LT Saloon

Soupy Sales: 83

Courtesy latimes and AP

Soupy Sales is dead at 83, one of my icons I base my routines on.
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Movie Review: Knowing

Cage is one of those actors that is just a tad too dry and sedate for me, but I felt this worked well with Knowing. The premise, if you haven’t heard, is that a time capsule for a school contains a “picture” drawn by a little girl that consists of numbers. She furiously wrote the numbers instead of the picture of the future requested by her teacher. But these numbers are far better than a drawing: they predicted the future. Most of that has already passed, but there are more numbers left. Just a few.

Most of the movie is the actors trying to play catch up with the dead on accuracy of the predictions and their personal relationships. The film is shot with a lot of blue-ish gray hues and is quite intense.

There is an interesting alien element to the script that gets fully reveled as it progresses, and one wonders if this isn’t just another example of multi-layered relationship expose’, only human/alien, that runs so deep through this movie.

It’s not the best movie, by any means, but the special effects and emotional intensity of it might make it worthy of a big screen viewing, rather than a rental. Catch it quick: there is about to be a big influx of new movies including the newest in the Trek franchise. It surely will get bumped soon in your area, if it hasn’t already.

I won’t spoil it, even though I find the movie quite predictable. Yet that doesn’t seem to hurt it in the slightest. Let’s just say if you have to have a happy ending you may, or may not, want to go to this movie. Depends upon your definition of “happy.”

On TV Now

It’s very light fare. I wouldn’t go there is something more mentally challenging or with dense scripting were available. But Reaper is good fun. You have a just barely beyond kid employee of a Home Depot-like store, his wannabe/not wannabe girlfriend, his two buds who help him track down people escaped from Hell: one’s a helpless romantic so desperate he recently decided to take up with a demon, and the other is an over weight sex-crazed pervert who somehow doesn’t manage to turn every woman off on the planet the innuendo-laced litany he spouts.

Even Satan is good for a few laughs.

The side stories are about as interesting as the souls he needs to send back to Hell and the odd vessels Satan gives him to catch them.

If you’re looking for Hellish fun without all those dark brooding Supernatural-like clouds hanging heavy, try Reaper.

They Dreamed of Bushwacking Barbara

You may remember my Inspection column from a few months back about Jay Ward. I mentioned the show they had on briefly called,Fractured Flickers. I just happened to run into this today. The hilarious thing is Ward would make sure the guest didn’t know what was actually going to happen during the interview. This was planned and, even once it became obvious amongst industry types that they were going to do something off kilter, the guest never allowed to know what. I think Barbara Eden handled this quite well.

The Premise That Refuses to Die

…but I’m beginning to wish someone would drive a stake through its wretched heart.

The venue: TV… though X-Files hit the big screen.

The premise: everything out there we can imagine, usually bad, is true. And a conspiracy… good or bad. (Yes, there are “good” conspiracies. Just think of Men in Black and the reason given by Tommy Lee Jones description as to why they don’t just let people know what’s going on.)

I didn’t watch a lot of X-Files. After a few I told my wife, Millie, “This is the same story, they just keep switching the monsters and aliens.” So I missed that delightful stage in the end where the writers get bored with their hackney premise and start… writing. It can be fun. They add a lot of stuff into the mix that, occasionally, does nothing to save a program that should have been strangled along with the idiot who suggested it.
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