1. "R.I.P. Mr. Voice": Don LaFontaine has passed away, and the (in a) world will never be the same. The link above takes you to Quint's appreciation at Ain't It Cool News (many embedded clips). Click here for the letter Don's family sent out after he entered hospital. Picture above from a Swindle Magazine profile. The Hollywood Reporter obit is here.
["He started on DR. STRANGELOVE, but not as a voice. He was a producer, editor and eventually fell into voice-over work, which became his profession for the last 40 years. The man was a machine, said to have done around an average of 60 promotions a week, sometimes as many as 35 in a single day. His voice will always signify a period of cinema history, his baritone always remembered by people of my immediate generation as being a warm-up for the main feature."]
2. "La rentrée": Viva cinephilia! Richard Prouty's four-year-old son has seen "the beach movie" at least twenty times.
["Because of other commitments, this past weekend my family was not able to engage in our traditional Labor Day activity, which is searching for Jimmy Hoffa's body. However, as my family does its own dispirited, pessimistic rentrée, my four-year-old son asked to see one of his perennial favorites: Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday. In Ben's mind Tati's film ranks right up there with the all-time greats: Ratatouille and the Shrek Trilogy. (My eighteen-month-old daughter so far seems indifferent to movies, but she loves to put on Mary Janes and dance to R.E.M.) I don’t know how he came to first see it, but he's seen "the beach movie," as he refers to it, at least twenty times. "]
3. Walter Chaw reviews the DVD of Shotgun Stories at Film Freak Central.
["I'm sick of the kind of exceptional that Shotgun Stories represents--sick enough that I wonder if it doesn't actually reflect a certain faddism attending the creation of the picture. How many times is it seemly to invoke Faulkner before the prestige of it sours into eye-rolling familiarity? To call Shotgun Stories an American classic ignores that it's a tonal clone of David Gordon Green's idylls, which themselves owe their cadences to Terrence Malick's true American classics (which themselves owe a tremendous debt to Charles Laughton's singular Night of the Hunter). That's just the cinematic legacy. At the end of all that impeccable menace, that twisted Grant Wood Americana and surreal, gravid Norman Rockwellian perversity, is this post-millennial, post-9/11 moral that revenge is strange and bitter fruit. As it goes, it's not much; and as the novelty of it's faded like the cheap denim spent in the telling of it, the only thing left is this faint after-image of better, more pioneering films in the genre. Like so much that begins as alternative fare, Shotgun Stories ends up the normative mean to which prestige indies inevitably tend. There's a lot to admire about this film, I just feel like I've seen it about a dozen times by now."]
4. "Google Chrome: Browser competition back in high gear": From Digital Media.
["Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield. So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?"]
5. "Singer-actor Jerry Reed dies at age 71": From MSNBC.
["Jerry Reed, a singer who became a good ol’ boy actor in car chase movies like “Smokey and the Bandit,” has died of complications from emphysema at 71. His longtime booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed, no relation to the star, said Reed died early Monday. “He’s one of the greatest entertainers in the world. That’s the way I feel about him,” Moore-Reed said."]
Quote of the Day: Laurence J. Peter
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Promotional still from Married Life, now out on DVD. My review of the film is here. Sean Axmaker speaks with lead actor Chris Cooper here and director Ira Sachs here.
Clip(s) of the Day: Mr. Voice—West Coast/East Coast: Don LaFontaine and Hal Douglas
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Links for the Day (September 3rd, 2008)
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3 comments:
I've tried Google Chrome. It's got a ways to go yet before it will surpass Firefox, but the potential is definitely there.
And I have no use for it at home on my Ubuntu laptop right now, anyway. That said, their method of promotion - the "leaked" Scott McCloud comic explaining its technical innovations - is a fascinating artifact, and a fairly political move on Google's part, I thought.
Re: #3. Waitaminute. Since when does the classic have to be the original groundbreaker? And what is so wrong with pulling from other sources for inspiration? Case in point: Shakespeare. Why is novelty the top criteria for 'classic'? How strange.
Admittedly, I have not seen Shotgun Stories.
should be interesting to see if Chrome works more efficiently than FireFox... if it's faster than Firefox, since isn't IE, then i'll use it
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