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Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden ignored and tried to bury. Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. The players tell their stories in their own words. Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle. |
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Thumbnails Mar 23 by Tony Medley Navalny (10/10): 92 minutes. R. A plane from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020 was diverted to Omsk when passenger Alexei Navalny became seriously sick. Navalny just happened to be Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare and most voluble critic and was leader of the opposition. Navalny’s wife and virtually everyone else were certain he had been poisoned. Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT), contacted the recovering Navalny and told him he thought he knew the men who tried to kill him. Navalny invited Christo and his team to the German town where he was recovering and Christo recorded their investigation in real time as Navalny continued his opposition to Putin, despite the threat on his life. This is Cinéma vérité in the truest sense of the term, a can’t miss film of a man of enormous patriotism and courage, full of tension, better than any fictional thriller from Hollywood, and a testament to a man now in a Russian prison being brutally tortured, according to Christo in a Q&A after the screening. Full Time (9/10): 85 minutes. NR. Laure Calamy gives a bravura performance as a single mother of two young children working as a chambermaid in a five-star Paris hotel, but still trying to get a better job and get out of debt. She commutes to Paris from a small town when a transit strike hits and the fit hits the shan. Hard as it might be to believe, this is full of tension as she juggles her life and tries to survive. One of the best films of the year. In French. The Playboy Murders (7/10): six-part series. It’s all coming out now, the depravity surrounding Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, an exclusive Los Angeles enclave. A previous multi-part documentary, Secrets of Playboy (2022) told the tawdry truth about how the “Bunnies” were manipulated and taken advantage of. This series deals with six murders. I’ve seen the first, Bunny Meets Bachelor. It emphasizes the low-class people involved in Hefner’s “home.” These women who flaunted nudity and free sex were not the kind you would take home to Mother, but they still had the right to be respected as human beings, and they weren’t. While it’s not unexpected that these women and the men who took advantage of them, all of whom were of a low moral tone, would live such lives, it is still surprising to learn that they were killers and victims. As an aside, I played lots of tennis with the late Keith Hefner, Hugh’s brother, and he was a soft-spoken gentleman when I was with him, but he lived in his brother’s mansion and is seen in some of these clips. Marlowe (6/10): 102 minutes w/o credits. R. A gorgeous heiress (Diane Kruger), the daughter of a big movie star (Jessica Lange) hires PI Philip Marlowe to find her former lover and naturally a lot of nefariousness is uncovered. Writers William Monahan and Neil Jordan, who also directed, and Liam Neeson give an interpretation of Chandler’s iconic private eye as morally casuistic, of which I doubt Chandler would approve. While the leaden story drags, though, I was watching something else. The eagle-eyed will notice posters in the background of some scenes for 1940 movies like Mexican Spitfire and Dance, Girl, Dance, (which starred Lucille Ball) among others. Is this a roman à clef about a real studio in 1940? These were real movies, and all the posters were of films made by RKO. But in one of the final scenes set in an office, there’s a poster on the wall for a film entitled The Black-Eyed Blonde. There never was a movie made with that title, but it just so happens that it is the title of the book upon which this film is based. Cute.
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