Patricia Rooney Mara (born April 17, 1985) is an American film and television actress. Mara made her acting debut in 2005 and has gone on to star in films including A Nightmare on Elm Street, the remake of the 1984 horror film, and The Social Network. Mara portrayed Lisbeth Salander, the title character in the 2011 version of the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of three Sony Pictures films based on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium book series. She received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.
More importantly, for football fans:
Her paternal grandfather, Wellington Mara, the long-time co-owner of the [New York] Giants, was succeeded in that position by her uncle, John Mara. Her maternal grandfather, Timothy James “Tim” Rooney, has run Yonkers Raceway in Yonkers, New York since 1972. Mara is the great-granddaughter of both New York Giants founder Tim Mara and Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney, Sr. Her great-uncle, Dan Rooney, is chairman of the Steelers, the United States Ambassador to Ireland, and the co-founder of The Ireland Funds charitable organization.
Up until a few weeks ago, if you’d asked me what the “best worst movie” ever made was, I’d say, without hesitation, Road House. And why not? Patrick Swayze, at the zenith of his popularity, stars as James Dalton, a philosophy major turned cooler (super-bouncer) who shows up at the Double Deuce, a bar in Jasper, Missouri. The Double Deuce is the kind of place where the janitors are just as likely to find eyeballs on the floor as spare change and lost sets of keys. Ben Gazzara stars as Brad Wesley, the town’s resident Evil Rich White Guy™… whose relatives and associates work at the Double Deuce and are fired by Dalton. Wesley also owns the liquor distributorship, so he has the Double Deuce (and Dalton) in a bind. Kelly Lynch stars as Elizabeth Clay, the too-pretty-to-be-real doctor who sews up Dalton’s cuts and falls in love with him, and Jeff Healey and his band appear as the house band in the film.
It’s all great cheesy fun. And every time Road House shows up on TV I have to stop and watch it. Seriously: if I was having a three-way with Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson and somehow found out that Road House was on TNT… sorry ladies: I want to be nice, but now it’s time to not be nice.
But all that changed a few weeks ago. I was hanging out at Snug Harbor here in Charlotte, ostensibly to see a popular local band. But my friend William and I were mesmerized by a movie they were showing on the TVs there. I went home and did some googling and found out that it’s a 1967 Japanese film called Kingu Kongu no Gyakush?, or King Kong Escapes in the English-speaking world.
As I say, it’s Japanese. It’s from the late 1960s. It has campy goodness written all over it. It’s obvious that the film had a tiny budget, and not only are the special effects laughable to modern eyes, the scale of them is all wrong (sometimes Kong appears to be 50 feet tall; other times he’s not much bigger than a modern linebacker). And there’s one scene where the camera pans across some military equipment (Jeeps and such) and it’s painfully obvious that they’re the same Revell models I put together as a kid, with some of those fake trees used on model railroads. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s a Japanese film with white people in it, too!
The plot is simple: an evil genius named Dr. Hu (get it? Dr Who?) has created a robotic King Kong which he wants to use to mine “Element X”, a highly radioactive substance which Hu can use to… make weapons? Blackmail or extort governments for huge sums of money? Hell, I forget. But while this is going on, a delegation from the UN is in a submarine doing peaceful research when engine trouble forces them to stop at the mythical Mondo Island, home of the real King Kong. When they go to investigate Kong’s existence, Lt. Susan Watson (Linda Miller, voice provided by Akiko Santou) is attacked by Gorosaurus, a Godzilla-like creature. Kong kills Gorosaurus, allowing his new love to escape, but not before Kong battles a sea serpent that’s attacking the submarine. Hu ends up kidnapping both Kong and the submarine, and he hypnotizes Kong into digging for Element X. But Kong snaps out of it and escapes, swimming off to Tokyo. Hu tracks them down, and Mechani-Kong (yep, that’s his name) picks up Watson and carries her to the top of the Tokyo Tower. And then the real Kong takes care of business by saving Watson, killing Mechani-Kong, killing Hu, and then swimming for home. The end!
Because the only thing better than King Kong is a ROBOT King Kong.
What I love most about this movie is the shotgun approach the makers took with the film. It’s as if they held a focus group of 8 year-old boys that went something like this:
Focus Group Leader: “So… what would you like to see in a new King Kong film?”
Kid 1: “Submarines!”
Kid 2: “Godzilla!”
Kid 3: “Pretty blonde American women!”
Kid 1: “Helicopters!”
Kid 4: “Sea Serpents!”
Kid 5: “A James Bond style mega-villain… only Japanese and with a bad haircut!”
Kid 1: “More helicopters!”
Kid 6: “OMG! A ROBOT King Kong!”
Everyone: “Coooooooooooolllllll!”
Focus Group Leader: “So… uh… what if we used all those things in the same movie?”
Everyone: “Coooooooooooooooooollllllllllllllll!”
It’s a really horrible film. I mean, seriously. It’s bad. I don’t know how it will hold up over repeat viewings (something tells me that Road House will win out in the long run). But still… this is one awesome bad movie! Walk – don’t run – to add it to your Netflix queue… NOW! You won’t regret it.
It’s going to be a busy springtime for me this year music-wise, as the new Madonna album will be released in a few days, and new discs are expected in the next month or two from Ladyhawke, Saint Etienne, and Marsheaux, among others. But Beach House’s new album, Bloom, has leaked online and it’s bloody brilliant! It’s already well out in front in the early race for album of the year!
Emily Olivia Leah Blunt (born 23 February 1983) is an English actress best known for her roles in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), The Young Victoria (2009), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). She has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, two London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, and one BAFTA Award. She won a Golden Globe Award for her work in the BBC television drama Gideon’s Daughter (2007).
If you’re one of the 14 people still using Internet Explorer, you might have noticed an annoying new “feature” that Microsoft introduced in IE 8 and continued in IE 9: when you save images from different tabs, IE always defaults to the user’s “Pictures” folder instead of the previously used folder.
For example, say you’re at an imageboard like Reddit, and you have opened a bunch of funny images you want to save in to different tabs. You right-click the first image and choose “Save Picture As…” and IE opens the save dialog box in the Pictures folder. You navigate to your c:\MyStuff\pictures\reddit\funny folder and save the image. You then go to the next tab, right-click that image and choose save… but instead of the previous location, IE has defaulted back to the “Pictures” folder. So you have to navigate to the your preferred location. And then repeat the process for all the other pictures in open tabs.
This happens because Microsoft used a method it calls “Loosely Coupled IE” (LCIE) to spawn new instances of IE every time you open a new tab. In other words, every time you open a new IE tab, Windows treats it as a completely new instance of IE. Which is why new tabs revert to default locations, but saving multiple images from the same tab don’t exhibit this behavior. And the reason Microsoft did this is for stability: if one of your open tabs crashes, only that particular instance of IE is killed, not the other instances of IE. So LCIE makes IE much more stable generally, but adds a huge annoyance for saving images.
Can you change this behavior? Yes, but you need to read this first: Trust me, it’s not the usual techno-babble yadda yadda yadda.
You can force IE to run as a single process, but this has two important ramifications: for one thing, all instances of IE will run as a single process, so if one tab crashes, all tabs will crash. Also, forcing IE to run as a single process disables Protected Mode in Windows Vista and Windows 7, because IE is running as a single process, instead of separate instances which Windows can run at different integrity levels.
Suranne Jones (born Sarah Anne Jones; 27 August 1978) is an English actress. She first rose to prominence playing the role of Karen McDonald in ITV1’s soap opera Coronation Street over a period of four years. In 2004, she left Coronation Street, later remarking: “I just thought, while [Karen]’s brilliant and I’m enjoying her, I’ve got to get out”.
Upon leaving, Jones took on roles in many drama series broadcast on ITV1 and BBC1, such as Vincent, Strictly Confidential, Unforgiven, Five Days and Single Father, whilst also appearing in various theatre productions, earning her critical acclaim, described by Andrew Billen of The Times as being in a category of “those brave, talented few who earn their wings on a soap and then fly gloriously beyond it”. In 2011 Jones starred in Scott & Bailey as DC Rachel Bailey, with the television series being an original idea conceived by Jones herself and fellow actress Sally Lindsay.
