Showing posts with label Jack Nicholson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Nicholson. Show all posts

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Michael's Musings

As The Quarantine Turns
Michael Shinafelt
This weeks episode of As The Quarantine Turns clearly has me doing something many of you have more than likely done too. That's correct minions, it's called going through all of your old photos as you can see by this weeks image of myself, I have clearly been doing just that.

Once upon a time I used to bleach what was left of my hair blonde. I did have more fun, and it looked groovy, onward with this weeks tomfoolery buttercups.

It's Purple Monkey Time, woot!

Florida beaches are now open. I'll  just leave that here.

I can deal with your problem, or rock out. But I can't do both

The season finale of  Law and Order: SVU is on tonight, while I can't wait I am riding on a bummer there will be no other new ones until who knows when 😞

Four months in and 2020 feels like 2024

Some sweet news - See's Candy is slowly resuming operations

Now for some frivolous news - It's official I can't stand new addition to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Sutton Stracke, ugh, simply ugh!

Pets are smarter than people, because pets don't hate people over politics


Woman Crush of the Week - Fiona Apple, she made "Fetch" happen with her latest album Fetch The Bolt Cutters

Jack Nicholson recently turned 80, I love me some Jack, what a great actor

All I want is a Disco Stick 

Yesterday was the day when people who were flying private roughly a month ago made social media posts about Earth Day

Also happened yesterday, the title of the Hunter S. Thompson novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas took on a whole new meaning. Think about it, but not too much...

Pizza is my latest food group during quarantine

Join me for a Pepperoni/Jalapeno won't you? at:
https://www.instagram.com/michaelshinafelt/?hl=en
https://twitter.com/MShinafelt.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Michael's Musings

And The Oscar Goes To...
Michael Shinafelt
"I never really saw anything grow before. How tiny those seeds were and yet they know they were supposed to be lettuces." - Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

While Marilyn Monroe never won a Best Actress Oscar she did in my mind for The Misfits. Written by her former husband Arthur Miller and Directed by the great John Houston. Marilyn Monroe etched a portrait in my soul as Roslyn Taber

Even though she won a Golden Globe for Some Like It Hot (she was brilliant) Oscar gold always eluded her. 

Didn't we all fancy a dream in passing when we were young of winning one? But of course we did! Moving on as we got older and realized being an Academy Award Winning star might not necessarily be out path?

With the arrival of the big event Sunday this weeks column is a tribute, trivia and salute to the dreamer in us all!

Oscar Winner for Funny Girl Barbara Streisand had her dog cloned. Hey Barbara, did you not see Pet Semetary?! 

Kate Winslet keeps her Oscar in the bathroom

I've held the Oscar that Dan Jinks won as Producer for Best Picture, American Beauty

 "As a little kid I lived in the projects, and you're the people I watched. You're the people wanted—made me want to be an actor. I'm so proud to be here. I'm proud to be an actor and I'm gonna keep on acting. And thank you so much" Whoopi Goldberg,Best Supporting Actress for Ghost

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Meryl Streep is the most nominated in the Best Actress category for an Oscar, clocking in at 17 nominations 

Jack Nicholson is the most nominated actor with 12 under his belt

My dream was always to win an Oscar for portraying someone truly evil

"When I was little my mother said, "I want you to be something." And I guess this represents twenty-three or twenty-four years of my work, and I've never won anything before from my peers. I'm really, really happy" Cher, Best Actress for Moonstruck 
Margot Robbie
My personal pic for Best Actress this year? Margot Robbie for I, Tonya 

Who could ever forget Sally Field's battle cry:  "I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!"


Remember that time when 72 year old Jack Palance won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for City Slickers and did one armed push-ups on stage? I do.


Weirdest Oscar winning song? It's Hard Out There For a Pimp by 3 6 Mafia from Hustle & Flow


Strange Best Supporting Actor Nominee: Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. He's great! But think about it, not too much.


And the Oscar goes to...find out this Sunday!


In the meantime follow me at:

https://www.instagram.com/michaelshinafelt/?hl=en
https://twitter.com/MShinafelt   

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Killing Jimmy Hoffa

Killing Jimmy Hoffa comes to DVD July 21st

The real story of the Teamsters boss told through exclusive interviews, news footage, and photographs 


Remember the saga of Jimmy Hoffa?

I do...he is one of the most prolific figures in American History.

So much so that there was a 1992 movie starring Jack Nicholson directed by Danny DeVito simply called: "Hoffa"

Fascinating stuff...


Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance and probable murder is one of the great crimes of the century. Despite a massive Federal investigation spanning 4 decades and hundreds of suspects, only the general contours of the crime are known. In the American mythology Hoffa is both hero and villain; a self-made man who ran the nation's largest union and was so beloved by the rank and file Teamsters he represented that they supported him as union president while he was under indictment and even in prison.

Hoffa also moved in the highest circles of organized crime. Among his closest friends and business partners were members of the national Mafia commission, men he was forced to align with during the violent and chaotic early days of union building when corporations deployed armed goons and police to attack workers in the street, and unions battled each other to control the workforce. 

Hoffa's chief nemesis was US attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and the two men developed a deep hatred for each other. In the long aftermath of President F. John Kennedy's assassination Jimmy Hoffa's name swirled in the aether of conspiracy theories, and his close Mafia associates Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante are at the center of the most plausible theories about Kennedy's death.

The two men Hoffa thought he was going to meet on the day of his disappearance have the most ironclad alibis of any suspects in the case. All the FBI's other leads came from informants and unreliable witnesses. In the years after the case the FBI has dug up farms, investigated waste dumps, and debriefed numerous Mafia turncoats that purported to have information on Hoffa's death, but they all turned out to be ephemeral. The only physical evidence is a single piece of Hoffa's hair found in Mafia enforcer Tony Giacalone's son's car.

Frank Sheeran, a Teamster ally and Mafia enforcer, made the claim that he personally killed Hoffa in a house in Detroit and his story became a national best seller. But the veracity of Sheeran's story is undermined by his previous attempts to get a book deal centered around the claim that Richard Nixon had Hoffa killed, and his use of a forged document purportedly signed by Hoffa that validated his story. 


"Killing Jimmy Hoffa" covers the life and times of Hoffa and explore all the theories about his disappearance. In analyzing the suspects we will take a tour of America's 20th criminal landscape and see how the Hoffa hit was the final act in the nearly 50 year reign of La Cosa Nostra as a shadow government that wielded chilling power and control over America.

Finally, we will unveil a previously unknown, and the most likely, account of the events of July 30th, 1975, the day James Riddle Hoffa vanished.

Jimmy Hoffa was a Shakespearean character. One of the last of the self-made American men to rise out of the working class, he was born fighting. To seize and maintain the power he so obviously craved Hoffa had to embrace the corruption of the world he inhabited. Corrupt businesses, corrupt politicians, and the very essence of corruption: La Cosa Nostra. He was a Caesar surrounded by many Brutus'. He lived to see his great nemesis, the golden boy Robert F. Kennedy, die before him, but also lost his greatest possession-the Teamsters union itself. In the ultimate insult, whoever killed him got away with it; Hoffa's soul forever un-avenged.

Why do we still think about him? It must be that he reminds us of something about America, he reminds us that it wasn't always so easy, that it wasn't always so slick and clean. We know that he is dead, but the important question is: Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa?

The cast of characters in the saga of Jimmy Hoffa is quite a menagerie. His peers were the most powerful men in America, on both sides of the law. The Kennedy brothers, Mafia strongmen like Detroit's Giacalone brothers and the murderous Carmine Galante, hard-nosed union men, CIA spies, and the captains of American industry. Hoffa was at the center of such a complex web of relationships, plots, and conspiracies that eventually he could no longer manage them and found himself taking a ride that he would never return from.

At the height of his fame, his face was more recognizable than a movie star, he was more loved than Mickey Mantle. Just as the Kennedy's were the Golden Boys of the aspiring classes, of the college students , James Hoffa was the Golden Boy of the all those Americans who worked for a living, even if he was just as flawed as Jack and Bobby.

The Hoffa hit was the last great flexing of Mafia power on a national scale. While the government didn't charge anybody, all the prime suspects received significant prison sentences soon after, unlike in the assassination of JFK, where they got away fairly cleanly. Starting in the late 80's many of the top Mafia chiefs were sent to prison for lengthy terms, and their ability to pull off crimes right in the public eye diminished. What we saw was an end to a period of extreme corruption in the American economic, political, and social systems that began during Prohibition. The era of assassinations, Watergate, etc. Corrupt politicians, corrupt police, corrupt leaders. Hoffa was a man of his times. Hoffa's disappearance was the capstone of 15 years of psychic trauma and shocking events that started with JFK's assassination and continued through the murders of MLK , RFK, and Watergate.