television Archives - Page 10 of 25

I’m Adopting Victor Garber

I was visiting SamuraiFrog’s site and he noted that someone named Slpotchy has designated a day to adopt an actor. I would recommend you pick a character actor, as they are the unsung heroes of the entertainment world.

By adopting Character Actor X you are not expected to be an exhaustive resource on X, nor are you expected to have seen all movies in which X acted. No, none of that crap.

I would only ask that you promote the actor from time to time, and occasionally keep tabs on their progress (assuming he or she isn’t dead). If you want to do it up nice, make a l’il space on your blog where you can have a picture of them.

As I recently noted, I saw a fine production of Godspell at my church this past Sunday. I watched it with my wife and daughter. Unsurprisingly, my wife asked if I had had a recording of Godspell. I do, but my vinyl (unlike my CDs) is in such disarray that FINDING the recording of the Off-Off-Broadway production would take some time.

So I went online and, avoiding the dreaded Buying Something I Already Own In A Different Format, purchased the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack instead, since I did see the 1973 film.

The key casting change was the replacement of Stephen Nathan, who played Christ onstage, with Victor Garber, a talented young singer/actor who would go on to a distinguished stage career that would include two Stephen Sondheim musicals, Sweeney Todd and Assassins. Garber was a stronger singer than Nathan, and that improved things noticeably.

Though he’s not singing a solo here, I thought you’d enjoy seeing a video of the young Canadian Victor Garber in his very first motion picture, according to IMDB, where he plays the Lord. Where does one go after THAT?

Well, I’ve seen him in the movies Sleepless in Seattle, The First Wives’ Club, Titanic, Legally Blonde and, most recently, playing Mayor George Moscone in Milk. On TV, I’ve watched him in Cinderella (King Maximillian), Annie (Daddy Warbucks), Life with Judy Garland (Sid Luft), the Music Man (the Mayor), plus a guest on a variety of shows (I’ll Fly Away, Law & Order, Frasier). And, of course, his role in Alias, which I saw only for a couple seasons. I read that he’s going to play Sinestro in a Green Lantern movie, and given my attraction to all things green, I may just see that.

I’ve always liked those song-and-dance men who can do the dramatic as well, such as the late Jerry Orbach from Law & Order.

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: Frost/Nixon

Because Richard Nixon was the first President for whom I could have voted for – I didn’t – he has long held a special role in my life and my heart. In the day, it was nothing but anger and revulsion; since then, a more nuanced view. At the time, I thought he was destined to be one of the United States’ worst Presidents; in hindsight, merely one that was fatally flawed.

I saw the Oliver Stone-directed movie Nixon (1995), starring Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen, when it came out, with its warts and all. I enjoyed it well enough, but its quirky narrative style sometimes got in the way.

So last weekend, the wife and I did one of those “split date” things, with me going to the movies on Saturday and her on Sunday to see the more “conventional” filmmaker Ron Howard’s take on an event that took place after the Nixon Presidency, but which was necessarily all about it, Frost/Nixon.

I’ve found that a great number of people no longer remember David Frost, the “British satirist, writer, journalist and television presenter” who interviewed Nixon in 1977. There’s no current comparison who fully encapsulates it, but it’d be like Jay Leno or Larry King doing a hard-hitting interview of George W. Bush.

Most people who disliked Nixon wanted the interviews to be the mea culpa that Nixon never gave after the resignation, but felt that Frost was a lightweight who was was not up to the task. So it was that each participant had something to prove. Frost/Nixon turns out to be an intriguing film, not just the one-on-one, but the whole backstory leading up to the main event, including the need to secure the $600,000 for the interview, the slams of “checkbook journalism” and the desire to get the interview right.

Frost/Nixon is another play that was made into a movie. But unlike Doubt, it didn’t feel as stagy. One would not expect a historically-based movie about two guys talking to be so tense and yet so revealing of both men. Frank Langella, who is rightly nominated for best actor, “does” Nixon without being a caricature. In fact, the most revealing scene has Langella saying nothing. But look at his eyes! They spoke volumes about what was going on in Nixon’s mind. But the movie would collapse if Michael Sheen as Frost was not up to the task. Sheen, who played Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen, ends up being as worthy an acting partner for Langella as Frost was an adversary for Nixon.

Some critics inevitably kvetched about historic inaccuracies here and there, which almost always happens. I wondered if the last scene – which is REALLY funny – actually happened; it matters not. I was entertaned and I learned a few things.

Recommended.

Frost, who has interviewed the last seven U.S. Presidents and six British Prime Ministers (excluding, so far, the current ones) now works for Al Jazeera English.

See part of the Frost/Nixon interviews here (97 minutes) and here (10 minutes).

ROG

Do You Believe In Thaumaturgy?

My friend, the Hoffinator, wrote: “The headline I read included the phrase, ‘the thaumaturgic abilities of professors…’ I was curious, so I looked it up. Thaumaturgy is the performance of miracles. See if you can work it into a conversation…..”
Thus:
thaumaturgy [THAW-muh-tuhr-jee]-noun
The performance of miracles or magi.
thaumaturgic [thaw-muh-TUR-jik]–adjective
1. pertaining to a thaumaturge or to thaumaturgy.
2. having the powers of a thaumaturge.
thaumaturge [THAW-muh-turj]–noun
a worker of wonders or miracles; magician.
Also, thaumaturgist.
Interesting word. But it got me thinking that if pop songs replaced the word magic and its variants with thaumaturgy and ITS variants, it would make for some terrible scansion:

Black Thaumaturgic Woman by Santana

Thaumaturgic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf

Do You Believe In Thaumaturgy by the Lovin’ Spoonful

My Baby Must Be a Thaumaturge by the Marvelettes -hmm, actually that work, scansion-wise

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Emotionally intelligent signage
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The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.
-Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895
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DIY Dryer Sheets
Mix one part liquid softener to four parts water and place in an old spray bottle. Spray some on a dedicated washcloth and toss in the dryer along with the clothes. One bottle of liquid fabric softener lasts a very long time.
Here’s the website that has a lot of other good tips.
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Mark Evanier linked to the opening of a mid-1960s TV show called Branded, starring Chuck Connors (“The Rifleman”). My sisters and I used to play “Branded”. We’d sing the theme together and take turns being the commander breaking the “sword” over our knees. (Usually it was a stick, but we also used to rip this piece of thin cardboard that used to be on the hangers when they came back from the dry cleaners.) And yes, I still know the song by heart.
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Cool pics of the universe

ROG

C is for Cash

I felt that Johnny Cash was one of those characters that kept drifting in and out of my awareness. As a child, I was vaguely aware of him from his later 1950s like I Walk the Line (#17 pop, #6 country) and the even bigger pop hit Guess Things Happen That way (#11 pop, #8 country). 1963’s Ring of Fire was also a crossover hit.

Johnny Cash went through some commercially desolate years due in no small part to his drug use. Then in 1968, now clean, he decided to do a concert in Folsom Prison, California in January, which was released as an album in May of that year. Despite less than enthusiastic support of his record company, Columbia, the album became a big country hit. More surprisingly, it also became a crossover hit, getting up #13 on the pop charts. Jann Wenner, from a relatively new periodical called Rolling Stone, touted the album, which undoubtedly helped fuel its rise. Even more successful was his album At San Quentin, which spawned the #2 pop hit, A Boy Named Sue, penned by Shel Silverstein.

This led to Johnny getting a primetime show on ABC-TV for a couple years, featuring a wide range of artists including Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, Arlo Guthrie, Merle Haggard, Joni Mitchell, Odetta, Minnie Pearl, Pete Seeger, and many more.

Of course, even success has its downside. Contrary to the legend about one of his signature songs, Johnny Cash had taken a Gordon Jenkins tune called Crescent City Blues and changed it to Folsom Prison Blues.

He told Sun Records what he’d done, and eventually Jenkins, who said he had no problem with it. The version in 1955 was a relatively minor hit but the 1968 live version on Columbia was massive, and Jenkins (apparently pushed by his publisher) sued Cash and received a settlement. There is an album called Johnny Cash: Roots and Branches; you can hear 30 seconds of Crescent City Blues here; you can also read an analysis of Folsom Prison’s most iconic line, “I shot a man in Reno” here. Somehow, this ripoff of an existing song didn’t bother me as much as others, especially given the fact that John had ‘fessed up.

Johnny Cash, Live at San Quentin – Folsom Prison Blues
LINK

John continued with an up-and-down profile. He’d show up in supergroups such as the Highwaymen (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson) in 1985 or the Class of ’55 (Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison) in 1986; I have the latter on something called vinyl, BTW. But it wasn’t until a friend of mine sent me American Recording, the 1994 first album he performed produced by rock/hip hop producer Rick Rubin. The sparse sound was a revelation and I rediscovered Johnny Cash in that series of American albums: Unchained, Solitary Man, and The Man Comes Around, plus the posthumous A Hundred Highways and a boxed set. The defining song in his later years, of course was the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt.

Justin Timberlake, who beat out Johnny for a video award, said publicly that John should have one for Hurt and later conceived the posthumous video for God’s Gonna Cut You Down.

Johnny Cash died September 12, 2003, just months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash passed away.
ROG

Jack Johnson

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by boxing. I think this was a function of my paternal grandfather’s interest in watching it on television; boxing was on primetime TV from 1946 to 1964 on four different networks, including Dumont. It was a mix of admiration and horror, I think. I knew all the heavyweight boxing champions, and their approximate reign from John L. Sullivan to Jersey Joe Walcott to Joe Louis – the Brown Bomber to the undefeated Rocky Marciano to ~~Cassius Clay~~ Muhammad Ali.

No one, though, intrigued me more than Jack Johnson. Perhaps it was because he was the first black heavyweight champ, but more than likely it was because he seemed to annoy so many with his unforgivable blackness. He won the title in a brutalizing fight; I suspect that he fought that way as payback for being denied even the opportunity to fight for the crown for five years for reasons of race.

From the Wikipedia post: “[R]acial animosity among whites ran so deep that even a socialist like Jack London called out for a ‘Great White Hope’ to take the title away from Johnson — who was crudely caricatured as a subhuman ‘ape’ — and return it to where it supposedly belonged, with the ‘superior’ white race.” His 1910 “Fight of the Century” victory over former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries lead to riots by the white public, often leading to near lynchings of blacks.

Jack Johnson was the first person ~~persecuted~~prosecuted under the United States White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910 which not only prohibited white slavery, but also banned the “interstate transport of females for immoral purposes.” You may know it better as the Mann Act, which was so broadly worded that courts held it to criminalize many forms of consensual sexual activity. Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Berry were charged under it and Eliot Spitzer might have been.

I remember that my girlfriend at the time, her late father and I saw the movie The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander, both Oscar nominated, when it came out in 1970. We were all mesmerized and enthralled, though like many movies made from plays, it was more like the filming of a play than a true theatrical experience.

Last September, Congress, with the strong support of, among others, John McCain, passed a resolution to recommend that the President grant Johnson a “pardon for his 1913 conviction, in acknowledgment of its racist overtones, and in order to exonerate Johnson and recognize his contribution to boxing.” I can find no record suggesting that such a pardon was ever granted.

There’s an online comic book called The Original Johnson. The description: “Trevor von Eeden introduces the first really free black man.” It was just over a century ago, December 26, 1908– “ironically enough, Boxing Day in many countries– Jack Johnson beat Tommy Burns to become both the heavyweight champion of the world, and the most notorious black man on the planet.”

ROG