Category Archives: Film

Dept. of Pictures That Should Make You Smile

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This one:

Screen Shot 2012 10 04 at 5 03 04 PM

from here.

For the record, ages then and now, from left to right:

  • Cary Elwes: 49 now, 24 then
  • Robin Wright: 46 now, 21 then
  • Mandy Patinkin: 59 now, 35 then
  • Chris Sarandon: 70 now, 45 then
  • Wallace Shawn: 68 now, 43 then
  • Carol Kane: 60 now, 35 then
  • Billy Crystal: 64 now, 39 then

Not pictured:

  • Chris Guest: 64 now, 39 then. Now’s as good a time as any to remind you that Guest is a hereditary peer known more completely as Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden Guest.
  • Fred Savage: 36 now, 11 then.

Two others are, of course, dead. Peter Falk died last June at 83. He was 59 when the film was made. Andre Roussimoff died 19 years ago at 46, only a few years after the film was made.

In the “somewhat distressing” category: of the main cast, only Sarandon and Shawn were older than I am now.

Related: I wondered if Chris Sarandon and Eric Roberts should team up in some kind of “creepy (ex)relative of awesome leading lady” project, but it turns out they did do a movie together in 2000. It appears, however, to have garnered only mixed reviews despite the presence of Cary Elwes.

Four Minutes with Tony Scott

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If you remember him for nothing else — which is patently absurd, given his resume, which includes The Hunger, Top Gun, Man on Fire, and others — remember him for directing Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken in this scene from 1993’s True Romance (written, famously, by Tarantino).

I remember watching this in a theater with Chris Mohney and the rest of our pals, all of us absolutely on the edge of our seats as the tension built to impossible, unimaginable levels. (Watch closely, and see if you can spot Tony Soprano.)

Roger Ebert has more about Tony Scott.

Mad Men Redux

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The excellent Mad Men Unbuttoned blog points out two bits you may have missed:

  • Joan wears the fur Roger gave her on her “date”; and
  • It turns out Lane’s commentary on Pete — a “grimy little pimp” — was a bit of foreshadowing.

Dept. of Obsessive Attention to Detail in Mad Men

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It should surprise precisely nobody that Matthew Weiner is very, very careful about the correct current events in Mad Men, even including what play Don and Megan went to see.

(Also cute: the modern Hare Krishna movement — more formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON — was founded in New York in 1966, just months before the last night’s Christmastime episode.)

Update: It gets deeper. I’m informed via the Well that:

  • The diner Crane and Kinsey meet in at the end of the episode is identifiably Ratner’s, which happens to be just down the street from an actual ISKCON storefront on 2nd Avenue.

  • Mohawk was hit by a strike in December of 1966, which lasted until the end of January.

Dept. of PBS just not getting it.

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I’m very happy that PBS is running the second series BBC’s Sherlock on TV; that’s completely awesome.

What makes zero freaking sense, though, is that they’re running it opposite HBO’s Game of Thrones. Really? You don’t think there’s some overlap there? You couldn’t pick another night?

Sunday’s already chockablock with actual quality TV, as Mad Men follows GOT. Why not stake out another night, for God’s sake?

Whatever. It matters a little less because all three shows are post-network, and run several times per week, making conflicts much less annoying — especially if you’re a Tivo user. We’ll pick up Sherlock on the 1AM showing. But it still seems like a stupid decision by PBS.

Six Degrees of Richard Speck in Mad Men

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Last night’s Mad Men included references to the Richard Speck murders in Chicago, which places the episode just after July 13, 1966. (The last ep was clearly dated by the reference to the death of Pete Fox on July 5.)

The excellent Mad Men Unbuttoned blog notes that Life Magazins’s archives are online, and that you can read their account of the Speck murders from scans (which, appropriately enough, preserve the period advertising).

Today’s fun fact: the author of the Life piece was Loudon Wainwright — father of the folk singer and grandfather to Rufus — who wrote and edited for the magazine for many years.

I’m not sure if it counts as spoilers, but this page might give us hints about upcoming background events. Of particular interest in the summer of 1966, we have:

  • Charles Whitman did his Longhorn Sniping on August 1.
  • On August 8, Star Trek premiers.
  • In October, Toyota releases the Corolla.
  • LSD was legal in the US until October 6 of this year.
  • The AFL-NFL merger gains Congressional approval on October 21.
  • In November, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono.
  • Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball happens on November 28.
  • Lenny Bruce dies on August 3.

Unlikely to be referenced: On October 29, One regenerates into Two.

Dept. of Movie Theaters Committing Suicide

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There is apparently now talk of theaters addressing the lack of demand for (and therefore lack of revenue from) more expensive 3D tickets by raising 2D ticket prices and then charging the same amount for both.

The official Heathen position is simple: Fuck 3D, and fuck absolutely everything about this idea. Hello, home rental! I mean, seriously: we barely go to the movies as it is because on nearly every metric important to us, the home experience is superior. There’s no chattering. There’s no texting. There’s no $17 “small” soda. There’s no parking. We can sit in the center of the room and control the volume. We can back it up if we need a line repeated, or pause it if we need to take a leak.

What, exactly, does Regal offer me besides overpriced snacks, extortionate ticket prices, and the “opportunity” to share the movie experience with a few hundred mouth-breathing jackasses.?

“Poor Bernie”

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In 1998, Texas Monthly‘s Skip Hollandsworth wrote a long piece called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas” about Bernie Tiede, a somewhat effeminate undertaker in rural Carthage, TX, who befriended a nasty but wealthy local widow named Marjorie Nugent. He left the funeral business and took a job basically looking after her; they’d travel together — first class all the way — and he would tend to her affairs.

Until, they say, he killed her. Which was unfortunately about 9 months before anybody actually noticed she was gone; he’d stored her body in a deep freeze at her home, which he continued to tend. The residents of Carthage were, somewhat amusingly, untroubled:

Sitting at his regular table at Daddy Sam’s BBQ and Catfish (“You Kill It, I’ll Cook It”) in the East Texas town of Carthage, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson began to realize that he might have some problems prosecuting Bernie Tiede for murder.

“Bernie’s a sweet man, Danny Buck,” a waitress said. “He’s done a lot of good things for this town. He’s given poor kids money to go to college and everything.”

“You got to admit nobody could sing “Amazing Grace’ like Bernie could,” someone else said.

The bulldog-faced Danny Buck took a bite of slaw and sipped his iced tea. “Now y’all know that Bernie confessed, don’t you?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “He came right out and told a Texas Ranger that he shot Mrs. Nugent four times in the back and then stuffed her in her own deep freeze in her kitchen.”

There was a long silence. “Danny Buck,” one man finally said, “it’s just hard for me to believe that old Bernie could fire a gun straight. He acts…well, you know…effeminate! You can tell he’s never been deer hunting in his entire life.”

“And you know what?” a woman told Danny Buck later at a convenience store. “I don’t care if Mrs. Nugent was the richest lady in town. She was so mean that even if Bernie did kill her, you won’t be able to find anyone in town who’s going to convict him for murder.”

Yeah, I know. It’s total Southern Gothic territory. I only read this story because it showed up in inbox thanks to the excellent SendMeAStory people (whom you should check out, if you like that sort of thing). It’s a bizarre but compelling account.

It turns out that Richard Linklater thought so, too. Jack Black is Bernie. Matthew McConaughey is local DA Danny Buck Davidson. And Shirley MacLaine is the widow. In theaters next month. Here’s the trailer.

And theaters WONDER why home video eats their lunch

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An Open Letter To The Worst Human Being To Ever Sit In A Theater pretty much sums it up in a worst-case scenario kind of way.

I know there exist some theaters (God bless, you Tim) who take this stuff seriously, but the overwhelming majority simply do not. If the options are “wait for video,” “theater full of yahoos,” or “drive half an hour to the closest Alamo,” I’m going with home video every damn time. It’s no contest. I have a great wine list, a comfy couch, two great cats to hang out with Mrs Heathen and I, and the ability to pause it when we need to take a leak. And, most importantly, Heathen World HQ is a yahoo-free zone.