Actor, Emmy winner, Philly native, LaSalle College alumnus and former seminarian Peter Boyle, 71, died Tuesday night. DAN BUSKIRK REMEMBERS: Peter Boyle didn’t look good bald. Actually, he didn’t look good with hair either, and perhaps you should put aside your warm memories of the recently departed actor and take a good look at his picture. His eyes are partly unreadable because of his natural squint, his lips are thin and seem to rest in a perpetual smartass smirk, and that forehead! With its thickened brow leading up to that bulbous dome, Boyle’s swollen head seemed to suggest both the […]
HOLLA: J-Kenn, Straight Outta The 610, Lord Help Us
THE WOOK SPEAKS: You gotta at least give Jamie Kennedy a shout on this front — he’s easily the second best performer ever to emerge from the 19082 — a few paces behind Tina Fey and a good mile ahead of the dead heat that is the chick from the “Blair Witch Project” and the corpse of Jim Croce. Which is to say that when “Scream” was the shizzy back in ’96, J-Kenn was assuredly Upper Darby’s Great White Hope.Which explains why 10 years on, he’s put out a rap album. Actually, the tense on that should be past, as […]
BREAKING: Peter Boyle Dead at 71
Dec. 13, 2006 — Peter Boyle, who gained fame playing everything from a tap-dancing monster in “Young Frankenstein” to the curmudgeonly father in the long-running TV sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” has died. He was 71. Boyle died Tuesday evening at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma and heart disease, according to his publicist, Jennifer Plante. Boyle was beginning to gain notoriety playing hard-bitten, angry characters when he took the role of the hulking, lab-created monster in Mel Brooks’ 1974 horror film sendup. The movie’s defining moment came when Gene Wilder, as scientist Frederick Frankenstein, introduced his […]
A Multiplex Grows In North Philly, Blatstein Gives Folks Seven More Screens To Shout At, Still, This IS Progress
“The project, which broke ground in April 2005, caps years of attempts to build a movie theater and retail complex adjacent to Temple University. In 2002, Kravco Simon Co. and basketball great Magic Johnson planned to construct a 14-screen theater and retail shops at the site. That plan was canceled last year. “This is one of the most significant developments in some time,” Councilman Clarke said of the Tower Investments project. “It will be a catalyst for North Philadelphia.” The complex is the linchpin of a plan to revitalize the blocks along the North Philadelphia corridor. Other projects in the […]
BREAKING: Robert Altman, AMERICAN MASTER, Dead At 81
“THE DEATH OF AN OLD MAN IS NOT A TRAGEDY.” –ROBERT ALTMAN, 1925-2006 FROM THE SF CHRONICLE: Garrison Keillor, who starred in Altman’s last movie — this year’s “A Prairie Home Companion” — said Tuesday that love of film clearly came through on the set. “Mr. Altman loved making movies. He loved the chaos of shooting and the sociability of the crew and actors — he adored actors — and he loved the editing room and he especially loved sitting in a screening room and watching the thing over and over with other people,” Keillor said in a statement e-mailed […]
SNEEK PRE-VIEW: Fur
WIKIPEDIA: Diane Arbus
TRIBUTE: Jack Palance, Up From The Mines Of Pennsyltucky To Best of The Bad Guys Oscar Immortality, RIP ‘Curly’
When reporters asked him what he thought about most of his films, he tended to dismiss them as “garbage.” Still, his part as a homicidal husband stalking Joan Crawford in “Sudden Fear” (1952) also won him an Oscar nomination, and his role as a robber with a heart in “I Died a Thousand Times” (1955), a remake of Humphrey Bogart’s “High Sierra,” earned Mr. Palance better reviews than the movie received. Walter Jack Palance was born Feb. 18, 1920 or 1918, in Lattimer Mines, Pa., the third child of Vladimir Palahnuik, a coal miner, and the former Anna Gramiak, both […]
The Early Word: If Man Is Five, And The Devil Is Six, Then God Is Seven, THEN GOD IS SEVEN
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 7 @ The Trocadero Theatre Y-Rock on XPN and Philadelphia Weekly present THE PIXIES loudQUIETloud DVD SCREENING PARTY FREE ADMISSION / Showtime: 8pm / Age restricted 21+
Sneak Preview: Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Unofficial Borat Site: One Hot Sexy Bitch On Fire!
Come On Feel The Rage
DISCUSSED: IRISH GIRLFRIENDS; THE IRA; RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE; MUMIA; PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN; THE END OF DEMOCRACY; AND JUST HOW AWESOME IS THIS PHOTO OF BRIAN JONES? Five years and three girlfriends ago, Rage Against the Machine was on the FOP shitlist for staging a Free Mumia concert at the Meadowlands. Mumia, as you may have heard, was convicted of killing officer Daniel Faulkner. None of that hubub was much on my radar back then. But my gal at the time, well, she was pretty hardcore Irish, Up The Ra! and all that. Her aunt was a tough-but-sweet old broad […]
Top 5 Of The Moment
THE INVISIBLE MAN Now out on DVD, HBO’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is, like the titular changeling himself, by turns fascinating, tragic, trippy, ingenious and a little corny, but in a sweet way. Like Sellers’ existential quick-change act of a life, Geoffrey Rush’s performance is one of those nested Russian dolls: Unscrew Inspector Clouseau and you find Dr. Strangelove, and inside of him is Chance the Gardener, and finally, just when you think you’ve gotten down to Peter Sellers, there’s … nothing. He was a cipher, quite literally the man who wasn’t there, which made for a […]
Can You Dig It?
(Illustration by Alex Fine) 20 Essential Rock Snob Artifacts Unearthed In 2005 1) Patti Smith Horses: 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition (Arista) As the high priestess of punk, Smith revived the shamanistic notion that words could be strung like Christmas lights, and — when whipped around like whirling dervishes atop three-chord garage rock — could open the portal of the ecstatic. 2) Bruce Springsteen Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Sony) After two commercial duds, the suits demanded a hit or else. Written as a time-lapse snapshot of one long summer night in the teenage jungleland of Jersey — with […]
Everybody Must Get Scones
(Illustration by Alex Fine) SCORSESE, STARBUCKS AND DYLAN TOGETHER AT LAST! There are two ways to sell out: sooner, and later. Back in ’62 they sure as hell didn’t sell double skinny caramel mochiatto decaf lattes with whipped cream on top at the Gaslight Cafe, the rough-hewn subterranean coffeehouse that served as Mecca for the Greenwich Village folk boom. That little bit of cognitive dissonance will be airbrushed out of the minds of future generations starting next week, when Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962 goes on sale exclusively — for 18 months anyway — at Starbucks. I know, […]