Star Wars VII: return of the cast

At long last, Disney, Lucasfilm and director J.J. Abrams have unveiled the cast of "Star Wars: Episode VII." Original stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew and Kenny Baker will be joined by Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson and Max von Sydow.

Comics History 101 (from IGN)

09/26/12 - Captain America 2: who is the Winter Soldier?
03/14/13 - Who are the Guardian's of the Galaxy?
09/20/13 - Who Is Ultron?
11/8/13 - Thor 2 easter egg explained
12/6/13 - Who is Jessica Jones?
12/20/13 - Who is X-Men's Apocalypse?
01/28/14 - Who is Ant-Man?
2/5/14 - X-Men: Days of Future Past Explained
2/20/14 - Wonder Woman Explained
3/14/14 - Who is the Vision?
3/26/14 - Captain America: The Winter Solstice easter egg explained
4/16/14 - Who are the Sinister Six?
4/25/14 - Who is Dr. Strange?

Here's the youtube playlist.

Tom Shadyac and Happy

I thought I blogged about this earlier, but I don't see it so here goes.

Shadyac was the director of movies such as Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty.  But then had a bicycle accident that changed his life.

He sold his possessions and made the documentary I Am (available on Netflix, hulu, snagfilms).

I remember learning about him on Oprah.

Anyway, I went searching for my blog entry (that apparently never existed) as I was watching the movie Happy on Netflix (also available on Hulu and HitBliss/Amazon.com) and saw that Shadyac was involved.  I thought he might have created the movie, but looking it up, he was one of the producers.

Here's the wikipedia description.

Happy is a 2011 feature documentary film directed, written, and co-produced by Academy Award nominated film-maker Roko Belic. It explores human happiness through interviews with people from all walks of life in 14 different countries, weaving in the newest findings of positive psychology.

Director Roko Belic was originally inspired to create the film after producer/director Tom Shadyac (Liar, Liar, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty) showed him an article in the New York Times entitled "A New Measure of Well Being From a Happy Little Kingdom" [which talks about Bhutan]. The article ranks the United States as the 23rd happiest country in the world. Shadyac then suggested that Belic make a documentary about happiness. Belic spent several years interviewing over 20 people, ranging from leading happiness researchers to a rickshaw driver in Kolkatta, a family living in a cohousing community in Denmark, a woman who was run over by a truck, a Cajun fisherman, and more.

boy flies from California to Hawaii

outside the plane!

Officials say a 16-year-old boy is “lucky to be alive” and unharmed after flying from California to Hawaii stowed away in a plane’s wheel well, surviving cold temperatures at 38,000 feet and a lack of oxygen.

“Doesn’t even remember the flight,” FBI spokesman Tom Simon in Honolulu told The Associated Press on Sunday night. “It’s amazing he survived that.”

The boy was questioned by the FBI after being discovered on the tarmac at the Maui airport Sunday morning with no identification, Simon said.

“Kid’s lucky to be alive,” Simon said.

Simon said security footage from the San Jose airport verified that the boy from Santa Clara, Calif., hopped a fence to get to Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 on Sunday morning. The child had run away from his family after an argument, Simon said. Simon said when the Boeing 767 landed in Maui, the boy hopped down from the wheel well and started wandering around the airport grounds.

“He was unconscious for the lion’s share of the flight,” Simon said. The flight lasted about 5 1/2 hours.

Paul Shaffer was too busy

Paul Shaffer made a huge error in judgement when he said that he was “too busy” to consider the role of George Costanza that Jerry Seinfeld once handed to him on a silver platter.

The actor was not even required to audition for the part. One reason why the creators of “Seinfeld” were so fond of Shaffer for the role is because he looks so much like Larry David on whom the part is based.

He got a call from Seinfeld but never even called him back. Despite missing out on a role in the hugely successful sitcom, Shaffer has enjoyed a long career as David Letterman’s sidekick.

***

Will Smith was the first choice for the lead role in the incredibly successful sci-fi franchise “The Matrix.”

He says that he turned it down because he didn’t understand the movie and knew that he wouldn’t be able to give the role the respect it deserved.

Instead, Smith went on to star in the action comedy “Wild Wild West” and the role of Neo went to Keanu Reeves.

***

It seems like Harrison Ford was born to play Indiana Jones, but the role was originally intended to go to Tom Selleck who was a huge hit in “Magnum, P.I.” at the time.

The show was reluctant to let their star perform in a movie that was obviously destined to be a mega hit.

The moustached actor was forced to choose between the two roles and decided to honour his original commitment to the TV show.

David vs. Goliath (according to Gladwell)

first of all — the sling is one of the most feared weapons in ancient times. It's not a child's story. The rock that goes from David's sling has a stopping power that's equivalent to a bullet from a .38-caliber handgun. When David decided to bring a sling to a sword fight, he's got superior technology. He's not messing around here. He knows exactly what he's doing.

Second, Goliath probably had something called acromegaly, which is a condition where there's a tumor on your pituitary gland, and so your pituitary overproduces human growth hormone. And many of the great giants in history had acromegaly. André the Giant — the great wrestler — acromegaly. Tallest man in history — a guy named Robert Wadlow — had acromegaly. He was 7'11", I think. Acromegaly makes you really, really big and tall. It also comes with a side effect that the tumor starts to compress the optic nerves and radically diminish your vision.

And if you read the biblical story of Goliath very closely, it's clear the guy can't see. He's led onto the valley floor, much more than this, by an attendant. He's the mightiest warrior in Palestine and he has to have a boy lead him by the hand to the battlefield. And then there's this whole thing about it takes him forever to figure out where David is and what David is doing — because David comes down from the mountain and doesn't have a sword. Doesn't have a shield. Isn't wearing armor. Duh! He does not intend to fight you in a sword fight. Why does Goliath take forever to respond to this? Because he can't see him.

So, here you have a kid who is really fast moving, nimble, has superior technology. Has changed the rules of the conflict without telling his opponent and his opponent is largely blind. That is not the story of an underdog. David holds all the cards, properly understood.

*** [6/27/14]

Gladwell is the opposite of disagreeable,
the word he uses to describe many of the
underdogs chronicled in his new book, people
who overcame perceived disadvantages to
change their lives and the world. The word is
not meant to be a stigma but a way to identify
those people who, through means, motivation
and even hubris, managed to make their
mark in unusual and unorthodox ways.

These disagreeable folks include Gary
Cohn, the president and chief operating officer
of Goldman Sachs, who learned to use his verbal
skills and chutzpah to compensate for his
dyslexia; the Impressionist painters, who, after
mostly being rejected by the prestigious Salon
in Paris, started their own modest art gallery to
gain notoriety; Wyatt Walker, Martin Luther
King Jr.’s right-hand man, who knew how to
strategize and how to manipulate the media to
advance the cause of civil rights; and Emil
Freireich, the blustery, imposing doctor who
used unconventional and even controversial
means to battle childhood leukemia.

“Doing something disagreeable is doing
something that is frowned upon by your peers,
that is offensive to your peers and that requires
you as a person to take extraordinary social
risks,” Gladwell tells The Connection.

“Sometimes that strays into things that are
downright questionable. In Freireich’s case, he
was breaking lots of rules, but his argument
would’ve been the rules are dumb. In retrospect,
he was right. He also had to be coldblooded,
like when I tell the story about him
jabbing the needles into the kids to get the
bone marrow. It’s really hard to do. Most people
didn’t want to do it and were looking for
reasons not to do it. He didn’t let those kinds of
considerations get in the way of what he knew
had to be done, and I think that’s an
incredibly disagreeable act and an incredibly
heroic act at the same time. I think
he’s an extraordinary figure.”

The way Gladwell views the world is
refreshing. Whether he’s discussing how a
spontaneously strategic Vietnam vet beat a
highly prepared Pentagon team during pre-
Iraq war games in Blink, analyzing the time
and place factors that led to Bill Gates rising
to prominence in Outliers or chronicling
underdog ascensions in David and Goliath,
the author espouses clarity of thought, learning
to sift through and filter out the noise of
the world to focus on what is essential to one’s
life, and to perceive people and situations for
who and what they are rather than what one
thinks they are.

“I feel that people are experience-rich and
theory-poor,” asserts Gladwell. “That is to say,
most people have lots and lots and lots of
experiences but don’t have the time to try to
make sense of them. It’s a luxury to be able to
sit and theorize and read psychologists, sociologists
and historians and to attach explanations
to events. The reason people read books
like my own is that they’re searching for those
kinds of explanations, of ways of making sense
of things. There is this tremendous body of
knowledge in the world of academia where
extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful
people have taken the time to examine on
a really profound level the way we live our lives
and who we are and where we’ve been. That
brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in
academia and never sees the light of day. I’m
trying to give people access to all of that brilliant
thinking. It’s a way of going back to college
long after you’ve graduated.”

Ideas have always propelled Gladwell’s
writing, which is clear when interviewing
him. While some authors or intellectuals gesticulate
dramatically, he is rather soft-spoken
and thoughtful, but still passionate, in his
delivery, sometimes surreptitiously
fiddling with his utensils as we
await our meal. He quips
that if you think going to
a library is an exciting
event, you will probably
enjoy his books.

“I write for people
who are curious and
who don’t mind having
their beliefs challenged,”
he says. “I don’t shock
people’s belief systems, but I
do nudge them sometimes.
Some people are fine with that, and
those are my readers.” Several authors and columnists
have challenged assertions or claims in
his books, but that at least proves he knows how
to stimulate debate among his readers.

Has his work on all of his books given him
a new worldview or altered the one he has?
“The last three books in particular have made
me very suspicious of the way that all of us as
human beings react to the world,” the author
replies. “The assumptions that we carry around
in our head aren’t very good. Our first impressions
of things can sometimes be really terrible.
This book is basically about how we look at
situations and misread them.

-- Costco Connection, October 2013

Archie to be killed off

LOS ANGELES >> Not even Archie Andrews is immortal in the world of comics.

Archie Comics announced Tuesday that the famous comic book character will heroically sacrifice himself while saving the life of a friend in a July installment of "Life with Archie," a comic book series that tells the story of grown-up renditions of Archie and his Riverdale gang.

"We've been building up to this moment since we launched 'Life with Archie' five years ago and knew that any book that was telling the story of Archie's life as an adult had to also show his final moment," Archie Comics publisher and co-CEO Jon Goldwater said in a statement.

Archie's final moments will be detailed in "Life with Archie" No. 36, while issue No. 37 will jump forward a year and focus on his friends Jughead, Betty, Veronica and Reggie honoring the legacy of their red-headed pal.

Archie first appeared in comics in 1941 and went on to become a colorful icon of wholesomeness.

Mickey Rooney

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mickey Rooney, the pint-size, precocious actor and all-around talent whose more than 80-year career spanned silent comedies, Shakespeare, Judy Garland musicals, Andy Hardy stardom, television and the Broadway theater, died Sunday at age 93.

Rooney started his career in his parents' vaudeville act while still a toddler, and broke into movies before age 10. He was still racking up film and TV credits more than 80 years later — a tenure likely unmatched in the history of show business.

"I always say, 'Don't retire — inspire,'" he told The Associated Press in March 2008. "There's a lot to be done."

Among his roles in recent years was a part as a guard in the smash 2006 comedy "A Night at the Museum."

Rooney won two special Academy Awards for his film achievements, and reigned from 1939 to 1942 as the No. 1 moneymaking star in movies, his run only broken when he joined the Army. At his peak, he was the incarnation of the show biz lifer, a shameless ham and hoofer whom one could imagine singing, dancing and wisecracking in his crib, his blond hair, big grin and constant motion a draw for millions. He later won an Emmy and was nominated for a Tony.

Rooney's peppy, all-American charm was never better matched than when he appeared opposite his friend and fellow child star Garland in such films as "Babes on Broadway" and "Strike up the Band," musicals built around a plot of "Let's put on a show!" One of them, the 1939 "Babes in Arms," brought him his first Oscar nomination. He was also in such dramas as "The Human Comedy," 1943, which gained Rooney his second Oscar nomination as best actor, and "National Velvet," 1944, with Elizabeth Taylor.