|
|
|
Hey folks, Harry here... Pretty much, my entire life... I've known the name of Ollie Johnston. One of the most beloved animators of all time - he is credited to giving Disney's characters a lot of the warmth we love about them. Before Ollie - Disney characters rarely touched unless they were slapping each other or kicking one another in the ass. Ollie brought the more human relationship to bare focusing on the warm connections that we humans have... the act of holding hands, putting an arm around one another.
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... Man, the world is knocking off some of my favorite old school talent. Richard Widmark... and now, JULES DASSIN. Last year, when I threw Half-Ass-A-Thon I screened Dassin's classic trippy as hell film TOPKAPI, which is being remade as the sequel to the THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR - and will never ever touch the brilliance of that original film.
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... This past year at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9, I showed my personal favorite Richard Widmark film. A little movie he shot with Sam Fuller called PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET - I liked showing it knowing he was still alive... somewhere out there in the world. His Skip McCoy is one of the greatest heroic cads in the history of cinema. A pick pocket that's a Minnesota Fats with the pool table of life, knowing all the angles, or at least thinking he does. I've often said that Richard Widmark was a Warner Brothers character brought to life...
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... Today's a sad day - we lost Anthony Minghella earlier today - and now we've lost one of the most brilliant minds in science fiction, Arthur C Clarke. For many of us - he'll be the man that worked with Kubrick in creating the science fiction Masterpiece... 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - but for fans of the written word he was so much more.
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... I'm a bit under the weather... took a big dose of Nyquil and woke up 15 hours later in a daze. It's a beautiful day outside and as I've been going through the 800 or so messages that have accumulated since I last logged in - I read a notice from a friend of mine, Michael Kaluta. He received a call from Dave Stevens' mother that Dave passed on yesterday. She said it was a blessing, as Dave had been suffering a lot of pain, due to chemo and had no prospects for it "getting better".
Posted in | »
|
Gary Gygax passed away at his home in Wisconsin yesterday. He was co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and the person most directly responsible for the invention of the role-playing game.
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... it falls upon me to write this OBIT - because well, I'm the one that loves FIRES ON THE PLAIN. I am not an expert on Kon Ichikawa. I won't pretend that I am, but around 13 years ago, my father and I were driving back from a dinner on the south side of Austin, and decided to check the cheapie bin at the BLOCKBLUSTER VIDEO around the University of Texas campus. You know the drill, you dig through their previously viewed weeding out of titles and you find gold. This was back in the videotape era -
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here... As many of you know... I was born into geekdom. My parents owned the first Pop-Culture Memorilbia Store in Austin, Tx... N.E. MERCANTILE COMPANY. It sold movie posters, animation cels, original art, props and comic books, pulps and all sorts of paper ephemera. From the youngest of ages - I have loved talking duck characters. I knew the Disney Ducks, the Warner Brothers Duck... and from the world of comics... the cigar-chomping, master of Quack-Fu himself.... HOWARD THE DUCK.
Posted in | »
|
Harry here... Heath Ledger was found dead in a Manhattan Apartment today around 2pm according to the NYPD and CNN. At this point - my take on this is... Please don't fucking be true.
I first met Heath Ledger 8 years ago on the set of A KNIGHT'S TALE - he was impossibly young, handsome and charming. He went on to become one of our absolutely most talented and promising actors.
Posted in | »
|
Harry here... Nobody has written up an Obit on Brad Renfro because frankly... it's not a story any of us wants to write. Here was a kid actor that showed an awful lot of promise. I remember watching APT PUPIL the first time in my living room with Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood and Laura Harris as the two boys went through jealousy pains because they each desperately wanted that role - and they loved what Brad did with it.
Posted in | »
|
Hey Folks, Harry here... unlike Uncapie - I did not know Charles B Griffith in person - I just knew his work. When I was a child - my parents had 5 films in 16mm prior to the advent of VHS - but one of those 5 films that I so with such repitition as to become an engraved memory was the original LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. In fact I still own the print. The writing was so sharp, so deliciously sardonic - so wonderful. Years later when I discovered the bliss that is BUCKET OF BLOOD - I was stunned. These were films shot with the smallest of budgets, yet they're wonderful. A large part of that was due to Mr Griffith's writing. Seek out these films that Uncapie talks about, that's the best way to know why we loved the work of Charles B Griffith. Here's Uncapie...
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here with some sad news for Bond fans the world over. Lois Maxwell, our Miss Moneypenny from DR. NO to A VIEW TO A KILL representing 23 years of unrequited lusting for 007 to our delight, has passed away. She had cancer. It's easy to think of her as just Moneypenny - but us geeks loved her in films like Kubrick's LOLITA and Robert Wise's THE HAUNTING... She did TV work on just about every cool show out there like THE AVENGERS, O.S.S., DANGER MAN, THE SAINT, GHOST SQUAD, STINGRAY and more. Of her non-Bond work, my fave has to be as Dr. Markway's wife in THE HAUNTING.
Posted in | »
|
Father Geek here. For the longest time I thought Tarzan -Olympic champion Herman Brix and handsome leading man Bruce Bennett where different actors. A co-star of one of my top 5 films of all time 1948's Treasure of the Sierra Madre as Bruce Bennett along with Bogart, Tim Holt & Walter Huston, I never thought of him as the Tarzan actor Herman Brix battling fellow olympians Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller for the jungle throne. Herman - Bruce was the lead in 35's New Adventures of Tarzan as well as Tarazan and the Green Goddess, and Tarzan in Guatemala.
Bruce was in other Bogart flicks as well. He was there for Dangerous Passage, Sahara, and Invisible Stripes. He played the lady's man to Ann Sheridan's Nora Prentiss and Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce among others. He was a regular in the 40's Lone Wolf series, but other than his role as Cody in "Treasure" I most remembered him for his ripsnorting adventure - action roles.
Posted in | »
|
Fathergeek here with some farewell words about "Super" Producer Carlo Ponti who died in Geneva Switzerland on Janurary 10th. Why? well back in the late 60's and early 70's when Harry's mom and I were in Film School it seemed every movie that was worth bothering to go to had his name somehow attached. From massively popular epics like DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, to the "must see" contemptory Film School list toppers like ZABRISKE POINT, CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS, and BLOW-UP.
Carlo was cutting edge, a filmmaker who had the habit of making important film. Whether it was heavy duty Arthouse classic masterworks like LA STRADA, TWO WOMEN, and MARRIAGE ITALIAN-STYLE; or hardcore Italian "Giallo" with lots of grit like Robert Bloch's TORSO, OASIS OF FEAR, and THE BEAST. Carlo even gave us top of the line Pop-exploitation fare like POLICEWOMAN, and ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN, in 3-D no less. He even threw-in a couple spagetti-fu flicks for good measure, like HERCULES VS. KING FU. Yeah, he covered alot of bases as a producer from the 1940's thru the 90's.
Posted in | »
|
Hey folks, Harry here with some bad news. Yvonne DeCarlo has passed away. For film fans and television lovers - this is a sad day. She's probably best known as that hottie that Ol Moses fell for in that Technicolor beauty, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS - or as the wondrous undead Lily Munster.
But that's not how she started out - for years in the forties she was just playing eye candy in feature films... a showgirl in THIS GUN FOR HIRE, a handmaiden on the ROAD TO MOROCCO, a girl in a cafe wondering, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS or as Princess Wah-Tah in THE DEERSLAYER (1943). She played Chorus Girls, Secretaries, Handmaiden's, Companions, Office Clerks, Hat Check Girls - until...
Posted in | »
|
|
|
