He's That Guy

I don't consider myself to have nearly a photographic memory but there are always actors and performances I file in the back of my mind and then come back to at some other point and realize "wow, is that the same actor who was in such and such back in the late seventies?" Somewhat a kin to a movie fan's first introduction to realizing who Rutger Hauer is and how he's that guy who seemlessly shows up in so many different things, if that makes sense.



Case in point as I was thinking about my Braveheart post and watching some of the included blu-ray extras. One of the most memorable characters in that movie is Stephen from Ireland. You remember, he's the crazy dude who claims Ireland is his island? Good stuff. Well, I'm watching the actor who played him, David O'Hara, talk about his experiences filming the movie and he looks nothing like his crazy Stephen character, and I'm thinking "I know this guy from other stuff". So I sit back and close my eyes and go through the catalog of cinematic memories in my brain. Come to find out the first thing that pops in there is a scene from The Departed where he argues with Leonardo DiCaprio over the spelling of the word "citizen's". A smile comes to my face as I place the two and realize Fitzy from The Departed is crazy Irish dude from Braveheart.



And then the cinematic rolodex continues and I pop out an immaculately dressed assassin giving himself some running room inside an office building and the sprinting into and crashing through a huge glass window as Mr. X in Wanted.



Good stuff! Not that great of a movie, but so cool matching these characters to one another. That movie needed much more of his British class and presence. For some reason those Brits excel at no-BS, well groomed killers.



In this final photo here, O'Hara's Fitzy is hanging with fellow mob mic Delahunt, played by Mark Rolston. Rolston himself is forever engrained in my memory from one of my favorite movies of all time, The Shawshank Redemption. There he plays Bogs, the lead anal rapist of Shawshank Prison. "Has anyone gotten to you yet"? shiver. Sometimes I have nightmares about that line.

I Demand More

Far be it for me to shy away from writing when I'm feeling venomous, but what else can I say, I'm a moody muthafucker. I picked up Braveheart on blu-ray last week, part of Paramount's new Sapphire series, due in part of blu-ray.com's review of the release.


I love Braveheart and own it on dvd, and shelling out the $27 or so took some deliberation. But I did it, and was expecting to be completely blown away. Don't get me wrong...it look good. But the transfer to blu-ray isn't, say, The Dark Knight good. Blu-ray.com gave the picture quality a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars; I'd bump that down to a 4.


Sometimes I feel the less I know about a movie star in real life the better off I am. It's the Tom Cruise syndrome. Huge fan of Tom up through Magnolia (or maybe even Minority Report), but really all the personal retardedness just got to me and I can't sit through his movies anymore. Same thing to a certain point with Mel though I've never been a big fan in general of his. Anyway, watching some of the dvd extras with him just talking make me want to shut the damn thing off. Case in point, he says dude a lot. You shouldn't be 60 years old and continuously using the term "dude". Especially like this: "Dude! You just have to film women over 28 frame per second because they're so beautiful". Ugh. In his interview, he's also off by about 150 years when speaking about the time in which Wallace lived. Just sayin'.



Also lacking...a huge amount of extras in general. Movie comes on one disk (with commentary that I haven't listened to yet) and the second disk contains a "brief" synopsis of the Braveheart battles, a shabby investigation into the "real" William Wallace, and a history on Smithfield (the part of London where he and many others were executed). The Smithfield documentary is the best one on there. Even though it's a bit lacking, I was enthralled with historian and author Lucy Moore. Brilliant and looks like Prince Williams girlfriend, only at age 40 or so.


One of my pet peeves is historical accuracy, so I had to sit through screenwriter and descendant Randall Wallace tell me he just wanted to capture the spirit of William and not particularly the historical truths...such as that the first battle happened over a bridge instead of a large field where they used those big ass pikes, and how he left Scotland after being defeated for something like 5 years before coming back and then being captured, and all that BS about an affair with the Princess of Wales. Screw the spirit of it all, I want to know what really happened. It's pretty sad to find out that in reality King Edward Longshanks died even before his gay son, the eventual Edward II, married Princess Isabella from France and so therefore she could have never whispered in his ear on his deathbed that she was carrying a child not of his lineage, which we're led to believe is the love child of William Wallace, and knowing our history we're thinking "wow, since the first born son of Ed II and Isabella is the eventual Edward III, one of the most powerful English monarchs ever, does this mean his daddy is really Wallace and every monarch since that time is from his line??" No, actually, it's all BS. Oh, and by the way, neither Edward Longshanks nor Edward the II actually spoke English; they only spoke French.