I don’t know if I mentioned this or not, but I recently wrote a little crime novel called Niketown. Check it out. In the book, the protagonist, Carter Chase, invents a recipe for hot dog which he names “The Mark Chase Dog” after his missing brother, and the ingredients are described in loving detail.
Well, Michael Taylor of Paducah, KY decided to make himself some Mark Chase Dogs and was kind enough to send me photographic documentation:
Now I feel lazy because I never got around to making Casey Ryback’s salad recipe from UNDER SIEGE 2, even though I put it in Seagalogy. Michael also reports that he once read one of my greatest works, my GARFIELD review, at an open mic night. That warms my heart. Thanks Michael!
SAMURAI FICTION is a deeply enjoyable period samurai picture, made in 1998 but shot mostly in black and white, so it looks very classical. Not that it’s trying to pass. It occasionally uses more modern filmatics, like a seemingly endless shot pulling back down a road in front of three running samurai, or a slow motion shot of a girl smiling to represent the protagonist being smitten with her – you can imagine a love song playing over it sarcastically, maybe something in a Carpenters or a Barry White.
I noticed everybody’s writing about the latest Disney’s Star Wars news on an old post that has about ten billion comments on it and takes six hours to load. We don’t yet have the technology to create a forum, so out of the kindness of my heart I am giving you this fresh new post for any Star Wars related commenting.
Man, say what you will about Luc Besson, he’s still got his exploitation producer thing going, and he’s squeezed more cinema out of Parkour than Cannon ever got out of breakdancing. Back in the late ’90s the LEON director saw dudes bouncing off the streets, walls and rooftops of France, and while other people might’ve thought “I hope that guy doesn’t fall [in French],” his reaction was “I gotta put this shit in an action movie!” So by ’98 Besson, as writer and producer, had Parkour in a foot chase through traffic in TAXI 2, and by ’01 he’d done a whole movie called 
BEHIND THE CANDELABRA is Steve Soderbergh’s one last big score before retirement. In some countries it played in theaters, but here in his home country it went straight to cable. Why? The Man obviously didn’t get how contemporary this story is even though it takes place in the ’70s through early ’80s.
“Me and Priest go back to the golden age of hustlin.”
“I am retired. Can you dig where I’m coming from?”
it was called SUPER FLY T.N.T.? You’d think I’d’ve gotten on that shit right away. But I’m not the only one who forgot about it. This 1973 sequel has never been released on DVD. It has no external reviews on IMDb. And its soundtrack has never been on CD, even though it’s good enough that I bought a vinyl copy on ebay right after I watched the movie.
I’ve seen SUPER FLY a bunch of times, but I guess not since the VHS days. It’s a good looking movie on DVD, a nice document of extravagant ’70s clothing, small but fancy apartments, a white Rolls Royce rolling around dirty New York streets, its shiny hood ornaments leading the charge like a figurehead on a boat headed to the new world. It’s not a plot-heavy movie, it’s full of long scenes showing off the Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, for my money probly the greatest song soundtrack ever made for a movie (though the blaxploitation genre’s got several classics: 
I wanted to point out 
