Entertainment & Sports: December 2005 Archives
According to my wife's reading from CrimeLibrary's entry about Steven Seagal:
1. Steven Seagal really claims he's done Covert Ops for the CIA in REAL LIFE!!!"You could say that I became an advisor to several CIA agents in the field and through my friends in the CIA, met many powerful people and did special works and special favors."
- Steven Seagal2. Steven Seagal was shaken down by the Italian Mafia because he wanted to stop doing action movies. The Mafia guys, now in prison for death threats against Seagal among other things, said Seagal was "petrified."
3. Steven Seagal married two women at the same time and didn't tell them. They found out. They got mad.
4. Steven Seagal claims to have fought off several members of the Japanese Mafia...all at the same time.
5. Steven Seagal routinely embellishes stories about himself and has been called a "pathological liar."
6. Steven Seagal refers to himself onset as a "deadly marksman."
7. Steven Seagal once challenged a stuntman to a judo match during a break in filming. Seagal was left lying unconcious on the ground.
8. Steven Seagal has a custom tux tailored to conceal two handguns.
9. Steven Seagal put out a $50,000 hit on a former colleague because "he was out to get me."
10. Steven Seagal was granted legal immunity in order for his testimony about his ties to the Gambino family.
11. Steven Seagal paid the Gambino's rival mob family, the Genoveses, to protect him from the Gambinos.
12. Steven Seagal's movies are allegedly all about his real life experience...according to Steven Seagal.
Plus, according to his energy drink advertizing, "There is no telling what will happen once you get his juices inside you!"
I just saw The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, not having read the books, I thought it was just ok. Everyone who has read the books and seen the movie said it was very faithful to the source material, which is great, but part of the problem with faithfully rendering a book onto film is that good books and good movies are paced very differently. Parts of the movie dragged, but even with the slow pacing the timeline of the plot was hard to follow. I didn't get a sense of days or weeks passing, and yet armies were mustered and battles were fought seemingly overnight. Characters remarked on how large Narnia was, and yet they seemed to traverse the world in mere hours.
The acting was more than sufficient, particularly Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, who was strangely reminiscent of Cate Blanchett's Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings movies. The kids did a great job, and the voice acting for the animals was good. Some of the animation was a bit lackluster, but that may have been by design since the movie was clearly aimed at kids and probably steered away from visual violence on purpose.
On the whole the movie was definitely entertaining, and it gave me an inkling to read the books that I've had on my shelves for years.
