RECENTLY VIEWED: GHOSTBUSTERS - AFTERLIFE

This weekend I was just looking at the movies on cable, and I decided to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife finally. I was 10 when the original Ghostbusters came out, and I enjoyed the movie but I never thought it was a great as people said it was. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a 2021 American supernatural comedy film directed by Jason Reitman from a screenplay he co-wrote with Gil Kenan. It is the sequel to Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II (1989), and the fourth film in the Ghostbusters franchise. The film stars Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, and Paul Rudd, alongside Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver reprising their characters from the earlier films. Set 31 years after the events of Ghostbusters II, it follows a single mother and her children who move to an Oklahoma farm they inherited from her estranged father Egon Spengler, a member of the original Ghostbusters.

A third Ghostbusters film was in development since the release of Ghostbusters II, but production stalled because Murray refused to return to the series. After cast member Harold Ramis died on February 24, 2014, Sony produced a female-driven reboot that was released in 2016. In 2019, Jason Reitman confirmed a sequel to the original films, the new cast was announced by July, and the original cast signed on two months later. Filming took place from July to October. This was the final film to be produced by and involve the franchise's co-creator Ivan Reitman before his death in February 2022.

Produced by Columbia Pictures in association with Bron Creative, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was screened unannounced during the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas on August 23, 2021, and was then released in the United States on November 19, after being delayed four times from an original July 2020 date due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film received praise for the cast's performances, Reitman's direction, nostalgic tone, and its respectful tribute to Ramis, with criticism mostly being directed towards its screenplay and fan service. It grossed $204.4 million worldwide against a production budget of $75 million. A sequel is set to be released on March 29, 2024.

I won't tell you the whole plot of the film, but there are a lot of great moments honoring the original film as well as the memory of Harold Ramis. The new cast of Ghostbusters are excellent, and even the the original Ghostbusters appeared, it was sad to not really have Harold Ramis among them. If you liked the orignal Ghostbusters, you will like this movie. Even if you are a new viewer, the movie has a sort of Stranger Things vibe to it, and you will still like the film. As a movie to watch on a lazy Saturday evening, Ghostbusters: Afterlife really fit the bill...

MY RATING: 8 out of 10

MUSIC BREAK: VIVIENNE SEGAL - TO KEEP MY LOVE ALIVE

THE LAST DAYS OF LORENZ HART

One of the most compelling figures for me in the world of musicals is Lorenz Hart. Since I was little, I have loved the lyrics that came from his pen. Sadly, Hart did not have a happy life, and he died very young. Recently his nephew Larry Hart talked about the lyricist's final days. Hart,  a political consultant in Washington, D.C. read an essay on his famous uncle filled with falsehoods.

The essay repeated the oft-told tale of how Hart arrived at the opening of a revival of the show in 1943 drunk and unruly. Ejected from the theater at intermission, he “wandered off into the snow, apparently passed out in a snowdrift, and was taken to the hospital on the early morning of Nov. 18 . . . Four days later, he died of acute pneumonia,” the program said.

(Alan Jay Lerner once claimed his writing partner, Fritz Loewe, was the person who found Hart drunk and sitting in a gutter, not a snowdrift, outside a bar on Eighth Avenue.) But Hart’s nephew says this story is inaccurate. It is, he says, “a myth” that was created for “Words and Music” – the 1948 MGM biopic about Rodgers and Hart – “and has been perpetuated ever since.”

What the nephew believes happened, as told to him by his mother, Dorothy, Hart’s sister-in-law, is this:

By 1943, Hart was suffering from acute alcoholism brought on by years of depression (he was gay at a time when that was unacceptable, he was short and thought himself ugly, and he was desperately lonely).

While rewriting of the show for the new production, he was in and out of Doctor’s Hospital “and in fact wrote some of the lyrics for the revival while there,” says his nephew.

Hart was sloshed on opening night and started singing along with the chorus, “which he had a tendency to do when he was drunk.”

Rodgers had him thrown out of the theater, but he did not leave alone. He was with his sister-in-law.

“My mother poured him into a cab and they got out at my parents’ apartment,” Larry Hart says. “My uncle passed out on the couch. He was never found lying in the street or in a snowdrift. I’m a weather buff and I’ve checked the records: There was no snow in New York in November of 1943.”

After Hart sobered up, he left the apartment and was not heard from for two days. On Nov. 19, gravely ill with pneumonia, he was taken from his apartment on Central Park West to Doctors Hospital, where he died on Nov. 22.

Larry Hart says he wants to set the record straight because his mother and father, Teddy (Hart’s brother), “have been cut out of the record. People have tried to portray my uncle as this guy who was all alone in the world. But he had my parents, and they tried to take care of him.”

Lorenz Hart could express himself lyrically in countless songs he wrote, but unfortunately could never get over the demons that plagued his life...

FORGOTTEN ONES: BOB CHESTER

Just like there was a lot of big band singers from the 1930s and 1940s, there were a lot of big band leaders. Sadly some of those big band leaders are forgotten even more of their singers. I think one such band leader was Bob Chester,a great bandleader and tenor saxophonist.

He was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Chester's stepfather ran General Motors's Fisher Body Works. He began his career as a sideman under Irving Aaronson, Ben Bernie, and Ben Pollack. He formed his own group in Detroit in the mid-1930s,with a Glenn Miller-influenced sound. This band was unsuccessful in local engagements and quickly dissolved. He then put together a new band on the East Coast under the direction of Tommy Dorsey and with arrangements by David Rose. This ensemble fared much better, recording for Bluebird Records.

Chester's group, billed "The New Sensation of the Nation," had its own radio show on CBS briefly in the fall of 1939. The twenty-five-minute program aired from the Hotel Van Cleve in Dayton, Ohio late on Thursday nights (actually 12:30 am Friday morning, Eastern Time); the September 21, 1939 edition can be heard on the One Day In Radio tapes, archived by Washington D.C. station WJSV.

Chester's Bluebird records have proved excellent sellers, both for retail dealers and coin phonograph operators such as "From Maine to California"; "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie"; "Madeliaine"; and two songs from "Banjo Eyes" - "Not a Care in the World" and "A Nickel to My Name". His only national hit was "With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair" (b/w "I Walk With Music"; Bluebird 10614), which featured Dolores O'Neill on vocals and went to No. 18 on the chart in April 1940.

Chester's orchestra included trumpeters Alec Fila, Nick Travis, Lou Mucci, and Conrad Gozzo, saxophonists Herbie Steward and Peanuts Hucko, drummer Irv Kluger, and trombonist Bill Harris. His female singers included Dolores O'Neill, Kathleen Lane, and Betty Bradley; among his male singers were Gene Howard, Peter Marshall, Bob Haymes, and Al Stuart.

The orchestra disbanded in the mid-1940s, due in part to the shrinking market for big band sound. After a stint as a disc jockey at WKMH radio, Chester assembled another band for a short time in the early 1950s, but after it failed he retired from music and returned to Detroit, to work for the rest of his life in auto manufacturing. Bob Chester died in October 1966, at the age of 58. Forgotten in 1966, he is even more forgotten today...

KEEFE BRASSELLE: TINSEL TOWN HOPEFUL AND HOLLYWOOD FAILURE

Not many people remember the name Keefe Brasselle. In the 1950s, he was supposed to do for Eddie Cantor what Larry Parks did for Al Jolson in their respective bio pics. This was not meant to be for Keefe, and his career suffered for it. Keefe Brasselle broke into motion pictures while serving in the U. S. Navy. His first co-starring role was opposite singing star Gloria Jean in the waterfront mystery River Gang (1945). His dark, chorus-boy looks landed him featured roles in movies through the early 1950s.

He was groomed for stardom in The Eddie Cantor Story, filmed in response to the wildly successful The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again starring Larry Parks as Al Jolson, one of Cantor's musical-comedy contemporaries. The Eddie Cantor Story could not equal the success of the Jolson films, largely because Brasselle didn't fit the role physically. Standing almost a foot taller than the real Cantor, and unable to convey Cantor's natural warmth, Brasselle's performance became a caricature: the actor played most of his scenes with bulging eyes and busy hands, which was effective in the musical numbers but awkward in the dramatic scenes. Ultimately, Brasselle's career did not launch as anticipated. In 1954, he was a guest on an episode (season 4, episode 21, Feb. 21, 1954) of The Colgate Comedy Hour with host Gene Wesson, as a promotional tie-in for the film.

Eddie Cantor commented on his bio pic that if that was his life that "he hadn't really lived at all". I could find no mention of what Eddie thought of Keefe's performance though. Brasselle turned to nightclubs, where he appeared as a singer and comedian. In 1961, an Edison Township, New Jersey, nightclub owned by Brasselle burned under suspicious circumstances. Fire officials came across six empty cans of gasoline at the scene, while their caps and spouts were found separately in a paper bag.

Keefe was later blackballed in Hollywood for writing a novel which was a thinly disguised account of his dealings in Hollywood called The Barracudas (1973). In 1974, Brasselle signed on as director of the low-budget sex comedy If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind (released 1975; shown in Britain as You Must Be Joking). This was a feature-length parade of burlesque blackouts, double-entendre jokes, and bawdy song-and-dance numbers. Brasselle staged the musical numbers himself and even appeared as a specialty act, embellishing his performance with Eddie Cantor's gestures and mannerisms. The film was booked into hundreds of theaters for midnight shows and, despite scathing reviews from mainstream critics, was very popular with college students; it earned more than four million dollars.

Keefe Brasselle died forgotten in 1981 at the age of 58 of liver disease. Hollywood was never his friend, and it probably contributed to his early demise...

RECENTLY VIEWED: BARBIE

Okay, you readers will probably laugh at me but this past weekend I just saw the best movie I have seen this year - Barbie! Yes, it is a girl's movie and a kid's movie, which is sometimes is, but it also has some adult themes, and the message behind the movie is pretty profound. Barbie is a 2023 American fantasy comedy film directed by Greta Gerwig and written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Based on the Barbie fashion dolls by Mattel, it is the first live-action Barbie film after numerous computer-animated direct-to-video and streaming television films. The film follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) on a journey of self-discovery following an existential crisis. It features an ensemble cast that also includes America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, and Will Ferrell.

A live-action Barbie film was announced in September 2009 by Universal Pictures with Laurence Mark producing. Development began in April 2014, when Sony Pictures acquired the film rights. Following multiple writer and director changes and the casting of Amy Schumer and later Anne Hathaway as Barbie, the rights were transferred to Warner Bros. Pictures in October 2018. Robbie was cast in 2019, and Gerwig was announced as director and co-writer with Baumbach in 2021. The rest of the cast were announced in early 2022. Filming took place primarily at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden, in England and on the Venice Beach Skatepark in Los Angeles from March to July 2022.

Barbie premiered at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on July 9, 2023, and was theatrically released in the United States on July 21, 2023, by Warner Bros. Pictures. Its simultaneous release with Oppenheimer led to the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon on social media, which encouraged audiences to see both films as a double feature. The film received positive reviews, and has grossed $382 million worldwide to date.

Margot Robbie is also a producer on the film and had pitched the film to Warner Bros early on. During the green-light meeting, Robbie had compared the film to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) and had also jokingly suggested that it would gross over a billion dollars. Later on, she approached Greta Gerwig as the screenwriter as she enjoyed Gerwig's previous films, particularly Little Women (2019). Gerwig was in post-production for another film, and accepted the role on the condition that her partner, Noah Baumbach, would also write the screenplay. Gerwig signed on to also direct the film in July 2021. Robbie said that the film's aim was to subvert expectations and give audiences "the thing you didn't know you wanted".

The film could very well make a billion dollars. As a father of a beautiful daughter, I try to instill her that women can do anything but also making her aware of the harsh world she'll be facing. This movie does a great job of not only being optimistic but realistic as well. The movie theather was full of young children, but some of the adult jokes will go over their head so be prepared to explain some of the jokes afterwards, but this film had it all - fun, tears, laughs, and an important message to not only young girls but society in general...

MY RATING: 10

A TRIBUTE TO REGIS PHILBIN - THREE YEARS LATER

It has been three years now since the great broadcaster Regis Philbin has died. He is still missed...