Movie thoughts: Hollywoodland

There is a game we used to play. Well, it isn't a game really, it's more of a...I don't know what to call it. It went like this, we would sit around and offer suggestions for which actor would be best for playing the role of characters in movies. Movies about books, or re-makes of old TV shows, or comics or whatever.

Anyway, the one character I have had the most difficulty with is Mike Hammer. Stacy Keatch was excellent as Hammer on the television shows he did, but he is way too old now.

Mike is your quintessential hard-boiled private eye straight from the pulp dime novels and film noir genre that brought us the likes of Phillip Marlow and Sam Spade. Marlow and Spade were earlier of course, and were translated into films near the height of the film noir genre, both benefiting from the abilities of Humphrey Bogart.

But Mike Hammer never got a good shot at the silver screen. The best Hammer flick I have witnessed to date is "Kiss Me, Deadly" starring Ralph Meeker and a very young, and not to shabby lookin' Cloris Leachman.

Anyway, what I was getting at in the beginning of this whole thing is that I have found a person who could do a justice to the role of Mike Hammer. This actor is one that I would never have thought of on my own in a million years. In fact, I couldn't say that I ever really thought him much of an actor anyway. That guy, is Ben Affleck. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Ben Affleck, you mean that guy from Gigli? That guy from Sum of All Fears? That guy who was almost married to J-Lo? WTF????"

I know, I know, I couldn't believe it either. Not only has ne not really 'looked' the part, he's, I mean come on, he's Ben Affleck for crying out loud. However, I did sit down last night at watched "Hollywoodland". Quick synopsis of the film, George Reeves was a somewhat struggling actor. Had a fairly minor part in Gone With the Wind, and a Saturday morning kiddie show as Sir Galahad. He needed the money, so he auditioned for, and was awarded, the part of Superman on the old TV series.

After several years on the show he is hopelessly typecast as Superman, when the show is canceled, he still cannot find work. Eventually, he ends up on his bed with a bullet hole in his head. The question is, was it suicide as ruled by the police, or murder? Reeves mother hires Louis Simo (played by Adrian Brody), a fairly down on his luck PI to investigate.

Affleck plays Reeves, and did it with so much more talent than anything I have seen him in previous to this. The movie is not a pow-pow bang-bang shoot 'em up action film, but neither is it boring. It moves along slowly and methodically, and uses flashbacks to portray periods on Reeve's life. The flashback sequences are well done and only serve to move the story forward.

I am thoroughly surprised this movie was not nominated for an Oscar. Brody, Affleck and especially Diane Lane (who played Reeve's "sugar momma") deserve more recognition than they received. Well worth a watch.

Holy COW!!!

Man, I thought I really needed a Microsoft Surface device, but then I ran across this little puppy. This is what I really, absolutely, positively NEED!




I found it over at Popular Mechanics.

Donations are being accepted!

Is it real or memorex?

I was surfing this evening when I came across this video:

glumbert - Genius 3-year-old finger painter

At first I was completely floored and super impressed with this kid. But then I started thinking, is this for real? And I started looking at the video again, but with more cynicism (I know, I know, those of you who know me can't believe I looked at it without cynicism the first time - hard to believe).

Personally? It think it is fake. You never really see the kid painting the actual picture. You see close ups of a hand painting, you see far away shots of the kid putting his fingers in the bowls, but you never actually have a shot where you see the kid applying paint to the actual painting. There are two shots where it looks kind of convincing. One is where the kid is getting paint on his fingers, and then putting them on some paper, but all you can see of the paper is the corner. No one can see what is on the rest of it. The other shot is at the end where it looks like he is putting the finishing touches on the painting, but then he picks the painting up and it is dry.

At the end, watch the end, when he picks up the painting, notice anything missing? Yeah, me too, his shirt is way too clean, and not one drop of paint can be seen on the table. RRRRIIIIIGGGHHHHTTT

14 years in the making

A little over 14 years ago, the 5/8 and I sat in line for several hours attempting to obtain tickets to the Garth Brooks concert. We were at the Jones Store Ticketmaster outlet. Several things about that ordeal ticked me off. One, is that this outlet didn't start selling tickets until almost 20 minutes after the official start time. Second, the bloke in front of my bought up the last two tickets.

Well, we get another chance to see him in concert. Garth is coming to Kansas City, and the radio station in Kansas City is billing it as 'one city show'. That is, he is not doing a whole tour, just playing Kansas City.

This time around, we had better luck. And we didn't stand in line, and we didn't have to deal with smelly, rude people while not standing in line. This time we went online to the Ticketmaster website and got tickets to see Garth Brooks show in Kansas City next month. The radio on Friday reported that Garth had said he would make tickets available as long as people were buying them. I thought this was a kind of bogus line. I mean, seriously, the Sprint center only holds so many people.

But as we were frantically trying to obtain the tickets - three of us; myself, the 5/8 and No. 1 Son all hitting the Ticketmaster website over and over trying to obtain the tickets, we got a message the original 14 Nov show was sold out, but another show date, 12 Nov, became available. We were able to snag tickets to that one. The last I looked at the Ticketmaster site, there were 9 dates for Garth in the Sprint Arena in Kansas City. I guess he was true to his word.

Along with this, I was impressed with the price at $27/ticket, they were extremely affordable. We paid $60-something a ticket to see Shania Twain about three years ago. And that $27 is for all seats, they all carry the same price. Which is way cool. And Ticketmaster stated the online and phone sales were limited to folks in Kansas, Missouri, SE Nebraska and SW Iowa, based on the credit card billing address. Which was also way cool. This would keep the ticket bots from buying up all the tickets like that Hannah Montana fiasco.

I could have made it all up.

This whole 30 days of posts thing doesn't seem to be going over very well. Here is it, 4 days since my last post, and I don't have any valid reasons for not posting. Sometimes, you just have nothing to say, and sometimes you have plenty to say, you just don't have the right words to say it. Then again, sometimes you might put the whole thing at the bottom of the list of things to get done. Placing a lower importance on it than, say, pressing the "Stumble Upon" button in the browser tool bar. Sometimes, you just want to kind of vegetate and do mostly nothing, especially something that will require you to think, and possibly express some kind of idea, or thought, or tell a story.

But who knows really, mostly I think sometimes things just - are; and you are just too damned apathetic to give a rat's hind end about much of anything. So here it is, yet another Sunday, and I haven't posted anything since Thursday and I'm thinking to myself 'why didn't I just take five minutes and put something, anything up?' and there is no answer. Just nothing. But I'm making the effort anyway. As this whole experiment goes on, it just seems like what there is to write about doesn't seem all that interesting. And if it isn't interesting to me, I have to wonder how interesting it is to anyone else. I'm not going to give up on it though. I missed a few days, but there were some days that I posted multiple times, so that should count for some extra credit at least.

But then again, I could have just made the whole thing up.

Bionic Woman Redux

After two episodes, I'm still trying to get past the vast and sweeping changes to the Bionic Woman mythos that are created in the re-imagining of the show. About the only things that are retained from the original show are; the bionic woman's name is Jaime Sommers, and she has robotic parts. Apart from that, almost nothing is retained.

There is no Oscar Goldman. There is no government spy agency called OSI. There is no Dr. Rudy Wells who pioneered the bionics project. And there is a bionic woman 1.0 - who is 1/2 crazy - running around mucking things up.

Instead of the OSI, Jaime works for some super-secret private firm who are trying to keep the world from being destroyed, and she cost $50 million (instead of $5 million in the original). I guess it would have to be a private agency to get all those bionic parts (two legs, 1 arm, 1 ear and 1 eye - the eye is another deviation from the original) for only $50 million. I'm quite certain if it was a government project, it would have run closer to $5 billion. In a government program, she probably could have gotten a bionic little toe for $50 million.

I'm going to give it some more time. At least with Battlestar Galactica they mostly kept the familiar names around. With this, the only name they kept was Jaime Sommers. But I'm still waiting for Lindsey Wagner to do a guest appearance - I'm almost certain that is in the works.

Blogs in Space

Okay, this is just kind of cool. Not that I really think for a second that my 'blog is headed to space, but hey, it's free, and they have nifty buttons and graphics you can put on your blog to proclaim that your blog is being transmitted up to where the Enterprise can receive it in a couple of centuries.

But they do carry this disclaimer:

Bloggers who use this site are urged to keep their blogs devoid of any language, comments or content that might offend, taunt or provoke alien life forms in any way. Let's not start an intergalactic war :)

And here are all the different badges/buttons they have:











I haven't quite decided on which one I'm going to use, but I'm leaning towards the first one.

Lost teaser on this week's Chuck

I had to post something about this, so I get bonus points for two posts
in one day for my 30 Days of Posts experiment. For those Lost fans out
there, there was a Lost teaser in tonight's episode. Did you catch it?

The scene was when Chuck was being shown the images by the doctor. An
image of an airplane appeared on the screen, and Chuck says "Oceanic
flight 815 was shot down by [unintelligible] experimenting with
underground warfare". This is from memory, so it might not be 100%
accurate, but both myself and the 5/8 caught it!

I know, two different networks, but I will swear on a stack of bibles that this is what he said.


Technorati Tags: Television, Chuck, Lost, ABC, CBS, Oceanic 815

Leaving Las Vegas

One of my favorite shows the last few years has been "Las Vegas" on NBC. I started watching it because of James Caan. Since "Rollerball"(the original, not the crappy remake) I will pretty much watch anything James Caan is in.

Caan's character was great. Ex-CIA spook guy now running a Casino in Las Vegas. Knows all the old-timer mob guys, and how to take care of business 'off the books'. Last season (I believe it was) Caan's character left for awhile. The show was somewhat draggy then. Without Caan, it just wasn't going to fly. I was about ready to give up on it when he came back.

In this season's opener, he left for good. And I'm pretty sure it is for good this time. But I have faith that they can do the same great show without him this time. Last time, when Caan left, there was nobody to fill his shoes. All that was left was the young eye-candy characters - don't get me wrong, the eye-candy is nice. This time though, they have brought in a new character, and new old salt kind of guy. A Wyoming rancher who simply 'wrote a check for $247 million to pay off the casino's back taxes. The character is portrayed by Tom Selleck.

Twenty years ago, Selleck was the bomb as "Magnum, P.I." but his after Magnum career has somewhat stifled. He did some crappy movies and some guest shots on other TV shows. If the western genre was better received, he would have had some good hits with westerns. He seems to just kind of slide into the cowboy role, and this character acts exactly how you might expect a cowboy to act. When an oncologist from Kansas City is caught cheating at black jack, instead of sending the guy to jail, Selleck himself deals cards to the fellow and makes the proposition "You stole over $1 million of my money. Now, I believe sometimes people make mistakes. So what we're going to do is play blackjack until I win all my money back, every cent, then you go back to Kansas City and save some lives." (ok, it was paraphrase, my memory isn't that good, but you get the drift).

I think Las Vegas will last without Caan just fine. Unfortunately, I don't think "Criminal Minds" will last without Mandy Patinkin. Another show I started watching for the actor, Ever since "Princess Bride" I have watched most things Patinkin has done. Sadly, I missed the whole "Dead Like Me" era of his career, but I'm sure that somehow I'll get over it.

Holy Cow! Look at all those reference links. You'd think I'm getting paid for that many links but alas, I don't.

Have a great rest-of-your-Monday!