Miscellaneous Heathen

Saturday Night Live now has its first second-generation castmember in Abby Elliot, an Upright Citizens' Brigade/Groundlings alum who also happens to be Letterman fixture and 1994-95 SNL cast member Chris Elliot's daughter. Bonus: Elliot is the granddaughter of 50s comic Bob Elliot.

By John Hodgman:

1. Dr. No (1962, Sean Connery). It all starts here, when Connery introduces himself at the baccarat table. Ursula Andress wows audiences as she strides out of the sea in a belted bikini as Honey Rider (the image is iconic enough that it's been referenced twice since then, first by Halle Berry in the forgettable "Die Another Day," and then in the #2 film by Bond himself). Jack Lord co-stars as Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA counterpart; Lord was already too famous from Hawaii 5-0 to continue in the role, however, and the role proved somewhat intermittent anyway -- since '62, he's been in 9 films (counting the upcoming Quantum) and been played by 7 people (most recently Jeffrey Wright).

2. Casino Royale (2006). Daniel Craig renews the entire franchise. It's really that simple. That's a little over-simplistic; they did well by hiring Judi Dench a few films ago, but the wholesale reboot here makes the whole affair seem fresh, even if the parkour sequence seems a bit contrived up front.

3. Goldfinger (1964, Connery). Look, how do you NOT love a film wherein Honor Blackman introduces herself as "My name is Pussy Galore?" The other star of this one is the Aston-Martin DB5 (the same make and model Craig's Bond wins at poker in Casino Royale) chock full of, shall we say, aftermarket goodies. ("Ejector seat? You're joking!" "I never joke about my work, 007".)

4. From Russia, with Love (1963, Connery). By far the most complexly plotted of the original films, it's still somehow under-appreciated by modern fans. Bonus: nemesis Red Grant is played by Robert Shaw, later famous as the salty old fisherman Quint in Jaws. The gadget thing starts here with a fantastic trick briefcase.

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, George Lazenby). The odd one out; you can win bar bets by knowing this Australian model's name. The story is that Connery left the role for fear of being typecast, and Lazenby got the nod. Then Connery decided to come back one more time (for 1971's Diamonds are Forever), and poor old George got the boot. The film is quieter and a bit more subtle than most Bond outings; it's also the only one with an actual romance (until 2006, anyway). Bond's paramour in this one is played by Diana Rigg, and by the film's end he's married her. Sadly, she's also murdered by arch-nemesis Blofeld (a viciously cackling Telly Savalas!) before the credits roll. [Blofeld, Bond's most persistent antagonist, appears or orchestrates action in five films, but shows his face in only three. In those, he's played by three different actors: Savalas here, but previously Donald Pleasance ("Halloween") in "You Only Live Twice" and subsequently by Charles Gray (the Criminologist from "Rocky Horror") in "Diamonds are Forever."]

6. GoldenEye (1995, Pierce Brosnan). I always thought it was cool that Brosnan got a second shot at Bond after NBC wouldn't let him out of "Remington Steele" to take the role in '86. It's a damned shame only one of his films is worth watching. It's only in checking facts to write this that I realize why this may be: GoldenEye was directed by martin Campbell, who also directed Casino Royale. The plot here is more plausible than most, too -- post-USSR heavy weapons are ending up in the wrong hands, and Bond has to stop it. It earns extra points by casting Royal Shakespeare alum Sean Bean as the bad guy, and even MORE points by returning to classic nomenclature with Famke Janssen's lethel "Xenia Onatopp." Somewhere, Fleming is smiling. (Robbie "Hagrid" Coletrane makes his first appearance here, too, as ex-KGB Bond associte Zukovsky.)

7. Live and Let Die (1973, Roger Moore). Bond does the Voodoo, and fights that 7-Up dude. No, really. Actually, the main bad guy here is the mysterious Mister Big, played by Yaphet Kotto (see also "Homicide"), but Geoffrey Holder does appear as Baron Samedi, a voodoo priest. Jane Seymour plays a virginal (until Bond gets to her, anyway) clairvoyant. This one's the first Moore outing, and includes the delightfully absurd super-magnetic Rolex with a bezel that doubles as a circular saw. Suffice it to say that this is where the gadgets get goofy.

8. Moonraker (1979, Moore). It's terrible -- a few years after Star Wars, and even Bond is in space -- but it was also the first one I saw. My dad took me when I was 9 -- at a drive in. How dated is that? Also, the wrist-mounted dart gun is a delight, even if we are a bit afraid that the by-then 52-year-old Moore will pass out in the G-force testing apparatus. (Bad news: Moore holds on until the patently ridiculous "A View to a Kill" six years later; even Christopher Walken and Grace Jones couldn't save that one from the idea of 58-year-old Bond.)

9. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Moore). This gives us the first appearance of two late-70s Bond fixtures: the Lotus Esprit the doubles as a submarine, and Richard Kiel as the 7-foot steel-toothed henchman Jaws (he returns in Moonraker). It's otherwise reasonably forgettable, except for Barbara Bach as KGB agent Triple X.

10. License to Kill (1989, Timothy Dalton). By the 80s, the producers at Eon were well out of unmined material with only a few exceptions, and apparently felt that it was too early for a third version of "Casino Royale" (there's a 1954 American TV version, plus the satirical '67 take starring David Niven and Peter Sellers). Several of 80s films were actually cut-ups taken from some of Fleming's short fiction, and LtK is the last of those scripts. As such, it's kind of a mess, but the central thread is still fun: Bond's off the reservation and is hunting down the drug lord who killed his pal Felix's wife (remember him?). (80s note: the wife was played by Priscilla Barnes, near-famous for replacing Suzanne Sommers on "Three's Company.") The film's also fun because of its cast -- Robert Davi chews scenery as the baddie, and Bond's girls include a pre-Law-and-Order Cary Lowell. Lovable gadgetmeister Desmond Llewelyn makes his only field appearance when Q heads to central America to aid the technically unemployed Bond in his quest. Oh, and Wayne Newton shows up as a crooked TV preacher. What's not to love?

Our favorite scary move, hands down, is the excellent Bubba Ho-Tep. The premise is simple: late in his career, Elvis arranged to swap places with an impersonator in order to escape the circus his life had become; his intention was to swap back, but before that could happen, the impersonator expired on the royal throne at Graceland, and the authentic E.A.P. (an excellent Bruce Campbell) was stuck as the impersonator, eventually ending up in a rural Texas old folks' home where his best friend (played by Ossie Davis) is convinced he's actually JFK.

And that's when the mummy attacks start.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous and silly. But trust me: they completely pull it off with the right blend of horror and comedy plus an unexpectedly graceful touch on the existential angst of aging. Highly recommended. (And previously discussed here (10/2003) and here (12/2003).)

There's a follow-up coming, which is sadly bereft of Campbell, but perhaps Perlman can pull it off.

Martin Luther has 95 Theses, but the pope ain't one.

(Via Kevin at Facebook)

I've been taken in by HBO's True Blood, which is at least fun. Last night, however, when I watched Sunday's episode, I found myself kind of uncomfortable with the final scenes -- not because of any plot development, and not because of what Joe Bob Briggs called "aardvarking", but because of who one of the aardvarkers was.

She's grown up very nicely, and is (according to IMDB), a healthy 26 years old, but it still made me feel vaguely creepy to watch half-naked Anna "The Piano" Paquin in a sex scene.

I know what you're thinking. Barry and Levon, where did you get $240?.

(Re-found via my friend Kevin over on that Facebook.)

From my friend (and Mobile native) Michelle Richmond's blog, in a post about a documentary film making the rounds called The Order of Myths, about (the original) Mardis Gras in Mobile:

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel about searching and longing in Louisiana, Binx Bolling, himself a less-than-enthusiastic participant in the better-known Mardi Gras of New Orleans, says that to see one’s own city on the big screen is, in a way, to have one’s own place and time validated, made real. I’m a long way from Alabama. It’s fair to say that, for a long time, I have not considered it home. In one of the stories in my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the narrator, Gracie, who has also left Mobile, remarks on how ill-at-ease she feels every time she returns there: “Some Mobilians don’t know that the party has long-since ended, clinging hard-heartedly to the notion that the Confederates won the war.” I was 25 years old when I wrote that, close enough to home to despise it, too young to understand the subtler nuances that Brown captures in The Order of Myths. This is a film for Southerners who’ve left home, and for those who have stayed, and for anyone who wants to reach a deeper understanding of a place and a culture that has been by turns mocked and mythologized for decades.

There's a trailer.

A year after taking their ball(s) and going home, NBC Universal programming is once again available in iTunes. Turns out they need Apple more than Apple needs them. No surprise there; making it hard for your customers to see your programs they way they want to see them is never a good plan; NBC's bullheadedness here certainly sent Heathen to the Torrents to catch up on Battlestar last year, after they foolishly pulled the show from iTunes without having DVDs in the channel.

Don LaFontaine is dead.

This bit from the WaPo almost certainly sums up The Clone Wars better than anything else:

Lucas fulfills his lifelong dream of completely dehumanizing his space opera, replacing it with a digitally animated style that is somewhere between cartoons, Christmas specials and panoramic paintings on the side of a van. One thing is definitely intact from the most recent prequel episodes: From the first frame, all but the learned geeks in the audience won't know what the heck is going on. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (celebrity voices impersonated) are in the midst of the legendary and pointless Clone Wars, the battles of which seem to transpire on either Planet Marriott Airport or Planet Phallic Symbol.

Zap! Pow! What's? Boom! Happening? But wait: Now Yoda has ordered our heroes (accompanied by their inappropriately dressed teenage Jedi summer intern, Ahsoka Tano) to help rescue the kidnapped toddler of Jabba the Hutt. That's right: There's a Baby the Hutt. I'd go on explaining "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," but you'd think I was high.

Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes: "I've been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix."

Even better is Keyes on library size: "I don't care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn't matter if I don't want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles."

Somewhere, I have a no-doubt-decaying VHS tape of one of Dana Gould's early standup specials; it's some incredibly funny stuff, but I worry it's become unwatchable. Fortunately, a signficant subset of it is available in his MySpace channel. Check it out, especially if you're Frank and remember the tape. (No, the commercial bit isn't included.)

The film is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, about a production of Hamlet infested with vampires and the quest to cure them, stars Jake Hoffman and Devon Aoki, and includes Jeremy Sisto and Ralph Macchio. No, I'm not kidding. Watch the trailers.

Via MeFi.

As it turns out, the old Dana Carvey Show had some pretty fantastic moments. Do NOT miss "Germans Who Say Nice Things" or "Skinheads from Maine" or, especially, "'First Ladies as Dogs."

For some reason, Metafilter didn't call out Mrs H's favorite terrible Lifetime movie in their pointer to Lifetime Wow!?

(Well, we looked it up: apparently, BM:SoF was for USA, not Lifetime, so there you have it. Still, you have wonders like "Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict" to keep you happy.)

Mrs Heathen tells us that Ze Frank has a movie deal.

You all completely and totally suck. You just had one final chance to reward the best show to ever be on television with proper recognition, and you blew it. Instead:

“The Wire,” the just-ended, critically acclaimed HBO drama about police and drug dealers in Baltimore, lost its last shot at a best-drama nod after years of Emmy snubs. It received one nomination Thursday, for writing.

What got best drama nods? Lost, Mad Men, Damages, Boston fucking Legal, Dexter, and House. The Wire makes all those look like high-school plays. Seriously.

There's a Watchmen trailer online.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script is friggin' hilarious. Enjoy.

So, it's for a David Byrne song, right? And it's comprised entirely, at the first level of analysis anyway, with naked dancers. However, the real meat of the video is what they do with the black bars covering the dancers' naughty bits. Just watch. Really.

UPDATE: Well, shit, the video's gone. I'll see if I can find another copy.

Bowdlerization as provocation. (YouTube; SFW, mostly.)

And, unsurprisingly, also a Clayton Cubitt find. Check out Death to the Tin Man, a 12-minute undergraduate film by a 24-year-old director. Really. Close your office door and watch this thing.

Harrison Ford, in answer to the unasked "now that you've shat all over Indy, will you do the same to Han?" question, says no more Star Wars.

Mohney provides three three-word reviews of "Crystal Skull:"

• "Big dumb puppy"
• "Jar Jar Lebeouf"
• "I miss Nazis"

All spot on.

Sydney Pollack is dead at 73.

Spielberg, apparently jealous of the way in which his buddy Lucas was able to completely destroy a film legacy with three new films, does his level best to shit all over Indy in a single, derivative, bloating, and limping sequel comprised largely of elements stolen from the X-Files, the 2nd Mummy film, and misplaced fifties nostalgia. For the most part, he succeeds.

Stay away.

Pajiba:

And as it all that weren’t enough, news also came down this week that Nicolas Cage will star in a remake of Bad Lieutenant (holy shit) directed by Werner Herzog (holy shit). Pressman Film Corp. will produce the updated edition of its original, which was directed by Abel Ferrara and starred Harvey Keitel as the titular bad lieutenant. Who knows what direction Herzog will take the picture; maybe he’ll have Cage ride around L.A. on a grizzly bear.

Tricia "6" Helfer is starring opposite Leelee Sobieski in a new comedy/thriller called Walk All Over Me. In it, Helfer plays a dominatrix.