skimpole

Continuing on with performances that got an oscar nomination but not a golden globe: 1980 Robert Duvall, The Great Santini 1981 Paul Newman, Absence of Malice Susan Sarandon, Atlantic City Marsha Mason, Only when I Laugh 1984 Judy Davis, A Passage to India

TCM said the movie was made in 1981, but its release was delayed until 1987, when it appeared in a censored form. The one scene that the film itself says couldn't be restored was one in which after the protagonist runs into a transit guard and gets into a fight, other transit guards come over and beat him. What I find curious is that since all three variations involve the protagonist facing moral dilemmas because of the one-party state's intolerance of opposition, I am curious what the Polish viewer would have been able to see in 1987 when that same state was still in power.

I saw four movies this week. The first two movies are late films. The Arrangement was not Elia Kazan's last film, but it was the movie where critics lost their patience with him. Oddly, the movie is less successful about its basic theme, the upper bourgeois mid-life crisis than Strangers When We Meet, made almost a decade earlier, and also starring Kirk Douglas. And in retrospect, it's hard to be sympathetic to a movie that argues that a husband should replace Deborah Kerr with Faye Dunaway for no better reason than that the latter is twenty years younger. The movie also has some 'modern"

1976: Rocky #12 (#8 English) 1977: Annie Hall #1 1978 : The Deer Hunter #2 1979: Kramer vs. Kramer #16 1980: Ordinary People #20

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/nino-castelnuovo-star-umbrellas-cherbourg-011745917.html Francesco “Nino” Castelnuovo, the Italian actor who starred in the Palme D’Or winner “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and the Best Picture Oscar winner “The English Patient,” died on Monday after a long battle with illness, his family announced. He was 84. Born in Lombardy, Castelnuovo took on blue-collar jobs like house painting and mechanic work before traveling to Milan and enrolling in the Piccolo Teatro acting school. In 1957, he got his start as an actor as a mime on a children’s TV show and

I remember seeing the 1995 Johnny Deep/Christopher Walken movie Nick of time and being the only one in the theater. It wasn't that bad a movie.

Tess is many things, but the last hour is about an arrogant man who bullies a vulnerable and desperate woman into abandoning her husband, and is stabbed through the heart for it.

I suspect TCM may remember him for the year-end obituary movies. If so they'll probably show Breathless. But TCM should get in the habit of showing Pierrot le fou, with Belmondo my choice for best actor of 1965.

Did it? In Canada at least it showed the Swedish original.

Returning to comic books, after twenty years (1987-2007) of being married, Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Mary Jane Watson had their marriage literally annulled. The Marvel comics equivalent of the devil literally erased their marriage from history, in a literal deal with him to save Peter's aunt after she had been shot. There were no shortage of reasons why Marvel sachems decided to make this move. That doesn't mean they were good ones. One thing is that the current series of movies about Spider-Man viewed him as a teenager, even though in the comic book entered university about three yea

Last week I watched a remarkable nine movies. Gorky Park was clearly the least of these movies. Interestingly, it's also Dennis Potter's least interesting work. It's striking that the movie is best known for the cold ruthlessness the murderer uses to disfigure his victims, and then the Soviet authorities easily work their way through it, even though powerful people aren't interested in solving the case. While it doesn't help that William Hurt is his underwhelming self (his sex scene is inexplicable in terms of supposed charisma), the plot doesn't make sense. Basically the murders are a pa

Often TCM Canada can't get what TCM America is showing, and the replacement is below par. But in this case Bugsy is replaced with Days of Heaven, which is both a Morricone film and better than Bugsy (which is a good film in itself.)

Turns out Mother and Son has been cancelled and replaced with My Life as a Dog.