Friday, October 10, 2008

Turner Classic Movies will air a 24 hour Paul Newman marathon starting Sunday (Oct. 12th) at 5 a.m. (schedule here). Newman has always been one of my favorites, and he makes a roasted garlic salsa that I can pretty much eat with a spoon. The marathon is a pretty nice list, obviously they couldn't get the rights to everything. No Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, no The Hustler, two of my (and everybody's) favorite Newman movies.

On this list, I'd put a plug in for Hud, which is probably one of Newman's "classic" movies that few have actually seen. Torn Curtain is a bit slow for Hitchcock and for Newman, but it's worth seeing. And if you haven't seen Cool Hand Luke, really, isn't this the time?

Enormously cool and enormously generous, willing to be goofy on Letterman, Newman has inspired a bunch of tributes. If you've seen the classic movies, I'd put a plug in for a trio of modern movies that show Newman lost none of his aura and charm in old age. The Hudsucker Proxy is always regarded as a lesser Coen brothers movie, but I loved it. Tim Robbins really should do more comedy. Newman is great as the evil robber baron. In Where the Money Is, Newman embraces his age, playing an old con man lured back in for one more big hit by a younger generation. It's a low budget sort of crime movie and worth seeing. And Nobody's Fool is probably mentioned too often to be considered overlooked, but if you can bear to look at Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith in a drama, this is worth seeing. It's about a guy getting ground down by life, who may not know what kind of legacy he is leaving his town and his friends. Unlike Newman, who left a hell of a legacy behind him.

Labels: movies, obit, youtube goodness

11:15 bone daddy

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke dies.
And so the last of the triumvirate of early sci-fi giants, along with Heinlein and Asimov, is gone. Phil Dick once said that every time someone used a robot that thought it was human he should get paid. For Clarke, it's every time a giant spaceship hovers over a city and people gather together to look up in awe and fear. Childhood's End is a legitimate classic. The stories stay with me more. "The Star" and "Nine Billion Names of God" are perfect, mind-blowing constructions. R.I.P.

Clarke is eulogized at Salon.

Labels: Books, obit, sci-fi

23:31 bone daddy

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Gary Gygax, RIP. Really tough to overstate how Dungeons & Dragons changed the way we (boys) played in the past three decades.

Labels: games, obit

08:42 bone daddy

Monday, March 03, 2008

Jeff Healey dies at 41, apparently from the same cancer that took his sight.

Labels: music, obit

17:28 bone daddy

Monday, February 11, 2008

Roy Scheider dies. With Jaws and The French Connection and, I have to add, Blue Thunder there were a good two or three years where this guy stood with Burt Reynolds and Marc Singer in the trifecta of movie masculinity for me. Not saying that was entirely a good thing, but there it is. Other people had John Wayne, I had Hooper and Beast Master.

Labels: movies, obit, sharks

10:50 bone daddy

Friday, January 18, 2008

Bobby Fischer Died Yesterday [NYT obit]

Labels: obit

10:45 cdogzilla