#John Janssen

[realhousewives-fan]

Alexis Bellino is Filming RHOC!

When it rains, it pours for Shannon Beador. Not only is Alexis Bellino dating her ex. She’s also filming for season 18 of RHOC!

Alexis was a housewife on RHOC for four seasons during season 5-8 and is probably best known as “Jesus Jugs”, as Tamra Judge called her.

She was on the show with Tamra and Heather Dubrow. And she has been seen filming with Heather and Emily Simpson.

The fact that they were with Emily surprised me a little bit since things weren’t great between her and Heather at the reunion.

But Emily has joined the Two Ts in a Pod series and is doing Popping Off with Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave.

Are Emily and Tamra getting closer?

Tamra and Shannon are feuding as Tamra backed out of their Tres Amigas tour, and Tamra understands that bringing Alexis on the show might be good TV.

And Emily isn’t exactly shy about direct and messy questions. If she can smell a story, she will follow it shamelessly.

It is strange that Shannon’s ex, John Janssen, who’s supposedly didn’t like the limelight, left Shannon for another housewife.

There’s an interest here.

According to Emily, Alexis was under a lot of pressure while she was on RHOC because of her marriage to Jim Bellino and couldn’t really be herself.

Alexis had also been hesitant to return to RHOC as she didn’t want to kick Shannon while she was down, but she did decide that she would no longer feel guilty for her relationship with John.

And Shannon is going to lose her mind.

She had multiple meltdowns after she learned that the women were talking about her relationship with John last season.

And she has never reacted calmly and collected.

And she must work overtime to make Alexis irrelevant to the show if she wants to avoid her.

Emily, Heather, and Tamra have invited Alexis back onto the show. Who’s going to be Shannon’s ally in season 18?

Well, it certainly won’t be Gina Kirschenheiter, who was furious with the way Shannon was talking about her DUI and her children last season.

[wheel-of-fish]

Phantom acting choices (2/?)

Cooper Grodin (with Julia Udine and Ben Jacoby, U.S. Tour, 2014)

He Liangchen (with Yang Chenxiuyi, Shanghai, 2023)

Hans Peter Janssens (Antwerp, 2000)

Peter Karrie (Toronto, 1998)

Earl Carpenter (with Rachel Barrell, London, 2006)

Ted Keegan (with Emilie Kouatchou, Broadway, 2022)

Hugh Panaro (Broadway, 2005)

John Owen-Jones (with Celia Graham, London, 2002)

Brad Little (World Tour, 2014)

Tomas Ambt Kofod (with Sibylle Glosted, Copenhagen, 2019)

Set 1

[theconjurervfx]

The Faculty (1998) dir. Robert Rodriguez

[localratmag]

Rounders (1998)

Two childhood friends - reluctant law student Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) and jailbird conman Worm (Edward Norton) - play highstakes poker and embark on a mission to settle a big debt.

movie score: 6 | damon score: 6.6

this is pt. 4 of the damoning (a project where this local rat watches every major matt damon movie in chronological order):

localratmag.tumblr.com/damoning

[clemsfilmdiary]

GoldenEye (1995, Martin Campbell)

9/6/24

[silveragelovechild]

When I saw the first John Wick movie, I actually liked it. It was a revenge movie (he’s after the Russian goons that killed his beloved puppy). Sure, it was ultra violent but the fight scenes were stylish and I t introduced some novel concepts like the Continental.

I saw a couple of the sequels, but they were just rinse-and repeat with less style and more death and mayhem.

This year Hollywood offered us two contenders for a piece of the pie that John Wick baked. The first was Monkey Man, written and directed by Dev Patel. It too involved revenged (the cop that killed his mother) and an endless line of thugs for him to kill. The twist? He was aided by a transgender hijra community!

This week we got Boy Kills World starring Bill Skarsgård (famous as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Stephen King’s It). He’s out for revenge too - the evil dictator who killed his mother and sister. The twist in this epic is that it’s a comedy. That is, if you find an endless line of thugs and innocent bystanders getting slaughtered is funny.

Skarsgård plays an unnamed Boy who survived a firing squad. He’s trained (and tortured) by a Shaman who wants him to kill the people that killed his mom & sister. The shaman is always blowing hallucinogenic smoke in the boy’s face. This made me wonder how much of the story we’re seeing is real.

BTW, the boy is also deaf and mute. As he grows older he forgets the sound of his own voice, so he imagine to be like the announcer of his childhood favorite video game. So throughout the movie we hear his thoughts voiced by H. Jon Benjamin of Bob’s Burgers and Archer fame.

Anyway, like John Wick and Monkey Man before him, the Boy kills Thugs (or the World as the title suggests)… lots and lots of thugs. There is a major set piece towards the end set in a theater with a winter theme… snow, igloos, and snowmen. I think it’s suppose to be funny, it not.

Oh, I forgot to mention… throughout the movie, in between killing thugs, the boy sees a hallucination of his young sister. These scenes are the best in the movie. Actress Quinn Copeland does a good job in an R Rated movie that she’s too young to see.

Neither Boy Kills World or Monkey Man are as clicker as John Wick or even John Wick sequels. Boy Kills World’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t known when to end. There’s a point when you think the story is over, yet it introduces another long and bloody slugfest. And when that’s over, there’s yet another bloody and long slugfest. Enough already!

Boy Kills World does answer a few Hollywood Mysteries:

It shows the reason why Famke Janssen will not play Jean Gray in the post MCU/X-men movies. (She’s starting to look like Katherine Helmond in the movie Brazil.)

It’s explains what happens when your post Downton Abbey career fails. (I’m talking to you Michelle Dockery).

[antonomasia09]

[stormxpadme]

Chapter 15 of Weathered I: FROM THE ASHES is online.

In which the X-Men try to keep the Brotherhood from putting their deadly plan in the power plant into action, leading to a catastrophic final break between them and Pyro and Jean revealing more and more how clouded her mind is.

[realhousewives-fan]

The Tres Amigas Has Broken Up – Again!

Tamra Judge announced her break up with The Tres Amigas in the most typical Tamra way possible.

She posted a picture of herself with the caption “Uno,” and then she tweeted:

I guess that The Tres Amigas are fighting again, but in my opinion, Tamra’s rekindled friendship with Shannon Beador last season was just an alliance.

Tamra was hellbent on taking down Heather Dubrow at any cause, and that meant pausing her own feud with Shannon.

The tricky thing is that The Tres Amigas had comedy show tour booked, and now that Tamra has dropped out, Shannon and Vicki Gunvalson must change their shows.

It was in poor taste anyway.

Why would someone who was just arrested and sentenced for a hit and run DUI, be touring a party show?

Tamra even commented on that under her tweet:

I was wondering after BravoCon how Tamra’s friendship with Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave would affect her friendship with Vicki.

At the end of BravoCon Andy Cohen tried to get Teddi and Vicki to end their feud, but Teddi ruined it by implying that Vicki was triggered by someone who actually had cancer.

But it seems what started this fallout was the surprising relationship between Shannon’s ex John Janssen and former Housewife Alexis Bellino.

Apparently, Tamra had allegedly wanted Alexis to join RHOC again once their relationship was official and Shannon felt betrayed by that.

I can already predict that Shannon is going to act like the biggest victim of all time in season 17, and it’s true that she has been through a lot of craziness.

But in my opinion is a lot of it self-inflicted.

And she needs to take accountability and make changes in her life to get it back on the right track.

Will Vicki film with Shannon as friend in this feud? Vicki is the only one active on social media about this feud, and she’s ruthless.

When Tamra announced she was on The Traitor this season, Vicki commented:

The fans were quick to take Shannon side and jumped immediately on the bandwagon of treating Tamra as the villain.

[catholic-saint-tournament]

Modern Saint Bracket Announcement

Instead of waiting until Sunday, the modern bracket will open immediately after the post-schism bracket is over. This is the modern bracket, which will be followed by a final four, and then there will be even MORE polls (losers' brackets, Marian apparitions, we're going all summer baby.)

Catholic Saint Tournament Modern Bracket Round 1 Pairings:

St Therese of Lisieux vs St Elizabeth Ann Seton

St Padre Pio (of Pietrelcina) vs St Charles de Foucauld

St Maximilian Kolbe vs St Benilde Romancon

St John Bosco vs St John Neumann

St Mother Teresa (of Calcutta) vs St Arnold Janssen

St Jacinta Marto vs St Edith Stein

St Maria Goretti vs St Marianne Cope

St Charles Lwanga (& co) vs St John Vianney

St Oscar Romero vs St Josemaria Escriva

St Bernadette vs St Damian of Molokai

St Faustina vs St Catherine Laboure

St Mary MacKillop vs St Katharine Drexel

St Gemma Galgani vs St Frances Xavier Cabrini

St John Henry Cardinal Newman vs Pope St John Paul II

Pope St John XXIII vs St Mark Ji Tianxiang

St Francisco Marto vs Sts Louis & Zelie Martin (package deal)

You can still submit nominations for beatified folks, propaganda for your favorite saints, or other thoughts in the ask box! Or suggestions for future polls, questions, etc.

May the best saint win!

[trusswork]

childhood play

The child who plays privately by themselves is trying to achieve something -- this general fact may be difficult to discern, or easy to forget, and it is almost impossible to see what particular thing the child is trying to do, because it is so inward and dependent on an unseen world. Nevertheless, when a child plays alone, just as much as or even more than when they play with others, they are trying to make something come right. Thus a child can become frustrated with a doll or a toy all by him or herself, and this will often have nothing to do with some physical problem (eg, balancing blocks, or making a train go - those are achievements of a cruder kind). There is simply something that the child wants to happen, is causing to happen, or sees happening or potentially happening in their play, the animation or retreat of some part of the play's world. A truck can very tragically fail to be in the right place, no matter their efforts; a stuffed bear can fail to be quite as near or far from a child's heart as the child desires at that moment; and this can end in tears that seem to come from nowhere. (Maurice Sendak's Kenny's Window shows this happening better and more truly than perhaps any other book.) A particularly sensitive child may find these same problems enacted in play with more abstracted toys such as sticks, rocks, pieces of string, paper, and so on. An extremely sensitive child will see the whole world as animate and frustrating in this way.

John and Faith Hubley's 1958 animation “Cockaboody,” set to audio of the couple’s children playing, emphasizes this world of the shifting, sometimes uncooperative toys and invisible companions. In a different way, it reminds me of Tove Janssen’s Moomins books; the child, Moomintroll, changes his moods to himself easily; or completely forgets about something he is preoccupied with, and then later remembers it and is just as enthusiastic as ever.

Edward Lear’s poem “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” set by composer Elena Langer and premiered by the BSO, March 2024: as Langer notes, it is a nonsense poem taken very earnestly and set accordingly, by a writer and artist whom Langer compares to Shelley or Byron. Before that, the orchestra played Ravel's Mother Goose suite, and it made me think how precisely symphonic childhood can be in our time -- between toys, records, stuffed animals and dolls, weather and seasons, other children and grown ups, rooms in a house, and so on -- in growing up, there seem to be fewer such simultaneous ingredients in life sometimes.

"The Noontime Witch," this dark middle European fairy tale in a setting by Dvorak -- on the same BSO program -- seems to reveal more about motherhood than many such tales: the intense, overflowing frustration with a child, the furious need to protect it, and the danger of protecting it too much.

[brokehorrorfan]

The Swiss Conspiracy will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on February 20 via Film Masters. The 1976 action film is directed by Jack Arnold (Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man).

David Janssen, Senta Berger, John Ireland, John Saxon, Anton Diffring, Arthur Brauss, and Elke Sommer star. Norman Klenman, Philip Saltzman, and Michael Stanley wrote the script.

The Swiss Conspiracy has been newly restored in 4K from original 35mm archival elements. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film historians Daniel Budnik and Rob Kelly

Jack Arnold: The Lost Years featurette

Jack Arnold: A Three-Dimensional Filmmaker visual essay by film historians Ryan Verrill and Will Dodson

Original trailer

Recut trailer

Essay by Cinema Retro editor-in-chief Lee Pfeiffer

A Swiss bank president hires a former U.S. Justice Department official to ferret out a group of blackmailers who have learned the identity of five, anonymous numbered account holders, including a Chicago mob figure who is also being pursued by American gangsters. Investigator David Christopher (David Janssen) identifies four potential suspects, including the bank vice-president's mistress, Rita (Elke Sommer). Adding to the intrigue are the suspicions of the Swiss Federal Police which complicates the investigation. When the bank pays the chief blackmailer in uncut diamonds, the ransom rendezvous results in a dramatic showdown in the snow-covered Alps and a shocking revelation.

Pre-order The Swiss Conspiracy.

[2ndaryprotocol]

Robert Altman’s star-studded Southern fried suspenser ‘The Gingerbread Man’ opened in theaters this week 25 years ago. 🍻⚖️☠️

“𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚎𝚡𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗' 𝚒𝚜 𝚓𝚞𝚖𝚙𝚒𝚗' 𝚝𝚘 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚌𝚕𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜.”

[michaelvarrati]

Take me to your teacher! This week, Peaches and Michael navigate the evils of high school in celebration of 1998’s THE FACULTY! In addition to discussing this cult classic’s considerable power cast, our hosts delve into the movie’s layered commentary on teen assimilation. Joining the conversation is celebrated actor and producer Ben Baur, who not only muses on the film’s queerness, but also its parallels to another “disturbing” 90s shocker. Then, acclaimed actor Joshua Tonks stops by to dig into his lifetime of love for this alien romp and the ongoing legacy of writer Kevin Williamson. From John Stewart to alien squirts, this episode has it all! Go!

[ljones41]

"GOLDENEYE" (1995) Review

"GOLDENEYE" (1995) Review What can I say about 1995’s "GOLDENEYE"? For one, it marked a series of firsts for the Bond franchise. The movie happened to be Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as James Bond. "GOLDENEYE" also turned out to be Dame Judi Dench’s first time portraying Bond’s MI-6 boss, "M". And the movie also proved to be a first Bond film for director Martin Campbell, who returned eleven years later to direct 2006’s "CASINO ROYALE".

After 1989’s ”LICENSE TO KILL”, I found myself frustrated by talk that it was time for EON Productions to give up on Timothy Dalton as Bond and find a new actor. To be frank, I did not want them to give up on Dalton. I thought he could have done at least one or two more Bond films in the 1990s. Needless to say, a lengthy lawsuit and Dalton’s reluctance to return to the role had put an end to my hopes. I was quite prepared to dislike ”GOLDENEYE”, until I heard that Pierce Brosnan had took over the Bond role. As much as I had grown to love Dalton’s interpretation of Bond, I had always been a Brosnan fan since his four-year stint as TV detective, ”REMINGTON STEELE”. I felt certain that he would be the right man for the job. Needless to say, ”GOLDENEYE” proved me right. Brosnan’s introduction as the British agent proved to be a major success. The man had the talent and the presence to pull off the job. I must confess that originally, he did not strike me as possessing his own originally style to portray Bond. Critic Roger Ebert once described Brosnan’s Bond as a combination of both Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s styles. To be honest, Ebert’s comments did not impress me very much. True, Brosnan’s style seemed like a combination of his two predecessors on the surface. But in time, I realized that he had his own style – that of a well-dressed dandy who hid his emotions and insecurities behind a poser façade. And yet, sometimes that façade cracked whenever faced by betrayal . . . as it did when he learned that his late colleague – Alec Trevelyan (Agent 006) - had faked his death in order to create a crime syndicate and eventually wreck havoc upon Britain with the aid of a stolen Russian weapons system. Many claimed that Brosnan did not really come into his own as Bond until his next film, ”TOMORROW NEVER DIES” (1997). Frankly, I disagree. I think that Brosnan did a very good job in establishing himself as the James Bond of 1990s, right off the bat. Looking back on the Brosnan era, I realize that the Irish-born actor had been very lucky with his leading ladies. And that luck began with Izabella Scorupco, the Polish-Swedish actress who portrayed Natalya Simonova, a Level 2 programmer at Russia’s Severnaya Satellite Control Station. With her exotic looks and no-nonsense attitude, Scorupco seemed to have no trouble at all keeping up with the more experienced Brosnan. Her Natalya is an intelligent and plucky woman who proved to be a very tenacious survivor . . . no matter what came her way. My only problem with the Natalya character was her tendency to use the ”Boys with toys” phrase or comment upon Bond’s destructive uses of vehicles. I found it tiresome after the second or third time. Brosnan had even better luck with the actor who portrayed 006 Agent-turned Janus crime syndicate leader – Alec Trevelyan. What can one say about Sean Bean? This guy is a true professional and his Alec Trevelyan turned out to be – at least in my opinion – one of the best Bond villains in the franchise. Because he was trained as a MI-6 agent, he proved to be a true match for Bond, as a nemesis. This was never more apparent than in the exciting martial arts fight between the two in the film’s last 30 minutes. Did I have any complaints about Bean’s performance? Nope. Did I have any problems with his character? Unfortunately, yes. Poor Alec Trevelyan seemed to suffer the same malaise as other Bond villains – setting up the agent for an over-the-top death. Shame. He could have been the best amongst the bunch. As I had stated before, ”GOLDENEYE” marked Dame Judi Dench’s first appearance as the head of the British Secret Service – M. I am a great admirer of Dame Judi, but her debut as M seemed a bit stiff to me. I realize that her character is supposed to be new in the position, but I got the feeling that not only did the character went through great lengths to prove that she could be Bond’s supervisor, but the actress also went to great lengths to prove that she could portray a ruthless and no-nonsense head of intelligence. Thankfully, Dame Judi will get better in the role. Bond is assisted by two characters in ”GOLDENEYE” - CIA agent Jack Wade (portrayed by former Bond villain, Joe Don Baker) and former KGB-turned-entrepreneur Valentin Zukovksy (Robbie Coltrane). Baker was his usual competent self and he had some good moments during Bond’s initial meeting with Wade. But eventually, I found the character a little tiresome, especially with his nicknames for Bond – namely “Jim” and “Jimbo”. Coltrane seemed more effective to me. He was just as funny as he was in 1999’s ”THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH”, but Zukovsky came off as a little more intimidating in this film. Trevelyan also had his assistants – namely former Soviet pilot Xenia Onatopp (Famke Jenssen) and the computer geek Boris Grishenko, who had betrayed Natalya and other programmers at the Severnaya Satellite Control Station. I had been worried that Jenssen would prove to be as over-the-top (please, no jokes) as Barbara Carrera’s Fatima Blush in ”NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN”. Thankfully, my fears proved groundless. Well . . . somewhat. There were moments when Onatopp’s penchant for rough sex seemed a little tiresome. However, those moments seemed few and far in between. As for Alan Cummings (both he and Jenssen would go on to portray costumed mutants in the comic book franchise, ”X-MEN” with other Bond girl Halle Berry), his Boris Grishenko seemed at times very amusing and at other times, downright annoying. I must admit that he and Scorupco managed to create a nice little screen chemistry. And Minnie Driver had a hilarious cameo as Zukovsky's girlfriend, who happened to be a singer with a lack of talent. The plot for ”GOLDENEYE” revolved around former MI-6 agent Alec Trevelyan’s desire to exact revenge upon Great Britain for betraying his family and other Leniz Cossacks (former Nazi collaborators) to the Soviet Union following World War II. Trevelyan’s parents managed to survive the purge, but they eventually committed suicide in the face of survivor’s guilt. After Alec learned of his bloody past, he decided to get his revenge. He defected secretly during a routine mission in Soviet Russia with Bond and immersed himself in the underground world of the Russian Mafia. Nine years later, Trevelyan emerged as the mysterious Janus – leader of the Janus Crime Syndicate. And how does he get his revenge? First, he stole “keys” to the secret Russian EMP weapon, "GoldenEye", before disappearing into Cuba. With the keys to “GoldenEye”, he planned to electronically rob every bank in the UK setting off the GoldenEye blast – crippling every electronic device in the Great Britain and disguising his theft. Not a bad plot. Of course, Bond and Natalya foiled him in the end. Although the plot seemed to have similar nuances to those “megalomaniacal” plots to destroy the superpowers and rule the world . . . it seems bearable without going over the top. And despite the almost out-of-this-world aura of Trevelyan’s scheme, director Martin Campbell managed to film ”GOLDENEYE” as a tight and suspenseful thriller with good performances and believable action sequences like Trevelyan and Onatopp’s theft of the NATO Tiger fighter helicopter, General Ourumov and Onatopp’s theft of the GoldenEye satellite keys, Natalya’s survival of the massacre and destruction of the Severnaya Satellite Control Station, Bond and Natalya’s escape from both the Russian holding cell (the tank chase aside) and their escape from Trevelyan’s ICBM train. But the piece-de-resistance for me turned out to be the Bond/Trevelyan fight. I have commented upon how much I enjoyed it. But I more than enjoyed it. For me, it was the best hand-to-hand fight scene in the entire franchise. I consider it superior to the Bond/Grant fight in ”FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE”. However, I doubt that many would agree with me. However, there were scenes that defy reality . . . and logic. I never could understand why Trevelyan did not simply have Bond shot dead in that icon graveyard, instead of setting both him and Natalya up to be blown up inside that Tiger helicopter. Bond’s escape from that chemical weapons facility in the pre-title sequence . . . a tad unbelievable. Although the tank chase through St. Petersburg is considered one of the best in the franchise, I hated it. I’m sorry but I do. By including a tank in a chase scene, it simply bogged down the story for me. And I am not particularly fond of the finale at Trevelyan’s Cuban facility. The acting seemed in danger of going over-the-top and the method of how Trevelyan finally met his death (having the entire complex) fall upon him seemed to ridiculous to believe. He should have died after that fall he had suffered. If there is one thing about ”GOLDENEYE” I truly hated, it was the theme song, performed by diva Tina Turner. Poor Ms. Turner. I think she had the bad luck to perform what I consider to be the absolute worst song in the entire Bond franchise. And the musical score (written by Eric Serra), with its computerized tones combined with music to be . . . I will simply state that I hated it as much as I did the song. End of story. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed ”GOLDENEYE” very much, after twenty years. It possessed enough good performances and action sequences to be a worthwhile entry for EON Productions. As far as I am concerned, ”GOLDENEYE” is probably Brosnan’s best Bond film and Campbell’s second-best film overall. And it is number eight on my list of favorite Bond films.