Third Eye Cinema / Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine podcast

Weird Scenes 4/4/19: Sean Connery - Beyond Bond

Our late in the run At Eye Level correspondent from Scotland regularly brought up, as a sort of bemused reality check, the fact that his grandmother's milkman was none other than Sean Connery. A prophet has no honor in his own country...

Supposedly an amateur bodybuilder (though you'd probably never know it from what we see on celluloid) and ex-Royal Navy man, Connery was a milkman both as a youth and an adult, a truck driver, a grave digger, an artist's model and a laborer. But that all changed.

Turning down all manner of blue collar jobs and manual labor (supposedly even a shot at being a pro footballer), he made a crucial right turn into acting...and give or take ten years working his way through inconsequential bit parts in westerns, Disney pictures and such, the rest is history.

Because in 1962, he took on the role of Ian Fleming's superspy James Bond, one rejiggered to the fantasies and hopes of its day, all tech gadgets and Cold War gravitas kneaded into a pulp action adventure series unlike any other...but which spawned literal hundreds of imitators globally, most notably the krimis, Edgar Wallace and Mabuse films and Jerry Cotton series out of Germany and ridiculous numbers of Italian, French, British and Spanish Eurospy pictures. Hell, even washed up crooners like Dean Martin and tongue in cheek types like Tony Randall and the James Coburn In Like Flint series got in on the act, domestically...

Tonight, we're going to tackle some of the notable films he's been front and center for, from poorly sung Irishmen chasing leprechauns to taut thrillers, from bizarre Eurowesterns and gritty, soul searching 70's cop dramas to weird allegories about sex and society, lousy disaster films, midgets, monks, evil knights, badly Russian accented sub commanders, awkward Alan Moore adaptations...even Indiana Jones' father!

We've taken on his more famous series twice over, but this is virgin territory...

So stay tuned as we tackle the (non-Bond) films of Sean Connery, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 62: Sean Connery - Beyond Bond

 

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Weird Scenes 3/21/19: Roddy McDowall - a true character

A British character actor, who made precious few films outside the US.

A former child actor who made his fortunes more on his adult career than what came before.

A man who’s starred in well over a hundred films and dozens of
television shows, many falling well inside the realm of cult, SF and
horror, but seldom as more than a minor role, even a cameo.

And yet, he’s the one you’ll remember when the credits roll…

Join us tonight as we wend our way through some highlights of a
significantly lengthy career of one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved character actors, the inimitable Roddy McDowall!

Week 61: Roddy McDowall - a true character

 

 

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Weird Scenes 3/7/19: The Italian Stallion: the Films of Sylvester Stallone

Hells Kitchen brought the world two rather formidable things: my grandfather and the Sylvester Stallone.

The son of...of all things, a beautician and an astrologer (!), Stallone survived a difficult birth and life on the mean streets of what had already become something of an ethnic ghetto to star in a notorious off Broadway play soon to wind up as a Radley Metzger film: Score.

Following theatrical work with a number of walk ons and bit parts (including the infamous Italian Stallion aka Party at Kitty and Studs, Woody Allen's Bananas, Death Race 2000 and episodes of Police Story and Kojak), Stallone rose to sudden and unexpected fame when he scripted...and demanded the leading role in, despite studio pressure to use established marquee names...the story of a washed up never-was who made a surprise bid at the big time...namely, Rocky.

Going on to star in several films in this franchise, he'd strike gold for a second time when he starred in a film adaptation of a hicksploitation novel about Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD in a nation that looked down on their efforts...First Blood, the first of the Rambo pictures.

Alternating ongoing box office successes in those two series with a number of interesting, but critically much maligned box office flop attempts at stretching as an actor, his work throughout the 80's and 90's would veer wildly between weird fish out of water comedies like Rhinestone and bottom of the barrel efforts like Stop or my Mom Will Shoot! and Judge Dredd to...er...Over the Top cop films as different in tone as Cobra and Tango and Cash, before once again hitting box office success with Cliffhanger, Demolition Man and the recent Expendables series.

So join us as we put on our paisano, to take on the inimitable Sylvester Stallone!

Week 57: The Italian Stallion: the Films of Sylvester Stallone

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Weird Scenes 2/21/19: The King died on the throne: the weird world of the Elvis movie

Elvis Presley.  The very name conjures a host of associations, both general and particular to the individual.  

 

The young trucker with a golden voice, making his way through the tough Southern rockabilly circuit before emerging as the posterboy for everything rock n' roll - the positive liberation of an emergent youth culture and the first musician to truly "cross the color line" of the era, the negative associations of stiff necked traditionalists and conservative fearmongers, damning everything from rock n' roll to comic books for their children's nascent rebellion from conformity.

 

The clean cut army brat with the whirlwind (and presumably chaste) romance with a teenaged Priscilla Beaulieu.  The surprisingly adept actor and musician, contract bound into a decade worth of million dollar a picture films, seemingly unaffected and siloed away from a rapidly and dramatically changing world.

 

The high overlord of Las Vegas, one of its biggest draws and chronicle of his ongoing downfall, a spiral of cheesy balladeering, noticeable weight gain and increasing wackiness, from karate and UFO obsessions to meetings with the controversial Richard Nixon and using an honorary law enforcement badge to pull over random strangers and give them a cadillac, all eventually culminating in an ignominious demise consuming truckloads of drugs while, as the coroner's report notes, "straining at stool" in his lavishly appointed bathroom.  

 

There are at least three distinct Elvises, each with its own gaggle of posthumous impersonators (who can marry you in a quickie Vegas wedding!) and fans - a figure of bizarrely literal worship to some (many of whom eagerly devour Weekly World News 'sightings' and entertaining conspiracy theories that he may actually still be alive...), a figure of camp to others, but a versatile performer to all.

 

Tonight, we celebrate perhaps the strangest element of Elvis' life and career: his films.  A cinema that occupies its own bizarre, detached universe, as different from pale imitators like the Frankie and Annette beach party films or the many JD films of the 50's and early 60's as they are from traditional musicals or cinema proper; neither television-style sitcom or hard edged "rebel without a cause" teenaged outsider film, but standing somewhere crossing all of those, and coming off far superior in terms of budget, supporting casts and general quality of entertainment than any of its putative rivals.

 

Join us as we share an appropriately balanced mix of both well deserved laughs and due respect to these unique bits of Americana, only here on Weird Scenes!

 

Week 56: The King died on the throne: the weird world of the Elvis movie

 

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Weird Scenes 2/7/19: Wk 58 Superhero cinema pt. 3: Marvel studios steps in

We've talked superhero television (and the serials before them) in an earlier show, now buckle in as we take on the long running, seemingly inexhaustible run of superhero cinema, from the serials to its (mostly televised) fits and starts of the 1970s and 80's through the Fox Studios licenses of the early millenium to the ever more interconnected Marvel Studios universe of today!

In our final show, we pick up where Marvel Studios begins, finally bringing the outsourced characters home to roost and building a still evolving (and surprisingly still popular, after so many years and films) Marvel Cinematic Universe!

Join us for the finale of our trilogy of exploration (and occasional evisceration) of superhero cinema, as we take on the Marvel Studios superhero films, only here on Weird Scenes!

Wk 58 Superhero cinema from the 90s to today pt 3: Marvel Studios steps in (or superhero cinema as you know it)

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