Hi, everyone! Tonight, on twitter, I will be hosting one of my favorite films for #MondayMania! Join us for 2013’s The Cheating Pact!
You can find the movie on Prime and Tubi and then you can join us on twitter at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) See you then!
Since today is Presidents Day, my scene that I love features one of my favorite fictional presidents! In this scene from 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) attempts to explain why something funny might happen with the bomb to his Russian counterpart.
Sellers reportedly based President Muffley on Adlai Stevenson, the self-styled “rational intellectual” who twice ran for President against Dwight Eisenhower.
Ah, Eisenhower. There’s a President that I wish I could have voted for.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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!
Today would have been the birthday of director John Schlesinger. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 John Schlesinger Films
Darling (1965, dir by John Schlesinger, DP: Kenneth Higgins)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967, dir by John Schlesinger, DP: Nicolas Roeg)
Midnight Cowboy (1969, dir by John Schlesinger, DP: Adam Holender)
Marathon Man (1976, dir by John Schlesinger, DP: Conrad Hall)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1987’s Programmed To Kill!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Programmed To Kill on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
Enjoy!
by Erin Nicole
Happy President’s Day!
For Presidents Day, here’s a music video featuring a different group of Presidents singing about their love of peaches and fighting off a group of Ninjas. How many other presidents can do that?
This video was directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford and future collaborator with Wes Anderson. Coppola made his feature directorial debut with the excellent CQ in 2002.
The Presidents of the United States of America, one of the more refreshingly angst-free bands of the 90s, broke up in 2015. Lead singer Chris Ballew explained the break up by saying, “We’re old people now.” If only all presidents were as honest.
Enjoy!
Bud Cort died on February 11th, at the age of 77. He was a beloved character actor, one who had a real skill for bringing eccentric characters to life. He became a star briefly with films like Brewster McCloud and especially Harold and Maude but Hollywood never really knew what to do with him. After he was nearly killed in a car accident in 1979, his momentum stalled. Smart directors still cast him because he always gave good performances but he spent most of his career in small roles. (In Heat, he was the obnoxious restaurant manager who drove Dennis Haysbert back into a life of crime.)
When Cort died, most of the stories focused on his performance in Harold and Maude. That was understandable. That said, I’ve always been touched by Cort’s performance in 1970’s MASH and I wanted to take a moment to just express how wonderful I thought he was in the role of Private Boone.
Though he had previously appeared in two earlier films, Cort got an “introducing” credit for his role in MASH. He played Boone, a usually quiet corpsman who speaks with a slight stutter. When a patient in Post-Op develops complications, Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) tells Boone to get a cardiac needle. Boone obviously isn’t sure what Burns needs but Burns snaps at him to get it. When Boone comes back with a needle, the patient has already died. Burns calls Boone an idiot for getting the wrong needle. Burns offers to get a nurse. “It’s too late, Boone,” Burns says, motioning at the dead man, “you killed him.” Burns walks away as Boone, a look of shock on his face, tries not to cry.
And I have to admit that I want to cry with him. It’s one of the more shocking scenes in Altman’s film and it works because of not only Robert Duvall’s memorably nasty turn as Burns but also Bud Cort’s emotional vulnerability of Boone. Boone, who is in Korea because he was drafted, has not only seen a man die but he’s been told that he’s responsible. With just the slightly cocking of his head and the sniffling of a young man who doesn’t want to cry on duty, Bud Cort shows us just how devastated Boone is.
And, of course, Boone was not responsible. Trapper John (Elliott Gould) takes one look at the patient’s chart and sees that it was Burns’s own incompetence that is to blame. When Trapper punches out Burns, it’s a cathartic moment. The only thing you regret is that Boone wasn’t in the room to see it.
That was Bud Cort’s big moment in MASH, though he appears throughout the film. Indeed, if you watch carefully, there’s a subplot in which Boone starts dating one of the nurses and eventually becomes much more confident in himself. We don’t know much about Boone but we do see that he’s become a member of the gang. Unlike Burns or David Arkin’s Sgt. Vollmer, Boone is accepted by the inhabitants of the Swamp.
He even gets to attend the mock suicide of Painless.. Reportedly, Boone’s line of “You’re throwing away your whole education,” was improvised on the spot by Bud Cort.
Ah, Bud Cort. Rest in peace, you wonderful actor.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
Oh my God, this episode….
Episode 4.22 “Work Related”
(Dir by Jean de Segonzac, originally aired on May 17th, 1996)
At first, the fourth season finale of Homicide: Life On The Street feels like a typical episode of Homicide.
Lewis, having just returned from his honeymoon, obsesses on a case in which a man was killed by a bowling ball dropped from an overpass. Kellerman doesn’t feel that the case can be solved. The murder was just too random. Lewis, however, refuses to let it go. As Kellerman soon deduces, Lewis doesn’t want to go home because he and his new wife are already fighting.
Meanwhile, Bayliss is frustrated by Pembleton’s refusal to act like a sentimental new father. While Bayliss talks about the wonder of life, Pembleton coldly talks about how expensive it’s going to be to raise a child. It’s the typical Bayliss/Pembleton dynamic. Bayliss wants his partner to open up. Pembleton wants to keep things strictly business. Bayliss wants to find the deeper meaning of every event. Pembleton wants to remain rational and focused on doing his job. They’re both spiritual men, in their way. It’s just that Bayliss is a seeker whereas Pembleton is a man on a mission.
Bayliss and Pembleton investigate a shooting at a fast food restaurant. It doesn’t take much of an investigation to realize that the shooter was a recently fired employee and that his accomplice was a friend who still worked there. When Pembleton and Bayliss get the friend into the box, it seems like it’s going to be an easy investigation.
That’s until Pembleton suddenly yells out, grabs his head, and has a violent seizure. He collapses into the lap of a venal defense attorney who quickly shoves Pembleton away. Pembleton is rushed to the hospital. He’s had a stroke. The rest of the Homicide squad sees a comatose Pembleton lying in bed. But the viewer has seen the inside of Pembleton’s mind, where Pembleton is currently lying in a coffin and screaming to be released.
Agck!
I knew this episode was coming. Ever since I started reviewing Homicide, people have told me about the stroke episode. That said, it still took me by surprise when Pembleton collapsed. Pembleton has always been the strongest character on the show, the one who never lost control and whose mind could unravel any alibi and solve any mystery. Pembleton crashing to the ground, helpless and unable to speak, was not easy to witness. Andre Braugher was a great actor and he proved it in this episode.
That was how the fourth season ended, with Pembleton lying in a hospital bed and Giardello trying to keep the squad focused on doing their job while Bayliss — poor Bayliss! — found himself once again trying to understand the cruelty of fate. It was powerful, it was disturbing, it was sad, and I think it was the type of thing that only a show as good as Homicide could have pulled off.
Next week, we begin season 5. I’m almost scared to see what happens.
After her husband is arrested for financial fraud, country singer Faith (Jana Kramer) returns home to North Carolina and reconnects with her estranged family. Her father (Gerald McRaney) is there to offer support and small-town, no-nonense wisdom and she’s going to need all of it when she has to choose between the hot local doctor and her repentant husband.
Because Faith’s father was dying of a brain tumor, I assumed this was a Nicholas Sparks movie but it wasn’t. It was just a close copy. Heart of the Country was a movie about the importance of keeping your marriage together, even if your husband was involved in a Ponzi scheme! Faith’s husband (Randy Wayne) didn’t have anything to do with the scheme but he knew it was going on at his firm and he didn’t say anything. When he thinks about rejecting a plea deal that would keep him out of prison because it would mean admitting his guilt and embarrassing his old money family, Faith’s father tells him to be a man and admit that he knew what was going going on at his firm.
Other than some mild language, Heart of the Country could have easily passed for a Hallmark movie. I didn’t agree with Faith’s decision at the end but I did like the way the movie portrayed the relationship between her and her father. Gerald McRaney was really good in the role. It was the last movie that I watched yesterday and I’ll give it a mild recommendation just because of McRaney and some of the music on the soundtrack. If you’re into Hallmark-style movies, this one was okay.
After popular high school student Landon Carter (Shane West) gets busted for drinking on school property and pulling a prank that nearly killed another student, he’s given a choice. He can either be expelled or he can tutor other students and take part in the school play. At both tutoring and play rehearsals, he gets to know Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore), the daughter of the local reverend (Peter Coyote). Even though Jamie doesn’t wear makeup and only owns one sweater, Landon falls in love with her. Too bad she’s dying.
A Walk To Remember is a movie that I can remember walking down to the movie theater to see with my friends. Shane West was so handsome. Mandy Moore was so beautiful, even if she did only own one sweater. The film taught us all that there’s nothing more romantic than falling in love when you only have a year to live. (At least, that’s what it taught us girls. The boys just learned that they could nearly kill someone and their only punishment would be having to appear in a school play.) I loved it when I first saw it and I still enjoyed it when I rewatched it yesterday, even if I now realize that it never made sense that Mandy Moore would only own one sweater. There’s a lot about the movie that doesn’t make any sense but Shane West and Mandy Moore had that irresistible chemistry. Early on, when Jamie warns Landon not to fall in love with her and Landon says it will never happen, that’s when everyone knows that they’re destined to be together.
The movie still made me cry, even though I now know that someone has to die in every Nicholas Sparks story. Getting married right out of high school makes sense when one of you is going to be dead before college reopens for the fall. Did Landon ever remarry? He better not have. I will never forget A Walk To Remember.
Through the Shattered Lens 