Larry Ratliff

So much for holding off on Bin Laden humor

All day yesterday, while the world was coming to grips with the fact that a team of U.S. Navy SEALs had taken out Osama bin Laden in -- as Steve Martin would say -- a condo made of stone-a, I was wondering how comics and latenight talk show hosts would react to the long-awaited news.

Would Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest play it somber, or go for the punchline jugular?

I caught Leno first.  His doctored video of President Obama's "Bin Laden is Dead" Sunday night primetime TV break-in ended with what looked like the president doing backflips along the red carpet in the East Wing of the Whitehouse.

Letterman wasted no time either, saying something like, "The Navy SEALS fired a couple of warning shots into bin Laden's head."

Kimmel's "Weekend at bin Laden's" movie trailer spoof may have been the most savage ... and inspired.  Click here to take a look.

Letterman had the best of both worlds -- serious and silly -- on the night following the announcement of Bin Laden's demise in Pakistan.

Brian Williams, host of the "NBC Nightly News," dropped by to chat, gloat, joke and talk serious about the historic significance of the past 24 hours, despite the fact that Williams was about to anchor an expanded one-hour version of his own show.

Letterman may or may not have taken the correct approach -- a balance of the somber and the wacky.  But his Top 10 List from Monday night will live on in my warped mind for years to come.

 

(David Letterman, Brian Williams photo courtesy CBS-TV.)

R.I.P.: Phoebe Snow, a singer's singer

Remember when singers used to actually sing instead of merely screaming their heads off searching for the highest sustainable screech?

Music lovers lost a real singer earlier today.

Phoebe Snow, who hit it huge with "Poetry Man" in the mid-1970s, died Tuesday morning in New Jersey from what published reports are calling "complications of a brain hemorrhage she suffered in January 2010," according to Rick Miramontez, Snow's longtime friend and public relations representative.

Snow was 60.

And here's something you might not know about the unassuming major talent with the silky smooth bluesy voice.  If you're wondering why you haven't heard much from Snow in recent years -- no self-promoting appearances on late-night talk shows, for instance -- it's because Phoebe Snow chose family over fame after her daughter, Valerie Rose, was born with severe brain damage in 1975.

"'She was the only thing that was holding me together,' she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. 'My life was her, completely about her, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed at night.'

"Valerie, who had been born with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain cavity that inhibits brain development, was not expected to live more than a few years. She died in 2007 at age 31," according to an Associated Press obit on Snow posted on the Yahoo.com Web site.

(Click here to read the obit in its entirety.)

Rest in peace, Miss Snow.  You have found your Poetry Man.

 

(Phoebe Snow album cover courtesy:  Amazon.com.)

The late, late Liz Taylor reveals a secret

 
Reports are circulating that Elizabeth Taylor, who died Wednesday of congestive heart failure, thought it would be funny to be fashionably late for her own funeral Thursday.

She was, and it was.

A procession of black limousines inched up a long driveway at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA and deposited family and friends into a white tent.

 

Colin Farrell, the actor who was a friend of Taylor's, read the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo," according to published reports.

But leave it to Liz, who was married a total of eight times to seven husbands (twice to Richard Burton), to leave one last surprise behind.

With the bloom still fresh on the flowers placed on Taylor's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, The Daily Beast Web site is reporting that the legendary actress revealed a secret about the late James Dean to writer Kevin Sessums during an interview for POV magazine 14 years ago.

But she insisted that the secret remain just that until her death. 

"'When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life,' alleged Taylor.

"'In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During 'Giant' we'd stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me,'" an item posted on the Hollywood Reporter Web site states.

Taylor also had some things to say about working with playwright Tennessee Williams.  Click here to read the entire article.

(Photo of Elizabeth Taylor Hollywood Walk of Fame star courtesy:  KHMX.radio.com.)

R.I.P.: Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood legend

Cleopatra died this morning.

And so did Leslie ("Giant"), Maggie ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), Gloria ("Butterfield 8"), Martha ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?") and two-time Oscar winner Elizabeth Taylor.

A raging combination of fiesty and sultry on screen in a career that began with a couple of "Lassie" movies and playing Velvet Brown in "National Velvet" in the early and mid-1940s, the legendary actress died early today (Wednesday) at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

Taylor was 79.  According to multiple news reports, the enduring actress who performed for almost 60 years died of congestive heart failure.

"She was surrounded by her children: Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton," Taylor's publicist, Sally Morrison, said in a statement posted by The Hollywood Reporter.

"'My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love,' her son, Michael, said in a statement to ABC News," according to the Hollywood Reporter post.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Taylor, but I, like many of you I'm sure, have strong memories of her striking performances on screen.

Oddly, as I look back over the career of a true Hollywood legend this morning, the first Taylor movie that pops into my mind is not "Cleopatra" or "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," but "Elephant Walk," the adventure-drama of 1954.

I grew up in the mid-50s.  I'm pretty sure I didn't see "Elephant Walk" until a few years later, when a curious growing boy's thoughts turned from the elephants to a seductive screen beauty named Ruth in the movie, but Elizabeth Taylor in life and Hollywood history.

I remember a young Taylor sipping tea in an exotic locale where elephants roamed right up to the stately mansion in the wild.

Then, when the elephants had enough of encroaching humans, they roamed throughout the house in a stunning sequence that returned the landscape to pre-human form and left a lasting impression on a wide-eyed boy forced to no longer ignore the elephants in the room.

Rest in peace, Ms. Taylor.  Hollywood will never find another one quite like you.

(Elizabeth Taylor photo at the Macys Benefit Gala in 2009 courtesy:  starpulse.com./"Elephant Walk" poster courtesy:  Paramount Pictures.)

R.I.P.: Jane Russell, pin-up cowgal

Janey got her gun and fame and, according to her son, made career hay until the end.

Jane Russell, who made her sexy feature film debut in "The Outlaw" under the direction of Howard Hughes in 1943, died Monday surrounded by family in Santa Maria, CA, according to a Web post by the Hollywood Reporter.

She was 89. 

When I broke the news to some colleagues at a screening of the upcoming beauty-and-the-beat teen romancer "Beastly" Monday night, at least one colleague responded with, "Jane Russell was still alive?"

Very much so, according to the Hollywood Reporter story.  Russell's son Robert Waterfield said his mom "continued to work in show business right up until the end."

"'She had never stopped,' says Waterfield. 'My mother's famous saying was 'I'm going to die in the saddle.'  She stayed very active.'"

According to the Hollywood Reporter Web post, the one-woman show would feature Russell singing and telling stories from the old Hollywood days.

"'Everyone wants to hear about those days,' says Waterfield. "Especially in the days of Charlie Sheen, you want to hear about the old icons.'"

Some movie fans might only remember Russell from Hollywood lore as the pistol-packin' mama who spent some time in the hay in a special bra manufactured by Hughes as she fell for "Outlaw" Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) in her feature film debut.

 

Russell will also be remembered for her performance in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" opposite Marilyn Monroe in 1953 and for her overall zest for show business.

Russell's son told The Hollywood Reporter that she had just returned from a series of one-woman shows in Florida at the time of her death.

(Jane Russell photo from "The Outlaw" courtesy:  DailyMail.co.uk.)

Yates inspired my break away to film criticism

 

Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher) in "Breaking Away."  (Courtesy:  20th Century Fox)

Four-time Oscar-nominated British director Peter Yates has died.

Yates passed In London at the age of 82 after suffering a long illness, according to British newspaper Web site guardian.co.uk.

Serious movie lovers will remember Yates as the director who guided Steve McQueen through "Bullitt" in 1968.  Together, with McQueen doing much of his own driving according to the Guardian article, Yates and McQueen catapulted movie chase scenes to a new, dangerous, higher level.

As director, Yates was nominated twice for Academy Awards; for "The Dresser" in 1983 and for "Breaking Away" in 1979. 

I liked "Bullitt" and I appreciated "The Dresser," a compelling backstage drama starring Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay.

"Breaking Away," however, changed my life path.

In 1979, when "Breaking Away" debuted, I was prepping for a career as a movie critic.  I had a job; a good paying one, in fact, as a bartender in Dallas. 

I never intended to tend bar, really.  But I had hopped off my career path as a television news anchor a few years earlier to make the world laugh as a stand-up comedian.

Great comedy comes from suffering, the big boys said, so I toiled away as a cab driver, a waiter, a bar manager and finally a bartender.  I found out pretty quick that the world -- or at least as many people as I encountered of it -- preferred to laugh at me as a TV news person.

As a comedian?  Not so much.

So I morphed (way ahead of my time, I might point out) to Plan B:  Professional movie critic.  I won't bore you with too many details here.  Let's just say that while I was searching for a newspaper that would have me, I cut back my bartending to four nights a week.

The plan was to see three movies a week and then sit down and write reviews of them.  That's a practice I recommend to aspiring film critics to this day.

One dreary afternoon in 1979, I wandered into Dallas's Highland Park Village theater for a film I knew nothing about titled "Breaking Away."  Some might call it merely a stylish bicycle race drama with some comedy.

They would be wrong, though.  What Yates did with "Breaking Away" was deftly construct a portrait of restless blue-collar American youth of Bloomington, Ind. taking on those better off financially in a relay bicycle race that amounted to a clash of class titans.

Jackie Earle Haley, San Antonio's Oscar nominee for "Little Children" in 2006, played Moocher, one of the "cutters" (locals).  But that's not the reason "Breaking Away" and Yates' direction have left such a mark on my professional psyche.

When I went to afternoon movies in the late '70s, I seemed to always share a half (or less) empty auditorium with well-dressed businessmen (salesmen, I'm guessing) who, for whatever reason, were shucking their professional duties of the day.

They were a tough movie-watching bunch to excite.  But at the end of "Breaking Away," when the race neared the finish line, I saw grown men -- perhaps "cutters" themselves at one time -- stand up and applaud and cheer.

That, my friends, is about all you can ask of a filmmaker.

I was so inspired that I amped up my courage to make it as a film critic despite long odds.

So, thank you, Peter Yates.  Although I  never got a chance to thank you in person, I won't forget the filmmaker who inspired me to shift gears out of a comfort zone and race on to my life's calling.

Rest in peace.

(Peter Yates photo from the set of "Roommates" courtesy:  Deadline.com) 

R.I.P.: Leslie Nielsen; Don't call him Shirley

 

Leslie Nielsen enters the pilot's cabin and comic history in "Airplane!"  (Courtesy:  Paramount)

If you really can take it with you, there's a whoopee cushion in heaven this morning.

Leslie Nielsen, the serious dramatic actor turned cinematic comic legend, died Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., according to published reports.  He was 84. 

A prankster in real life who once broke our interview calm and wind with the assist of a concealed whoopee cushion (thank goodness), Nielsen's career turned on a dime from Hollywood "heavy" to comic bungler with a couple of lines in "Airplane!" in 1980.

"Surely you can't be serious," an airline passenger played by Robert Hays said.

"I am serious," Nielsen replied. "And don't call me Shirley." 

   

I've been thinking of Nielsen ("Forbidden Planet," "The Poseidon Adventure," "The Naked Gun" series) often lately.  I frequently show clips from "Airplane!" as an ice breaker at several of my Movie Memories presentations. 

Nielsen's deadpan comic timing was second to none, with the possible exception of the late Jack Benny.

Benny, the undisputed master of the comic pause, used his off-key violin as a comic crutch.  Even the great Benny never displayed the nerve to broadside the non-suspecting with cushion-generated flatulence, though.

Rest in peace, Leslie.  Your God-given magic gift of deadpan buffoonery will not soon be forgotten.

F-o-o-d f-i-g-h-t! re-do? Belushi pic in works

John Belushi in "Animal House."

(Courtesy:  mptvimages/Universal Studios)

Jack Black as John Belushi?

No one's saying it will happen yet, but it just might.

According to an exclusive post on the Hollywood Reporter Web site, Todd Phillips, director-producer of "The Hangover," and screenwriter Steven Conrad ("The Pursuit of Happyness") "are developing a biographical film about the late comedian's life."

The "Saturday Night Live" cast member-turned-movie star ("Animal House," "The Blues Brothers," "1941") died young; at 33 of a drug overdose in L.A.

"The role is sure to be intensely pursued by high-profile comic talents, as Belushi was the progenitor of a certain kind of manic, aggressively goofy comedy that played in both sketch format and features, paving the way for everyone from John Candy to Chris Farley and Will Ferrell.

"One actor mentioned as a potential strong fit for the iconic role is newly ubiquitous Zach Galifianakis, who starred for Phillips in both 'The Hangover' and the upcoming 'Due Date.' But Galifianakis is already 40 years old, as is Jack Black, another funnyman who embodies much of Belushi's zany spirit (In 2008, Black was quoted as saying he would turn down any offer to star in a Belushi biopic, saying, 'His life is not as funny as his work, and watching me do an imitation of him doing his 'Saturday Night Live' bits won't be as funny as watching him do his 'SNL' bits')," the Hollywood Reporter article states.

Click here to read the entire report.

R.I.P.: Patricia Neal -- Told 'Hud' where to go

Patricia Neal as Alma in "Hud."

(Courtesy:  Paramount Pictures)

I never had the pleasure of meeting Patricia Neal, who died over the weekend at 84.

If I had known that she was in Texas filming "Hud" opposite Paul Newman in the early 1960s, though, I would have tried to get there somehow.

I was just a kid in high school back then; trying (with very little luck) to figure out the world and my place, if any, in it.

Based on Larry McMurtry's novel "Horseman Pass By," "Hud" earned a best actor Oscar nomination for Newman as the irascible rancher's son and an Oscar nod for director Martin Ritt.

It was Neal, however, who drew the golden statuette for best actress as hard working housekeeper Alma Brown.  (Melvyn Douglas picked up a supporting actor Oscar as well as Hud's long-suffering father.)

Alma took a lot of guff from Hud, who'd speed back to the ranch convertible-weaving drunk and flirt to the point of pinning her to the kitchen sink.  When she'd had enough, though, Alma packed her bags and caught the bus to get the hell out of a volatile situation.

The raw dramatic power of "Hud" left a still-identifiable mark on an impressionable young movie lover who would grow up to analyze films for a living.

As Duane Byrge points out in Neal's obituary on the Hollywood Reporter Web site, Neal's life "was as dramatic and inspirational as anything she did on stage and (on) screen."

"In February 1965, after the first day of filming 'Seven Women,' Neal -- then 39 and three months pregnant -- suffered three strokes caused by a brain hemorrhage as she was bathing her 8-year-old daughter, Tessa. She was in a coma for three weeks.

"She emerged unable to speak, her memory erased and her right side paralyzed. Neal was confined to a wheelchair at first, but her husband, British writer Roald Dahl, designed and inspired her recovery. Three years after her stroke and still displaying aftereffects, she returned to acting with 'Roses' and kept acting through the next four decades.

"The 1960s were especially harsh for Neal. Before her stroke, her 7-year-old daughter Olivia died of measles, and a taxi hit her infant son Theo, causing brain damage," states the Hollywood Reporter obit. (Click here to read the entire article.)

By the way, it was a battle with lung cancer that got to Neal, not a stroke.

Apparently, she told those strokes where to go, just like she did Hud.

Rest in peace, Ms. Neal.  It was an honor viewing your excellent work.

Yo, Stallone's 64 and 'Eclipse' kills a guy

Actually, the news gets worse.  Cinderella is dead, too.

Are you sure this isn't a second Monday of the week?

Sylvester Stallone is back in action in "The Expendables." (Courtesy:  Lionsgate)

First comes news that Sylvester Stallone, the mushy-mouthed icon of "Rocky" and "Rambo" who's 64 today, is now one year away from Medicare benefits.  Then the news that Ilene Woods, the voice of golden-haired Cinderella in Disney's 1950 animated classic has died at 81.

Now word comes trickling in from the Risky Business blog at the Hollywood Reporter Web site that a 23-year-old New Zealand man was found, uh, expired in a movie theater after watching "The Twilight Saga:  Eclipse."

"Paramedics who arrived on the scene to resuscitate him found no obvious injuries, which can only mean one thing: 'Twilight' killed him," a Risky Business blogger surmises.

That, according to the Hollywood Reporter dispatch, left only one question to be solved:

"Was the unnamed gentleman a fan or critic of the beloved film franchise? Did he die in a burst of physiologically overpowering excitement, perhaps in the climactic battle between werewolves and vampires, or maybe just when Taylor Lautner first took his shirt off? Then again, he like so many male 23-year-olds outside the 'Twilight' target demographic may have literally been bored to death. We'll never know," sez the blog scribe.

My guess is that waiting for the autopsy report won't help much.  I'm pretty sure that if one could die from movie boredom it would have shown up as a killer long before this.

But back to Stallone for a sec.  The Oscar-nominated (as actor and screenwriter of "Rocky" in 1976) actor/filmmaker is hardly finished.

Stallone directs and stars in "The Expendables," which opens Aug. 13.  He'll share the screen with fellow hardened mercenaries of a certain age Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts and Steve Austin.

"Yo, Aleve!"