Wait...Christopher Walken played a Bond villain?

Alternate title for this post: "This is What a Useless Rabbit-Hole Tumble Yields."

So...it started when neither Corrie nor I could remember the name of the actress who played Miracle Max's wife in "The Princess Bride." I could se her in my brain, see other movie's she's been in ("My Blue Heaven", "Scrooged") but her name escaped me.

It drove me nuts for about six seconds, as I went to find my charging phone and look it up. Carol Kane. Of course, duh. Geeze...old/dad/teacher/booze-connoisseur brain.

But among the names and pictures on that online list was an actor in a military beret, in black and white:

The actor who played the King in "The Princess Bride" had been a decorated war veteran. That made sense, as many of the dudes playing old guys in the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had been WWII vets (like Tom Poston, et al).

I clicked on Mr. Willoughby Gray's name and read up a little about him. He starred for a time in British television in many, many shows, and would have been far more familiar to someone my age to my folks' age, had they lived and grown up in the UK.

It also said he was best know to today's audiences as the King from The Princess Bride and the former-Nazi-mad-scientist doctor and "father figure to the Walken's Bond-villain Max Zorin."

That was the record-scratch halt to my brain. Christopher Walken? Bond villain? What what what?

The year was 1985, the same year Goonies, Rocky IV, and Back to the Future came out (!!!), and the Bond "classic" A View to a Kill was released. The quotes on classic in the previous sentence are doing some very heavy lifting. "A View to a Kill" was the last of the Roger Moore appearances as the super-spy, stars Christopher Walken as the bad guy in a plot that sounds like the plot to Superman from 1978 (land speculation and attempting to destroy coastal California), and while named for an Ian Fleming stry, was a wholly original idea. (Maybe "original" idea?)

It also stars Tanya Roberts (Midge from "That '70s Show"), Grace Jones, and features the youngest Bond-girl ever in Alison Doody. This was her first role, and in between it and her breakout role as the blond Austrian Nazi-sympathizer in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" she starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in "Taffin." So...she played opposite three separate James Bonds in four years...

I still haven't seen "A View to a Kill." I'm not exactly rushing out to see it, but I may be more interested now than I had been the day before this little rabbit hole dive...

Random Sacramento Fact

Deep into some research (I guess), I came across a random fact about Sacramento that felt right, or made anyone whoever lived there for at least a year say, "Story checks out," and here it is, in a screen grab:

Er, the sunniest location on Earth?

Doesn't that sound like it could be accurate? Sure it sounds fantastical, and beyond the pale, but having lived there for a total of thirteen years I can say it feels like it could be an accurate fact.

(I guess I'm showing off that I didn't dig into that reference ([65]) to check out its trustworthiness. It just sounds like it could be true... If any place feels like it gets 98% of possible sunshine for an entire month, Sacramento would be my guess.)

Ringing in the New Year, 2024

The year is new now, but for the last day of the old year, we took the kids over to see the fireworks at 9pm off in the distance down the street from us, down Elm to view at the public zone across Ocean Ave at Elm. Fro there, we went to check out the view of the decorations at the Performing Arts Center.

Their tree was bigger than ours (duh), but of course it wasn't real. In the past we'd walked over here around this time of year for photo ops, but this year we didn't make the journey until after 9pm on the 31st.

Later on that night, after the kids went to bed, Corrie and I watched a pair of movies that were leaving Netflix on 1/1/24. Well, we watched 1.5 movies...

First we watched the Jason Statham brain-melter "Crank," a silly action movie where his character has been poisoned and must keep his adrenaline up in order to not die. It's as bonkers as it sounds.

Then we started the sequel, "Crank 2: High Voltage," in which he somehow survived the end of the previous film (umm, okay), has his heart stolen, replaced by a fake, and the battery pack for it gets destroyed within minutes, meaning he has to regularly find electricity to zap himself with during his pursuit of his old heart. It may be the craziest action movie made in America. At midnight we went outside to ring in the new year, and upon returning to the telly to watch the last half of the film, it was already no longer available. I'd hoped that starting it would have made it possible to finish it, but alas, it didn't happen.

So I bought the double pack on DVD---just to have both for posterity's sake---and it arrived today. Rad. Soon we'll see if Chev Chelios (whatta name for Jason Statham's character!) gets his heart back. Politically incorrect, sure, but both films are wild and stupid in awesomely hilarious ways.

The night ended much later for us, as we heard commotion outside our apartment and eventually joined the fracas, which was just our floor neighbors partying. Corrie even sang karaoke, while I deferred.

Happy New Year!