false arrest?

Actor (not really, but that's how he's known) Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years in jail for tax problems. I'm upset about this...because if he needed to go to jail for anything it should've been for Passenger 57, perhaps the worst movie ever...it's so bad, it's not even entertaining.

selling bad actors

In doing research for my Van Damme post, I ran across the Steven Seagal homepage. It's amazing in that not only does Seagal push his "acting" ability, he also calls himself an "accomplished musician," in addition to also selling his own energy drink (which is called...no lie...Stephen's Lightning Bolt). There are brief music clips, and it's much better than you'd expect...but then again, I had no expectations at all.

Compare this to the very amatureish Van Damme homepage. The best thing about this is that it has a Van Damme quiz...you can test your knowledge on the celebrity! Of course, the best thing about JCVD is the fan page http://www.vandamme.ru/, which has a hilarious selection of Van Damme wallpaper.

I know you're just dying to get the image of him doing karate splits...

Van Damme-it

Slate has a rather remarkable article which is paying homage to Jean-Claude Van Damme. If you have never seen a Van Damme movie, you don't know what you're missing...

Van Damme has a lot in common with Stephen Seagal...except Seagal is a much better actor. Van Damme can't show any emotion, growth, skills other than kicking people. And yet this man has been in 36 movies.

I should hate the man, but in spite of my sometimes elitism about popular culture, I kind of like really bad movies...and Van Damme has made a lot of them. However, he's never really sunk to the true level of dreck that makes a classic bad film.

Van Damme still has a ways to sink yet. He hasn't done the marvelously self-aware commercials that Seagal has. He hasn't made anything as classically hideous as Over the Top, Commando, or Road House.

When he really begins to bottom out, I might have to start liking him.

why Roger Ebert rocks.

Film critic Roger Ebert just wrote a very great article on why he will be attending a film festival, in spite of numerous surgeries to rid his body of cancer that have left him temorarily disfigured and unable to talk. He writes: "We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival."

Everyone should have this kind of love for their life.

HST revisited

I have been wanting for a while to write more on the death of Hunter Thompson. I wanted to write about how much his writing meant to me, how much energy and verve it had, how much I learned about accepting the bizzare and outrageaous as legitimate and even beautiful parts of real life.

Instead, I'm left with the news that when Hunter killed himself, he did so (1) with his wife on the phone, and (2) with his son, daughter-in-law and 6-year-old grandson in the house (see this Yahoo article for details).

Of course, any suicide is a complex matter, and unless you know all the facts, any judgement you make should be tempered. I had a friend who committed suicide a while back, and I still have no clue as to how I should feel about that one...and as I will never know enough, I doubt I ever will. However, knowing that a family member will discover your bleeding corpse is bad. Killing yourself when your wife is on the phone to you and your six friggin year old grandson is a room or two over....

Right now, it's really hard for me to like Hunter.