DVR Notes
Watching Lebowski for the umpteenth time the other night (first time in HD though), I noticed a couple things.
1. Aimee Mann plays the female nihilist (aka, the one who sacrificed her toe). So, the table at the pancake house features Flea, Mann, Peter Stormare, and Torsten Voges, whose career certainly peaked with that 1998 performance. An excerpt from an Onion interview with Mann from 2000:
O: Do you have any proper lines in that movie?
AM: Well, I'm supposed to be German, and me and the other Germans are sitting around the diner talking. One of the other guys actually was German, so he and I got together and actually figured out a little dialogue in German so we'd actually have something to say, because otherwise, when they say "action," you have to make up some fakey German-y fake language. Which is what Flea did, and the other guy is Swedish, so he kind of spoke this Swedish-German composite. He didn't care.
O: What were you talking about in German?
AM: Um, he says to me, "Do you have the key?" And I say, "No, you have the key." We had an argument about who had the key. "Well, you had the key, you locked the door!" "No, I didn't lock the door, it locked by itself." It was really stupid. Then the waitress comes and we order pancakes.
2. Also, David Thewlis plays Maude's excitable friend, a man more well-known for his Harry Potter performances, even though I always confuse him with Alan Rickman.
Yesterday I attempted to ignore the heat while watching the made-for-TV movie "Mission Of The Shark", about the USS Indianapolis, a battleship lost in the Pacific Ocean towards the end of WWII, shortly after dropping off a vital piece of the atomic bomb. Anyone who has seen "Jaws" will hopefully remember the scene towards the end of the film where the three main men are drunk and Robert Shaw's Quint character describes how he was on the ship that sank and watched his fellow crew members get picked off by sharks. There was even talk about making one of the Jaws sequels a serious prequel regarding this incident. However, that never happened and instead we are left with this tame film.
The subject of the boat's survivors being abandoned and the subsequent court martial of the captain (along with the delivery of the atom bomb) is quite fascinating, and should have made for a decent historical war film. Of course I wasn't expecting much from something custom-made to insert commercials, and the story is therefore way too condensed. Also, adding sharks to the mix is kind of an afterthought to the maker's of "Mission", and it would be nice to see this story remade with a decent budget.
Leave a comment