Category: Movies

Hall of fame and Oscar-winner day

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ike Turner is 74 today.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Art Garfunkel is 64.

Sam Shepard is 62. An inductee as a playwright into the Theatre Hall of Fame, Shepard was also nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Bill Walton is 53. He’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Kellen Winslow is 48. He’s a football hall-of-famer.

Tatum O’Neal is 42. Miss O’Neal won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at age 10 for Paper Moon.

Vivien Leigh (who died at age 53) was born on this date in 1913. Miss Leigh was selected as Best Actress twice — for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (opposite Clark Gable) and for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (opposite Marlon Brando).

And Leonard Franklin Slye was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1911. As Roy Rogers he’s an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the only person to be elected twice — as the King of the Cowboys and as a founder of the Sons of the Pioneers (“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water”). Rogers died in 1998.

Lonely Are the Brave

Albuquerqueans in particular might enjoy Lonely Are the Brave, a modern-day western filmed largely in the Sandia Mountains. Kirk Douglas is a throw-back cowboy who breaks out of jail and heads for the crest on horseback to escape the sheriff’s posse (in jeeps and helicopters). It’s in black and white and difficult to see anything in the distant shots of Albuquerque — except that there wasn’t anything anywhere close to the mountains in those days (the film was released in 1962).

Walter Matthau is the ambivalent sheriff, George Kennedy a sadistic deputy. Look for future television stars Carroll O’Connor, WIlliam Schallert and Bill Bixby. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo from a novel by Edward Abbey.

NewMexiKen once read that Douglas thought this was his best performance.

The film has been making the rounds on cable a lot lately.

Teary-eyed

Shakespeare’s Sister asks, “What movie scenes always make you cry?”

Well, some might tell you that NewMexiKen can well up watching The Incredibles, but that’s because they don’t recognize the difference between emotions and an allergic reaction to popcorn. With that caveat, I’ll list three scenes that get to me.

Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby: “Mo cuishle. It means my darling. My blood.” (Jeez, I welled-up just typing this.)

Adult Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird: “Neighbors bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a knife, and our lives.”

(It’s also pretty powerful earlier in that film when Reverend Sykes says to Scout: “Jean Louise. Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passing.”)

When Paikea gives her report at the school in Whale Rider and her grandfather isn’t there.

Don’t be afraid to add to the discussion in the comments.

Link via Rox Populi, who links to a couple of other lists (read the comments).

It’s the birthday

… of Bill Keane. The artist and creator of Family Circus is 83.

… of Diahann Carroll. The actress is 70. She was once married to singer Vic Damone and once engaged to Sidney Poitier and later to David Frost. Ms. Carroll was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for Claudine. Her TV sitcom “Julia” was the first to star an African-American woman.

… of Edward P. Jones. The author of the Pulitizer Prize winning novel The Known World is 55. A great book.

… of Grant Hill. The basketball player, high school classmate of Emily, official second daughter of NewMexiKen, is 33.

… of Kate Winslett. The actress is 30. She’s been nominated for the best actress and best supporting actress Oscar twice each.

… of Ray Kroc, developer of the McDonald’s empire, who was born on this date in 1902.

But by 1941, “I felt it was time I was on my own,” Mr. Kroc once recalled, and he became the exclusive sales agent for a machine that could prepare five milkshakes at a time.

Then, in 1954, Mr. Kroc heard about Richard and Maurice McDonald, the owners of a fast-food emporium in San Bernadino, Calif., that was using several of his mixers. As a milkshake specialist, Mr. Kroc later explained, “I had to see what kind of an operation was making 40 at one time.”

…

Mr. Kroc talked to the McDonald brothers about opening franchise outlets patterned on their restaurant, which sold hamburgers for 15 cents, french fries for 10 cents and milkshakes for 20 cents.

Eventually, the McDonalds and Mr. Kroc worked out a deal whereby he was to give them a small percentage of the gross of his operation. In due course the first of Mr. Kroc’s restaurants was opened in Des Plaines, another Chicago suburb, long famous as the site of an annual Methodist encampment.

Business proved excellent, and Mr. Kroc soon set about opening other restaurants. The second and third, both in California, opened later in 1955; in five years there were 228, and in 1961 he bought out the McDonald brothers.

Source: Kroc obituary in 1984 from The New York Times

And it’s the birthday of NewMexiKen’s mother; she would have been 80 today. In the month before she died in 1974, Mom made some cuttings of a spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum). Those cuttings (and their descendants) still grow in NewMexiKen’s living room more than 31 years later. I’m not sure what I believe about an afterlife, but I know what I believe about the spirit in those plants.

It’s the birthday

… of Charlton Heston. Moses is 81 today. Heston won the best actor Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), his only nomination.

… of Susan Sarandon. The five-time nominee for best actress (she won for Dead Man Walking) is 59 today.

It’s also the birthday of Buster Keaton, born on this date in 1895.

Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time. …

It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.

In films such as THE NAVIGATOR (1924), THE GENERAL (1926), AND THE CAMERAMAN (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films.

Source: American Masters | PBS

And it’s the birthday of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on this date in 1822.

As the Library of Congress tells it:

Rutherford B. Hayes became…president in 1877 after a bitterly-contested election against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Tilden won the popular vote, but disputed electoral ballots from four states prompted Congress to create a special electoral commission to decide the election’s result. The fifteen-man commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, eight of whom were Republicans, voted along party lines deciding the election in Hayes’s favor.

It’s the birthday

… of Michael Douglas. He’s 61.

… of Mrs. Douglas. Catherine Zeta-Jones is 36.

… of Will Smith. The Prince is 37.

… of Mark Hamill. Luke is 54.

… of Barbara Walters. She’s 74.

The Shakespeare of sportswriters was born on this date 100 years ago. That’s Red Smith. Here he is on the 1951 World Series (after the Giants’ miraculous playoff win to be there):

Magic and sorcery and incantation and spells had taken the Giants to the championship of the National League and put them into the World Series … But you don’t beat the Yankees with a witch’s broomstick. Not the Yankees, when there’s hard money to be won.

On DiMaggio:

Sometimes a fellow gets a little tired of writing about DiMaggio; a fellow thinks, “there must be some other ball player in the world worth mentioning.” But there isn’t really, not worth mentioning in the same breath with Joe DiMaggio.

See it now

Burnishing the legend of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who in the 1940’s and 50’s established a standard of journalistic integrity his profession has scrambled to live up to ever since, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility. It opens the New York Film Festival tonight and will be released nationally on Oct. 7. The title evokes Murrow’s trademark sign-off, and I can best sum up my own response by recalling the name of his flagship program: See it now.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times

It’s the birthday

Bill Murray is 55 today. Nominated for an Oscar for Lost in Translation, NewMexiKen still thinks Murray’s best effort was as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.

Stephen King is 58. The Writer’s Almanac tells us about King:

It’s the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine (1947). His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father’s science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father’s books inspired him to start writing horror stories.

He studied creative writing in college. He tried to write some literary stories, but he found that writing about giant man-eating rats was a lot more fun. He worked at a gas station after college and at a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. He did his writing in the furnace room of his trailer home. He did the first drafts typed single-spaced and no margins to save paper.

He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn’t sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.

It’s the birthday

… of Tommy Lee Jones. He’s 59. Jones has been nominated for the Best Supporting Actor twice, winning for The Fugitive, but not for JFK.

… of Oliver Stone, also 59. Stone has been nominated for seven Oscars and won three — he won for writing for Midnight Express and for best director for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.

And of Jackie Cooper; he’s 83. Cooper’s first appearance in film was in 1929; his last 60 years later. He played Perry White in the Superman films but his real fame was as a child actor, most notably Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1934). He was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Skippy in 1931. This is the role where the director got him to cry on camera by telling Jackie (falsely) that his dog had just been run over by a car.

It’s the birthday

… of Margaret Sanger, born on this date in 1879. From her obituary in The New York Times (1966):

As the originator of the phrase “birth control” and its best-known advocate, Margaret Sanger survived Federal indictments, a brief jail term, numerous lawsuits, hundreds of street-corner rallies and raids on her clinics to live to see much of the world accept her view that family planning is a basic human right.

The dynamic, titian-haired woman whose Irish ancestry also endowed her with unfailing charm and persuasive wit was first and foremost a feminist. She sought to create equality between the sexes by freeing women from what she saw as sexual servitude.

… of Hal Wallis, born on this date in 1899. A producer, Wallis was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar 15 times, winning for Casablanca in 1942. Wallis died in 1986.

… of Sam Neill, born in Northern Ireland on this date in 1947. Neill has appeared in numerous films, most famously The Hunt for Red October, Jurassic Park and as the ass-of-a-husband in The Piano.

The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener is a gripping, harrowing film adapted from John le Carré’s novel of corporate greed and political corruption set in Kenya. Ralph Fiennes is superb as the too timid British diplomat and Rachel Weisz brilliant as his radical wife Tessa.

An emotionally demanding film.

*****
A personal note: This film is edited with so much camera movement, swirling focus and quick cuts that NewMexiKen actually became nauseated watching it. I respect the filmmakers’ art and understand how this sort of cinematography can add to the impact of the film — in this case to the confusion and chaos surrounding the principals — but …

Don’t sit too close.

Acting the part

Robert De Niro is 62 today. De Niro has been nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar five times, winning for Raging Bull in 1981. He also won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role as the young Vito Corleone in Godfather II. De Niro’s nominations were for Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Awakenings and Cape Fear.

Sean Penn is 45 today. Penn has been nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar four times, winning last year for Mystic River. Penn’s other nominations were for Dead Man Walking, Sweet and Lowdown and I Am Sam.

And actress Maureen O’Hara is 85 today. Once voted one of the five most beautiful women in the world, Miss O’Hara is proabably best known now as Natalie Wood’s unbelieving mother in the classic Miracle on 34th Street; or perhaps as Esmeralda to Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Top 100 movie quotes

The American Film Institute announced its Top 100 movie quotes of all time. Here’s the top 10.

  1. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” “Gone With the Wind,” 1939.
  2. “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” “The Godfather,” 1972.
  3. “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am,” “On the Waterfront,” 1954.
  4. “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939.
  5. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Casablanca,” 1942.
  6. “Go ahead, make my day,” “Sudden Impact,” 1983.
  7. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” “Sunset Blvd.,” 1950.
  8. “May the Force be with you,” “Star Wars,” 1977.
  9. “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night,” “All About Eve,” 1950.
  10. “You talking to me?” “Taxi Driver,” 1976.

Just awful

The most fascinating thing about Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie film, is that some in the audience actually laughed. In fact some people even applauded when this horrible movie ended. (At the time I thought they were applauding the film. I now wonder if maybe they felt like me and just were applauding it being over.)

Two totally unsympathetic video game characters — professional killers, no less — attempting to kill one another; even beating each other up. Hilarious.

Ron Howard’s brother in new Ron Howard film

Ron Howard’s brother’s latest film — Cinderella Man — is another in the growing library of motion pictures that have turned boxing films into heart-warming tearjerkers. It’s the true story (pretty much) of fighter James J. Braddock and his remarkable comeback from injury to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Russell Crowe, once again magnificent, rings the bell as the depression-era boxer who, when asks why he fights says, “For milk” (for his three kids). Renée Zellweger plays his wife and Paul Giamatti is superb as his manager. The film is directed by Ron Howard.

Clint Howard plays a referee in an early fight scene; Ron Howard’s father, Rance Howard, plays a fight ring announcer.

It’s an entertaining film with no car chases or explosions, though plenty of blood and guts. It does seem as if the drama of the championship fight is drawn out a little too long and that the forces of good and evil lack much subtlety or nuance (did no one root for Max Baer?), but those faults are relatively minor.

Four-and-a-half ristras on NewMexiKen’s scale of one-to-five (five being best).

Marion Michael Morrison …

was born on this date in 1907. As John Wayne he won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit. He was nominated for the same award 20 years earlier, but did not win for Sands of Iwo Jima. Wayne had the lead in 142 films (all but 11 he was in). He died in 1979.

(Morrison was named Marion Robert Morrison when he was born. His middle name was changed by his parents to Michael — or possibly Mitchell — when his brother Robert was born.)

Henry Fonda …

was born 100 years ago today in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Seems hard to believe but Fonda was only nominated for an acting Oscar twice — for Grapes of Wrath and On Golden Pond. He won for the latter in 1982, a few months before his death. Particular favorite Fonda films (other than those two): 12 Angry Men, Mister Roberts, My Darling Clementine (he played Wyatt Earp), The Ox-Bow Incident (with sidekick Harry Morgan, aka Col. Sherman Potter) and, maybe best of all, as Clarence Earl Gideon in Gideon’s Trumpet (made when Fonda was 75).

Only a Sith thinks in absolutes

A.O. Scott in The New York Times generally likes “Revenge of the Sith;” indeed, if I read him correctly he thinks it ranks with “The Empire Strikes Back” as the best of the six “Star Wars” films. Some of his keenest observations:

“Mr. Lucas’s indifference to two fairly important aspects of moviemaking — acting and writing — is remarkable.” …

“Yoda, the spry green Jedi master voiced by Frank Oz, some of his finest work in this film does.” …

“[T]he sheer beauty, energy and visual coherence of “Revenge of the Sith” is nothing short of breathtaking.” …

“Mr. Lucas has surpassed Peter Jackson [blashphemy to some NewMexiKen readers, I know] and Steven Spielberg in his exploitation of the new technology’s aesthetic potential.”

Sounds to me like it’s worth $9.

The meaning of life

And so we went to see The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill tonight at the Guild Cinema. It affected me on several levels. Not that the film is a puzzle (It is a straight-forward report of a man and his “hobby.”). Rather, it’s simplicity allows one to look deeper into small pleasures…and wonder how they fit into the fabric of one’s own life.

— Jon at Albloggerque

Many have praised this film, for example:

A thoroughly absorbing portrait of one man’s discipline and commitment — and, yes, spiritual transformation….Quite simply, a beautiful film, in both form and content. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And your heart is guaranteed to soar.

— Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood

Buenos días Caballeros y Damas. It’s so clear this morning I can see the snow still on the top of Mt. Taylor 60 miles (96km) west.

Mike Wallace is 87 today. 60 Minutes is the only place where the average age is higher than that of the Catholic College of Cardinals.

Albert Finney is 69. He’s been nominated for an Oscar five times; no wins. Remind me to check out Tom Jones from Netflix.

Glenda Jackson is 69 today as well. She only has four Oscar nominations, but she’s won twice for Best Actress: Women In Love and A Touch of Class.

James L. Brooks is 65. Brooks won the Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay for Terms of Endearment. Broadcast News, Jerry Maguire and As Good as It Gets got him various nominations as well. For my money, I like his work as executive producer of Mary Tyler Moore and, of course, The Simpsons.

Candace Bergen is 59. Ms. Bergen was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1980 for Starting Over.

Billy Joel is 56. If you need a couple notes of Billy Joel, click here.

Sir James Barrie was born on this date in 1860. NewMexiKen thought Johnny Depp was superb in his portrayal of Barrie in Finding Neverland. Barrie may or may not have been like the character portrayed, but Depp got the sensitive wuss down really well. And to think, the year before he was a pirate. If they’d nominated Jamie Foxx for Best Actor for Collateral, he’d have gotten my vote. But now that I’ve seen the five performances that were nominated, I gotta go with Johnny Depp.