrait of a damaged guy who, rather than dealing with his problems, has escaped into a level of existence low enough he hope he can hide from them.

But, as the movie proves, eventually it catches up with you.

My rating: 3.5 stars out of 5.

#2 The Verdict (1982, Sidney Lumet) is the story of Frank Gavlin, a down on his luck alcoholic lawyer played brilliantly by Paul Newman. Reduced from his once promising career to stalking funeral homes and giving his card to the bereaved, Gavlin is on his way out.

Then a friend of his (played by Jack Warden) shows up, offering him an easy case: a woman was given the wrong anesthetic and ended up with brain damage. Gavlin sees an easy payday, but while investigating the case, something in him suddenly snaps, and he decides he wants to try and win it in court rather than settle.

Standing in his way is an attorney dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" (played with charming ruthlessness by one of my favorite actors, James Mason), who will stop at nothing to beat Gavlin, and an antagonistic judge.

Now if you're thinking this story sounds a bit cliche, well, you're right. But the movie doesn't play that way. Newman, Lumet and legendary screenwriter David Mamet conspire to make the plot seem to spring from the peculiarities of the characters. And while the story and character seem grim, Newman's charm makes its way through his portrayal of the damaged Gavlin.

The character's final summation is one of the most famous in the history of the movies.

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.

#3 Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin) is a wonderful French crime movie. Directed by the expatriate Dassin, an American who had been forced to flee the US due to HUAC, Rififi tells the story of a group of thieves who plan and execute an elaborate jewel heist.

The key character is Tony le Stephanois, a serious-as-a-heart attack ex-con riddled with tuberculosis played Jean Servais with tired, lethal authority (Servais himself was an alcoholic).

In a sequence that would inspire countless heist films to follow, the burglars cut through a hole in the ceiling above the jewelry store, crack the safe and escape with the jewels. The sequence is done without music or dialogue and takes up a quarter of the movie's 115 minute running time. And it's fantastic. It was realistic enough to get the movie banned in Finland and Mexico, where it was thought that similar burglaries would be attempted because of it.

But as exciting as the burglary is, the movie is still only half over. Due to carelessness by one of the team, a ruthless nightclub owner with a longstanding feud with le Stephanois finds out about the team, and he goes about tracking them down. Eventually, the son of one of the men is kidnapped. This springs le Stephanois, coughing and brutal, into action, and he begins to hunt the men down, tracking them to a house in the country.

Rififi is the perfect example of a well executed crime/noir film. Though the protagonists are thieves and killers, they're loyal to each other and to a code of conduct. As hardbitten as le Stephanois is, in earlier scenes he's gentle with the young boy who eventually gets kidnapped, making his desperate search for him something we can identify with.

So yeah, it's a great movie. And a bonus, to you folks who want to see it, is that someone's posted a high quality version of it on YouTube. Embedding has been disabled, but it's available at this link:

Rififi part 1 of 12.

Part 2 is here, to give you an idea how the titles have been formatted.

Needless to say, Rififi gets a 5 out of 5.

So that's that. I didn't get a chance to review Buster Keaton's Seven Chances here. But if you're interested, it was good, but not great. Say a 3 out of 5.

The Importance of Remembering Ernest

An abbreviated (ie, half-assed) post today, inspired not by a birthday or even a death day, but by this funny video I found today.

As a kid, I loved the Ernest movies. I remember going to see Ernest Scared Stupid in the theater (dragging one of my parents along). I would have been nine years old. After a few months went by, I wanted to rent it, so we went to the video store. Being a shy kid, I asked my mother to ask the person behind the desk if they had it.

Now, my mother is a wonderful woman. I love her dearly. She is the most giving, self-sacrificing person I have ever known.

Her response to my (forgive the pun) earnest plea?

"If you want to know whether they have it, go ask them yourself."

Yeah. My mom wasn't a fan of ol' Ernest. And how could you blame her? We watched the shit out of those Ernest movies.

To give you an idea, let's say I'd developed incurable cancer and my dying wish had been to meet Jim Varney. I'll bet you anything that if he'd actually showed up and started doing that whole "knowwhutimean?" schtick, there's no way she would have been able to restrain herself from kicking him square in the balls.

Fortunately for everyone, that didn't happen. Unfortunately for me, however, they didn't have Ernest Scared Stupid. As a matter of fact, they never had it. I went back a few times and always made sure to ask, and then at some point (like two weeks ago) I just stopped asking, having grown out of it.

But I'm a big ol' nostalgic softy, so these movies still hold a place in my heart.

At some point I'll probably Netflix Ernest Goes to Camp, which has this adorable/ridiculous scene in it.

It's a good thing the Germans never thought of this. They could have captured the world.

Fun Fact: The character of Ernest P. Worrell was created by an advertising company for use as a versatile pitchman. Among the companies Varney did commercials for as the character was Kroger's, a grocery store chain that's apparently big in Tennessee (speciality: sows ears).

Fun Fact Part Deux: Jim Varney (who died in 2000) had a near genius I.Q. level. When people would come up to him and begin to treat him as though he were actually Ernest, his normal response was to shout equations at them until this happened.

Fun Fact 33 1/3: The "P" in Ernest P. Worrell stands for "Powertools". No seriously. That's what it stands for.

Fun Fact Brett Favre: These "fun facts" are a lot easier to write than paragraphs with transitions.

Knowwhutimean?

The Worst Movies... Ever (with a Miscasties on top!)

Congratulations, Batman and Robin (1997)!

When I started making a mental list of movies to include on this series, Batman and Robin was, of course, one of the first that occurred to me. But despite that, I've avoided it until now.

Why? Because making fun of Batman and Robin is almost too easy.

Talking about this hunk of monkey turds is more than anything an exercise in superlatives. I mean, exactly how many ways can you say "it sucks" before you run out of ideas?

For instance: does it suck "like a starving Ethiopian whore"?

Or is it's terribleness better expressed by the notion that if movies were US presidents, Batman and Robin is probably Stalin.

I distinctly remember the experience of watching Batman and Robin in the theater. I was 15 and had really liked Batman Forever, and even though they had replaced Val Kilmer as Batman, you know, who gave a shit? Val Kilmer was a mediocre Batman. I remember reading a story where some actress said all you needed to play Batman was great lips, and "George has great lips."

Yeah, not so much. From frame 1, you could tell Clooney had realized he'd made a mistake and had decided to phone it in. Hard. If Rule #1 of acting is to believe every line of dialogue you give... well, Batman and Robin proves George Clooney's capacity to be a terrible actor.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious he'd be terrible. Clooney's chief attribute as an actor is his ability to display a kind of ironic amusement. His entire performance in Ocean's Eleven is built on this.

As Batman, this is all wrong. After all, Batman is an inherently ridiculous concept. If you don't sell it, you make everyone in the audience sort of realize, "hey, that guy's wearing a rubber bat costume!"

This is not to say, of course, that even Laurence Olivier could have made Batman and Robin into a good movie (though I'd have paid good money to watch him try), or that Clooney is the only one terrible in it. I mean, the truth is that almost the entire cast of Batman and Robin could be given one of my coveted Miscasties.

After all, we're talking about Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl. And also Uma Thurman, as Poison Ivy, who clearly didn't learn her lesson from appearing in this piece of shit.

And then, of course, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger, as criminal supervillain Mr. Freeze.

On paper, casting Arnold as Mr. Freeze made some sense. After all, the script calls for Mr. Freeze to deliver a lot of cheesy one liners, and if there's one thing Arnold's good at, it's one liners.

But on Batman and Robin, they forgot something pretty important: the one liners have to be, you know, good.

Upon busting in:

Mr. Freeze: Ice to see you!

After hearing Poison Ivy's plan for them to rule Gotham together, despite the fact that one of them wants to turn the Earth into an iceberg and the other wants to turn the Earth into a giant greenhouse:

Mr. Freeze: Adam and Evil!

To his henchmen:

Mr. Freeze: Let's kick some ice!

I realize at this point I haven't even described the plot. Do I need to? By this point, you get the idea. The whole thing's a shit sandwich. And all of us who went and watched it in the theaters? Well, we all had to take a bite.

What do we get in return? Well, this.

A Few Words About the Title of the Blog

So I've been doing the blog for about three months now, and those of you who read it regularly are by now fairly attuned to what it's about: rude jokes, weird trivia, snark and a celebration/recognition of people who don't get enough celebration/recognition.

All that's all fine. But as a matter of semantics, at this point the blog's content doesn't really have anything to do with the title, which of course is Hollywood Humiliation.

Now I explained this in my first post all those moons ago, but it bears repeating: I've decided to make a rather significant life change and pursue the ridiculous dream of working in Hollywood, you know, on movies and stuff.

That explains the Hollywood.

The Humiliation refers to the most likely outcome of such a desire, which is that I get in one way or another humiliated, ie fail miserably.

Like this, only in Hollywood.

And, you know, this seemed like a pretty good title for it at the time. Amusing, but self-deprecating. And I was pretty happy with it until I discussed it with my good friend Liz, and we had this exchange.

"So, what are you calling it?" she asked.

"Hollywood Humiliation," I said. Then I explained the above.

Suddenly she's laughing.

"What?" I said.

"What if people think by humiliation you mean, you know?"

This.

"Oh shit!" I said. "I didn't think of that!"

By then, it was pretty much too late to change it, and by now it's certainly too late. Here at the ol' HH we're up to about 600 unique page views per month, which isn't great or anything, but it's certainly more than you would expect from one dumbass and his funny, funny jokes.

So it makes me wonder whether, you know, people come to the site expecting to find something that isn't here (like, for instance, funny funny jokes).

So for the record, to all of you freaky ass people out there: this blog will never make reference to ball gags, chains, whipping, hot wax, slaves, masters, furries or the like, unless in a humorous context (though when you think about it, how could those things not be humorous, no matter what the context?).

That is all. Feel free to go about your incredibly fucked-up business.

Signed,

Management

Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Philo T. Farnsworth!

Farnsworth is not particularly remembered today, but he should be. Why? Because that picture up there, of the TV, he's responsible for it.

The TV, I mean. Not the picture.

What I'm trying to say is: Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television as we know it. As in, you know, came up with it.

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, it wasn't quite so cool for Philo, who eventually came to regard the TV as a monster that wasted people's lives (also known as "having fun"). Philo so despised television programming he wouldn't even have one in his house.

Oh, and he died essentially penniless. And is forgotten.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born in 1906 near Beaver City (in what we can only hope is called Coochie County) Utah. The town had been founded in 1859 by Farnsworth's grandfather on the orders of some person called Brigham Young. I believe they founded a University named after him or something.

When Philo was 12, his family moved to a ranch in Idaho four miles from the nearest school (this seemed a lot farther when even if you had a car -- which the Farnsworth's didn't -- it looked like this). A huge nerd, Philo was fascinated by electrons and electricity, and asked to take extra courses at the school in technology.

Well, that electronic stuff just made sense to ol' Philo. Watching a field being plowed when he was 14, Farnsworth dreamed up the the cold cathode ray tube, a device still in use in many TV's today.

You and I see a corn field. Farnsworth saw television.

Not unlike Doc Brown (who has a hilariously long Wikipedia entry), it took a few years (in this case, seven) before Philo had the money to build one.

Once he built it, he gave it a terrible name: the "Image Dissector." Televisions at the time used mechanical scanning devices known as "Nipkow discs" which were combined with photoelectric cells. Farnsworth's Image Dissector was completely electrical, and by 1929, two years after debuting it, he was making the best TVs on the planet.

Oh, and he was just 23.

Things probably would have ended pretty well for ol' Philo if it hadn't been for a man named David Sarnoff, the head of RCA at the time. Sensing the potential of television, he sent his chief engineer, Vladamir Zworykin, to take a tour of Philo's laboratory.

Impressed by what he saw, Zworykin cheerfully copied Philo's advancements and combined them with a design of his own called the Iconoscope.

Then, as you can probably guess, all hell broke loose.

I won't bore you with the boring details (since I have read them and can confirm they are indeed boring), but it took until 1935 before Farnsworth was awarded "priority of invention" for the electrical TV. Sarnoff and RCA appealed, but were eventually forced to pay Farnsworth $1 million in royalties.

But not for long. The patents for Farnsworth's major advancements expired shortly after WWII (when sales of TVs had been suspended). As soon as they did, RCA took control of the television business, and with a energetic public relations campaign, promoted Sarnoff and Zworykin as the "fathers of television."

Things kind of went downhill from there. Farnsworth began drinking. He suffered from depression. In 1947, his house burned down.

But he kept on inventing. By the time of his death, he held more than 300 patents, helping to create radar, infra-red night vison, air-traffic control systems, the electron microscope, baby incubators, and the astronomical telescope.

Oh, and he invented a process for nuclear fusion. But development went slowly, and when investors started cashing in their loans, Farnsworth went broke and died shortly after of pneumonia at the age of 64.

So there he was, one of God's own prototypes, and I think it's past time we celebrate Philo T. Farnsworth for giving us the opportunity to waste so much time. What would any of us do without him?

Oh, that's right.

The Worst Movies... Ever

Congratulations, The Thin Red Line (1998)

Pictured: a piece of shit

The Thin Red Line is that incredibly rare breed: the intolerably boring war movie. Why? Because the director, Terrence Malick, took his superb cast (Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Caviezel, Adrian Brody, John C. Reilly, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, and John Travolta), and the WWII battle on Guadacanal and used them to ask a bunch of lazily philosophical and totally unsubtle questions about the nature of war and existence.

Take for instance this snippet of voice over from Caviezel's character:

Private Witt: This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the Earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed to this night?

Uh, what? And how about this:

Japanese Soldier: Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?

I mean, yeah. This is the kind of pretentious rambling brain diarrhea you expect to find from a freshman year philosophy student doing mushrooms for the first time, not a war movie that's supposed to be, you know, entertaining.

The making of the movie itself is one of the great fucked-up stories of the cinema.

The story of the movie begins in the late 1970s, when a pair of producers, Barry Geisler and John Roberdeau, approached Malick (who had made a name for himself with Badlands and Days of Heaven) with an offer of $250,000 to write an adaptation of James Jones' book The Thin Red Line.

Malick agreed, but his first draft, delivered five months later, was more than 300 pages (translating to about five hours of movie), and featured research Malick had done on pacific reptiles, Japanese drummers and Navajo code talkers.

Instead of realizing they were clearly dealing with a crazy person, Geisler and Roberdeau (neither of whom, it bears noting, have produced a movie since, though in Roberdeau's case it probably has something to do with dying in 2002) jumped in with both feet, spending long hours discussing the film with Malick.

According to Barry Geisler, who we imagine to be a well meaning but naive sort of guy:

"Malick's Guadalcanal would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war. Much of the violence would be portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out a tree."

For some reason, no one bothered to ask whether the audience would know what the fuck was going on if you did that. Speaking as someone who's seen the movie: yeah, they do that. And yeah, it's baffling.

The project languished for a few more years, during which time Malick worked on other projects for Geisler and Roberdeau, eventually pocketing more than $2 million for his efforts. By 1995, Geisler and Roberdeau were broke, and Malick was off somewhere alternating between laughing at them and crying himself to sleep on books of teenage poetry. Finally they went to Malick to ask him to just fucking choose something.

20th Century Fox eventually agreed to put up $39 million for The Thin Red Line as long as Malick would cast five movie stars from a list of ten who were interested. As Malick's previous movies were apparently artsy fartsy, but good (not that you could pay me enough to watch them at this point), movies stars, sensing a reclusive "genius" in their midst and not wanting to miss an opportunity to get up all on 'dat, lined up 10 deep in every direction to do whatever Malick said.

"Give me a dollar and tell when to show up," Sean Penn, for example, told Malick. At various times, everyone from Kevin Costner to Leonardo DiCaprio to Brad Pitt to John Depp showed interest. None of them would end up in the movie.

Pre-production went slowly, as Malick, in a move pretty consistent with a guy who hadn't made a movie in 20 years at this point, had a tough time making decisions. Eventually they settled on the North Australian jungle as the location. But when it came time to shoot, Malick, in a hilariously dickish move, told Geisler and Roberdeau -- the two guys who had gone broke trying to get Malick's movie made -- that they weren't allowed on set, apparently over a dispute they'd had with other producers on the project over whose name would go over the credits.

The shoot itself ran for 100 days, which Wikipedia described this way:

"Malick's unconventional filming techniques included shooting part of a scene during a bright, sunny morning only to finish it weeks later at sunset. He would make a habit of pointing the camera away during an action sequence and focus on a parrot, a tree branch or other fauna."

The original cut of the movie, as you can probably guess, ran five hours. It took (and I'm not making this up) more than two years to edit it down to just three hours, during which time parts filmed by Billy Bob Thorton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke were completely cut from the movie, and other appearances (like Clooney's and Travolta's) were trimmed until they were essentially cameos. Adrien Brody, told his character would "carry the movie", instead saw his part cut down to two lines and five minutes of screen time.

The end result was a seriously fucked up mess, wherein you have moments of extended voice over, shots of animals walking around, snippets of battle scenes and movie stars popping up and disappearing for no reason (like, say, Jennifer Garner showing up in Catch Me if You Can, except a whole movie like that).

I suppose, as much as anyone, I should blame the reviews, which were actually inexplicably good (79% on Rottentomatoes.com). Martin Scorsese actually called it his second favorite film of the 1990s (behind what, Cool As Ice?). Based on them, I bought the movie without having seen it or talked to anyone who saw it (ugh). And I still have it. A few days ago I rearranged my DVD collection, and there it was, laughing at me.

But through all of this, the movie does have at least one redeeming quality.

In one scene, Woody Harrelson gets his ass blown off. Literally.

@2:30

Netflix to the Rescue

So I've sat here for a few minutes trying to think of something sarcastic to say about Netflix, but I can't. It's a great service. I've had it now for a week or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Currently I have 145 movies in my queue to go along with 579 rated movies, identifying me as someone who clearly has too much time on his hands.

Not quite this much, but pretty close.

So I'm liking the service. It gives me a chance to watch movies I've wanted to see but not enough to go buy on spec. So far, I've watched three of these, with another (Shoot the Piano Player) here on my desk, and I thought, in my capacity as a person who writes about Hollywood and movies, that I'd briefly review them. So here goes.

Movie #1, La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), is a boring movie about bored people. That's it's not phenomenally boring is actually something of an achievement, since it's protagonists, a married couple played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, go through the movie phenomenally bored by everything: parties, restaurants and especially each other.

They float about in a kind of haze. Always polite to each other, but never more. Mastroianni's character gets involved in little flings. He tells his wife about one and she brushes it off as though she doesn't care. She takes a taxi to the dilapidated building they lived in as newlyweds but doesn't smile, and when Mastroianni comes to pick her up she observes it will probably be torn down soon.

You get what I'm saying? It's like that. Later they go to a party at the house of a rich man. Mastroianni gets a job offer and tries to seduce the rich man's daughter. Meanwhile Moreau wanders the property, briskly walking away when anyone gets near her.

I started watching the movie last night when I was tired and I had to turn it off 35 minutes in when I nearly fell out of my chair and hit my head on the side of my bed. I finished it this morning mostly out of habit.

My grade: 2 stars out of 5

Go West (Buster Keaton, 1925) was made during Keaton's "golden era" during the 1920s, but it's not one of his better movies. Keaton stars as "Friendless," a down on his luck drifter who gets a job on a cattle ranch even though he knows nothing about being a cowboy. Though this sounds like a potentially comedic situation (or perhaps it doesn't), the movie is only occasionally amusing and doesn't really go anywhere, even after Keaton makes friends with a cow named Brown Eyes and tries ineptly to save her from being slaughtered.

The final sequence, with Keaton dressed in a red devil's costume leading a herd of cows through the streets of LA to a slaughterhouse (if the cows don't get there, the man who owns the ranch will be ruined, and Keaton has become sweet on his daughter), is the best part of the movie, even though, when you think about it, it's just a lot of walking.

My grade: 2.5 stars out of 5

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), the legendary neo-realist movie, was the best of the three. With a cast of non-actors, the movie (also known as The Bicycle Thief due to a translating error), is about a poor man and his son searching the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, which he needs to work.

Though it drags here and there and features a notably bleak ending, I found it a fascinating portrait of an honest man stuck between his principles and his need to work. In 1952, four years after it was made, it was deemed the best movie of all time in the first Sight and Sound poll, now held once per decade (in the latest poll, held in 2002, it placed sixth).

Now, it's not as good as that, but I found it a well constructed morality tale. In the Alewine household, however, I was in the distinct minority, as my brother (whose idea it was to watch the movie in the first place) declared after it was over that he would have turned it off after 20 minutes. My father, who came in for the last 45 minutes or so, turned to us after when the credits started rolling and said, "uh, whose idea was it to watch this movie?"

My grade: 4 stars out of 5

So there, assholes.

The Not-Yet-Dead Set, featuring Eli Wallach

"To be or not to be"? asks Hamlet, somewhere in the 35th hour of the play that bears his name. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of David of 'David and Goliath' fame and apparently some Comanches, or to nuke those motherfuckers and just be done with it?..." 

Note: my memory might be faulty on that last part. 

Anyhow, every year thousands of children are forced to read that speech, and some, like me (thanks, Mrs. Rafter!) are forced to (sort of) memorize it. 

Read at the above speed, Hamlet still takes seven or eight hours to complete. 

I mention this speech here at the top because it's probably the most famous "should I continue living or not?" speech in literature, and because that seems like a clean setup to talking about people who can be said, by now, to have decided pretty squarely on that question, given that they're older than what geologists like to call "dirt". 

Today's not-dead person? 

-Eli Wallach- 

Wallach is one of the great character actors in cinema history. Born in 1917 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, Wallach became involved with acting at a young age, training at the legendary Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner, whose alumni include such prestigious actors as Robert Duvall and such, you know, unprestigious actors as Amanda Bearse. 

Wallach later transferred to the University of Texas, where he acted in student plays with his eventual wife, Anne Sheridan (to whom he's been married since 1948), and his eventual not-wife, Walter Cronkite (yeah, that one). 

After being discharged from WWII (where he served heroically as a staff sergeant in a military hospital), Wallach moved back to New York, where he began taking classes at the New School. He also began acting on Broadway, winning a Tony Award in 1951.  

This eventually led to roles in films, though usually as some sort of ugly and underhanded person. Wallach's first major film, to give you an example, features him trying to extract "erotic vengance" on the wife of a man he thinks has burned down his cotton gin. 

No seriously, they made a movie about that. 

Wallach eventually landed in roles in more, you know, plausible films, including The Misfits, Lord Jim and The Magnificent Seven (cast not against type as a Mexican bandit who menaces a town for money even a random person walking down it's main street should be able to guess it doesn't have). 

All of this, however, led to his role in one of the greatest films ever made, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Portraying another Mexican bandit, Tuco (the Ugly), Wallach transformed the tough, street-wise Tuco into the most vulnerable and human character in the movie. 

Sadly, Wallach's career has never reached the heights his talent probably deserved. He's acted extensively on Broadway and is well respected, but after turning down the role in From Here to Eternity that won Frank Sinatra an Oscar and having a falling out with Sergio Leone, he pretty much faded from view. 

But that's okay. These days Wallach still acts, albeit only sporadically. He nearly saved the mediocre third Godfather movie with a sensational performance as a rival mob boss and earned an Emmy nomination for a role on one of the few good episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He also proved hilarious as a foul-mouthed liquor store owner in Mystic River (directed by Clint Eastwood). 

Oh, well. Wallach is by all accounts a very nice guy and ranks near the top on a list of Hollywood people I'd most like to meet (the subject of a future post, no doubt). So keep on living, Eli. Some of us out here still love you. 

A Few Words About John Hughes

Well, John Hughes is dead. I'm sure you all have heard about it. And if you haven't before now... well, there it is. 

The truth is, I'm a little too young to be truly heartbroken over the death of John Hughes. I was born in 1982, which means that by the time the 80s -- the decade Hughes reigned over as much as any filmmaker -- was over, I was, you know, eight years old. 

But that's kind of the thing. Think about it. Sixteen Candles (his very first movie) was made in 1984. Home Alone (which he wrote but didn't direct) was made in 1990. He was involved in other things after 1990 (writing legendary turds like 101 Dalmations, Flubber and Maid in Manhattan), but between 1984 and 1990 he was responsible for The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. 

That's a pretty good run. In fact, that's fucking ridiculous. 

Not quite this ridiculous, but you get the idea. 

I mean, I remember when Home Alone came out on video. Macauley Culkin and I are about the same age, and the movie was quite an inspiration for a mischievous kid who, you know, thought he could probably outsmart the shit out of two seasoned thieves if it really came down to it. True story: a few days after we got it on video, I watched it seven times in a row. Then I dreamed up a plan to take over the world using cream cheese.

Though most of Hughes' movies were about people at least 10 years older than me, they had a quality that made them last and relate beyond that, and as I got older, I started to make my way through them. 

The Breakfast Club was first shown to me my freshman year of High School as part of some kind of hilariously useless orientation (at one point during a Q and A, this blonde senior jock confessed to having smoked a cigarette and had a beer at the same time. "It made me so sick," he said. "It was awful.") 

The experience nearly ruined The Breakfast Club for me, but I now recognize it as a very earnest movie that, you know, while sympathetic, didn't quite get it right. 

But all was forgiven, of course, the first time I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Ah, what a movie! Roger Ebert calls it a poor man's Mr. Hulot's Holiday. In fact, he's used that comparison so many times I actually watched that movie just to see what the fuck the deal was. 

Uh... yeah, it sucked. I turned it off after 20 minutes.

Ferris Bueller, however, doesn't suck. A movie about skipping school and having fun in Chicago for a day -- it proved definitively just how lame I am, as Ferris and his friends managed to have more fun on that one day than I did in an entire year of living there. 

So thanks, John Hughes, for proving that. And thanks for your movies. You really had something there for a while, and a lot of what you did turned out awesome. Sleep tight. 

The Miscast-ies -- A Tribute to Hilariously Bad Casting

The Miscasties, for those of you who don't remember, is my tribute to horrible casting choices from the world of cinema. For instance, I was once cast as Winthrop Paroo in the play The Music Man. The problem? Winthrop is supposed to be, like, 6, whereas I was like, 11 or 12, and nearly six-foot tall. 

Thankfully, the rich, famous and talented people of Hollywood usually get it better than that. But not always. And sometimes -- spectacularly not always. 

In this instance, the Miscastie goes to..........................

Cameron Diaz! For her role as football franchise owner and massive bitch Christina Pagniacci in Oliver Stone's legendary turdbomb Any Given Sunday! 

The Wikipedia entry on Diaz's character Pagniacci neatly sums up what I'm talking about.

"The owner of the Miami Sharks who inherited the team from her father. Given the team's poor results in the last few years, which she attributes to Coach D'Amato's "old-school methods", she attempts to take a more hands-on approach to the team, including bringing in innovative offensive coordinator Nick Crozier. She shows disregard for players' feelings and well-being, convincing Mandrake to cover up injuries. She has hinted several times that D'Amato will not return after his contract expires, adding to his distractions. She also begins political maneuvers that cause confrontation with the AFFA Commissioner and the Mayor of Miami." 

Does that kind of ball-busting Jerry Jones-style biznatch sound like something ditzy, goofy, empty-headed surfer girl Cameron Diaz could pull of to you?

No, me neither. The closest thing to an actual clip of Diaz's acting in this hunk of shit I could find is from the trailer (which should give you some idea of how bad the rest of the movie is).

In case you're wondering, she did actually ask Al Pacino (also poorly cast), "why the hell do you think my father put me in charge of the team you bullheaded moron?" 

Wonderful writing. Basically, Stone needed a female Gordon Gekko, and boy did he ever not get it. Try to imagine Cameron Diaz doing this famous monologue from Wall Street and you'll see what I mean. 

Yeah. Not so much. 

So congratulations, Cameron. You were pretty hot in The Mask, and of course we all loved you in There's Something About Mary. But ruthless career woman roles? For the love of God, no. 

Celebrity Birthday of the Day

(Thanks to all of you out there for your patience. After moving and then driving 20 hours across country without a break, I needed a few days off from everything but eating, shitting and sleeping. But now I'm back, and present without delay another entry in my Academy Award winning series on, you know, celebrity birthdays.) 

Happy Birthday, John Landis. 

Man, what the fuck happened to you? You used to be awesome. Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Coming to America. All great movies. 

Then, uh, something happened, and you started making movies like Beverly Hills Cop III, The Stupids and the monumentally bad Blues Brothers 2000 (the subject of one of my Worst Movies... Ever entries). 

Landis was born in 1950 in Chicago, but grew up primarily in Los Angeles. He got involved in Hollywood as a teenager, beginning as a mail boy at 20th Century Fox. Working on Kelly's Heroes in Yugoslavia in 1969, Landis was promoted to assistant director after the original AD had a complete nervous breakdown and left the set. 

Apparently he didn't do a very good job, because he stayed for several years in Europe, working as everything from a dialogue coach to a stunt double (specializing in horse falls, which is, you know, what they generally have the really talented people do). 

Landis returned to the US in 1971 and made the movie Schlock, which is apparently well named, as it is known as a piece of shit. It took six years before Landis was allowed to direct again, this time turning in The Kentucky Fried Movie, written by Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers, who would later make Airplane!. 

Then things really began to heat up for Landis. His next two movies, 1978's Animal House and 1980's The Blues Brothers, were, you know, awesome. 

In 1982, while directing a segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, an explosion mishap on set combined with a helicopter crash resulted in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow (father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and two child actors: Myca Dinh Le and Renee Chin-Yi Chen. Landis was subsequently sued for ignoring child labor laws and negligence, but was eventually acquitted. He later blamed the special FX man, a tactic he probably should have also tried on Beverly Hills Cop III. 

After this, Landis' career became more spotty, as he began to alternate really good movies (Trading Places, Coming to America) with mediocre to shitty movies (Spies Like Us, Three Amigos!). He also began directing humorless Michael Jackson videos like "Thriller" and "Black or White". 

Landis' career decline has never been able to be linked to anything in particular, like for instance brain surgery. But whatever it was, he just started to suck. 

As a result, Landis hasn't made a movie since 1998's Susan's Plan (no, I haven't heard of it either), working instead on TV documentaries and episodes of awesome shows like Honey I Shrunk the Kids: the TV Show. 

Yeah. 

Well, what can you do? Here's hoping Landis can return to making awesome, irreverent movies. But barring that, I'd rather him just not make any more movies at all. It's too painful.