From Those Were the Days:

1937 - Comedian Red Skelton got his first taste of network radio as he appeared on the Rudy Vallee Show on NBC.
10:58:07 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings.”

After taking my Dad to breakfast this morning—what I can say? I’m a people person—I popped Little Big Man (1970) into my DVD player for that morning’s entertainment. When Dustin Hoffman is mentioned, one usually thinks of movies like The Graduate (1967) or Midnight Cowboy (1969) or Tootsie (1982), but for some reason this film rarely gets recognized, a funny and poignant Western directed by Arthur Penn and based on the novel written by Thomas Berger.

121-year-old Jack Crabb (Hoffman) is relating his life story to a reporter (William Hickey) about how he was kidnapped and raised by the Cheyenne after his family was massacred by Pawnee Indians. Under the tutelage of his “grandfather,” Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), Jack is adopted into the tribe as a “human being” and spends much of his life back and forth among both the Indians and the white man. Along the way, he meets up with a colorful cast of characters: a self-righteous preacher and his frisky wife (Faye Dunaway), a snake-oil salesman (Martin Balsam), Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey, one of my favorite character actors and Lt. Ybarra on radio’s The Adventures of Philip Marlowe) and finally, the arrogant and insane General George Armstrong Custer (Richard Mulligan, in an unforgettable performance). Crabb gets married, becomes a gunslinger, a drunk, and finally ends up the lone white survivor at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

When Dances With Wolves (1990) came out and my sister Kat dragged me with her to see it, it wasn’t twenty minutes into the film before I leaned over and whispered: “I liked this movie better when Dustin Hoffman was in it.” Little Big Man is truly one of my favorite Westerns, a movie that turns the genre upside-down with raucous humor and wonderful characterizations, and yet manages to be one of those rare films completely sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans at that point in history. Penn and screenwriter Calder Willingham crafted a highly-charged political allegory, one that draws a none-too-subtle parallel between the cavalry’s massacre of Indians and the genocide of Vietnamese villagers during the modern-day era. It’s a movie that forever remains in the memory, with breathtaking cinematography by Harry Stradling, Jr., superb editing by Dede Allen, and fine support from Carol Androsky, Aimée Eccles, Kelly Jean Peters, Thayer David and Alan Oppenheimer.
10:56:53 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Slave to the DVD

Bill Crider posted a link to this USA article that talks about how DVDs are changing the face of entertainment:

Couch potatoes still prefer watching TV to other media pastimes, but more often, the TV is playing DVDs.

Americans' love affair with DVDs continues to grow as people spend more time and money on them, a new report shows. But they also are spending more time playing video games, surfing the Internet and — here's an old-school development — listening to radio, according to the Communications Industry Forecast & Report, just out from Veronis Suhler Stevenson research.

Well, as far as playing video games goes—that’s something I never could get into. I don’t have the prerequisite hand-to-eye coordination, for starters. I don’t surf the Internet all that often (I have a few must-read sites, and that’s pretty much it) and far as radio goes, I stopped listening ages ago. I live in Savannah, where every radio station is cut from the same cookie-cutter mold save the type of music. I lament that there is practically no local radio anymore; that everything sounds as if it’s being beamed down by satellite.

(Last week, I went downtown to hang out at a bar where a buddy of mine plays and he was equally wistful about the state of radio—since we both used to work in radio, he waxed nostalgic about all “those good times.” “We didn’t make any money,” he cracked, “but we sure had a lot of fun.”)

Bill adds his two cents:

This whole article is kind of depressing, if you're a writer. Somewhere below I think I expressed my theory that people were watching DVDs instead of reading. Apparently they're doing it in preference to just about any other kind of entertainment. According to the article, people are spending less time going to theaters, listening to music CDs, and reading newspapers, magazines, and books. Sigh.

Apart from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I’ve been pretty much a no-show, movie theater-wise, and the reason for this is that they don’t seem to make movies for adults anymore—just kids and people entertained by car crashes and explosions. But I think Bill can take heart in that I do manage to get a little reading in; I read a goodly portion of our local paper thanks to the gentleman who fills the newspaper vending machine (he gets to come in and use the restroom, and I get a free paper—it’s a nice arrangement), and I’ve been pretty good about reading at least one book a month (right now I’m reading Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?, an outstanding political book if ever there was one). Though I do put in a music CD now and then, I’m so tragically unhip that I couldn’t tell you who the most popular artists are if you put a gun to my head.
11:43:19 AM    comment []  trackback []