Author: Scoop

R.I.P. James Earl Jones

Scoop, ... 13 comments.

Here’s why he was famous:

  • The voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa
  • The ultimate baseball fan in Field of Dreams
  • “This is CNN”

Here’s why he was great:

I have seen many of the greatest modern stage actors live on the boards, like Derek Jacobi, Richard Kiley and Richard Harris, and I’ve seen recorded performances of the legends like Olivier, Mark Rylance, Nicol Williamson and Richard Burton. I’ve always loved the theater, and did some bad stage acting of my own when I was young and even more foolish than I am now.

And I’ll say this:

Some of the gentlemen I mentioned may have been greater stage actors than James. People wiser than I say so. But of all the performers I’ve ever seen, no man or woman has ever commanded a stage the way James Earl Jones did in The Great White Hope, which I saw when I was in college. When he was a young man, his legs were lightning, and his voice was thunder. His voice didn’t just go through you, it was all around you. It was everywhere. When he spoke, that voice became your universe. If the lord god is real and has a voice, he won’t be needing it any more. He now has James Earl Jones to speak for him.

————–



Obituary from NPR

—————–

Something fascinating: James Earl Jones’s father, Robert Earl Jones, in One Potato, Two Potato (1964):



James Earl Jones worked with Robert Earl Jones on stage in a 1962 production of a play named “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.”


image host

Rita Jenrette in Zombie Island Massacre (1984)

Scoop, ... 5 comments.

Nobody can say that Rita Jenrette hasn’t had an interesting life. She was, at various times, a Republican Party power figure (although married to a Democratic congressman), a scholar, a big-time real estate wheeler-dealer, a central figure of the ABSCAM scandal, a TV presenter, a Clairol spokesman, a Playboy model, a novelist, an autobiographer, a princess, an actress … and probably many other things I’m forgetting.

She was probably also a power forward in the WNBA and the inventor of insulated gloves, for all I know, even though I just made that shit up.

I’ll let Wikipedia pick up a famous Rita anecdote:

She gave an interview to Playboy that appeared in the April 1981 issue, accompanied by a nude pictorial. The article’s revelation that she and her husband had sex on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during a break in an all-night House session caused a hoopla. The comedy group Capitol Steps takes its name from this escapade.

Years after her party girl days, she is still in the news. The Italian government just chased her out of the home where she has lived for decades, thanks to an inheritance battle between her and the children of her late husband. When she refused a court order to leave, the Carabinieri showed up to to evict her, causing a classic scene right out of an Italian movie, where she evaded arrest by fleeing through the back door of the villa, but tripped in the process, breaking two ribs and her clavicle.

This is no ordinary house they are fighting over. It is said to be the most expensive in the world. It is surrounded by the usual expansive gardens dotted with the obligatory statues of deities. The house itself is six stories tall and covers half of an acre. One of its ceilings is valued at $350 million! You’re wondering how that could be. The ceiling mural was painted by Carafuckingvaggio himself, and is thought to be the only such work of art in existence.


image host

Meh. No big deal. It looks exactly like the ceiling of my trailer, which was coincidentally also painted by Caravaggio – Chuck “Dirty Needles” Caravaggio, a tattoo artist who lives in the next trailer. He painted my ceiling in lieu of repaying the thirty bucks I lent him.

I’m just fuckin’ witcha. I don’t really live in a trailer.

But I am hoping to upgrade to one.

Anyway …

Two years after being in the very lap of luxury, Her Incredibly Serene and Formerly Rich Highness, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, is now more like Her Lowness, broke and homeless, essentially couch-surfing. Did she deserve such a fate? I look at it this way. The odds of the Italian legal system producing a fair and correct decision are about the same as the likelihood of Kristi Noem and Michael Vick being named the co-chairs of PETA, so yeah, she probably got hosed. It’s all about the Euros, signore.

Rita did the whole Playboy-and-B-movie thing in the early 80s, and that included Zombie Island Massacre (3.3 at IMDb). Now this is a very sensible film! For example, the first three full minutes of the film consist entirely of Rita naked. That’s followed by a mere six minutes of exposition before it’s back to the fun stuff, with Rita doing a sex scene in perfect light. It’s good to see a director who has his priorities straight, and so soon in his career – Massacre was the very first film he ever directed. It was also the very last, although he lived almost 40 more years.

Hey, by the way, why does anyone go to Zombie Island in the first place? “Hey, Marge, whaddya think? Disney and Europe are so bourgeois. The brochure for this Zombie Island looks nice, and they think the volcano may be dormant now. Plus it’s all-inclusive!”

I hear it’s even all-inclusive for the zombies – all the brains you can eat!

For the non-zombie population, this seems like even a worse vacation choice than Bergman Island …

or worse than this place …

image host

or (and I know this is hard to believe) possibly even worse than Delaware.

But you know, it’s an island, and life’s a beach, so I guess people can put up with a few wandering undead people when it means quality sun-and-snorkel time at an affordable price, especially when unlimited booze is part of the package.

I can see why Rita wasn’t worried. She was a Republican, so she was relatively safe from creatures seeking brains.


image host image host image host image host image host image host image host image host

College pigskin week 2 – not a “great day for the Irish”

Scoop, ... 5 comments.

Do you remember the wrestling “jobbers”? They were guys whose job was to make the headliners look good. Back in the day, the televised wrestling matches served no purpose other than to develop and market story lines for the live events. In the TV matches, no headliners clashed. The heroes du jour would defeat some poor jobbers in short order with “scientific” moves, and then the main villains would abuse other lackluster jobbers with trash talk and dirty tricks, while boiling over with braggadocio about how they would do the same to our heroes in the live events.

The same jobbers came out every week to get slaughtered. Among the notorious perpetual losers were such luminaries as The Duke of Dorchester, Iron Mike Sharpe, the Brooklyn Brawler, Barry Horowitz, and Leaping Lanny Poffo, who happened to be the son of one wrestling legend, Angelo Poffo, and the brother of another, The Macho Man. The first three I listed usually lost to heroes, while Poffo and Horowitz normally squared off against heels. Four of those guys were at least trying to be colorful, with the nicknames and all. Iron Mike Sharpe even billed himself as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete.” (Sorry, Gretzky!) As for the fifth guy, I don’t know what the deal was with Barry Horowitz. He could have been “Bart Howitzer” or “the Florida Flash,” but no-o-o-o-o. He just remained plain old Barry Horowitz. That’s not a moniker likely to strike fear into your heart, unless he’s auditing your tax returns.

Anyway, discarding my light racism and moving on to the real topic of this post, college football also has its jobbers, uninspiring programs that manage to make big bucks by traveling to the homecoming games of powerhouse teams, fully expecting to lose by 40 or more. You recognize some of the names: Bethune-Cookman, UAB, Austin Peay, Lindenwood, Arkansas Pine Bluff, Southern Utah, Albany, Akron, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan, Western Carolina … basically any team that starts with “Western.”

As a general matter of honor, there are two conventions that apply to jobber games: (1) the big teams usually only schedule these teams in the first three weeks of the season, before conference play begins; (2) the big teams shouldn’t run up the score any higher than 70, preferably even less. Sometimes the jobbers are so weak that the big teams go over 70 unintentionally, even when they play all of their reserves, because their fourth-stringers keep scoring. That happened last week, when Ole Miss squeaked by mighty Furman 76-0. Ole Miss tried to tamp it down. They called rushing plays for eight different guys and tossed passes to ten different receivers. By the end of the game they were calling plays for members of the marching band. I think the chubby tuba guy even rushed for a first down.

Unlike the wrestling jobbers, one of the patsy teams occasionally receives the smile of Lady Fortune and wins a game against a power team. There was one this year. Lowly NIU defeated #5 Notre Dame on the Irish home field in South Bend. That was the first win in history for a Mid-American Conference team against an AP top-five team, following 51 consecutive losses. If you saw that coming, you could have been a rich man. NIU was a 28.5-point underdog, and paid off 25-1 on a bet to win outright. The point spread was high enough that 2/3 of the bettors took NIU and the points, so the bookies took a heavy beating on those bets. It has not been reported how much action was on NIU to win outright, but probably not much, unless Nostradamus is still alive and follows American college football.

In a semi-important game:

#3 Texas easily defeated #10 Michigan, in a battle of the newly aligned super conferences, and they did that on Michigan’s home field. It was 31-6 before Michigan scored a meaningless late TD, but it wasn’t as one-sided as it sounds. Texas did outplay the Wolverines, but the score got so lopsided because of Michigan turnovers. That means the new SEC, which now has 16 teams (eight are nationally ranked), defeated the new Big Ten, which now has 18 teams (six are nationally ranked).

USC, which is now in the Big Ten, had already defeated LSU, so the two mega-conferences are now 1-1 in head-to-head games.

College football scoreboard.

Mariia Netavrovana totally naked in Free Falling (2024)

Scoop, ... 13 comments.

This is a new film from Spain. The original title is Caída Libre.

Marisol believes she has her life completely under control. She lives in a seemingly happy marriage and works as a coach for the Olympic rhythmic gymnastics team, where she is a methodical and authoritarian boss, with the world championship on her mind. When she discovers that her husband is unfaithful, her whole world will be shaken and she will enter a self-destructive spiral that could end her.


image host image host

Video

Sports films have as many passionate fans as the sports themselves. For example, name the best baseball movie. Is it Bull Durham? Field of Dreams? The Natural? Major League? 42? Moneyball? A League of Their Own? Long Gone? Bingo Long? Bang the Drum Slowly? Pride of the Yankees?

So many choices.

Too many choices.

But I’ve never heard a boozy barroom argument about the best rhythmic gymnastics movie.