June Movies & TV

 I spent most of June rewatching DS9 on Pluto TV so not really a lot of "new" stuff that I watched.

Money Monster:  I didn't watch this when it came out in 2016 and forgot about it until another blog mentioned it in February.  But then it was only on Starz.  In June, though, it was on Hulu so I could finally watch it.  And I was not disappointed. 

George Clooney is Lee, a Jim Cramer-type who hosts the titular financial show.  Julia Roberts is his harried producer who has to almost constantly rein Lee in and keep the show on track.  One day a delivery guy named Kyle (Jack O'Connell) shows up on set with a gun and bomb vest.  Kyle lost $60,000 thanks to Lee's urging to buy a certain tech stock.  More than that, people lost $800M on that stock in the span of a day.  Kyle plans to hold Lee hostage live on the air until he gets answers.

The police led by Giancarlo Esposito set up outside and there's kind of the cliche thing where he doesn't want to go in guns blazing but of course some hothead in SWAT does.  Meanwhile, everyone is trying to find the CEO of this tech company to get answers while Lee tries to stay alive.

I really enjoyed this movie.  It never got boring.  I think they mixed things up with the hostage situation enough that even without a John McClane running around killing people, it didn't get dull or maudlin.  There's actually a funny (and sad) scene where Lee urges everyone to buy the tech stock to pump it back up, sort of like Gamestop.  Buuut...it loses money instead.  Whomp, whomp.  And then Kyle's pregnant girlfriend shows up and is not very helpful.  Meanwhile there's also the mystery of the tech company and how it lost so much money.  So there's enough going to keep things from getting stale.  And of course there's a great cast; Clooney and Roberts have worked together enough times that they have natural chemistry.  Esposito could have used more to do but it was probably nice not being a villain.  O'Connell is great as the blue-collar guy who just wants back what's his and to fight the unjust system.

The ending isn't really Happy Ever After.  It's realistic--and disappointing--to think in the end nothing will really change and the tech company will probably get away with most of its crimes.  You need more than one hostage-taker to get any real progress. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was directed by Jodie Foster, who probably could have played the Julia Roberts part if she had wanted to.)

The Sisters Brothers:  This 2018 Western seemed like it should have been funnier from the title and that it stars John C Reilly as Eli, one of the titular brothers.  The other, Charlie, is played by Joaquin Phoenix.  They work for a man known as "The Commodore" in Oregon City in 1851.  He sends them to find an amateur scientist named Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) who is being watched by private detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal).

There's a lot of mayhem ensuing then as Charlie's drinking, a spider, a bear, and other problems slow the brothers down.  By the time they find Warm and Morris, those two have thrown in together and are on the verge of some Brokeback Mountaining.  When Eli and Charlie throw in with them it seems they'll be rich--until things go horribly wrong.

The last act gets kind of gross and depressing and then the problem is just sorta solved on its own.  There's a cameo at the end by the great Carol Kane as Mrs. Sisters.  Overall it's a unique twist on modern Westerns.  These aren't rugged, square-jawed tough guys but kind of dumbasses who pretty much just have one skill in killing people.  It's not a fun movie but it's entertaining enough with a talented cast. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  The movie features a really weird credit:  "With the Participation Of Rutger Hauer."  Hauer played the Commodore though he didn't have any lines and only appears in a window and in a coffin.  Most of this Western that was supposed to be in Oregon and California was actually filmed in France, Belgium, Spain, and Romania.)

Sympathy for the Devil:  I saw this on Hulu and didn't bother adding it to my list; I just watched it right away.  I mean, "Nic Cage taking Joel Kinnaman hostage in a car."  And only 90 minutes?  I'm down for that. And it gives you what you expect:  Nic Cage being a crazy bad guy while terrorizing Kinnaman's seemingly normal family guy who looks like a prequel version of Walter White.

Kinnaman is just pulling into the hospital where his wife is having a baby when Nic Cage--looking like a lounge singer version of Satan in a sparkly red jacket, maroon hair, and goatee--hops into the backseat to hold him at gunpoint. He tells Kinnaman to drive him to Boulder City--wherever that is.  Mayhem ensues!  But soon it starts to become clear that Kinnaman is not who he appears to be, which makes things more challenging for Cage.  It's also clear that this was not a random carjacking, but what is Cage's agenda?

Like I said, this has exactly what you want from a straight-to-streaming movie like this:  Nic Cage being crazy, some violence, a couple of twists to keep things interesting, and a fairly short run time.  It's not cinema, just a quick, fun ride. (3.5/5)

Desperation Road:  This straight-to-streaming movie from last year is described as a "Southern noir" because I suppose it's not a very pleasant movie and is supposed to take place in Mississippi--though it was filmed in Louisville, Kentucky.  There are a couple of stories that end up overlapping.

First there's a woman with a young girl who are walking to the woman's hometown in Mississippi.  Low on cash, the woman decides to whore herself to a trucker.  Though she doesn't actually do this, a cop shows up to bust her.  Instead he takes her to a remote location and rapes her.  But as he's going to call his buddies to let them have a turn, the woman gets the cop's gun and shoots him.  She takes the gun and runs away.  She and the girl leave the motel and look for somewhere safe.

Later, Russell (Garrett Hedlund) is released from prison.  When he gets back to the town the woman is in, he's greeted by a scummy guy named Larry, whose brother he accidentally killed.  Russell gets beaten up before Larry is run off.  Russell goes to the farm owned by his father (Mel Gibson) who gives him a house and a rifle.  But it isn't long before Larry finds the house and breaks the windows.

Eventually the woman runs into Russell and takes him hostage with the cop's gun, forcing him to drive her and the kid away.  He agrees to help her and the kid find somewhere safe, but that proves to be difficult between Larry and Russell's black friend who's a deputy.

Everything comes to a head with Russell, Larry, and the woman.  Overall it's not a bad movie and not poorly made like some of these straight-to-streaming movies.  At about 2 hours it's a little slow in parts.  Despite describing it as "noir" there is a fairly happy ending though it requires some moral sacrifices.  As you might expect, Mel Gibson doesn't really do a lot, though he does contribute something to the end.  I kinda think a few years ago his part would have gone to Bruce Willis. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Hedlund sings the titular theme song during the end credits.)

Wander:  A former cop turned PI/conspiracy theorist podcaster (Aaron Eckhart) is contacted by a woman whose daughter mysteriously died in the town of Wander in the Southwest.  He goes to investigate only for his past to start coming back to haunt him.  And we're supposed to question how much is real and how much isn't.  It was pretty good with a few twists and turns.  At about 90 minutes it's not very long either. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Eckhart's podcast partner is played by Tommy Lee Jones; they played both versions of Harvey Dent/Two-Face in Batman movies.)

Last Man Standing:  Not the Tim Allen sitcom from a few years ago but the 1996 movie starring Bruce Willis.  Basically it's like if John Woo made a Western only using 1920s gangsters.  Willis is a hired gun leaving the country and ends up in Jericho, Texas, near the border with Mexico.  This is during Prohibition and bootlegging is a big business--big enough that an Irish Mafia gang and Italian Mafia gang have both established themselves in the town.

Willis decides to shake down both groups to turn a tidy profit.  He kills a bunch of guys on both sides while hooking up with a couple of women and nearly being killed a few times.  He makes friends with a bartender (the robot fixing guy in Blade Runner) and kinda falls in love with the Native American-Mexican woman the leader of the Irish guys is ga-ga for.  And he makes an enemy of Christopher Walken, a hired gun for the Irish who is jealous that Willis is so quickly accepted into the fold.

Most of it isn't terrible.  It could have been better.  The female characters are barely used as anything except honey pots and damsels in distress.  The action scenes are ridiculously exaggerated with guys flying back or hopping back many feet when they get shot and the guns magically only need reloaded when it's a convenient time despite being fired a couple dozen times. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Bruce Dern plays the corrupt sheriff who makes a living by letting both sides bribe him to not do a lot.  "Tiny Ron" plays one of the Irish henchmen and was also the bodyguard of Grand Nagus Zek in DS9.)

Lions for Lambs:  This 2007 movie by Robert Redford is kind of a smaller-scale Babel or Magnolia in that it involves three stories that are all connected.  Redford is a professor at "a California college" who meets with a student (Andrew Garfield) to encourage him to stop slacking.  He mentions two former students (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) who dropped out against his advice to join the Army in 2003.  Pena and Luke are now in Special Forces and sent to take a mountain in Afghanistan, but their chopper is shot down and they wind up separated from their platoon.  Both are badly wounded and Taliban troops are moving in.  The soldiers were dispatched thanks to a new strategy conceived in part by a senator (Tom Cruise) who is revealing this strategy to win the war to a veteran reporter (Meryl Streep) who is disillusioned at being used as a mouthpiece for the administration, military, and a potential presidential candidate.  Most of the characters (except Redford and Cruise really) have hard decisions to make.

The movie isn't bad but obviously in 2024 it feels pretty dated.  It also sometimes feels melodramatic and it's about as subtle as a two-by-four to the head.  Yet a lot of it remains true.  Obviously none of our genius strategies for Afghanistan ever really panned out.  The media is even more a tool of right-wing politicians and rich assholes than back then.  Meanwhile the poor get used as cannon fodder.  I think a lot of us have felt Andrew Garfield's cynicism at how the system works--or doesn't work.  In the end I don't think the movie has many answers to offer.

While it probably would have been better to watch it back in 2007-2008, it's still a bit relevant as I mentioned.  And there is a lot of talent involved.  Most people say Tom Cruise just plays himself, but in this case he doesn't have to do a lot more than act kind of smug and glib.  Streep doesn't get a lot to do beyond being horrified by Cruise.  Luke and Pena bring the blue collar heroism that really is the heart of the movie.  Perhaps the most moving part is the end credits where it shows various common scenes in silhouettes and people start to disappear to indicate the people lost in two disastrous wars. (3/5) (Sad Fact:  Redford explains the title by explaining to Garfield that in World War I, German soldiers admired the British soldiers (the lions) but mocked their pathetic, cowardly leaders (the lambs).  It's hard not to think of us in a similar situation where we have so many brave men and women but they're being led by politicians who really don't know anything about war.)

What Just Happened:  I don't remember hearing about this back in 2008 though it seems like it should have been on my radar.  It's directed by Barry Levinson and stars Robert de Niro, Robin Wright, Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, and Kristen Stewart plus Sean Penn and Bruce Willis as fictionalized versions of themselves.  That's a lot of talent for a movie I hadn't heard of until I saw it on Hulu weeks ago.

My way to describe it is it's like Altman's The Player only not interesting.  De Niro is a movie producer and has some issues.  A movie with Penn has a bad test screening, mostly because it brutally kills a dog and then Penn.  So convincing the director (Michael Wincott cosplaying Keith Richards) to change the ending is his first problem.  There's another movie starring Willis except Willis refuses to shave a beard he's grown, so that's another problem.  There's also his ex-wife Kelly (Wright) whom he still kind of loves but he finds out a writer he knows (Tucci) has been sleeping with her.  And his first daughter who's 17 (Stewart) was in love with an agent who killed himself.  The Willis issue gets solved but the other stuff doesn't really go well.  But it ends before we can learn if de Niro can find a way to turn things around.  So what was the point?  Not much.

Overall for all the star power, it really doesn't amount to a lot.  I guess it was better off forgotten. (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact: I was mostly interested in this because I wrote The Leading Men in 2002 about a TV producer and much later I wrote Casting Change about a movie producer in the 60s who has to become his lead actress.)

The Rewrite:  This movie is from 2015, involves the movie business, features a pretty well-known cast, and I had not known about it before I saw it on Hulu.  Unlike the previous movie, I actually enjoyed this one.  

Hugh Grant is Keith Mitchell, a screenwriter who had a big hit in 1999 but hasn't had much since then.  With the power in his apartment turned off, he decides to take a writer-in-residence job at Binghamton College in central New York state.  Soon Keith meets his boss (JK Simmons), his co-worker/neighbor (Chris Elliott), and runs afoul of the head of the department ethics (Allison Janney), and also runs into Marisa Tomei who is a single mother of two kids who also works 2-3 jobs as well as taking classes.

Keith doesn't want to actually teach so when JK Simmons says he has to pick ten of the 30-page script samples submitted, he pretty much picks the most attractive girls and a couple of nerdy guys who won't spoil his game.  And then his first class he tells them to finish their scripts and come back in a month.  Which does not go over well with his bosses, so he has to actually start teaching.

Maybe you could guess where this goes from there.  Keith starts to like teaching his students while also seeming to make progress with Marisa Tomei.  Though he faces some trouble from one of the other students, whom he slept with his first night in town and a few times after that.  She gets jealous and goes to Allison Janney to get him fired.  Really all that was missing was a moment where the students get on their desks to say, "O Captain, My Captain!"

Still, I enjoyed the movie while I watched it.  It's so light and good-natured (which just a little bit of an edge in the sexual content) that it's highly watchable.  Only after it's done might you start thinking how cliche and formulaic it all was.  Or how cynical and a little sexist it is that in a class that's 90% women, it's one of the nerdy guys who writes a big hit that stars a "kick-ass woman." (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Chris Elliott's character goes out with a State Farm agent; really they should have made it Farmer's Insurance since JK Simmons represented them.)

Misconduct:  This is the kind of thriller where it seems like the director took all the script pages, threw them into the air, and then pieced them back together.  It starts in sort of the middle with Anthony Hopkins as a pharmaceutical CEO who finds out his much-younger girlfriend (Malin Akerman) has been kidnapped and a supposed meeting to give the kidnappers the ransom goes wrong.  Then it jumps back to a driven lawyer (Josh Duhamel) who is contacted by his old girlfriend Akerman while his wife (Alice Eve) is estranged the last year or so after a miscarriage.  Then we move forward to where Duhamel meets with the head of a big law firm (Al Pacino with a Foghorn Leghorn accent) to use information stolen by Akerman to sue Hopkins for killing patients.

And then there's an assassin (Byung Hun Lee or Storm Shadow from the first 2 GI Joe movies) who kills or beats up some people.  And Duhamel finds Akerman dead and is seemingly framed for her death and...lots of stuff happens but the movie really, really overestimates how invested I would be in actually figuring it all out.  I mean, I don't really want a bunch of jigsaw pieces to try to assemble into some kind of picture.  Maybe if Duhamel, the center of the movie, wasn't kind of an asshole who cheats in his cases and seems to cheat on his hot wife I would have cared about figuring things out more.  Simplify, movie!  It's too bad because there's a decent cast that could have done a much better movie. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Also in the overly talented cast is Glen Powell of Top Gun 2 and Hit Man as Duhamel's friend.)

Code Name Banshee:  Hulu had been recommending this to me for a while now.  I finally got to that point of just saying "fuck it" and watching it.  It's a straight-to-streaming thriller that probably could have been better if it had built up the titular character a little more.  Banshee (Jaime King) is some kind of assassin/spy for hire.  Years ago a CIA(?) guy named Greene seemingly killed her father and his best friend/her mentor Caleb (Antonia Banderas) framing them as selling secrets to the Russians.  Banshee has since been trying to track down Greene and anyone else responsible.  

She finally gets a lead on Caleb, who owns a bar in Connecticut.  He also has a house and daughter.  But just as Banshee starts to get reconnected with him, Greene's people track her down and then there's a big, long shootout/fight at the house.  It's really the kind of thing that just sort of drags after a little while but I suppose they didn't want to spend a lot on locations.  King does an OK job as a cut-rate Black Widow but like I said, they don't give her a lot to work with.  Banderas lends some gravitas and professionalism to the production as the only big name attached.  Basically it's OK but if I had not said "fuck it" and watched it then I wouldn't have missed much. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  For some reason I kept thinking it was Ruby Rose playing Banshee; I guess I wasn't paying attention during the credits.  In the end credits it says not only did Antonio Banderas have a driver but also an RV driver.)

Wanted Man:  Dolph Lundgren writes, produces, directs, and stars in this pretty obvious movie.  Dolph is a cop named Joe in southern California who was caught on tape beating an illegal immigrant suspect and calling him a "filthy Mexican" or something like that.  When two women who survived a DEA bust gone wrong are found in Mexico, Dolph is assigned to pick them up and bring them back as sort of a reverse Joe Don Baker in MST3K/Rifftrax favorite Final Justice where he had to take a bad guy to Italy.

Anyway, he goes to Mexico and soon some bad cops ambush him and Dolph has to go on the run with one of the women.  And wouldn't you know he starts to bond with her and her family?  And he has to sneak into the country with some illegals?  I'm not a Trumper screaming about "wokeness" but this was really too obvious.  Though I can understand where Dolph, an immigrant himself, would feel sympathetic on this issue.  It just could have used a better movie behind it. (2/5) (Fun Fact: One plot hole to me is earlier Dolph uses his cell phone and that allows the bad guys to find them.  Later the woman's family has him use his phone and then they have a nice, leisurely dinner.  And guess what happens?  Bad guys show up.  It seemed pretty obvious.) 

The Best Man:  A bunch of mercenaries are hired to rescue a woman, which they do, but at the cost of losing a few guys, including one named Axel.  A year later, Cal (Luke Wilson) is going to marry the girl they rescued.  He chooses his cousin (Brendan Fehr) to be his best man.  And there's also Dolph Lundgren, who shambles around, drinks, and plays piano.

The wedding is to be held at the Mountain of the Gods resort in New Mexico.  The bride's father rents the whole thing so it will only be wedding people and staff.  But then Axel shows up with a bunch of goons to take over the place.  Luke Wilson, Brendan Fehr, and Dolph have to fight back.  It was pretty blah and not that interesting.  It's the kind of thing where you wonder if the notable names just did it for a free weekend at a fancy resort.  They definitely could have used someone better for the father of the bride; even a lot of older country music guys could have done better than this guy.  I'm just saying. (2/5)

Section 8:  I had watched 2 Dolph Lundgren movies already on Hulu, so when I saw this, I thought, "Why not go for 3?"  And the answer is:  because it sucks.  This is that lame kind of straight-to-video action movie that advertises Dolph, Mickey Rourke, Durmott Mulroney, and Scott Adkins, the more attractive and less popular Jason Statham.  But guess what?  Each of those guys is in maybe 10% of the movie.  Most of the work is done by nobodies.  Bait and switch! 

So the real star (some guy) is named Jake and he was in Afghanistan with Dolph.  He comes home and marries a girl and has a son and lives in way too expensive a house while working in some crappy garage in a crappy neighborhood.  The garage is run by Mickey Rourke, who's getting shaken down by some gangbangers.  Jake beats them up so in retaliation, they kill his wife and kid--a 2-for-1 fridging special!  Jake kills them and goes to jail.  Five months later, someone from "Section 8" recruits Jake to join them, which he does.  But when he objects to some things they do and runs off, they send hitman Scott Adkins after him.  And boring "mayhem" ensues.

I started losing interest in this pretty quick.  Besides the opening flashback, Dolph doesn't show up until close to the end.  Rourke pops up in a couple of scenes, as does Adkins.  Mulroney chews some scenery as the evil head of Section 8, so like I said, most of the real work is done by nobodies who really can't carry a movie, but if we put Some Guy and Some Woman on the cover, who would buy/rent/stream it?  It's kind of a Catch-22.  (1/5) (Fun Fact:  In M*A*S*H, Section 8 was a certification that a soldier was crazy and could be sent home; Klinger wore dresses in the early seasons hoping to get a Section 8.  How this relates, I don't know.)

Body Melt:  This was a pretty oddball Australian horror-comedy from 1993.  Basically there's an evil vitamin company calla VillaVille or something.  Their drugs are supposed to do...stuff, but mostly they seem to make people explode--not so much melt.  In the Outback is a Hills Have Eyes-type group of freaks who have something to do with stuff.

It was pretty weird and sometimes gross, though maybe not as much as I thought.  The problem is other than two cops whose names I don't really know, the rest of the characters are basically a parade of easily-replaced victims.  There was really no one to focus on.  And the soundtrack often sounded like crappy exercise video music.  Anyway, I doubt many of my Phantom Readers would want to watch it. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Unfortunately the movie wasn't captioned, which would have maybe helped with some of the Australian dialogue.)

The Veil:  This anthology series only had one episode come out the year before The Twilight Zone.  The remaining 10 never aired until they were packaged into three movies. It's sort of the same thing as TZ, with a host (Boris Karloff) introducing a story with a paranormal twist.  The differences are that Karloff participates in most of the episodes and the twists are very mild, sometimes to the point of being unnoticeable.  Like in the first episode where a guy has a dream about his brother being murdered and comes home.  That's it, that's the twist.  Others are better like one where Karloff owns an airplane delivery service and brings his son home to fly for him.  The son starts seeing a ghostly face telling him to go somewhere and discovers some secrets from his father's past.  There are some other episodes that are pretty good but nothing that ever rises to the level of the best TZ episodes. (3/5)

Thriller:  This is not related to the Michael Jackson album/song/music video of the early 80s.  It's sort of a remake of The Veil; this 1960-1961 series features longer episodes, many of them more crime stories or I guess Hitchcock-type stories than Twilight Zone stories.  Though the one I watched called "The Return of Andrew Bentley" from the middle of the second season was more of a TZ story and the teleplay was written by Richard Matheson, who wrote some TZ episodes.  Boris Karloff appears at the beginning to do the introduction and to introduce the characters; I don't think it was one of the 5 episodes he stars in.  The episode is that old trope about a guy and his wife inheriting his rich uncle's house so long as they stay in it and monitor the uncle's crypt.  Eventually some low-key mayhem ensues.  Like with TZ, expanding these to 50 minutes usually leads to a lot of tedium--and organ music. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  Google said the rest of the series was on Freevee (nope) and Xumo (nope...though it's hard to tell since their app kinda sucks for that) but JustWatch.com says it's on Roku Channel so maybe I'll find it there and watch some more.  According to the Wikipedia page Bill Shatner is in two of the episodes and there are some other actors who went on to do better stuff as well.  And also a lot of TZ writers and actors and such are involved in this show; in this episode the guy who played a Nazi death camp Kommandant in one episode and a criminal who freezes himself for 100 years only to die of heat stroke was one of the characters.)

The Master:  Not the movie about the Scientology guy starring Joaquin Phoenix.  This 1984 NBC series is partially familiar to MST3K fans as the first four episodes were put together into two "movies" dubbed "Master Ninja 1 & 2."  But really there were 13 episodes in the show's only season.  When I heard this was on Tubi, I decided to watch the whole series.  It's not bad if you liked similar fare from the time like Knight Rider, The A-Team, The Fall Guy, or Airwolf.  Or maybe if you liked Kung Fu in the 70s.

The plot involves the titular "Master" who is named John Peter McCallister.  He's the only white guy to ever become a ninja master.  He learns he has a daughter back in the States and so leaves his order to find her--but the order doesn't want to risk him divulging their secrets so they send another ninja (Sho Kosugi) to kill him.  In America, McCallister runs into a young hothead living in a van named Max Keller (Tim Van Patten--son of Dick).  They team up with Max becoming the master's new student.  They go around helping people and occasionally trying to find the daughter.  Sometimes the evil ninja will show up.  Sometimes he doesn't.  It jumps around from small towns to big cities like "Las Vegas" or "New York City" that were probably not those actual cities.  Unfortunately when the show ended, the daughter had not been found and the evil ninja was still out there. (And obviously they're not going to do a revival after 40 years and Lee Van Cleef being dead 35 of those years, so I guess we'll never get any answers.)

Like I said, if you liked other 80s action-adventure shows then you'd probably not think this is too bad.  I didn't hate it, but there are a couple of obvious problems.  Lee Van Cleef is good when the Master is just doing normal stuff, but he's too old and out-of-shape for anyone to believe he's in the ninja suit jumping around and kicking guys.  And the show makes very little effort to disguise the stunt double, who looks Asian from the glimpses shown.  Sometimes when the Master is in regular clothes it's obvious they have the stunt double in a bald cap.  It's not convincing at all.  They probably should have cast someone a little younger than 59--and a well-traveled 59 at that--who actually died 5 years later.  And maybe find someone who could enunciate better than Tim Van Patten.  I kind of wonder if the focus on a ninja was a little ahead of its time; I think it was still a few years before GI Joe became all about ninjas for instance. These days we'd call having a white ninja cultural appropriation but it was the 80s, where you could still have someone in blackface (Trading Places, etc.) or brownface (Short Circuit) or use racist accents (A Christmas Story).  (3/5) (Fun Facts:  The first 4 episodes feature some pretty decent guest stars like a young Demi Moore, Claude Akins, Clu Gulager, young Crystal Bernard, and Aussie James Bond George Lazenby--along with the Aston-Martin spy car.  After that, there aren't as many, though a couple like Robert Pine--Chris's father who when you watch it now you can see the resemblance--and Marc Alaimo, aka Gul Dukat on DS9.)

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