TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

Just got back from an afternoon showing of Zero Dark Thirty.  Not badly made at all.

Yup. Very good movie. Really tight.

I also like how the director and screenwriter don't moralize; they simply present.

Yeah, there wasn't any of that.  If it wasn't based on the real thing, it would've made just as nifty a story.

[CountDeMoney]

Holy shit, they're actually responding to a call on Chicago Fire, and not boinking the living fuck out of one another.
But the intro credits are still rolling yet.

[Grey Fox]

They already answer way too many calls.

[CountDeMoney]

I like the chief, though.  He's no Martin Castillo or Al Giardello, but as a boss he's pretty cool.

[Grey Fox]

He's also a very, very wide man.

[fhdz]

Yeah, there wasn't any of that.  If it wasn't based on the real thing, it would've made just as nifty a story.

"Osama? Osama?" thhp thhp thhp

[Ed Anger]

I'm gonna give history's Vikings miniseries a try. Ragnar Lodbok? I'll give it a shot.

[CountDeMoney]

Your parents, grandparents and grumbler know who he is.

Dale Robertson, an Oklahoma horseman who became a TV and western movie star during the genre's heyday, died Tuesday at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. He was 89.

Robertson, who was best known for starring in the series "Tales of Wells Fargo" from 1957 to 1962, had pneumonia and lung cancer, his family said.

The handsome, square-jawed actor, who was often said to resemble Clark Gable, was an able horse rider by age 10 and was training polo ponies in his teens. He applied those skills in Hollywood, where he appeared in more than 60 movies, including a prime role as Jesse James in 1949's "Fighting Man of the Plains." His leading ladies included such glamour icons as Betty Grable and Mitzi Gaynor.

In the 1950s, Robertson moved into television, where the faster pace appeared to suit his no-nonsense style.

Starring as stagecoach troubleshooter Jim Hardie in NBC's "Tales of Wells Fargo," he made the role memorable in part because he drew his pistol with his left hand, a quirk that became necessary because he drew so fast with his right hand that the camera missed the action.

"In truth, it was an honest gimmick that allowed Hardie to shake hands with a bad guy, hang on to his hand, and draw on him," Robertson told the Toronto Star in 1987.

After that series ended, Robertson appeared in "Iron Horse" from 1966 to 1968 as a ladies' man who wins a railroad in a poker game. The actor then was a host on the anthology series "Death Valley Days" from 1968 to 1970.

Robertson continued to work in TV through the 1980s, when he landed roles in the popular nighttime soap operas "Dallas" and "Dynasty." He also starred in the short-lived 1987 series "J.J. Starbuck" as an eccentric, crime-solving Texas billionaire.

In 1993, he took what would be his final role, as Zeke in the television show "Harts of the West," before retiring from acting to spend more time at his ranch in Yukon, Okla., where he raised horses. He lived there until moving to the San Diego area in recent months, according to his niece, Nancy Robertson.

Dayle Lymoine Robertson was born in Harrah, Okla., on July 14, 1923. He attended Oklahoma Military Academy at 17 and boxed in professional prize fights to earn money.

He joined the Army and fought in North Africa and Europe during World War II. Wounded twice, he was awarded Bronze and Silver stars and a Purple Heart.

While stationed in San Luis Obispo, he had a photograph taken for his mother. When a copy of it was displayed in the photo shop window, it attracted movie scouts. The 6-foot-tall, 180-pound Robertson soon was on his way to Hollywood.

He had strong opinions, especially about what he saw as latter-day Hollywood's preoccupation with sleaze. His old-fashioned values, he suggested in an interview some years ago, were the reason his character in "Dynasty" was killed off-screen after the first season.

"They got me to do 15 episodes ... but that was enough," he told Canada's Globe and Mail in 1988. "They kept putting all of this sex and stuff into it and I didn't do it the way they wanted. I never had the ability to keep my big mouth shut."

In 1985, Robertson received the Golden Boot Award, given by the Motion Picture & Television Fund to those who have made significant contributions to the western genre.

Married several times, he is survived by his wife of 33 years, Susan Robbins, and two children.

[Ideologue]

The One (2001).  An underappreciated example of 80s badass cinema that happened to come out about fifteen years too late to be recognized as the great silly fun it was.  Originally known as "Stop Hitting Yourself," The One features Jet Li, like Peter Sellers before him, in many roles, but most importantly as Gabriel Yulaw and Gabe Law, multiversal analogues of one another, Yulaw from a technologically advanced Earth and Law from our lame one.  Yulaw has discovered a profoundly stupid-awesome high concept--if you kill other universes' versions of you, you gain their power.  Naturally, he runs with it, traveling from universe to universe, killing increasingly more powerful Jet Li's until there is only one final Jet Li left to conquer.  No one is precisely sure what will happen when someone becomes the last Jet Li in the multiverse--as Delroy Lindo, multiverse cop explains, "[he] may implode, [he] may explode," but Yulaw is pretty sure, no doubt with hardnosed, rigorous science to back him up, that he will become a GOD.  Jason Statham is also around, as the multiverse cop who doesn't get beaten to death by a superhuman.  Once Yulaw and Law meet, exactly what you expect happens, they fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight.  It's rad.

The movie is almost too efficient for its own good, but only almost.  Structurally, it's not terribly different than Len Wiseman's truly abysmal 2012 Total Recall remake.  But James Wong is smart enough to know that 1)the world of the movie is neither interesting enough nor coherent enough to spend hundreds if not thousands of words of exposition on; 2)that pace is a thing that exists, and which can be used in the making of a film; and 3)that a movie that is 80% chase sequence should not ordinarily be two fucking hours long--The One clocks in at a brisk 87 minutes.  The film also understands and embraces the fact you don't really care very much about these people as people, and with the exception of a couple of moments (one of which involves Jason Statham attempting to portray human feeling, and thus wasting film, and one of which is actually quite bittersweet and affecting), doesn't really bother much with the finer points of characterization; it thus eliminates so much potential chaff and leaves you with more kung fu wheat.

So, The One really is just about above reproach within the bounds it sets for itself, except that it truly unfortunately boasts one of the worst soundtracks on record, full of rotten turn of the century nu metal.  I am not down with the sickness, and this mars some otherwise beautiful fight scenes.  One again wishes that Jet Li had been taken back in time to make this film in the 80s, when more appropriate musical accompaniment would have been current, such as Survivor or Whitesnake.  Is there any good reason that The One does not close Gabe Law's story with "Here I Go Again"?

The film notably features one of the better lines in any film, and probably the only good implied prison sexual assault joke in history, at least that wasn't in Norm MacDonald's Dirty Work.  When Jet Li has arrived in the prison dimension, surrounded by situational homosexuals, he confidently assets that he is nobody's bitch, but they are rather his--which I guess means Jet Li is going to rape some guys.  Cool?

Sadly, the critical response was more like "The One?  More like one star LOLOLOLOLOL."  It's got a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Here's a gem from one review: "Li, as ever, can be relied upon to make you blink a hundred times more than usual with his kinetic gifts, but he's let down by a script which hasn't enough good dialogue here for one Yulaw, never mind two."  This is sort of like complaining there is not enough sexual tension in Black Hawk Down or enough buddy humor in Irreversible.

Completely, totally underrated, I'd recommend The One highly if you're after a dumb but good-hearted actioner that hearkens back to the days when not just about every Goddamned popcorn movie had to be the dourest five hour long shit imaginable.

B, but it could earn a B+ if you're either deaf, tone deaf, or like the music of Disturbed--but I repeat myself.

[garbon]

[CountDeMoney]

OK, the only Geico commercial worth a shit anymore with those stupid hipsters playing their little ukeleles like coffee house rejects doing Mumford & Sons covers is the laughing Dikembe Mutombo.
Because more people need a laughing Congolese Hoya blocking all their shots in life.

[Ed Anger]

OK, the only Geico commercial worth a shit anymore with those stupid hipsters playing their little ukeleles like coffee house rejects doing Mumford & Sons covers is the laughing Dikembe Mutombo.
Because more people need a laughing Congolese Hoya blocking all their shots in life.

No no no!

[Tonitrus]

Watching "Island Huntes" on HGTV.

Nothing like watching a couple looking at buying a private island in the Bahamas, and complaining about how there isn't a path cut through the brush to the beach, to bring out the revolutionary communist in you. 

[Eddie Teach]

I wish I had my own island.

[mongers]

I wish I had my own island.

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND.