Posted on December 31, 2017 at 1:44 pm
This adorable gif from “Madame Satan” celebrates the moment that the old year ends and the new one begins. Happy happy new year to all of my readers and I look forward to sharing more with you in 2018.
Posted on December 30, 2017 at 11:20 pm
In the 1950s, there were over 4000 drive-in theaters across the country. There are only about 330 left today. Don’t miss “At The Drive-In,” the award-winning true story of the Mahoning Drive-In Theater (@MahoningDIT), with a live Q&A with director Alexander Monelli (@Monellifilms), January 3, 2018 at 7:20pm.
Posted on December 30, 2017 at 1:46 pm
I once had the privilege of interviewing Stuhlbarg. The movie we were talking about was “A Serious Man,” written and directed by the Coen brothers, where he played a professor of physics. In one scene set in a classroom he covers the blackboard with equations, writing so quickly that I assumed it was a camera trick until the shot opened up and it was clear that it was him and he really was writing all of the numbers and Greek letters as though he had been doing it all his life. I asked him about it and his answer was simple, straightforward, and very meaningful. He said that the character would have been able to write all of the equations very fluidly and he wanted to make it look as though he was completely familiar and at ease, and so every night he just wrote them and wrote them and wrote them over and over until it was completely natural.
Stuhlbarg will return to Italy in the upcoming “Gore,” playing the longtime partner of writer and enfant terrible Gore Vidal. I am looking forward to it.
Posted on December 29, 2017 at 1:56 pm
Some movies to help celebrate the new year:
Garry Marshall’s “New Year’s Eve” shows us a variety of happy, poignant, and romantic encounters on the night of December 31.
“When Harry Met Sally” has a memorable New Year’s Eve dance.
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn “step into a waltz as the old year dies” while the fancy society engagement party for him and her sister goes on downstairs.
Best Picture Oscar winner “The Apartment” has Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine playing what might be sweetest card game in movie history. “Shut up and deal.”
“200 Cigarettes” follows several stories that take place in New York City on New Year’s Eve 1981.
A New Year’s Eve celebration goes very wrong when a tsunami hits the cruise ship on “The Poseidon Adventure.”
Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, and Jamie Leigh Curtis take a train ride on New Year’s Eve in “Trading Places.”
Other movies with New Year’s Eve scenes: “About Time,” “The Holiday,” “The Godfather Part II,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” and “Rent.”
Happy new year! Here’s hoping for health and happiness — and lots of good movies — for all.
Posted on December 29, 2017 at 12:29 pm
After all, she had been a singing superstar as a little girl with a very big voice and and a bigger personality, billed as “the child wonder.”
Here she gives her thoughts on comedy.
And how the Sally Rogers character was based on her own personality.
I was proud to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign for the documentary about Rose Marie that came out earlier this year. It includes many remarkable stories about her early days as a child superstar and her appearances in Las Vegas back when the mob was running the casinos.
Carl Reiner, creator of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” wrote on Twitter:
I was so sad to learn of the passing of Rosemarie. There’s never been a more engaging & multi-talented performer. In a span of 90 years, since she was four, dear Rosie performed on radio, in vaudeville, nightclubs, films, TV, & Vegas & always had audiences clamoring for “more!!”
Bill Persky, a writer for the show, paid tribute on Twitter as well: “Laughter lost a friend today with the passing of Rosemarie, Every line we wrote for her was guaranteed, she never failed to deliver, The New Year will be less happy with her gone.”
Columnist Amy “Ask Amy” Dickinson wrote in her book that her appearances on the NPR show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” are inspired by her inner Sally Rogers. I think all of us of that generation, especially those who write, have a bit of Sally — and Rose Marie — in us.
May her memory be a blessing.
