TV Bites: Blood Simple

THE SNACK:
Sugar Snap Pea and Cheese Curd Salad



If it wasn't so damn hot outside, I'd still be heating up as I've been in computer hell the last few weeks now, since returning from Montreal. My computer overheated in my bag because it didn't shut down all the way when I rushed to put it away before landing as the airplane steward was tapping his foot and standing over me. Say la vee, as they'd say up there in Quebec. Then I thought it had come with an extended warranty, which it didn't, so I sent it in anyways to Sony, but they wanted more to fix it than I could buy a refurbished model with a 3-year warranty, so I had them send it back. Ah, the disposable society we live in. Meanwhile, I bought a little Acer netbook that was on sale at Target, which worked for four days - just enough time to get it working right and loaded with software - for the hard drive to get burned. And of course, because of the sale, they're all out of replacement units, so I had to wait another day for a delivery to get that replaced. So, I've been working as much as I can on an old desktop but I'm taking it all in stride, mostly because it's too damn hot to go outside anyways, so dealing with all this has at least kept me physically cool, which helps to keep me mentally cool.

Just a little self-promotion.... American Grindhouse DVD

For those of you interested in such things, there are about 20 minutes of never before seen interviews I did in the 1980's with "the Godfather of Gore" Herschell Gordon Lewis & producer David F. Friedman (two of the nicest guys I've had the privilege of meeting) included as a DVD extra on the soon-to-be-released DVD of Elijah Drenner's documentary American Grindhouse on July 26th.

TV Bites: The Lady Eve

THE SNACK:
Roast Beef with Ale Jus



A shorter version of this post was originally published on the Criterion Collection website.

I'm a little surprised that I'm back to writing about Preston Sturges so quickly. But it's in the Criterion Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art had an afternoon screening of it while I was up in the New York City last month, and so here we are. Not that I'm complaining, but I haven't even written up one Welles, Kubrick, or even a Scorsese film yet, just saying. But interesting to note, that the only other directors so far to have two films here are Wim Wenders, and Billy Wilder - with Wilder being another writer at Paramount who suffered through having his scripts hacked, I mean directed, by Mitchell Leisen and decided he needed to direct himself.