Don La Fontaine "The Voice" 1940-2008

In a world without Don LaFontaine...

From Wikipedia:

Donald LaFontaine (August 26, 1940 – September 1, 2008) was an American voiceover artist famous for recording more than 5,000 movie trailers and hundreds of thousands of television commercials, network promotions, and video game trailers. His nicknames included "Thunder Throat" and "The Voice of God".[1] He became identified with the phrase "In a world…", which has been used in movie trailers so frequently that it has become a cliché. He parodied this cliché several times, most recently in a commercial for GEICO insurance.

Ronald Reagan "A Time for Choosing"

Here is an inspiring selection from Ronald Reagan's 1964 Speech "A Time for Choosing" available in full at American Rhetoric. My thanks to Teresa Summerlee Isanhart for bringing it to my attention.



A transcription of this excerpt:

...Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.

Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny."

Dune 1984 (Extended Edition)

Starring: Kyle McLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jose Ferrer, Sian Phillips
Director: David Lynch

Dictators named Saddam and Vladimir, poisoning,assassination, suicide warriors and Jihad, a vital resource found only in dessert sands...sound familiar? But this is not from the headlines,but rather from Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune. Herbert was decades, if not milennia ahead of his time.

The 1984 release of the movie adaptation was long awaited, and a disappointment to many fans, suffering in many of the same ways that The Fountainhead did, as being too rich and too long a story for screen adaptation. Yet what did appear on screen in 1984 was faithful in large part to the spirit of the original novel.

Now an extended version, with some 40 minutes of footage cut from the original is available as an import or from NETFLIX in all DVD formats.

This release begins with some exposition done by charcoal storyboard, and there is narration which could have either been better done or omitted. But the added visuals and the cut-out plot elements will make this version a must-see for anyone who enjoyed the original.

The care that was put into designing the sets for the interior shots, done by H.R.Giger of Aliens fame, is wonderful. Much of this was lost from the original theatrical release. Likewise, the extra-widescreen version of this release makes the viewing experience much more enjoyable.

If you liked the first release with all its flaws, this is a must-see.

Hew Strachan "The First World War" DVD Set

While Americans tend to see WWII as the seminal event of the last century, in actuality, it is merely one of the many events set in motion by the true great tragedy of our age, the Great War.

This ten hour video series, available on DVD or airing on the Military Channel, is a splendid introduction to the facts and the reasons behind the facts of the First World War.

In many ways, the issues that broke loose in the conflict of the First World War are issues that fester today - Balkan nationalism, Russian corruption and self-doubt, the fall of old powers and the rise of new. This war drew lines in the sand of the Middle East which vex us today.

This series is incredibly written, dramatically portrayed, assumes no great knowledge of the subject, yet provides a deep analysis of deeper causes. Moving pictures and color images from around the world make this truly global disaster personal and immediate. I cannot recommend this lesson in history highly enough.

Here is Episode 10, War Without End, on YouTube.

Umberto Eco "The Name of the Rose"

Upon rereading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose I am struck by the obvious influence of Jorge Luis Borges on the work. When I first read the book in 1984 I was not aware of Borges, and had only just put down my first reading of Atlas Shrugged. The book itself is presented, in Borgesian manner, as a reconstructed text based upon a partial translation of a now lost and otherwise undocumented manuscript from the late Middle Ages. The plot concerns the investigation of a murder mystery set in a fictional monastery renowned for its unique library, the largest collection of books in Christian Europe, supposedly holding works of Aristotle lost to modernity. The characters are primarily scribes or other intellectuals. Yet, unlike much of Borges' esoteric works, this novel is not merely a curiosity, an intellectual insider's joke, but a true intellectual adventure story rewarding on many levels.

The hero, William of Baskerville, a Franciscan brother, is a champion of reason who has abandoned his position with the inquisition. He saw that institution not as a means of pursuing the truth, but as the use of force to compel confessions, which, even when they implicate guilty parties, are an affront to God's justice and his gift to man of the intellect. Brother William is a follower of Thomas Aquinas, a student of Roger Bacon, and a proponent of the scientific method, although he does not, of course, explicitly identify his investigations as such.

The story is told in retrospect by the Benedictine monk Adso of Melk. At the time of the story Adso was in his teens but he writes his tale as a dying man who promises to "tell the facts without interpretation" so that the signs he conveys will speak for themselves, allowing other wiser men in the future to draw their own interpretations. Adso is a mystic, and not an intellectual, but he admires William as a sincere instrument of justice, better than he.

The novel is steeped in the intricacies of pre-reformation Catholic theology; the debates among the great Scholastic thinkers such as Abelard, Occam, Duns Scotus and the other thinkers at the universities of Paris and Oxford, the details of monastic life, the methods of copying and illuminating texts, the herbal lore of the high mediaeval period, the particulars of numerology and its place even in architectural symbolism, and of course, as one would expect in the tradition of Borges, a great deal of irony, symbolism, abstruse academic references, and the ever present contrast between substance and form, essence and accident, genus and species, and exemplar and type. We hear Latin on most every page, verse and speech in Middle English, and contemporary German, French, Italian, Spanish and Provencal. One character, Salvatore, is so deformed that not only does he physically resemble a monster sewn together from the parts of different corpses, his speech is an almost unintelligible farrago of words from Latin and all the vernacular tongues which he has encountered. Listening to him can be as fascinating (or as disconcerting) as listening to a conversation on the NYC subway between a mixed family of a Puerto Rican and an Orthodox Russian Jew whose children go to public school - English, Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and Ebonics all in one sentence.



Adso himself religiously promises on the first page of his memoirs not to relay "mere" visual details such as the expressions of speakers or the appearance of their faces, as they "will be long dead" by the time we read his description of events. This is an ironic promise which, thankfully for us, he breaks almost immediately. While some of the descriptions of architectural, sacrimonial and mythological details can become tedious, the book is visually vivid and his concretizations make the setting and characterizations immediate and lifelike.

While the murder mystery is the prime mover of the story, it serves as an excuse for many interesting digressions: lengthy discussions of Papal, local and Imperial politics, the details of everyday monastic life, not only spiritual, but also scribal and mundane, such as the details of animal slaughter and food preparation; the tensions between various factions within the Church advocating poverty versus temporal power, faith versus reason, tradition and the new learning, the tensions between the old feudal political and economic power of the monastic centers and the Pope versus the rising market power of the new trade centers and the monetary power of the princes.

Much of the content of this amazing and brilliant work is religious, specifically Catholic in substance. There is lengthy examination of religious themes such as temptation, sin, and penitence, the nature of God and Satan, heaven and hell, prophesy, heresy, schism and persecution, the Antichrist and the Second Coming and personal salvation through works and grace. This contemplation is counterposed to the main action of the hero, a true scholar and scientist who uses reason and observation, not suspicion and circular justifications, to solve his mystery and save much more.

This book has been made into a very satisfying movie. Yet, as with any great work of art, its adaptation into that medium has required that much be simplified, reduced or omitted. The movie retains the bare bones of the actual murder mystery, and makes Adso's love interest (Adso was Christian Slater's first movie role) much more important than in the novel. On film, cliche often replaces depth. In the novel, the first charcter to die is a young initiate who has had a homosexual encounter with another initiate. In the movie he is not, as in the book, seduced by another young man, but by an obese, leering old lecher. While the movie is a few hours diversion, this novel is an engrossing immersion in and education about a world of which many of us know little, but a world which is much closer in time than one might think. In a fictional monastery in the mountains of Italy in an age which many call dark we literally see the power of reason, the place of philosophy, and the fight of men of good will to preserve the light amidst that darkness.

Kim Novak in "Bell, Book & Candle"

This 1958 romantic comedy stars Kim Novak as a witch in modern Manhattan who does the one thing a witch must not do, fall in love with a mortal. This light-hearted work is one of Novak's best, although her romantic lead, Jimmy Stewart, is poorly cast for the part.



Novak's Gillian Holroyd has heard of the old wives' tales that say a witch can't ever cry, or fall in love, without losing her powers. After a whirlwind romance with Stewart, Novak finds out that this time it's more than just a case of "hot blood," it's for real. Ernie Kovacs, a hack writer and drunk who thinks he knows about witchcraft is initiated into the "lifestyle" by Novak's brother, played by Jack Lemmon. The movie is visually lush and features Novak at her most alluring. The nightclub encounter where Novak steals Stewart out from under his fiancée's nose is a classic, a barefoot Novak at her best. Camille Paglia has described the movie, which she sees as a metaphor for the hidden love lives of the homosexuals of the 1950's, as one of her all-time favorites. This light-hearted fantasy pleases on many levels, and bears repeated viewings.

This not-very-impressive trailer undersells the movie, but I'll include it in any case.

Servalan "There are no women like me."

The BBC science fiction series Blake's 7, which ran from 1978 to 1981, remains a cult classic. Pitched by Doctor Who writer and Dalek inventor Terry Nation as "The Dirty Dozen" in space, the series follows the adventures of a crew of criminals on the run from a totalitarian "Terran Federation" on a stolen alien ship, the Liberator. Renowned for its unconventional nature, the show occasionaly kills off characters. The political dissident title character, Roj Blake, (Gareth Thomas) an often foolhardy do-gooder, faces resistance from his crew, primarily from Kerr Avon, (Paul Darrow) a computer expert who counsels discretion and self-preservation above sacrificial gestures. Blake leaves the series half way through, leaving Avon in charge of the crew. Avon and the Liberator crew battle one of the most notable villians in science fiction, the ever fashionable Servalan, (Jacqueline Pearce) Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation. Pearce, with her sultry over-the-top delivery and her trademark crewcut has a cult following of her own.

Like Doctor Who, Blake's 7 is not known for its lavish production. The series is often referred to as "Blakes 7" (no apostrophe) since this was omitted from the opening title, if not from the script. There are no Daleks. The set designers never seem to have had that much ambition. The show relies on complex story arcs, campy costumes, tensions between the crew, and sexual tension between Servalan and her henchmen (as well as with the series true "hero" Kerr Avon) and on witty dialog to maintain interest. Given the show's continuing popularity after three decades, it seems they succeeded.

Here are two fan compilations of Servalan's best moments available on YouTube:

Servalan Compilation 1 of 2



Servalan Compilation 2 of 2