RIP Chuck Norris

The Cinematic 90s Diner

Cigarettes & Coffee - 1993

Look at the entire aesthetic of "Cigarettes & Coffee" and compare to...

High and Dry - 1996

That's extremely close.

Of course "Cigarettes & Coffee" is Paul Thomas Anderson's short film that was later made into...

Hard Eight - 1996

And there's also...

Pulp Fiction - 1994

and 

The Big Lebowski - 1998

And if you're worried that we've jumped from the booth to the counter, I promise this is the only time. And anyways you can cover that here.

And now that we're in Comedy there's...

Can't Hardly Wait - 1998

And...

Swingers - 1996

And then if we go over to Television...

Seinfeld (1989-1998)

Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

 

One of the things I love discovering and posting about is pop-culture surprises and oddities. A while back I looked at the history of Peanuts TV Specials and noted the oddity of the live-action "It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown." There is another Peanuts oddity that I have been avoiding posting anything about but I may as well just get it over quickly and move on.

I'm just going to say it. The plot of "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?" is: a little girl in Charlie Brown's class gets cancer. And.... that's not what you expect when you want to watch Snoopy.

I can't do a beat-by-beat breakdown of how wacky and crazy it is - it's well executed, I suppose. The noteworthy thing is just the very concept is shocking and unusual. So it exists, I watched it, it doesn't make sense to me but perhaps that's due to the nature of Peanuts - it's watched by kids but wasn't intended to be solely for kids; it's not afraid to get serious among the jokes, and so forth.

Evidently it was well received and was praised for helping educate kids on this subject.

A Family Thing (1996)

 Robert Duvall's passing has given me impetus to revisit his filmography. Some movies are re-watches of his classics, some I'm watching for the first time. Among the "new" movies, it's a mixed bag, of course. But I have found one so far that I would consider a "hidden gem" - "A Family Thing."

Duvall stars as an older man whose mother dies and reveals in a letter that she was never actually his mother. His mother was a black woman and, oldey Southerney times being what they were, he was taken away to be raised by his white father and was never told of his heritage.

The corollary of finding his mother was black is that he has black kin who he's never met, including a black brother (James Earl Jones). Duvall sets out to meet his brother and events evolve from there.

This movie is very much a product of the 90s (both good and bad but mostly good) and it's just a very nice, fairly mundane character-study-slash-buddy-movie. It has the feel of  a play. The premise (or the casting, really) is ridiculous Robert Duvall doesn't look mixed race in any respect, but if you get past that hurdle, it's excellent. I considered it like "Back to the Future" - you just have to accept that a DeLorean was made into a time machine and then you move on. The true highlight of the movie is simply seeing two great actors - Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones - acting together.

A few more notes: the script was written by Billy Bob Thornton - this is after he'd made the "Sling Blade" short but before "Sling Blade." Secondly, James Earle Jones was a lifelong stutterer though I never saw it in any form and I doubt you did either, but in this movie he uses it as part of his character. Finally, I just to have to get out that the title is terrible. It's so uninteresting and unmemorable - it may be the sole reason this movie is so obscure.

So there you go, I'm not saying this is a classic, it is not perfect, but it's a solid, charming movie from another era with two legendary leads and I really enjoyed it.

The Hu - This is the Mongol

I was quite sure that I posted this in 2020 and I was quite sure that the video was taken down and that the link on my blog needed to be corrected, once a substitute was found. So here is the substitute, even though I now see no evidence that I ever posted it in the first place. Having memories of false posts is an annoying problem.

This is The Hu, a Mongolian metal band who are no longer new but put your mind back to 2020 and they were pretty new. The mixture of Mongolian throat singing with metal rhythms, plus the utilization of the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle) within a rock context is, if nothing else, extremely unique, you have to admit. What a tremendous and unexpected East-meets-West mash-up.

Of the songs of theirs that I've heard this is the only one that really hit me hard. It rocks.

Now let's all agree this post is real and definitely exists now.

RLM - Star Wars Trivia

Nothing to add here, just another fun game show.