birthday Archives - Page 12 of 49

Mary Elizabeth “Sissy” Spacek turns 70

Recommended: In the Bedroom; The Straight Story

Although I never saw either Carrie or Coal Miner’s Daughter, I’ve seen Sissy Spacek in a slew of movies, so many that I had to look them up on IMDB.

Three Women (1976). Robert Altman film about three women in a western desert town. It was creepy, as I recall.

Missing (1982). It was a Costa-Gavras (Z) political drama in a South American country on the precipice of a military coup. American activist Charles Horman (John Shea) suddenly disappears. Spacek plays his wife Beth, who can find no information from either the new rulers or from the American consulate. Her father-in-law Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) joins Beth in the search, despite their political differences. A real thriller.

Crimes of the Heart (1986). “Three sisters from a rather dysfunctional family in the South are gathered together for a birthday. One can’t seem to stay in a relationship for long, one was just released on bond for shooting her senator husband, and the other is an aspiring actress.” Well-acted but stagey, if memory serves.

The Nineties

The Long Walk Home (1990). The Mongomery (AL) bus boycott of 1955/1956 was “a decided inconvenience for Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek), a well-to-do white woman. Now, Miriam must drive to the black section of town to pick up her maid Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) and bring her to work.” I recall it as pretty good, albeit sober.

JFK (1991). Spacek played the wife of the crusading district attorney wife of the Louisiana district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), who is skeptical that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby each acted alone. Liz Garrison served as a sounding board, I believe.

If These Walls Could Talk (1996 TV movie). An anthology “about three disparate women coping with unexpected pregnancies.” Spacek is in the middle section in 1974 “when Barbara, who already has four kids, tackles another one. A pretty good, if overly earnest, film.

The Straight Story (1999). A G-rated David Lynch film about “a trip made by 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth in his final role) from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion, Wis., in 1994 while riding a lawnmower. The man undertook his strange journey to mend his relationship with his ill, estranged, 75-year-old brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). Spacek plays Alvin’s daughter Rose. This was REALLY good and quite touching.

21st Century

In the Bedroom (2001). “A New England couple’s college-aged son dates an older woman who has two small children and an unwelcome ex-husband.” This is Spacek’s best performance among the ones on this list. “Quietly wrenching…”

Tuck Everlasting. I’m fairly certain I saw it, but the details of the book adaptation are failing me.

North Country. I recall that Charlize Theron was quite good as “Lori Jenson, who took a job at a Minnesota iron mine in 1975. She and other female miners endured harassment from male co-workers.” But I’m not remembering Spacek.

Get Low (2009). I saw the movie. Fortunately, I wrote about it, and the details are refreshed.

The Help (2011). She played the old woman pushing back against her daughter’s bigotry.

Sissy Spacek turns 70 on Christmas Day 2019.

Robin and Maurice Gibb would have been 70

The working title for the film was Saturday Night

Bee Gees 1977 — Barry, Robin, Maurice Gibb, 1977

Robin and Maurice Gibb, fraternal twin brothers and 2/3s of the BeeGees, would have been 70 on December 22.

Maurice “died unexpectedly on 12 January 2003, at age 53, from a heart attack, while awaiting emergency surgery to repair a strangulated intestine.” Robin had contracted pneumonia, went in and out of a coma, and “died on 20 May 2012 of liver and kidney failure” at age 64.

This leaves Barry as the only brother Gibb remaining, as I noted here. What more can I say about these guys beyond what I’ve already written?

I’ve always liked this anecdote: “When Bee Gees manager Robert Stigwood was producing a movie about a New York disco scene, the working title for the film at that time was Saturday Night. Stigwood asked the group to write a song using that name as a title, but the Bee Gees disliked it.

“They had already written a song called ‘Night Fever’, so the group convinced Stigwood to use that and change the film to Saturday Night Fever… The string intro of ‘Night Fever’ was inspired by ‘Theme from A Summer Place’ by Percy Faith…”

While their disco-era music was fine, I always felt their earlier stuff is still somewhat overlooked. They never received a Grammy or An American Music Award before 1978. They did make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, based on the whole body of their work.

LISTEN

I decided to fill this, in part, with some BeeGees covers. Coverville has a necessarily incomplete list. Chart action is from US Billboard charts; some of these songs were bigger hits in the UK and elsewhere.

Bee Gees Medley – Perpetuum Jazzile, which popped up on that “next song” feature on YouTube
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart – Al Green
More Than a Woman – Tavares, from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, #33 pop, #36 RB in 1978
To Love Somebody – Roberta Flack

BeeGees songs from SNF I had not previously linked to:

How Deep Is Your Love
Night Fever, #1 pop for eight weeks, #8 RB in 1978
More Than a Woman

Songs from the first BeeGees greatest hits album that I had not previously linked to

Holiday, #16 in 1967
I Started a Joke, #6 in 1969
First of May, #37 in 1969
Massachusetts, #11 in 1967
Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You
Tomorrow, Tomorrow – #54 in 1969; only on the CD, replacing Spicks and Specks

Actor Bill Nighy turns 70

Love Actually

Although I’ve seen relatively few films featuring the British character actor Bill Nighy. I’ve enjoyed most of them, or at least him, quite a bit. The Bookshop (2017) my wife liked more than I, but we both loved him.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2010) was delightful. The sequel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015) was a lesser effort.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) was overstuffed with storyline. After seeing Notes on a Scandal (2006), my wife said she felt as though she needed a shower afterward, and I understood what she meant.

Love Actually

But my favorite Bill Nighy film is the first one of his I saw, Love Actually (2003). I could come up with descriptions, but why do that when Jaquandor has done it for me.

“I wouldn’t be so enchanted with Love Actually if the movie wasn’t so wickedly funny. There isn’t a scene with Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), the aging rocker, that doesn’t leave me grinning at the very least… I’d love to see a biopic of aged, battered old rocker Billy Mack, who late in the movie admits that his life, though lonely, has been a wonderful life.”

Jaquandor also speaks to the other attributes of the film. “Few movies seem as full of real people, to me, as Love Actually. That’s a testament, really, not just to the writing, but the entire production, because the movie by its nature has to rely on its actors and editors to make the whole thing really come to life.

“Since each story in the movie is basically told in miniature, each cast member is put in the position of having to knock each scene out of the park. Luckily for the movie, they accomplish this.”

He quotes the late Roger Ebert: “I once had ballpoints printed up with the message, No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough. ‘Love Actually’ is too long. But don’t let that stop you.” [Emphasis added.]

In fact, I haven’t seen the film in quite a while. I should remedy that.

Actor Jeff Bridges turns the Big 7-0

Starman: I do know the rules.

Somehow, I have a difficult time thinking of Jeff Bridges turning 70 because of Sea Hunt. Jeff appeared in four episodes, and his eight-years-older brother Beau a couple of times in the series. Sea Hunt starred their late father Lloyd, an early syndicated show in the late 1950s.

You probably know Lloyd Bridges best from the movie Airplane! Actually, Jeff and his brother both made their film debuts, without billing, alongside their mother Dorothy Dean Bridges (née Simpson) in the film The Company She Keeps (1951).

While I’ve seen Jeff in a few films, I’ve NOT seen most of his iconic roles. Need to fix that, surely. I did catch him in The Last Picture Show (1969), The Fisher King (1991), Iron Man (2008), and Crazy Heart (2009).

Starman (1984) which I loved, has one of my favorite pieces of dialogue:
Starman [Jeff Bridges]: Okay?
Jenny Hayden [Karen Allen]: Okay? Are you crazy? You almost got us killed! You said you watched me, you said you knew the rules!
Starman: I do know the rules.
Jenny Hayden: Oh, for your information pal, that was a yellow light back there!
Starman: I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.

I have soundtracks of two Bridges films that I did not see, Against All Odds (1984) and Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), the latter containing Joe Jackson songs. I also have the Crazy Heart soundtrack, on which Bridges gives credible performances.

Bowling

But I missed TRON (1982), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1988), and Hell or High Water (2016), among others. And I have never seen, all the way through, The Big Lebowski (1998). I’m quite aware of its cultural significance of The Dude.

The Big Lebowski played at the Madison Theatre, three blocks from my house, less than a half-decade ago, but the timing didn’t work out. Now I have seen large chunks of it, and for that matter, TRON, on TV from time to time. If the Madison ever reopens and brings it back, I’ll be in line.

Jeff Bridges turns the Big 7-0 today.

Garry Shandling would have been 70

Zen Diaries

In the 2016 article, Why Garry Shandling Was One of the Greatest Jewish Comedians Ever, Jason Diamond noted, “His persona was an anxiety-ridden, grimacing, guarded, confused man on the verge of losing control.” I think I related to that.

Though his two signature shows were initially on premium cable, I managed to see many episodes of each of them. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which he co-created with Alan Zweibel, ran from 1985 to 1990 on Showtime. The edited reruns started playing on FOX, which I watched regularly, starting in 1988.

Like The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show decades earlier, the series frequently broke the “fourth wall” and spoke directly to the audience There were 72 episodes, and it began with the intentionally silly theme.

No flipping

His experience as the frequent guest host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson led to his next series. “In 1992, Shandling launched another critical and commercial success by creating the mock behind-the-scenes talk show sitcom The Larry Sanders Show… It ran for 89 episodes… on HBO.”

It featured Jeffrey Tambor as sidekick Hank Kingsley, Wallace Langham as Phil, and the late Rip Torn, who died in July 2019, as Artie, “the foul-mouthed, dyspeptic talk show producer.”

I don’t think I subscribed to Home Box Office regularly, yet somehow I managed to view several episodes. The finale was titled “Flip,” a reference to Sanders saying to TV audience, “no flipping.” I watched it in a Boston hotel either the day I taped my JEOPARDY! episodes or the night before, in September 1998.

He even co-wrote with David Rensin Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host: The Autobiography of Larry Sanders in the voice of his alter-ego, published in 1999. Ken Levine wants you to meet comedian/writer Jeff Cesario– He was also a writer/producer on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW.

Back when I used to watch those things, “Shandling hosted the Grammy Awards in 1990, 1991, 1993, and 1994. He hosted the Emmy Awards in 2000 and 2004 and co-hosted (giving the opening monologue) in 2003.

Dead at age 66

“Shandling suffered from hyperparathyroidism, a condition that can be fatal. On March 24, 2016, Shandling died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California at age 66… The autopsy showed that he died from a pulmonary embolism… On February 4, 2019, Shandling’s estate bestowed $15.2 million to benefit medical research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.”

In The New Yorker, Naomi Fry describes Judd Apatow’s four-hour documentary for HBO, The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Janis Hirsch briefly worked on the first series, where she had a less-than-positive experience. Nevertheless, she recommended the study.

Both Naomi Fry and Jason Diamond noted “the scene in the ‘Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers’ episode of ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ Specifically, the part where Martin Starr’s Bill comes home to an empty house, fixes himself a snack and watches one of Shandling’s sets…

“It’s the connection, those few moments removed from the real world that Bill gets, that makes that scene so easy to relate to. The lonely kid doesn’t feel so alone for a few minutes.” That was a gift of Garry Shandling for many, including his peers.

Garry Shandling would have been 70 on November 29.