I’ve watched this eulogy for Muhammad Ali about a dozen times, and it’s still the greatest ever. Enjoy.
Tag: Entertainment
Menacing Talent
I see with sadness that veteran Brit actor David Warner has gone to join the Choir Invisibule, and the screen has lost one of its better character actors in consequence.
My favorite of his roles is in the (apparently-forgotten) time-travel piece, Time After Time, in which he played Jack The Ripper to Malcolm McDowell’s H.G. Wells (storyline here).
What I loved about this movie was that when H.G Wells (the good guy) is transported from his comfortable Victorian life forward to modern-day San Francisco, he finds it incredibly difficult to cope. Not so for the Ripper (Warner), who finds that evil transcends culture and, for that matter, time as well — and among San Francisco’s prostitute population, he has an even greater choice of victims than in 19th-century London. And Warner is beyond-words excellent in the role.
R.I.P.
Old-Time
As an Ole Phartte of some renown, imagine my gleeful chuckles when reading about this man’s requirements for employment at his business:
A Welsh dessert shop boss has shared the most brutal job advert you’ve ever seen on Facebook, but has been universally praised for his no-nonsense attitude.
And if you don’t give at least one approving “attaboy” when you read the ad, we can’t be friends.
Here’s a similar no-nonsense attitude, but in precisely the opposite direction.
We run Britain’s strictest pub – no phones or kids are allowed inside and anyone who swears is BANNED
As one would imagine, I would be in real danger here — although I’ve found that the more I drink, paradoxically, the less I swear. (Regular Drinking Buddies Mr. Free Market, The Englishman and Doc Russia might contradict this, though.)
Whatever: I would happily guard my tongue at the Fox & Goose to be free from screaming children and fucking (oops) cell phones. The only thing that might cause me to give the place a miss is that I’m not that fond of Samuel Smith beer — but then again, life is full of compromises. innit?
Unwanted Feature
Here’s another thing about this so-called “Modern Lifestyle” that is a stone in my soul’s shoe:
A SUPERYACHT owned by a Russian tycoon boasting an eye-watering £61million price tag is set to be auctioned off after being seized.
The stunning 240ft vessel – named The Axioma – has a catalogue of bougie features including six decks, a pool with a swim-up bar and even a cinema.
What is it with having an in-home movie room these days? You can’t open a real estate listing without seeing a windowless room with a giant screen and a few overstuffed easy chairs in it, and if I ever bought a house with such a “feature”, all that crap would be tossed out and replaced with something of redeeming social value — like a tasteful, fully-stocked bar — before the ink was dry on the closing documents.
Here is where I could hang out with a few friends, enjoy good fellowship, conversation and companionable drunkenness, all in a friendly setting. Maybe a TV screen in the corner so we could catch a decent game or a Grand Prix maybe, but live sporting events are different from movies, as a moment’s thought will prove: they are definitely group entertainment.
Movie houses are, almost by definition, not a place for gathering and social interaction. Oh sure, you enjoy the movie “experience” together (not that too many modern movies actually provide much of an experience, don’t get me started), but that’s it.
“Oh, but Kim,” I hear the cry, “it’s really a place for your teenage kids to hang out with their friends.”
Yeah, I really want my teenage daughter hanging out in a dark room with her testosterone-laden boyfriend, with the sound turned up loud lest parents actually hear what’s really going on in there. Or if there’s a whole group of them, to be greeted by a sea of thrusting pimply adolescent backsides when I walk in the room.
Okay, enough of that. 
Or if not a bar, then a gun room. Yeah, a wall full of cabinets such as below, inside a securely-locked door and suitably-impregnable walls:
Add a decent cleaning station / workbench, and I think you can all see where I’m going with this one.
Of course, someone might say that this would not be a place where I could entertain my friends — but clearly, you don’t know my friends.
Whatever alternative use you can dream up for that room, you can be sure that you’d get more enjoyment out of it than can be had from a screening of Fast & Furious 207 or whatever other childish comic-book action comes out of Hollyweird.
Mumbles In The Darkness
Here’s an article which resonated with me:
Why are today’s TV shows and movies so GRAY?
I’ve now got to the point where the movie has been consistently dark during the first five or ten minutes, off I go to somewhere else. Ditto the Brit movies in which the dialogue is either mumbled, spoken in an unintelligible accent or both. Also, the ones where impenetrable slang is in more than half the dialogue — I know, it’s realism, but still — I don’t expect characters to speak Received English via the Royal Shakespeare Company either.
And for gawd’s sake, S-L-O-W D-O-W-N when you speak your lines.
Pardon me if I just want to know what the hell is going on in your precious Work Of Art. Cinema is becoming like modern art, where the expression is so personal that it needs explanation by the auteur. And don’t give me that “mood” jive, either. You wanna see a mood, just watch my expression as I hit the “outta here” button on the remote.
I do make an exception for the Scandi-noir movies and TV shows, because the Scandis only ever get about two hours of sunlight a day, so an average production would take years to shoot if they waited for sunny days.
But even that’s a problem: in every police station I’ve ever been in (and there have been quite a few hem hem), the rooms are brightly lit to almost daylight levels. In the movies, I’m constantly yelling at the screen for someone to hit a light switch.
No wonder they miss so many clues: they can’t fucking see them.
And no wonder so many people are ditching Netflix, Prime et al., when so many movies are being made according to the Intangible / Unintelligible Sludge formula.
Welcome Back, Jack
Am I the only one who found this little turnabout amusing?
Appetite for money, of course. When Depp was first involved in that “#BelieveAllWomen” court case, Disney dropped him like a hot rock.
I wrote this at the time:
Considering that Depp’s performance was the only thing that made the whole thing at all watchable, this should be its death knell, and not a moment too soon. I watched the first two Pirates movies with huge enjoyment, lost interest after that. I doubt that anything Disney does would make me watch another one, unless the new lead character was portrayed by Carol Vorderman, in the nude.
Now that Depp’s been cleared of all the accusations made by his loony ex-houri, no doubt the foul moneygrubbers at Woke Disney will be all too willing to welcome him back into the fold, to play Captain Jack Sparrow for the umpteenth time so they can refill their vault at Gringotts Bank.
And I hope that he tells them to go and fuck themselves.