In the latter, he played real-life Col. Jack Ridley, a test pilot, gum-chewer, and whom later became chief of the Air Force’s Flight Test Engineering Laboratory.
Chuck Yeager, who became the first person to break the sound-barrier in the X-1 rocket-plane, called Ridley “The brains behind the whole X-1 test program”. He was renowned for his superb engineering and problem-solving skills. Here, in this scene from the movie, Ridley fashions up a way for Yeager to pilot the craft with a broken arm.
What I love about the scene is Helm giving a hint at 1:10 as to his day job.
Of course, it was 100 years ago today that the Titanic sank (though it struck the iceberg shortly before midnight). There are so many dimensions to the event that can spin you off into years of fascination.
My own surrounds the Californian — a ship that ten miles away, saw the great ship stop for the night, fire its distress rockets, and yet did not come to its aid. The Carpathia, the ship that did come, had to steam from fifty-four miles away, by which time, 1,500 people were dead.
Anyway, the Titanic intersects with another of my interests, Bayside Cemetery. One victim of the disaster, George Rosenshine is buried there. Like so many plots at the cemetery, it had become overrun. But my friend Anthony Pisciotta, who has done a ton of work at Bayside, cleaned up his grave, along with the family plot.
Interestingly, Rosenshine, who was from a wealthy family and was a first-class passenger, traveled under the assumed name of “Thorne”, as he was unmarried, but accompanying him on the trip was his girlfriend, (or “mistress” to use the terminology of the time), Gertrude Thorne. She survived, though she wasn’t provided for in his will. Coincidentally or not, she’s buried in the Bayside as well.
P.S. Earlier in the night, the Californian’s radio-telegraph operator did attempt to warn the Titanic of ice, but was told by Titanic’s operator to “Shut up”, as they were busy sending passenger traffic.
This incident was filmed for James Cameron’s Titanic, but cut, because the movie was already running more than three hours in length (which limited how many times a theatre could show a movie in a day, thus eating into profits).
Here, I think she was channeling both Ed Grimley, and Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck. (Though come to think of it, maybe Nicholas Cage is always ‘doing’ Ed Grimley).
One long week ago, Carl Bernstein compared the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal to Watergate. He would know, and he is right.
What immediately flashed through my mind was John Dean’s comment to Richard Nixon, as recorded by the Oval Office taping system.
“I think that there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within - close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.”
I didn’t write about it at the time because the day-job was keeping me busy, and also, it was so obviously true. It wasn’t ever the News Of The World scandal, or the Andy Coulson, Lee Hinton scandal, nor even the Rebeka Brooks scandal. It’s always been the Rupert Murdoch scandal.
It was under Brooks that the News hacked the voice-mail of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler. That fact was apparently unknown to the police at the time, but Brooks had been called to a meeting with Scotland Yard, where according to the Guardian, she was informed,
Brooks was summoned to a meeting at Scotland Yard where she was told that one of her most senior journalists, Alex Marunchak, had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to run surveillance on behalf of Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, two private investigators who were suspected of murdering another investigator, Daniel Morgan, when the latter was a partner of Rees’s in the firm Southern Investigations. The Yard saw this as a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice.
Brooks was also told of evidence that Marunchak had a corrupt relationship with Rees, who had been earning up to £150,000 a year selling confidential data to the News of the World. Police told her that a former employee of Rees had given them a statement alleging that some of these payments were diverted to Marunchak, who had been able to pay off his credit card and pay his child’s private school fees.
After her stint as editor of the News, she became the Sun’s first female-editor, and two years ago was promoted to running Murdoch’s entire UK news business.
She became a favourite of Rupert, who put his arm around her and told reporters she was his top priority when he flew into London a week ago to take charge of the crisis shaking his global media empire News Corp .
The notion that he would be unaware of that, and later the hacking and the surveillance of the police themselves, is, as the president of Geritol (played by Martin Scorcese) in the perfect movie Quiz Show, says, “insulting.”
I know lots of people are complaining about NetFlix’s new pricing plan, but it’s actually a better deal for me. I like all the DVD extras, and watch Blu-Ray, so I don’t stream movies – I do the mail-thing.
I can have one disk (including Blu-Ray) out at a time, and last month I paid $13.05. The new deal is $9.99. When I signed up in June, 2008, I paid $9.79.
That’s a clip from Heather Quinlan’s upcoming film, If These Knishes Could Talk:The Story of the New York Accent.
Yet every time I’m in Utah, I have this exact conversation on the lifts. Over and over.
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“Where in New York?” (like someone from Onadaga would say, “New York”)
“New York City.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from New York.”
I’m never sure what to say in response. I was born and grew up in the city, but don’t have a stereotypical (e.g. Woody Allen-esque or ‘dese and dose’) accent. I grew up in Forest Hills, a part of Queens,and pretty much everyone I know from there, talks like me.
Contrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as a Brooklyn or Bronx accent, and anyone who tells you differently, or they can identify someone by it, is full of crap. As Heather’s film expands on, New York accents are based much more on socio-economics and education, than location per se. Things do of course tend to correlate a bit — Staten Island tends to be blue-collar Italian; Spanish Harlem poor and Puerto Rican, at least when I grew up. (It was originally working-poor Irish and Italian. You can hear it in Burt Lancaster).
Here’s an example from Knishes, of a Korean-American, raised on Staten Island,
The part of Forest Hills I grew up in, is Forest Hills Gardens, 2/3 Catholic, 1/3 Jewish, and full of doctors and lawyers. The Ramones, grew up in a more middle-class part of Forest Hills, and have more of that “classic” New York accent.
My parents, were also born in the city, (their parents, too) and both have much heavier accents than me. I’d always notice it after coming back from sleep-away camp. My dad (who also grew up in Forest Hills, but not in the Gardens), pronounces “comfortable” as “kahmfortable, and my mom, growing up very lower-middle-class in the Jewish South Bronx, almost says ‘eye-dear’ for “idea”.
For those who don’t know the sound of my voice, I think I sound similar to John McEnroe. He grew up in Douglaston, which like the Gardens, is also an upper-middle/lower-upper part of Queens.
Coincidentally, this commercial was filmed in the Gardens, just a few blocks from the the West Side Tennis Club, former home of the U.S. Open.
What I like about this, is not only does Kong have to fight a giant robot doppelgänger, but apparently has to put up with shit from a plesiosaur, too. WTF?!
In the tradition of Pirates of the Caribbean, Fast & Furious, and the other mechanized, CGI crap-fests, here is a movie we all knew was going to be the loudest, most soul-deadening yet. And it delivers. It’s an apotheosis of shit, in 3D.
Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is a visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I’ve had at the movies.
But after reading this review from Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central, he realized he may have been too easy on it.
…Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers: Asshole) is a new low watermark for Bay and this naughty-little-boy franchise that highlights Bay’s misogyny, puerility, and imbecility for all the world to see. Better, it works as a fine illustration of how this industry of ours that I spend a lot of time defending is in bed completely with the Michael Bays of the world, who represent, I think, the money-making potential of any industry that consents to peddle vice and venality to children. Think of the cash a live-action hardcore porno based on the Barbie license would bring in…
Read the rest, it’s well worth it. And if you see this movie, any of those others, and/or take your kids to any of them… shame on you. And if you’re about to say, “Crap Part 1 was pretty good”. Don’t. Just shut up. I mean it.
I picked up the Blu-Ray of Once Upon A Time In The West, one of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve owned the DVD for a couple of years, but the Blu-Ray makes me love Sergio Leone’s masterpiece all over again (as did the DVD before that).
If Leone was known for anything in his movies, it was his love of faces, and not the faces you see in most movies. Tight shot after tight shot.
Above is Jack Elam, from the film’s opening scene. Elam, who appeared mostly in Westerns, once famously described the arc of a character actor’s career.
Stage 1: “Who is Jack Elam?” Stage 2: “Get me Jack Elam.” Stage 3: “I want a Jack Elam type.” Stage 4: “I want a younger Jack Elam.” Stage 5: “Who is Jack Elam?”
Leone grew up in Italy, a kid in love with movies and the American West as portrayed in them. With Once Upon A Time, he set out very deliberately, I think, to pretty much make the Western to end all Westerns. And with this, his “opera of violence”, he succeeded. An apotheosis, a beautiful, elegiac, epic.
