Written by Kirk Baird
Michael Clarke Duncan was a giant of a man, whose first big impression on moviegoers was as an innocent death row inmate with mysterious healing powers in 1999’s The Green Mile. His performance was nominated for an Oscar.
Duncan died Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, following complications from a heart attack he suffered in July. He was 54.
A former bodyguard, the 6-foot-5-inch Duncan turned to acting in his 30s, with his breakthrough coming in 1998’s Armageddon starring Bruce Willis. Willis was impressed with Duncan – enough to work with him again a year later in Breakfast of Champions and to recommend him for the role of John Coffey in The Green Mile. The pair would also work again in 2000’s The Whole Nine Yards and 2005’s Sin City.
Duncan also appeared in the 2001 Tim Burton remake of The Planet of the Apes, 2002’s The Scorpion King, 2003’s Daredevil, and 2006’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. With his bass-like voice, he was a natural for animated films as well. Duncan provided voices to the 2003 Spider-Man TV series as the villain Kingpin (which he also played in the live-action Daredevil), the leader bear Tug in Disney’s 2003 Brother Bear and its 2006 sequel, the rhinoceros Commander Vachir in 2008’s Kung Fu Panda, and the heroic CGI Green Lantern Kilowog in the 2011 live-action Green Lantern starring Ryan Reynolds.
Check out:
The Green Mile
Daredevil
Kung Fu Panda
Planet of the Apes (2001)
The Scorpion King
Armageddon
Written by Kirk Baird
The
National Football League kicks off the regular season tonight at 8:30 p.m. EDT
with the Dallas Cowboys taking on the defending Super Bowl champs, the New York
Giants. Here are a few football films to help pad the season.
The Replacements (2000):
This 2000 comedy starring Gene Hackman and Keanu Reeves tackles that brief
period in professional football when substitutes took over for the striking players.
Any Given Sunday
(1999): A gritty behind-the-scenes examination of professional football
directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, with Al Pacino chewing scenery (as
only Pacino can) as the head coach, Cameron Diaz as the team’s president and
co-owner, and Jamie Foxx as the promising young quarterback, a role that made
Foxx a star.
Brian’s Song
(1971): This made-for-TV film is the ultimate tear-jerker for grown men, chronicling
the true story of teammates and friends Brian Piccolo (James Caan) and Gale
Sayers (Billy Dee Williams).
Invincible (2006):
Mark Wahlberg plays Vince Papale, a bartender turned improbable walk-on with
the Philadelphia Eagles in this drama based on an incredible true story.
Friday Night Lights
(2004): Texas is crazy for high school football — I know, I grew up there
— and this drama based on the bestselling book by H.G. Bissinger and
starring Billy Bob Thornton captures it like nothing else. Also check out the award-winning TV series (2006-2011) as well.
Rudy (1993): Sean
Astin takes on the inspiring true story of a Notre Dame football player
considered too small to play and who fought the odds to take the field.
Jerry Maguire
(1996): A terrifically entertaining look at the money side of football through the
up-and-down career and relationships of a sports agent (Tom Cruise), with an
Oscar-winning performance by Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a difficult but talented wide
receiver.
The Longest Yard
(1974): The original drama starring Burt Reynolds is far superior to the Adam Sandler comic remake about a former pro quarterback now in prison who fields a
football team of inmates to play the prison guards.
Today marks fifteen years since the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales. The beloved royal was killed in an automobile accident in Paris. She was 36.
Diana married Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, in 1981. The ceremony, which took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, reached a global television audience of approximately 750 million. Over the course of her time as princess, she became involved with a great number of charities and causes both domestic and international. In fact, she was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 due to her effort to help ban the use of landmines worldwide.
Her marriage to Charles, which began on such a glorious note, was eventually fraught with a number of highly publicized problems. The two divorced in 1996. However, Diana remained close to the couple’s two sons, Princes William (born 1982) and Harry (1984). When William was engaged to Catherine Middleton in 2010, the ring he presented her was his mother’s own engagement ring from Charles.
In 2011, Prince William married Catherine (who was then named Duchess of Cambridge) in a ceremony that was once again seen by millions around the world via television and the Internet. They carried on Diana’s charitable bent, establishing a fund to which celebrants could donate in lieu of wedding gifts.
Nor is that the only way in which William and Catherine honor Diana’s memory. In September, the couple will visit Southeast Asia as part of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebration. While in Singapore, they will attend an orchid-naming ceremony in which a flower will be named for Princess Diana.
Fifteen years later, there is still a great deal of interest in Diana, her sons, and the British Royal Family. Here are some titles that may be of interest to your patrons.
DVD
The Princess Diana Collection
Princess Diana (Conspiracy?)
Diana – An Intimate Portrait
Prince William & Kate: The Royal Romance
William & Kate – Planning a Royal Wedding
The Royal Wedding – William & Catherine
Audiobook
The Diana Chronicles
The Real Diana
Prince William
William and Harry
William & Kate: The Love Story
The Making of a Royal Romance
Elizabeth the Queen
Her Majesty
CD
A Musical Tribute to Diana
Written by Kirk Baird
Perhaps because this summer marks my own 25th high school reunion, I have a fondness for Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a Blu-ray release. The film stars Oscar winner Mira Sorvino ( Mighty Aphrodite) and Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe on Friends) as two best friends from high school whose fashion sense and other peculiarities made them objects of derision by the cool girls in school. A decade later and Romy (Sorvino) and Michelle (Kudrow) have left Tucson and their classmates behind and moved to Los Angeles. The best friends are roommates, virtually inseparable, and quite content with their lives, but the 10-year high school reunion causes them to take inventory of their accomplishments. Romy is a window clerk at a car dealership, and Michelle is unemployed. They have dreams of being fashion mavens, but that’s never panned out. So when they decide to attend the reunion, they concoct a plan to reinvent themselves as successful businesswomen – they fabricate a story that they invented the post-it notes, or, at least, the adhesive glue on the back of the paper – to impress those who once made fun of them. Naturally, things don’t go as planned.
Sorvino and Kudrow partner so well together and have such great chemistry as best friends on screen, you wonder if perhaps it didn’t spill over into real life. It’s a shame they never worked together on another major project. The cast also features a wickedly comedic performance by Janeane Garofalo as a high school outcast with an acerbic personality who is determined to prove her worth to those who rejected her. Alan Cumming plays the nerdy classmate who overtly pines for Michelle – though she politely declines his advances. And Julia Campbell plays the most-popular girl in school who plots to make Romy and Michele’s life hell in high school, and a decade later at the reunion.
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was written by Robin Schiff, who also wrote the play on which it’s based. (Schiff also wrote and directed the 2005 prequel Romy and Michele: The Beginning, a TV movie with Katherine Heigl (Romy) and Alexandra Breckenridge (Michele) in the leads.) The script’s dialogue retains the feel of a stage presentation, but the sly humor and observations survive the transition to the big screen intact. Schiff clearly has an affinity for her protagonists, and she never lets them devolve into caricatures, as is the case with a lot of films about ditzy or eccentric blondes. These are warm, friendly souls we can’t help cheering for.
Director David Mirkin, who has long-served as a producer on The Simpsons, employs a mostly subtle approach to the film’s humor, allowing the characters and their motivations to supply the laughs rather than inventing obstacles for them to overcome. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion may not be gut-busting funny, but it doesn’t try to be: it’s a pleasant comedy with characters you genuinely care about. For those of us with high school reunions on the brain, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is worth another visit, even 15 years later.
Written by Kirk Baird
Following up yesterday's post about Jaws on Blu-ray...
Jaws is arguably the most effective film of all time. Consider that more than 35 years after the release of the first true summer blockbuster, how many of us still suffer an almost irrational fear of sharks?
The film’s legacy of fright was hardly surprising to its co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, who recalls in a documentary included in the new Blu-ray release of Jaws that he recognized the lasting impression it would have with audiences when production began on the movie.
“I said that we have the chance to make a movie that’s going to do for the ocean what the shower scene did for Psycho in terms of affecting a generation with kind of a fear of water. And to this day when people come up to me and know that I’ve worked on the screenplay for Jaws and talked to me about it, inevitably one of the first things they say is, ‘You know, that whole summer I didn’t go swimming,’ or ‘I’ve been afraid of the water ever since that movie’ or ‘I’m still afraid of sharks.’”
The film remains a monster of merchandising as well, with legions of fans collecting authentic movie props, along with vintage and new toys, games, posters, magazines, books, puzzles, towels, T-shirts, Halloween costumes and everything else with a Jaws logo or name slapped on it.
Jaws was Hollywood’s first modern-day blockbuster, a film that changed the landscape of the industry upon its release in the summer of 1975, as just as Star Wars did two years later.
But did you know…
Jaws was the first film to break the $100 million mark — it took only a three-month span to do it — on its way to becoming the biggest film of all time. It now has a lifetime gross of $260 million in the U.S., according to boxofficemojo.com, which is good enough for No. 60 on the biggest films list. Adjust for inflation, though, and Jaws leaps back to No. 7, with a gross of $1.027 billion, behind Gone with the Wind ($1.620 billion), Star Wars ($1.428 billion), The Sound of Music ($1.142 billion), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial ($1.137 billion), Titanic ($1.087 billion), and The Ten Commandments ($1.050 billion).
Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss will forever be linked in their iconic roles as Chief of Police Brody, shark hunter Quint, and marine biologist Hooper, but Scheider and Shaw were not the original choices. Sterling Hayden and Lee Marvin were initially offered the role of Quint, and Robert Duvall was the first choice for Brody; he turned it down for fear the film would make him famous. Dreyfuss also politely declined the role of Hooper, but fear of a flagging movie career after seeing his performance in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz convinced him he should take the offer while it was still there.
In the novel Jaws, written by Peter Benchley, and in the version of the film’s script he turned in, the massive great white shark dies from a combination of exhaustion from towing three floating barrels attached to it, as well as wounds from a harpoon. Director Steven Spielberg, who was only 27 at the time and making only his second theatrical release, felt the shark’s death was anticlimactic and opted for a more visceral and dramatic ending, with Jaws being blown up by a scuba tank detonated by a bullet. Benchley hated the ending but after seeing the film, he agreed with Spielberg that the director’s ending worked much better.
Jaws was first shown to a test audience in a Dallas theatre. The filmmakers knew they had a hit from the first collective scream from the moviegoers when the shark first attacks. But Spielberg thought there was one scene – when Hooper discovers the head of Ben Gardner in a wrecked hull – that didn’t elicit enough surprise and fear from the audience, so he reshot the sequence in a swimming pool and paid for it himself. It worked: the next screening, audiences screamed louder at that “scare” than anything else in the film.
Written by Kirk Baird
Arguably the greatest man vs. nature film, Jaws is an enduring masterpiece, a gripping thrill ride of scares and exhilaration that marries popcorn entertainment with intelligent writing, effective casting, and the determined vision of a young director about to become a filmmaking force.
As most everyone knows, the film is about a 25-foot great white shark that terrorizes a small island resort on the East Coast one summer by dining on several swimmers, a colourful fisherman, a young marine biologist, and a police chief with a fear of the water determined to kill the beast.
The blockbuster has been on every home video format there is, with the exception of Blu-ray…until now. And was it worth the wait.
The video quality of Jaws on Blu-ray, released as part of Universal Studio’s centennial celebration, might be reason alone to upgrade to high-definition, if you haven’t already.
I compared the Blu-ray to the 25th anniversary DVD release of the film, itself remastered, and found the difference in colours, lack of artifacts on the film, and the overall clarity of the image to be remarkable. Jaws may be 37 years old, but it has never looked this good. As director Steven Spielberg noted in a 10-minute feature on the digital remastering of Jaws, his film looks better now on Blu-ray than when it was released to theatres in June, 1975.
The sound has been upgraded as well from simple two-channel stereo as originally shown to 7.1, meaning the dialogue, music, and sound effects have been expanded to play through up to seven speakers plus a subwoofer.
If that’s not enough to convince you to upgrade, consider the Blu-ray’s extensive extras to sink your teeth into: roughly six hours plus of features, including two separate documentaries that delve deep into the notoriously lengthy and problem-plagued film production, as well as hundreds of on-set photos, original storyboards, and deleted scenes and outtakes. Some of this has been available on DVD before, but never in one package. Even better, it all fits on a single Blu-ray disc.
Jaws is one of Hollywood’s great films, and now it’s one of the best Blu-ray offerings, with a digitally remastered and near-flawless presentation, and a treasure trove of facts, trivia, and behind-the-scenes accounts for fans of the film and those who love film period.
When the Curiosity rover landed on Mars in the wee hours on August 6, it represented a high point in a project that began, tentatively, in 2004. Across the U.S. (including a huge gathering in Times Square), people watched breathlessly as the rover touched down on the surface of another planet. After launching on November 26, 2011, and traveling approximately 563 million kilometres through space, Curiosity landed less than 2.4 kilometres from the original target site. The actual landing site has been named Bradbury Landing in honor or Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles (among many other things).
Curiosity’s mission is to explore the climate and geology of Mars. Primarily, it will be looking for evidence of water, as well as organic material and chemicals necessary for life. This information will help determine the feasibility of a manned mission to the Red Planet.
With the success of the landing, interest in NASA and space exploration has skyrocketed. Curiosity even has its own Twitter account for those interested to follow the progress of its mission. Here are some titles to bolster your library’s space collection. For more titles, see our website.
DVDs
The What’s Up, NASA? Series
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos Box Set
NASA – The Complete Story
Apollo 11 – A Night to Remember
Magnificent Desolation – Walking on the Moon
Space Flight Collection
Mars – The Red Planet
Mars in 3D - Images from the Viking Mission
IMAX - Hubble
Audiobooks
Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin
Too Far from Home by Chris Jones
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