As a kid — I’m talking 11, 12 years old — I used to grab my weekly allowance and lie to my parents about going to the museum downtown. Instead, I would go to the movies, because this was back in the good old days when kids could still sneak into R-rated movies. There was more than one downtown theatre in those days, and I always went in search of double or triple features, and sometimes the first flick was an older film. And you have to remember that back in the mid-seventies, things were different. Downtowns weren’t as cosmopolitan then. They were urban, and that was the audience the theatres targeted.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of crap. In fact, most of the films were completely forgettable horror and action programmers that had no redeeming value, even to someone like myself who adores B-movies. More than once I walked out and ended up killing the day buried in comics at a used bookstore. But every once in a while, the first feature would be an older film, something that had been popular just a few years earlier. And this is where I fell in love with Bruce Lee, George Romero, Leatherface, Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy.

I had never even heard of Pam Grier before, but within five minutes she was added to my short list of those who reflect all that is ideal in womanhood — strong, smart, independent, sexy, womanly, a lady, a sense of humor — a list that to this days includes Raquel Welch and Angie Dickinson. Ten years later I would add a fourth and final name to that list, and a few years after that she actually married me.

Yes, Pam Grier is stunning to look at, but beautiful women are really a dime a dozen in Hollywood. What Grier really is is pure, 100%, undiluted movie star — and that is about as rare of a human species as you will ever find (especially today). Whether it was a small role in Andrew Davis’ “The Package” or her unforgettable turn as a junkie prostitute in “Fort Apache The Bronx,” you can’t take your eyes off her. And God bless Quentin Tarantino for seeing that, as well.

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While most movie fans are satisfied building a collection of their favorite DVDs, Shane Scheel has gone miles beyond in his devotion to his favorite cinematic treasures.

As the co-creator and producer with Christopher Lloyd Bratten of the “For The Record” series of live events held at the Barre VT bar in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, he has paid tribute to the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. The series features performers re-enacting the most iconic dialogue exchanges of those filmmakers’ features, as well as singing and dancing their way through the greatest tunes of their oeuvre.

But Scheel has topped himself big-time with his current show, “John Hughes: Holiday Road,” which plays Wednesday through Sunday nights before closing Dec. 30.

The two-hour extravaganza features an amazingly talented six-person cast and a five-piece rock band bringing the best of Hughes’ scenes and songs to life from his ‘80s films through “Home Alone.” Whether you’re a fan of Hughes’ high school movies (“Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) or the “Vacation” series and “Planes Trains and Automobiles,” the interactive cabaret-style show is one of the most entertaining nights of music and comedy you’ll ever experience.

Scheel spoke with Big Hollywood recently about how the “For The Record” series – which next takes on Baz Luhrmann’s films including “Moulin Rouge” – came about, and why he thinks Hughes’ films continue to resonate with American film fans.

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You didn’t have to watch more than the opening sequence of 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” to know Christoph Waltz had the Best Supporting Actor Oscar all but wrapped up.

The actor’s post-Oscar career remains a head scratcher. Yes, it’s too soon to label his career a letdown, but often the best scripts actors ever see come after they’ve grabbed that gleaming statuette.

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Waltz’s first gig after “Basterds” came via “The Green Hornet,” an awkward superhero comedy from director Michel Gondry. Waltz played the film’s arch villain, an unremarkable baddie with an inferiority complex. Mediocre movie, less than flattering role for someone of Waltz’s abilities.

But “The Green Hornet” was practically “Citizen  Kane” compared to “The Three Musketeers,” the recent mega-bomb casting Waltz as the evil Cardinal with designs on the kingdom. It’s the kind of work an actor grabs when there’s little else around, or they’ve got a serious case of swashbuckle envy.

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It’s almost impossible to watch ‘Pulp Fiction’ today without mentally checking off director Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic tics.

Great soundtrack? Yup. Aging actors rescued from obscurity? Yes, indeed. Dialogue so quotable you could print bumper stickers from every other line in the script? Oh, yeah.

But back in 1994, when the film first rocked movie houses, ‘Pulp Fiction’ was simply Tarantino’s entrance into the upper echelon of movie makers. The film hasn’t lost its zip in its new Blu-ray incarnation. If anything, the giddiness Tarantino fuses to the action genre is more appealing in an era of shaky cams and uncertain plot twists.

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Expectations were sky high after Quentin Tarantino stunned the film world with the double barrel greatness of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction.’

It’s one reason why his third directorial effort, the slow and soulful “Jackie Brown,” was met with indifference in some quarters.

The 1997 film, out this week on Blu-ray, deserves a second, longer look. Tarantino had more up his sleeve than simply reviving the stalled careers of Pam Grier and Robert Forster. ‘Jackie Brown’ is a tribute to patient, clear-eyed storytelling as much as it is a wet kiss to the blaxploitation era.

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Before Peter Jackson reached Steven Spielberg levels of Hollywood mainstream acceptance, he was a chubby, hairy kid in New Zealand who loved making movies with tons of laughs provided by oceans of blood and gore.  Jackson’s first feature, Bad Taste, lives up to its title. Featuring aliens who want to grind humans into meat for their intergalactic fast food chain, it was packed with blood, guts, and nonstop laughs.  No video store experience beats picking up the cover for Bad Taste for the first time and beholding an ugly alien, wielding an AK-47, giving you the finger. The box proudly proclaims “From the director of Lord of the Rings!”  Jackson followed up that little gem with Meet the Feebles, a puppet-populated look at the drug-addled behind-the-scenes of a troupe that puts on an act not unlike The Muppet Show.  It was with his third film, Dead Alive (also known as Braindead internationally), that ol’ Peter pulled out all the stops and created a masterpiece of gonzo gore and dark humor.

Dead Alive comes to Blu-ray this week, and I can say without a doubt that it’s the most fun I’ve had watching a zombie movie, ever.  Zombies flicks are huge right now, yet most of them owe everything to George A. Romero’s films.  Dead Alive, on the other hand, has more in common with Dan O’Bannon’s hilarious post-modern zom-com Return of the Living Dead in terms of tone and overall content.  For a low-budget horror flick, this film is incredibly ambitious, in terms of special effects, and pulls off its aims beautifully.  I ask indie horror filmmakers everywhere:  Why imitate Romero when you can build on Jackson and O’Bannon?  This movie has vengeful entrails giving off stinky flatulence, mischievous zombie babies, butt-kicking priests, and the best use of a lawnmower ever in a film.  What else do you want?

Dead Alive is a movie I love showing to people who have never seen it.  Just this past weekend, I watched it with a living room full of friends who had never had the pleasure. It was a gory good time for all.  The movie may be a bit much for the squeamish, but the film’s spirit is so lighthearted it’s hard to imagine anyone getting offended by the content.  It’s October, so if you’re loading up on horror movies and have never seen this one, get on the stick.

Available on Blu-ray

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Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine and here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge.

A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too. (more…)

[CONTENT WARNING: This post contains harsh language.]

On Wednesday night, Quentin Tarantino was roasted at the New York Friars’ Club. Some of Hollywood’s most famous and talented stars were on hand, many of who did the actual roasting. Among them Samuel L. Jackson, Jerry Lewis, Sarah Silverman, Rob Schneider, Eli Roth, and Neve Campbell. One shameless roaster named Whitney Cummings, often seen on Chelsea Lately, delivered the most buzz-worthy/cringe-worthy line of the night:

[Tarantino has] produced more retarded things than Sarah Palin’s vagina.

Somewhere out there, Andrew Dice Clay is blushing. Not because the joke is off-color, he doesn’t care about that. He’s flushed because it’s unfunny, stolen hackery.

Let’s deal with the unfunny part first: Who is the butt of this joke? A toddler who suffers from down-syndrome and the mother that chose not to destroy him while he was in the womb. Yikes. Regarding Trig: Lay. Off. The. Kids. Okay? Regarding Mama Palin: Is it possible to write a more obvious joke on a more obvious target? I’m sure Ms. Cummings fancies herself irreverent; what would be truly irreverent is if she would harness a little of that hate that dwells in her dreary heart and direct it toward someone who is actually in power. Here are some possible targets she may want to consider: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden (notice how I’m not mentioning Obama’s children?). If she insists on resorting to humor that’s main attribute is shock-value, why not try a target that might actually shock someone?

Now let’s deal with the hackery part. It’s one thing that Whitney Cummings is mean-spirited, vulgar, and boring, but it’s quite another that she stole this joke. Here’s a super-NSFW clip of Louis CK on Opie and Anthony going on a jag against Sarah Palin that ends with him referring to her vagina as a “retard-making cunt.” (more…)

The new film Machete is born of a joke. No, really. In 2006 when Quentin Tarantino was gearing up for his double feature movie experience Grindhouse, he solicited other directors like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie to make fake trailers for bad 70’s exploitation moves. These trailers were shown between the two features in a takeoff of the coming attractions shown between movie features in those old 70s era B-picture film houses Tarantino was spoofing with Grindhouse. Machete was one of these over the top, fake movie trailers and it featured the catch phrase, “This time they f**ked with the wrong Mexican.” It got such a rousing reception from fans that director Robert Rodriguez decided to proceed with a full-length feature version.

But the joke has soured. In this film, white America is the enemy and the United States is an oppressive force. It gets so extreme that in one scene a pair of white men shoot to death a pregnant Mexican woman merely so that her baby won’t be born in the USA. The pair then cruelly say, “Welcome to America,” to the dead woman’s Mexican husband. From the Hollywood Reporter:

Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.

That is some pretty harsh stuff.

Sometimes Hollywood doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. As a two-minute fake trailer in context with the Grindhouse experience it was funny. I attended the full Grindhosue movie experience and had a great, laugh-a-minute time. Unfortunately, Machete is now a full movie of its own, one that is polarizing people instead of entertaining them like the original, fake trailer was able to do. (more…)

After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and actors, and authors, and painters, and musicians) doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. I miss young John Woo almost as much as I miss young Steven Spielberg, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way: (more…)

There’s no confusion about who the villain is in Machete – it’s you.

More specifically, it’s you and the other 69% or so of American citizens who agree that we should have a say in who does and doesn’t come into our country by enforcing our immigration laws.  There’s been a lot written about the race war angle of Machete, including a lot of back-pedaling from writer/director Robert Rodriguez himself.  But it’s hard to see this script as anything but a sick MEChA-approved fantasy in which every Anglo man is a slobbering borderline savage who tortures Mexicans when not slaughtering them outright, and every Anglo woman a nymphomaniac yearning to strip down and have a crack at our hero Machete’s macho Mexican manhood.

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Perhaps Rodriguez isn’t making an explicit plea for racial warfare, but Rodriguez’s crude racial stereotypes make Hitler’s Der Stürmer propaganda look like a subtle, sophisticated and affectionate commentary on Jewish culture.  The script does not bat an eye as Machete butchers nearly every Anglo, innocent or “guilty,” who is unfortunate enough to cross his path.  In the end, there is no doubt that Rodriguez is making the most overtly, outrageously and unrepentantly racist film in modern Hollywood history.

But Rodriguez does deserve props for one thing – in purely technical terms, this is one of the best-written scripts I’ve ever seen.  It is vivid, coherent and flows smoothly, unlike the majority of unreadable Final Draft failures out there.  There is not an ounce of flab.  The “jokes” mostly fall flat, but Rodriguez will likely direct it with flair and style.  It’s just too bad this movie combines the racial insights of a 1942 Robert Byrd with the collective moral sense of Enron’s Board of Directors. (more…)

The real fun of the Oscars isn’t the cut-throat competition for the little gold naked man but guessing who will make the biggest idiot of himself. 

The Academy Awards show has a fine tradition of pampered celebrities popping off with something stupid when they hit the stage.  It must be something about TV cameras and the opportunity to make damn fools of themselves before tens of millions of people around the world that the Hollywoodoids find irresistible.  Notice how you never hear any fallout from the “technical awards” ceremony?  You know, the non televised ceremony recognizing the boring technological stuff that actually makes movies possible that is usually held at the Beverly Hills Elks Lodge with hosts Steve Guttenberg, Charo and/or one of the lesser Sweathogs.

Some of the past magic moments are legendary.  Remember back in 1993, when Tim Robbins and his then-gal pal, tranny vomit insanity enthusiast Susan Sarandon, harangued the crowd about the detention of Haitian refugees?  Of course, right after that these stars led the way by opening up the grounds of their mansion to these huddled Haitian masses.

Roberto Benigni engaged in memorably tiresome antics after winning “Best Foreign Language Film of 1997” for the Worst Film of All Time, the insanely appalling Life Is Beautiful.  Life has certainly aged well, and Benigni’s shtick has only gotten fresher, contributing to the runaway freight train of success that his career has become since then. (more…)

Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.  The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic, since writing is truly the key – no director could make a masterpiece out of “The Ugly Truth.”  It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.  Together, those three wrote It’s a Wonderful Life.  (Together, Goodrich and Hackett also worked on The Diary of Anne Frank, The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Father of the Bride.) 

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras.  (more…)

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
 
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.  (more…)

Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” has all the trappings of a Tarantino film – from the rich cinematography and soundtrack to the unpredictable action and character development. Tarantino has directed and written another effort that, as usual, is in a class of its own. 

“Basterds,” misspelled the way Brad Pitt’s moonshining Lt. Aldo Raine character carved it into his rifle, takes place in German-occupied France from 1941 to 1944.  Tarantino makes a point of specifying “Nazi-occupied France,” justifying to the film watcher the extreme measures needed to deal with this particular type of human evil.  That National Socialist German Workers’ Party membership never numbered more than about 20 percent of the adult German population is beside the point; the Nazi Party in the guise of Hitler (played by Martin Wuttke) controlled the Wehrmacht from the top.  

“Basterds” follows three characters.  ”Chapter 1″ introduces Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) a young Frenchwoman whose dairy farmer family is wiped out in 1941 by the Germans and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who directs the killing.  Landa is a member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party, who considers himself a detective asked by his government to find every last Jewish person in France.  In “Chapter 2″ we meet U.S. Army Lt. Aldo Raine. Raine’s crossed arrows insignia on his collar identifies him as a member of the First Special Service Force, a U.S.-Canadian commando force called the Devil’s Brigade.  Lt. Raine leads a small band of soldiers, all of whom happen to be Jewish, on a mission of retribution, mayhem and terror behind enemy lines, the goal: take 100 “Nazi scalps” each.  (more…)

So another Rambo flick is on its grimy, sweaty way and this time the villains are human traffickers and drug lords. To make them even more despicable, they’ve kidnapped a young girl and are probably ignoring her strict vegan needs.

Look, I applaud Sylvester Stallone’s heroic stance against human traffickers and kidnappers – for I know there will be quite an outcry especially from the large and very influential human trafficking and kidnapper lobby.

Of course, this movie comes on the heels of two other edgy ventures: The G.I Joe flick – which turned a gritty American icon into an airbrushed Benneton ad, and “Inglourious Basterds” a fantasy that has average Jews hacking Nazi soldiers to pieces.

These three movies have two things in common:
1) They avoid present, real danger in the world and instead choose villains that are not just safe, but politically correct to hate. You’d think it would be easy for Quentin Tarantino to find a present day enemy for the Jews (like, say, a terrorist group that denies the Holocaust and wants to wipe Israel off the map), but maybe none exist! And what of those guys who flew planes into the World Trade Center? I suppose in the era of the “unclenched fist,” we must be more sensitive to “backlash” than barbarism. (more…)

Remember the children’s magazine, Highlights? Its motto is “fun with a purpose.” The motto for Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick, “Inglourious Basterds,” should be “violent with a purpose.”

It’s 1944 in Nazi-occupied France. Joseph Goebbels’ (Sylvester Groth) latest film triumph starring Germany’s latest hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), is set to premiere for the top brass of the Third Reich – including the big cheese himself, Adolf Hitler – and their guests. Funnily enough, the premiere is to be held in a cinema owned by Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish refugee with her own obvious reasons for hating the Nazis. Naturally, she plans her revenge for the fateful night.

Meanwhile the Basterds, a crack group of Jewish-American soldiers under the leadership of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is undercover in France and “in the business of killing Nazis, and business is booming.” Those Nazis who manage to escape death are given meaningful souvenirs of their time with the Basterds. The paths of these two groups cross in a way that only Tarantino, master of gory coincidence, could imagine.

A good ol’ boy and Jews brutally mowing down Nazis. What’s not to like? It’s probably one of the few times you’ll see a redneck positively portrayed in Hollywood. (more…)

“Inglourious Basterds” opened this weekend. It has the potential to be satisfying for Quentin Tarantino fans. I will definitely see it. It is an “alternative history” of WWII, but despite its setting, Tarantino characterizes the movie as a “spaghetti western.” My guess is a hint of the “pulp fiction” writer Elmore Leonard will, like a super fine mist, be present in the film.

On my Facebook profile page, I dutifully filled out my personal interests. Under favorite movies I listed “anything Quentin Tarantino”; under novels I listed “anything Elmore Leonard.” What I left out under “movies” was “anything Elmore Leonard which seem like Quentin Tarantino” and vice versa. To me, they are almost indistinguishable. I have read virtually all of Leonard’s books. I just purchased today his latest, “Road Dogs.” I have seen nearly all of Tarantino’s movies. I have read or seen many of their works multiple times. I still get surprised by a Leonard movie from time to time. I recently saw “3:10 from Yuma” on TV. There was something rivetingly familiar about it. It turns out it was adapted from a 15 page short story by Leonard that I had never read. (more…)

Only a tiresome poseur like Quentin Tarantino could think that the Hollywood pretty boys he cast in his soon-to-be released opus The Inglorious Basterds are convincing movie tough guys. Where is Lee Marvin when we need him?

You’ve probably experienced the Basterds publicity blitz.  Brad Pitt looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Folks I know who have been around him say he really is a pleasant and laid-back guy, and these are hardly the characteristics of a beady-eyed killer.  Creepy Eli Roth, taking some time off from directing his degenerate torture movies, is just a leering clown – he looks like he should be squatting in the back of his Ford panel van offering Tootsie Rolls to passing tweens.  And B.J. Novak?  The guy is a hilarious writer and is really funny in The Office , but I’m not buying this cat as the scourge of the Third Reich.

In contrast, Lee Marvin’s tough guy legacy lives on despite the fact that his body rests with thousands of other heroes in Arlington National Cemetery. He earned that right when he was wounded fighting the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific as a Marine private. His Purple Heart is 100% USDA certified proof positive of his prime badassary. Who is the Hollywood tough guy of today who can dare step up to the Lee Marvin plate and take a swing?

Nobody. (more…)