earworm 10/15/2017

I can now report that the building the movie was set in is gone, but the Caribbean Club, a bar in which some scenes were shot, is still there.

There's a big sign that says "Smoking Permitted", another one that says "No Dogs Allowed", and a couple of big old hounds flaked out on the floor.

The wooden carving by the door labeled "Bogart" looked more like Edward G. to me, to be honest.

Earworm, Independence Day Edition

Yes, I run this one every year.

So sue me.

When we were first dating, Mrs. Drang asked me what my favorite musical was, and I said 1776. As she stared at me, all agog, I allowed as how Man of La Mancha was pretty good, too.

Its a wonder she went out with me again.

1776 is good theater, and the movie is good entertainment, even if they did a song ( rumor says to avoid landing on Nixon's enemy list,) but it's not very good history. Aside from the fact that there were no song and dance numbers, John Adams and John Dickinson never came to blows on the floor. The debates depicted actually took place, but mostly in pamphlets and Letters of Correspondence. They cut many Founding Fathers from the script simply because a play cannot afford to have a Cast of Thousands! So Bill "KITT" Daniels as John Adams wound up speaking for cousin Sam.

Still.

If you want history watch the Paul Giamatti mini-series John Adams, and then have your barbeque and set off your fireworks two days before the official holiday.

As a mythopoeic retelling of the founding of America, 1776 can't be beat.

Stolen

Blatantly.

I mean, I was never a huge Bowie fan, but that doesn't mean I never enjoyed any of his music, or  movies, and I am certainly aware of his contributions to rock music.

Alan Rickman, OTOH, is probably my favorite Bad Guy.  Die Hard. (Best Christmas movie ever!) Quigley Down Under. Harry Potter. And, just for variety, Galaxy Quest.

Crap.

RIP, Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O’Hara, Actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dies at 95 | Vanity Fair

My favorite John Wayne co-star, which sadly may be the way most remember her. She was quite the swashbuckler too. Swashbuckleress? Swashbucklitrix?





Maureen O'Hara - Biography - IMDb filled in a few banks I was unaware of:

In 1968 Maureen found much deserved personal happiness when she married Charles Blair. Gen. Blair was a famous aviator whom she had known as a friend of her family for many years. A new career began for Maureen, that of a full-time wife. Her marriage to Blair, however, was again far from typical. Blair was the real-life version of what John Wayne had been on the screen. He had been a Brigadier General in the Air Force, a Senior Pilot with Pan American, and held many incredible record-breaking aeronautic achievements. Maureen happily retired from films in 1973 after making the TV movie The Red Pony (1973) (which won the prestigious Peabody Award for Excellence) with Henry Fonda. With Blair, Maureen managed Antilles Airboats, a commuter sea plane service in the Caribbean. She not only made trips around the world with her pilot husband, but owned and published a magazine, "The Virgin Islander", writing a monthly column called "Maureen O'Hara Says".

Curmudgeonry, Cinematic

WatchingThe Quiet Man, and I can't help but think that

1. This is one movie that could not possibly be re-made today, and 
2. If they did, the credits would have to include the line "No redheads were harmed in the making of this film."

"King Of The Khyber Rifles"

Hadn't seen it in a long time. What a hash.

Mind you, as an adventure movie it's good, but...

Only similarity between this and the novel is the title, and the rank and last name of the title character.

• Talbot Mundy's novel was set at the time of the First World War, and Captain Athelstan King was doing intelligence work on the frontier. No one gave any thought to his mixed blood. There was a strong supernatural element.
• The movie seems to be based on the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Sort of. 
• British Uniforms are a mess.
• Including the rank insignia. (Alan King is a captain, but wears a Major's rank.)
  And includes Sam Browne belts decades too early
• They  use American bugle calls
• In the movie, the Khyber Rifles are cavalry...
• ...And are depicted in one scene using Kukri knives as a throwing weapon.
• And the Regimental Music includes a pipe band, playing Highland tunes.

RIP Christopher Lee

When someone asked young Chuck Norris what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said "Christopher Lee!"

My previous post about Sir Christopher: Who knew?

Here's that death metal video again:

This one is kind of cool:

QOTD, 08/28/2014, Cisbellum Movie Edition

Me, I kinda relish gettin' old. Takes the bother outta livin'.
James Whitmore, The Outriders

For a while, anyway...

For a generation James Whitmore is best known for flogging some gardening nostrum or other. 

To me, he will always be SSG Kinnie, the platoon sergeant in Battleground.

The Best Years Of Our Lives

In the article linked to below, I learned that the classic movie The Best Years Of Our Lives, about what happened to three members of The Greatest Generation, and their families, when they came marching home, is on Turner Classic Movies tonight.

The Best Years of Our Lives | Power Line

Its an interesting "making of" article, too.

"Monuments Men"

Hit the two dollar cinema to see Monuments Men yesterday.

Not a big fan of Clooney or Damon, but I do enjoy seeing what Bill Murray will come up with next.  It was fun, certainly worth the two dollars, and may have been worth full price.  Certainly a theater charging more would have more comfortable seats...

The movie is about a team of soldiers who were recruited, and tasked, to recover and return works of art that had been looted by the Nazis.


Mrs. Drang is reading the book, which (she tells me) is intended as a detailed history, so, while the movie is a fine entertainment, it is more "inspired by" than "based on" true events.  For example, the  movie follows 6 or 7 guys, and implies that that was all there were; in fact, the team in France had 18 members, and there was a another team in Italy. (And the author intends to write  separate book about them.)

There was little to set off my military-history-geek-accuracy-BS-meter; one scene where Clooney's C47 landed at an airstrip, and there was a pristine B17, P47, and P51B set up side-by-side, or actually in an arc, like a static display.  Highly unlikely three unused examples of three different aircraft would be parked on the apron like that.  Also, the bumper numbers on all the trucks used were nonsensical.  (Bumper numbers always get my attention, trying to decipher them...)

Highly unlikely that a bunch of radios scrounged from various sources and repaired with tubes, ditto, would have been useful for the separate teams to communicate across all of France and western Germany.  (And en clair, at that!)  Amazing that Clooney didn't get shot up in "blue on blue" action driving around in a scrounged kubelwagon...

In the credits--doesn't everybody stay through those?--I noticed that, in the "props and F/X" category, they had two people listed as "Military Webbing Masters".  I don't get quite that obsessed, but then, I can understand how those unfamiliar with such things might need help...  (Entirely possible that a cinema "military webbing master" isn't tasked with helping actors assemble and wear their web/load bearing gear properly, but that's what seem most likely to me...)

All in all, a pretty good flic.  Especially for the price.

The Desecration of Smaug

Mrs. Drang and I went to see the second Hobbit movie Friday night.  I was going to write up the experience, but Daddy Bear saved me the trouble.



A note on the title of the post:  It's a device.  Despite having written a few term papers on The Lord Of The Rings for English classes in High School, I do not consider myself a die-hard Tolkein fan.  I quite enjoy reading Harvard Lampoon's Bored Of The Rings, and laugh at people who consider it or the "Secret Diary" websites that came out after the original LOTR movies to be some sort of heresy.

"Task Force"

(Originally posted from my cell phone; typos corrected...)

Walked in on Task Force, with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan, on TCM.  The movie follows the development of naval aviation from 1922 through WWII; I walked in on the aftermath of Midway.  The next scene was off Okinawa, so obviously I missed most of it.

Cooper was his usual self, convincing as the taciturn Man Of Action, less so when trying to show weakness.

Odd to see Walter Brennan in a role played straight...

I will say that they did a good job selecting "live" (Combat Camera) footage to use, no F4Fs in 1945, TBMs not TBFs, the Japanese aircraft really were, etc.

Found myself ID'ing aircraft by wing shape, landing gear, windscreen; guess some stuff never goes away...

Infamy

h/t Only Color Footage of the Pearl Harbor Attack, 12-07-1941 - The Federalist Papers

Interesting...

Seeing that The Searchers was going to be on soon, I turned to the station and saw that the 1942 version of The Jungle Book was on.  In a sudden fit of "Where are they now?" curiosity, I looked up Sabu on IMDb, and learned that his early career was almost a Hollywood cliche, as he was trained (appropriately enough) as a mahout, but was discovered while mucking out the elephant stables and "had a movie career handed to him on a silver platter."

After making three wildly successful movies for Alexander Korda, he moved to Hollywood, where he was, alas, cast largely in formulaic potboilers...

...and, after becoming an American citizen in 1944 he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, where he served as an aerial gunner and was awarded the Air Medal and the Distinguished Service Cross.

Alas, his post-war movie career never met the promise of those early days, and he died of an unexpected heart attack at the age of 39.

This headline reminds me of a movie scene...

House GOP Leaders: We Can Pass Gun Control, Immigration, Without Republican Support

With Boehner et. al standing in for James Earl Jones cast as "The Sheikh" in the penultimate scene of Marty Feldman's The Last Remake of Beau Geste.

If you haven't seen it--and why not?--the surviving Legionaires and the Tuaregs have ridden off together, and The Sheikh is riding madly after them, yelling

Wait for me!  Wait for me!  I'm your leader!  How can I lead you if you won't wait for me?!

An Unexpected Sequel

I'm not going to write a review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because I figure that just about anyone who reads this blog will be familiar with the story, will have seen Peter Jackson's movie adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's  Lord of the Rings, and have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

So, yeah, it's Peter Jackson, filmed in New Zealand, visually stunning, good f/x, blah, blah, blah.  Many actors in the LOTR movies reprise their roles in this one, including several who do not appear in The Hobbit at all; this movie is far more a prequel of LOTR than the book was. 

One thing I did not realize was that this is part one of a two-parter.  (Part Two:  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, release date December 13 2013.)  We agreed that, with the way all sorts of back-story was added, it was fairly necessary.

Mrs. Drang:  "I wonder if Part II is where Saruman goes over to 'The Dark Side.'"
Me: "I dunno.  He was sure talking like a Democrat..."

Wolverines!!!

Zachary Lehman takes two Asian exchange students to see the remake of Red Dawn:  'Red Dawn' Doles Out Tea Party Patriotism.   (h/t Instapundit.)

I'm not gonna lie: I have low expectations, especially since the production caved in and remade it was north Korea as the bad guys!  But I've seen a few reviews that say that, if you can mentally substitute ChiComs for norks, it's pretty good.  So maybe I'll see it after all.

QOTD, 11/04/2012

Power, Lincoln, comes not from hate, but from truth.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Impeach Obama!

Instapundit » Blog Archive » WHY BARACK OBAMA SHOULD RESIGN. Just for the record, this is what it looked like for a man who made a film that made the Obama Administration uncomfortable:…

Original article:  Alleged 'Innocence of Muslims' filmmaker taken in for interview - latimes.com  (WARNING!  Comments are full of Islamofascism, as well as the more garden-variety Progressive fascism.)

At midnight.  "It was a question about his probation" my ass!  At midnight on Saturday?!  Voluntary?!!  With half a dozen sheriff's deputies "helping" him to the car?

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

He's being rousted because the Islamofascists are using this pathetic movie trailer--and kudos to You Tube and Google for refusing fie on them for caving to the take-down request!--as an excuse for acting like a bunch of neobarbarians.  Not that it come shard for them, or that they need an excuse.

Or that the spineless narcissist currently disgracing the White House could be expected to do any different.

Note to His Imperial Majesty:  The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is specifically intended to protect offensive speech. That includes me calling you a spineless worm, or campaign oratory by your opponents, or hokey videos with bad acting and poor production values.

Rousting a guy of indeterminate relationship to the video in hopes that it will appease a bunch of man-jammy wearing wogs and distract from the incredibly inept manner in which your misadministration is screwing the situation up by the numbers will only make matters worse.

Schmuck.

h/t  Daily Pundit

Related: Instapundit » Blog Archive » ANN ALTHOUSE: “You start disputing my God, and you’ve got a problem.” “Says a man the filmmaker moc…
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I did not know that...

So, puttering around the house with Turner Classic Movie's quarterly* John Wayne marathon running, and I wandered in front of the TeeVee long enough to catch the credits for Rio Bravo--that was th Howard Hawks/John Wayne western with Dean Martin as the drunk deputy sheriff, and Angie Dickinson as the love interest, in case you have a hard time keeping track--and learned that SF author Leigh Brackett co-wrote the screenplay.


*Or so it seems.