Word: shaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...office than those of any other actor in history. "I want the movies I'm in to remind me of things I spent Saturday afternoons watching as a kid and then went home and pretended to be in." The Star Wars prequels satisfied his Errol Flynn swordplay fantasies. Shaft let him be the urban John Wayne. Snakes on a Plane, out Aug. 18, fulfills his love of B-movie suspense and his endless desire to watch himself kick ass. "When I think about it," he says, "a lot of my choices are wish fulfillment...
...when my character dies for no goddam reason"--as has happened more times than he can count--"or we pull punches on the action, or the thing just doesn't make logical sense ..." He stops there in frustration, but Jackson has been known to bring a little bit of Shaft-like menace to the set. David Ellis, who directed Snakes and has worked as an assistant director on four other Jackson films, says of the actor, "Unless the director is a total jerk, he's always very respectful. But he's a tireless advocate for the film he read...
...collaborated with Spillane on several anthologies, cast him as a featured player in two movies. Collins directed and co-authored One Lonely Knight, the only book-length study of Spillane. Collins credits Spillane with creating, in Hammer "the template for James Bond, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack, Rambo, John Shaft, and countless other fictional tough guys." (When TIME reviewed Casino Royale, it praised Bond as "Mike Hammer in gentleman's clothing...
...Williams and Juan Tizol. But after bassist Jimmie Blanton and tenor-sax man Ben Webster signed on in 1939 and '40, it became the leader's best ever. The compelling evidence is on these three discs, on tracks like Cotton Tail, Ko-Ko, Jack the Bear and Harlem Air-Shaft. Individual glories abound, but the band's chief glory remains the nonpareil jazz composer whose instrument it was: the Duke himself...
Maxwell spends eight hours a day in P Tunnel, a shaft resembling a semifinished subway excavation 1,300 feet below Rainier Mesa. A narrow-gauge electric locomotive takes workers into the tunnel, which ends in a rocky cul- de-sac 1 1/2 miles away. Bare light bulbs dangle overhead, and the brilliant flare of a welder's torch flickers on the rock walls. Labyrinthine cables coil along the floor, and the tunnel reverberates with a sometimes deafening din, punctuated by shouts and horn blasts. In an eerily normal scene near ground zero, a surveyor chats on a Touch-Tone wall...