Tag Archives: review

Music Video of the Day: A Fifth of Beethoven by Walter Murphy (1976, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Based on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven …. oh, wait a minute.  I just got that.  Fifth Symphony …. A Fifth of Beethoven.  That’s clever.  How would Beethoven have felt about a disco version of his symphony?  I imagine Beethoven would probably sue for royalties.  The music business is cutthroat.

Anyway, this song is best known for appearing on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  When Tony Manero and his friends step into the club, this is the song that’s playing in the background and it fits in perfectly with Tony’s view of himself as being a God among men.

The song was composed by Walter Murphy, who had previously been a jazz musician.  He played all of the instruments himself on the original recording but the song was still credited to Walter Murphy and The Big Apple Band because it was apparently felt that it was better to be known as a member of a band than a solo artist.

This video is from 1976.  Is that the Big Apple Band that Murphy’s performing with?  I don’t know.  It’s a good song, though.  For the longest time, I thought it was also the theme music for Judge Judy but then I did some research at the University of Google and I discovered that Judge Judy’s theme song was actually the Fifth Symphony.  I also discovered that Judge Judy was still alive so it was a productive session.

Enjoy!

Book Review: The War For Late Night by Bill Carter

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Remember when Conan O’Brien was the host of The Tonight Show?

It occurred back in 2009, back when the Shattered Lens was just starting out.  After hosting the show for 17 years, Jay Leno stepped down as host of The Tonight Show.  Though he was never popular with critics and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actually made it a point to watch him, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was the number one in the late night ratings.  David Letterman may have had more cultural cachet but Jay Leno was the host that most late night viewers were watching.  Other comedians may have mocked Leno for his safe and non-controversial hosting but, obviously, it worked.

When Leno first left The Tonight Show, no one was surprised by Leno’s retirement because he had announced it five years earlier.  In 2004, NBC renewed Leno’s contract as host with the condition that Leno would step down in 2009 and that Conan O’Brien would become the new host of the Tonight Show.  The fear was that, otherwise, Conan would switch to another network and compete directly against Leno.  At the time, Leno privately complained that he felt he was being fired but, publicly, he announced that he was happy to hand the show over to Conan in 2009.  In words that would come back to haunt him, Leno announced, “It’s yours, buddy!”

In 2009, Conan took over last night while Jay Leno got his own primetime talk show, which aired every weeknight.  It was an odd arrangement, one that was undertaken to keep Leno from going to another network.  (NBC was apparently very paranoid about its talent hopping to to other networks.)  Not only did NBC have to rearrange its schedule to make room for 5 days of Leno but many observers suspected that the whole thing was essentially some Machiavellian network scheme to eventually once again make Leno host of The Tonight Show while destroying Conan’s viability as a potential competitor.  Regardless of why NBC did what they did, it didn’t work out.  Leno’s primetime ratings quickly tanked.  So did that ratings for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  O’Brien’s supporters said that Conan’s bad ratings were due to Jay being a bad lead-in.  Jay’s supporters said that Conan just wasn’t ready for the 11:30 slot and that Conan’s ratings had been going down for a while.  And while most television critics sided with Conan, NBC obviously sided with Jay, who had always been viewed as being a good and loyal company man.

NBC’s solution to the problem made about as much sense as any of their other actions.  It was announced that Jay would have a new late night show, a thirty-minute variety show that would air before The Tonight Show.  The Tonight Show would be bumped back by half-an-hour.  O’Brien objected to getting stuck with a later start time but it turned out that his contract gave NBC the right to move the show back by 30 minutes.  O’Brien resigned, writing an open letter to “the people of Earth,” in which he said that he would not take part in the “destruction” of The Tonight Show.  Depending on which side you were on, Conan was either being heroic or overdramatic.

How big was this story?  It was so big that even I knew about it, despite the fact that I didn’t watch any of the late night shows.  It was one of the first big cultural conflicts that I can remember blowing up on Twitter.  Twitter was almost 100% pro-Conan.  Meanwhile, Leno’s supporters tended to be older, they tended to not have much use for social media, and they tended to be a bit more pragmatic.  Jerry Seinfeld sided with Jay, saying that the only problem was that Conan wasn’t getting the ratings.  Jimmy Kimmel very publicly sided with Conan.  David Letterman let everyone know that they were now seeing the Jay Leno that he had always known.

It was a mess and no one came out of it untouched.  Leno returned to hosting The Tonight Show but his reputation with now irreversibly tarnished.  Conan moved to TBS and, while the critics respected him and his fans continued to love him, he never quite regained the cultural prominence that he had before The Tonight Show debacle.  Most of all, NBC came out of it looking worse than ever.  The entire reason for Jay’s early retirement announcement was to avoid conflict and controversy.  Needless to say, that didn’t work out.

Looking over it all, one can’t help but wonder how a group of industry professionals, people with television experience who were paid to know what they were doing, could have so dramatically screwed everything up.

Bill Carter’s The War For Late Night is probably the best place to look for the answer.  Published in 2010, mere months after Leno replaced Conan as the host of The Tonight Show, The War For Late Night provides an insider’s look at what went down in the corporate offices of NBC as well as what was happening in both the O’Brien and the Leno camps.  Carter also examines what was going on with the other late night hosts while O’Brien and Leno was battling for the future of Late Night.  The book deals with the unsuccessful attempt to blackmail Letterman (remember that?) and also provides an interesting reminder of how likable Jimmy Kimmel was before he got all self-important.

Though Carter appears to be Team Coco, the book itself is relatively even-handed.  Leno is not portrayed a monster and Conan is not transformed into a saint.  (Indeed, the books makes clear that the real villains were the NBC executives, who first screwed Leno by forcing him out when he was at the top of the ratings and then screwed Conan by refusing to give his version of The Tonight Show time to grow.)  Instead, the book suggests that the main reason for the conflict between the two hosts was that Leno and Conan had two very differing ways of looking at their job as host of The Tonight Show.  Jay viewed it as a job.  Conan viewed it as almost a holy calling.  In the end, Jay was incapable of understanding why Conan was so upset about what was happening while Conan couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t be upset.  After reading Carter’s book, it seems like a foregone conclusion that NBC would side with Jay.  Management always prefers an employee who doesn’t make waves compared to one who does.

Towards the end of the book, when David Letterman tries to arrange for Conan to appear in a Super Bowl commercial with him and Jay, Conan snaps that Letterman doesn’t understand how upset Conan still is over what happened.  Conan says that he will never be ready to laugh about it and, having read The War For Late Night, you don’t doubt it.  The book succeeds at both explaining what happened and also revealing the human beings behind the conflict.  In the end, even if you understand Jay’s position, your heart breaks for Conan.

Cleaning Out The DVR: An American Dream (dir by Robert Gist)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Loosely based on a novel by Norman Mailer, the 1966 film, An American Dream, tells the story of Stephen Rojack (Stuart Whitman).  Rojack’s a war hero, a man who has several medals of valor to his credit.  He’s married to Deborah (Eleanor Parker), the daughter of one of the richest men in the country.  He’s an acclaimed writer.  He’s got his own television talk show in New York.  He’s been crusading against not only the Mafia but also against corruption in the police department.  He has powerful friends and powerful enemies.  You get the idea.

He’s also got a marriage that’s on the verge of collapse.  Deborah calls Rojack’s show and taunts him while he’s on the air.  When Rojack goes to her apartment to demand a divorce, the two of them get into an argument.  Deborah tells him that he’s not a hero.  She says he only married her for the money and that she only married him for the prestige.  She tells him that he’s a lousy lover.  Being a character in an adaptation of a Norman Mailer novel, the “lousy lay” crack causes Rojack to snap.  He attacks Deborah.  The two of them fight.  Deborah stumbles out to the balcony of her apartment and it appears that she’s on the verge of jumping.  Rojack follows her.  At first, he tries to save her but then he lets her fall.  She crashes down to the street, where she’s promptly run over by several cars.  The cars then all run into each other while Rojack stands on the balcony and wails.  There’s nothing subtle about the first 15 minutes of An American Dream.

Actually, there’s nothing subtle about any minute of An American Dream.  It’s a film where everything, from the acting to the melodrama, is so over-the-top and portentous that it actually gets a bit boring.  There’s no relief from the screeching and the inauthentic hard-boiled dialogue.  When a crazed Rojack starts to laugh uncontrollably, he doesn’t just laugh.  Instead, he laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and …. well, let’s just say it goes on for a bit.  It’s like a 60s version of one of those terrible Family Guy jokes.

Anyway, the police don’t believe that Deborah committed suicide but they also can’t prove that Rojack killed her.  Meanwhile, within hours of his wife’s death, Rojack meets his ex-girlfriend, a singer named Cherry (Janet Leigh).  Rojack is still in love with Cherry but Cherry is also connected to the same mobsters who want to kill Rojack.  Meanwhile, Deborah’s superrich father (Lloyd Nolan) is also on his way to New York City, looking for answer of his own.

An American Dream is a very familiar type of mid-60s film.  It’s a trashy story and it’s obvious that the director was trying to be as risqué as the competition in Europe while also trying to not offend mainstream American audiences.  As such, the film has hints of nudity but not too much nudity.  There’s some profanity but not too much profanity.  Rojack, Deborah, and Cherry may curse more than Mary Poppins but they’re rank amateurs compared to the cast of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  It’s an unabashedly melodramatic film but it doesn’t seem to be sure just how far it can go in embracing the melodrama with alienating its target audience so, as a result, the entire film feels somewhat off.  Some scenes go on forever.  Some scenes feel too short.  The whole thing has the washed-out look of an old cop show.

All of that perhaps wouldn’t matter if Stephen Rojack was a compelling character.  In theory, Rojack should have been compelling but, because he’s played by the reliably boring Stuart Whitman, Rojack instead just comes across as being a bit of a dullard.  He’s supposed to be a charismatic, two-fisted Norman Mailer-type but instead, as played by Whitman, Rojack comes across like an accountant who is looking forward to retirement but only if he can balance the books one last time.  There’s no spark of madness or imagination to be found in Whitman’s performance and, as a result, the viewer never really cares about Rojack or his problems.

Noman Mailer reportedly never saw An American Dream, saying that it would be too painful to a bad version of his favorite novel.  In this case, Mailer made the right decision.

Music Video of the Day: Disco Inferno by The Trammps (1976, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Burn, baby, burn!

I kid you not when I say that this song was supposedly written after a viewing of the 1974 Best Picture nominee, The Towering Inferno.  Now, of course, the song is also about the heat that rises from the dance floor while everyone’s out there moving and apparently, there are some who think that the song was meant to be a reference to the counter-culture’s cry of “burn, baby burn!”  Myself, though, I will always assume that this song is all about Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Steve McQueen, OJ Simpson, and a cast of thousands trying to survive that towering inferno.

“You keep building them,” McQueen said to Newman, “and I’ll keep putting them out.”

Disco Inferno became a hit when it was included on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  More recently, it’s become a hit-of-a-different-sort because of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns.  It turns out that “Burn, Baby, Burn” can also be heard as “Bern, Baby, Bern.”  I mean, no wonder he won Iowa.

(Did Bernie win Iowa?  I can’t recall.  Hey, remember when I said that I was going to vote for Marianne Williamson and everyone thought that I was being serious?  What was that all about?)

Anyway, The Trammps is one of those bands that actually had a few hits in their heyday but will probably always be associated with just this one song.  The Trammps are still performing, though they’ve split into two different groups, each one using the Trammps name.  The fires of the disco inferno will never be extinguished.

Enjoy!

International Film Review: Kapo (dir by Gillo Pontecorvo)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What turns someone into a collaborator?

That’s the question that is at the heart of the 1960 Italian-French film, Kapo.

The film opens in Nazi-occupied France, with 14 year-old Edith (played by 22 year-old Susan Strasberg) practicing the piano at her teacher’s house.  Edith wears the yellow star on her dress and, as she finishes her lesson, her teacher instructs her to be careful returning home.  Edith cheerfully states that she and her family have nothing to worry about.  Edith walks home and, as the opening credits roll, we follow her as she walks through what appears to be a very robust and busy city.  Other than the yellow star on Edith’s dress, there are no outward signs of the occupation in the city.  However, when Edith finally reaches her neighborhood, she sees that her family and her neighbors are being rounded up the Germans.

Edith and her parents are sent to a concentration camp but get separated as soon as they arrive.  Wandering around the camp, Edith meets another prisoner named Sofia (Didi Perago).  Sofia takes Edith to the camp doctor.  He arranges for Edith to switch identities with a non-Jewish prisoner who has just died.  Edith’s new name is Nicole and her yellow star is removed and replaced by a black triangle, which designates Edith/Nicole as being “asocial.”

Edith is transferred to another concentration camp, this one in Poland.  She comes to think of herself as being Nicole.  When another prisoner, Terese (Emmanuelle Riva), asks her is she’s Jewish, Nicole replies that she’s not.  Nicole quickly grows hardened to life in the camp and exchanges sex for food.  She becomes the lover of a guard named Karl (played by future spaghetti western mainstay Gianni Garko) and is made a Kapo, a prisoner who also works as a guard.  However, when Nicole then falls in love with a Russian prisoner-of-war and he asks her to help him and his comrades escape, she is forced to finally decide whether she is Nicole or whether she’s Edith.

To return to the question that started this review: What makes someone a collaborator?  That’s the question that Kapo attempts to answer and it’s a question that was undoubtedly close to  Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s heart.  Pontecorvo was one of the most political of the post-World War II Italian filmmakers.  He was born in 1919 and, as a child, saw firsthand the rise of Mussolini.  As a Jew, he also experienced anti-Semitism firsthand and, in 1938, he left Italy for France.  In France, he befriended Sartre and many other key members of the International Left.  He was reportedly emotionally and politically moved by his friends who left France to fight on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.  During World War II, he joined the Italian communist party and fought in the resistance.  It’s perhaps not a surprise that, in Kapo, Nicole’s chance at redemption comes about as a result of falling in love with a communist soldier.

Unfortunately, Kapo struggles to answer the question of why one would collaborate with the enemy.  The main problem is that Susan Strasberg is miscast of Edith/Nicole, never convincing us that she’s a naïve teenager or a hardened collaborator.  She’s also not helped by a script that continually reduces everything down to who Edith/Nicole happens to be in love with at any given point of time.  It also doesn’t help that Strasberg find herself acting opposite Emmuelle Riva, Gianni Garko, and other actors who all authentic in a way that she’s not.

Kapo is more valuable as an examination of the horrors of the camps than as a character study.  The film’s most powerful moment comes early on, when Edith/Nicole learns that, in the eyes of the Nazis, it’s preferable that someone be a criminal to being a Jew.  In that moment, the film captures both the brutal horror and the arbitrary absurdity of prejudice.  The scene is followed by another harrowing moment, in which Edith can only helplessly watch as her parents are marched to gas chambers.  In those brief moments, Kapo becomes an important film.  You may not remember much about Edith/Nicole but you will remember those scenes.

I should also note that, regardless of its flaws, the film does end on a powerful note, one that will leave many viewers asking how much they would be willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.  Would you sacrifice your life to save hundreds of others?  It’s a question that Edith/Nicole has to answer, though the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether her final decision was made by her or if it was made for her.  Still, the film’s final images do stay with you.

In America, Kapo received a nomination for what was then known as the Best Foreign Film Oscar.  In Europe, though, many critics criticized Pontecorvo for making a film that they felt sentimentalized the Holocaust.  Stung by their criticism, Pontecorvo’s next film, which would be considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, would be the documentary-style The Battle of Algiers, one of the most resolutely anti-sentimental political films ever made.

Novel Review: The Power Exchange by Alan R. Erwin

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Northern states are hit by a harsh and deadly winter, one that leads to a nation-wide blackout.  The residents of a Buffalo nursing home die while waiting for help that never comes.  Panics sets in across the nation as citizen realize that the federal government can’t solve all of their problems.  The President, a craven politician, puts the blame on the state of Texas, saying that the state has been hoarding its energy resources and not contributing their fair share to keep the rest of the country running.

With the President determined to make Texas into a scapegoat and proposing a series of new regulations designed to take control of the state’s natural resources, the people of Texas rebel.  The newly elected governor fights back, announcing that Texas is prepared to take advantage of the controversial clause in the article of annexation that he says gives the state the right to secede.  China and OPEC are quick to offer aide to the new Republic of Texas.  While the courts and Congress debate whether or not Texas has the right to leave the union, the CIA decides to take action into their own hands….

That may sound like a particularly paranoid take on today’s headlines but it’s actually the plot of a 1979 novel called The Power Exchange.  As a Texan, what can I say?  The idea of seceding from the Union has always been a popular one down here, even if it’s not something that we necessarily take seriously.  After all, we know that the rest of the States don’t really like us and, for the most part, we don’t like them either.  (Not me, though!  I love every state in the Union.)  So, why not secede and close the northern border and basically kick out anyone who complains about the weather or demands to know why we don’t have a Waa Waa on every street corner?  It’s an enjoyable little fantasy, even if it’s probably for the best that it will never happen.  For one thing, if Texas actually did secede, Austin would probably then want to secede from the Lone Star Republic and form the People’s Collective of Travis.  And if Austin seceded, Dallas would definitely follow, just so we could brag about how much better The Free Republic of Dallas was when compared to all of the other new nations on the North American continent.  Things would get messy.

The whole point of The Power Exchange is that it would be very difficult for Texas to secede.  Not only would there by legal issues but there would also be military conflict.  The new nation would have to make some deals with some less than savory characters.  In the book, it may be Governor Jack Green who masterminds the secession but it falls to Lt. Gov. Margaret Coursey to actually pull it off and she quickly learns that there is no easy way to declare your independence.  The book was written by political journalist so, needless to say, the sections about how secession actually works tend to get a bit overly technical.  Fortunately, there are also secret agents, assassins, and one out of nowhere sex scene that is tossed in to keep things from getting too dry.  One thing I’ve learned from reading old paperbacks is that every novel, regardless of the subject matter, had to have at least one sex scene randomly tossed in.  It’s kind of like when a character in a movie suddenly curses just to make sure that the movie gets at least a P-13 rating.

The Power Exchange was among the many paperbacks that I inherited from my aunt.  I read it the week after Christmas.  It was a quick read and fun little “what if?” scenario.

Music Video of the Day: Disco Duck by Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots (1976, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have long been of the opinion that everything that happened in the world of entertainment during the 70s was the result of cocaine.  If you doubt me, then I dare you to explain this to me:

Now, I’m not making the argument that the song Disco Duck was necessarily written while anyone was high, though it probably was.  However, I am arguing that a lot of people probably first heard the song while they were high and perhaps trying to talk to a duck and that explains why Disco Duck became a hit.  Apparently, it also won the 1977 People’s Choice Award for Best New Song and again, everyone knows that the People’s Choice Awards were determined by people who spent most of their spare time with a credit card, a mirror, and rolled-up twenty.  That’s just the truth of the matter.

Anyway, Rick Dees was a DJ and Disco Duck was a novelty record.  The song is officially credited to Rick Dee and His Cast of Idiots but, personally, I think the band was being a bit too self-critical with that name.  I mean, it takes a certain amount of intelligence to turn a song called Disco Duck into a number one hit.  The song, itself, is not actually about a duck but about a man who dances like a duck …. wait a minute, what?  How do you dance like a duck?  (“With great difficulty!  Ha ha ha!”  Thank you, hack comedian.)  It doesn’t matter.  The song was a hit.

This performance was from a show called Midnight Special.  It aired on October 29th, 1976, just a few days before Halloween.  According to the imdb, ABBA, KC & The Sunshine Band, and the Bay City Rollers also appeared on this episode but none of them performed with a guy in a duck costume.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Strike Commando (dir by Bruno Mattei)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“American,” a young Vietnamese refugee says to Sgt. Mike Ransom, “tell me about Disneyland.”

Ransom tells him all about Disneyland, a magical place where, according to Rasom, the trees are made of ice cream and genies pop out of lamps.  Ransom breaks down in tears, sobbing as he realizes that his friend will never get to experience Disneyland firsthand.

Years later, Ransom is in Manila, blowing up a former American military officer who gave aid to the communists.  “DIE!  DIE!” Ransom shrilly yells as the man literally explodes in front of him.  And while the man may not have been one of the good guys and he did a lot of bad things during the Vietnam War, it’s hard not to feel that Ransom’s attitude would get him banned from Disneyland.  Not even the ghost hitchhikers at the Haunted Mansion would want to accept a ride from the “Die!  Die!” guy.

That Mike Ransom, he’s a complicated man.  As played by Reb Brown, he’s also at the center of the 1987 Italian film, Strike Commando.  As you can probably guess from the film’s title, he’s the leader of an elite squad of soldiers, a team of strike commandoes who are determined to lead America to victory during the Vietnam War.  We’re continually told that Ransom is the best, though we don’t see much of evidence of it.  He’s the type of commando who specializes in sneaking behind enemy lines and hitting the communists before they even realize he’s there but he’s so bulky and loud that it’s hard to imagine that he’s ever been able to successful sneak around anywhere.  He has a particularly bad habit of shrilly screaming every word that he says.  Even when he’s not telling people to die, he’s yelling.  He’s like the athletic coach from Hell.

In fact, as I watched Strike Commando, I started to wonder what it would be like to live next door to someone like Mike Ransom.

“Hi, Mike, are you doing okay?”

“I’M DOING GREAT!  GREAT!  GREAT!”

“Any plans for the day?”

“I’M MOWING THE LAWN!  MOWING!  MOWING!  MOWING!”

“I think I’ve got some mail for you that accidentally left in my mailbox….”

“THE POSTAL SERVICE LIED!  LIED!  LIED!  LIED!”

At first, living next door to Mike Ransom would probably be entertaining but I imagine it would get kind of boring after a while.  Yelling can be an effective way to express yourself but it loses its power if that’s the only thing you ever do.  The same can be said for Strike Commando as a film.  It gets off to a good start, with several extremely over-the-top action sequences and, of course, Mike telling a little refugee child about Disneyland.  But the second half of the film, which involves Mike being held in a POW camp and meeting a fearsome Russian torturer named Jakoda, drags a bit because there’s only so much time you can listen to Ransom yell before you start to tune him out.  It doesn’t help that the second half of the film features some particularly nasty torture scenes.  Still, it is somewhat redeemed by a scene where the Viet Cong attempt to force Ransom to broadcast a propaganda message over their radio station.  “KEEP FIGHTING!” Ransom yells into the microphone.  Hell yeah! You tell ’em, Ransom!

Strike Commando was directed by Bruno Mattei, an Italian exploitation filmmaker who was never one to just turn things up to ten when he could turn them up to 11 instead.  Strike Commando was obviously meant to capitalize on the success of the Rambo films.  In typical Mattei fashion, the action is over-the-top, nonstop, and more than a little silly.  Mattei was never shied away from embracing excess and Strike Commando has everything that you would expect from one of his war films: lots of stuff blowing up, heavy-handed use of slow motion, and plenty of grainy stock footage.  You have to admire Mattei’s dedication to always finding something for Reb Brown to yell about.

Book Review: Things I’ve Said But Probably Shouldn’t Have by Bruce Dern, with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Bruce Dern is an interesting person.

He’s an actor, of course.  He spent a lot of his early career playing bad guys.  He was in a lot of biker films.  He killed John Wayne in a western.  Even Dern’s heroes were often unhinged in some way.  As he aged, he made the transition to becoming a character actor.  He still often plays characters who have their own individual way of looking at the world but now a Dern character is just as likely to be seen dispensing wisdom as he is to be seen killing people.

In real life, Bruce Dern was born into a socially prominent family.  (When Dern was born, his grandfather was serving as Secretary of War in FDR’s presidential cabinet.)  His godfather was Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president a handful of times.  Dern was a championship runner in high school.  When he was 20, he tried out for the Olympics.  In Hollywood, he appeared in both studio productions and independent films.  He was friends with everyone from Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper to John Wayne.  He worked for both Robert Evans and Roger Corman.  At the same time that Dern was playing drug-crazed bikers in Roger Corman movies, he was perhaps unique for being one of the few young actors in Hollywood who didn’t do drugs.  As he has commented in several interviews, he played Peter Fonda’s acid guru in The Trip despite the fact that he had never so much as even held a joint.

Bruce Dern is one of those actors who tends to show up in a lot of documentaries about Hollywood in the 60s and 70s.  If you read a book about that era, you can be sure that you’ll come across a lot of quotes from Dern.  Usually, Dern comes across as being both witty and straight-forward.  He’s an opinionated guy and he doesn’t hold much back.  It’s not surprising that he would be someone who many would want to interview.

Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have is Bruce Dern’s memoir and it’s just as quirky as you would expect it to be.  Now, I should make cleat that the book was published in 2007, which was a a few years before Bruce Dern made his comeback with the Oscar-nominated Nebraska.  It was also written before Dern became a member of the Quentin Tarantino stock company and was introduced to an entirely new generation of filmgoers.  At the time this memoir was published, Dern was a part of the Big Love cast and his last “big” movie was Monster, in which he had a small but memorable role.  Things I’ve Said…. was written before the “resurgence” of Dern’s career and, as such, there are certain parts of the book that almost feel like an elegy.  At times, it’s almost as if Dern is saying, “Okay, I was never as big as I should have been but I still had fun.”  Fortunately, films like Nebraska and others reminded people of just how good an actor Bruce Dern actually is and, even in his mid-80s, he’s a busy character actor.

As you would probably expect, Things I’ve Said is a bit of a quirky book.  If anything, it reads as if Dern just sat down beside you and started talking about his career.  It skips back and forth through time.  Just because a chapter begins by discussing one subject, there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick with that topic.  A chapter about his Oscar-nominated turn in Coming Home also contains his thoughts on Florence Henderson (“A Cloris Leachman type dame …. a real fox”) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Some of his best-known films are mentioned only in passing while others, like The The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, get an entire chapter’s worth.  He writes about how he came up with the perfect final line for Walter Hill’s The Driver and how he created his most memorable movie psycho, the blimp pilot in Black Sunday.  He writes about turning down roles that were offered by everyone from Woody Allen to Francis Ford Coppola to Bernardo Bertolucci.  (Coppola, Dern writes, offered him the role of Tom Hagen in The Godfather but just as a bargaining tactic to get Robert Duvall to reduce his salary demands.)  Dern writes about his friendship with Jack Nicholson and the other members of the Hollywood counter culture and how he always found himself competing with people like Nicholson and Scott Wilson for roles.  He also discusses how killing John Wayne in The Cowboys led to him receiving death threats and getting typecast as a villain.  Dern seems to be more annoyed by the typecasting than the threats.

It’s an enjoyable read.  Dern comes across as being a genuine eccentric but he’s the good type of eccentric as opposed to the type of eccentric who keeps dead animals in his basement.  He also comes across as being very confident.  He has no fear of saying that his performance saved certain movies.  But you know what?  Bruce Dern has saved a lot of movies.  So, if he’s a little bit overly sure of himself …. well, he’s the earned the right.

I’ve read a lot of bad actor memoirs and a lot of good actor memoirs.  Bruce Dern’s memoir is definitely one of the good ones.

TV Review: Dexter: New Blood 1.9 “The Family Business” (dir by Sanford Bookstaver)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

We all knew that, at some point, Dexter would have to welcome Harrison into the family business.  It finally happened on this week’s episode of Dexter: New Blood.

Set on Christmas day (but, oddly enough, airing during the first week of January), the ninth episode of Dexter: New Blood found Dexter and Harrison finally bonding.  Dexter told Harrison the story of Wiggles the Clown though, at the insistence of Ghost Deb, Dexter said that he just told Wiggles to stop doing what he was doing.  Even when Dexter was telling the story, it was obvious that Harrison knew there was more to it than just Dexter giving a stern lecture.

Harrison also told Dexter that he had stabbed his friend and that he wasn’t the hero that everyone made him out to be.  Yeah, we all figured that out a while ago, Harrison!  Still, it was interesting to watch Harrison discover what the rest of us take for granted.  We’re so used to the idea of Dexter tracking down serial killers and murdering them that it’s easy to forget just how weird and traumatic it would be for someone to learn about it or witness it for the first time.  One of the big problems that I had with the final season of Dexter’s original run is that Deb never seemed to be truly shocked at the discovery that her brother was a serial killer.  Fortunately, the reboot did a better job with Harrison than the original did with Deb.

And yes, Harrison did learn the truth.  He and Dexter tracked down Kurt’s secret lair and saw Kurt’s “trophies.”  And when Harrison announced that Kurt needed to die, just the slightest smile came to Dexter’s lips.  Dexter managed to bring Harrison over to his side without actually having to confess to all of the people that he had killed.  Only after Harrison had announced that he was on board with the idea that some people deserved to die, did Dexter admit to killing Wiggles the Clown and Arthur Mitchell.

Kurt met his end in this episode.  Harrison watched as Dexter killed him and then, somewhat ominously, had a flashback to Rita’s murder.  Is Harrison going to realize that, for all of Dexter’s rationalizations, his father is a serial killer as well?  If Harrison truly buys into the code, then Dexter could be in some trouble.

Actually, Dexter might be in trouble regardless.  Angela appears to have figured out that Dexter killed the drug dealer.  And, at the end of this episode, she received a letter telling her that “Jim Lindsay Killed Matt Caldwell” and one of the titanium screws that was left behind after Dexter burned Matt’s body.  If Angela learns the truth, will she arrest Dexter or will she let him and Harrison go free?  Angela has sworn to uphold the law but Kurt also murdered Angela’s best friend.  And, as we learned on Sunday, Kurt also murdered Molly.  Angela might be tempted to let Dexter escape.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

It was an excellent episode, though I have to admit that I was really disappointed when Molly showed up as one of Kurt’s trophies.  When Molly first appeared, her character annoyed me but, as the season progressed, I came to appreciate both the character and Jamie Chung’s performance.  In many ways, she was the stand-in for the viewers.  It was hard not to feel that she deserved better than to be killed off-screen.  Indeed, considering that she knew that Kurt was probably a killer, you have to wonder how he managed to ever get to her in the first place.

Still, that aside, The Family Business was Dexter at its best.  The deliberate pace and the atmospheric direction all reminded of the classic early seasons of Dexter.  Michael C. Hall perfectly captured Dexter’s love of his work while Jack Alcott played Harrison with the right mix of fascination and fear.  Still, I have to wonder what the show’s end game is going to be.  Ghost Deb was pretty adamant about Dexter not bringing Harrison into the family business and Ghost Deb usually know what she’s talking about.

We’ll find out next week!