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william shatner

Review: Olympus Has Fallen, Evil Dead and Escape from Planet Earth

By Cinema, Reviews

While ori­gin­al Die Hard dir­ect­or John McTiernan lan­guishes in min­im­um secur­ity fed­er­al pris­on his heirs are keep­ing the action movie flame alive. Most recently, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen might as well be called Die Hard at the White House as one man attempts to res­cue the host­ages held cap­tive in the impreg­nable bunker beneath the most fam­ous Palladian man­sion in the world. North Korean ter­ror­ists have man­aged to take con­trol of the build­ing and the President (Aaron Eckhart), Secretary of Defence (Melissa Leo) – and some extras play­ing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs etc. – are all cable-tied to a rail­ing while acting-President Morgan Freeman and Chief of the Secret Service Angela Bassett are power­less at the Pentagon.

What the bad guys don’t know is that dis­graced former Secret Service (and Special Forces, natch) dude Gerard Butler heard the shoot­ing and crossed town from his low level secur­ity job at Treasury to sneak in to the build­ing before total lock­down. Now, he’s tak­ing out the trash one by one but can he res­cue the President’s son (Finley Jacobsen) and save the free world before every nuke in the American arsen­al goes “boom”.

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Telluride Diary part five: The show (part two)

By Cinema, Travel

Saturday dawned early and I was grate­ful that the first screen­ing of the morn­ing was at the Chuck Jones’ in Mountain Village, barely a fif­teen minute shuttle from my accom­mod­a­tion. Time to grab a cof­fee and then wait in line for an 8.30am repeat of the Roger Corman Tribute from the night before. This time the host and inter­rog­at­or would be Leonard Maltin (famil­i­ar to all New Zealanders of a cer­tain age, I think) instead of Todd McCarthy.

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A fairly rep­res­ent­at­ive pic­ture of Mountain Village architecture.

Before Mr Corman was invited on stage, we got to see an excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary on his life and work, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. After that, Corman entered the stage to a stand­ing ova­tion and we were treated to insights and stor­ies from an exceed­ingly well-educated and thought­ful entre­pren­eur and artist for almost an hour. The sur­prise for me was hear­ing about Corman’s lib­er­al polit­ics and how he might have steered his film­mak­ing in that dir­ec­tion if it had­n’t been for the com­mer­cial fail­ure of The Intruder (1962, star­ring William Shatner as a white supremacist).

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“the aurora that is SHATNER”

By Asides, Cinema, TV

Shatner inter­viewed in GQ (via @saniac):

Resistance is futile, of course. You aren’t in Shatner’s pres­ence ten minutes before he reverse-engineers your emo­tion­al state; first, you adopt those con­ver­sa­tion­al rhythms of his—everywhere, the jelly!—and then, by God, you start to feel the enthu­si­asm of your words, an enthu­si­asm inev­it­ably heightened by your know­ledge that this is WILLIAM TIBERIUS FUCKING SHATNER! you are deal­ing with, the most meta, the most absurd, human being in Western Civilization, and you fall in love with that meta-absurdity, the bon­anza of impun­ity and laughs it generates.

When I did The Immortals recently, the dir­ect­or and I had three short­cuts for line read­ings: Clarkson, Blessed and Shatner.