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The Biggest Loser: who is Captain Dumbass?

I can’t help it…I can’t help but talk about what a dumbass Arthur is in this season’s “The Biggest Loser.” I’ll get to exactly why in a minute, but first, let’s begin the recap of last night’s episode…..

So host Alison Sweeney kicked things off by telling the contestants that they would officially be going to a red team (the unknowns) and either blue or black (ranch team). The ranch team chose black, so it would be red vs. black for this week’s weight loss challenge. And they started with another temptation challenge–chocolates for Valentine’s Day. The person who ate the most chocolate could control things a bit–they could either choose to keep the teams as is, or they could swap out one couple from their team for a couple on the other team. The good thing, though, is that it would be a secret who ate the most and who made a decision to change teammates. Q was eating chocolate and could not stop, and the same went for Rulon, Marci and Moses, the latter who ate 21 pieces of chocolate. But Arthur, as you might suspect, ate 35 pieces. It was really disgusting to watch such a fat man stuffing his face with chocolate. But that was all they showed, so we didn’t know if Arthur won or not. What we did know is that Jay and Jen from the ranch team had to switch sides and they were trading places with Sarah and Deni. Yikes. Was it Arthur? Why would he do that? No, it had to be someone else, right?

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How did The History Channel miss this one?

I don’t know how it took more than 70 years for someone to come up with this. Director Richard Raaphorst of the Netherlands gives us the story how the Nazi war machine literally built its fighting forces, “Frankenstein’s Army.” Warning: contains some relatively mild black and white WWII gruesomeness with some rather brilliantly disturbing historical resonances.

H/t the Film Drunk.

Now, sing with me fellow Elvis Costello fans: “Frankenstein’s Army is here to stay; Frankenstein’s Army are on the way…”

OMG! Brad Bird giving up animation under extreme duress!!! I repeat, “OMG!!!!”

The first 4.5 minutes of this awards video of Brad Bird’s extremely well deserved Windsor McKay Award from the Annies is pretty much your standard career retrospective about the former “Simpsons” creative turned writer/director of the instant classics, “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles,” and “Ratatouille.” In the second half, Bird himself appears. He’s presumably somewhere near the set of his live-action debut, the next “Mission: Impossible” installment, which will star Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg, among others.

The weird part is that he says he’s giving up animation forever, but then it gets weirder and more worrisome.

H/t Mike Fleming.

RIP Tura Satana

I was very sad to learn yesterday of the death at age 73 of a true grindhouse legend and an early icon of female empowerment. I had the good fortune of having a couple of longish chats with Tura Satana, the legendary star of Russ Meyer’s 1965 grindhouse tour de force, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and other light classics of exploitation cinema. We both appeared in my friend Cody Jarrett’s women-in-prison opus, “Sugarboxx,” though she actually got to speak. She enjoyed talking about the old days and I certainly didn’t mind listening.

One-quarter Japanese, Filipino, Cheyenne-Indian, and Scots-Irish, her story included a childhood stay in Manzanar, one of the internment camps where all Japanese-Americans on the West coast were illegally forced to spend World War II. She was a victim of a childhood rape who, she said, eventually tracked down all her attackers. That anger would later find an outlet in her work, to say the least.

faster-pussycat-kill-kill-tura-satana1

Her performing career began with notoriety as an exotic dancer and martial artist. A gig posing erotically for photographs by aging silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd led Lloyd to suggest a career in movies. She eventually made a brief appearance in Billy Wilder’s “Irma La Douce” and that was followed by her bone-crunching interpretation as the villainous/anti-heroic Varla in Russ Meyer’s insane mix of sexual innuendo and, for the time, shocking violence. She would likely have appeared in later Meyer films, but she was unwilling to do the kind of nudity that was his usual calling card. A certain amount of tragedy followed her later in life and her 1970s career was cut short by a bullet wound, her children, and a second career as a nurse.

Tura wasn’t Dame Judi Dench, but then Dame Judi is no Tura Satana. She was one very cool, very brassy woman who held an audience’s attention in a way that was entirely unique to her and entirely unforgettable.

For more, please do check out some of the links at MUBI and also Kimberly Lindberg’s really great 2007 tribute and bio. After the flip, I have a few key moments of Satana.

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Superbowl movie ads

If you happen to be one of those weirdos like me who missed the Superbowl but want to see some of the new glimpses of upcoming big time movies being offered during the big broadcast, you’ve come to the right place. (Admittedly one of many right places all over the ‘net.)

We’ll start with the one that maybe has aroused the most curiosity, if only because the least has been known up to now. J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8.” True to its press, what little there’s been, it appears to be kind of “Close Encounters of the Extra-Terrestrial Kind.”

Now here’s more of “Captain America” than we’ve seen before. We even get a split second of the Red Skull (for some reason my favorite super villain as a kid).

A moment with everyone’s favorite Asgard resident.

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