Cinemascope
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Posts posted by Cinemascope
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That is true. It is also true that outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
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Well actually that was just a little joke... but I think "31 Days of Oscar" has a nice ring to it.
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I really don't like prediction the Oscars because no matter how hard you try, you really can't think like the Academy. At best you might get a lucky guess.
Probably wouldn't mind watching Scorsese win for a change, at least the director's Oscar.
So has anyone seen the DVD bonus features yet? Worth watching?
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So.... anyone have photoshop?
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Another bump for Cesar!
The fun starts at 3am ET on Sat., Feb. 24th.
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Well, it's a big promotional opportunity for TCM. They usually have a huge nationwide advertising campaign to promote "31 Days of Oscar", I suppose hoping to bring in more viewers -- and hopefully getting them hooked for the rest of the year.
And as I've said in other threads, having a few modern popcorn movies could just be a way to justify the cost of the publicity campaign. Since they're not selling access to the channel like HBO and Showtime or any premium channel, I look at it as a way to keep TCM strong and healthy and with a large viewership.
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Just to clarify a point, IIRC the original question had to do with people being shown in bed together.... nudity wasn't necessarily a part of it, because there are ways to do it very discreetly, and they are actually done that way in some modern movies.
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Sorry that you don't enjoy the Marx Brothers, to me they're the greatest comedians that ever lived. Well, at least in the sound era.
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I disagree... it's certainly been different, but I wouldn't call it worse than other years... and it all goes back to normal next March, doesn't it?
The 6 "rediscovered" RKO titles we're going to be watching will more than make up for anything we didn't like about Oscar month!
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The awards may seem silly to you, and to a lot of people even, but they're taken very seriously by the people who actually *make* movies.
To say that some of the great movies of the 20th century are "worst" in some sort of way only makes any attempt at serious discussion totally irrelevant.
I'll take just about any one of these "worst" movies over the average Hollywood movie being made today, because those are worse than these so-called "worst".
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Izcutter, you make some fine points, but tbh, there's a lot of different interpretations that could be derived from the historical facts about the 60's.
Some of the mistakes that were made at the highest levels could quite possibly be explained with just one word: hubris. Maybe there was too much arrogance (at least among some government officials) after the U.S. became a superpower.
Media and entertainment had been radically altered from the first half of the decade, when most people didn't get their news from television. The corporate structure of many (if not all) of the major studios had been profoundly altered. Many would say that the new studio chiefs were out of touch with what moviegoers wanted.
Additionally, a new generation of filmmakers was coming out of film school (a big generational gap on its own) and were heavily influenced by European cinema -- Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, Bergman, etc.
I genuinely don't think that people didn't want escapism in the late 60's, I think that Hollywood just couldn't deliver. I don't think people found really effective escapism in the movies until the Spielberg-Lucas blockbusters of the 70's, and they reacted positively to it.
There's a lot of interesting points but I really wouldn't want to get too far from the main subject.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to one simple fact: the movie musical genre, as it existed in the first half of the 20th century, is now dead. There is no steady stream of musicals that, for the most part, capture the kind of entertainment that will appeal to a large number of movie goers. Movies that could be considered musicals are few and far between.
We can disagree about whether it died in the early 60's or late 60's, or even later, but it's just a minor point in the big picture.
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So what is the best of the worst of the best or the worst of the best of the worst?
Seriously, this lists are a waste of time, so much of it relies in things that are a matter of taste. And while I couldn't disagree with the notion that some of the Best Picture winners might not have deserved the Oscar as much as other pictures that were nominated, the bottom line is this: this is whom the Academy members voted for, and it tells us more about them than it does ultimately about the movies that were chosen.
And a lot of the movies that are now being called "worst" are waaaaay better than many other movies that were released in their respective years.
So it all comes to some silly little category like "best of the worst of the worst of the best" or something like that...
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And we should all be grateful they didn't change the name of their Oscar event to "28 or 29 days of Oscar."
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> So the bad/tough guy is the icon for greatness then?
My guess is it's the only one of the icons that's instantly recognizable as something out of something from the early decades of movies....
But that's just a wild guess, only a TCM spokesperson can give a definite answer!
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Honestly, it's just a vague resemblance, the comic-strip Dick Tracy didn't have such an ugly mug... (if the resemblance was much closer, they'd probably have to get permission from the owners of the Dick Tracy copyright or risk copyright-infringement lawsuits!
)Like all of the icons that pops in and out of the TCM website and occasionally on screen as well, they're probably just based on stereotypical movie parts... so this one probably is just meant to be the bad/tough guy...
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I hope they filmed it in such a way that no horse was hurt or had to endure any stress during filming!!
I just remember that movie because it was one of the few of its time that seemed a bit above the usual mainstream crapola.
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filmlover, it really does sound like the samer person coming here over and over crying that the sky is falling, always under a different username...
the bottom line is, TCM remains the best there is, and there is no question that this is a niche that is worth catering to, if TCM stopped doing it, then probably someone else would step in, but TCM hasn't and I don't think that it will; it is part of the same corporate umbrella that WHV, and nobody has done more to get classic movies on DVD than WHV, thanks to the library that encompasses WB, classic MGM, and RKO.
As it is, TCM complements my movie watching instead of dominating it. I'd much rather watch stuff on DVD whenever possible because the picture quality is better than you can get over cable/satellite. Whenever stuff is not on DVD, then of course I'll watch it on TCM if and when they show it.
I also get to watch some good oldies on the Fox Movie Channel, where the ratio of old movies to new movies is much more heavily geared towards contemporary... but what the heck, I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
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Nicely put Erebus. To the terms that you used I would add that it's about principles and idealism... about letting go of your ideals and getting them back. We confront many similar dilemmas in our lives even in the 21st century, in very different forms of course, but in their essence very similar. That's why Casablanca is timeless.
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> As far as any of the movies made during the 60's
> starring Rock and Roll singers the story line was
> garbage.You can take the Beatles,Hermans
> Hermits,Sonny and Cher or even Frankie Avalon they
> were just made to get the singer/group on the scrren
> any way they could plot be damned.
Was it really any different before the 60's? The only thing that mattered were the performers and their numbers, the story could very easily take a back seat in any musical.
In fact the only reason we got musicals with a story is because audiences quickly got tired of the early musicals that were basically just filmed vaudeville acts/revues with no story. Gene Kelly explained it very eloquently in That's Entertainment! III and they showed some clips of music numbers that got discarded "when people got tired of these storyless musicals".
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I'm really lookin' forward to them myself, WHV seems to have quite a busy release schedule for DVDs this year!
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Any way you slice it, you're still talking a more fractured demographic in the 60's than any previous decade... and making a musical that would appeal to a wide spectrum of movie goers became harder than ever... you had a few hits (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) but you also had a lot of films that failed to find an audience for any number of reasons (Finian's Rainbow, Star!).
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Another good point, RTRiley, we may not know how much the studio interference and financial cutbacks could have affected the final movie... Logan certainly directed some fine movies, and even accounting for the factor that some directors may experience creative burnout towards the end of their careers, there may be other factors at play.
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Izcutter,
Did you read what he said? He said all of his films were "horribly directed." I'd certainly never say that about a director who has passed on, it seems tactless at best and downright mean-spirited at worst. He did make some fine films, even if they're not everyone's cup of tea. Were some of his movies flawed? I wouldn't dispute that, but I'm not going to totally lambast the life work of any filmmaker unless I could have shown them how to do it better. Anyone who couldn't have shown them how to do a better job should just shut up, myself included.
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It might be partly a matter of taste, but for what it's worth, I'm in total agreement with everyone who considers it the greatest musical ever made. I like all musicals, everything starting with The Jazz Singer and up to new stuff like Chicago and Rent. I like all different musicals produced by all the studios, with a particular preference for MGM musicals, but also those of RKO, Fox, Columbia, etc. I even like foreign-language musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
And of all the musicals ever made, Singin' in the Rain stands out as the definitive, greatest musical of all.
Part of it is that it entertains as well as tells the story of how musicals came to be -- everything that happened in Hollywood around the time that sound was introduced, and all the difficulties great and small that had to be overcome. It also happens to have one of the greatest (if not the greatest) solo number of all time, Gene Kelly's performance of the title song.
There's a lot of other musicals that are excellent, but nothing, not even An American in Paris or The Bandwagon, can possibly top Singin' in the Rain when seen from this perspective...
Oscar Doc
in General Discussions
Posted
But in any event it would have to wait until next year, at the earliest.