The Di tella family legacy in Argentina.

So sieht er aus. Ein Mitarbeiter von mir hat mir eine besondere Freude gemacht. In seinem Urlaub hat er meinen Traumwagen entdeckt, fotografiert und das Foto via iPhone an mich geschickt. Ausdrücklichen Dank an Michael. Es handelt sich um einen schwarzen Ford Mustang. Ja, ja, jetzt geht es wieder los: Energiebilanz, Kraftstoffverbrauch, Emissionswerte, kein Platz für Kinder, ja, ja. Aber trotzdem: Ich finde der Mustang ist ein geiles Stück Blech. Ok, der Aston Martin DB 9 ist noch besser, aber leider habe ich da ein eklatantes Finanzierungsloch. Weil Schwärmen ja so schön ist, habe ich mir am Abend gleich den Steve McQueen Film „Bullit“ auf Blu ray reingezogen. Frau und Kinder waren nicht da, also Anlage voll aufgedreht und der Mustang röhrte durchs Haus. In den guten Siebzigern gedreht ist „Bullit“ ein starker Bullenfilm mit einem obercoolen Steve McQueen. Es gibt wohl neben Bogart und Brando keinen cooleren Schauspieler. Schaut euch die blauen Augen an und ihr wisst, was Schauspielerei mit den Augen ist. „Bullit“ steht für mich in einer Reihe mit den harten Dirty Harry-Polizeifilmen mit Clint Eastwood. Neulich habe ich gelesen, dass Eastwood den dreckigen Harry wieder aufleben lassen will. Dieses Mal soll Harry aber ins Gras beißen, getreu seinem Motto „Make my day“. Ich hoffe, es wird ein würdiger Abgang, ähnlich wie John Wayne in der „letzte Scharfschütze“, einem genialen Spätwestern mit einem tot kranken John Wayne. Aber zurück zu „Bullit“: Der Film spielt in San Francisco und durch zahlreiche Macword Expo durfte ich in der Stadt weilen. In dem Film fährt McQueen einen grünen Mustang und vollführt mit ihm eine halsbrecherische Verfolgungsjagd durch die Stadt. Sicher eine der besten Verfolgungsfahrten der Filmgeschichte. Ich bin zwar nicht Steve McQueen und so cool bin ich auch nicht, aber irgendwann kaufe ich mir meinen Mustang. 

Si sigues este blog habrás observado que no he escrito nada sobre el fallecimiento de ningún artista o actor. Celebro la vida de todos ellos, pero no me apetece escribir en el momento en que nos dejan. Pero todo tiene una excepción y es este uno de esos momentos.

Paul Newman ha sido y es mi actor favorito de todos los tiempos. Ni Brando, ni Pacino. Paul Newman. He crecido con sus películas y las he disfrutado en más de una ocasión, algunas de ellas decenas de veces. Jamás me he cansado de ver nada en lo que hubiese intervenido. Sus intervenciones con Redford en El Golpe y Dos Hombres y un Destino; sus desventuras carcelarias en La Leyenda del Indomable; su faceta de detective en la saga Harper; su papel en la magnífica e infravalorada El Premio (intriga en la guerra fría en el entorno de los premios Nobel); y sus obras de los últimos años, donde destaca la magistral Road to Perdition. Mientras pongo algunos ejemplos, me vienen a la cabeza muchos otros: El Coloso en Llamas, El Buscavidas, Where The Money is (con la impresionante Linda Fiorentino), Fort Apache... Todo lo que ha hecho en pantalla ha sido bueno, en ocasiones, excepcional.

Pero además, Paul Newman ha sido excepcional como persona. Casado durante toda una vida con Joane Woodward, ha colaborado con organizaciones humanitarias e impulsado actividades benéficas, al auspicio de su propia Fundación, la Newman's Own. Y también, con ese nombre como marca, provó suerte y con éxito como empresario de alimentación de productos del todo naturales.

Paul Newman lo tenía todo: carisma, inteligencia, físico, corazón. En ocasiones, ante la típica pregunta de "de no haber sido quien eres, ¿quien te hubiese gustado ser?", siempre he pensado que me hubiese gustado ser Paul Newman.

Pois é, eles voltaram! ABrando (JP) desenterrou eles, colocou uma tela coloria TFT de 1.52" com a resolução de 128x128, criou em 7 cores diferentes e vai lançar eles em 22 de Novembro com um custo de US$ 48 (~90 reais) no Japão.

Eles querem vender 200.000 unidades até o final de Março de 2009. Boa sorte a eles.

Fonte: CrunchGear

Update: não sabia que eles ainda existiam e que tinham uma história tão comprida...

Most earbuds are pretty similar. They are black, go into your ears, and you use them to listen to music. These new novelty shaped earbuds are strange and look like ducks, ladybugs, flies or a pair of pigs. If you are looking for way to spruce-up your ears, while listening to music, this might be it. It might look tacky, but it will definitely get you some looks.

My latest from Unplggd...

We didn’t get a television set until 1951. By that time I was out and running. The power of television wasn’t strong enough to keep me in the house. Before TV, the avenues to entertainment had been the radio and the movies. We listened to the radio in much the same way coming generations would sit in front of the TV. But we went out to the movies, and we did so as often as we could. And just as later with television, what we watched didn’t even have to be good. We would watch anything; Charlie Chan, short films featuring parakeets in hats and tiny suits, cheesy serials, even the cheap, grainy Republic westerns from the nineteen-thirties. 

There were four movie houses within walking distance of our street, and features usually changed three times a week. The regular rotation would be a big first run movie on Friday and Saturday, an “On the Waterfront” with a Brando an “Anna and the King of Siam” with Rex Harrison and Deborah Kerr. First run was actually a misnomer. If you couldn’t wait for a new movie to make it to the neighborhood, then you had to go downtown, to one of the big, pricey picture palaces on Market Street where new movies stayed, often for weeks and weeks, before being distributed to neighborhood theaters. 

Sunday and Monday would be a double feature, “B” movies, Tom Conway in one of “The Falcon” detective pictures and maybe a Randolph Scott western. Or the double feature might be a Bowery Boys – Sherlock Holmes combination. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday would be something in between, a musical with Jane Powell, an Esther Williams Technicolor swimmer, or the latest from Abbot and Costello. The classic Saturday afternoon matinee would deliver a couple of shorts, Joe McDoak’s “Behind the Eight Ball,” maybe an Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol “Brothers-in-Law” short. There’d be two or three of the Warner Brothers cartoons I loved, coming attractions and a double feature that included a couple of low budget westerns or possibly an awful Gene Autry or Roy Rogers singing cowboy color movie. Saturday matinee bills also might include a Johnny Weismuller “Tarzan” movie backed by one of Hollywood’s comic strip spin-offs; a “Blondie” with Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake and/or a “Joe Palooka” with Roscoe Kearns as Knobby Walsh. 

In the six years between 1945 and 1951, the years of my childhood movie going, I saw repeated silvery black and white opening scenes of the Manhattan skyline, each accompanied by a rising hurly-burly of symphonic jazz proclaiming and celebrating New York as the center of the world. And there were the hurtling, steaming locomotives, rivers of newspapers and headlines spewing from presses, calendar leaves flying, clock hands and seasons turning. Every time Tarzan dove into the water, the camera would cut to the same terrible crocodiles sliding down the same muddy riverbanks. By the time I reached the age of twelve, I had become an unconscious expert on most of the conventions and clichés of movie making. 

Of the four theaters in the neighborhood, the Lindley at Fifth and Rockland was the oldest and the least attractive. Surviving somewhere near the bottom of the theatrical food chain, the Lindley rarely offered anything that made me want to go there. The place had grown threadbare and rump sprung. One blistering August day, probably because everyone else was going, I made my plaintive pitch for a dime to go see some awful movie at the non-air-conditioned Lindley. My mother’s reaction began with the expected  “Mother of God,” and went on to “ I wouldn’t go in the Lindley on a day like today if they were giving away one of Astor’s pet horses with every ticket.” I didn’t know what my mother would have done with a horse, but I got the idea. 

The Felton Theater on the other side of the Boulevard on Rising Sun Avenue was just a little too far for regular attendance. Around 1950 the Felton resumed showing German language films, a practice interrupted by the events of 1941-1945. I had walked to the Felton on an autumn Saturday afternoon in 1946, lured by the promise of an all cartoon matinee. Following the show when the theater doors all flew open, I was part of the pack of over-stimulated kids bursting out into the glaring sunlight when someone shouted, “there’s one. There’s one.” The “one” referred to a brand new Studebaker. The 1947 Studebaker was the first major postwar departure in automobile design, sleek and low, with hood and trunk sloping down to its bumpers. Accustomed as everyone was to the lumpy, bumpy designs of the early 40’s, the new Studebaker provoked the half-joking question, “which way’s it going?”  We picked up that chant as we crowded around the car, unaware that we were looking at the concepts that would dominate auto design for the next thirty or more years, design concepts that would outlast the Studebaker brand itself. 

At the far north end of the neighborhood, across from the great trees fronting Fisher’s Park was the Fern Rock. I was never comfortable in the Fern Rock. It wasn’t just the low, horizontal art deco atmosphere of the place, it was more that the Fern Rock, while the newest of the neighborhood theaters, had a stuffy, overly respectable quality to it. As a connoisseur of cartoons, Warner Brothers cartoons of course, I was put off both by the Fern Rock’s miserly allocations of cartoons, usually one cartoon, two at most. And worse, they were always “nice” cartoons, that is unfunny cartoons, Walter Lantz’ Woody Woodpecker drivel or Tom and Jerry, or Mighty Mouse, crap that no serious cartoon aficionado could take seriously. The only thing worse were Walt Disney cartoons, cutesy cartoon humor by adults for cutesy kids. Warner Brothers never made that mistake, not with Bugs, Sylvester or Daffy. At the Fern Rock, I never felt I was getting the bang for my dime. You got a newsreel, one cartoon, coming attractions and a feature that may or may not have been screened with a kids matinee in mind. The Fern Rock, like the Lindley was a movie house of last resort. 

The movie theater of my childhood, my home away from home, was the Colney. Just north of the intersection of Fifth and Olney, the Colney Theater was the neighborhood’s true center of gravity. It was neither a little hole in the wall like the Regal on Oxford Circle, nor was it one of the more opulent regional houses like the Circle in Frankford or the Orpheum in Germantown. Like the Baby Bear’s bed and breakfast, it wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small; it was just right. 

On Sunday afternoons, The Colney box office opened at twelve-thirty for the one-o-clock double feature. The reasoning eludes me, but we operated under an imperative to be there and be in line before tickets went on sale, something to do with getting a good seat. I don't ever remember a Colney matinee turning anyone away. 

On a winter Sunday afternoon when I was a sixth grader and standing in a line that stretched down along the front of the large grocery store next to the theater, I watched Gerry Flynn conduct a scientific demonstration of the effects of sympathetic vibration. In 1948, Philadelphia’s Blue Laws were still in effect, and the grocery market like all stores, was closed. Movies on Sundays had been allowed only since the beginning of the war, ostensibly to permit war workers entertainment on their day off. 

Putting both of his hands on the market’s display window, Gerry began to gently pulse his palms against the heavy plate glass. As the speed of his hand movements increased, the entire window began to vibrate. As we watched, the motion transferred itself to the pyramids of canned goods stacked against the glass for support. When the first stack collapsed backwards onto the floor of the store, a cheer went up from the long line of kids waiting to get into the Colney. Through the thick glass, we could hear the cans hitting the floor inside the closed store. We watched approvingly as a dozen or more cans went rolling in every direction. Without slowing down his moving hands, Gerry looked up and indicated that we hadn’t seen anything yet. Keeping the motion going, he moved along the window taking down one stack of cans after another. Only the opening of the ticket window distracted the crowd from this amazing feat. 

The following Saturday, emboldened by his success or just oblivious to the fact that the market was open for business, Gerry attempted to put on a repeat performance. Caught in the act by the store’s manager, Gerry was grabbed by the ear, taken inside and made to restack every fallen can to the store manager’s satisfaction. Gerry was so shaken by the manager’s threat to call the police on him that he went straight home without seeing the matinee. 

The Colney shared the art-deco look that characterized most of the movie houses built in the 1930s to accommodate the new talkies. The dominant color scheme of the Colney Theater was a dark burgundy, accented with stainless steel and lots of mirrored glass. The outer lobby behind the glassed-in box office sloped gently up to a row of wood framed glass doors. Usually the door on the far right was propped open, and there an usher would stand taking tickets, tearing them in half, and returning one portion just in case you might ever have to prove purchase of entry. My mother maintained that you always kept your ticket stub in case the theater caught fire and you had to leave before seeing the entire picture. “As long as you have that stub,” she would say, her voice rising to indicate certainty, “they have to let you back inside after they put out the fire.” 

To encourage consumer planning, the walls of the lobby were lined with framed, glass-covered posters for the coming attractions. While the outer lobby was all hard edges, glossy metals, marbled floors, and bright with diffused, indirect light from rows of elegant sconces, the inner lobby was soft, fuzzy and dark. 

When we passed the bored teen-aged usher taking tickets and entered the inner sanctum of the Colney, we were still on an uphill grade. But now the floor was thickly carpeted. The rising floor peaked at the partition separating the lobby from the seating area that sloped down toward the stage and the big screen. The darkness of the inner lobby was barely broken by dim light fixtures high up on the walls. Your eyes would immediately move toward a single island of brilliant but isolated light, the candy counter. There on display behind lit glass were row upon desirable row of nickel candies; Clark Bars, Paydays, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, Caramel Creams, a wonderful array of all that was good about life. And there was popcorn of course, at ten cents a box. Soft drinks were not yet sold or permitted inside movie theaters. For Saturday matinees, I was usually given a dime for candy in addition to the dime needed to get in. If I wanted to go again on Sunday, I was on my own. Children’s admission rose to an exorbitant sixteen-cents during my final year of eligibility. My mother was outraged at what she regarded as price gouging. Several times, in an experiment to make my dime last, I didn’t purchase the two five-cent boxes of Jujy-Fruits I so loved. Instead, it was ten, penny-each, pretzel rods, the same kind we bought at school at recess. A great idea in principle, the sheer bulk of the pretzel rods seemed the way to maximize the buying power of my dime. But by the fifth or sixth dry, salty pretzel rod, I felt like I was eating sticks of plaster board, and I had to make repeated trips back up the aisle to the water fountain. The experiment in economics concluded, I went back to Jujy-Fruits. 

It was my love of Jujy-Fruits that brought me to one of my earliest moral dilemmas. In the back of the Colney along the wall near the men’s room door was a mechanical candy machine. The handle would turn when a nickel was inserted, and you could then select the pull-lever beneath the displayed candy of your choice. One Saturday afternoon as I cranked the handle and pulled the knob to allow a box of Jujy-fruits to drop into the bin, Eddie Lesh said to me, “wanna get one for free.” Sure, I said without thinking. “Here’s what you do,” said Eddie, not looking at all like the serpent. “Take most of the candy out of your box. Close it back up and then stick it back up inside the machine.” With a proprietary smile, he concluded his little lesson in larceny saying, “then when somebody comes along and puts in a nickel, your box, the one that’s almost empty, drops down. You go over and pick up the full one that comes down behind it. I do it every week,” he said. “It always works. If they get pissed about getting screwed, they complain to the manager. But by then you’re watching the movie and eating your candy.” 

The simplicity of the plan appealed to me. I dumped most of the Jujy-Fruits out of the box and into my knickers pocket, the pocket without the hole in it, and proceeded. Three or four kids came along and used the machine, but nobody pulled the Jujy-Fruit lever until a girl I recognized from the Incarnation schoolyard stopped at the machine. When she picked up her purchase and ran after her friends I saw the bright yellow box lying in the machine’s bin. As quickly and as casually as I could, I moved past the machine and with a single motion scooped up my prize, a full box of Jujy-Fruits, for free. 

Ill-gotten though it was, the candy lost none of its sweetness. I left the movies that afternoon without a thought of my evil deed, running down Fifth Street with the rest of the kids, re-enacting whatever action sequences we’d seen on the screen. The problem began in the schoolyard Monday or Tuesday of the following week whenever I walked past the girl whose candy I had stolen. I felt like she was looking at me. All morning, I kept waiting for the classroom door to open with a messenger sent to summon me to Mother Superior’s office. The day passed. But all that week, I kept crossing paths with the candy girl. I had the feeling that everyone was on the cusp of knowing what I had done. 

The following Saturday afternoon, a repeat of my now unspeakable crime was out of the question. I avoided Eddie Lesh like he had ringworm, and I spent my dime on a Milky Way and a box of Mason Dots. I couldn’t face a Jujy-Fruit. When the kids’ matinee ended, I kept on going down Fifth Street right past our street until I got to Lindley Avenue and the Incarnation Church. Confessions were heard every Saturday until six. I got five Our Fathers, ten Hail Marys, and was instructed by a disembodied voice, it was Father Glenn, to make restitution. I couldn’t and I never did. While I recognize the venial nature of my candy machine offense, I still get that ever-so-slight wincing sensation at the sight of the yellow and red Jujy-Fruit logo. It never stopped me from eating them. I still do. That little dose of guilt, the price for having cheated an nine-year old girl out of her full share of gummy candies, just might have helped me decline other more serious temptations, things that could have left me feeling a whole lot worse about myself. 

I wasn’t usually a forgetful kid. But one Saturday afternoon following a Colney matinee, I was halfway down Fifth Street before I realized I didn’t have my hat or mittens. It was a warm winter day in 1948, and I was ten years old. I raced back up to the Colney, explaining myself to the kid taking tickets for the first showing of the Saturday evening feature. The house was already darkened and the all too familiar grainy, brownish national anthem flag clip was just finishing. Making my way down the aisle, looking for where I had been sitting earlier, I noticed that only a half dozen people, all grownups, were in the darkened theater. 

Rooting among the seats for my hat and mittens, I could see that the screen looked blank, gray. A low but slowly increasing growling roar began to fill the air of the theater. As I looked again to the screen, I saw rows of white lines against the gray and realized that I was looking at the sky and that the white lines were now connected to black dots; contrails, airplanes, lots of airplanes, formations. My hat and mittens were lying on the empty seat next to where I had been sitting. As the roaring sounds increased and the camera closed in, I sat down. The planes were dense formations of B-17 Flying Fortresses, heavy bombers, and the footage was documentary footage used for the dramatic opening of one of the best war films ever made, “Twelve-O-clock High,” the Gregory Peck/Dean Jagger classic about the Eighth Air Force and the daylight bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. Within seconds, I was hooked, mesmerized. 

I sat spellbound as the casualties mounted, as oxygen-masked door gunners in sheepskin insulated suits spun their fifty-calibers to track the attacking ME-109s and FW-190s. Again the action scenes employed footage shot during the actual battles, planes bursting into flame, fighters closing at lightning speeds and skies filled with the harmless-looking but deadly puffs of shrapnel-laden black smoke. It must have been halfway through the movie when I was jolted back to the present. The usher’s flashlight beam was bouncing on me and I heard my father’s voice saying, “that’s him,” and “ thank you.” All the way down a now darkened Fifth Street, I prattled on excitedly about the movie, about the planes, the action and about the arguments as to why we had to accept the losses associated with daylight bombing. When we got into the house, my mother went ballistic.” My father didn’t say a thing until after I had eaten the dinner my mother had kept warmed for me. “You know,” he said. “If you don’t come home when you’re supposed to, you’re going to cause your mother and I a lot of worrying about you.”  I’ve since earned a worrywart’s reputation for always calling home, even when I think I might be just a few minutes late. 

It was in the last row of seats at the Colney Theater on a rainy Sunday afternoon that I first encountered one of the more inexplicable and enduring mysteries of life. There I was, thirteen years old, kissing and touching a girl who until that afternoon I had never so much as spoken to. Almost overcome with ecstatic surprise, I assumed I had somehow stumbled through into a new and perfect world of unqualified joy. 

It had all started in the schoolyard two days earlier at Friday morning recess. Albert Quirk walked over to me and said,  “Nancy Green likes you.” Nancy Green was in the eighth-grade girls. I was in the eighth-grade boys. Boys and girls attending the Incarnation parish school were kept separated from each other by a flight of stairs, the best efforts of the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and most effectively by mutual incomprehension. Other than a few tentative, awkward boy-girl birthday parties of the previous year, social gender segregation remained almost total. I knew about girls, but until this particular moment, they had been a distant, alien species, as relevant to my existence as Buddhist monks, polo ponies or lobsters. That Sunday afternoon in the dark, back row of the Colney when I reached over and put my arm around Nancy Green, I figured that all of that was about to change. 

Albert Quirk had delivered the message to me because his twin sister hung around in the same crowd as Nancy Green. I knew Nancy Green. In fact at Patsy Mullins’ twelfth birthday party the previous year, I had even kissed Nancy Green during an adult-supervised game of post office. The experience of kissing girls in a darkened dining room had been one of the transforming events of my life to date. I didn’t know how or why. I just knew that I’d never before experienced anything quite like it. And I wanted to do more of it. Unfortunately I had no idea as to how one went about making friends with girls. A combination of shyness, incompetence and deathly fear of rejection had left me distracted and restless, pulled by undefined, diffused longings. 

It wasn’t yet consciously about sex. A measure of my innocent oblivion was that during that summer between seventh and eighth grade, I met Louie McCain on Third Street one afternoon. Louie, who was in my class at Inky and who must have assumed that I was among the knowing, couldn’t wait to tell me a dumb joke about masturbation. “O.K.,” he said. “Pretend you got a cat in your lap. Now you got a knife in your hand.” The knowing pause. “Now,” he said, “take the knife and start stabbing the cat!” As I followed his instructions, Louie’s smirking face broke into a “gotcha, gotcha” yelping.  I didn’t get it. Louie looked at me in dumbfounded puzzlement. He began to try and explain the joke to me, but stopped, shook his head and walked away. My ignorance didn’t last the week out. 

By the start of eighth grade and my thirteenth birthday, I was obsessed with girls. I knew I desperately wanted to be near them, to be able to touch them, just about any one of them would do. The disconnect that would define too much of my future had become manifest. Distracted to despair by the hormonal equivalent of nonstop, amplified white noise screaming inside my brain, I still had to go through the motions of daily life as if nothing had changed. My mother would ask, “do you want banana on your cereal? Is your brother up yet.” I would nod and say just like yesterday, “O.K.,” or “no,” or “whatever.” Inside my head, it was “Banana, banana, cereal? My brother! What brother? Who cares?” I was consumed, caught in a glandular firestorm; absorbed, distracted and stimulated beyond any lasting satiation, trapped between the goofy, noodley kid that so recently had been me and the sordidly driven sex fiend I had become. How can this be happening? Doesn’t anyone else know what’s going on? 

I soon learned that the condition was general among the secret society of adolescent boys; that most of my peers also had mutated into tortured obsessives. A fresh class of initiates, going through the motions of life, sitting with their families listening to the radio, watching television, going to school, playing sports, but all the time burning, burning, burning. And then Al Quirk walks up to me in the schoolyard and says, “Nancy Green likes you.” 

On the afternoon in question, I was still almost four years away from a real movie date. A real movie date meant asking a girl out in advance, picking her up at her home where her parents would get a look at you, paying her admission, treating her to whatever she wanted from the candy counter. It meant actually watching the movie and after, stopping somewhere for sodas or for something to eat. You then walked the girl home where if things had gone well you might get invited in for some kissing or maybe more. Most likely it would be a kiss goodnight on her front steps. That was a real movie date. 

In eighth grade, initial arrangements for what we thought were dates were always arranged by a go-between. Libby Petrone came up to me in the schoolyard and asked if I was going to the Colney on Sunday. I wasn’t sure, but said yes. “Nancy Green wants to meet you inside,” she told me adding. “I’ll be there too, I’m meeting Louie McCain.” Remembering the joke, Louie McCain was the last kid I wanted in on my first date with a girl. That Saturday, I skipped the matinee and made sure my mother knew it. What I didn’t want on Sunday was a “no movies for you today. You went yesterday. Read a book.” 

I never went to the movies by myself. I never went anywhere by myself. At thirteen, the pack impulse dominated. That Sunday, I walked up Fifth Street all alone. I was a good six months past the point where I should have been paying for an adult admission and I certainly wouldn’t have tried my “getting in for small” act if I had been with a girl. Spared that, I put my sixteen cents on the marble sill of the ticket booth and was issued a child’s admission. Standing in the back of the Colney were Libbie Petrone and Nancy Green. Louie had gotten hassled at home and never showed. There wasn’t any small talk. Libby took charge and led the way into the very last row of seats. There was no romance on Libby’s radar for that afternoon, but her open pleasure at matchmaking seemed consolation enough. 

The three of us sat like strangers through the news and the coming attractions. About fifteen minutes into “Charlie Chan at the Opera” (1936, starring Warner Oland with Keye Luke as Number One Son), I made my move. As casually as I could, I put my arm around the top of Nancy’s seat and let it slide down around her shoulders. Nothing. After a couple of minutes, my arm began to ache. Decisions, Decisions. This was all new. There were no precedents. As the pain in my left arm spread from my shoulder to my elbow and down into my forearm, I had to do something. Uncharacteristically bold, I shifted my weight, turned and planted a big kiss right on Nancy Green’s lips. 

It was grand. She smelled good and we kissed and kissed well into the second feature, a rerun of Errol Flynn in “They Died With Their Boots On.” Until that afternoon, nothing could have kept me from watching a movie like that. Nancy Green and I both came up for air, and I realized that as good as all of this was, there had to be more. Now Nancy Green was a nice girl.  In fact all of the girls I got involved with were nice girls. That was the problem. That and the fact that despite urges that had come to dominate my every moment, I was probably still a nice boy. 

The hours spent kissing with Nancy Green were a pleasure tempered by frustration and seriously mixed emotions. It was a pleasure that generated a discomfort so acute that it ultimately undermined the very pleasure it initially promised. But it was exciting. It was a thrill beyond anything I had ever known. And I think I decided that very afternoon that given a choice between a pleasure and thrill, I would always go for the thrill. Pleasures you could always get. A thrill like this was of a different order. Nothing else that I might have chosen to do that afternoon could have come even close to sitting in the dark and kissing Nancy Green. I was in love. 

For the next four Sunday afternoons, Nancy Green and I were fixtures in the back row of the Colney. We kissed until my lips hurt. My life had become a sweet agony. The idea of Nancy Green filled my every waking moment and many of my dreams. In the schoolyard, I wandered away from my friends and loitered near the invisible line that separated the boys from the girls hoping to catch a glimpse of Nancy Green. I lived for Sunday afternoons. 

On one of those Sunday afternoons, I stopped at the candy counter and bought my usual box of Jujy-Fruits plus a box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts for Nancy. I felt that our relationship now warranted that kind of a gesture. I stood at our spot and waited. The national anthem played, the news, the coming attractions and then the opening of the first feature, a Bowery Boys movie. Several times, I checked the last row of seats. No Nancy, but Libby Petrone was there with Denny Walsh. Louie McCain was already history.  I slid along the empty seats to ask her if she knew where Nancy was. Libby at first feigned innocence, but she couldn’t wait to tell me that Nancy was at the Lindley with Robert Schmidt. 

My life was over. I was devastated. Too old to cry, too young to even begin to know what had happened to me. It was awful. My mother asked, at first charitably, “what’s wrong.” That quickly morphed into, “what in the hell is wrong with you.” It went on for almost a week, a lifetime at thirteen. That Friday after school, serving my papers, Barbara McClosky stopped me on Wellens Avenue and asked me if I was going to the Colney on Sunday. “Because,” she said, “Chrissie Reagan likes you, and she says she’ll meet you inside.” That Sunday afternoon, for the first time, the cashier at the Colney refused to let me in for small.

Hank Miller hadn’t always done casual work down the street at the Lancaster County Farmer’s Market, nor had he always painted houses in the neighborhood. Hank had held a couple of real jobs since getting out of the Navy at the end of the war. But they all ended in a pattern. The people who employed Hank just didn’t seem to understand how things should be done, no matter how many times Hank tried to tell them. For a while he had been a washing machine repairman. His route could have been plotted by tracking the customer complaints that so often followed a visit by Hank. It wasn’t the work. Hank could do the work well enough. He was mechanically gifted, a natural tinkerer. It was more a combination of an attitude and of Hank always having a lot to say. Usually things that people really didn’t want to hear.

My mother dismissed Hank as an “odd duck,” a “strange bird,” but harmless. Even though Hank had fifteen years on me, he tended to be out on the street hanging out with the kids. Despite a contrary disposition, Hank received the deference accorded to someone in a position to bestow goodies. Hank had a car. If you could manage not to annoy Hank, you might be included in the group that would be invited to ride up to Melrose Country Club to sled on the hills. Or you might be among those taken on a run to Bauer’s Ice Cream Parlor up on Rising Sun Avenue in Lawndale. Hank’s car was in keeping with its owner, a 1939 Plymouth coupe, festooned with reflectors and little yellow lights. The lights ran along both running boards, down the seams of the hood and trunk, and outlined the car’s roofline.

Over the course of the summer of 1946, Hank found Jesus. His mother attributed the intensity of Hank’s sudden evangelical zeal to staying up too late at night listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes, neither of which met her approval. In a time and place where churchgoing was more a matter of group identification than of strongly held convictions, Hank’s new enthusiasms taxed the forbearance of his neighbors. Mr. Farr, the Jewish debit insurance man, who came door-to-door collecting the thirty-five to fifty cents a week industrial insurance premiums, learned to plan in advance his escapes when stopping at the Miller house. Hank would be waiting for him armed and ready to win another soul for Christ. Hank of course remained Hank, and soon after joining the Bible Baptist Chapel that met in a storefront on Rising Sun Avenue, he felt it his duty to straighten out the pastor and the elders on what he felt were their incorrect interpretations of the scriptures. Following the schism, the only remaining evidence of Hank’s days as a soldier of the cross was a sticker on the rear window of the ‘39 Plymouth announcing that "Jesus Is Coming – Perhaps Today."

Trumping the car’s colored lights and the Jesus sticker were the set of horn effects Hank had installed and loved to use. They included a wolf whistle and an “oogah” klaxon. Even at eleven or twelve years old, I found it embarrassing. But the alternative was being left behind.

My relationship with Hank took a serious cultivating turn when he bought a used Whizzer motorbike. I wanted to ride that motorbike more than I ever wanted to do anything up that point in my life. Sex was still lying unknown over the horizon. I began going out of my way to engage Hank in conversation, to listen attentively to what he had told them down at the shop, to how he had set some woman straight when she tried to tell him where the washing machine hoses should go. Like a Shakespearian villain, I plotted to maneuver Hank into allowing me to take out the Whizzer. I think I was twelve at the time and according to the law you had to be a licensed driver to operate a motorbike. It took some doing and some time, but one weekday afternoon, with Hank home between jobs, I finally got the go-ahead. His caveat was “don’t get caught.”

This was five years before “The Wild One” and eighteen years before “Easy Rider.” But my image of myself on that putt-putt motorbike anticipated both Brando and Peter Fonda. Unfortunately, the old motorbike conked out on Second Street up near the reservoir. I was at least twenty-five blocks from home and had no idea of how to restart the bike. The walk home pushing the now non-whizzing Whizzer was long and a lot of it was uphill. Hank was pissed that I was gone so long. My tale of bad fortune fell upon deaf ears, and I never again tried to get the use of the motorbike. Two years later when Hank bought an old prewar Harley, I didn’t even ask.

Living next door to where Hank lived with his widowed mother and their arthritic dog was the Myers family. Mr. Myers was a little guy with a belligerent manner. The “Missus” had about four inches and at least seventy-five pounds on him. Their two daughters were also a study in contrasts. The older girl, Elly, was bright and good-natured, but she was plain and nearly as wide as she was tall. Her younger sister, Norma, was a different story. She was, considering the standards of our time and place, a knockout. My mother was less than amused if, when Norma went by, my father so much as raised an eyebrow.

Norma was tall and she was voluptuous. She was blonde and had the look of a Betty Grable knock-off. She was all soft curves and bulges and giggled whenever a grown man spoke to her. Hank Miller had a thing for Norma. He might as well have wished for the moon. I picked up on what was going on one day out on the street when one of the older kids, Matty Mac, made lewd note of Norma’s charms in Hank’s presence. Hank’s face twisted and changed colors. Oblivious, Matty was moving to the next level when Hank broke in and said, “you ever say anything like that again, and I’ll go right over to your house and tell your mother.” This from a twenty-three year old to a thirteen year old. Matty Mac never got another invitation to go anywhere in the 39’ Plymouth with the funny horns and yellow lights.

Things got very bad for Hank when Elly’s sailor boyfriend, Willie, brought home a Navy Yard buddy for Norma. Earl was everything Hank was not, and Norma went for him. He was tall, thin and slinky looking in his dress blue bell-bottoms. He had a sly, shifty look to him, a look that wasn’t helped in any way by the thin pencil mustache he affected. Together, he and Norma looked like characters from a low budget movie. Hank was devastated.

Probably out of desperation, Hank befriended Earl as he had earlier fallen in with Willie, Elly’s suitor. For a while, they were a fivesome, going to the movies as a group or going for rides, all jammed into Hank’s little coupe. The arrangement seemed to work until Norma announced that she wanted to learn how to drive. Since Hank was the only one with a car, since he wasn’t working, and had nothing else to do, he was the obvious choice for the job. What we didn’t realize then was that Hank would have done anything to remain in the proximity of Norma. With a transparent reluctance, he agreed that maybe, just maybe he might find his way clear to spending long periods of time alone with Norma in his car.

To Hank’s dismay, Norma was a quick study. After just a few sessions, she believed she was ready to go out to the Belmont Barracks and take her driving test. Hank wouldn’t hear of it. He began raising questionable, nit-picking criticisms of her performance behind the wheel. His instructions got more and more demanding. Norma came back from one of her driving lesson in tears. In his hopeless quest to keep Norma near, Hank tried to impose standards of driving perfection upon her beyond those required to qualify for the Indy Five Hundred. On a Saturday afternoon, at the corner of Fifth and Chew Streets, shoppers got an unexpected treat. A spectacular, but enraged blonde exited the driver’s side of a prewar Plymouth coupe to an accompaniment of horn and siren effects and shouted “you can take your driving lessons and your crappy car, and you can stick them up your ass.”

Earl either wasn’t aware or didn’t care, but on the day that he and Norma were married at Lindley Methodist, Hank came down with the flu that caused him to miss the ceremony and the reception. With a G. I. Mortgage, the newlyweds bought an unfinished house up in Bucks County, a place we’d only just begun to hear of, Levittown. One cold, dreary Sunday afternoon, I was a part of the group that rode up to Lower Bucks County in Hank’s car to inspect the progress of the construction. We walked on boards strung out over snow filled ditches to get to the house. Inside the unheated house, a beaming Earl and Norma with Elly and Willie at their side began pointing out all the modern features of the place. I was impressed by the idea that someone I knew was actually going to live in a single house. Hank didn’t have much to say, but all the way home down the Boulevard he went on about all the things that were wrong with those kinds of houses.

 'Godfather'

When Marlon Brando died last week, accolades poured in from around the world. He was heralded as a great performer and an enormous influence on a generation of actors.

But the one group on which Brando might have had the most influence exercised its right to remain silent.

I'm not talking about the Screen Actors Guild.

I'm talking about the mob.

A lot of mugs can pull a trigger. It takes a studious sociopath to remember his lines before delivering the kill shot. Thanks to Brando, underworld tough guys have never run short of material.

Just as movie tough guy George Raft taught his Hell's Kitchen pal Benny Siegel and a generation of less notorious killers how to sneer and deliver a one-liner before knocking off the competition, Brando's performance as don Vito Corleone gave a whole new generation of hoodlums something to aspire to.

Namely, a sense of tradition and an ounce of class.

How popular is "The Godfather" with the boys?

When law enforcement agencies carry out search warrants, they are required to record a list of "returns," those items collected and catalogued as evidence. Over the years, scores of copies of "The Godfather" have been duly noted at the homes of a legion of mobsters.

And not just those of Italian-American extraction. Ghetto gang-bangers and barrio bad boys alike have been known to keep copies of "The Godfather" series as close to them as their favorite sidearm. Russian and Asian organized crime figures have done the same, whether or not they've managed to obtain dubbed versions of the Coppola classics.

Some will add "Goodfellas" and "The Pope of Greenwich Village" to their list of favorites. Others will augment their collection with copies of "Scarface," both the original 1932 version starring Paul Muni and the foul-mouthed 1983 remake featuring Al Pacino.

Perhaps a younger generation of gangsters one day will look at Tony Soprano with a sense of reverence and respect, but for more than 30 years Brando set a high standard. When Tom Hanks in "You've Got Mail" says, " 'The Godfather' is the 'I Ching.' 'The Godfather' is the sum of all wisdom," he was only half joking.

The traditional mob is known to take its "Godfather" very seriously.

As a boy growing up in Boston, Anthony Fiato was partial to the local mob soldiers and to silver-screen tough guys such as John Garfield. By the time he joined the ranks of the street mob, Fiato saw how Raft and Edward G. Robinson had influenced the mannerisms of the older made mafia men.

By the time "The Godfather" came out in 1972, it raised the hoodlum element to a whole new level. It was, Fiato says, like watching a bunch of whiskey drinkers sip champagne with their pinkies extended. He still laughs when he recalls the impact "The Godfather" had on Boston mob guys Paulie Intiso and Nicky Giso.

"After seeing 'The Godfather,' Paulie altered his speech," recalls Fiato, a reformed mob hit man who now is a federally relocated witness and the subject of my book "The Animal in Hollywood." "Paulie started acting like Marlon Brando and talking like him. Paulie was raised in the North End, and suddenly he's talking like Vito Corleone. It was incredible. Paulie was a 'dems and dose' kind of guy, and every other word he would swear; but after the movie came out, he starts to articulate. He starts philosophizing."

It wasn't the first time Brando had an impact on the street element. Fiato recalls "Crazy Joe" Gallo wearing black shirts and white ties after Brando set the trend as Sky Masterson in the 1955 film version of "Guys and Dolls."

As if to illustrate how much a part of American street culture Brando had become, Fiato nails the "coulda been a contender" scene from "On the Waterfront."

Fiato's former associates loved Brando, but they hated the fact he'd played the punchy palooka Terry Malloy, who in the end ratted out the racket boss.

Experience has taught Fiato that sometimes art imitates life.

After all these years, don Marlon Brando's godfather portrayal seems more legitimate than all the gold-plated gangsters on the street.

Si tenéis un iPhone y sois unos apasionados de la fotografía, probablemente os salga más a cuenta haceros con una cámara como dios manda pero como no estoy aquí para juzgar a nadie, aquí tenéis algunos de los accesorios y hacks más (im)prescindibles para el teléfono de Apple. Empezamos con el conocido Telescope de Brando (imagen de la derecha), un aparatoso zoom de 6x diseñado expresamente para el iPhone 3G que se acopla mediante una carcasa especial. Su precio es de 19 dólares

Por su parte, la compañía japonesa eyeMobile cuenta con un amplio abanico de adaptadores (imagen de la izquierda) compatibles con la mayor parte de teléfonos (incluyendo el iPhone y el iPhone 3G) que permiten modificar ópticamente la longitud focal de la cámara entre los que destacan el ojo de pez y un macro. Además, también disponen de toda clase de filtros, desde el clásico polarizador hasta otros más particulares con efectos para triplicar la imagen en panal o dar un aspecto estrellado a las luces. Dependiendo del modelo escogido encontramos precios que oscilan entre los 1000 y los 6000 yenes (de 6 a 37 euros).

Y para terminar, un terrorífico hack del que han hablado recientemente en TUAW para girar físicamente la lente del iPhone de modo que puede enfocar más cerca. Tanto si atesoráis el suficiente valor como para atreveros a hacerla, como por mera curiosidad, podéis echarle un ojo a la galería de Flickr con algunas fotografías de ejemplo tras la delicada operación. En fin, una bonita forma de mandar al cuento la garantía, ¿no?

Fuente: Applesfera

Excelentes aportes!

"No complete soundtrack album was ever released due to Frank Sinatra's contractual restrictions," states the 2004 Theatermania Guide to Musical Theater Recordings.

In 1955, Decca Records did release four songs from the film ("I'll Know," "If I Were a Bell," "A Woman in Love," and "Luck Be a Lady") on EPs at both 78 and 45 rpm, but of course, they don't include any of Sinatra's numbers.  The 2000 reissue of the original Broadway cast album includes these four songs as bonus tracks.  The liner notes elaborate, "Frank Sinatra's exclusive recording contract with Capitol Records prevented Decca from releasing a soundtrack of the film featuring Sinatra's performances."

Do not despair, Sinatra fans.  In 1963, Sinatra and labelmates such as Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Debbie Reynolds on his new record label, Reprise, recorded key songs from Guys and Dolls as part of the Reprise Musical Repertory Theatre four album set.

Perhaps it's better this way.  What's terribly odd about the casting of the movie is that Sinatra was given the largely nonsinging role of Nathan Detroit and that nonsinger Marlon Brando was given the lead role of Sky Masterson! Hmm.  Brando's voice is described as a "tuneless whisper" in an NPR feature on Guys and Dolls (as part of their top 100 musical works of the 20th century).  Supposedly, Sinatra referred to Brando as "mumbles."  But somehow the film works with Brando's voice really being not so bad and Nathan Detroit's character being given another number, "Adelaide," to sing.  Still, apart from the film, Sinatra  regularly performed Sky Masterson's signature number, "Luck Be a Lady."

Sometimes, you might see copies of the complete film soundtrack for sale.  These are unauthorized bootlegs on import or dubious labels such as Motion Picture Tracks, JJA, or Blue Moon.  In "Frank Sinatra: A Complete Recording History," Richard W. Ackelson describes a 1960s soundtrack LP of Guys and Dolls as being "illegally taken from the film's sound."  Or currently, on Amazon.com, a Spanish import version is described by a reviewer as having its songs recorded directly from the DVD and thus contain dialogue, sound effects, background noise, etc. Caveat emptor.

It is surprising that record labels Decca and Capitol, the companies that currently control them, Sinatra's estate, or whoever else might be involved, cannot secure the rights and issue an official, comprehensive, movie soundtrack.  The movie was one of the top-grossing films of 1955.  The original Broadway production ran 1200 performances and its cast album hit #1 on the charts.  The 1992 revival ran over 1100 performances.  Other successful revivals or recordings were in 1955, 1965, 1966, 1982, and 2001, plus an African-American cast in 1976, not to mention countless regional, community, and school productions.  Soundtrack or not, there are plenty of opportunities to see or hear Guys and Dolls.

-- Tim

Coming from a rock chick such as myself, this might surprise you. If you looked at the boys, you wouldn’t even suspect that they can play in a band. No, with their unassuming and sweet looks, you’d think that they work in your office, down the hall in the graphics department; Button down shirts, neatly tucked into jeans and chinos, with a belt of course. Nothing flashier than a simple wedding band or old class ring as bling. No bravado or swagger. But don’t let their prep school appearance fool you. You will be transformed.

Long before Vampire weekend or Chester French made preppy chic again, The Walkmen rose from the ashes of two great bands. Hamilton Leithauser, who could be perfectly cast as a‘soc’ in the Outsiders though he has the angst of a greaser, had formed the Recoys in Boston and then joined up with former classmates from the defunct Jonathan Fire Eater. The band members remain close, churning out more than an album's worth in any recording process, and still finding time for side projects such as recording a cover of Harry Nilsson’s Pussycats, recording a staged reading of Sex And The City (seriously), and co-writing the Great American Novel. Apparently the novel seems to be taking a lot more time than they thought to finish – tell me about it, boys. Tell me about it.

With BOWS AND ARROWS, they had a break out hit with ‘The Rat’, a blistering account of a soul broken by a split. I’ve even heard that it was written about a mutual friend in the Brooklyn indie rock circle, but I decline to name him. Perhaps you can figure it out when you read my forthcoming book (shameless plug).

YOU AND ME, the latest album, unofficially dropped in July in a unique way. With their creative contemporaries such as Radiohead and Trent Reznor offering the music online as a pay what you can scenario, The Walkmen teamed up with Amie Street and offered a download for a $5 donation to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. So now, if you were going to even think about downloading it illegally, bear in mind that the boys are donating the proceeds to a cancer charity. Even I, who gets her music for free, clicked on paypal for this. An advance of one of the greatest albums of the year – AND I get to help fight cancer? Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

But what exactly is it about The Walkmen that captures my fancy? It's hard to put a finger on it. Once when posed with the task of describing the sound of The Walkmen, a friend said it sounded like drunken fairy saloon music. I think that is far too passive and sweet a description. It’s more like elfin mad scientists drunk on absinthe turning wooden knobs at a Narnian console.

Their dirge-ish songs alternate in flavor. Sometimes big band, sometimes calypso or country, you are listening to the soundtrack to a weekend in an Irish pub or a stormy Caribbean vacation. Or perhaps this is the music of the underworld that Orfeo’s true love heard when she was stuck on the other side. Lest the sounds get too sweet, the lyrics can be like a thousand little cynical papercuts. “What’s in it for me….I heard you the first time.”, “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor…we’ve been through this before.” “I don’t get some people, but I don’t really try.”, and titles like “Revenge wears no wristwatch”, “This job is killing me”, “Everyone who pretended to like me is gone” These reveal a certain callous and unsympathetic look at what once was happy times. I suppose it's the duality which resonates with me. The inner idealist wrestling with the voice who has seen disappointment - a 'fuck you' to over-sentimentality, which by nature is somewhat sentimental.

The show at the Troubadour was all of this and more. The guys, armed with a horn section, took the stage in an un-assuming, modest way, but hit the crowd confidently with a beautiful, ethereal, punk wall of sound. The performance was so startling and arresting, and then lulling and then engaging.

Ham’s voice, an odd yelping cry which wavers between a Bob Dylan call to arms and a raspy Rod Stewart growl is an unique layer a top the swirling Wurlitzer and big band orchestrals. His fist over the mic like an MC, with the cord wrapped tightly around his arm, pulling on it, tourniquet style, he howled and yelped in epileptic fits, accessing and channeling some type of Brando rage.

There’s a sense of hearkening back when you’re listening in on them. Maybe it’s the vintage gear, or their somewhat formal and almost polite appearance. But one does feel like Hamilton is yearning for a time when people respected each other and did the right thing.

Of course nostalgia can be dangerous - looking at the past for those golden moments, and glorifying a time which was most likely the same mix of heaven and hell, is not an enlightened place to start from. But it is the stuff that bar dirges are made of. And old Hollywood movies. And sweeping novels. It is this magical lightning in a bottle, that the Walkmen capture for me. A bit of gilded memory with the somewhat sour taste of the present.

In fact, while listening to their set, this is what the music made me imagine:

The smell of library books. An empty field at twilight. A pork pie hat with a madras plaid band. Mass held at an all boys Catholic boarding school. A black and white Robert Doisneau photograph. The first time reading JD Salinger or Mark Twain. An old Frenchman covering Bob Dylan. A 400 year old pub on the cliffs of Dover. The ignited sugar cube dropped into a glass of illegal absinthe. Dickie Greenleaf in a late night jazz club. A flamenco dance on a honeymoon.

I can only blame The Walkmen and their gorgeous music for making me emoscribe like this. I want to go for a walk in a rainstorm. I want to smoke cloves while watching the sun set. I want to go plant a freaking tree. See? YOU AND ME has turned me into a mushy mess of flowery prose. Who knows? If I keep listening, perhaps I may just finish my Great American Novel.

The Walkmen perform at the Troubadour Friday, August, 22, 2008. Their latest album, You And Me was released on August 19th.

Brando has just come out with a new universal battery charger. It works on the same principles, jaw-grip/adjustable electric contacts, as their previous Thanko version. This little gizmo is designed to be portable and draws its power from a USB port. It can supposedly adapt to different voltages.

My latest from Unplggd...

If you've been thinking to yourself what my iphone needs is a telecope for my 2 megapiel camera, then your'e in luck cos mobile computer have found just the thing from Brando. But the best part is getting Brando to explain their own product:

"- Install the crystal case first enclosed with the telescope.
- Adjust the clear focus with the naked eye.
- It can take a picture while fixing the telescope on back crystal case. (If the screen of your cellphone is analyzed degree enough, you can adjust the focus with the screen of the cellphone)."

Clear?

Link

There are also other new accessories for E71 from Brando. You can find it in here.

I know some incidents of very easy breaking Brando cases which were delivered in last few weeks, so I’ll keep you updated how is this case lasting.

[Update]

Two days ago I have received Brando' Crystal Case for Nokia E71. I was afraid about its durability, as I know about issues with very fragile Brando cases ordered in last few weeks. Here is an update! After two days the case has first fracture on a back side. I’m sure the phone did not fall. It looks like an effect of tension in plastic used for the case. Please see attached photo. No good news!

 
Apocalypse Now (en castellano Apocalipsis now o Apocalipsis ahora) es una película bélica dirigida por Francis Ford Coppola en 1979. El guión se basaba en la novela El corazón de las tinieblas (Heart of Darkness) de Joseph Conrad, aunque trasladando la acción a la invasión estadounidense de Vietnam. Ganó dos Oscar, a la mejor fotografía y al mejor sonido, y obtuvo seis candidaturas, al mejor director, a la mejor película, al mejor actor de reparto (Robert Duvall), al mejor guión adaptado, a la mejor dirección artística y al mejor montaje. También fue merecedora de la Palma de Oro del Festival de Cannes de ese año.
En 2001 Coppola presentó, también en el Festival de Cannes, un nuevo montaje de la película, ampliada hasta las tres horas y media de duración, con el nombre de Apocalypse Now Redux. Si la primera película se convirtió en una película de culto, la versión de 2001 logró no defraudar a la crítica ni a los antiguos admiradores.

Sinopsis:
Al capitán Willard (un hombre con sus propios problemas) le encargan un peligroso viaje río arriba hacia el interior de la selva camboyana. Su misión: matar a Kurtz, un enigmático coronel estadounidense instalado en aquella zona remota y que, aparentemente, ha perdido el juicio. Durante el trayecto, Willard comienza a sentirse fascinado por el currículum de Kurtz, al tiempo que empieza a conocer aspectos de la guerra que le harán comprender mejor las razones de ese hombre al que tiene que asesinar. Magistral disección de los horrores y sinsentidos de la guerra, en "Apocalypse Now" Coppola exprimió todo su dinero, ambición y talento -que no era poco- para rodar una fascinante bajada a los infiernos del conflicto de Vietnam. Por lo demás, Marlon Brando epata con un escalofriante personaje que consagra esta búsqueda de un coronel demenciado por los espantos de la más cruel creación del hombre. Una obra colosal, tan impresionante como inigualable.

Unfortunately, the only information that Brando provides about the screen is that it’s an “iPhone 3G Replacement LCD Display”. It’s probably not advisable to open up your iPhone unless you really know what you’re doing, but Brando does at least provide some help in that department. (link)

Is there really a market for this? I'm beginning to think iPhone users treat their phones with utter disregard. Dropping it or just being careless is no excuse. Take care of your gadgets or be prepared to pay for the consequences. Don't bother crying to the Apple store because of your carelessness.