Rami Malek "You don't need to be more than yourself" video

Rami Malek video: featuring stills and candids, soundtrack: "You don't need to be more than yourself" by Elliott Murphy.

"Mr. Robot" is centered on hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), whose morphine-monotone describes to us in somber detail why he spends much of his life stealing people’s information and planting bugs in their machines. He often seems like a hopeless character, but nonetheless one who wields a lot of power. While he legitimizes his illegal activity with his own somewhat tired moral compass – hacking a drug dealing rapist and having him arrested – it’s not enough compensation to provide him with any kind of emotional stability or even ephemeral happiness.

The perils of hacking, especially when it involves social justice, is one of the fundamental aspects of the show. Hacking is portrayed as being a very lonely, slightly demented, and never truly fulfilling vocation – the more he knows, the heavier the burden. In some respects Alderson is suffering for our sins. He’s a martyr in the age of computer technology. In one scene he admits, “I’m good at reading people; my secret, I look for the worst in them.” And he finds it, in ample measures. When he’s not involved in hacker vigilantism, he’s working at his desk, a job he doesn’t enjoy, as an engineer for a cyber-security firm called Allsafe.

One of Alderson’s inner monologues should resonate with anyone who’s read Palahniuk: "The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our commentary bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking us into intimacy, or is that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. Fuck Society." Source: siliconangle.com

Rami Malek in Mr. Robot (Sad & Beautiful video)

“What I do have? Clinical depression, social anxiety, a day job, a night job, confusing relationships, others depending on me, taking down the largest corporation in the world, and I chose it all,” Elliot says, speaking to the audience (or someone inside his head) in one of the character’s now-familiar voiceovers. In the fourth of 10 episodes this season, an audacious plan of Elliot’s puts members of the hacker collective F Society on a road trip to sabotage a data storage compound in upstate New York. A hallucinatory detox dream ensues, featuring images of a key, Elliot strapping on a mask, and recurring questions about who his “monster” is.

-A big question that we as viewers have is how much of this world is real, and how much is in Elliot’s head?

-The question gets asked in the dream: What is your monster? And that’s something I kept asking myself while working on Elliot. Once I started asking that question, everything in the dream made a little more sense to me. The show approaches these grand themes about the constructs of who we are as individuals and what we coalesce to be as a society. What we’re doing to either alleviate this stagnant, corrupt world we live in. The short answer is, working on this dream sequence allowed me to do some examination of who I am and what my monsters are, and that’s going to let people reflect in a way that’s not always offered by television. Source: blogs.wsj.com


A video featuring photos and stills of Rami Malek, mostly in Mr. Robot, also some scenes from the pilot episode and the episode 6 "Brave Traveler." Soundtrack "The Joke Explained" by Wilco and "Sad & Beautiful World" by Sparklehorse.

Happy Anniversary, Myrna Loy!

Happy Anniversary, Myrna Loy!

Myrna Adele Williams (Myrna Loy) was born on August 2, 1905 in Radersburg, Montana, USA. She was labeled "Queen of Hollywood" and "The Perfect Wife" in the 1930s and 1940s. Myrna Loy became a big star during the Golden Age, being one of the most popular box-office stars. According to a list published in the TLA Video & DVD Guide of 2005, Myrna was the #1 female star of the 20th century in estimated movie tickets sales. The rest of the top ten actresses in ticket sales after Myrna Loy were: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ginger Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn.  Myrna Loy died on December 14, 1993 in New York City.

From the beginning, Myrna Loy’s screen image conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld. “Who is she?” was a question posed in the first fan magazine article published about her in 1925.

This first ever biography of the wry and sophisticated actress best known for her role as Nora Charles, wife to dapper detective William Powell in The Thin Man, offers an unprecedented picture of her life and an extraordinary movie career that spanned six decades. Opening with Loy’s rough-and-tumble upbringing in Montana, the book takes us to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where Loy’s striking looks caught the eye of Valentino, through the silent and early sound era to her films of the thirties, when Loy became a top box office draw, and to her robust post–World War II career. Throughout, Emily W. Leider illuminates the actress’s friendships with luminaries such as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and her collaborations with the likes of John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and William Wyler, among many others. This highly engaging biography offers a fascinating slice of studio era history and gives us the first full picture of a very private woman who has often been overlooked despite her tremendous star power. Source: www.ucpress.edu

“Myrna Loy and William Powell are the ham and eggs, the peaches and cream, the salt and pepper of the movies,” an MGM scribe commented as their fourth of six Thin Man films was being released. “They go together naturally as night and day.” The screen marriage of this matched pair of lithe bodies and insouciant spirits outlasted any of Myrna’s offscreen couplings and for their fans has never lost its luster.

Powell and Loy made fourteen films together between 1934 (the year they first worked together, in Manhattan Melodrama, and also the year of The Thin Man) and 1947. Their connubial bliss seemed so perfect that fans found it hard to believe that in real life they were never married to one another. During their heyday Loy regularly received fan mail seeking marital advice because of the obvious happiness of her union with Powell. When the couple came to San Francisco to make After the Thin Man in the mid-1930s, the St. Francis Hotel management, unaware that Jean Harlow, also in San Francisco, was Powell’s main squeeze at the time, booked Loy and Powell into its honeymoon suite.

Nick and Nora show their affection via mutual ribbing.“Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people,” says Nora as one thug after another joins their party. When Nora asks him if he goes for a particular type of girl, Nicks answers,“Only you, darling—lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.” Nick and Nora rarely speak a straight line, so much do they love verbal and physical pokes in the ribs. But in the privacy of their hotel bedroom they never seem to have sex; they just dodge bullets, converse, re-cover from hangovers, and now and then try to catch forty winks.

Loy’s talent for partnership allowed her to draw on one side of herself when she faced Powell, another side with Gable. She excelled at picking up and answering cues, falling into step, “listening” with her entire body. "Manhattan Melodrama" (1934) was the first film William Powell co-starred with Myrna Loy. Powell had shared the screen with several actresses—he was too much the gentleman to name names—who didn’t connect with him, actresses who, he said, “seemed to be separated from me by a plate glass window”. With Myrna there was instant connection, no plate glass. From their initial scene together, Powell would remember, “a curious thing passed between us, a feeling of rhythm, complete understanding, an instinct for how one could bring out the best in the other.” —"Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood" (2011) by Emily W. Leider

Laid-back David Duchovny in "Aquarius", "X-Files" comeback

Product Details - Actors: David Duchovny, Claire Holt, Gethin Anthony, Grey Damon, Emma Dumont - Number of discs: 4 NR (Not Rated) - Studio: ANCHOR BAY - DVD Release Date: September 15, 2015 - Run Time: 546 minutes

A gritty cop drama set in 1967 Los Angeles, Aquarius brings you the story of Sam Hodiak (David Duchovny) a decorated World War II veteran and homicide detective, responsible for policing a city ridden by cheap drugs, rising crime, protest, and police brutality. When Emma Karn (Emma Dumont), the 16 year-old daughter of an old girlfriend, goes missing in a sea of hippies, Hodiak agrees to find her. In doing so, he teams up with the young, idealistic undercover vice cop Brian Shafe (Grey Damon), who behaves like a hippie to infiltrate this new counterculture and find her. The two embark on an action-packed investigation which, unbeknownst to them, leads them to Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) and the Manson Family before their infamous murder spree.

The complete first season of the hit crime drama is planned for Blu-ray in September. In an early announcement to retailers, Starz/Anchor Bay is set to bring 'Aquarius: The Complete First Season' on Blu-ray on September 15. The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, a lossless 5.1 soundtrack, and supplements include Webisodes and First Look: Aquarius.

Los Angeles, 1967. Welcome to the Summer of Love. Aquarius stars David Duchovny as Sam Hodiak, a seasoned homicide detective whose investigations dovetail with the activities of real-life cult leader Charles Manson in the years before he masterminded the most notorious killings of a generation, the Tate-LaBianca murders. A small-time but charismatic leader with big plans, Manson has begun to build up his "family", recruiting vulnerable young men and women to join his cause. Teaming up with a young cop who will help him infiltrate Manson's circle, Hodiak is forced to see things through the questioning eyes of someone who came of age amongst the current anti-establishment counterculture. Edgy, addictive and visually stunning, the Age of Aquarius is here. Source: www.highdefdigest.com

Gethin Anthony, who played a gay character on “Thrones,” has no qualms about doing love scenes with other men. “It’s never been too much of an issue for me. Because I happen to be heterosexual, there’s a different element at play,” he says. “It’s more of a transformation.” Sexuality, he says, was “irrelevant” to Manson. “In my mind he was using sexual congress as a weapon,” he says. “There’s much more at play than his charisma or his rhetoric, which is there,” says Gethin by phone from London.

“Charlie read books in prison on how to influence people. He was actively schooling himself on human attraction. He was interested in getting people to do his bidding.” Gethin was a choirboy at school and that is him playing the guitar and singing Manson’s actual songs on the series. “Aquarius” was renewed for a second season a few weeks ago and Anthony, who has a non-actress girlfriend, expects to report back to work in October, when series star David Duchovny finishes shooting “The X-Files.”

“I was a bit in awe of him,” Anthony says of Duchovny. “He’s really laid back and professional but he has this really serene presence. I had a blast.” Source: nypost.com


“Are you ready for this, Scully?” Mulder asks in the 17-second clip. “I don’t know there’s a choice,” Scully replies. Thirteen years after the original series run, the next mind-bending chapter of THE X-FILES will be a thrilling, six-episode event series helmed by creator/executive producer Chris Carter, with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson re-inhabiting their roles as iconic FBI Agents FOX MULDER and DANA SCULLY. This marks the momentous return of the Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning pop culture phenomenon, which remains one of the longest-running sci-fi series in network television history. Production on THE X-FILES event series is set to begin in summer 2015.

THE X-FILES originally premiered in September 1993. Over the course of its nine-season run, the influential series went from breakout sci-fi favorite to massive global hit, and became one of the most successful television dramas of all time. The show, which earned 16 Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes and a Peabody Award, follows FBI special agents Scully (Anderson) and Mulder (Duchovny), as they investigate unexplained cases – “X-Files” – for which the only answers involve paranormal phenomena.

Book Review: ‘Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton story’ (2nd edition)

A second edition of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton story has just been released (April 2015) by BearManor Media. It is a slightly updated and better version of the seminal biographical tome that John O'Dowd first published in 2007 about actress Barbara Payton (born Barbara Lee Redfield, 1927-1967), accompanied with vibrant illustrations.

Half a century ago, in 1965, two determining events happened during a particularly low point in Barbara Payton's sad life. Following his return to Palm Springs, Payton's former lover —and failed Hollywood actor— Tom Neal shot and murdered his third wife Gail Kloke, for which he was arrested on April 2nd, receiving a sentence of 6 reduced years for "involuntary manslaughter." Gail had been called "a dark-haired version of Barbara Payton," and like Barbara, had been object of Neal's morbid jealousy.

Meanwhile, in the Spring of 1965, Barbara's parents Lee and Mabel —close to dying asphyxiated— had seen their home burned to the ground, a chilling parallel of the living hell Barbara's relationship with his father had always been. By then, Barbara had moved into the rundown Wilcox Hotel, described by Nick Bougas as "the seediest spot in the universe", on Yucca Street.

O'Dowd maintains a passionate tone, almost febrile in some passages, throughout this extensive and methodical biography of an underrated performer whose career was truncated by her terrible death at only 39. Although initially she had been considered talented and a potential major star, very early on Payton gave signals of mental instability and sexual addiction, —these deeds of her reckless daring in the context of the conservative '50s irreversibly led her to professional ostracism— being punished by the duplicitous studio system that had exploited her in the casting couch and hooked her on diet pills.

The author miraculously turns his affectionate passion towards Barbara's fallen soul into a formidable literary fuel that counterbalances the often decadent atmosphere of the starlet's tragic story, displaying all her different facets while wielding a non-judgemental narrative. O'Dowd takes his time to make us appreciate the sweet and resourceful all-American girl Barbara once was, reliving her childhood in Cloquet, Minnesota; her teenage blooming years in Odessa (the classic oil boomtown), and her crush towards James Cagney (her co-star in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye), whom she first met during a war bond rally in 1943.

All the chapters contain poignant analysis of Barbara's personal vicissitudes and progressively bad choices that would condemn her to an unfair blacklist in the film industry after her fulgurant yet brief stardom. It's quite premonitory when Barbara obsseses about infiltrating the Hollywood scene, against her husband's wishes. Barbara became a professional model in 1947 after signing with Rita La Roy Agency on Wilshire Boulevard. John Payton, an Air Force pilot who fathered her only son John Lee, vainly hoped his wife would outgrow this fascination, but Barbara was drawn to the nightlife she had glanced at Slapsy Maxie's club and decided to leave her husband behind in 1948, in favor of the blinding Tinseltown lights.

Barbara, who was depicted alternatively as "naïve" or "witless, mean-spirited man-chasing floozy," was not the docile cookie-cutter blonde mannequin Warner Bros. would have preferred. Instead, she routinely wrecked havoc on the studio backlot, exhibiting nonchalantly a forbidden lifestyle that gained her many enemies who hypocritically slut-shamed her behind her back.

One of her biggest mistakes, besides her high sexual impulsiveness, was not to focus more on developing her acting career and less on an increasingly unstoppable frenzy that isolated her from reality and consequently from a viable future. That fierce impulsiveness culminated in a fatidic love/hate triangle with an adrenaline-pumped Barbara between bad-boy Tom Neal and debonair Franchot Tone that made headlines worldwide in 1951, after an almost fatal beating that obliged Tone to undergo emergency hospitalization and facial surgery.

Practically all of Barbara's liaisons with men were doomed from the beginning, and O'Dowd exposes the traumatic relationship (bordering on anaclisis) she'd had with her father Lee Redfield as a very negative catalyst that tinged with regret her vision of the opposite sex. A possible abuse within her family or intimate circle —O'Dowd speculates— would help explain Barbara's self-destructive behaviour, a self-degrading pattern repeated with all her lovers and sugar-daddies as Bob Hope, William Cagney, George Raft and Howard Hughes.

On February 7, 1962, Barbara was arrested for prostitution when she approached an undercover cop on Sunset Boulevard. The L.A. Times captured a woman in ruins, reported in Andrew Dowdy's book The Films of The Fifties: The American State of Mind as "a plump blonde, eyes red from crying, her puffy face a reminder that the body treats alcohol as a fat. Nobody could believe she was the starlet who once looked like Lana turner."

Barbara Payton's cinematic legacy relies mainly on the noir thrillers Trapped (1949) and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), the kitsch rarity Bride of the Gorilla (1951) and Edgar G. Ulmer's Murder is My Beat (1955). Barbara, like Marilyn Monroe, had been pigeonholed as a sex-pot by a sexist industry that overlooked their essential humanity and complexity. Unlike Marilyn, Barbara's career didn't flourish and Barbara never believed she deserved the fame and fortune Marilyn got. But whilst Marilyn represents the golden years of a bright post-war America, Barbara Payton has come to symbolize the full depletion of the American Dream. For that reason, Barbara Payton still resonates with later generations, now wrapped in learned self-hate and defeatism.

A second volume on Barbara's life and career, titled Barbara Payton: A Life in Pictures is in progress, which will contain over 250 rare photos. Also, there is a long awaited film project based on a script by Linda Boroff, Fast Fade, which follows Barbara's portrayal in O'Dowd's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye in the hope that his heroine will find her deserved vindication on-screen again. Article first published as Book Review: ‘Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton story’ on Blogcritics.