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!
75 years ago today, Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California.
While at a party in 1970, Edie ran into a palm reader who grabbed her hand and then stepped away, shocked at just how short her lifeline was. “It’s okay,” Edie sweetly told him, “I know.” One year later Edie Sedgwick would pass away, with the cause of death officially being an overdose of barbiturates. She only lived 27 years but, for a brief few years, she was one of the most famous women in America. She was a model and an actress and, in her way, a revolutionary. She died before she had a chance to play the roles that she truly deserved. Instead, we have only a few films that she made with Andy Warhol and a lot of speculation about what could have been.
Bruno Sammartino, who passed away yesterday at age 82, wasn’t just a professional wrestler. He was an institution, an icon, a true American Dream success story, a hero to millions of kids now “of a certain age” (like me), and the biggest box-office star of his era, selling out New York’s fabled Madison Square Garden a record 187 times. He held the WWWF (now WWE) Heavyweight championship for close to twelve years during his two title reigns, facing the best in the business and vanquishing them all. Face it, Bruno was THE MAN!
The Man himself was born in Italy in 1935, and as a child hid from the Nazis in the Italian mountains. Coming to America in 1950 and settling in Pittsburgh, Bruno was a sickly, scrawny child who couldn’t speak English, and was bullied in school. This caused the young lad to begin working out with weights, and…
On April 18, 1938, National Publications presented Action Comics #1, showcasing typical comic book fare of the era like master magician Zatara, sports hero Pep Morgan, and adventurer Tex Thompson. And then there was the red-and-blue suited guy on the cover…
Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men… who can change the course of mighty rivers… bend steel in his bare hands… and so on and so forth! Eighty years ago tomorrow, Superman made his debut and changed the course of mighty comic book publishers forever. An immediate hit with youthful readers, Superman headlined his own comic a year later, spawned a slew of superhero imitators, became a super-merchandising machine, and conquered all media like no other before him!
Wayne Boring’s Superman
And to think he came from humble beginnings. No, not the planet Krypton, but from the fertile…
Years ago, during my senior year of high school, my AP History teacher taught us about Vietnam by bringing in a movie. He explained that the movie featured some “adult language” and was not always easy to watch. He also said that it was the most realistic portrayal of basic training ever put on film. Seeing as how he was a former Marine himself, we took his word for it.
That movie, of course, was Full Metal Jacket. The class loved the movie, though not in the way that our teacher was hoping. He was hoping that we would pick up on the film’s anti-war theme but instead we were all obsessed with Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann, the tough-as-nails drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey. It didn’t matter that Hartmann probably wouldn’t have welcome any of us into his beloved corp. (The majority of the class may have had Private Joker’s wit but they also had Private Pyle’s physisque.) From the minute that Hartmann started yelling at the recruits, the class thought he was the coolest and toughest sonuvabitch of all time. We were supposed to be learning that war was Hell and dehumanizing but we just wanted to listen to Hatmann yell about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and her pink panties.
Looking back, I feel bad for my teacher. He wanted to show us the horrors of Vietnam and instead, he ended up with a bunch of students who wouldn’t stop chanting, “I don’t know but I’ve been told/Eskimo pussy is mighty cold!” Every class debate, there was always a chance that someone would respond to an opposing argument by saying, “You wouldn’t even have the common courtesy to give him a reach around!”
I won’t even get into the number of times that, for the rest of the year, the term “skull fuck” was used in class discussions.
Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war film. The first half may be dominated by Sgt. Hartmann turning the recruits into “perfect” killing machines but the second half features those machines being picked off, one-by-one, by an unseen sniper in a bombed-out building. All of Hartmann’s words about the brotherhood of duty are meant to ring hollow as we watch one teenage girl gun down Marine after Marine. Perhaps they would have if Hartmann had been played by anyone other than R. Lee Ermey.
One reason why Ermey was so believable as Hartmann was because he actually had been a drill instructor. In 1961, R. Lee Ermey was 17 years old and had two arrests for criminal mischief on his record when a judge told him that he could either go to jail or he could join the military. Ermey chose to enlist. He served in the Marines for 11 years, getting a medical discharge in 1972.
He began his film career as a technical advisor to Francis Ford Coppola during the shooting of Apocalypse Now. This led to him playing Sgt. Loyce, a drill instructor in The Boys of Company C.
(The shooting of Apocalypse Now was so drawn out that The Boys of Company C actually ended up getting released a year before Coppola’s epic.)
Originally, Ermey was only hired to serve as a technical advisor on Full Metal Jacket. It wasn’t until Ermey put together an instructional video for Tom Colceri, the actor who had previously been cast as Sgt. Hartmann. When Full Metal Jacket‘s director, Stanley Kubrick, saw the tape, he replaced Colceri with Ermey. (Colceri still appears in the film. He plays the helicopter door gunner who brags about shooting 50 water buffalo.)
Kubrick not only gave Ermey his most famous role but he also allowed Ermey to improvise much of his dialogue, something that was practically unheard of on a Kubrick set. Kubrick also said that it usually only took 2 or 3 takes for Ermey to give him what he was looking for. That was a high compliment from Stanley Kubrick, the man who, during the filming of The Shining, made Scatman Crothers do over a hundred takes of one scene.
Ermey’s performance as Hartmann was so iconic and so quotable that it has become the standard by which all other film drill instructors are judged. It also made Ermey a much-in-demand character actor. Many of the roles that Ermey played were designed to capitalize on his fame as Hartmann. He played the a ghost of a drill instructor in The Frighteners. He was the voice of Sarge in three Toy Story films.
In a few films, R. Lee Ermey got a chance to show that he was capable of more than just playing variations on Sgt. Hartmann. In Prefontaine, he played the legendary coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman. He was a police captain in Se7en and the father of a murdered girl in Dead Man Walking. In the two remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he was Leatherface’s equally depraved uncle.
R. Lee Ermey died yesterday at the age of 74 but his performances will live on forever.
Milos Forman passed away yesterday in Danbury, Connecticut. He was 83 years old.
When the news of Forman’s passing first broke, many commentators focused on the fact that, over the course of his career, Forman accomplished something that few other directors have. Forman not only directed two movies that won the Academy Award for Best Picture but he also won two directing Oscars. On the surface level, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus may have looked like two very different films but both of them dealt with a nonconformist and the people who sought to destroy him. Time and again, that was a theme to which Forman would return.
Loves of a Blonde (1965)
Even before Forman won his first Oscar, he had established himself as an important director. As a young man, Forman survived the two greatest evils of the 20th Century, Nazism and Communism. Both his mother and the man who he originally believed to be his father died in concentration camps during World War II. After the war ended, Forman would discover that his real father was Otto Kohn, a Jewish architect who was also a survivor of the Holocaust.
The Fireman’s Ball (1967)
Forman started his film career working in the Czech Republic, which at that time was communist-controlled and known as Czechoslovakia. Forman was one of the leading directors of the Czech New Wave, making films that took a satirical look at life under the communist regime. It was during this time when he received his first two Oscar nominations, both for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1968, Forman was fortunate enough to be in Paris when the Russians decided to invade Prague and put an end to all that subversive individual freedom. While the new Czech goverment kept itself busy by banning all of his films, Forman moved to the United States.
Taking Off (1971)
Forman’s first film in the States was a satire called Taking Off, which failed at the box office but has since developed a cult following. Despite the box office failure of Taking Off, Forman was hired to direct 1975’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a film in which an authoritarian institution reacts to a nonconformist by ripping out part of his brain. Not only did this film win the Academy Awards for picture and director but it also won awards for actor, actress, and screenplay. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was the first film to win the big five awards since It Happened One Night.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Forman continued to make films about nonconformists. Hair was a film adaptation of the famous hippie musical. Ragtime looked at early 20th century America through the eyes of a proud black man who refused to bow under the prejudice of the time. Amadeus portrayed Mozart as a rock star and Salieri as a man who declared war on God, all the while trying to please a culturally illiterate ruler. Later films like Valmont, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and The Man In The Moon were a bit more uneven but all of them featured moments that celebrated the right of the individual to refuse to go along with the crowd.
Ragtime (1981)
A master director of actors, Forman directed Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, and F. Murray Abraham to Oscar wins while Brad Dourif, Howard Rollins, Eizabeth McGovern, Tom Hulce, and Woody Harrelson were all nominated for performances that they gave in Forman films.
Milos Forman may be gone but his films will live on.
On March 24, 1938, Americans tuned in to THE KATE SMITH HOUR collectively convulsed with laughter as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello introduced “Who’s On First?” to a national radio audience. The hilarious routine, with baseball manager Bud trying to explain the names of his team to an escalatingly exasperated Lou, soon became an American comedy classic, one I can never get tired of no matter how many times a watch a clip of A&C performing their signature bit – they slay me every time!
Chico asking Groucho “Why A Duck?” in 1929’s THE COCOANUTS
The routine had its roots squarely in burlesque long before Bud and Lou first made that historic broadcast. Puns and word play were the coin of the realm among burlesque comics, and variations on this confusing theme abounded in the early 20th Century. Early talking pictures feature a notable pair of examples: The Marx Brothers
On March 24th, 1958, 23 year-old Elvis Presley reported for his induction into the army. It was a day that the press and his fans dubbed as being Black Monday. Shortly after being inducted, Elvis and his fellow recruits were transported to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. That’s where my grandfather, Raymond Ellis, took this picture.
Unfortunately, the copy above is not a great scan. (When my Dad got his first scanner in 1995, the Elvis picture was one of the first things he scanned. I just happened to come across it a few weeks ago while I was gong through some old 3.5 floppy disks.) Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my hands on the original and share a better scan in the future. As far as I know, this picture of Elvis has never been published anywhere else.
As for Elvis, he served in the army for two years, getting promoted to sergeant and receiving an honorable discharge in 1960. He spent most of his army career in West Germany, where he met the woman that he would eventually marry, Priscilla Beaulieu.
John Huston’s filmnoir KEY LARGO is a personal favorite, and a bona fide classic in its own right that works on many different levels. Much of its success can be credited to the brilliant, Oscar-winning performance of Claire Trevor as Gaye Dawn, the alcoholic ex-nightclub singer and moll of gangster Johnny Rocco (played with equal brilliance by Edward G. Robinson ). The woman dubbed by many “Queen of Noir” gives the part a heartbreaking quality that makes her stand out among the likes of scene stealers Robinson, Humphrey Bogart , Lauren Bacall , and Lionel Barrymore .
Claire Trevor (1910-2000) arrived in Hollywood in 1933, and almost immediately became a star. Her early credits include playing Shirley Temple’s mom in BABY TAKE A BOW (1934), the title role in the Pre-Code drama ELINOR NORTON (also ’34), Spencer Tracy’s wife in the bizarre DANTE’S INFERNO (1935), and the reporter out…
News has reached us that singer/actress/comedian Nanette Fabray has passed away at age 97. She surely lived up to that old adage as a “star of stage, screen, and TV”, and was a trouper in the best sense of the word. Nanette began her career as a child in vaudeville, became a sensation on the Broadway stage, and moved to TV in the 50’s as part of CAESAR’S HOUR , with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris. She was a regular on HOLLYWOOD SQUARES, and later became a professional TV mom to the likes of Mary Tyler Moore (THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW), Bonnie Franklin (ONE DAY AT A TIME), and her real-life niece Shelley Fabares (COACH). Miss Fabray long suffered from hearing loss, and was noted for her work in deaf and hard-of-hearing causes.
Her best known film is undoubtedly THE BAND WAGON (1953), a backstage musical comedy…
Nine lives? Yeah you will need them! Have you ever exorcised a Kitteh? You might tonight!
Let’s get the technical out of the way first!
Cast:
Doug Jones (The Shape of Water)
Dale Midkiff (Pet Sematary)
Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog)
Preview:
Based on the web series and comic book of the same name, and inspired by writer-director Nicholas Tana’s experiences living with a professedly possessed cat, Hell’s Kitty tells of a covetous feline that acts possessed and possessive of his owner around women. The results are as funny as they are frightening!
Nick a Hollywood screenwriter, discovers his cat has become murderously possessed, and will stop at nothing to rid him of any women in his life. As his life unravels out of control, Nick must find a way to have his kitty exorcised of the demonic spirit haunting her and creating a body count.
Review:
I don’t think I have laughed or cried at a horror movie in a long time! As a cat lover,and owned by a cat,this movie puts everything in their mind right in yours!
Would I Recommend this movie?
Pussy, Please! You got to sharpen your claws and see this fun movie!
Where can you see it?
“Hell’s Kitty” will be available on VOD March 13th and on DVD March 27th!
Something You Should also know:
To kick of the movie release and to share their love for cats, the creators behind the film teamed with HOLLYSHORTS MONTHLY SCREENINGS and the TLC CHINESE THEATER recently hosted a premiere at the legendary theatre to raise money for FixNation.org. FixNation provides a free, full-time spay/neuter clinic with two full-time veterinarians capable of sterilizing as many as 100 cats per day. They also help hundreds of cats find suitable homes. For more info on the cause click here! http://fixnation.org/
Through the Shattered Lens 