To Absent Friends - George Kennedy

George Kennedy

1925-2016

Sad news has just come over the news with the report that Academy Award winning actor George Kennedy has died at the age of 91.

A most prolific actor, IMDB lists an incredible 183 acting credits to Kennedy dating back to the 1950's when he was a semi-regular on "The Phil Silvers Show".  There were a number of TV appearances, and at least two series in the 1970's, "Sarge" and "The Blue Knight".  There were a lot of movies, most notably his hilarious roles as straight man to Leslie Neilson in the Naked Gun movies, and that Best Supporting Actor Oscar winning role in "Cool Hand Luke" in 1967.  He even played President Warren harding in a 1979 TV mini-series. And of course, my buddy Tim Baker and I have been having a lot of fun in recent months about Kennedy's over-the-top role of Joe Patroni in "Airport" (1970).

Never the leading man, but a solid character actor who always delivered.  As I often say, you can't make movies without guys like George Kennedy.

RIP George Kennedy.

"Spotlight" - I Believe I Had That....and Other Oscars Thoughts

Your Best Picture of the Year, and as predicted by The Grandstander, "Spotlight".  Terrific movie and a deserving winner, and I am glad that it won.

Indulge me while I boast a bit about my Oscars Predictions.  As seen in this space yesterday, I made predictions in nine categories, and was correct in six of them, including the biggie, Best Picture of the Year.  Doesn't always work out that way, but I had it going for me this year, it seems.  For the record, I missed on Adapted Screenplay, Director, and Supporting Actor.

Some other Oscars observations....

• The elephant in the room, the #OscarsSoWhite issue, was capably addressed by Chris Rock in his opening monologue.  Then, as often happens in such events, it was beat to death throughout the show.  As NPR's Scott Simon observed on Facebook, as soon as the issue became a comic prop, the message became hopelessly diluted.
• Chris Rock did what a host has to do....a good opening, then he kept the traffic moving.  His comic bits were okay. I thought that his interviewing movie goers in Compton was pretty funny.  As for the Girl Scout cookie bit, cute, and if they REALLY sold $65,000 with of cookies in that auditorium, then too many people were walking around with too much cash in their pockets.
• I thought the speeches of the four acting winners were well done.  Classy.
• For the second year in a row, the single best performance  on stage was turned in by Lady Gaga.
• Fashion trend - women wearing over sized eyeglasses with very dark frames.  It's not a bad look.
• Another fashion note - Best dress of the night was that backless number worn by Rachel McAdams.  Gorgeous.

• Final fashion note.  What was up with Kate Winslett's hair?
• "Max Max: Fury Road".  Six Oscars.  Really?  As my friend Dan Bonk observed, they could give it a thousand Oscars, and I'm still not going to go see it.
• I've said it before and I'll say it again, they need to ditch the Oscar for Best Original Song.  All it does is eat up a lot of time during the telecast.  In fact, the nominated songs were so mediocre (to be kind), that only three of them were actually performed during the show, thank God.

I will close by saying that two of the best movies that I saw all year, "The Martian" and "Brooklyn" received no love at all from the Academy.  Multiple nominations, zero Oscars. It's to bad, but it happens.  I sometimes like to go back and look at past Oscars Awards for any given year.  It is interesting to see that sometimes movies that win big, become quickly forgotten, while the movies that they beat are still being watched and loved by audiences.  For example, in 1995 and 1997 "Forrest Gump" and "The English Patient" beat out, respectively, "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Fargo".  Of those four movies, which two would you rather watch today?  Twenty years from now, when people look back on the 2015 movie year, I am guessing that they will still want to watch "Spotlight", "The Martian", "Brooklyn", and "Bridge of Spies".  Those same historians may be scratching their heads over "Mad Max" and "The Revenant".  Time will be the ultimate judge of what the Best Movies of 2015 were, and I think that this year, the Academy got it right for the most part.

As for me, I am looking forward to watching my newly purchased Blue-Ray of "Spotlight", perhaps as early as this afternoon.

Academy Awards Predictions, 2016

Tonight is the big night for movie fans, the annual Academy Awards show.  The Awards this year are, of course, shrouded in controversy over the lack of diversity among all of the major nominees in the major categories.  What a year for the Academy to have selected Chris Rock to host the show.  Talk about serendipity!  I, for one, am looking forward to Rock's opening of the show.  It will surely be funny, and it will surely make a lot of people squirm.

But, on with the show, which means The Grandstander's predictions.

Of the eight movies nominated, I will have seen (after catching a matinee showing today of "The Big Short") five of them.  My opinions are just that - opinions - and are not fully informed.  My predictions are based upon those movies that I have seen, what I have read in various media, and how other awards have been handed out during this award season.

Three of the four acting awards are deemed to be pretty much a cinch, so I am not going out on any limb her by predicting that the Oscars for Best Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actress will be handed to Leonardo DiCaprio, Brie Larson, and Alicia Vikander.  It should also be noted that I have seen none of these three performances.

A word here about DiCaprio.  I think that he is terrific.  I have never seen him be anything less that excellent in any role that I have seen him play.  And while I didn't not see "The Revenant", everything that I have read or heard about his performance makes this one seem like a movie where the film makers and DiCaprio himself seem to be fairly screaming "Look and how I am acting  in this  movie."  I did see Matt Damon in "The Martian" and he was terrific.  In an understated way, he carried the movie and made it believable.  In his own way, I am sure that Leo did the same thing in "The Revenant", so I won't begrudge him his preordained Oscar tonight, but I am sorry that there will be no love for Matt Damon for what I thought was the best performance that I had seen all year.

The Supporting Actor Oscar race is an interesting one. Mark Ruffalo has been nominated for "Spotlight" and he was great in it (I saw that one!), as was Mark Rylance in "Bridge of Spies."  A lot of critical support seems to be favoring Rylance, and he would be a deserving winner, but the Academy often uses the Supporting Actor/Actress category as a sort of a make-up or lifetime achievement award.  I think that they will do it again this year and award the Oscar to Sylvester Stallone.

For Adapted Screenplay, I will predict that Nick Hornby will win for "Brooklyn".  This will be the Academy's way to honor this terrific movie.  For Original Screenplay, I'll go with Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy for "Spotlight".  However, don't be surprised if the Oscar goes to the writers of "Straight Outta Compton".  This could be a way for the Academy to answer all those embarrassing lack of diversity protests.

In an effort to pad my stats, I will predict that "inside Out" will win for Best Animated feature film.

Many are predicting that Alejandro Inarritu will win four "The Revenant", but I am going against the grain on this one since I don't believe that the Academy will go with back-to-back Oscars for Inarritu (he won for "Birdman" last year).  My pick on this one goes for Tom McCarthy for "Spotlight".

That leaves the Big One...Best Picture of the Year.  As I mentioned above, I have seen four of the nominees, "Bridge of Spies", "Brooklyn", "The Martian", and "Spotlight".  I will see "The Big Short" this afternoon.  The other three "Mad Max: Fury Road", "The Revenant", and "Room" fall into the category for me of "Didn't See It; Don't Wanna See It".  With all due respect to the filmmakers and the audience that loved them, they are just not my kind of movies.  Doesn't mean they're bad; just means that they are not for me.

So what movie would I choose if they gave me a vote?  Based on the four that I have seen so far, I would go in this order...#4 "Bridge of Spies", #3 "Brooklyn", #2 "The Martian", and the the winner would be...."Spotlight", but that's just me, and who am I predicting will win?

All forecasts and odds makers seem to say that it will be "The Revenant", but I am going to play a hunch and follow the lead shown by the Screen Actors Guild Awards and call for a Best Picture win for "Spotlight".

Terrific ensemble performance by everyone in this cast, a great story, and a true one.  

There you go...nine categories, nine predictions.  As always, watch, but don't bet.

To Absent Friends - Wesley A. Clark

Well, I had never heard of Wesley A. Clark, either, until a small obit in this morning's Post-Gazette caught my eye.  The fact that I am even writing this Blog, and that you are reading it on either a desk top home computer, tablet, or smart phone is the indirect result of the work of Wesley Clark, who died this past Monday at the age of 88.

Clark was a physicist who designed the first modern personal computer.  Working with scientists, programmers, and engineers at MIT in the late 1950's, Clark's ideas and designs built the bridge from massive, expensive, and inaccessible mainframe computers to those handy little gadgets that we all seem to be, for better or worse, connected to today.  As the obit said today, Clark and his colleagues "early on had the insight that the cost of computing would fall inexorably and lead to computers that were then unimaginable" in the late fifties and early sixties.

No word in the obit as to whether or not Clark became wealthy because of his work.

RIP Wesley A. Clark.

"The Maltese Falcon"

This past Wednesday evening, we took in the special TCM/Fathom Events showing to John Huston's 1941 classic, "The Maltese Falcon", on a big screen at the Cinemark Theaters.

Having just re-read the book last month (for the first time in over forty years), I was truck by how closely the movie followed the Dashiell Hammett novel, both in plot continuity and dialog.  The screenplay was written by John Huston, and it was his purpose to follow the book as closely as possible.  Two movie versions (1931 and 1936) of the book had already been made and both were terrible.  Huston saw the cinematic possibilities of the story as no one else had before him.  He convinced Warner Brothers to have him direct the movie. The result was a classic.  This was the first directing effort by Huston, who would go on to become one of Hollywood's great directors.  

The plot revolves around the recovery of jewel encrusted statue of a black bird, the Maltese Falcon, but as is often the case in such movies, plot is secondary to the acting, the setting, the dialog, and the mood created by the filmmakers.  And it is an important movie in that it rescued actor Humphrey Bogart from what had been a career of mediocre roles. The part of Sam Spade set the stage for the many great roles that followed for him in movies such as Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen.  "The Maltese Falcon" is also considered the first example of film noir in America, and, as such, it established the standard for so many movies of this nature in the years ahead.

Also, consider the part of Casper Gutman played by Sydney Greenstreet.  Greenstreet, a stage actor, was 62 years old at the time and this was his first movie role, and he was terrific, getting an Oscar nomination for his efforts.

Just a fabulous movie, and a great experience seeing it in a theater on a big screen.  Incidentally, mark your calendars for April when TCM/Fathom Events will be showing the great "On The Waterfront" as part of this series.

For a final, and more scholarly, and no doubt better written, treatise on "The Maltese Falcon", I give you to this piece written by the late film critic Roger Ebert in 2001.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-maltese-falcon-1941

Farewell, Heath Miller

The biggest sports news to hit Pittsburgh while I was away in Florida last week was the announcement  by Steelers tight end Heath Miller that he was retiring from football after an eleven year career.  As John Mehno put it in his Sunday column, if, as the Steelers fanatics believe, there really is a "Steelers Way", then Heath Miller was the embodiment of it.  Never flashy, never a showboat, never looking out for anything other than what was best for the team, Miller is undeniably the greatest tight end in Steelers history.  In fact, only Hines Ward has caught more passes in all of Steelers history.  Think about that for a minute or two.

And even in his last act as a player, Miller informed the team of his plans to retire early in the off season so that the team could structure their draft and free agency plans knowing that he would no longer be a part of the team.  Classy.

I would highly recommend that you read this piece by Bob Labriola that perfectly sums up the career of Heath Miller.  It says it all.

http://www.steelers.com/news/labriola-on/article-1/Labriola-on-Heath-Miller/acb3e647-e8be-48d7-bc6a-3a1513767a0c

So, farewell to Heath Miller, a two time Super Bowl Champion.

Another Family Reunion

One of the neat parts of our recent vacation to Boca Raton was the opportunity to meet my second cousin, Marla Madden.  Regular readers may recall the story of the phone call that I received last year from Marla informing me of her genealogical research into the family tree of one Thomas Madden (our great-grandfather) and introducing me to a whole flock of cousins that I never knew that I had.

Anyway, when Marilyn and I made plans for our trip, I had forgotten that Marla lived in Boca Raton, and when I remembered that fact a few weeks back, I contacted her, and we made the arrangements to get together, and it sure was nice to meet up with the person who has been responsible for so many Madden Family cousins getting to know each other.

Marilyn and I met Marla at her home, and we then had a delightful lunch together in downtown Boca Raton.  Unfortunately, we didn't  get to meet Marla's daughter, Tina, who was still in school that day.  That meeting will have to come another day.

Just for the record of those of you keeping score out there, Marla's grandfather, Leo Madden, and my grandfather, Bill Madden, were brothers, the sons of Thomas Madden.

Thank you once again, Marla, for pulling all of us together.