“Hell’s Kitchen” is getting a bit old with its same-ness and this season, with the lack of a clear-cut star. Gordon Ramsay is going to have to hire an executive chef from a Final Four of meathead Russell, a dude who can’t multi-task in Trev, a woman who acts and sounds like a little kid in Jillian, and another who continues to make big mistakes in Nona. Really? Well yeah, really. Here is the recap from last night:
Initial challenge: Re-creating a dish that Ramsay created by tasting it.
Last night on “The Biggest Loser,” there was a small bit of redemption. Well, maybe a huge bit of redemption, and a bigger bit of even more gameplay. Here is how it went down….
Host Alison Sweeney told the contestants after the last elimination that there would be a yellow line and a red line at the next weigh-in, meaning two eliminations and the Final Four selection. Then they showed The Alliance, aka Brendan, Patrick and Frado, mouthing off about how the winner of the show was sitting in that room and that it was all working “according to plan.” Bogus!
It was another special 90-minute episode of “Sons of Anarchy” tonight, but I honestly didn’t expect any less from the season finale, which opened with the typical montage, this time scored to an upbeat pop song while the club enjoyed a cheerful breakfast feast at the clubhouse. The festivities didn’t last long, however, as Gemma is becoming increasingly worried about Jax’s deal with Stahl after discovering a case file on the IRA council in his cut.
She’s still staying mum on the subject, but after Clay tells her about their expanding business relationship with the Irish, Gemma decides to try and save Jax’s skin before any more harm is done by turning herself in. Not that it will do her any good. Stahl has already exonerated Gemma of all the charges (apart from fleeing custody, which has landed her a few months under house arrest), so there’s really nothing she can do. Nevertheless, Gemma promises Stahl that deals like the one she made with Jax never work out because there’s no trust, and it’s going to end badly for one of the parties involved. If only Gemma knew just how right she would be…
With the hours ticking away until Jimmy is out of SAMCRO’s reach for good, Clay visits Otto at Stockton to set up a meet between him and Lenny the Pimp. Lenny agrees to reach out to his Russian contacts, but warns Otto that while they’re certainly not loyal to Jimmy, it’s going to take a hefty sum for them to flip on him. And as Clay soon learns, he wasn’t kidding, as the Russians ask for $2 million in exchange for Jimmy – money that the club simply doesn’t have. Thankfully, those boxes that Chucky has been trying to show someone for days just so happens to contain $5 million in counterfeit bills. It’s apparently from his time working for Henry Lin, and though he was supposed to destroy it, he decided to keep it instead.
Irvin Kershner, who died Saturday at age 87, was a solid journeyman director, his early films — several of which, especially “The Flim-Flam Man” and “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” are supposed to be pretty good — are obscure enough that even I haven’t seen too many of them. He was also a graduate of the USC Film School in 1950, which makes him, I guess, about the first of the film school brats.
He’s known today primarily because of two strong, dramatic action films. The first was a 1976 fact-based TV movie, “Raid on Entebbe.” The second was, uh-hmm, “The Empire Strikes Back.” For one film in the series, a “Star Wars” film had a genuinely well-written screenplay with good dialogue and a director who knew how to elicit strong work from actors and structure a dramatic moment. For some reason, everyone agrees it was the best of the series. Watch this scene again, though you’ve certainly seen it before. There’s emotion going on.
Kershner was, I gather, a gracious and intelligent man. Here is a brief tribute/outtake from the documentary “The Nature of Existence” in which Kershner endorses “the Force” in a way, while also speaking out for a spiritual, but entirely non-supernatural view of life, death, and creativity.
Much more, as usual, at MUBI.
UPDATE: The fine blogger Greg Ferrara argues that “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” was a lot better than “pretty good.”
It would be a fool’s errand to try and argue that Mr. Nielsen’s greatest moments were not in “Airplane” and as Lt. Frank Drebbin in the “The Naked Gun” and the “Police Squad!” series that preceded it. But, with everyone else saluting those amazing deadpan moments now that Leslie Nielsen has sadly left us at age 84, I thought I’d take a moment to take two somewhat less well known moments from his early, less funny movies.
First, before Captains Kirk and Reynolds and Han Solo, there was the not-so-dissimilar Commander J.J. Adams in “Forbidden Planet.”
And here is Nielsen in what honestly really is, in its way, an amazing pre-Zucker Brothers performance by Nielsen. In 1977’s “Day of the Animals” he portrayed an ad man who takes over one faction of an extremely ill-starred group of campers. Below, he indulges in some poor behavior even Sterling Cooper wouldn’t have tolerated.
And, because it’s mandatory, a brief moment of sheer genius from “The Naked Gun.”
More via Roger Ebert,Edward Copeland and MUBI.
UPDATE: More reaction to Leslie Nielsen’s life and passing from David Hudson.
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