R.I.P. Val Kilmer

 h/t Borepatch

Val Kilmer, 65, of pneumonia as a complication of throat cancer. 

We first saw him in Top Secret:

Then he doubled down on his comedy chops with Real Genius:

Then got all serious on us as Tom "Iceman" Kazansky:

Took a turn as the hero in Willow:

Played the only good FBI agent in Thunderheart:

Then stole an entire movie out from under Sam Elliot, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Powers Booth, and Michael Biehn with a Doc Holiday that will stand as the pinnacle of the character for a century or more in Tombstone:

Then blew everyone away as The One That Got Away in Heat:

And finally, brought the "Iceman" character out for one moving last hurrah in Top Gun: Maverick, to save Pete "Maverick" Mitchell one last time, with screentime measured in seconds, in a blockbuster movie that single-handedly saved Hollywood's box office for an entire year.

As a Valley kid from the L.A. suburbs, he came up out of a prep school drama class that included Mare Winningham and Kevin Spacey as co-stars and classmates. Must've been one hell of a kick-ass high school play that year. 

True Story: In yet another horrible remake of the never-ever-should-be-a-movie Island Of Dr. Moreau, a young and far too full of himself Kilmer got tuned up, in front of God and everybody, by no less an actor's actor than Marlon Brando. Apparently Kilmer was giving free rein to frequent prima dona tantrums on set on location in Australia, amidst both a very troubled production, and Kilmer in the middle of being sued for divorce by his wife of seven years, Joanne Whalley, the pair having first met on the set of Willow. Witnessing the latest of these fits, in front of the entire production cast and crew, Brando loudly and succinctly offered Kilmer some withering face-to-face notes on his behavioral histrionics, as authoritatively related by several eyewitnesses on the set:

"Young man, you confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent. 

I'm going back to my trailer. Please have someone come and get me when all of us are ready to get back to work."

The set got pin-drop quit as Brando walked off set, because when Marlin Brando tells you that you suck as an actor, you suck as an actor. 

Kilmer apparently took this to heart, because shortly afterwards, Kilmer pulled his head out, settled down, and there were no further tantrums reported for the rest of the film. And it seems to have brought him back to earth for the rest of his career.

Silenced way too soon, and now finally taken from us all far too young.

R.I.P. Gene Hackman

Aged 95, at home with his wife and dog (sounds suspicious, but probably a gas or carbon monoxide problem - time will tell). Double Academy Award-winning actor with about a million movies to his credit (he was doing 2-5 movies/year in the 1980s and 1990s). His big break-out role was alongside Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as a member of the gang in Bonnie and Clyde. 

Followed it up a few roles later with his Best Actor performance, with Roy Scheider in The French Connection. 

Then made the rest of his 79 career movies. Not counting TV roles and plays by the dozen.  (If, for one example, you haven't seen March Or Die, it's apparently temporarily available in full and free with ads on YouTube. Great Foreign Legion flick.) Even in mediocre roles or movies, (and most of his were anything but that) Hackman could always be counted on for an eminently watchable performance, and could captivate an audience in even a small role, and probably just reading a cereal box. 

Phenomenal actor with a monumental body of work over 4 decades in Hollywood, and with the good grace to generally keep his personal opinions to himself, and focus on being a great actor, a trait far too rare in many lesser lights (and beside him, most of Hollywood is a lesser light). Most of SAG-AFTRA heaved a sigh of relief when he retired in 2004, because it meant any five other actors could finally get some work.

_________________

3/7/25 UPDATE: Based on additional information from the authorities in NM, it sounds, sadly, as if the final conclusion is that Hackman's wife caught and succumbed to complications of Hanta Virus (which is generally non-fatal and treatable if care is sought), leaving Hackman, 30 years her senior, decrepit, in poor health, crippled and befuddled with Alzheimer's, unable to medicate, feed, or care for himself, and he died about a week after she did, of cardiac complications, unfed for some time before he died, and possibly unaware that she was dead, or even who she was. They were only found at all (partially mummified days after death) accidentally, discovered by strangers. What a freaking tragedy.

We wish we could relate that we don't encounter barely functional little old women taking care of barely functional little old men, or vice versa, every single day in the course and scope of our employment, but it's actually the rule rather than the exception once the odometer turns past age 80 for either partner.

Just Saying...

Just beating Wilder to the punch.

R.I.P James Earl Jones

This movie clip alone so immortal, it's actually in the Hall OF Fame at Cooperstown. From a movie so iconic, it doesn't pay homage to the sport, the sport pays homage to the movie, every single year, when two major league teams are selected to play the annual Field Of Dreams game in Iowa, and no one thinks it strange.

Just one part of an enormous acting legacy of a once-poor, stuttering boy from Jim Crow Mississippi, later a Ranger-tabbed Army veteran, who became one of the most celebrated voices and actors of any generation. He never took himself too seriously, but always gave his best performance, on stage and screen for 65 years, from Broadway to Dr. Strangelove to Star Wars to The Lion King to The Big Bang Theory, and everything in between.

Aged 93 years, of natural causes, at his home in the Hudson Valley north of NYFC. A truly gentle and incomparable man.

X Gets The Square: R.I.P. Peter Marshall

Long-time game show host Peter Marshall dead at age 98, of kidney failure, at home with his family in Los Angeles. Best known for spending fourteen years on TV giving quicker-witted stars a chance to come up with outrageous ad lib answers to trivia questions.

I lost track of how many sick days from school his show was the only highlight of a day where the rest of daytime TV was filled with nothing on but horrendous soap opera melodramas or asinine "reality" freak shows, which meant turning the tube off, and actually doing my homework.

RIP Bob Newhart

Few comedians get a hit series. Fewer still get two. Even less than that, the number who earn Emmy Awards for guesting on someone else's hit show. Find one who was married to the same woman for 60 years, and there's only TV and stand-up comedy legend Bob Newhart.

Passed in Los Angeles Thursday, aged 94, at home, widowed since last year, and after a 64-year career in show business. Which is easier to show, than to tell.

Follow-up 1. Follow-up 2.

Thanks, Bob. For every glorious minute of it. We miss you already.

R.I.P. Donald Sutherland

Aged 88, in Miami, after a long illness, and a 60-year career in motion pictures, notably in roles in The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, M*A*S*H*, The Eagle Has Landed, Animal House, Ordinary People (as virtually the only cast member in that movie stupidly not nominated for an Oscar), Backdraft, and Space Cowboys, just among the DVDs sitting on the nearby shelves.

Besides working constantly, in his acting career he racked up an Emmy, two Gloden Globes, and an honorary Oscar in 2017 to correct a 50-year oversight by the Academy.

Baby Brother, one of Big Green's tank commanders during the Cold War, could do this bit of dialogue of one of our favorite scenes of Sutherland calling from Chez Leon from memory. It's how we'll always remember Sutherland, fondly.

"You don't want in this thing, you don't get in this thing. I cut you out of everything; I don't need you. 60 feet of bridge I can pick up almost anywhere. Schmuck!"

Pre-Occupied...

Sorry. Other than some fall cleaning, got busy binge-watching the first season of Tulsa King. Haven't watched network schlock since...pretty much this entire millenium, especially not when I worked in it. Looked at Yellowstain er, Yellowstone the first season, but as I noted at the time, it's a really crappy Wyoming tin-earred echo of The Godfather, except done far, far worse than Coppola on a mac-and-cheese budget, despite Kevin Costner trying to carry the entire series on his back. Which multiple seasons of continued production just proves that the average cable Nielsen viewer will give a thumbs-up to watching turds circle in a porcelain bowl, just for being slightly less turdly than everything else on TV, broadcast, cable, streaming, or whatever

Tulsa King, by contrast, is a completely fresh idea, and Taylor Sheridan (unlike that earlier effort) seems to have hit his stride with a new concept, rapidly becoming the Joss Wheedon of the 2020s. For a bonus, as extra features noted, and unlike Justified, they didn't keep trying to sell you northern L.A. county as Kentucky (which as Austin Powers noted, look as alike as Malibu and the South of France), they actually shoot this thing in Tulsa OK. Bad for employees in The Biz, but great for production value and OK locals. 

Without looking at the credits, spotting the always lovely Dana Delaney (whose voice is still music), and an aging Barry Corbin, in recurring roles was a special treat.

I don't do streaming, preferring to watch what I want on my terms, forever, and actually own it beyond their freshness date of expiration (Disn-idiots at ABC producing The Rookie who refuse to put that series out on DVD/BD, call your office). So (spoiler alert) the cliffhanger ending was a little bit of a piss-off. But so it goes. We can settle for seeing an entire season at a time when it's this fun to watch.

If you haven't given this one a look, it's highly recommended.

Fun fact: Stallone was passed over as 29th Italian extra behind the wedding cake in The Godfather, and every studio in town passed on his script for Rocky, twice. Proving the timeless truth of William Goldman's maxim about Hollywood: "Nobody in this town knows nothin'." 50 years later, someone occasionally catches a clue.

Haven't seen anything more interesting IRL lately to make any given day not a new version of SSDD.

Halloween Treat: A Haunting In Venice

Kenneth Branagh's first outing as Agatha Christie's brilliant sleuth Hercule Poirot was in Murder On The Orient Express in 2017, but was hopelessly overshadowed by the original 1974 film by Sidney Lumet, which was the last movie made of her works to gain Christie's full personal approval. Albert Finney was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal, Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for it, and the flick is a cinematic classic.

Branagh followed that up by remaking Death On The Nile for a COVID-delayed 2022 release, this time comparing unfavorably with Peter Ustinov in a career tentpole role in the 1978 film, playing Poirot flawlessly in the first of six movies, three onscreen, and three for TV. Even Branagh couldn't compete with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, and Lois Chiles getting her head blown off half a dozen times in different flashbacks, and he probably shouldn't have tried.

This time, Branagh selected Christie's Hallowe'en Party as the novel to loosely base this film on in his third outing as Poirot, a book which no one else has adapted for the screen before. It was an excellent choice, and he has finally hit his stride.

If you're a fan of old Hollywood, and want to see a solid whodunit, perfectly selected for a Halloween season release, with a solid cast, clever plot twists, by a brilliant actor/director, and with none of the woketarded nonsense that infects currently and happily on-strike Hollyweird and every piece of crap they burp out, preferring instead great entertainment for your time and money, this is your movie.

Branagh's earlier attempts had him doing the role of Poirot well, but not superbly, and making decent remakes, but it wasn't anything like career-best work, certainly not up to his earlier standards, and comparing second-best even to the earlier versions.

A Haunting In Venice is more like his work back in his Henry V days, when at 29 he was rightfully described as the Orson Welles of the era, and for which film he was nominated for Oscars for both Best Actor and Best Director, back when the award denoted actual merit. If he keeps churning out adaptations of Christie's novels and playing Poirot like this, he will be back on that perch to stay.

Rating: ★★★★ - Enthusiastically recommended. And frankly, the best flick of the paltry four offerings we've bothered to see this year, to date. You should only go if you like good movies.

R.I.P. Alan Arkin

 h/t Evil Blogger Lady

"Please...I know everybody on this island is complete and total crazy. But you, Whitaker Walt? You are crazy too?!?"

Age 89, yesterday, at his home in Carlsbad CA, presumably of natural causes. Eight decades in show business, nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his first feature film role (above) as Lt. Rozanov, with only a Tony, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and 40 years after he started in films, an Oscar, to show for it. He sparkled in every role he had, and his final work was a role as a voice in Minions: The Rise Of Gru only last year.

"Serpentine!"

So good, it was worth an homage thirty years later in HBO's Generation Kill:

And a couple of last looks, from 1991's The Rocketeer:

Some actors, you just watch. Some, you're going to miss. Alan Arkin was definitely the second kind.

It's Just An Illusion

h/t ASM@ Borepatch

Mosey over to Borepatch's blog, and read ASM's epiphany on a classic scene in Full Metal Jacket. 

My take?

You (ASM) know no recruit ever saw a doughnut on P.I. Kubrick didn't. 

You're still overthinking it. (And BTW, Pyle confessed to stealing the jelly doughnut in the scene without further prompting. Trying to pin this on Hartman's imaginary dastardly subterfuge is plainly bad movie-watching comprehension.)

The doughnut scene was just lazy screenwriting, and bad shorthand to make a point, nothing more nor less. That's the discovery. Hollywood only does that 24/7/365. (Lou Gossett did it even worse, when he won an Oscar for them making it look like he single-handedly ran a Navy OCS platoon in An Officer And A Gentleman. As If.)

Pyle's failure is that he's Pyle. I knew many Pyles. I had them in my recruit platoon. Some of them hid it better than others. Some didn't even try.

We had "Sniper", caught sighting in his M-16 on 1st MAF's helo as it landed on the parade deck. 

The "Filter Kings", caught smoking a half-smoked cigarette butt they'd found. (The scene where Profile is running around the entire formation coming back from the range in Heartbreak Ridge? Oh yeah, that happened many times in real life. Just ask the Filter Kings.) 

And two outright Thieves who should've been shit-canned from the Marine Corps on the spot in boot camp, and were later court-martialed and shit-canned from the FMF, for stealing ordnance in MOS School right after. Leavenworth Correctional is tough to explain on a resume.

The Corps oft-times fucks up by trying to salvage the unsalvageable, when it should just do them a mercy and kick them out as "unsuitable for military service" for life, the first time it becomes bog obvious.

Not everyone left MCRD in dress blues. Some leave it in Levis. Even two days before graduation. Deservedly.

The D.I.s were simply the illusion of perfection, because they only had to put the show on for their shift. It is the most elaborate staged performance in a military full of them. The Blue Angels have nothing on Marine boot camp for creating an illusion. Doesn't matter for recruits, because they're expected to make illusion reality, Or else.

The problem comes when over-eager recruiters are desperate for audience participation, and screen in kids they should've screened out, and knew they should've screened out.

Anybody can do documentaries on Marine boot camp, or BUDS Class 234. It's not hard.

The one I want to see, that would tear the mask off, would be to do a documentary on BUDS Class 234 Instructors Behind The Scenes. Or ditto for Ranger School or SFAS Cadre.

Then the penny would drop. 

The military would crap itself to stop that reality show getting out.

(That's a lot of why The Guardian failed at the box office, despite being an excellent flick: Costner's senior chief was shown to be just as damaged in his personal life as the trainee he was trying to reach, and it was a little bit too on-point for audiences to like. It broke the boot camp movie mold.)

I saw one of the sister platoons' D.I.s in the base PX about a year after boot. After a momentary flashback, the truth dawned. He was just another motor T sergeant, buying T-shirts and socks.

Indiana Jones V: Spoiler Alert

Image copyright Paramount Pictures:
IJ4: Indiana Jones And The Temple Of What The F**k?

Saw the trailer for IJ5 last week ahead of the final John Wick installment. No word yet on whether the stunts will be CGI, use 80 year-old Harrison Ford himself, or if they'll just sub in a stunt cripple. But word to SNL: If you need a guy to do Biden in comedy sketches, while Harrison's about the right age, Nick Nolte is the right age and identical mental status!

One To Beam Up: RIP Nichelle Nichols

 Aged 89 years, of heart failure.

Even in Hollywood, even in Old Hollywood, it's a pretty rare and special thing to be volun-told you're Jackie Robinson.

Most actors would give their right arm to be typecast like any member of the original crew of the Enterprise was.

Uhura got it done. And a class act all the way.

Last Post For Cpl. Agarn: R.I.P. Larry Storch

 

Age 99 years. Of natural causes, at home in his apartment in NYFC.

Prolific character actor, WWII Navy veteran, and friend of navy radio operator Bernie Schwartz, who went on to become Tony Curtis.

R.I.P. James Caan

Alan Badillion Trahern. Rookie actor going toe-to-toe with the Duke, and holding his own, the year before Wayne won the Oscar for Best Actor.

Epic, and prescient. Of course, we know that evil mega-corporations will never treat the world's population as pawns and resources, right?

About three scenes total in the whole movie, and steals the show in about a minute flat.

Even the Corleones have a line you don't cross.

Pacino, Duvall, and Caan. Absolute acting royalty, all together in one scene. Seventeen Oscar nominations, and two Oscars between the three of them, but never one for Caan, although he was nominated for this role.

And when you see his son Scott in Ocean's Eleven, you can still hear his old man's laugh.

The butcher's kid from Queens. Not a perfect guy, but one helluva great actor. Dead at 82, in Los Angeles, per family announcement, of undisclosed cause.

Mississippi. 

Jonathan E. 

Santino. 

Eddie Dolan.

What a ride. R.I.P.

Dungball Review: Without Remorse

h/t Pergelator

Pergelator liked this flick. Well, it's a free country. And we hate to harsh anyone's mellow, but...

Equal time for an opposing view: 

Au contraire.

Based on a Tom Clancy story, which isn't the same thing at all.

It's Hollywood-speak for "fornicated the original story up past 11, and all the way to FUBAR." Which, as is tediously predictable, they did.

Anyone who read the original book probably shot their TV screen to pieces by 10 minutes into this craptastic bastardization of Clancy's story.

The flick wasn't shot before a live audience, but the writers, producers, and director - oh, and even Jeff Bezos, CEO of flick-producer Amazon - of this steaming pile of feces definitely should be.

Garbage reworking of his stuff was why, after the third horrible re-write out of four movies, Clancy vowed they'd never get another one of his books to ruin, unless it was over his dead body.

Well, he died in 2013.

So, here's what you get.

If one never read the source novel, from which they lifted the main character's name, and the title, before they burned everything else in a fire, take Clancy's name off this, as should be done, and try to sell it otherwise, and it's nothing but a D- piece of straight to low-budget cable and Albanian distribution dungball movie. It's Cheeze Whiz on a cracker pretending to be caviar.

Without Remorse mainly refers to the way the authors of this cinematic pantload took a crap on Clancy's work and legacy.

At that, it succeeds beyond their wildest expectations.

If somebody gives this to you for free, give it back. You'll be happier, and it's 20 bucks (had you bought it), and 109 minutes of your life you won't have wasted. If you can't turn it down, take it to the skeet range, and glue it to a clay pigeon. Best use of it I can think of.

Our Rating: Watching this movie is like licking your dog's butt. Just less fun for your dog.

Top Gun: Maverick

(No spoilers. Okay, almost.)

Most sequels suck. Even more so, sequels based on 36-year-old original material.

Hollywood usually - in fact reliably - screws the pooch on nearly all of them, because they can, and because most producers aren't even 36 years old. Now you know why they screw the pooch so often.

This is the exception that proves that rule. Cruise wouldn't let them screw this one up, not least because he was one of the producers (and let's face it, without him, as producer or not, there is no Top Gun sequel.)

This was in the can 2½ years ago, but COVID kept getting in the way of its release, and it was pushed from a year ago to last Thanksgiving to, finally, this Memorial Day weekend. It was worth the wait.

If you didn't like the original, don't bother. If you really liked the original, and saw it in the theaters, get yourself back to one now, and see this film. Ideally, in an IMAX theater. This movie is was what IMAX was made for, and this movie was shot for IMAX. You've never seen flying sequences like this, and as Jerry Bruckheimer said in lead-in interviews, you probably never will again either.

It tells a new story, but wraps itself in enough of the original to be satisfying. They couldn't get Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Clarence Gilyard, or Rick Rossovich back for this one, let alone older-than-dirt dinosaurs like James Tolkan (90), Tom Skerrit (88), or Michael Ironside (72) but the use of Val Kilmer was priceless.

And if Jennifer Connelly had been cast as the original Penny Benjamin and seen in the original film, we'd get why Maverick broke rules for her, but she'd have been jailbait at the tender age of 16 when the original premiered (she did Labyrinth that year). And we've been in hardcore lust with her since at least 1991, when she did both Career Opportunities and The Rocketeer (both of which you should catch some time, even if just for her). It also helps that at 51 now, and 48 when this was filmed, time has been far kinder to her than it has to currently best-left-in-your-80s-memories Kelly McGillis, now 64, and looking like somebody's cat-lady box wine granny. >shivers<. (Don't look. You were warned.)

You want to know spoilers, beyond the eleventeen trailers released over the last two years? Okay: you haven't seen your last Tomcat dogfight. Want more? Go. See. The. Movie.

You won't be disappointed. 

Our Rating: Fleet Admiral - 5 stars.

"Maverick is cleared for launch on Cat 1..."

"It's Always February 2nd. And There's Nothing I Can Do About It..."

 

At some point today, Watch The Movie.

Even if you've seen it a hundred times, it never gets old.

And it's probably as good as almost anything else you could do.

Dr. Johnny Fever Signs Off: R.I.P. Howard Hesseman

 

"So long, fellow babies. The Doctor is out...Way Out. Oh, and I almost forgot...BOOGER!"

Nice guy, 50-year career as a consistently working actor (which alone put him ahead of 90% of the barristas, waiters, and valets in Tinseltown), and generally inoffensive fellow whose politics you generally never knew and seldom heard about (which puts him ahead of 99% of the other working actors in Tinseltown). Dead of surgical complications, a month short of his 82nd birthday.

Best known for his role on WKRP In Cincinatti, but also Head Of The Class, and yet another 20-year "overnight" success (you can catch him in episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Dragnet, The Rockford Files,  The Bob Newhart Show). Never going to get an Oscar, nor even likely an Emmy (nominated, but no luck there), but fun and funny to watch, and a good memory from happier times. Even worked as a real DJ on a Frisco underground station to prepare for his role on WKRP. Survived by his wife of 33 years. And millions of saddened fans.

R.I.P. Sidney Poitier

 

Among the greatest character intros in film history.

Poitier already had an Oscar; Steiger earned his for this role.

Sidney Poitier, one of the most monumentally talented film actors of all time, and winner of multiple awards and honors (from back when they meant something), dead at 94, of natural causes, at his home in the Bahamas. Not a bad life for a kid from Miami, from when drinking fountains were still labeled "White" and "Colored".