A new job and a new dog have been eating up a lot of my time, so I’ve fallen down on my regular Halloween posts.
But here’s a nice video of the latest Halloween scare props. All these seem to be from the same company. Sadly, I doubt I can afford any of them…
Comedian, actor and director Jerry Lewis has died at age 91.
It’s hard to evaluate the work of someone who absolutely dominated their field for an extended period of time and then almost immediately went out of fashion. Lewis was far and away the most successful comic actor of mid-century America, appearing in an extremely successful series of movies with Dean Martin, then having a successful solo career as both a actor and director.
But after The Nutty Professor, it was a long, long slide. Between 1963 and 1980, you had Rowen & Martins Laugh-In, Lenny Bruce, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live and Robin Williams, yet in Hardly Working (intended as a “comeback” film), Lewis was doing the same tried physical shtick. (Roger Ebert called it “one of the worst movies ever to achieve commercial release in this country.”) In between he directed the amazingly ill-conceived and incomplete The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown (Lewis) entertaining children on the way to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surviving footage suggests it is every bit as awful and cringe-worthy as you’d imagine.
In the meantime, he taught an acclaimed directing class at USC attended by (among others) George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and was a familiar face for decades of television viewers for his Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon. And he turned in the occasional fine dramatic performance, such as in The King of Comedy.
For someone who smoked as much as he did, had as many health issues, and battled prescription drug abuse, 91 is a very rip old age indeed.
Here’s a very early footage of Lewis and Martin from what I think may be the very first MDA telethon:
Here he is making his appearance as nutty professor alter ego Buddy Love:
And here’s a long, interesting piece on Lewis I linked to once before.
Since Saint Marie records is releasing Secret Shine’s Singles 1992-1994
Haruo Nakajima, the original actor inside the Godzilla suit for the first twelve Toho films, has died at age 88.
The suit was so hot and heavy that Nakajima evidently fainted several times during the making of the original Godzilla.
Here are some video tributes:
It would be remiss of me not to share this…
Premiering on SyFy August 6.
Yeah, another live Slowdive song. I’ve been busy with a new dog, so I haven’t had a chance to go trawling for new shoegaze bands.
Hat tip to Andrew Wimsatt for alerting me to this.
Here’s a blast from the past: A young Joel Hodgson appearing on David Letterman before creating Mystery Science Theater 3000.
No wonder Letterman had him on: they both share some of the same goofy Midwestern sense of humor…
I liked last week’s Linda Guilala track so much I bought the album, so this week’s track is “Uroboros,” which is also off Psiconáutica.
Here’s Spain’s Linda Guilala (a band, not a woman) with “Monstruo” off their album Psiconáutica, which I might have to pick up, as the tracks strike me as a tasty mix of Shoegaze, classic analog synth and just a dash of 8-bit.
(Hat tip: Sounds Better With Reverb, which seems to have stopped updating after the end of 2016.)