CineSage_jr
-
Posts
3,852 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
Posts posted by CineSage_jr
-
-
Distinctions do need to be refined, though, in that there are those who will, rightly, point out that, in the the U.S., at least, the First Amendment to the Constitution gives the right to mislead.
If one misleads with the intent to cause injury, or if injury is caused, then the action of misleading is actionable, either criminally, or civilly, or both. Unfortunately, that is only after the damage is already done, since any attempt to prohibit it before hand constituted prior restraint (what should the Administration's penalty be, I wonder, for concocting false intelligence that's resulted in the deaths of at least 3,700 U.S. service personnel, a half-million Iraqis and cost a trillion dollars?).
In what was, perhaps, his most memorable statement, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, jr., once wrote that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic...The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
The key word being, of course, "falsely"; someone shouting fire in a crowded theater when there actually is a fire should be considered to be doing his or her essential civic and humanitarian duty.
The distinction between the right to mislead and be misled is, then, as much a moral one as it is a legal one.
-
As the Faulkner sisters said in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:"
"They're all pixilated.
Yes, pixilated."
"Except us, of course."
-
Thanks; now all we need is Jimmy Stewart to fly them out of this desert.
-
Joe E. Ross (aka Office Gunther Toody from Car 54) was a caveman in the series.
To quote the late, great Mr Ross:
"Oooh! Oooh!"
-
And I just saw Sidney Lumet's current BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD. Its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman (last year's Best Actor winner for CAPOTE), is the star, and certainly works hard for the effect he achieves (it's amost certain he'll be nominated for the Oscar again), but it's the sort of "busy," "modern" acting that tries to hew to too fine a line for my taste.
By contrast, Albert Finney, whose character spends much of the film walking, or sitting, around shell-shocked by the events that have unfolded in this non-linear storyline, carries the sort of profound, tragic grandeur that few actors can convey, nowadays. He steals the movie, and certainly deserves a nomination, himself.
Apart from him and Peter O'Toole (and, perhaps, Terence Stamp), that whole generation of roistering British actors who came of age in the mid-1950s-late 1960s is gone (Richard Harris, Peter Finch, Oliver Reed) are gone. I hope that the full appreciation of what Finney has brought, and continues to bring, to motion pictures will be acknowledged before it's too late for him to bask in it.
-
Well, this isn't about who may or may not have stood up for O'Reilly, but about what the Big, Sanctimonious Pasty Galoot had to say, himself.
Obviously, that's the important thing. People have every right to be misled, but not to mislead.
-
To which the obvious answer is, Why not you?
-
I can think of a lot of college students who'd probably gladly mummify Mr Wilson's body in Charmin as a fit send-off into the afterlife.
-
One accidental extra keystroke on "aluminum" (a different extra keytroke might;ve given me the British spelling, "aluminium"); "fit metaphor" means "worthy" or "appropriate." As you may imagine, there are far more unfit metaphors out there than there are fit ones.
-
It's About Time, a sitcom produced by Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, was nothing but a thinly-veiled re-working of that concept, with the Stone Age substituting for a desert island: a rag-tag mix of modern, "civilized" types thrown in amongst monsyllabic savages in bearskins, with eternal -- albeit, unrealstic -- hopes of somehow returning "home." Frankly, Schwartz began to run out of stories by the end of Gilligan's first season; by spreading those stories across two separate series with the same premise, he hastened both shows' demise.
For that, at least, we can all be thankful.
-
Worked with Houseman and Welles?
Houseman, Welles, Lewis Milestone, Chaplin, Jean Renoir and Hitchcock (among many others). And I think it's safe to say that the work of all of them would not be quite what it is without his largely unheralded, yet essential, contributions.
As for Olbermann on O'Reilly, the latter's refusal, or inability, to admit an error, even one as ludicrously wrong-headed and easy to research as O'Reilly's howler about U.S. forces supposedly massacring Germans at Malmedy during 1944's Battle of the Bulge, bespeaks a pathological need to be "right," even when he is wrong, wrong, dead-wrong.
And as bad as the above already is, the hypocrite-who-walks-like-a-man O'Reilly then compounds his from-the-hip bloviating by recently denouncing the so-called "liberal" press for daring to report that American forces in Iraq may have committed war atrocities.
I suppose, then, that, in O'Reilly's mind, it's perfectly all right to condemn the Greatest Generation -- separated as it is from the heat of current politics and viewed through a nostalgic cinematic prism -- for war crimes they didn't commit (against the Nazis, of all things; does O'Reilly have a soft spot in his heart for the Third Reich?) -- while denying that the latest model of GI is remotely capable of exactly that sort act. This is a nakedly political calculation on his part, having exactly nothing to do with the welfare of the troops, or even national honor (as though we have much of that left, after leaving it on the water-soaked floors of Abu Ghraib, and Guant?namo).
Stripped of political content, it's all about saving face and keep from jeopardizing his cash-flow. To admit error is to expose a **** in the adamantine wall he shows to his (shrinking) cadre of sycophants, just as George W. Bush refuses to admit error because he doesn't want to lose his infinitely useful cadre of sycophants, the ones named Limbaugh, Coulter, Kristol...and O'Reilly.
-
Captain Nice, with William Daniels, was better than Steve Strimpell in Mr Terrific (hard to see both, since NBC and CBS scheduled the two short-lived sitcoms opposite each other in those days before VCRs). The two shows had the same concept, one in which audiences were simply not terribly interested back in 1967.
-
And this scene is followed up with Fred walking through the fields of junked airplanes, reliving his war nightmares ... quite a powerful bit of filmmaking, and the musical score and camerawork here almost convince you the airplane Fred has entered is actually airborne.
After Fred climbs into the gutted bomber, stares out through the its pitted, clouded nose-cone and begins to sink into a painful reverie of his bombing missions over German-occupied territory (all to the throbbing insistence of Hugo Friedhofer's Oscar-winning score), he's again with his comrade, Kodarski, whose violent death beside him tormented his dreams earlier in the film.
It's at this moment that Fred realizes that he's been given a chance to make something of his life, vis-a-vis his love for Peggy, that Kodarski never had. It serves as his final motivation to ask the junkyard foreman for a job, and Peggy for her hand in marriage. As the foreman explains to Fred that the planes aren't being "junked," but are to be recycled for post-war housing, so Fred begins to understand that they are like steel and aluminuml phoenixes, rising from the ashes of war -- a fit metaphor for the lives of the servicemen lucky enough to have made it back home.
-
It's almost certainly the apex of Garner's career.
As for Coburn, he was in so many wonderful films, and left such an indelible impression with that trademark Cheshire Cat grin of his, that it'd be hard to pin down when his career eventually turned downward (if ever). After all, most directors and producers probably never gave much thought to casting Coburn in a heavy dramatic role; when he finally got one, AFFLICTION, in 1997, he aced it, winning his first (and, sadly, only, Oscar).
-
What this does is raise the question as to which is preferable: spell the name as it was in the Old Country, and have those encountering it in the new country mispronounce it, or alter the spelling (as much as is feasible) to a phonetic equivalent, so that casual acquaintances can pronounce it properly.
Beyond that, there's still no excuse for people mangling their own names so that they won't have to keep "correcting" others.
-
I didn't have the opportunity to see the interview on "Countdown". And I don't recall a "celebrity" interview of this type on the program before. Did KO give a reason for wishing to interview Norman Lloyd? I assumed KO might be interested in his "blacklist" experience most. Am I wrong?
Anyone who's ever met Lloyd (as I have had the pleasure of doing on several occasions -- Mrs Lloyd, too), or knows of his work, needs no greater reason than that. Few people conspire to give wisdom a good name better than Norman Lloyd.
Olbermann ascends only in an inverted universe.
If the Universe seems inverted, it's only because seven years of George W. Bush issuing pronouncements from his butt makes down seem like up, and vice versa. To quote Orwell's 1984):
"War is peace
"Freedom is slavery
"Ignorance is strength."
For those of you who missed the installment of Countdown, you can find the Lloyd interview on the show's website, here:
-
Universal's holdings are of the pre-1949 Paramount films, not 1948, and it'd be nice if they were to try to wring every penny out of those, too.
-
And who can forget Tucker's rough-and-ready portrayal of Wild Bill Hickok in 1953's PONY EXPRESS, opposite Charlton Heston?
-
Watch for Errol Flynn in a small but important role in The Case of the Curious Bride.
He's not too hard to spot, in that he doesn't do a lot of moving around in this one...
-
What should really make you cringe is not that non-Italian Americans don't know that the "g" in the "gl" combination is silent (or that the "g" in the "gn" combination produces a "nye"sound akin to the Spanish "?"), but that Italian Americans, themselves, are so divorced from the language and customs of the Old Country that they've Anglicized the pronunciation of their own names (something also very common among Polish Americans).
-
For the record, the film's title is THE CATERED AFFAIR.
-
For most of his tenure at MGM (where his full title was Vice President), Mayer's boss was Loew's, Inc. chairman Nicholas Schenck (pronounced "skenk"; Mayer disliked him so much that, in private, he usually referred to him as "Mister Skunk"), whose office was in New York. Mayer had despised Schenck ever since the Loew's chairman had sold his, and the company's, shares of Loew's stock to William Fox (founder of Fox Studios, which eventually became 20th Century-Fox) without informing him. It's only due to the stock market crash of 1929, and an automobile accident in which Fox was severely injured, that the deal collapsed, preventing Fox from controlling about 70% of all Hollywood production (the sort of anti-trust regulations that would've kept such machinations from even getting off the ground didn't exist in 1929).
In 1951, after delivering an ultimatum to Schenck over the increasing authority given to V.P in Charge of Production Dore Schary (who'd been brought over to MGM from RKO three years earlier to be the "new Irving Thalberg), in which Mayer said, in effect, "It's either Schary or me," Scenck made his decision: Schary got the job that Mayer had held since a merger formed MGM in 1924, and Mayer was out on the street. A few years later, Mayer tried to mount a hostile takeover of MGM, but indifference among those he thought would bankroll the attempt, and a case of ultimately fatal leukemia, doomed both Mayer's corporate putsch and Mayer.
-
Thank you sharing that profound philosophical observation with us.
-
I don't mind a couple of these series, such as Andy Hardy, or the Falcon, or, heaven help us, Maisie, back-to-back, but to devote a whole day to one series essentially freeezes out all of us who don't care to see them, making TCM a "lost" channel for that whole day.
It's different when TCM decides to devote a day to the work of a single director or actor, as long as his/her work covers a sufficiently wide type of subject matter that there's something for everyone.
This has got to stop.
PS: "The Masie Parade," cute, but I'm in charge of funny puns around here.
Amusing early movies that had racism & stereotypes
in General Discussions
Posted
I have always found it a little amusing about some of the racism in the early classic movies
No Way Out with Sydney Pottier comes to mind - that famous N word, there were so many early movies that had African Americans as butlers, big eyed , or resembling a 300 pound Mrs Butterworth syrup lady
in the Kennel Murder Case , William Powell refers to the Chinese cook as speaking pigeon English (me no speak English) & the 1942 Batman serial that was so anti Japanese (it was during WW2)...Chapter titles & movie lines used were along the lines of "****" and "Nip". The Fu Manchu movies had Karloff and Lee playing the Asian archenemy.
Even on MST the Robert Lippert movies portrayed white people superior to not just race, but even the better sex... Joel and the bots used to always make great jokes and skits on that..
I thought I would bring up this topic for something to talk about, hopefully not to cause hatred, just some racist scenes that you can think of or just talk about in general.
Hmm, let's see:
It's Sidney Poitier.
The fictional character of Mrs Butterworth is white.
The expression is pidgin English.
It seems to me that the one speaking or, in this case, writing, pidgin English, is you. And you're obviously in the enviable position of finding "amusing" the films in which minorities were marginalized and ridiculed for no reason other than that the films' makers could since nature, circumstance and blind luck just happened to drop your sorry consciousness into a body that, through no effort or virtue of yours, belongs to the majority of people in this country, i.w. white and, most probably, male.
Many of us like to think thast we, as a society, have come to a point where we can look back at the films and literature of an earlier era and glean from their off-handed depictions of "inferiors" a sense of where that society was, and how far we've come since then. Still, there're always a few that constitute lumps in the pudding, that keep it from going down as smoothly as the rest of us might like it to.