Screenhead

Now here’s an interesting bit of news–in case you were still on the fence about seeing David Carradine’s last movie, The Golden Boys, despite the review I gave it just a couple days ago, this might get you a bit more interested.

There are three clips roaming around YouTube–entitled Sister Schooner, The Three Stooges, and Acting Method–taken from the featurette interview with David Carradine on the DVD.    Each is just over a minute long, with Sister Schooner weighing in at about a minute and a half.  I’ve included The Three Stooges at the bottom of this clip, with links to the other two.  The Three Stooges, for example, has Carradine discussing his involvement with co-stars Bruce Dern and Rip Torn.  You’d be surprised what he thinks about them!

These three clips will help give you a little extra background on The Golden Boys, and if my review isn’t sufficient impetus to get you to grab a copy, these three just might be.  It’s really very good stuff, so I encourage you to see it.

Okay folks, brace yourselves, because I’ve got a real doozy right here for you today.  I’ve got no less than The Golden Boys here today, and though that may mean less than nothing, it shouldn’t…

…it’s David Carradine’s last movie.

And this time, his LAST time, he plays one of three retired sea captains who’ve decided to move in together.  And all’s well, until the three old salts realize they can’t cook or clean worth a…bilge bubble?  Okay, so my maritime similes aren’t up to snuff.  Anyway, the problem really comes in when they decide that one of the three needs to marry, and take the other two in as boarders.  But which one will wind up married, if any of them?

I’ll say this–this may be one of the best romantic comedies I’ve seen in quite some time, and I don’t ordinarily favor them.  Why?  Because this one, unlike the others (I’m going to answer both questions at once here) focuses on the comedy and makes the romance secondary.  The Golden Boys is downright hilarious, with a spectacular cast that literally brings the whole thing to a glorious, breathing life of its own.

David Carradine, by the way, makes…or rather made, sadly…an awesome elderly sailor.  Everyone else, meanwhile, plays their roles with ample skill and aplomb.

The Golden Boys is a charmer with plenty of laughs and some interesting romantic entanglements to boot.  There will also be plenty of surprises, as stuff you never see coming suddenly shows up.  I’m extraordinarily pleased with this one–guys out there looking for a date movie, take note: you’ll be able to stomach this one without much trouble and chances are the ladies will particularly enjoy it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands The Golden Boys a full eight out of ten for being charming and funny, with plenty of surprises to boot.

There are phrases you never want to hear people say.  You’ll hear several of them in Big Stan.

Despite a really, REALLY unpleasant beginning in which Rob Schneider talks an elderly woman into buying a time share by alluding to the neighborhood in which she’ll be surprisingly popular, Big Stan, one of Schneider’s newest titles and one of David Carradine’s last, is going to bring a whole lot of laughs.  This is despite the fact that it’s one of the crassest titles released in some time.

Big Stan is all about Stan Minton, a shady real estate shyster who finds himself doing a three to five year stretch in prison for fraud.  With six months to go before his sentence begins, Minton turns to a man, The Master, to teach him how to be a kung-fu badass.  Thankfully, The Master is played by David Carradine, so you know that Stan’s going to be taught right.  When Stan finally reaches prison six months later, he becomes an agent of change…until the warden decides that Stan’s OLD talents are much more valuable to him.  Will Stan take the easy way out?  Or will he serve his time in peace?

I hadn’t expected so many laughs to come out of this one.  I really hadn’t.  In fact, I was expecting yet another godawful Deuce Bigalow or something else to come boiling out of this mess.  The fact that it had gone, pretty much, direct to video was scarcely encouraging.

But if you didn’t know about it before, you do now–direct to DVD is not the trash heap it once was.  In fact, it’s becoming rapidly the wave of the future.  Cheaper, faster, easier–and we get solid product in rapid order.  Big Stan is an excellent example of how the industry is moving.  Fairly big names (let’s be honest here, most people recognize the name “Rob Schneider” when they hear it) making solid if low-budget titles.

Okay, sure–no one’s ever going to mistake Big Stan for Oscar material.  There are metric tons of rape jokes in here, and other, much less savory topics.  But there’s also plenty of action and lots of choice top-rank comedy.  There’s lots to love about this truly surprising charmer.  And I mean surprising–I was caught completely off-guard on this one.  I never expected I would laugh like this at a Rob Schneider film, and yet, laugh I did.

Most of us who remember Rob Schneider’s early career, back before the full-page ads and the relentless screaming at critics and other assorted garbage that he willfully cluttered his career with, remember him as a stand-up funnyman, the kind who could deliver laughs regularly and with great force.  Of course, that all started to fall apart about midway through, but perhaps the whole direct-to-video thing will be good for Rob’s career.  Maybe it’ll let him get that old funny back, and give us all reason to keep watching.

Maybe…but I’m not holding my breath.

The key take-away here, however, is that Big Stan is going to prove to be an excellent experience, with plenty of laughs, and once you get past the outer shell of crass humor, you’ll find all those laughs and be glad for every one.  Big Stan takes home a seven out of ten on the Screenhead Ten Scale for doing what it set out to do, if not necessarily in the best way.

Roadside Attractions has a comedy romance film based on the on the best-selling novel by Joseph C. Lincoln titled “Cap’n Eri.”

Set on Cape Cod at the turn of the century, three retired sea captains living together decide that the only way to keep their house in order is for one of them to get married. There is just one problem, none of them wants to get married.

The movie is set for release on April 17, 2009 and stars David Carradine, Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, Mariel Hemingway.

(Source) Comingsoon.net

Friday night on the BLOOMBERG TELEVISION program “Night Talk,” anchor Mike Schneider talked to Kung Fu Killer’s David Carradine. Carradine talked about leaving the Kung Fu television series in the 1970s, “I didn’t want to play this little bald Chinese guy for the rest of my life.”

He talked about playing “White Crane,” an orphaned son of Western missionaries who was raised as a Wudang monk. “I’ve always wanted to do…something about this character [the historical character in the new movie], but I never could because Warner Brothers owns the rights. But they don’t own the rights to history. Nobody has a copyright on history.”

“Night Talk” airs in the U.S., Europe and Asia on Bloomberg TV at 10PM on weeknights and is simulcast on Bloomberg Radio at 10PM. Bloomberg Radio is broadcast on 1130AM in the New York Metropolitan area and is available on XM and Sirius.

“Night Talk” can also be seen on Bloomberg.com

Reuniting for the first time since they appeared together in Kill Bill, David Carradine and Darryl Hannah are starring in Spike TV’s two-part original miniseries, Kung Fu Killer.  The miniseries premieres Sunday, August 17 and Monday, August 18 (10:00 PM – Midnight ET/PT) on Spike.

Set in late 1920s in China, before Communist rule, Kung Fu Killer tells the story of White Crane (Carradine), an orphaned son of Western missionaries who was raised as a Wudang monk to become a spiritual leader and master in martial arts, and his ultimate journey for revenge and justice.  Beginning in the Shanghai underworld, Crane encounters Jane Marshall (Hannah) a lounge singer from Brooklyn, who is on a mission of her own to find her lost brother.