Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

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Obit watch: August 7, 2024.

Wednesday, August 7th, 2024

Charles Cyphers, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Renegade”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Jake and the Fatman”.

Duane Thomas, one of the great Dallas Cowboys. ESPN.

Thomas spent the 1971 season without speaking with reporters and apparently his teammates.
It didn’t stop Thomas from performing on the field. He became the first player to score a touchdown in Texas Stadium in 1971. When that season ended, Thomas rushed 175 times for 793 yards and a NFL-leading 11 touchdowns.

Patti Yasutake, actress. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy, M.E.” of the ’90s except it sucked), “Murder One” (curiously, Charles Cyphers was also in “Murder One”), “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”, and “T.J. Hooker”.

Joss Naylor, English sportsman. He specialized in “fell running”: basically, running up and down mountains for days at a time.

His feats running the fells — the term in northern England for hills and mountains — defied common sense and earned him multiple nicknames, including “Iron Man” and “King of the Fells.”
In 1971, Mr. Naylor became the sixth person to conquer the Bob Graham Round — a 24-hour challenge to finish a 66-mile trek over 42 peaks in Cumbria’s Lake District. He overachieved, topping 61 peaks in 23 hours 37 minutes.
The next year, he crossed 63 peaks in the challenge, followed by 72 in 1975 — both times in under 24 hours.
Still running at age 50 in 1986, he completed the Wainwright Round, a series of 214 summits, in just over seven days, setting a record that stood until 2014. (He would have finished faster had he not stopped to save a lamb stuck in mud.)

…

In competitions that sometimes lasted a week, he survived on scone-like cakes and black currant juice with a dash of salt and cod liver oil that he swilled straight from the bottle — “like whiskey,” he once said.

…

In 1971, after the Bob Graham Round, he took on the National Three Peaks Challenge, which involved racing up the highest peaks in England, Scotland and Wales in 24 hours, including driving time between the mountains. He finished in just under 12 hours. Nobody has beaten that time.

Bucca di Bankrupt. (Headline hatip to Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Brief notes on film: “The Concorde… Airport ’79”

Sunday, July 28th, 2024

The Saturday Movie Group watched this last night.

It is not a good movie.

It is, however, an enjoyably good bad movie.

I think I will put a jump here to avoid any inadvertent spoilers, though frankly this movie arrived already spoiled…

(more…)

Posted in Bagatelle, Movies, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 21, 2024.

Sunday, July 21st, 2024

Sheila Jackson Lee (D – Houston). Fox 26 Houston. McThag.

Whitney Rydbeck, actor. Other credits include “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island”, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, “Switch”, and one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 19, 2024.

Friday, July 19th, 2024

Bob Newhart. THR. Tributes. Appreciation. Variety.

Something very sick makes me laugh. My wife says to me, “If people ever found out what you find humorous, they’d stop showing up.” I said to her: “That’s our little secret.

…

“I tend to find humor in the macabre. I would say 85 percent of me is what you see on the show. And the other 15 percent is a very sick man with a very deranged mind,” he said during a 1990 interview with Los Angeles magazine.

…

What do you think happens on the other side?

I think if you lived a good life, some people say it is rapture. You spend the rest of your life in a state of rapture. That’d be nice. What I’m actually hoping is there’s the Pearly Gates and God’s there and he says to me, “What did you do in life?” And I say, “I was a stand-up comedian.” And he says: “Get in that real short line over there.”

Ha!

God has an incredible sense of humor, an unimaginable sense of humor. Just look around.

I’ve had this discussion – God is a punster and has a sense of humor – with people at my church, too. I think it it worth noting that he was a faithful Catholic, and was married to the same woman for 60 years. (Ginny Newhart passed away in 2023.)

One of the less-reputable over the air networks used to run “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” back to back in the afternoons, and I’d have both on while I worked. I think “TBNS” is just about perfect as a show, but, oddly, I didn’t like “Newhart” so much. I do remember watching and enjoying it first run, but not so much as an adult. My dislike for it now is mostly because I felt the show shifted focus away from Dick to Michael and Stephanie, and I really didn’t like those two characters. But when Bob was dominating the screen, it was a pretty good show.

It turns out one of my favorite “Newhart” episodes is available on the ‘Tube (until someone files a copyright strike): “Dick the Kid”, season 5, episode 3.

Dick has a case of writer’s block, so he goes off to work as a cowboy on a ranch. The comic element of this episode isn’t Dick’s ineptitude as a cowboy. Just the opposite: he’s so good at being a cowboy, he wins the respect of everyone. Even the toughest most macho of the cowboys breaks down when Dick goes back to the inn.

The world is a lesser place today.

Edited to add: per THR, CBS will be airing a tribute to Bob Newhart on July 22nd, but I don’t have a specific time yet.

Lou Dobbs.

Cheng Pei-pei, Chinese actress. IMDB.

Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnamese Communist leader.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Politics, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 14, 2024.

Sunday, July 14th, 2024

Wow. It has been a weekend, hasn’t it?

Happy Bastille Day to all my readers, since I don’t expect to do a second post today.

The only thing I have to say about Trump is: in my opinion, 130 yards is not a sniper shot. It really isn’t even a very long shot for the average person. I believe most people zero their rifles so they’re on target at 100 to 150 yards. Calling this guy a “sniper” is an insult to actual snipers.

With all that out of the way:

Shannen Doherty. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Richard Simmons. THR.

And finally, speaking of snipers, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. NYT (archived).

…Westheimer is quoted as saying, “When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center — further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate [at] throwing hand grenades, too. Even today, I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.”

I’m sorry if it seems like I’m shorting these three people on coverage, but I feel like they all are getting a tremendous amount of coverage already (modulo the ongoing news coverage) and I just don’t have anything to add.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2024.

Thursday, July 11th, 2024

Shelley Duvall. This is breaking, and the NYT is in “full obit to come” mode. I’ll link to that later.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. As noted, they own Redbox. They also own the Crackle streaming service.

Fun fact:

In April 2021, Chicken Soup for the Soul acquired the film and television catalogue of Sonar Entertainment. In return, Sonar will hold a 5 percent stake in a new AVOD network featuring its library. Through the acquisition, Chicken Soup now currently owns the North American rights to a majority of the Laurel & Hardy films and shorts, and most of the Our Gang library, as well as the holdings of the former RHI/Hallmark/Cabin Fever/Sonar outputs, and a majority of the Hal Roach library, all via their Halcyon Studios division.

They had filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition (which would have allowed them to re-organize) but yesterday it was converted into a Chapter 7 petition, which is total liquidation. And it sounds like there was some sleazy stuff going on.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment had failed to pay employees and vendors for at least four weeks prior to its Chapter 11 filing. In court documents, HPS, the company’s top lender, had alleged gross mismanagement by the company. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment chairman and CEO Bill Rouhana Jr., in a declaration supporting the bankruptcy petition, claimed that the company’s financial straits were in part due to “refusals” by its lenders “to live up to their obligations, resulting in asserted defaults and/or contractual terminations across critical content and service providers.”

I have seen reports that they were pocketing employee health insurance premiums, but not actually paying the insurers. Those are just reports, and the executives are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But if it is true that they weren’t paying employees, and weren’t paying employee health insurance…the kind side of me thinks those people should be in jail. The unkind side of me thinks that rope and lampposts are in order.

Edited to add: more from THR, concentrating on the RedBox part of the business, but including the accusations of financial mismanagement.

Benji Gregory. Other credits include “Amazing Stories”, “The Twilight Zone” (the 1985-1986 revival), and “T.J. Hooker”.

Playing catch-up:

Joe Bonsall, of the Oak Ridge Boys.

James M. Inhofe, Republican senator from Oklahoma and former mayor of Tulsa.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 28, 2024.

Friday, June 28th, 2024

“Kinky” Friedman followup: NYT. THR.

How about a little music?

Edited to add: Reason tribute. Noted here for two reasons:

1. Jesse Walker mentions another of my favorite Kinky songs that I decided not to use, but it was a close decision: “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”.

2. I had always associated Kinky with the “dropped acid and listened to Shiva’s Headband at the Armadillo World Headquarters” crowd, so this is an interesting quote:

He even sneered at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the town’s legendary music venue: “A lot of people think it’s a very warm place, but to me it’s an airplane hangar.”

This is pushing the definition of an “obit” just a bit, but Will Dabbs, MD, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite modern gun writers, has a nice tribute up to Donald Sutherland.

More specifically, it is a tribute to Donald Sutherland’s role as “Oddball” in “Kelly’s Heroes”.

I’ve seen “Kelly’s Heroes”, but when I was a child, on the late night movies. (Kids, ask your parents about late night movies on TV.) I think the Saturday Movie Conspiracy is going to be re-watching it in the fairly near future. And I had not heard the story about the grenades.

Posted in Guns, History, Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 27, 2024.

Thursday, June 27th, 2024

This is breaking, and I may have more later on: “Kinky” Friedman, Texas musician, author, and politician. KVUE. KSAT. HouChron (archived). (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Bill Cobbs, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “A Mighty Wind”, “The Slap Maxwell Story”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Finally, a weird one:

Shahjahan Bhuiya, who hanged some of Bangladesh’s highest-profile death row inmates in exchange for reductions in his own robbery and murder sentences, then briefly became a TikTok star after his release from prison, died on Monday in Dhaka, the nation’s capital.

…

Last year, Mr. Bhuiya told the local news media that he was 74. But according to Mr. Bhuiya’s national identity card, provided by Mr. Kashem, he was 66 at the time of his death.

…

In a memoir that he published after his release, “What the Life of a Hangman Was Like,” Mr. Bhuiya wrote that he had put 60 inmates to death. Prison officials have said that the correct figure was 26.

…

After his release from prison, Mr. Bhuiya published his book and briefly became a TikTok star. His videos often featured his sexually suggestive conversations with young women.

Posted in Austin, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 21, 2024.

Friday, June 21st, 2024

Your Donald Sutherland obit roundup: NYT. THR. Variety. Variety tribute.

IMDB. I did not realize he was Wilhelm Reich in the video for “Cloudbusting”. And we’ve watched “Don’t Look Now”: I can’t recommend it, even with the sex scene. On the other hand, I would like to see “Kelly’s Heroes” again, not cut up for television. And I’ve never seen “M*A*S*H”.

Master Chief Petty Officer William Goines (US Navy – ret.). He was 87.

In his 32 years in uniform, which included three tours of duty during the Vietnam War, he received a Bronze Star and a Navy Commendation Medal among other decorations.
After the war, he joined the Chuting Stars, the U.S. Navy parachute exhibition team, performing 640 jumps over five years.

Master Chief Goines is credited as being the first black Navy SEAL (though the paper of record does note that there was at least one black frogman in the underwater demolition teams that preceded the SEALs).

Taylor Wily.

Hailing from Laie, Hawaii, Wily — who stood 6’2” and weighed 450 pounds, was recruited in 1987 into the Azumazeki stable of sumo, the century-spanning national sport of Japan. Wily, who wrestled under the name Takamikuni, was undefeated in his first 14 matches and soon became the first foreign-born wrestler to win the championship in the sport’s makushita division. Two years after starting his career in the sport, Takamikuni reached the rank of makushita 2; however, he declined to pursue sumo further after knee issues developed.

From sumo, he went into acting. Other credits include both versions of “Magnum P.I.” (an uncredited appearance in the first, “Kamekona” in the second), the “MacGyver” reboot, and “One West Waikiki”.

Posted in Heroism, Movies, Obits, Sports, Sumo, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: June 18, 2024.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

Yesterday was an extended travel day. I got in around 5 PM last night, and had to unpack the car and take care of other business. So blogging opportunities were limited.

Oddly, I have to work today, and have meetings tonight. But tomorrow is a company holiday. I’m planning to post something of a trip report then.

In the meantime, a few obits.

Anouk Aimée, French actress. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Kevin Brophy, actor. Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

Ben Vautier, French artist. I haven’t done an “Art, damn it! Art!” watch for a while, and he seems like a good candidate.

Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.
Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”
Mr. Vautier certainly did his part, as both a visual and performance artist, with works that straddled the line between conceptual art and punchline.
At the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany in 1972, he famously strung a banner that read “Kunst Ist Überflüssig” (“Art Is Superfluous”) across the top of the august Fridericianum museum.
He strove to show that art could be found in daily life, and in ordinary objects, as with his series “Tas,” in which he piled dirt and garbage into lots and signed them as if they were masterpieces.
Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Vautier gave staged performances — he called them “gestes” (“gestures”) — that could seem like practical jokes on the audience. In one, “Audience Piece No. 8” (1965), guests were informed that the next piece was to be presented in a special area. Ushers then led them in groups through back exits and abandoned them.
In “Piano Concerto No. 2 for Paik,” an apparent concert from the same year, a pianist fled the stage before playing a note and the orchestra chased him in hot pursuit, trying to drag him back.
Mr. Vautier was often all too willing to shock. In one performance piece, he urinated in a jar, which he then exhibited as if it were high art. In another, he repeatedly slammed his head against a wall.

James Kent, NYC chef.

He opened his own restaurant, Crown Shy, in 2019 with a partner, Jeff Katz, the general manager of Del Posto, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan that closed in 2021. “At Crown Shy, the Only False Step Is the Name” read the headline of a “critic’s pick” review by Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. (The name refers to tall trees’ tendency not to allow their upper stories to grow entangled with the branches of their neighbors.)
Mr. Wells wrote that Mr. Kent’s dishes “regularly over-deliver.” He singled out for praise “an almost absurdly creamy purée of white bean hummus under a fiery red slick of melted ’nduja; a beef tartare with toasted walnuts and rye croutons; and oysters served with “cucumber jelly, diced cucumbers, grains of jalapeño and microleaves of purple shiso.”

…

Crown Shy garnered one star from the Michelin restaurant guide. Saga earned two.
It was fine dining worthy of the European tradition, but with American casualness and an embrace of pop culture.
Mr. Kent played Wu-Tang Clan and the Notorious B.I.G. at Crown Shy. He eschewed a formal dress code. With his chef coat he could often be seen wearing expensive sneakers.
His spray-painted murals earned him a reputation as “a chef that’s also a wildly talented graffiti artist,” as Bloomberg reported in 2016. He was commissioned to do artwork at NoMad Hotel and the restaurant tech company Salido.

…

In April, The Times reported that Mr. Kent and Saga Hospitality Group had leased 3,000 square feet on the ground floor of the former Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn for a bakery and a “casual all-day restaurant.”
That same month, the lifestyle magazine The Robb Report described yet more ambitious plans. Mr. Kent was opening a new 140-seat restaurant on Park Avenue inspired by the Grand Central Oyster Bar, where his grandmother Sue Mingus first went on a date with the jazz musician Charles Mingus, who became her husband and whose legacy she took charge of overseeing until her death in 2022.
At the same time, Mr. Kent was planning a fast-casual fried chicken sandwich restaurant on the level of Shake Shack, The Robb Report said. LRMR Ventures, a private investment firm of LeBron James and his friend and business partner Maverick Carter, was backing Saga Hospitality Group’s expansion.
Investors “believe Kent’s a rare, multidimensional talent who’s primed to become the next great American restaurateur,” The Robb Report wrote.

He was 45.

Posted in Art, Food, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 12, 2024.

Wednesday, June 12th, 2024

Still traveling, so these are going to be on the brief side.

Mike “Duke” Venturino, longtime gun writer. I had been reading his articles since Jesus was a lance corporal at least, so this hits a little hard.

I never met him, but he was a swell writer. I don’t have any more information other than the linked article, but I’ll post anything additional I find.

(Hattip to Pigpen51 on this.)

Tony Lo Bianco, actor. Other credits include “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “The Twilight Zone” (the 1985 revival), and “Police Story”.

Jerry West, NBA player, coach, and executive.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 4, 2024.

Tuesday, June 4th, 2024

Janis Page, actress. She was 101. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “Lanigan’s Rabbi”, “Banacek”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. She was “Georgia Durian”.)

Brother Marquis, rapper with 2 Live Crew.

Larry Allen, of the Dallas Cowboys.

Allen was a second-round pick out of Sonoma State in 1994 and quickly became one of the most dominant offensive linemen in the NFL.
He was named to the Pro Bowl 11 times and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013. He played for the Cowboys from 1994 to 2005, winning a Super Bowl in 1995. He spent his final two seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.

He was 52.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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