Fedya

The Star Wars Holiday Special

I just watched Ordinary People over the weekend. Somebody should have taken James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Clue, sat him down and showed him Timothy Hutton's character, and then smacked Dean's character upside the head to get that phony whiny teen angst out of him.

The opening credits to The Best Man are done over a montage of images of every president up to LBJ. So we only need the presidents from Nixon on.

Then you need to get a copy of Truffaut's Day for Night. It's well worth watching. Of course, right now I'd rather watch Ants in Your Pants of 1938.

Perhaps you saw the Raquel Welch version instead? (Really, who doesn't want to see 90 minutes of young Raquel Welch in that skimpy outfit?)

In the 1933 MGM movie Should Ladies Behave (the answer of course is a resounding NO!!), the movie starts out at a New York theatre or concert with an intermission between acts. Several of the characters step out on the terrace during the intermission, and in the background you can see... an ad for Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight.

What do you have against Helen Hayes and Van Heflin?

One wonders whether The Ritz will remain on the schedule. I could swear Cries and Whispers was on the schedule once before but got pulled for a memorial tribute. Ooh, El Greco shows up. I hope it's letterboxed; the last time it was on the Fox Movie Channel ages ago is was panned and scanned which made it trule awful. I could swear there were scenes in which both of the people talking to each other were panned-and-scanned out of the picture. Our Mother's House is on the schedule again! Woohoo!

He was the subject of the monthly Spotlight back in May (I think; it was whichever month was the centenary of his birth). I heard a BBC documentary on Henry Jaglom's interviews with Orson Welles, and Welles' comments on Hitchcock confirmed my view that Welles was incredibly full of himself and overcooked his movies. I've commented before on my extreme dislike of F for Fake, but Mr. Arkadin is another steaming mess. But Welles went against the studio bosses, and there seem to be people who will praise anything Welles made simply because he went against the studio heads.

It's the song for a fun ship cruise:

Pay attention to the computer in the Dick Van Dyke sequence. I'm pretty certain it's recycled from Desk Set, which is coming up on Thursday night. (If memory serves, you can clearly see the light pattern that reveals "The End".)

They could start by not memory-holing threads on the boards (with the exception of the blatant spam).

I referenced the Rhonda Fleming "Word of Mouth" piece she did about Spellbound, in which she uses a word that the auto-censor stars out, so noticed that the thread was sent down the memory hole overnight. It would be far better just to lock this stuff, which I didn't think was that outrageous anyhow.

Now THAT Madame X ripoff is an overrated movie.

I get the Hibi-Jibis thinking of that thread panned and scanned.

You mean Johnny Olson, not Johnny Gilbert.

Will Smith went from being a rapper and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to big-time movies.

That never stopped Ruby Keeler.

I suppose she was too young to go live with Grandpa Melvyn for a while.

Apparently, Illeana Douglas has written a memoir titled I Blame Dennis Hopper and has been doing the rounds promoting it. In my podcast feed from Radio New Zealand this morning, I came across the following: The link above has a link to play the interview via streaming audio, or you can download the MP3 directly here. The MP3 is 28:20 and about 10.3 MB. (Disclaimer: I haven't listened to the interview yet or read the book.)

What's the copyright term now? I thought it was life-plus 70 years since it's got a single author, which in theory ought to put the original source material in the public domain now and would free up whatever versions TCM (or really its corporate owner) has the other rights to. I know Disney got the copyright terms lengthenend just before Steamboat Willie would have entered the public domain so that the short will now be under copyright until 2048 or something like that. Puts the lie to the Constitution's mention of "limited duration", the **** ****s. (Those asteriks in the original; not inserted by the board's automatic censorship software.)

I could have sworn Cries and Whispers was on the TCM schedule but got preempted for a programming tribute. The one I'd like to see them get the rights to is Schtonk!, a comedy about the Hitler Diary hoax.

No more than people will stop the "Will [insert person's name here] be TCM Star of the Month in [insert month here]?" posts.

Lots of people generally known as "serious" composers did film scores: Ralph Vaughn Williams did 49th Parallel Leonard Bernstein did On the Waterfront Aaron Copland did The Red Pony There are also people generally known as film composers who did "serious" classical work, such as Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, or Nino Rota. And there are lots of "classic" classical music pieces that weren't around in 1895.

Tell that to Philip Glass.