Sunday, January 30, 2011

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Wot Rong Khun temple in Chiang Rai

The sanctuary was conceived by acclaimed Thai artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, and is of such staggering complexity that it is estimated the building will need almost 100 more years to complete its construction.


Designed in white with some use of mirrors, the color symbolizes Lord Buddha’s purity, and the mirror stands for Lord Buddha’s wisdom that “shines brightly all over the Earth and the Universe.” The bridge leading to the temple represents the crossing over from the cycle of rebirth to the Abode Of Buddha. The small semicircle before the bridge represents the human world. The big circle with fangs is the mouth of Rahu is a representation of hell or suffering and the impurities of the human mind (similar to the Christian concept of original sin). All of the paintings inside the ubosot (assembly hall) have golden tones. The four walls, ceiling and floor contain paintings showing an escape from the defilements of temptation to reach a celestial “all seeing” state. On the roof, there are four kinds of animals representing earth, water, wind and fire. The elephant stands for the earth; the naga (Buddhist grouping of serpent deities) stands for water; the swan’s wings represent wind; and the lion’s mane represents fire.


Undoubtedly the most bizarre element of the design is the presence of contemporary images throughout the interior. Images of the Predator from the Schwarzenegger film franchise, Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Avatar, Keanu Reeves’ character in the Matrix, rocket ships, and others line the walls. The sea of hands holding skulls rising up towards the bridge to the temple is also very striking.

In Memoriam : Cary Grant ( January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986 )

Monday, January 17, 2011

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Bond 23 : we have a date!


Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions, together with Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, Co-Chairmen and Chief Executive Officers of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., today announced that the 23rd James Bond film will commence production in late 2011 for a worldwide release on November 9, 2012.

Sam Mendes will direct a screenplay written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Suite for Ma Dukes


Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson have been working together on a wide variety of projects, beginning in 2004 when Niño hired Atwood-Ferguson's string quartet to perform on Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio's Love is the Answer (Ninja Tune). The J Dilla production “Antiquity” also comes from this project.

Suite for Ma Dukes initially began in 2007, on what would have been Dilla's 33rd birthday, when Niño & Atwood-Ferguson recorded and released their strings, brass and reeds-only version of J Dilla & Common’s “Nag Champa” to DJs, producers and fans over the internet for free. They had written the entire piece to accompany the record as a their tribute to Dilla, feeling that the producer was still in the track not by his presence but by his absence.

The 4 tracks on Suite for Ma Dukes cover Dilla's productions from “Antiquity” and “Nag Champa”, A Tribe Called Quest's “Find a Way” and Slum Village's “Fall in Love”.

Early in 2009 the project received the official blessing from Ma Dukes herself.


..so bring on the big attraction my decks are cleared for action I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy

"A Caballo"

The Towering Inferno behind the scenes



Thursday, January 06, 2011

Mercedes McCambridge

It was, in an ironic twist on the old joke, a face made for radio. Her glittering eyes were set wide above a pinched nose that hooked slightly over a thin upper lip. Her hair was a cropped, mousy tangle. Though she was striking, and attractive to a number of paramours and two husbands, actress Mercedes McCambridge, who was never a conventional beauty. That her unusual looks and outspoken character determined the course of her career as much as her extraordinary talent made for a life and work more interesting than most of her more doll-faced peers.

Born in 1916 in Joliet, Ill., Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge grew up Catholic, middle class, Midwestern, and, as she acknowledged in her episodic but entertaining 1981 autobiography The Quality of Mercy, a good liar. Like many teens, she had aspirations to be an actor, but unlike most budding drama queens, she had at least one extraordinary talent, and it got noticed. Attending Mundelein College in Chicago, McCambridge belonged to a “verse-speaking choir,” which recited poetry in unison, with her as the occasional soloist. An NBC producer attended a performance and came away impressed enough that she was soon dividing her time between classes at Mundelein and starring in NBC radio plays downtown.


She thrived in radio, a medium she found liberating (you could be anybody, sometimes several characters per play, and no one cared what you looked like) and challenging (doing a one-hour play called for “a degree of concentration and creativity that was distinctive”). She also launched a distinguished career in live theater. In fact, McCambridge was working on Broadway when a friend urged her to audition for Hollywood producers casting New York actors. Not actually needing the gig and annoyed by the brutal, impersonal process, McCambridge walked into the audition room, chewed out the producer and director, and walked out with a meaty part in the 1949 film version of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Her debut film role won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and overnight stardom.

It wound up being a peculiar kind of stardom, however. Her next major role was as Joan Crawford’s sexually repressed nemesis in the 1954 bizarro Western Johnny Guitar; dressed in black frocks that can only be described as “nunnish,” she burns to punish Crawford’s sexually successful saloon owner to an almost comic degree. Next came her role as the mannish range-riding spinster sister of Rock Hudson’s cattle baron in Giant (1956); at one point, another character actually posits that everybody knows that McCambridge’s character would “rather herd cattle than make love.” When Orson Welles needed a sexually ambiguous leather-jacketed tough for a gang-rape scene in his 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil, he called old radio cohort McCambridge and asked what she was doing for lunch that day. In 1962’s Angel Baby, she took on an evangelist who spouts fire-and-brimstone scripture in the throes of love, courtesy of a young George Hamilton. She summed up her usual casting as “ugly duckling” roles; more plainly put, when it came to Hollywood’s portrayals of butchness and female sexual dysfunction, McCambridge was the A-list.


By the early ’60s, her second marriage to TV producer Fletcher Markle had ended, decent film roles of any kind were drying up, and her drinking had blossomed into full-blown alcoholism. She eventually dried out and began recovery, thereafter becoming something of a grudging spokeswoman for recovering alcoholics, despite the media and casting agents of the time being even less forgiving about addiction.

She continued to work onstage and in television up through the ’80s, but her last notable role was the one for which she is perhaps most famous, a role, like many of her prominent screen roles, that made the most of her considerable skills and was about as far as an actress can get from a romantic lead. Months after Linda Blair contorted herself on a bed in a set in Hollywood, playing a little girl possessed by the devil in 1973’s The Exorcist director William Friedkin summoned McCambridge to a Hollywood sound stage to record the voice of Satan. She was, in effect, back in radio again. The role was “the hardest work I’ve ever done,” she wrote, adding that she often had to lie down and rest for an hour between takes. Her bronchial wheeze and guttural rasp, almost more than all the pea-green spew and revolving heads Friedkin could marshal on the screen, helped make the film a terrifying smash. When she attended the premiere, she was devastated to see that she received no on-screen credit for her work; she only got it after suing Warner Bros. Out of sight, out of mind, apparently.




She died on March 2, 2004 in La Jolla, California, of natural causes, just two weeks before her 88th birthday.

For her contribution to television and motion picture industry, Mercedes McCambridge has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for motion pictures, located at 1722 Vine Street, and one for television located at 6243 Hollywood Boulevard.


Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Zeppelin (1971)

Zeppelin is a 1971 British World War I action/drama film of a fictitious German attempt to raid Great Britain in a giant Zeppelin and steal the Magna Carta from its hiding place in one of the Scotland's castles. It stars Michael York, Elke Sommers, Alexandra Stewart, with music by Roy Budd and cimatography b Alan Hume.

In the early days of World War I, constant bombing raids by German dirigible aircraft known as "Zeppelins" become a central issue for the British Admiralty. Young British officer Geoffrey Richter-Douglas, a Scotsman with German heritage, reports on the Zeppelin attacks and learns from a secret demonstration that the hydrogen-filled airships are not susceptible to gun shots, but only to incendiary bullets. Aware that Geoffrey, whose German relatives are aristocrats, has been approached by German spies to work for them, British intelligence encourages Geoffrey to go to Germany as a double agent. Although uncertain, Geoffrey agrees and on the night of his departure is purposely wounded in the arm to impress the Germans of the genuineness of his escape.
In Germany, Maj. Johann Hirsch and Maj. Alfred Tauntler from military intelligence welcome Geoffrey, who, they are delighted to learn, can easily identify isolated spots in the Scottish countryside. After his interrogation with Hirsch and Tauntler, Geoffrey runs into old family friend and Zeppelin designer, elderly Professor Christian Altschul. Revealing that he has recently remarried, Altschul invites Geoffrey to dinner the following evening to meet his wife Erika.
The next night, Geoffrey arrives at the Altschuls' apartment early and is greeted by the young, attractive Erika, who startles Geoffrey by asking him if he is a spy. Erika explains that she is a former student of Christian's and has helped design the latest Zeppelin model, the Z36. When Christian telephones moments later to report a problem with the new ship, Erika tells Geoffrey their dinner must be postponed, then unsettles him by cautioning him to take no action that might harm her husband. The next afternoon, Geoffrey reaches his British contact, but when he reports that the test flight for Z36 has been delayed, the contact relates that information has long been known. That evening while returning to his apartment, Geoffrey is forced into a car by military police and taken to a large, darkened field where, to his great surprise, he finds the Z36.
Hirsch and Tauntler are at the site and invite Geoffrey to make the airship's test flight with them, which they admit is top secret. Realizing reports of the ship's test being delayed have been a ruse, Geoffrey agrees to go aboard, struggling to squelch his long time aversion to heights. After the Z36 departs the airfield, Erika unnerves Geoffrey by observing that he is doing very well for a spy. Under the control of Christian and the ship's captain, Lt. Cmdr. Von Gorian, the Z36 breezes through speed and altitude tests the next day and the professor declares the Zeppelin ready for service. Hirsch then surprises Von Gorian by announcing that the Z36 will not return home but instead is to go into immediate military duty.
Meanwhile, pleased over the ship's test results, Erika chats with Geoffrey and confesses that although Christian was deeply distressed to learn the Zeppelins were used for bombing missions, he is so enthralled with the technical design that he has continued working on them. Abruptly realizing the ship has changed course, Erika and Geoffrey confront Von Gorian, who admits the ship is now under Hirsch's command. Hirsch directs the great ship to a river, where naval personnel await on a pier to refuel the craft. When most of the crew exits the Z36 to assist, Geoffrey hastily sends a Morse code message to British intelligence reporting the ship's Norwegian position. When the radio operator returns and hears a confirmation, Geoffrey is forced to kill him. Later, when the ship ascends to freezing, high altitudes and the crew must scrape off forming ice, Geoffrey tosses the dead man overboard and reports that he fell out. Hirsch accepts Geoffrey's explanation, but Erika remains suspicious. Late in the afternoon, after the Z36 rendezvous with a ship to load numerous soldiers and tubes of mustard gas, Christian protests vigorously.
Hirsch and Tauntler then reveal their mission: to break into the British Archives, housed in Scotland's Balcoven Castle, and steal historical documents, including the Magna Carta, to completely demoralize the British. Once aware of the Z36's destination, Geoffrey attempts to send another Morse message, but is followed by Erika. Although Hirsch questions them, Erika does not give Geoffrey away.
That evening as the craft crosses into Scotland, Tauntler orders Geoffrey to get into a small basket with him, which will be lowered from the ship, enabling them to guide the pilot directly to the castle. To Geoffrey's delight, he discovers his vertigo has disappeared. As the Z36 descends under Geoffrey's guidance, a local farmer hears the engines just before they are cut and reports it to the local military base. After the ship lands, the German soldiers silently infiltrate the castle, taking the guards by surprise. Forced to participate in the raid by Tauntler, Geoffrey evades the soldiers in the dark to locate the communications room, where he pleads with a skeptical operator to contact London. Once the Germans begin firing on guards and setting off explosives to reach the archive safe, the operator reacts, but, certain Geoffrey is German, wounds him in the arm. Alarmed by the farmer's account and a fleeting report from Balcoven of the attack, the British Admiralty orders numerous air squadrons aloft and sends ground troops to the castle. As the troops break up the German attack, Geoffrey steals a flare gun and rushes back outside, hoping to destroy the Z36. Inside the castle, Hirsch detonates a bomb in front of the archive safe, but although the heavy door is partially damaged, the Germans are unable to remove any documents before Tauntler orders a withdrawal to save the Zeppelin.
At the craft, Erika confronts Geoffrey and tells them that if he destroys the Zeppelin he will kill Christian, who is still onboard. Retreating soldiers help the wounded Geoffrey back on board and with only a few crew members, the ship takes off despite suffering numerous gunshots. As dawn breaks, Von Gorian suspects British planes will be after them and orders all surplus weight to be thrown overboard to help the ailing ship ascend. Erika tends to Geoffrey, but does not respond when he asks why she has not betrayed him. British squadrons close in on the Zeppelin and a gunfight ensues in which several airplanes are shot down and Von Gorian is killed. As the dead are thrown out to lighten the ship, the seriously wounded Tauntler throws himself out. After the battle, Erika and Geoffrey hunt for Christian and, finding his cabin empty, conclude he, too, threw himself overboard to save his ship. Spotting land that they recognize as neutral Holland, the wounded pilot makes a crash landing a few yards from shore and Erika, Geoffrey and the remaining crew members stumble to shore just as the craft explodes.



The Zeppelin was actually a 40 foot model filmed over a large water tank in Malta.

Air combat scenes were filmed in Ireland using Lynn Garrison's collection of World War One replica aircraft, originally assembled for 20th Century Fox's The Blue Max. During the aerial sequences one of the SE5a replicas, flown by Irish Air Corps pilot Jim Liddy, collided with the Alouette helicopter. Five people were killed, including Burch Williams, brother of Elmo Williams (a major Hollywood producer/director).

The scenes showing the sheds in which the Zeppelin was housed were filmed at Cardington, Bedfordshire in England.

welcome 2011