Baldwin Hills, California. March 2008. A napkin. Lemonade. Art.

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The Tudor Tailor
ISBN 0-89676-255-6
$35.00

quitespecificmedia.com

Just sayin’

Mondays starting Sept. 18 on NBC; if you have Netflix, you can get the pilot now on DVD, as we did.

The show is from the original West Wing team of Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme. Here’s the setup: A writing/directing team (Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry) are brought back to save a Saturday-Night-Live-like show - four years after they were fired from that same show. The chairman of the network, who fired them before, still hates them, but he’s setting up the new head of programming to fail. It’s much better than I describe it here, including Judd Hirsch in a meltdown right out of Network, and a nice cameo by Ed Asner.

One minor difficulty with the DVD: Chris and I are both somewhat dependent on closed-captioning, and this preview DVD isn’t captioned.

Note: As I archive, I’ll be storing the posts with their original dates.

Another Note: Where links to the original source are unavailable, I won’t repost. Some of these are available in the Internet Archive. Think of it as entropy in action.

Note to self: the Weblog section is done. Moving up one.

As I have sleep apnea, and I think the dig’ is cool, this is interesting me. This falls squarely into the “or I could go to New Zealand*” category, true, but a truly ugly digiridoo can be made for a few bucks. Lessons would be the hard part. I know a local dig’ player; I wonder if he’s still local, and does he teach? Must ponder.

*We currently have family in Wellington, so we’re saving up for a trip. This causes a behavior pattern: We consider buying something, then put it back on the shelf as we say “Or we could go to New Zealand”. Very therapeutic.

Barry Manilow is a registered trademark of Hastings, Clayton & Tucker, Inc.

Well. Does this mean that the man - the genius - behind I Write the Songs and Copacabana is a legal fiction? Did he never exist? And if that’s the case, who’s playing the Vegas Hilton?

My guess: The man inside c-3PO: Anthony Daniels. Note the eerie resemblance. And you never, never see Barry Manilow and Anthony Daniels together. Or even Barry Manilow and C-3PO.
And the Vegas Hilton does have a well-known connection to science fiction.

So what’s the real story? We may never know. The shadowy firm of Hastings, Clayton & Tucker, Inc. does not seem to have its own Web site. More details as we get them…

Go see Cast Away, the new Hanks/Zemeckis movie, for the middle. See it to see an actor at work. Acting students should see this movie, because the core of the movie is a textbook lesson in acting for the camera.

Hanks plays a FedEx troubleshooter. The year is 1995, and we see him haranguing an inefficient Moscow crew about time being the enemy. He comes home to Memphis, the FedEx headquarters just in time for Christmas dinner with his family and his (obviously) about-to-be-fiancee, played by Helen Hunt. Naturally, his pager goes off. Off he goes to the airport; on the plane things go wrong. Nice plane crash sequence, shown from Hanks’ point of view. Most deliciously harrowing. Then the plane ditches and breaks up. Hanks is the only survivor. He washes ashore on a tiny South pacific island, where he’s not just the only person - he’s the only mammal.

This is where the core of the movie begins. In a sparse, restrained style, we see Hanks transform from 1990s man to survivor. And that’s where the acting lessons are. For most of the movie, the only things we see are Tom Hanks, the island, a few props and seamless special effects.

Hanks, as a man driven to the brink and back, gives a masterful peformance. As the lone actor in most of the picture, he uses the film actor’s tools wonderfully. For lessons on how acting for the camera really works, this is the movie to see in 2000/2001.