Why Can’t Modern Football Players Act?

So someone help me out here: why don’t modern football players transition to acting careers as successfully as old timey football players did?

In the Olden Days, we have:

In the modern era, we have, what? Brett Favre in There’s Something About Mary? Brian Bosworth in Stone Cold?

Take a look at this list: 50 Football Players Who Acted in Movies and note that the ones who could be said to have made a successful transition to films and television played prior to the 1980s, and that most of the roles from then on are as “Self”? Is it a transition in football culture? Is it that older players were better-rounded and most professionals these days are football robots, funnelling all their energy into it from an early age?

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That’s So Mashed Up

As I said on Facebook the other night:

Brian J. Noggle snivels, slinkers, and mutters, “Our two dollarssess, we wantses it.”

You see, I thought I would be the only guy in the world who could successfully mash-up Johnny from Better Off Dead:

With Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

Yeah, I thought I could possibly be the only one who could pull that off.

But, wait, there is another:

Demian Slade

That’s Demian Slade, who actually played Johnny in Better Off Dead 26 years ago.

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I’m The Kind Of Guy Who Invites Flash Gordon Allusions

How many Flash Gordon allusions do you get or make in a single day?

Today, I’ve had two.

First, while discussing teaching toddlers to laugh diabolically, a friend on Facebook said that Ming the Merciless had the most diabolical laugh. I had to agree.

Secondly, I am prone to singing to my second son, who has a monosyllabic name, “<monosyllabic name>, ah-ahhhhh!” Tonight, my wife asked me what that was from.

From the Queen theme song to the thirty-one-year-old film, old man:

Maybe it’s because my father and I caught one of the old serials starring Buster Crabbe on a Milwaukee television station in the late 1970s.

Maybe it’s because I own a DVD of episodes from the 1950s television series starring Steve Holland.

Maybe it’s because I watched that 1980 film over and over while my mother, brother, and I lived with friends who had HBO ca 1983 and Flash Gordon played a bunch amid the Fraggle Rock.

Or maybe I’m just the sort of fellow who is open to the universe and its possible Flash Gordon allusions.

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I Remember It Differently

In a slug leading to a review of the film Battle: Los Angeles, someone talks about a film he or she has not seen:

Remember ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ‘District 9,’ Independence Day,’ and ‘Cloverfield?’ The war against aliens went better in those movies.

The Somali are from another planet? Really?

The review itself, written by someone who has presumably seen Black Hawk Down, does not make the mistake the slug does.

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Film’s Alumni Compare and Contrast

Actors from the film Predator (Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzeneggar) go onto become governors; Actors from the film Predator 2 (Gary Busey, Danny Glover) go on to make Turkish anti-American films (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Five Minarets in New York).

Actually, since Predator 2 also starred Robert Davi and Adam Baldwin, it cannot have been something on the catering truck.

I shudder because Busey and Glover also starred in the holiday classic Lethal Weapon. I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy it unequivocally again.

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Another Trailer Booed

My wife and I attended the cinema this week, and we saw the action film Red.

Because it’s almost the same thing, really, someone with the theater chain or studios determined it would be a good idea to run the trailer for the Valerie Plame fiction (inspired by true events, where the “events” are emotional outbursts of the left).

I booed it, of course.

Here is Kyle Smith’s review, which is also a boo of sorts.

Anyone want to guess the Box Office on this one? I go with $7 million total. Unexpectedly, the American people won’t understand the message and genius of the film that’s for their own good.

(Link seen on Big Hollywood.)

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What Could Have Made It Better

So I watched To Kill A Mockingbird last night for the first time, and when we got to the courthouse scene, the defense’s closing argument delivered by Gregory Peck:

I couldn’t help but think that the speech would have been far cooler if it had been written by Ayn Rand and/or delivered by Gary Cooper:

Of course, I’m enough of a fanboy of Objectivism to think that speech was cool and prefer Gary Cooper over Gregory Peck. It was the best performance of Peck I’ve seen so far, but that just meant that it was a performance where I didn’t think the main character was a complete wuss.

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Klavan on Gibson

Author Andrew Klavan has a thoughtful piece on Mel Gibson’s potty mouth that reflects on the nature of arts, artists, and wisdom. Also, he quotes Socrates.

Klavan does. Not Gibson. Although it’s interesting in imagining Gibson quoting Socrates: “You enclothe yourself like a perfumed porcine, and if you’re despoiled by a group of Sophists, your intellect will not have prevented such an ordeal.”

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Reflections Upon The Film Striptease

As you remember, gentle reader, I read the book in 2005. When I discovered that the Demi Moore film was based upon the book, I bought it and had to watch it.

As I did, I had the following thoughts:

  • Maybe Ashton Kutcher isn’t as dumb as I thought.
  • I must buy some Annie Lennox albums. I wonder how much she spent for product placement here.
  • Robert Patrick could not have made this film and then go on to play a Terminator. Good thing he did the opposite.
  • It’s hard to capture a Carl Hiaasen book and its characters and plot in a two hour movie. The filmmakers decided to abandon most of it to fit in more Demi Moore strip routines. A good second choice.

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Top Movies of the 90s That I Have Seen

You know what I haven’t seen in a while? A list meme.

The International Cinephile something something has presented its list of the top 100 films of the 1990s. The ones in bold I’ve seen. The ones in italics I’ve seen parts of.

01. The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)
02. Short Cuts (Altman, 1993)
03. Trois couleurs: Rouge (Kieslowski, 1994)
04. Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 1996)
05. The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993)
06. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
07. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
08. Trois couleurs: Bleu (Kieslowski, 1993)
09. The Ice Storm (Lee, 1997)
10. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)
11. Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
12. LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
13. Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
14. The Double Life of Véronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
15. Safe (Haynes, 1995)
16. All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999)
17. Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)
18. The Remains of the Day (Ivory, 1993)
19. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
20. The English Patient (Minghella, 1996)
21. Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)
22. Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990)
23. The Grifters (Frears, 1990)
24. Barton Fink (Coen & Coen, 1991)
25. The Piano (Campion, 1993)
26. Secrets & Lies (Leigh, 1996)
27. A Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997)
28. Ed Wood (Burton, 1994)
29. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)
30. Happy Together (Wong, 1997)
31. Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)
32. Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)
33. Howards End (Ivory, 1992)
34. Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax, 1991)
35. The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992)
36. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
37. Naked Lunch (Cronenberg, 1991)
38. Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994)
39. Lone Star (Sayles, 1996)
40. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang, 1991)
41. Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990)
42. Naked (Leigh, 1993)
43. Fargo (Coen & Coen, 1996)
44. Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
45. Husbands and Wives (Allen, 1992)
46. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale & Wise, 1991)
47. The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
48. La belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991)
49. Miller’s Crossing (Coen & Coen, 1990)
50. Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994)
51. Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997)
52. Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)
53. Rosetta (Dardenne & Dardenne, 1999)
54. Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995)
55. Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
56. Underground (Kusturica, 1995)
57. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou, 1998)
58. The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, 1999)
59. Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, 1997)
60. Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991)
61. Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)
62. Days of Being Wild (Wong, 1990)
63. The Player (Altman, 1992)
64. La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)
65. Beau travail (Denis, 1999)
66. The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999)
67. Fallen Angels (Wong, 1995)
68. The Big Lebowski (Coen & Coen, 1998)
69. Titus (Taymor, 1999)
70. Vanya on 42nd Street (Malle, 1994)
71. Crash (Cronenberg, 1996)
72. Ulysses’ Gaze (Angelopoulos, 1995)
73. Van Gogh (Pialat, 1991)
74. Babe (Noonan, 1995)
75. Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)
76. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991)
77. Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
78. American Beauty (Mendes, 1999)
79. Dead Man Walking (Robbins, 1995)
80. Kundun (Scorsese, 1997)
81. Porco Rosso (Miyazaki, 1992)
82. Smoking/No Smoking (Resnais, 1993)
83. The Crying Game (Jordan, 1992)
84. Gattaca (Niccol, 1997)
85. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993)
86. Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)
87. Trois couleurs: Blanc (Kieslowski, 1994)
88. Bullets Over Broadway (Allen, 1994)
89. Everyone Says I Love You (Allen, 1996)
90. Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)
91. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou, 1996)
92. Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
93. Carlito’s Way (De Palma, 1993)
94. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Mirkin, 1997)
95. Un coeur en hiver (Sautet, 1992)
96. The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999)
97. Dong (Tsai, 1998)
98. JFK (Stone, 1991)
99. A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer, 1996)
100. Edward II (Jarman, 1991)

Strangely, I take pride in having seen so few.

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Fellow Milwaukeean Also Undorses Brothers

John Nolte, formerly of the northwest side like yours truly and now of Big Hollywood, agrees with my assessment of the forthcoming Brothers:

The budget for ”Brothers,” per director Jim Sheridan, is $25 million, which probably doesn’t include marketing for promotion and … well, tell me again how Hollywood is driven by profit and not ideology? We’re a month away from 2010 so it’s hard to argue “Brothers” went into production before everyone was well aware that every single war film flopped miserably.

But who does the snob Sheridan choose to blame in advance should his war-themed film flop? Not his own bonehead decision to jump into a genre with a 100% failure rate, not the investors who dove in with him … no, he blames We The American People….

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Warm and Fuzzy To The Right (Left) Mindset

It didn’t sound like the sort of film I’d see since I’m not dating/married to a girl who would want to see it, but this review of the film Amreeka doesn’t make it sound like it delivers warm and fuzzies to people of a certain mindset:

The two arrive at the Illinois home of her sister Raghda (Hiam Abbass of “The Visitor”) shortly after the start of the war in Iraq, as anti-Arab paranoia runs high.

Was anti-Arab paranoia peaking in 2003? I would have put whatever anti-Arab paranoia at its peak in 2001 or 2002. Also, I’d like to wonder who diagnosed suspicion of Middle Eastern people after an attack by Middle Eastern people on Americans as clinical paranoia.

A film reviewer, no doubt.

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Wherein Brian Says FU Back To Hollywood

I was treated to this trailer on Veteran’s Day when I treated my wife to what turned out to be an anti-Iraq War film Men Who Stare At Goats:


You know, it could have been a good drama. Soldier dies in combat, and his ne’er-do-well brother straightens out and grows up as he sort of steps into the role of father-figure for his nieces and eventually the lover for the widow. Then, the MIA soldier returns. I could see it being chock full of drama as they deal with the emotional situations.

But.

In the trailer, the eventual seduction takes place over a joint and the movie-normal “I’m not too straight to toke” trope. And the soldier returns home apparently an angry, psychotic fellow who cannot relate to his family and wants to hurt them or commit suicide by cop.

Frankly, through the trailer and my own predilections, the Iraq soldier is the most sympathetic character. But he’s just an archetype to endanger the pot-smoking, non soldier lovers in the film.

I booed the trailer in the theater.

Instead of a dramatic film with real emotion, I think Lionsgate has gone for the sure Oscar award-winning, Cannes Palm D’or, and Nobel Prize for Cinema route. Which probably won’t make any money, but they’re making art. All-too-predictable, comfortable-to-the-artists and offensive-to-the-plebes art. Hey, Hollywood: <expletive deleted>.

UPDATE: I originally identified the soldier as serving in Iraq, but I guess it’s supposed to be Afghanistan. MfBJN regrets this error and retracts everything. Well, everything except the words including the letters I-R-A-Q.

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Book Report: Back to the Future III by Craig Shaw Gardner (1990)

Last autumn, I read Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II. Back then, I said:

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the third novelization of the movie (although I do have the trilogy of movies, which this book encourages me to watch). And I want it.

Well, I didn’t have to go to Ebay or anything since it turned up serendipitiously at a school rummage sale I attended last week. So I jumped into it as soon as possible. The novelization is from the same guy who did the second one, so he still overuses the question marks and the exclamation points. But he does neat things to cover visual effects, such as the Eastwood Gorge sign change in the end. In the film, it’s a visual effect, and the author seamlessly has Marty notice it. Other times, though, he seems to bang it a little bit.

The movies are very visual experiences, and some of it is lost. But a good nostalgic read never the less.

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Joe Williams Catches The Essence Of A Republican Party Meeting

In his review for the film Observe and Report:

History will attest that the most frequently occurring character in the comedies of this decade has been the self-inflated blowhard who is actually a pinhead, but in the hands of man-child Rogen, Ronnie is several degrees to the right of a blustering Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell.

We watch in shock as this wannabe cop engages in date rape, hard-drug abuse and vigilante mayhem that seems derived from repeated viewings of “Taxi Driver.” Some of the slapstick is brutally funny, but the laughs are like involuntary confessions elicited by a taser.

Date rape, hard drug abuse, and vigilante mayhem. That pretty much identifies what conservative thought is. If you’re an unthoughtful film critic.

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Book Report: The Three Musketeers (abridged) by Alexandre Dumas (1974)

I thought this book would be a movie tie-in book because it has the actors from the movie arrayed on the front cover, and it has action stills in the photo section in the middle of the book. Oh, but no. Instead of being based on the script for the film, it is truly just an abridged form of the book (which I read in its entirety last year).

So it lacks some of the more campy humorous bits that the film had. It’s a pale version of the complete book and unrelated at all to the movie, but I suppose it does distill some of the plot points that the film captured from the original book. However, some scenes I recall from both the book and the movie (breakfast at the seige of La Rochelle) have been abridged from this edition entirely.

Probably not worth the read unless you’re a fan of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, but might be worth your time if you’re into treatments of Dumas.

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Book Report: Back to the Future by George Gipe (1985)

One of the best things about movie tie-in paperbacks, aside from their brevity and probable familiarity with the storyline, is the speculation within them. Did they work from a treatment? An early version of the script? Or the actual movie?

This book dealt with an early version of the script, so it doesn’t actually jibe with the movie that well. In addition to the extra depth that the authors add to the interior lives of the characters that you don’t get out of dialogue, this book has completely different scenes than what appears in the film. Some are missing, too, such as the original beginning scene (Marty with the big guitar amplifier). Ergo, this book is sort of like a weird alternative-universe version of the movie.

An interesting artifact if nothing else.

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Book Report: Event Horizon by Steven E. McDonald (1997)

You know, I kind of knew the premise of the book. The sort of thing I like: a mystery involving a big ship and whatnot (such as Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, and so on). I didn’t see the movie because I heard it was a bit of a gorefest in space with an ultimately weak premise.

I had some hope when the thing began; however, it hit the pivotal climax with disturbing imagery (here, recounted in word, but that’s disturbing enough). The bodies start dropping, and random characters survive. The premise, of course, is that the ship has wormholed through Hell or something and it has become possessed by an intelligence that wants to kill people. A sad, weak premise, ultimately, and not up the the hopes I’d had.

But if you go into the Hyundai dealership looking for German engineering, you’re bound to be disappointed, but at least you’ll be disappointed cheaply.

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