piranesi

They have two huge deomgraphics tied up right in the title.

Let's wrap this whole thread in a neat little bow and declare now that whoever wins the March Madness pool gets a Ribera replica jacket.

Japan, Cena. Japan!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously did no one else see that guy casually and firmly destroy his son's happiest moment in life? Dude was the Anti-Cena in form and spirit.

When Cena said he fights "For that kid in the front row. For his dad" and pointed to a kid. The camera cut to some kid and dad in a Cena shirt and the kid was smiling, and the dad looks down at him and says: "It's not you." Fucking best dad in the world ammiright? That's that kids memories of his dad probably forever: "It's not you." Someone GIF that shit immediately.

We had a VEEP thread. VEEP is so great. But to really appreciate it you have to watch each new episode immediately after an episode of GAME OF THRONES. The dissonance along with the weird parallels are astounding.

If only you could combine the WWE video game videos with Truck driving sim ones. I'd love to watch John Tenta move a shipment of catheters from Lyon to Zagreb.

I can believe there are American sports fans utterly ignorant of the banana as slur thing. In my entire life, I don't think I ever saw or heard of it until I started following F(u)ootb(o)al(l). I can also buy that a Giant's fan has bananas in his adorable startup-branded carryall along with energy bars, a walking GPS, bluetooth headphones shaped like frogs, and a hacked chromecast plugged into a 3DS housed in a 1920-wood-radio custom case running SNES games via R4 while live-tweeting THE WALKING DEAD. You really think that guy is ever without a banana?

Y'know, I liked this the minute I saw it, but my good god, I LIKED this. Forget asses in the seats. Davey RIchards excels in the new most important metric for career success. He generates more "likes" on this board than anyone else. Ron Perlman is a distant second but for opposite reasons.

This is impossible and spinning out of control. I just wanted James Hong to win an award. An aim not devoid of merit.

That bird in the background is going to go home and be all like "People, we have a big problem! We're at Defcon Gary Larson."

Probably half or more of those are shorts though. Rippa? Do we offer college credit?

It's weird. There's no real formidable opponent for the ending, and no one is closing in on Dexter. I mean, way too many people know about him now, and there is a risk there. But none of them are after him. Vogel, Hannah, Deb, Zach. The story of Dexter having to kill this kid now and Vogel not wanting him to could make a solid season ending arc if they had developed the Dexter/Zach relationship more. But as a series ending? It's starting to feel like the end of this series is just going to be the set-up for the spinoff, rather than a satisfying ending. Which sucks, because if there was ever a show that screamed from its first episode "HOW IT ENDS IS WHAT MATTERS!!!!!!" It was this one.

I think there was a discussion at some point on the old board where we compared what was awesome about Ron and Chris. It started with wondering why they were both in so many awful movies and ended with how great they were in them and how much fun they had no matter how bad the movie was. The Ron example was POLICE ACADEMY 7: MISSION TO MOSCOW I can't remember what the Christopher Lee example was. Maybe HOWLING 2??????

I've underestimated you for the last time: Truly nice choice. I watched THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN the other night.

You know we all know. Just post a picture of him already.

The theme here is addictive substances that rot your teeth? Ohhhhh....

Before I realized how much fun stuff Jeanette Nolan did, I was just going to use her as an excuse to see who has over, like 500 credits. Some guy on IMDB compiled a list, and it turns out almost all the top # of credits are people who worked in porn...I guess not surprising, though I'm a little surprised that all shows up in IMDB. The only non porn person who cracks the top 10? 1036 credits, but that includes like 800 voice part probably. The next non-porn person was someone named Bess Flowers, but almost all of her roles are listed as "uncredited" which means someone went through and put all the things she was an extra in on there. Nope... Francis Ford is the first recognizalbe name on the list, but that includes hundreds of shorts from the 1920s. By the time you get to people who aren't filling up on porn, voice work, shorts, or extra work, you're around the upper 300s to 400. James Hong is near the top at 382, but I see lots of video games in there. Cleaning this up and deciding what parts count would be a task for a small army of interns. Rippa? We do have interns, right?

Random chain of IMDB hunting leads to another installment of "OLD PEOPLE YOU SHOULD LOVE" I was watching an episode of COLUMBO where Martin landeau plays identical twins who orchestrate a murder and there was a great old lady playing a housekeeper who keeps screaming at Peter Falk and calling him a bum. Just another old lady in some 70s show? It's never just another old lady. Anytime an old lady steals a scene, I am on the case. There are thousands of them, yes. But each one is special. They all have some magical place in the history of it all: Mean old Columbo-hating lady ended up being Jeanette Nolan. IMDB gives her 197 acting credits. Yes 197 credits...ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY SEVEN. So take a few minutes and dive into the life of Jeanette Nolan., a life that included roles from 1948 to 1998. Fifty solid years. Bear in mind that her first role...her youngest role in film (she had already acted for years on radio), was a turn as Lady Macbeth at the age of 37. By "a turn as Lady Macbeth" I mean she played Lady Macbeth in ORSON WELLES' INSANE FILM VERSION OF MACBETH!!!!! Here big scene is at 1:40 here: "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand..." That was her first screen role. not bad. Her last role? Playing Robert Redford's mother in THE HORSE WHISPERER. Jesus, shit Cain and Abel! What a pair of bookends for someone most people have never heard of! In between is the usual sea of television roles including multiple turns as "creepy lady" on THE TWILIGHT ZONE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. For those closer to my age, she and her real-life husband played Dan Fielding's parents, who he is ashamed of because they are hicks, on NIGHT COURT. The NIGHT COURT thing was something of a inside joke. She and her husband often appeared together as old hillbillies. He, himself has 140 IMDB credits, almost all westerns and almost all some version of "craggly old man" or "mean old judge" and he easily deserves a separate post. But not tonight. Most intriguingly, though, she had her own show for about a season. It was the only ever official spinoff of GUNSMOKE and it sounds like the greatest idea ever. It was called DIRTY SALLY and if you aren't comfortable googling "dirty + sally" I'll paste the synopsis, since it is completely bananas: Here she is as Dirty Sally. I mean, COME ON. How is this not still on? It's like THE INCREDIBLE HULK (yes, she was on an episode of that too) but with a crazy old bag lady in the wild west. You can get a taste of her in the role from the original GUNSMOKE episode that set up the spinoff. She shows up around 10:27: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ-zNapkYOU Absolutely Bananas. Other Highlights along the way include THE BIG HEAT: Prominent Voice over work in THE RESCUERS and THE FOX AND THE HOUND: and perhaps most awesomely as the evil three-fingered Grandma spy in CLOAK AND DAGGER: One of the greatest movies of all time. Her son played Alan Freed in AMERICAN HOT WAX and HOLY SHIT JEANETTE NOLAN IS ON AN EPISODE OF THRILLER THAT IS ON MY T.V, RIGHT NOW! SHE IS EVERYWHERE!!!!! (if everywere = MeTv reruns which it pretty much does for me). One special note: In 1938 she also did what sounds like an amazing turn in a one-off radio play penned by the great Norman Corwyn called THE PLOT TO OVERTHROW CHRISTMAS. If you don't know Norman Corwyn and you fancy yourself some kind of profound writerly type, get on the ball and look up his old radio plays and speeches. Especially his inspirational WWII "We can do it!" copy. He is one of the great American writers to ever work exclusively to "the masses" and should be way more famous than he is today. Ray Bradbury called him “…the greatest director, the greatest writer and the greatest producer in the history of radio.” THE PLOT TO OVERTHROW CHIRSTMAS is not a Bill O'Reilly special, yet. It is a rhyming radio play about an army of hell ghosts gathering in hell and planning to kill Santa Claus (Okay, so maybe allegorically it is the Bill O'Reilly special that is playing on a loop in Bill O'Reilly's own brain). The army is made up of Nero, Mephistopholes, Ivan The Terrible, Caligula, Lucrezia Borgia (played by our own Jeanette Nolan), and Simon LeGree...Yes. Caligula, Lucrezia Borgia and Simon Legree from UNCLE TOM'S FUCKING CABIN are IN HELL conspiring THE DEATH OF SANTA CLAUS. That's some serious shit for little kids to hear on the radio on Christmas Eve in the midst of the Great Depression. They send Nero to do the deed, but at the last second he repents when Santa teaches him about the true meaning of Christmas and gives him a new violin. Did I mention that all the dialog is metered and rhymes? Fuck the Grinch. This shit is madness.

I think being the face of a company in their commercials pays pretty well though, I doubt Flo from Geico is hurting for money. I think she was a comedian before that with connections to the Mr. Show guys, and has continued to work with their sort of circle on things like CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL and TIM AND ERIC. I don't think anyone there is going to hold the commercials against her, if most of what she was ever going to do was small comedy bits anyway. Those guys are pretty easy on each other when it comes to cashing-in parts and make fun of themselves about it all the time. I don't see why they'd be any tougher on her. You'd have to be some kind of intolerable film-school/actor's-studio mark to not hire someone because they were in some commercials. Beacuse they sold out the purity of the form, man!

THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS was so boring. In two distinct ways: 1) Boring in the way that there are long dull stretches where nothing of value is happening and long ponderous speeches by people no one has any reason to care about or be invested in because their stories are bland and they just aren't very cool. and 2) Boring in the way where when things are actually happening, they are so clumsy and disjointed and fragmented that you just can't parse it enough to be excited I was hoping it would be a fast, lighthearted goofy homage like NINJA ASSASSIN which, while it wasn't great, was at least competent. But instead I got something that wanted to be epic and deadpan while somehow also being ironic and "grindhousey." I get that RZA wanted to make a strong connection between old King Fu movies and the history of Blacksploitation theaters. And that's a neat idea he had and I guess it justifies the horrendously dull middle section that focuses on the most boring character (him). But he is unable to write or direct or act and that proved to be a problem. He has a great eye for the big climactic moments but doesn't know how to get to them...so he just strings a bunch of them together, but none of them hit because none of them were set up very well. Large stretches of this movie felt like an old Golan-Globus movie just in terms of static action and line deliveries and werdly clumsy directing. This was not, I don't think, the homage he had in mind. The old kung fu movies he was supposedly emulating had incredibly dynamic camera work and made visually interesting compositions out of shoestring budgets. RZA here managed to make $20 million look worse than the average TVB or CCTV martial arts soap opera cranked out with 1/1000 the money. Coery Yuen provided the absolute bare minimum of consciousness to slap together inchoherent fight scenes. Trey parker's fight scene in ORGAZMO made more sense and had more impact. Even the soundtrack was filled with dumb ideas...lots of homages to sounds that everyone agrees are cool but are deployed here as a substitute to any actual buildup...loud, redundant, distracting, pointless. When he makes a callback to Sally Yeh's iconic song from John Woo's THE KILLER all it does is remind you that you could be watching a more more fun movie right now.

The crazed insane murderous gang-leader from the glorious Jack Hill epic SWICHBLADE SISTERS went on to be one of the main voice actors in the cutesy children's cartoon RAINBOW BRITE. Admittedly she was deliberately cast in the former because her babyface and squeaky voice made her behavior even more shocking. But it's still kind of funny. Special note: Her name is Robbie Lee, which is an interesting coincidence since her acting style when playing psychotic gang chick is nearly identical to that of AJ Lee. Seriously, if you need a template to grasp AJ's line deliveries...watch a Jack Hill movie. Also one of the dude gang members is next-door-neighboor Bob from THAT 70S SHOW. I wonder if they ever refrenced that an an inside joke, since the kids on the show were perfectly placed in time to have gone to see this at the drive-in.

So where are all those dudes names Seamus from?

Until I see the word "Papa" next to the word "Shango" I'm not tuning into any of this.