Saturday, July 01, 2017

MELROSE PLACE

Did you watch MELROSE PLACE?

I sure did!

I loved that show.

Amanda was my favorite, followed by Sydney.

Of the guys, probably David Charvet's character (Craig?) was my favorite.

I also liked Michael.

Allison got on my nerves so bad.

Especially when she became a drunk.

But I pretty much liked everyone.

Including Traci Lords as the cult member when Syd joined the cult.

Syd was always funny.

I think the reboot suffered by making Syd die in the pool in the first episode.

Anyway, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER has a conversation with the cast and some producers of the show to reflect 25 years later and here's an excerpt:

Locklear: Kimberly pulling off the wig in front of the mirror and we saw her huge scar. It was like, “Oh my God! She’s back!”
Savant: Marcia pulling that wig off and exposing her scar was the quintessential Melrose moment. At that point, I was tangential part of the show.
Cross: I was doing Twelfth Night at the Old Globe in San Diego at the time they said Kimberly was coming back. I enjoyed doing Melrose but didn’t want to give up the play. I decided to do both at the same time. My agent even said, “Don’t do it.” I just said, “Watch me.” I remember flying up from San Diego to the set in Oxnard, going from Shakespeare to pulling off a wig to show a scar. After that twist, and seeing how people went a kooky for it, I realized, “Oh god, this is real!” I didn’t really understand what was going on for a long while until then.
Zuniga: Jo did have it tough. She lived with an abusive guy. She was kidnapped. She shot her kidnapper with a gun she found in the bottom of a boat. She found out her dead lover got her pregnant. His parents stole her baby. She came home to find Kimberly breastfeeding that baby … it was a lot!
Carol Mendelsohn (supervising producer, 1994-95; co-EP, 1995-99): We had Sydney and Jane burying Jane’s ex-boyfriend alive. Sydney kept having dreams about being in prison with Jane. That was as far out as you could truly go.

Bissett: Jane had some pretty unforgettable moments, like when she was raped and then she and Sydney dragged the guy out into the woods and buried him. And he turned out to still be alive. One of my favorite scenes was when Jane finds Sydney with her wedding dress on and they end up fighting in the pool. We did that in one take because we only had one wedding dre
Thorne-Smith: There were times when I thought, “Oh, please don’t make me do that!” The hardest scene for me to play, and the one that still makes me cringe, was when Allison decided to confront her father at the family barbecue about being molested. Trying to walk that line was brutal.
Star: There was also The Kiss. It was a scene where Billy watches Matt kissing his best friend in the courtyard. I was adamant we had to shoot the scene because we weren’t going to censor ourselves.
Savant: Darren knew full well when he delivered the script to the network that they wouldn’t let him shoot the kiss. He kept it in knowing what would happen. It created this controversy of Is The Kiss In Or Out? We had the temerity to shoot it while the network didn’t have the temerity to allow it.
Star: In the end, I thought if they’re going to make the decision to cut it, that was going to be their decision. And they did in fact cut around it, showing Billy’s reaction to the kiss but not the kiss. Still, we kept pushing things as much as we could.

Mendelsohn: In the middle of all this, our set decorator met with an artist who thought up the idea that art could carry a subversive message through television. We thought it’d be a fun thing to do. This was a time when you couldn’t show a condom on TV, so the sheets in Peter Burns’ (Jack Wagner) bedroom looked on camera as if they had a print of condoms. When Sydney had a fight with someone and broke a painting, it was a picture of Watts Tower decorated with poppies all around it because there was a belief that the CIA sent opioids to Watts to addict the community. When Allison is pregnant and working from her couch, the pattern on the quilt was the chemical structure of the drug RU486. It was clandestine the whole time. We didn’t even tell the actors.


Allison really got on my nerves.

I think my favorite Amanda line ever was when someone (Michael?) told her she needed to see a doctor and she replied, "All I need is an aspirin.  You need to learn to mind your own business."

Or maybe it was when she told Jo, "Paws off, Jo, I saw him first."

I loved Syd because she wanted to be Amanda but it never worked out for her.

Her schemes always seemed to backfire on her.

Made me root for her all the more.

Andrew Shue?

Lucky to have had a job.

There was never a worse actor in the cast -- and you include guest stars as well.

Also didn't find Shue attractive.

Much preferred Jake (Grant Show's character).


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Friday, June 30, 2017.  Chaos and violence continue, The Mosul Slog continues, Moqtada rises, and much more.




Some Tweets.

Iraqi PM Declares ‘End of ISIS State of Falsehood’





BREAKING: Iraq's Prime Minister declares the end of the ISIS state





So the Islamic State is no more in Mosul -- or, according to Hayder al-Abadi -- in Iraq at all?

ALSUMARIA reports that Lt Gen Abdul Ghani al-Asadi declared today that the "final victory" in Mosul over the Islamic State will be "in the next few days."


Some rush in a little foolishly.


why is twitter filled with news about rihanna and her man and not the fact that da3sh got terminated from iraq








Maybe because the Islamic State has not been terminated in Iraq.




: firing with RPG at vehicle in Province.








Maybe because Rihanna is an artist with a huge following so whomever she dates becomes news.






Maybe because the press knows people like Zain will be hating because they get a little nervous whenever a Sunni (Rihanna's new boyfriend) is involved.

But primarily because the Islamic State remains in Iraq.

In yesterday's snapshot, I called Liz Sly out for this Tweet:



Reuters: Iraqi forces have captured the Nuri Mosque where Baghdadi declared the ISIS caliphate. The battle for Mosul is as good as over.






A little while after we posted, this went up.

Replying to 
2/2 But to be clear, winning back Mosul does not mean the war in Iraq is over. Far from it. ISIS still controls a big area there & in Syria







She's correct.  Susannah George (AP) observes, "Even after Mosul is retaken, however, IS still controls significant pockets of territory in Iraq that Iraqi forces say will require many more months of fighting to liberate."


The White House's special envoy Brett McGurk Tweeted the following:

Spent last two days in with local leaders in & . "caliphate" crumbling. More to follow.







At present, The Mosul Slog continues -- even Brett McGurk's not calling it over yet.  So it's day 250 of The Mosul Slog and still it continues.


Day 250.


And if it ends tomorrow, what happens then?

If patterns hold, not a whole to cheer about.

Jacob Rogers (Medill News Service) reports:

Cities in Iraq and Syria that have been liberated from Islamic State control still suffer a great deal of violence at the hands of the extremist group, but the attacks may be ISIS’ reaction to its weakening foothold in the region, according to a report Thursday by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

The report monitored 16 cities, from their date of liberation until April 2017, and used self-reported data from ISIS, which only reported death tolls in 30 percent of its 1,468 attacks. The group claimed just under 2,600 deaths, about 8.6 per attack. According to the CTC report, if that average were applied to the remaining 70 percent of attacks, the death toll would be greater than 12,000.  





For 250 days, The Mosul Slog has provided a lot of cover for Hayder al-Abadi's do-nothing government.

The cover slips away when the slog ends.

And some are preparing for that day.

ALSUMARIA reports that committees have been formed to investigate theft and corruption -- specifically corruption in the ports of Basra and theft of land in Baghdad.  Who's leading this call?
Shi'ite cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr.


Hayder al-Abadi's been little more than thug-lite, Nouri al-Maliki 2.0.

And Nouri's bound and determined to return as prime minister.

Next year's elections (if they take place) could be explosive as Nouri and Moqtada are already squaring off against one another.

Nouri is the poster board for corruption.

A fairly broke thug leaves office with millions while the Iraqi people suffer?

The people struggle and Nouri's thug son has lodgings all over the world.  And sports cars parked at every one.

Nouri got rich during his two corrupt terms as prime minister.

While that happened, the Iraqi people suffered.

One reason Moqtada hits so hard on the topic of corruption is that it's one of Nouri's biggest liabilities.

The provinces were supposed to hold elections back in April.

That did not happen.

September is supposed to be when this will take place but there is also talk of merging them with the national elections planned for next year.

Mustafa Habib (NIQASH) reports:

The Sadrist movement has had a busy few months. The Iraqi political movement, which is led by the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has defected from the larger Shiite Muslim political alliance to which it belongs, withdrawn ministers from government, joined in popular anti-corruption demonstrations calling for political reform and now, it seems, the Sadrists are trying to form a new alliance in preparation for federal elections next year. The most interesting thing about the latter is that the Sadrists appear to want to form an alliance that does not rely on sectarian affiliations – that is, whether one is a Shiite or Sunni Muslim. It may also end up not mattering whether one is religious or not, too.
For several weeks now, the Sadrists have been holding a series of talks with secular political groups. If successful, the alliance would be the first between a religious, Shiite Muslim political group and a secular, civil-minded one.
“The Sadrist movement will be the first to break away from these sectarian alliances,” Ali Shawaileh, an MP for the Sadrist movement’s political party, known as the Ahrar bloc, told NIQASH; the model built on sectarian alliances and quotas for each of them in Iraqi politics has failed, he argued.
“And we have made many concessions in order to be able to do so,” Shwaileh continued. “We withdrew our ministers from the government so that the prime minister [Haider al-Abadi] was able to choose technocrats for ministers. However all the other political parties rejected this and continued to insist on the posts being filled, according to sectarian quotas.”

The meetings between the Sadrists and secular groups involve two major subjects. Firstly, their ability to form a future-proof political movement and how to compete in the next federal elections, slated to be held in 2018, with it. And secondly, how to keep up the pressure with weekly protests that take place every Friday in Baghdad and in other provinces.
There are obvious ideological differences between the two groups but they also have some very important things in common. One of the most vital is their shared enmity for Iraq’s former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Not a week goes by without some senior member of the Sadrist movement criticising al-Maliki. Muqtada al-Sadr himself said in a television interview in mid-May that he would never vote for al-Maliki again because he had sold off the country.



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