it’s a Deathmobile 🙂

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but it was a great one! Here’s a quick video from Pinball News, I think they shot this video Friday…..

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here’s where I’ll be, hoping Thu night!

Cinerama – Coming Soon

in the meantime, 3 comics from another person who can’t wait for the new movie…. (keep scrolling)…..

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I have always been fascinated by iconoclastic people – some being celebrities, many politicians or leaders, musicians – the list is somewhat long. In a recent discussion with a friend about the somewhat old movie Westworld (1973), I happened to come across this interview with Yul Brynner. What an interesting and candid guy – compared to most celebrities, he seems fairly genuine, relaxed and happy to simply talk and open whatever the interviewer wants to talk about:

I then found a Biography-style one hour piece on him. Between this and the info on IMDB, it paints a very interesting picture – besides his unique physical appearance and charisma, he was just a guy comfortable with being mysterious, yet a perfectionist and an extremely hard worker that also got to enjoy the results along the way. My favorite is the anecdote they tell about his directing days in the early 50’s at CBS, proving he defnitely had a sense of humor as well as his own self and value to the network at that time:

Of course for me the iconic role was in fact Westworld – I knew about The Magnificent Seven but have never watched it – i’ll definitely be going back to check out some of his older stuff. I saw The Ten Commandments when I was a kid but may have to even go back to that one, too!

A true original, to be sure.

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So Wed. night I rewatched Airplane!. I’ve seen this movie several times, last time was several years ago at the beach with my nephew. Always funny, and I distinctly remember the first time seeing it in the theater (because I’m old) and never laughing harder at a movie than this one, then or since. When it came out, this movie skewered all the stupid disaster films that were all the rage at the time (the tiresome Airport series, Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure – the list went on). All the more reason to tear it down by sending the ‘genre’ up. 🙂

While there’s a few bits now that are a tad bit borderline (this was the ’70s after all) – it’s still funny through and through. And it’s one of those movies that has so many sight gags in it, you have to watch closely (or repeatedly) to catch all of them. To wit, the Peter Graves scene at the magazine rack – can you spot the obvious (and not-so-obvious)? 🙂

And of course the announcers arguing over the PA about the ‘white zone’ and the ‘red zone’ – and the airport cult member smackdown (remember cult people in the airports? Ah, memories….).

What is also hilarious is how many veteran actors are spoofing themselves (Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack), especially Lloyd Bridges with all his side comments and ridiculous posturing as a stressed-out airport traffic mgr. I had forgotten the scene where he slams the phone down and leans forward on his desk all intense, and the camera pans out to show an identical picture of him doing the same thing, hanging on the wall behind him – too funny!

And the cameo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was genius, even if he’s obviously reading off a cue card at one point. And don’t forget Johnny, or the ‘Automatic Pilot’.

here’s a clip montage that only shows the tip of the iceberg – and if you have never seen this movie, get crackin’ and watch it 🙂

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If you lived in Portland, OR from the late 70s through the 80s, you know who Jack Ramsay is. What a class act – rare these days. Rest in Peace.

Hall of Fame coach Jack Ramsay dies at 89

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Privateers race to capture forgotten NASA space probe using crowdsourced cash

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Watched The Wolf of Wall Street the other night at a friend’s house. Oh Martin Scorsese, wtf? This is going to be a short review because barring a sadly few jokes here and there, this is a stupid, way overlong (3 hrs!?!) movie that tries to be the next Goodfellas, but fails in almost every way.

You have the first person narration of most of it. You have a hugely unsympathetic central character. You have actors I otherwise like (jonah hill, leo dicaprio, matthew mcconaughey and even rob reiner) playing people I don’t, in a movie lined with and praising ‘douchebags uber alles’. And you have what has to be the most contrived BS story (the book it is supposedly based on – that guy has to be lying through his teeth or has the smallest penis on earth to brag about this stupid s*** like he does) i’ve ever heard.

At least with Goodfellas, while the main characters were largely unlikable (especially Joe Pesci), you were hooked because it was outright crime (and made BEFORE this stupid movie) – watching this one was like just ‘not-nearly-as-Goodfellas’ over and over again.

And do NOT believe the rating on IMDB – you will want your 3 hours of life back when this is over, I guarantee you. Again, unlike Goodfellas.

What could be the only redeeming grace would be if the upcoming Gojira movie had a scene where G stamps this d-bag flat as a stamp in the first 5 minutes. Bryan Cranston, can you help a brother out?

Update: I think this parody movie poster sums it up quite nicely, actually…

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Just finished reading Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am, which I got from Kerewin on my recent birthday.

Being a huge Who fan for at least a couple decades now and having read (or own) most of the Who bio-type books out there (Maximum R&B by Richard Barnes; Before I Get Old by Dave Marsh; Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher; Full Moon by Peter “Dougal” Butler; countless other Mojo and similar articles) I’ve read a lot about them besides enjoying their music, and am familiar with much of their history, successes and demons over time.

But this book is quite different, no doubt intended that way by Townshend – it’s much more personal and revealing, and to me, not always in a good way – but again, as implied or outright stated by Townshend in the book in several places, that’s exactly the way he wanted it.

On the plus side, you get to see a fairly different view of The Who and its principal songwriter. The Keith Moon books (Butler, Fletcher) paint a varied picture of a semi-fulltime lunatic who played drums brilliantly at his peak, but sunk pretty low or perpetually lived in a fantasy land when not, often to the sometimes extreme detriment of those around him. There is no real book directly dealing with John Entwistle or Roger Daltrey that I know of, and as the former is sadly dead, besides possibly a book on his massively powerful and influential bass-playing, I suspect there won’t be – Roger of course can still write his and may be in fact doing so, not sure. Both Dave Marsh and Richard Barnes give a pretty good look at Roger in their books, however.

And so we come to Pete, who ended up being the creative driving force behind the band over time and arguably the real engine behind its success. In this book Pete tries to come to grips with many personal demons in explaining his life story and role in The Who’s peaks and valleys, and confesses to being a potential cause of several of the latter. And it was nice to see – say by comparison to the recent Ginger Baker movie I watched – that he usually takes responsibility for his failures, even if he doesn’t always learn from them (womanizing, drugs, booze). He even calls himself a self-obsessed prat at intervals depending on the story he’s telling.

For me a bit of downside came in all the womanizing – sure, he had a tough childhood – much tougher than I knew of, and fraught with loneliness and alienation from his flaky/lame parents – And surely being married at 25 with two kids amid crazy sudden fame and pressure to keep delivering hits might drive anyone mad. But, I still don’t see why he got married if he was going to carry on with groupies while on the road with the band? Surely any/all rock star womanizing isn’t ‘good’ anyway generally – but at least those who aren’t married aren’t kidding themselves (and those they fool around with), either? Just seems extremely lame to me.

The alcohol and drug abuse – pretty par for the court in the rock world of that time (and since), and most of Pete’s contemporaries went through much of the same, including most of The Who and its surrounding posse. But despite knowing a lot about and being a fan of Pete and The Who, this whole ‘user/abuser’ scenario is simply so outside my experience, I really can’t relate to it. I’m just glad he survived it, even if a lot of it was his own doing.

I guess I would have liked knowing more about his inner thinking when writing songs – I felt I got glimpses of it here and there but the book is more a story about experiences and consequence (to me, anyway) than about methods. And perhaps that stuff is too hard to put on paper, or simply too hard/too private to put in even a memoir. I would have also liked to know more about his usage and experimentation with sounds, synthesizers and the like – he mentions them all the time in passing, but doesn’t provide much detail.

I think the final conclusion for me is/was that Pete is very human, with all the positives and negatives that can come from same – I’m thankful for the great music he’s created with The Who, and still remain a huge fan – even at his worst – he still kicks a**!

Other thoughts on the book:
Wikipedia
American Songwriter
LA Times
Rolling Stone

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You be the judge – $1000 a week, or $1000 a day? Bill Murray vs. (the original) Terminator? 🙂

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