The Royal Treatment

Seriously: what do directors say to Ian McShane? “Listen, Sir Ian–oh, it’s just Ian, is that right, somebody must’ve blinked, huh?–anyway, Ian, I hate to do this to you, I know you’ve been giving it your all for days now and that you were up all night deflowering virgins and rescuing orphans from burning buildings, but see, the thing is…there’s a lot of Russian mob money tied up in this production, and word came down that if there’s any chance that the audience is able to take their eyes off you at any point of the finished film, the next time I get to see my kids will be when their pictures are on the side of milk cartons…” I myself was late in discovering just how unworthy I am to share a solar system with Ian McShane. It didn’t happen until I saw Sexy Beast, the kickass British gangster movie in which McShane, wearing an expression of weary dyspepsia and a topping of shiny black hair that looked as if a buzz saw couldn’t get through it, played a crime lord known as “Mister black magic himself,” Teddy Bass. (A tip for any aspiring writers of hard-boiled crime fiction: be sure and name one of your seedier characters “Teddy.” McShane in Sexy Beast, Mickey Rourke in Body Heat, John Malkovich in Rounders–it always works.) Before then, I had a vague impression–based mostly on a few lame old movies (If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Last of Sheila) and several thousand commercials for the series Lovejoy during its run on A & E–that McShane was a lightweight fellow with a tendency to sort of twinkle at the camera. So seeing him as Teddy Bass, the kind of dark lord who makes mere career criminals shake a little in their shoes, who’s never scarier when he’s trying to be affable (“Gentlemen, you’re all cunts!”), was a rude shock: either I’d been ill-informed and/or half-blind or he was a motherfucker of a late bloomer.

“I’m Sure He’s Gonna Be Like Tupac, Y’know…”

Legend has it that Lenny Bruce had to play a gig soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. The audience was stiff with anticipatory anxiety: would Bruce risk the crowd’s anger and disgust by making fun of the traumatic event, or would he go soft in the face of national tragedy, and which of those options would actually be worse? Bruce marched out onstage, looking pensive and upset about something, and then finally blurted out, “Boy…poor Vaughn Meader!” The Vaughn Meader of Billy Mays’s sadly foreshortened life was “JaboOody Dubs”, whose deceptively simple formula for redubbed Billy Mays videos, as seen at the JaboOody Dubs site or at YouTube, consistently struck me as just about the most inexplicably funny things on the web. I don’t know what Mays thought of them, though I’d like to imagine that, as a proper pitchman, he was grateful for anything that made his face a little more familiar, and I can honestly say that I have a degree of affection for the fellow that I wouldn’t have if these things did not exist. Rest in peace, and check the archives.

–Phil Nugent

Blood on the Dance Floor

To be honest, my first reaction to the news of Michael Jackson’s death was a feeling of relief. Like a lot of people, I spent part of my life sort of feeling as if I’d grown up with Michael Jackson, and it was tiring to watch him spiral downward, from tabloid mess to tabloid mess, amid reports that he was on the verge, or past the verge, of utter financial ruin. I didn’t realize how soothing it would be to get the word that I’d never hear about another catastrophe that he was involved in. I long ago lost any interest in him as an entertainer, and I thought I’d lost any stake I ever had in him as a person. But as it happens, my first sense of who Michael Jackson was came not through his music as a solo act or with the Jackson 5 but through the old Rankin/Bass animated TV series The Jackson 5ive, and maybe you never get over being a little in awe of someone who, as a kid, achieved the ultimate dream of many of us at that age: to become a cartoon.

R.I.P.

R.I.P.

R.I.P.

Summer of ’89: Batman

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the time machine and jump back twenty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’89!

Batman

Release Date: June 23, 1989

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Jack Palance, Billy Dee Williams

The Buzz: Hot young visionary director of Beetlejuice brings America’s favorite comic book hero to the big screen

Keywords: Vigilante, Joker, Gadget Car, Christ Allegory, Urban Renewal, Evil Clown

The Plot: A vigilante patrols the Gotham City night. Is he man or bat? Or man dressed as bat? (SPOILER: He’s man dressed as bat.)

Read the full post here

Andrew Osborne’s Brush With Greatness #4

One man’s continuing effort to catalogue every famous person he’s ever encountered.

CE1K:  It’s a little known fact that film and video lenses protect us from the full, debilitating beauty of celebrities, in much the same way pinhole cameras enable us to experience a solar eclipse without going blind. I first discovered this fact in my early days as a Los Angeles resident, when I was browsing happily through the dear, dear, departed Virgin Megastore on Sunset (damn you, Generation Y!) and happened to spot Helen Hunt shopping for CDs with then boyfriend Hank Azaria.  Now, I always thought Helen Hunt was relatively attractive, but nothing to write home about…yet seen amidst ordinary proles, without the protective filter of a lens, I couldn’t take my damn eyes off her. My God, I thought at the time, if Helen friggin’ Hunt is this hot in real life, what must it be like to encounter a celebrity like, say, Heather Graham?

CE1K:  Coming out of a theater one night at the Sunset Five in the same beloved, lamented Virgin Megastore complex, I see Heather Graham outside a movie premiere and my face melts off.

New in Nerve

My interview with Jennifer Lynch

–Phil Nugent

The Children’s Glower

Up until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of Jon and Kate Gosselin, and I might not have heard of them before a couple of days ago if I hadn’t happened to catch the right episode of Best Week Ever, the one broadcast after Jon was seen in the tabloids cavorting with young lovelies. It turned out that Jon and Kate have eight little kids, and for the past few years they’ve been the stars of a reality series about, I guess, wanting a camera crew in your living room because your eight kids don’t make enough noise. The series now airs on TLC, whose name used to stand for “The Learning Channel”, though I’ll bet that it’s now supposed to just be one of those random collections of initials, like KFC. Last night’s episode included commercials for another show that seemed to be about a family of bakers. Mom was on the warpath because she didn’t want her boys making dirty cakes, so the guys were trying to make one behind her back to provide to a bachelorette party.