Just Wrong

I don’t follow any kind of professional fighting (boxing, MMA, whatever) so I first thought Paige VanZant was Ronnie’s daughter or something.  Of course, I was wrong, about that anyway, as she’s quite well-known in fighting circles:

Okay, she cleans up pretty nicely, albeit in that not-quite-trailer-park kinda way:

But that’s not what’s upsetting me.  This is:

What the hell kind of gun is young Paige holding?  It looks like she’s about to shoot one of those USPS book-boxes.

Yeah, I know, it’s a Kriss Vector (sounds like an old Marvel villain’s name), and all the cool kids are shooting them.

My feelings on all these modernistic guns is, I think, well known;  but seriously?  This is uglier than a USPS book-box.  1960’s-era Buck Rogers Mattel toy comes to mind.

And all this at $1,600 just to shoot the silly 9mm Europellet?  Pass.

I need to get my busted M1 Carbine to the gunsmith.

Doesn’t look as cool as the Mattel thingy, but mine also has a 15-round (non-Glock) magazine (which isn’t relevant as I don’t own a Glock pistol anyway).

And I’ll take the .30 Carbine over the 9mmP every day of the week.

Classic Beauty: Suzanne Pleshette

I’ve loved this extraordinary woman since I was a 6-year-old boy, when I tagged along with my parents to see Roman Holiday  (a.k.a. Lovers Must Learn ), coming soon to TCM.  OMG that face, that laugh, and that voice

Not to mention her other attributes:
   

Here’s a political joke:

If I’d ever woken up next to her, you’d have had to pull me out of bed at gunpoint — with no guarantee of my compliance, either.

Classic Beauty: Greer Garson

It is a great pity that most memories of flame-haired beauty Greer Garson are going to be in black-and-white, because she was extraordinary even by the standards of her time.

The best part about Garson is that initially, she never had any intentions of becoming a movie actress. She graduated from university with a degree in French and 18th-century literature and worked in an ad agency in her native London. Then she got into some stage acting, and when she was spotted at a performance by L.B. Mayer, he offered her an acting contract on the spot. Her effect was immediate: she got an Oscar nomination (the first of seven) for her very first movie role in Blossoms In The Dust, and won Best Actress for Mrs. Miniver  just a couple years later.

Most British actresses were portrayed in the contemporaneous stereotype of the calm, classy woman, but Greer Garson somehow managed to escape the typecasting occasionally, such as the dancer in Random Harvest (coincidentally, one of my all-time favorite romantic movies, by the way):

…and she was also capable of being not just beautiful, but sexy as well. Here she is in (yet another of my favorite movies) Mrs. Miniver, showing off her new hat to her husband, wearing a nightgown which… I don’t wanna talk about it:

Maybe it was an inadvertent act on the part of the movie’s director (I doubt it), but that scene is one of the most understated yet sexiest ever filmed — no nudity, no sexual banter, nothing but Greer Garson’s astonishing beauty. And in both the above movies (they came out in the same year, 1942) she was already thirty-eight years old, an advanced age by Hollywood standards.

Here are a few more examples of what I’m talking about:

If only they’d been taken in glorious Technicolor… but hey, I’ll take what I’ve been given.

Classic Beauty: Ruth Roman

I was re-watching a 1957 movie called 5 Steps To Danger on TCM (Turner Classic Movies), which featured Sterling Hayden and Ruth Roman, and once again was bewitched by Ruth’s low, sexy voice.  Her problem was that her face was too similar to Ava Gardner’s, and Gardner already had that space occupied.  Still, here she is:

She also had a steaming pair of legs, if that counts:

 

With all that, it’s still the voice that gets me on my takeoff run.  Watch 5 Steps  if you can find it — but be warned, the plot is typical of late-50s suspense not directed by Hitchcock, i.e. awful and cheesy.  She makes it worthwhile, though.

Hidden Gem

I am, as Regular Readers are aware, a huge fan of gloomy Scandi detective shows.  My latest binge was The Killing (on Prime), which I devoured, all twenty hours of it, over a couple days last week.

*Disclaimer:  I know that Denmark isn’t regarded as a Scandi country.  As far as I’m concerned, any country on the western shores of the Baltic which has damp, freezing, miserable weather, gets dark at about 4pm, and features actors speaking a language which sounds like a chicken with its throat half-cut, is a Scandi country.  Also, if the heroine detective — they’re all heroine detectives;  all the men are idiots, clowns or bad guys — is halfway between plain and ugly, and the plot is dense and contains about five different story lines, then it’s a Scandi detective movie.

As was The Killing, in absolutely every respect.

However, in this show I saw something out of the ordinary:  a woman with quite a large part, who was not halfway between plain and ugly.  Let me introduce you all to Marie Askehave:

In the TV show, she has coal-black hair which shows off those startling blue eyes to perfection:

Also, she’s one of those women who doesn’t do well in still photos — in a movie medium, though, she’s captivating.

The show’s good, too.


Lest anyone thinks I’m going overboard about plain-to-ugly Scandi female detectives, here’s The Killing‘s lead, Sofie Gråbøl:


…and that’s a studio pic — she looks far worse in the show.