lee_eisenberg

Obviously, "DuckTales" was sort of a corny show, with oligarch Scrooge McDuck spending his days doing and saying things reminiscent of Thurston Howell III and Monty Burns.* With the show's popularity, it was inevitable that Disney was going to turn it into a movie. The result was the innocuous "DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp", basically an Indiana Jones-type story. It'll entertain the tykes, while we adults will come up with weird interpretations (i.e., I posited that the hotel in the mountains was the Overlook from "The Shining").

As for the cast, we of course have Alan Young voicing Scrooge; he's generally known to TV audiences as Wilbur on "Mister Ed" (personally, I always thought Carol was the real reason to watch it). In supporting roles are Christopher Lloyd, Russi Taylor, Chuck McCann, Richard Libertini and Rip Taylor. Quite a cast there.

All in all, some harmless fun.

*My 2012 Halloween costume was a combination of plutocrats depicted on comedy shows (Messrs. Howell, McDuck and Burns), defined as the 1%.

Cocaine was the famous drug of the '80s. It was assumed that every Hollywood celebrity and every Wall Street stock broker was using it. Drawing less attention was crack, a cheap form of cocaine that devastated entire communities. Vince DiPersio's and Bill Guttentag's "Crack USA: County Under Siege" focuses on some youths in West Palm Beach, Florida, who got hooked on the stuff. Some truly nasty stories.

The point is that a drug epidemic doesn't just affect the "other"; it ends up affecting everyone. I might add that we now have the opioid epidemic (notice how when it primarily affects white people it gets treated as a medical issue, but when it primarily affects black people they get labeled "addicts"?). There is simply no such thing as a drug-free society.

The documentary is available on YouTube.

Clint Eastwood's first time directing a biopic casts Forest Whitaker as jazz great Charlie Parker. "Bird" shows Parker as an undeniable genius, a damaged drug-user, and a philanderer, all amounting to one fine piece of work. Whitaker plays the role perfectly, as do Diane Venora as Parker's common-law wife Chan and Michael Zelniker as his bandmate Red Rodney. It just goes to show that music genres like jazz and blues are the source of all popular music in the United States. Definitely see it.

The rest of the cast includes Keith David, Diane Salinger, Michael McGuire, Sam Robards and Bill Cobbs. Watch for appearances by "Candyman" star Tony Todd as Frog and "The Mask" co-star Richard Jeni as Morello.