CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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I would like to know if the 'Chicago Civic Opera House' is the very one that was owned by Geo. M. Cohan? Is it still in his family in some way? Or owned by the City? It is a magnificent 48ish story structure. Your info would be highly appreciated, thank you.
No, it's the one built by newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane to promote the short-lived opera career of his second wife, Susan Alexander.
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It's absolutely essential to see the film with an audience to appreciate just how hilarious the movie is.
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There's a sad and ironic postscript to the film version of ON THE BEACH: Neville Shute's story was, of course, concerned with the specter of thermonuclear war between the superpowers, and how it might very well eradicate all life on Earth.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, that threat has receded dramatically, and been replaced by that of nuclear-armed terrorists, which wouldn't end all life, or civilization, but cause mass casualties and societal upheavals as panicked populations demand more and more security, even at the cost of their civil liberties.
Berry Berenson, the widow of Anthony Perkins (Lt. Cmdr. Peter Holmes in the film), was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the hijacked airliner that flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
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"A fifth columnist, if ever there was one, since he hid so well the insidious machinations of his adminstration's illegalities under his trademark hollow platitudes."
Under Ronald Reagan, fighting a Democratic controlled Congress, income taxes were cut dramatically and the country came out of an economic malaise left by Jimmy Carter.
Economic growth was tremendous and The Great Man won 2 landslide elections.
There was peace and prosperity.
I'll grant you that even Reagan was more practical than G.W. Bush; when it became obvious that his administration's spending, especially on the military (much of whose procurements were mothballed as soon as they rolled off the assembly lines because they were things the Pentagon didn't even ask for), carving out huge deficits, Reagan pushed through the largest tax increase in U.S. history.
There was no "'economic malaise' left by Carter" (a word he never actually used, by the way), there was a little thing called the Arab oil embargo (which Ford's adminstration allowed to happen), whose lingering effects caused the runaway inflation of the late 1970s.
There's currently peace and prosperity in Russia. You want to live there under Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedyev?
Fact: No new refineries have been built in the country in about 30 years. Oil companies are not willing to take the risks in a hostile anti big oil environment.
The government has offered the oil companies cheap land on former U.S. military bases for the construction of refineries, along with tax breaks and other incentives, but the companies have repeatedly turned down the offer, citing that the bases are all too far from exiting pipelines and/or port facilities (the real reason is that a constriction of refinery capacity keeps prices high. Oh, well, it keeps the price of my Exxon stock high, too).
Drilling in ANWR would put about 20 percent more available oil on the market.
In 20 years, maybe; not now.
Fact: Nuclear energy is a taboo in this country and should not be. We should use it.
Nonsense; the $5 billion dollar cdost for a modern plant is keeping most utilities from building them (I grew up a mile from the three-reactor Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, NY. On Sept. 11, 2001, two of the hijacked planes flew directly over Indian Point, following the Hudson River south to Manhattan and the World Trade Center. Had the hijackers known that crashing those planes into Indian Point would've killed twenty times the number who dies at the WTC, and rendered at least 1000 square miles of some of the most valuable real estate in America unihabitable for the next 10,000 years, they might never have gotten to NYC).
Fact: The United States has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia if it were to use its vast shale oil reserves in the Rockies.
The deposits in oil shale don't shoot out of the ground like Jett Rink's wells in GIANT; turning it into something useful would cost $300 per barrel (and you're worried about $200?).
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Gentlemen: I was browsing thru, and read your comments. If your aircraft knowledge did not recognize the planes as bonified ones, then chances are Hollywood in it's infinite wisdom (not) overhauled them for esthetic filming reasons as they generally do with all moving vehicles in movies. I have seen cars in movies that look production, but there is always something different about them that doesn't jive with what we see on the street. Movie makers like to change everything to keep us on our toes..lol. It may be the case with your questionable planes, especially in the close-up shots. I recently purchased the orig. Kong on DVD, with Ray Harryhousen <<< spelling, and one of the orig. producers I think who narrate the film from one of the Special Features it has, but I don't think they make reference to the plane designs. I will watch it again, and pay attention to any plane reference, and follow this thread up if I learn something that may help you. Happy Flying Guys..
That's bona fide (correctly pronounced "boh-nah FEE-day") and Ray Harryhausen.
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Rubbish. The current run-up in oil prices is due to futures-speculation in commodities in a weak economy, and the old bugaboo: lack of refining capacity.
You could double the world's supply of crude oil and the price of refined petroleum wouldn't decline much. And any oil provided by the "opening up" of ANWR and off-shore fields to more drilling wouldn't end up in your gas tank for 15-20 years, because that's how long it takes for the process of exploration-to-drilling-to-bringing it-to-market takes.
Improving vehicles' mileage standards, on the other hand (something well witin the technological and engineering capability of all the world's automakers), would have nearly immediate benefits. Frankly, I'd rather have a car that gets 50 miles per gallon -- and pay $5.00 a gallon fo fuel, than drive a car that gets 25 miles per gallon, and pay $2.50 per gallon.
We are actually a Federal Republic, not a true democracy as myth implies. The majority generally does not have it their way all the time thanks to civil rights and the ACLU. The majority vote sometimes don't always count as recent history show. Whether if "electorial votes" is of benefit depends upon who wins. Either side will whine or give thanks depends on which side wins.
Boy, you're just a fount of misinformation. That this is a republic -- a representative democracy -- is no secret. Just imagine if it were a true democracy, and everyone had to vote on every issue. Insane.
The Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution designed the United States' system of government specifically so that there would be tyranny of the majority over the minority, long before there was a concept of "civil rights" or an ACLU to hold transgressors' feet to the fire. Without such protections, it wouldn't be long before you found yourself in the minority over some issue or other, and then you'd be screaming for some kind of "protection" from majority rule -- only there'd be no ACLU to protect you. Hypocrite.
To show hypocrisy, when FDR won more then 2 terms in office, the Republicans had the law changed so that the President can only serve 2 terms. When Ronald Reagan came along many thought he should serve more then 2 terms and tried to have the law they created in the1940's repealed. Sorry guys (not the members replying) but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
It's not merely a "law," it's the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution, which no mere subsequent "law" can repeal. And while it was the Republican-controlled 80th Congress that wrote the amendment in the form of a joint resolution of both houses of Congress, it still had to be approved by at least two-thirds of the membership of each house (meaning a lot of Democrats had to vote in favor of it for it to be approved) -- and then approved by the legislatures of at least three-fours of the states (36 then). It's a process the Framers made wisely arduous to prevent trivial, and politically-motivated amendments from being enacted, and you should thank your lucky stars that those Framers had more common sense than you evidently do.
This is not an argument but historical fact. All in all we don't live in an idealistic world and country. People in general should help, not hurt in its function and give humanity a hopefull future. Sorry to hear that you have become cynical and wants a fair equal playing field world to live in, don't we all.
You won't know a 'fact" if it painted itself orange and bit you on the butt.
Bump...
Coersion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
Ronald Reagan
The great man...
A fifth columnist, if ever there was one, since he hid so well the insidious machinations of his adminstration's illegalities under his trademark hollow platitudes.
"Freedom" is as subjective a term as exists in English, or any other language. In Regan and the Republicans' mind, it means the freedom of big business and the well-heeled to ride roughshod over everyone else in search of ever more profits and control, a process that has only accelerated under Bush/Cheney/Delay/Hastert.
PS: The noun form is spelled "coercion."
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Wow! Luise Rainer AMAZES me!
She won Best Actress in 1934 and 1935 (I think!), but she is still alive! WOW!
Ninety-eight years old. But she won her Oscars for her 1936 performance in (THE GREAT ZIEGFELD) and '37 (THE GOOD EARTH).
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Elements in HUNGRY HILL are reminiscent of THE VALLEY OF DECISION, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, and EDWARD, MY SON, though it's more loosely plotted than any of them.
As for the title, "Hungry Hill" seems to explain rather nicely why Barack Obama still has someone to run against for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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What he likes to do is wait until there is a nice thread going about a classic movie, then he likes to jump in, mess it up, and take it over with his leftist rants and lectures.
No, I usually wait till some right-wing nut-job posts a lie, and then debunk it.
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I especially like the part about Walker being arrested for fondling an undercover police officer. Reminds me of an old Lenny Bruce routine.
Reminds me of Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig.
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I'm a "native American" because I was born here. Indians are, properly, Aboriginal Americans, in that their presence on this continent predated European settlement.
Well, assuming each beer had a head, this is an example of a one-to-one correspondence. In fact, Galileo used the idea of one-to-one correspondence to prove that there are just as many natural numbers {1, 2, 3, ...} as there are squares of natural numbers {1, 4, 9, ...}. This, of course, has nothing to do with this thread ... although Galileo did get in trouble with the Church for his views ... anybody wanna pick on Galileo?
Any number can be squared, so it's self-evident that every number has a corresponding whole-number square.
Yes, you're correct. And the spaceship scene at the end is footage from Forbidden Planet. One other bit of trivia: the episode was filmed on the street used in the Andy Hardy movies.
Carvel Street. I was on it thirty years ago -- MGM's Lot 2 -- before it was torn down. The monsters then were the people responsible for tearing it down.
The border problem will continue to increase because eventually the children of the poor immigrants grow up being educated here and they don't want to work at slave wages in the US, so new poor immigrants have to keep coming across the border to replace the older retired ones. American wages have gone up so much for manual labor, employers would rather pay poor immigrants $2 to $6 an hour rather than paying educated American workers $20 an hour. So there is always need for more new poor immigrants.
Kind of like the economic realities of the tobacco industry, whose best customers keep dying off younger than they should, and who, in turn, need to be replaced by kids -- new, much younger addicts -- to keep the profits coming in.
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Are you sure you don't mean best Olsen and Johnson movies?
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In writing the article, "Boy meets girl, her dad sues for patent infringement," author Peter Glaskowski demonstrates that he has no idea what he's talking about, vis-a-vis the following
A script defines the appearance of sets, lines for actors to read, camera angles and lighting to be used during the production, and a specific sequence of scenes that express a story. By any reasonable standard, a script is a description of a process. It seems to meet the requirements of 35 USC 101: it's new (in the sense of being original or novel), and it's useful because it tells us how to make a movie.
It makes me wonder whether he's actually ever read a film script. What a script does is establish a drama, which is defined by the actions and words of characters, something surely not covered by U.S. (or any other nation's) patents law. Descriptions of the camera angles and the physical surroundinngs in which the story takes place are amorphous, impermanent and subject to change at the director's whim. A script emphatically does not establish or define the filmmaking process, something that, in any case, is so long-established generic that it cannot be patented.
The filmmaking process, such as it is, is defined by editing; from script stage, through shooting, to the actual editing of the shot and developed film, it's a matter of deciding what does into the film, and what is left out. Beyond that being an equally generic and un-patentable description of virtually all human endeavor, it describes the "language" of film begun in the late 19th century, and refined through the work of the most notable Russian film directors and theorists of the first quarter of the 20th, especially Sergei Eisenstein, to wit, the joining of two pieces of film on either side of a "cut" that, in itself, is of no duration, is, essentially, nothing, but that contains the heft and power to eliminate that deemed unnecessary to tell a story.
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Herman Mankieweitz made a Turner Classic Blooper...he mistakenly said that Lucille Ball was in the movie of "Hello, Dolly!" when obviously he meant to say Barbra Streisand. Lucy was the dud star of the movie "Mame" based on the B'way musical starring Angela Lansbury.
Herman Mankiewicz, Ben's grandfather, surely made his last blooper in March, 1953, when he breathed his last.
As for HELLO DOLLY! vs MAME, the only thing to be determined is which film is the more dreadful.
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It's a composite photo, for humorous effect: Swanson's head grafted onto the body of the photo's original subject.
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Cinesage,
I like Skeffington and am grateful that Steiner did not write the music for it. At least so I thought. So I went to IMDB and note Steiner is not listed. Franz Waxman and some other is on record for doing so. Not to refute your story, perhaps Steiner was around and could have been engaged to write some of the music for that film, but ended up not doing so. In any case, I wish that Miss Davis had said something of the like on the set of Jezebel, to wit, "Either I go out and dance with Press, or Max can go out and dance with Press, but we are not going out there and dance with Press together!" because I hate that waltz he composed for the scene. Here's a case where I wish they had gone to the classical repertory and selected Valse Triste by Sibelius. The music is a bit morbid but it might have actually worked considering poor Julie Marsden's experience out there on the dance floor.
You're absolutely right; it was late, and I just didn't riffle through my mental file of composers/films to remember that it was, of course, Waxman (and I do have the wonderful re-recording of the score by my friends John Morgan and Bill Stromberg).
The story about Davis is true, however (though her actual words to the director vary a bit, depending on who's telling it). One can merely insert the name of any film she made that was also scored by Steiner for the story to be valid, if not 100% accurate.
As for THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN, it's my absolute favorite Steiner score.
Regarding Alfred Newman, THE MARK OF ZORRO was probably written (for the most part) by Hugo Friedhofer, under Fox music head Newman's guidance, a not-uncommon occurrence for the vastly talented but unlucky Friedhofer at that stage of his career (something that was rectified by his Oscar-winning score to THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES six years later.
AIRPORT has never been a favorite of mine, as it's too self-consciously "jazzy" in that forced-hipness sort of way (I hate the film, too, which doesn't help). I think that the best work of the last phase of Newman's career is HOW THE WEST WAS WON, an absolute masterpiece (and, according to his associate, Ken Darby, the most enjoyable and gratifying scoring assignment of his long, illustrious career). A couple of years later, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, also a wonderful score, proved to be the most trying and worst of Newman's career. His on-again, off-again work on that film cost him the opportunity to score CLEOPATRA for Joe Mankiewicz at Fox. As great as Alex North's score for that film is, one can only wonder what Newman might've come up with.
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Well....I thought the story was amusing & then you spoil it by making it into something disgusting. Not funny, just sad.
You have a dirty mind.
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Midnight suffered by comparison to the much superior The Palm Beach Story which has tighter direction and carries better performances from Colbert and Astor. I also don't think the script was as good as other Wilder-Brackett collaborations. The characters were always trying to one-up each other and left very little room for pathos. Leisen's direction was also uninspired.
That Preston Sturges's script for THE PALM BEACH STORY may be marginally better than Brackett & Wilder's for MIDNIGHT can probably be ascribed to one major (and minor, pun intended) factor: Sturges wrote his according to his own taste and judgment, Paramount having given him free rein to make the film he wanted to make (within the constraints of the Production Code); the film was then cast to suit the material.
By contrast, MIDNIGHT was first conceived as a vehicle for Claudette Colbert, with its story then formulated to showcase her talents.
As far as the direction goes, Billy Wilder always credited Mitchell Leisen with hastening his (Wilder's) transition into directing: Wilder felt that Leisen, a former costume designer, was a studio hack who directed every one of his and Brackett's scripts into the ground, and that the only way Wilder was ever going to protect the material he and Brackett had so carefully crafted was to direct them himself (though in later years, a somewhat mellowed Wilder allowed that a few of the Leisen-directed films were actually pretty good).
Sturges, on the other hand, had a sure grasp of the best direction for his own screenplays, resulting in that incandescent period from 1940-'44 in which he produced one sublime and unique comedy after another. It does make one wonder, though, what a Sturges-directed Brackett & Wilder script might've been like.
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MY MAN GODFREY may be a classic of the type, and situated right in the middle of the too-short trend of making those films, but it was not "the original," which implies that it began the trend, something generally ascribed to 1933's TWENTIETH CENTURY.
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Regis asked "who is it" and she said "DUSTIN HOFFMAN". The cashier suggested Regis join "Dusty"but he didn't want to disturb Mr. Hoffman because he thought he was probably doing some observational study.
Yeah, like Pee-wee Herman was doing "obeservational study" in that Florida movie theater a few years ago.
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No Zulus to fight.
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Well, at least nobody's mentioned M.S.'s name yet. The absolute worst, IMHO. So dull, so pedestrian. One of my favorite movies, Jezebel, is diminished (but thankfully not ruined) by it. The big scene on the dance floor and he composes this horrible waltz, it's totally at odds with the gravity of the occasion. The main theme to Wuthering Heights is trite. Maybe it's just me, but his music makes me groan.
You sound as though you've been channelling Bette Davis, who was well aware of the part Max Steiner played in the gesamtkunstwerk that were her Warner Bros. films (she was, in fact, singularly fortunate to be working at Warner's, where she had Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold and, frequently, Franz Waxman on the composing staff, as compared to, say, MGM, where the chief composer was that hack, Herbert Stothart, whose bland "scores," usually compiled from the classical repertory, undermined many a film and actor's performance).
As I said, Davis knew Steiner could be her helper, or her competitor. A famous story has her declaring to director Vincent Sherman on the set of MR SKEFFINGTON, in a scene in which her character was required to acend to the second-floor of the house she shared with her cuckolded husband, "Either I am going up those stairs, or Mr Steiner is going up those stairs, but we are not going up those stairs together!"
While there were several composers in Hollywood better than Steiner as regards pure invention or ability to dramatically seek out and elevate the heart of a drama, I seriously doubt that anyone's music is more sheer fun than Steiner's, if one merely allows oneself to roll with its plentiful Wagnerian leitmotivs, and the big, brassy Warner's sound.
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Crack in the World is the winner.
What do I win?
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You might try calling or writing:
Turner Broadcasting System
1050 Techwood Drive Northwest, Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 827-1717
(Off topic, but.....)
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Happy Mother's Day, indeed.
Time to break out the DVD of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN.