CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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If you believe the sort of press-agent fantasies that have greased the wheels of the Hollywood ballyhoo machine that's operated here since Florence Lawrence was the Biograph Girl, then you deserve whatever you get, including the derision of folks like me.
Who cares what the Max Factor Museum has to say on the matter? It's all cooked-up rubbish, and any sensible person knows it.
But, I'm big enough to admit when I'm wrong.
The fixed value of gold was actually $20.67 per troy ounce, from 1879 to 1932; it rose to $32.32 in 1933, and then to the aformentioned $35.25/oz. in 1934, where it remained until 1939. It declined by $.50/oz. in 1940, then began to rise, peaking at $43.00 in 1947 before settling back to $35.00/oz.
In 1970, the price of gold was allowed to float like any commodity, with its price determined by supply-and-demand. As of this morning's trading, gold is fetching $789.00 per ounce.
I hope you got yours back in Marlene's day.
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Speaking of Brad Pitt and Eva Gardner...yesterday, I watched the 2004 movie Troy on television. About half-way through the four hour presentation, I paused the movie and I said to my wife, "that person (Diane Kruger) they cast as Helen?...Helen of Troy?...'the face that launched a thousand ships' Helen of Troy? No, I don't think so. Diane Kruger's face might launch one or two ships, but not a thousand". Then, I thought about the subject for a second and I continued, "now, Eva Gardner (pretty much at ANY age)...Eva Gardner's face could launch hundreds, or even a thousand, ships. In fact, Eva Gardner may not be the most beautiful actress ever, but Eva Gardner has 'what it takes'...to launch a bunch of ships". Well, that is what I said. I restarted the movie and watched Mr. Pitt do a decent job of posing and jumping and pointing and sticking sharp objects in people and...making his face look just like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Rusty
Well, obviously, her face is on its way to launching a thousand quips.
And it's Ava Gardner, not "Eva."
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THE SEVENTH VEIL (1946), with James Mason, Ann Todd and Herbert Lom.
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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!
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Marlene Dietrich demanded that Max Factor sprinkle real gold dust on her wigs to add glitter. This trick was very expensive and the cost for an ounce of gold was $60.00 dollars. After use, the wig would be combed out and about $23.00 dollars worth could be reclaimed.
This sounds like exactly the sort of rubbish that Hollywood press agents have always been employed to cook up.
Since the U.S. treasury actually set a fixed value of $35.00 per troy ounce of gold back then, I seriously doubt this figure. In any case, a full ounce of gold would be enough to powder a hundred wigs.
Beyond this, there are plenty of substances, especially if one is shooting in black-and-white, that can be made to glitter exactly like gold, and it's a lot cheaper to claim in the press that it's gold than to actually use it.
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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.
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Yes, but it was all achieved with mirrors.
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A lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it."
One suspect that Josef G?bbels had a big needlepoint sampler expressing exactly that sadly catchy sentiment on the wall of his office down at the Reichsministry of Propaganda.
And Dick Cheney no doubt has the English-language version hanging in his office at that "secret, undisclosed location" we keep hearing about.
Message was edited by: CineSage_jr
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So do I, and I'd love to know what you've got (is this an announcement that you're selling some?).
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And no one will ever accuse him (though I think it's a her) of being prolix.
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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.
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A dissection of the concept of Man's Inhumanity to Many Guys Named Manny.
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Don't blame me for the getting Lloyd's age wrong.
And, as for O'Reilly, I suppose that no matter how much a pig plays in the mud, or how many diseases it carries, someone'll stick up for its right to be just such a pig.
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I Bauhaus to your perceptiveness.
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"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.
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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.
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It is, like a fine (Spanish) wine.
And it's Martin Scorsese.
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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).
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Let's not forget that there was also a Boston **** TV series (58 episodes), starring Kent Taylor, that ran from 1951-'53.
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Then you're depriving yourself of watching one of the few people in any medium who's not afraid to take on an Administration whose first and most pressing priority has been to cow the Media into fearful subservience, manipulating it in the same sinister manner that Hitchcock villians enlist the unwitting aid of the police to magnify their power in their attempts to crush the Barry Kanes of this world (did you think there would be no link to Norman Lloyd in this posting? Hah!).
That, and the essential quotidian dose of wackiness that is Olbermann's Oddball segment.
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She must be incommunicado, out there on Catalina, since she seems unaware that you've appropriated her name.
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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.
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I was relating the two cinematically, not historically.
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in Games and Trivia
Posted
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.