"General, that's a hell of an act"*

Actor Peter Falk, known to most people as Columbo, died today.  While Columbo was great, I remember him best as CIA agent Vince in the movie The In Laws.


"Serpentine, Shel, Serpentine!"




*This is what Vince says to General Garcia upon seeing the general's "Señor Pepe" act:

Tarantino gets away with this a lot

One of the more famous scenes of the movie Pulp Fiction is when Jules spouts a biblical verse (supposedly Ezekiel 25:17*) before he blows away big-brained Bret:





...except Tarantino lifted this almost word for word from the 1976 Sonny Chiba chop sockey flick Karate Kiba, also known as The Bodyguard.  (Not to be confused with the Kevin Costner movie.)  Here's the section so that you can judge for yourself:

*For accuracy's sake, here's the King James Version of the real Ezekiel 25:15-17:

"[15] Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart, to destroy it for the old hatred;
[16] Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will stretch out mine hand upon the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethims, and destroy the remnant of the sea coast.
[17] And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them."

So both movies pretty much made it up, except Tarantino (or Jules) stole it.

Top Ten Coolest Movie Fighting Skills

Since I'm sort of a martial arts movie geek (among other deficiencies) this is the kind of column I love, because I've seen nearly all the movies. I've even seen "Gymkata."  My favorite?  I really liked Bourne, but it's hard to beat the coolness of Darth Maul.

Netflix Can Yield Some Surprises

Take Ink, for example.

A weird, out-of-sequence story of either a man's fall from grace (with possible redemption,) or a young girl who is stolen by a monster, told in a visual style that you will find arresting and interesting, or irritating and headache-causing, in the same mold as The Matrix or The Cell. Not a kid's movie, lots of NSFW language. This movie was not released by a big studio, and if not for Netflix I would never have seen it. FWIW, I gave it a high rating.

Although it won't help much, here's the trailer:

"The Colonel"

You don't realize how immature you really are until you laugh at this.

Relatively Unimportant

A quick look at a poll on the IMDB website made me realize something. Many of my favorite movies have one word titles. From their list of the top-rated one-word movie titles, I enjoyed:

Goodfellas
Psycho
Alien
Aliens
Amadeus
Braveheart
Jaws
Unforgiven
Fargo
Patton
Platoon
Glory
Spartacus
Rocky

Relatively unimportant, but interesting.