It’s the month of January and the holidays have ended and it’s back to another year stuffed with quotes for all of you to enjoy. This month, we take one final quote about the holidays from satirist P.J. O’Rourke. P. J. O’Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. One of his first major writing gigs was writing articles for National Lampoon. He later became a freelance journalist and wrote articles for such publications as Playboy, Vanity Fair, Car and Driver and Rolling Stone. In addition, O’Rourke is an accomplished author having published 16 books. Two of his novels including ‘Give War A Chance’ and ‘Parliament of Whores’ have reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. O’Rourke has Libertarian political views and has been a frequent political commentator on television programs such as ’60 Minutes’ and ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’. He is a regular correspondent for publications such as ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, ‘The American Spectator’, and ‘The Weekly Standard’. His latest book was published in November 2011 and is entitled ‘Holidays in Heck’. In this month’s quote, P.J. gives us his thoughts on the holiday season and what it means to be drunk just before the new year begins…

[ratings]

Share This

It’s almost Christmas time and that means another quote of the month that has very little to do with Christ’s birth. This month, we take a look at Charles Dickens who was an English writer and creator of some of the world’s most popular fictional characters. Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England and left school at an early age to work in a factory in order to help out his family. Dickens worked hard in order to succeed and was doing multiple gigs including writing novels, editing weekly newspapers, writing short stories and lecturing at various public speaking engagements. Dickens had a soft spot for the poor and wrote extensively about poverty in many of his novels. Dickens was known for his philanthropy and helped out save several hospitals from bankruptcy. In addition, he helped to set up a home for the redemption of fallen women from the working class. During his last few years, Dickens went on a hugely popular reading tour that lasted nearly a decade. While Dickens is best known for such novels as ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Great Expectations’; it’s his novel ‘A Christmas Carol’ which will be the focus for the quote for December. The story did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. Dickens catalyzed the emerging Christmas as a family-centered festival of generosity in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centered observations that took place in Victorian England previously.

Some of the characters that he created such as Tiny Tim, Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts have become Western cultural symbols that have been re-enacted every year in various film, television and theater projects. In ‘A Christmas Carol’, Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old man who believes that Christmas is just an excuse for people to miss work. He doesn’t believe in all of the good cheer and charity that the season promotes, and he makes sure everyone knows it. Three ghosts visit Scrooge successively: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. They show Scrooge his error in valuing money over people. In the fifth and final stave, Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning with joy and love in his heart. Scrooge has become a different man overnight and now treats his fellow men with kindness, generosity and compassion, gaining a reputation as a man who embodies the spirit of Christmas. We finish off 2012 with a quote from Scrooge allowing us all to enjoy Christmas and to enjoy being together this holiday season.

[ratings]

Share This

John Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He received 15 Oscar nominations and directed both his father and daughter to Oscar wins in different films. Huston worked as an amateur boxer, reporter, short-story writer and a World War 2 documentary filmmaker. Huston worked as a fine art painter early on in his career before becoming a film director. His visual style from his paintings helped his film career as Huston did very little post-production and preferred to shoot his films all at once which helped to save lots of money for the film studios. He wrote the screenplays for most of the films that he directed and most of these films have become Hollywood classics including such films as ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, ‘Moulin Rouge’, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and ‘Moby Dick’.

Toward the end of his career; he also began to act in various films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role in the film ‘The Cardinal’. Many of Huston’s films involved themes that discussed the human condition and how human beings react to being put in impossible situations. Many of his films involved heroic quests or love stories that didn’t have a Hollywood happy ending but instead ended with the actors being unsatisfied in the outcome. Other film critics thought that Huston preferred to write and direct about the underdog as being the protagonist in his films. By his own admission, Huston cared little for what made film audiences satisfied. In this month’s quote, Huston discusses the difficulty in figuring out what makes people like or dislike films…

[ratings]

Share This

Vincent price was an American actor best known for his role in several low-budget horror films that he made at the end of his film career. Price would learn some of his acting skills while attending Yale and studying art history and fine art. He begun his acting career on-stage in the 1930s but soon made the transition to film in the 1940s. Price’s first venture into the horror genre was in the 1939 Boris Karloff film Tower of London. The following year he portrayed the title character in the film The Invisible Man Returns. In the 1950s, he started to do more horror films and appeared in such recognizable films as ‘House of Wax’, ‘The Fly’, ‘Return of the Fly’ and ‘The House on Haunted Hill’. In the 1960s, Price starred in several low-budget box office hits for director Roger Corman. Some of these films included adaptations from Edgar Allen Poe novels such as ‘The Raven’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘Tales of Terror’, and ‘Last man on Earth’.

In addition, Price would have several recognizable television roles in the 1960s by playing the villain ‘EggHead’ in the Batman television series and appearing as himself on the television game show ‘Hollywood Squares’. At the end of his career, Price would appear in a Canadian Children’s television program called ‘The Hilarious House of Frightenstein’ and do several voice-overs for music albums from musicians such as Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson. Price’s last significant appearance in a film was as the inventor in the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’. In this month’s quote (in Halloween tradition), we give the audience Price’s thoughts on the concept of all things scary…

[ratings]

Share This

We continue our look at the over saturated entertainment industry with some new examples such as celebrity reality television, digital cable channels, magazines and D-List celebrity dance singles.

-Nowadays, we get more insight into our favorite celebrities through their use of social networking sites like twitter. But no medium gives us a more in-depth look at their lives than reality television. These programs are supposed to show celebrities as down-to-earth people who live normal lives just like you and I. It’s very rare that we’ve seen a reality show with an A-list celebrity. Most celebrities who participate on these shows are trying to either make a name for themselves or are trying to reclaim the spotlight after being swept under the rug by Hollywood. MTV was one of the first major television networks to launch a successful reality show when they scored a hit with the debut of ‘The Osbournes’. We learnt a lot from that show as we realized that aging metal rockers have trouble finding the remote or buying British chocolates in California. We then got new musicians stepping up to the plate as MTV attempted a second hit with ‘Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica’ which tried to showcase what a marriage was like between two newly married pop stars. Soon, the idea turned into a fad as we had everybody from Flavor Flav to Ice-T getting their own show. Heck, even Clint Eastwood’s wife and family got their own reality show. If these programs have taught us anything, it’s that they’re cheap to produce and tap into the voyeuristic tendencies of viewers which is why they get high ratings and continue to be pumped out at an alarming rate.
(more…)

Share This