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Health & Fitness

Invisible Frank, Chicken Wranglers & Bongos or How to Make Movie-Watching More Fun!

Why chickens and characters named Frank, make movies way more fun! And quicksand and tape drives and fezzes, etc.

When I first met the Chief, I told her that I love writing about movies and that movies fit into the Castro Valley Patch because in the early 1900's, Chickens were King in Castro Valley.

And any movie that has chickens in it is much superior to other movies.

Chickens are always fun. There is seldom just one chicken.  There are usually a bunch of them and they are always running from something. 

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You would be surprised at the movies that include chickens: In the Wizard of Oz, the chickens are running away from the tornado. In Knights Of The Round Table a lone chicken is running away from some very hungry Knights.  Do you remember any chickens in The Terminator?  Near the end of the movie, Sarah Conner is pregnant and escaping into Mexico and at the gas station, there are a bunch of chickens running around like chickens often do.  

How about a chicken in Patton?  Why in the world, you ask, would there be a chicken in a movie about General Patton?  I don't know, but I do know that when Patton is in North Africa complaining to the British Air Commander about lack of air protection, the Nazis bomb the HQ, the roof falls in on Patton and the British officer and then a "chicken wrangler" throws a chicken through the open roof.  Chickens don't have to make sense, they just have to be comedy relief or something.  

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Besides chickens, here is what I look for in movies: characters named Frank (females named Francis count or Italians named Franco, etc.), tape drives, bongos (just bongo music or even better actual bongos on the screen), vultures, fezzes, flamethrowers, the very rare tumbleweeds and the extremely rare quicksand.  It doesn't matter how lame a movie is, when I find one of my special items, it's always better.  When I was explaining this to my 14-year-old niece & nephew, I had to find a photo of a tape drive because they had never seen one.

About 10 years ago, I determined that about 68.3% of all American movies have a character named Frank and I did an IMDB search and found 4,444 characters in the credits named Frank.  There are very few movies with a character named Thomas or Tom. 

Lots of Frank characters are not named in the credits, but for some reason, American screenwriters just like that name.  In fact, the best Franks are usually not even in the credits.

Here is a list of some of the non-credited Frank categories: On the Phone Frank (someone gets a call and it's Frank - there was one in The Wrestler), Invisible Frank (in National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the President says: "Thanks, Frank" to an off-screen waiter, right before he gets taken away by Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) to the secret tunnel), No Line Frank (in Dante's Peak, at the very end when Pierce Brosnan & Linda Hamilton are trapped in the mine shaft, there is a blinking light that will save them and someone says: "What's that, Frank?" and he points to the light.

Of course, there are plenty of main characters named Frank.  In The Tourist, Angelina Jolie says to Johnny Depp: "That's a bad name," after he says his name is Frank, but (spoiler alert), he's a Fake Frank.  She should have said that The Tourist is a bad movie.  Not really bad, but the twist is so easy to figure out that it's spoiled.  But they did say Frank a lot, so that made it OK with me.

One of my all time favorite Franks is "Already Dead Frank".  In Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster & Hume Cronyn (At a tough penitentiary, prisoner Joe Collins plans to rebel against Captain Munsey, the power-mad chief guard.), the very first part of the movie sets the scene about how brutal the prison is.  Burt and his cell mates are looking out through the bars, it's pouring down rain and as a hearse drives out through the gate, someone says: "There goes Frank."

So be sure to check your movies for these touchstones of excellent movies. One of the all-time greatest movies is: What A Way To Go , starring Shirley MacLaine. It's got a Frank, chickens, tape drives and bongos...  It's also got Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dick Van Dyke and Dean Martin.  It's a lot of fun.

Next blog, I will share a movie review of The Knights Of The Round Table, starring Ava Gardner as Guinevere and Robert Taylor at Lancelot from 1953.  As you might imagine, it's not going to read like a usual movie review... 

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