Blood Diamond

Quick: Name the 2007 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award Winner.

I had to look it up, too.

While I have no quarrel with Alan Arkin's win--I thought he was terrific in Little Miss Sunshine--Djimon Hounsou's work in Blood Diamond is remarkable.

Maybe the role of a lifetime.

Hounsou's Solomon Vandy is a fisherman and father living in civil-war torn Africa in the early 1990's. As was--and still is--all too common, his life is disrupted when his community is invaded by rebels: his son is kidnapped and forced to be a child-soldier, while his wife and another child become lost in the confusion.

After discovering, and hiding, a rather large and incredibly rare diamond, Vandy finds himself surrounded by lots of folks who agree to help him find his family so they can get close to the diamond. Danny Archer (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a former soldier-turned-diamond-smuggler among them.

DiCaprio's acting is fine in the film, but it's overshadowed by the performance of Hounsou. The supporting actor allows the viewer to share the experience as he searches for his missing son, dodging military personnel, rebels and greedy bastards (read Archer) along the way.

Blood Diamond is a very good movie. Djimon Hounsou, though, made it great.

My Top 5: Movies That Give Me The Danny Gut

Mrs. Film Geek proudly announces, when the opportunity for the topic comes up, that she dated one single guy from the beginning of her dating years all the way through 12th grade. Danny, her high school sweetheart, was an athlete and a pretty popular guy from what I can gather. There are a lot of pictures of him in her high school yearbook, which reads more like an "Ode To Danny" than it does a class memorial.

Yep, I can understand how his down vest and Bay City Roller hairstyle really rocked the chicks back in the day. He had it going on.

Except for the smarts. I once had a couple of beers and a conversation with him. I swear to god, I talked to that guy for 45 minutes, and barely understood a word he said between the heavy swigs of beer, oddly-timed belly laughter and the mumbles.

As I understand the story, Danny called an end to the relationship during the senior trip, or soon after graduation, or during some other milestone event. Regardless of when it happened, the result of the break-up was several weeks of The Danny Gut.

You've had it. That nauseous, I-cant-stop-thinking-of-you and can't-eat-with-this-lump-in-my-stomach feeling we all have when we suffer emotional pain.

Although The Danny Gut originated back in 1984, the name for the condition stuck. Ask Mrs. Film Geek or any of her friends from high school how they feel when upset or recovering from the flu, and "I got the Danny Gut" is a likely answer.

Man, that's a legacy.

And in honor of it, here is My Top 5: Movies That Give Me The Danny Gut:

Glengarry Glen Ross: "Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers. "

What a movie! Watching a desperate Shelley Levene (played by Jack Lemmon) try to maintain some sense of dignity while recognizing his career and livelihood is over was an incredible experience. I already had great respect for Lemmon's huge body of great work but his performance in this flick topped anything he had ever done. I couldn't get the dialogue out of my head for days.

Requiem For A Dream: Dream was jam-packed with disturbing imagery and dialogue. Addiction--to anything, as this movie points out--isn't emotionally healthy and will often have pervasive and long-lasting consequences. One of the final scenes, of Marion hugging a bag of heroin she degraded herself to obtain, is one of the saddest scenes I've seen in movies.

Natural Born Killers: The current torture porn trend might make Natural Born Killers seem a bit tame if it was released today. But in '94 I felt like I was being held captive and forced to go along for the ride with Woody and Juliette. Whether I was repulsed by them (which I was at times) or invested in them (which occurred as well) I couldn't turn away during the scenes of violence.

And that disturbed me even more than the movie.

Boogie Nights: This movie brilliantly demonstrates how a lifestyle of excess can cause personal and professional devastation. Most of the characters in Boogie Nights were desperate for emotional and artistic stability, but incapable of achieving or maintaining it. The scene where Eddie, played by Mark Wahlberg, snorts cocaine for the first time is incredibly disturbing, particularly when you recognize that he did it simply to be accepted. As he raises from the mirror and wipes his nose, he asks something like: "Did I look cool doing that."

Chills, still.

Death Of A Salesman: The poster-flick for despair and hopelessness, Death Of A Salesman demonstrates how each of our lives can turn out if we allow ourselves to become irrelevant. Watching Willy Lowman believe his own delusions is riveting, as well as incredibly disturbing.

So That's A Thickburger!

Nancy Grace getting punked by her own staff makes her appear almost human.

Almost.

Whatever Happened To...Jack Baker

Wonderbug, which anchored the Krofft Supershow for 22 episodes beginning in 1976, was a clunker of a dune buggy that seemed barely able to drive up and down the side roads. When its magic horn--that's right, I said magic horn--was sounded, the rustpot transformed into Wonderbug, a sleek crime-fighting hip ride that had cool super powers.

Teens Barry (David Levy), C.C. (Jack Baker) and Susan (Carol Anne Seflinger), who found Wonderbug rotting away in a junkyard and rejuvenated it with the (cough) magic horn, traveled with the super car, fighting crime and righting wrongs.

Along with Electra-Woman and Dyna Girl, Magic Mongo and Dr. Shrinker, Wonderbug topped off my Saturday mornings with its idealistic themes and morality based stories.

There are many legends about celebrities that took a different path after their shot ended on national TV. Most are simply urban legends, and are not true. For example: Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver, was a Los Angeles police officer for 18 years after his show ended.

He did not--no matter how many times you are told otherwise--become a porn star.


But Jack Baker (far right) did.

He tried the mainstream route. Soon after the kid show cash stopped, Baker was seen on episodes of Happy Days, M*A*S*H and The Kentucky Fried Movie.


Mainstream projects began drying up fast.

Baker eventually starred on more than 20 adult movies, most with titles that suggest producers were targeting a [ahem] particular hard core audience. 

Sadly, he died of bladder cancer in 1994, at age 47.

So I Had A Bad Day

It's the little things that I didn't notice doing at the time that, as I reflect on them at night, tell me how bad my day actually blew.

In a moment designed to (a) get a brief sense of respite and (b) experience the pleasure that can come only from sex or chocolate, I read the newspaper and ate a Klondike Bar while sitting on the toilet in my locked bathroom.

That's just not right.

Because I Said So

Mandy Moore is cute and shows some pretty good acting chops in her major role as Milly, the daughter of uber-helicopter mother Daphne (played by Diane Keaton). The rest of the movie? Not so good. In fact, I think you should avoid it completely.

Why, you ask?

Because I said so.

Deja Vu

I've often thought that Denzel Washington films are hit or miss. The actor has such a presence that he can sometimes lift a film above common plot problems, or the typical frustrations that come with a badly written story.

Washington is one of those actors who stars in a film that either works, or it doesn't.

The past few movies in which Washington has starred, particularly Inside Man and Man On Fire, have worked. Both films had intense action, and required Washington to stretch his skills a bit to play character types with which he was previously unfamiliar. That torture scene in Man On Fire--where he tapes the hands of a criminal to a steering wheel and cuts off a finger every time the criminal lies--was unlike any character I can recall Washington playing.

And I loved it.


Washington teams up again with Man On Fire director Tony Scott in Deja Vu.


The movie starts out as a typical whodunnit before morphing into a sci-fi flick complete with time travel and alternate endings.

Washington plays Doug Carlin, an AFT investigator with a rep for being able to figure out tough cases of domestic terror. He is called to the scene of a horrendous crime: a ferry, carrying civilians and America navy personnel is blown up, killing hundreds. Carlin quickly recognizes the act of terror, and joins the FBI in it's investigation.

That alone is a fine movie plot, with enough material to entertain for 90 minutes. But, Deja Vu doesn't stop there. It transforms into a sci-fi thriller that incorporates the government's ability to investigate a crime by looking back in time. Carlin isn't content just to collect evidence by watching the event unfold again. Nope, he wants to prevent it from happening.

And to do that, he's gotta quantum leap back, to four-and-a-half-days before.

Deja Vu has some minor problems, such as being fairly predictable and selling out a bit on the ending. But Washington--like always, it seems--elevates this movie above it's otherwise pedestrian status. He makes it interesting, and makes the audience invest in him enough to care about the characters and the outcome.

Deja Vu; he did it again.

Charlotte's Web

Some pig (2006)

















Terrific (1973)

The Queen

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed The Queen. I expected a boring, stiff docu-drama about Her Highness and the royals. What I watched instead was a well acted expose of the generational and social class gaps that exist between members of the royal family and, well...everyone else.

The Queen centers on how the royals handled the tragic death of Princess Diana; mistakes were made that caused commoners to question the relevance of the monarchy. Although the royals eventually gave in to the mounting social tension created by their stubborn refusal to comment on the tragedy, they never fully understood the hate that commoners had for them during that week of silence.

Helen Mirren carries the film as The Queen, who seems entirely comfortable with style and less so with substance. She perceives protocol and procedure as "dignity," all the while hiding her emotions and her compassion behind behavior she views as proper. Faced with a serious problem or dilemma, she and the other royals simply ignore it, or pass the time waiting for the dilemma to end.

Over the course of history, repressing emotions become more than a coping mechanism. It became a normal way of life.


The Queen was supposedly researched quite extensively, and provides excellent insight into how those of incredible privilege perceive their place in society, and the place of others. The flick was a much-better-than-expected two-and-a-half star movie.

National Donut Day

June 1 is National Donut Day, eh?



Who knew?

And me, not gettin' you anything.

Huntington used to have terrific bakeries downtown, and many of them made wonderful donuts. Ward's Donuts, though, was my favorite. Located near campus, Ward's was a small eatery where you could drink hot coffee, eat a bowl of chili and talk to local prostitutes while watching your dozen being cooked in a large vat of oil.

Urban legend was that if the "H O T" sign was lit up on the marquee, hookers were ready and available. I can't verify that. I can only tell you the donuts were great.

One year--in must have been about 1988--I and several of my friends were watching some guy sing Jimmy Buffett covers while tailgating at Prindle Field before a Herd football game. As the evening progressed I became less and less aware of, well, anything. My next conscious moment was sometime after 2:00am, when I realized I was at a table in Wards eating chili, talking with a friend and the guy who was singing the Buffett covers.

I don't recall his name, or what we were talking about. I just remember getting really freaked out and leaving. Fast.

So, Happy National Donut Day. Please accept my uplifting and inspirational story as my gift to you.