CineSage_jr

The three-panel effect is called a triptych[/i].

is the american sweetheart you are refering too; Sally Fields or Merril Streep ? Sorry, my oversight: it's Meryl Streep.

As far as I know, Bob Burns still owns the original Time Machine. I've always loved Alan Young asking the housekeeper (but really the audience) "Which three would YOU have taken?" The housekeeper is called Mrs Watchett. When asked this question, most people reflexively list the Bible and Shakespeare, usually in that order (after that, they tend to fall silent). There's no point to bringing the Complete Works of Shakespeare, or any other literature: a society needs to write its own. The Bible? Surely the most corrupting and pernicious influence the world has ever known. Nothing provides such justification for sanctimony, self-righteousness and outright homicidal tendencies as the Good Book. Good riddance is more like it. H.G. Wells (and George Wells, his namesake in the book and film) was nothing if not a practical man, and an atheist. If limited to three books, they would be these (in general terms): A book on mechanical engineering. A volume of basic and intermediate chemistry. The best available medical reference of his (Victorian) day. I leave it to the Eloi to write "1001 Uses for a Dead Morlock" (if they were to develop a sense of humor, though I doubt that "A Treaury of Borscht Belt Humor" would be of much use).

Well, if you really want to know where Der Bingle is, it's: Holy Cross Cemetary, Culver City, CA Grotto plot, #L-119, space 1.

I have no memoirs to post; in any event, Walter is my second cousin, on my father's side. I know him, and he's a very nice man, but we've never been close. As Will Rogers said famously, "I only know what I read in the newspapers."

I am leaving the forums for a while because most of the people on these forums are mean, selfish, poopy, and conservative (Not Politically). Poopy? I'll have you known I own a pooper-scooper, and clean up after myself regularly.

No charge for the first but 5 bucs a month for addition ones. I don't want one at all, they overheat, make you use another remote and tak away all TV and VCR and remote features. The cable compny claims TCM forced the change so I'd quess the rest of the country will be forced to make the change too. This largely due to a little phenomenon called cable piracy. Signals that do not go through a cable box -- whether digital or analog, that scrambles the signal -- open them up to being stolen by unauthorized persons, either by physically cutting or tapping the cable company's lines, or using devices that suck leaking signals out of the air at fairly close range. Cable companies are usually loath to expose channels other than local over-the-air signals that they retransmit, plus a few low-value services foisted on them by federal regulations, to this kind of piracy. It's for the very reason that your cable company knows TCM is highly regarded by viewers that it, and other services for which they pay the telecasters (like TCM) substantial per-viewer fees, that they placed it and others on digital tiers. They're not about to let the substantial investment in fees they pay to service providers be squandered due to their failure to police their system via the most time-tested method avaoiable: scrambled or encrypted signals that require cable boxes to view it. Frankly, if your neighbors have trouble with their reception of digitial signals, their overall cable signal, including the lower analog tiers, is also compromised; it probably suffers from the various forms of degradation, ghosting, static, amplifier interference, line-temperature variations and artifacts inherent in the older analog processes. In short, you're just going to have to get used to the idea of going digital and using a cable box to gain access to programming you want.

Walter Mirisch is the only one of my cousins (out of three) who's still living, and he's apt to dismiss his and his brothers' early efforts (which he's done even with, say, 1958's MAN OF THE WEST, despite critics considering it a very important Western, starring Gary Cooper and directed by the great Anthony Mann). I guess that going on to win three Best Picture Oscars in only eight years can do that to you.

It's Sally Field, not "Fields."

Now you've gone and spoiled it, your reputation as being so ethereally above it all brought back to earth by the leaden specificity of the words below.

THE SEVENTH VEIL (1946), with James Mason, Ann Todd and Herbert Lom.

My cousins produced the Bomba pictures early in their careers. I remember watching the films when I was a kid, and they struck me then as they do now: a cheap way of capitalizing on the enduring popularity of the TARZAN series, using the basic concept of Tarzan's son, Boy (the most generic given-name, ever), and the actor who played him, without having to pay royalties to Edgar Rice Burroughs's estate. Ungowa!

The cigarette was 101 mm long and was the shortest lived! Shorter-lived than even the average smoker. But not by much. If all we smokers died in two weeks, who's gona pay for the expanded healthcare for children that is going to be financed by a $1.00 increase in taxes on a pack of cigarettes? It'd be paid for by all the savings realized by the government's not having to foot the bill for smokers' myriad smoking-related diseases, not to mention the cheaper health and life insurance rates for non-smokers who won't have to subsidize illness-wracked, short-lived smokers' drag on the insurance companies' bottom lines. I am a smoker. I have smoked for thirty years and while I'm not proud of it I probably will keep on doing it. I don't smoke at work and I don't smoke in restaurants. I try to be respectful of non-smokers at all times. At work, I keep my coat on a separate rack that I purchased because I know the smoke odor on my clothes could spread to other peoples belongings. No one asked me to this but as I said I try to respect non-smokers. You fail to comprehend the pervasiveness of the pollution smokers cause. The residue on your clothing (and breath, and hair, and skin, etc) is largely irrelevant. But the intrusion of live, "passive" smoke that non-smokers are forced to breathe in, whether its in public spaces, or that seeps into their dwellings through windows, cracks in floorboards, or porous walls, is not only annoying, but a legally-accepted danger to their health. If one were to take all the tobacco (plus the paper used to wrap it into cigarettes) burned in the world during an average year, and gather it in one place, it would create a cube roughly three-quarter-miles on a side: 3/4 miles long by 3/4 miles wide, by 3/4 miles high (obviously, the leaves could be compressed into a smaller volume, but the weight would remain unchanged). Imagine: a bale of tobacco 3/4 miles on a side, burned each and every year. Now, just imagine burning a comparably-sized forest --- year, after year, after year, after year. How much pollution, filled with toxic chemicals and lung- and nasal-passage-irritating particulate matter, does that dump into the Earth's atmosphere? You may think that it dissipates, but it's matter, it has mass, and it has to go somewhere. Some of it settles into the ocean, where it gets taken up by the aquatic food-chain, eventually ending up on your dinner table, in your gut and bloodstream. Much of the rest settles onto, and into, the world in which we move. Did you know that pollutants identified as coming from tobacco products have been found in samples of snow and ice from the top of the Alps? And the Himalayas? And Antarctica? Like bad Muzak in elevators, and stores and pedestrian malls, you just can't get away from the filth that is burned tobacco, and it builds up in our systems year, by year, by year. The tobacco companies have known this, and the dangers first reported by the Surgeon General in 1964, for decades. Their internal memos that have become public prove it. And those memos also prove that executives of those firms not only knew that smoking killed the very customers who keep them in business, but that the only way to replace dying tobacco buyers with new ones, and to keep those smart and, generally, strong enough to quit, is to artificially spike cigarettes with enough nicotine to keep them physically addicted even when they're wracked with bronchitis, emphysema, and lung cancer. The real stupidity, then, isn't in continuing to smoke in the face of such overwhelming evidence that it's killing you and your fellow (non-smoking) man (and women, and children), but that you let the tobacco companies, and their corrupt, overpaid executives get away with manipulating you and your very bodily functions to stay in business and keep their shareholders happy.

Here's a longer version of the Scorsese piece: http://www.scorsesefilmfreixenet.com/video_eng.htm

And no one will ever accuse him (though I think it's a her) of being prolix.

It's only a shame they don't kill within a week or two. Now wouldn't THAT be cool? Wouldn't teenagers look so much more adult and "grown up" if they could light up and know they'd live their whole life in a week or two? Yeah... great... This is what I've been saying for years: the problem is not that tobacco kills, but that it doesn't kill fast enough. I think that Congress (and all national governments) should mandate that tobacco products be spiked with whatever substances it takes to kill the user within a year or so. When the pool of smokers begins to die off faster than the tobacco companies can replace them with fresh gullible children and teenagers, only then will the tobacco industry, itself, begin to die the death it so richly deserves. It's kind of like those religious cults that use venomous snakes in their rituals. If one were to replace all those childish, novice-level rattlesnakes with just one African black mamba (a serpent is a serpent, right?), that cult would have a membership of zero within a day.

A dissection of the concept of Man's Inhumanity to Many Guys Named Manny.

I Bauhaus to your perceptiveness.

"CineSage jr" is an idiot. Just ignore him. Message was edited by: Metropolisforever I never call anyone an "idiot." I'd rather go the extra mile and prove, through "geometric logic" (to quote Captain Queeg), that someone I think is an idiot actually is an idiot. Thanks for saving me the trouble.

I have seen the orginal and it was more of a character study and the end, when they finely land their makeshift plane and survive make the whole 3 hours worth every second.. I seem to remember seing the remake and it was ok, but not the same as the original. I'm sorry that it seemed like three hours to you, since it was only 2 1/2. The original FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX is, as you say, a character study, and a test of wills between pilot Frank Towns (James Stewart), and model-plane designer Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kr?ger). Each man is so convinced that he is right that he's willing to die -- and let every other survivor of the plane crash die, too -- in order to prove it. Next to that, the film's major selling-point, the survivors' rebuilding the wreckage of their crashed "Sky Truck," is almost incidental. It's the struggle between the two men that's the emotional and dramatic core of the film. The re-make is, to put it succinctly, garbage. Its makers turned it into a typical, latter-day blatantly-phony-acts-of-heroism movie. Apparently they failed to understand, or just didn't care, that the original was, very deliberately, a film stripped of all heroism, its characters thirteen very, very frightened men who become less and less interested in posturing and demonstrating their manhood as the their plight becomes more and more desperate.

It is, like a fine (Spanish) wine. And it's Martin Scorsese.

Speaking of FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (one of my favorite films since I was a kid; the book's pretty great, too), it reminds me that I've been meaning to call someone at Fox with whom I'm acquainted, and ask if they might consider revisiting the film on DVD. About fifteen years ago I saw Robert Aldrich's personal print at UCLA. Though it wasn't radically different from the standard release prints (meaning few, if any, added scenes), there were all kinds of what're called "trims," or extended moments within existing scenes (including one really extraordinary moment, whose like I've never quite encountered in any other film). I'd love to see that version again, and I imagine that there are a lot of others who would, too, if they knew it existed (though the print's color was pretty badly faded, even then).

Let's not forget that there was also a Boston **** TV series (58 episodes), starring Kent Taylor, that ran from 1951-'53.

I also remember, towards the end of the film, the child finally fits in with the family--it's Christmas morning and the family is singing "Good old King Winsolot." And the song is called Good King Wenceslas.

I was relating the two cinematically, not historically.