This Casey Jones should not be mistaken for either the comic book artist or the Disney animator who share the same name. Instead, this Casey Jones was an illustrator who was active in the 50s and 60s. Check out some of his covers below and see what was considered to be racy in the 1950s:
The year is 1978. A television producer named Garry Marshall (Daniel Roebuck) teaches America how to laugh again by casting Pam Dawber (Erinn Hayes) and a hyperactive stand-up comedian named Robin Williams (Chris Diamantopoulos) in a sitcom about an alien struggling to understand humanity. Despite constant network interference, the show makes Robin a star but, with stardom, comes all the usual temptations: lust, gluttony, greed, pride, envy, wrath, and John Belushi.
The Behind The Camera films, which all dramatized the behind the scenes drama of old television shows, were briefly a big thing in the mid-aughts. Because they were lousy, they never got good reviews but they did get good ratings from nostalgia-starved baby boomers and gen xers. I think The Unauthorized Mork & Mindy Story was the last one produced. It probably would have been better if there had been any sort of drama going on behind-the-scenes of Mork & Mindy but, according to this movie, everyone got along swimmingly. Williams may get hooked on cocaine but the film squarely puts the blame for that on John Belushi. The script, which was obviously written with one eye on avoiding getting sued, is sanitized of anything that could have reflected badly on anyone who was still alive when the movie aired.
Stuck with unenviable task of having to play one of the most famous people in the world, Chris Diamantopoulos was not terrible as Robin Williams. Considering how sanitized the script was, not terrible is probably the best that could be hoped for. There was not much of a physical resemblance but Diamantopoulos nailed the voice and some of the mannerisms. Erinn Hayes looks like Pam Dawber but, just as in the actual show, the movie gives her the short end of the stick and focuses on Williams.
For aficionados of bad television, this is mostly memorable for Daniel Roebuck’s absolutely terrible performance as Garry Marshall and a scene in which Williams is heckled in a comedy club but an overweight man who steps out of the shadows and announces that he’s John Belushi! Roebuck’s performance as Garry Marshall begins and end with his attempt to impersonate Marshall’s familiar voice. He was much better cast as Jay Leno in The Night Shift. As for Belushi , since he was not around to sue or otherwise defend himself, the movie goes all out to portray Belushi (who was played by Tyler Labine) as being an almost demonic influence on Williams. The film’s portrayal of Belushi is even worse and probably more inaccurate than Wired and that’s saying something!
To quote Mork himself: Shazbot! This movie is full of it.
Producer/director Roger Corman finally cut ties with American-International Pictures after they butchered his apocalyptic satire GAS-S-S! Striking out on his own, Corman’s next movie was VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN, a World War I epic about famed German aerial ace The Red Baron and the Canadian pilot who shoots his down Roy Brown. There are grand themes, as Corman sought to make a statement on the futility of war, the end of chivalry, and the mechanized savagery of what was to be “the last war”. The film looks good, shot in Ireland, with exciting aerial footage, but despite all the outer trappings VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN is still a Corman drive-in movie.
John Philip Law also looks good as Baron Manfred von Richtofen, the aristocrat/warrior who became the feared Red Baron. Law was always great to watch, whether as the blind angel in BARBARELLA, the black-clad supervillain in DANGER: DIABOLIK, sexy Robin Stone in…
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For centuries, artists have been fascinated by eclipses. In honor of both today’s solar eclipse and everyone who is going to go blind from looking at it without special glasses, here are nine excellent eclipse paintings.
by Antoine Caron
by Cedar Lee
by Cindy Pinnock
by Johann Christian Schoeller
by Mark Coyle
by Michael Creese
by Sue Halstenberg
by Warren Thompson
by Yuli Choi
by Cyra R Cancel
Happy Solar Eclipse Day from all of your friends at the Shattered Lens!
by Skystar Warrior
Over the past few years, there’s been many movies about the end of the world.
A lot of them have been pretty bad. I never did find the high heel that I threw at the screen while watching Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World.
And some of them have been pretty good. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels come to mind.
And then there’s Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Von Trier is always going to be controversial filmmaker but no one has ever matched his brilliance when it came to capturing the end of existence. In Melancholia, a depressed woman (played in a revelatory performance by Kristen Dunst) finds unexpected strength in the end of the world. As can be seen in the scene below, it’s a beautifully sad film, one that ends on a note of triumphant apocalypse:
by Yuri Shwedoff
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Happy End of the World Day!
(In certain cultures….)
4 Shots From 4 Films
A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir by Georges Melies)
Moon (2009, directed by Duncan Jones)
Apollo 18 (2011, dir by Gonzalo López-Gallego)
Melancholia (2011, dir by Lars Von Trier)
I wanted to hold off on this video till later, but the sun and the moon made other plans. So, let’s go through it.
Why is Bonnie here in the first place?
Is the bird practicing to be thrown later?
Swinging lamps…
on loan from Harden My Heart by Quarterflash.
Harden My Heart (1981)
It’s safe to look at Total Eclipse Of The Heart…
but don’t look at the total eclipse of the sun today with the naked eye, or you could end up like this guy.
Doors also on loan from Harden My Heart.
Harden My Heart (1981)
It’s a Russell Mulcahy video. You can usually be assured that his videos will contain metaphoric liquids and/or homoerotic imagery.
Is this the same bird from earlier?
The Reflex!
The Reflex by Duran Duran (1984)
It was nice of Godfrey Ho to let Mulcahy borrow some ninjas.
Gentlemen, welcome to The Skulls.
Another thing from Harden My Heart.
Harden My Heart (1981)
Since both videos were filmed in Holloway Sanitarium, I like to think that while Bonnie was upstairs, Ozzy Osbourne was being chased around the basement by a werewolf for Bark At The Moon.
The Judas Priest dancers reaching for Bonnie.
And Bonnie’s reaction…to the entire video.
There’s more Harden My Heart in here, but I choose to show this person upside-down instead.
Definitely Mulcahy.
Pressure.
The Thin Wall by Ultravox (1981)
I love that they almost missed Bonnie with the altar boy.
Exactly how many birds is he supposed to have? We could see some others earlier, and there are a few behind him. Does he just wait around to throw them at people who pass by?
Wild Boys cameo
The Wild Boys by Duran Duran (1984)
Then Bonnie is rescued by an angel from the clutches of Mulcahy.
Or is she?
In reality, it was a bit of both.
Here’s what Mulcahy had to say about this video in the book, I Want My MTV:
I collaborated on the storyboard for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with Jim Steinman, who wrote and produced the song. Jim is fabulously, fabulously crazy. We would banter ideas over a bottle of red wine. I’d say, “Let’s set it in a school and have ninjas in one scene,” and he’d say “Let’s have a choirboy with glowing eyeballs.” We shot it in an old abandoned insane asylum in London. We had one sequence, which was Steinman’s idea, where a shirtless young boy is holding a dove and he throws it at the camera in slow motion. Bonnie came around the corner and screamed, in her Welsh accent, “You’re nothing but a fucking pre-vert!” And she stormed off.
There was nothing perverse intended. The imagery was meant to be sort of pure. Maybe slightly erotic and gothic and creepy, but pure. Anyway, the video went to number one, and a year later Bonnie’s people rang up and asked if I would direct her new video. And I told them to fuck off, because I was insulted about being called a fucking pervert. And I was a little mad because pervert wasn’t pronounced correctly.
So the bird throwing kid was Steinman’s idea. Interesting. Perhaps her comment is why he isn’t shirtless in the video.
I wonder what video Bonnie’s people wanted him to come back to direct a year later. I ask because the video for Faster Than The Speed Of Night, which came out the same year, puts a kid throwing a dove to shame.
Faster Than The Speed Of Night (1983)
Needless to say, regardless of their falling out, this kind of video became Bonnie Tyler’s thing for awhile.
Holding Out For A Hero (1984)
If mvdbase is to believed, she even got Jim Steinman back to co-direct If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man). It’s something you’d hardly notice if you watch the video.
If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man) (1986)
If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man) (1986)
If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man) (1986)
I’m glad she followed up Total Eclipse Of The Heart with similar videos. The songs are great, and the videos make them unforgettable.
Enjoy the eclipse!
30 Days Of Surrealism:
Through the Shattered Lens 