Or that other master of the fine arts, Tom Laughlin.
Joking. The song “One Tin Soldier” by The Original Caste was used as the theme song in Laughlin’s movie, Billy Jack. I’m not linking to the song because you will never get it out of your head.
Tin soldiers were originally child’s toys, long before they turned plastic. They were light, cheap, and easily breakable and discarded. All English kids would have played with them, and adults would be familiar with their literary meaning. A tin soldier is the hero in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” They also turn up in The Nutcracker ballet.
They don’t have the same deep history in American folklore, but Bernie Taupin would find it a natural metaphor for fake strength in soldiers “if there comes a time/Guns and gates no longer hold you in”.
In the Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts shaving himself with butter, and later basting himself in it, he gets Newman really hungry and he runs off to the coffee shop. Once there, he hallucinates Kramer’s face on a turkey. I just noticed, what the heck kind of coffee shop serves a full turkey that looks like its been in the oven like a Thanksgiving dinner? The waitress doesn’t even bring it in front of anyone, she just puts it on the counter and starts to cut it. Who cuts turkey on a lunch counter? Shouldn’t she be doing that in the back? Shouldn’t a cook be doing it?
I’m watching the American version of The Chase and I just found out that Robert Redford named the Sundance Film Festival after the Sundance Kid. :smack:
More precisely, Redford in 1981 created the Sundance Institute which he named after the movie and then in 1984 the Institute took over an already existing film festival and in 1991 named it the Sundance Film Festival:
Even more precisely, Sundance Institute is undoubtedly named after the Sundance Ski Resort that Redford opened in 1969 (although he may not have changed the name to Sundance until later). I’ve skied there, and was told that one of the figures off in the distance was Redford, but you couldn’t prove it by me.
Despite what the Wikipedia article says, there was originally a separate festival at Sundance. The festival at Park City was distinct I saw F/X (1986) at the Park City Film Festival (not “Sundance”) at the Egyptian Theater in Park City.
There was a ski area known as Timp Haven which opened in 1944. Redford bought it in 1968. At some point he renamed it the Sundance Mountain Resort. Did he really rename it in 1969, the year that the film came out?:
I don’t know, but I’ll bet he renamed it before Sundance Institute.
I don’t know, though, because I got to Utah in 1983, after the 1981 naming of Sunddance*. And, for some reason, neither the Wikipedia pages nor the Sundance site itself tell you when the resort was renamed.
*Actually, I first got to Utah in 1980, but I was only passing through, and wasn’y paying attention.
In the opening scene of Stephen King’s Rose Madder, Rose is suffering a miscarriage after a beating by her husband Norman. If the baby had been a girl, she was going to name it Carrie.
Which was the name of the book that first made King famous.
I was always a big Monty Python fan. I always liked the Piranha Brothers sketch. It is not surprising that as an American who first saw the show in reruns that I wouldn’t understand what it was parodying. But it was years after I saw the movie The Krays that it suddenly became clear.
I didn’t realize this until a few days ago and I feel ashamed about missing this for so long.
The circle in Circle K convenience stores is supposed to be synonymous with the letter “O”. Thus, “Circle K” is another way of saying “OK”. That’s something that’s especially apparent once you look at the company logo.
I was watching U2 on TV performing at the World Aids Day concert and I was thinking “Wow, when Bono takes off those sunglasses he’s always wearing it’s amazing how much he looks like Bruce Springsteen.”
In my defense, I was also engaged in a conversation about the upcoming football game at the time.
I can probably manage; I’ve got thousands of songs kicking around in my head, and it’s rare for any one of them to hold off all the others for very long.
But boy howdy, I’d forgotten just how…well, to call that song ‘preachy’ is a huge understatement. It’s more like the songwriters thought, “why hit people over the head with a hammer when an anvil will do?”
I don’t get it. (I thought at first that you meant that Bono was Bruce Springsteen, but Wikipedia says Bono is Paul David Hewson.) What’s the obvious thing that you didn’t realize?
Spoiler
I was re-watching the film Cloud Atlas the other day, and I noticed for the first time that Rufus Sixsmith – the only character to appear “as himself” in two different storylines (and the only one played by the same actor, James d’Arcy, in two different sections) – dies at the ends of San Francisco 1973 the same way his lover, Robert Frobisher did in Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 – being shot through the mouth.
It’s also interesting that Ben Whishaw, who plays the Frobisher who wrote the titular Cloud Atlas Sextet in the 1936 segment also plays the Record Store Clerk who can’t stop listening to it in the 1973 segment.
