Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Two not-so-new videos

I was going through my VHS video archives and found some awesome footage from when Reagan was President (first term) of me doing some fun parachuting stuff.

The first one is our pirate jumps off of the Newport (RI) Bridge, back in 1983 or 84.



And this one is a Santa Claus jump I did about a year later:



I'm turning 50 next month, and while I've known people a LOT older who still jump, I consider it a closed chapter in my life. I've accomplished everything I'm going to, and I have other stuff I enjoy doing more.

Plus, my back is kind of fucked up, and the idea of jumping out of airplanes doesn't hold the same appeal anymore.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

"Righteous Kill"

I finally saw Righteous Kill, the awful Robert DeNiro/Al Pacino movie that sucked so badly it only scored 21% at Rotten Tomatoes.com.

Other than the tremendous waste of talent that this movie represents, the only significant thing about it is that they filmed several scenes at The Star Cafe, a bar about 1/2 mile from my house last year. Here's some photos and screen caps (click on them to show full size):

This is supposedly the exterior of the bar, taken at another location. It establishes the fiction that the bar is located in a downtown NYC area, rather than the suburban street that the real bar is on.

This is the actual exterior of the bar, with the windows blacked out because either they knew the movie was gonna bomb and they didn't want anyone seeing it, or more likely because they were shooting scenes that represented nighttime and they didn't want sunlight streaming in to ruin the effect.

The next two images are screencaps from the actual film. Basically, it shows some of the inside of the bar, but it looks much nicer on film than it actually is. But I think that's because they dressed the set with lots of extra lights and things that make it look more colorful than the drab, rundown pub it truthfully is.

(I hope the owner isn't reading this; someone said he heard the guy threatened someone who referred to his beloved cafe as a "seedy" bar!)