Fedya
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Posts posted by Fedya
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In honor of yesterday's airing of *Shadow in the Sky*, I think [this video|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAK_P65YgnI] is appropriate.
(Don't worry, it's safe for work.)
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McKinley was a character, and his assassination a major plot point, in the movie *This Is My Affair* with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor.
And I'm not saying Kennedy doesn't deserve any place in history. I'm saying that the whole Kennedy era should be relegated from supposedly being a part of our current culture to a place in history.
And part of my talking about Huxley and CS Lewis is to point out that perhaps we shouldn't be treating our politicians as the most important people going.
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The Kennedys were the Kardashians of the 1960s.
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Hmmm. Apparently my post got sent twice, so I'll edit this one. Aldous Huxley died November 22, 1963, too. Perhaps TCM should have shown the 1940 version of *Pride and Prejudice* or the Orson Welles version of *Jane Eyre* since Huxley is credited with the screenplays to both films.
Edited by: Fedya on Nov 21, 2013 9:51 PM because there was apparently a double posting.
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I was born in 1972. I'm sick and tired of the whole Camelot garbage and the attempt to make the entire Kennedy family some sort of icons. Please can our political culture move beyond the 1960s?
CS Lewis died on November 22, 1963 too. Why not commemorate him instead?
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> I certainly didn't. Did I seem to say "newcomer" with a condescending air?
I think it was the way you were twirling your handlebar moustache like Snidely Whiplash. ;-)
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> And it is the solid use of tripods and dollies, with NO hand-held shots
I'm sure the folks who made *The Narrow Margin* would be pleased to know their movie doesn't qualify as a classic because they used hand-held cameras.
> and NO zoom, zoom, zoom.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Erich von Stroheim had had wide-screen cameras in 1923, his Death Valley scenes in *Greed* would have been more brilliant than anything David Lean came up with in *Lawrence of Arabia. Just because techincal quality advances doesn't mean that the new advances can't be classic.
> And good color. REAL color.
Two-strip wasn't good. Not having blues isn't real.
> Original Technicolor, not Eastmancolor, not De-Lux color, not Tru-Color, and not all yellow-color in 1960s,70s, and 80s films that are supposed to look like "sepia".
How real was three-strip, anyway?
> It's the good acting,
Oh, there was a lot of bad acting in old movies. And a lot of good acting in more recent movies.
> and the classic actors, and the proper clothes, cars and trains. not like the 1960s trains used in the 1920s settings in THE CINCINNATI KID. And NOT 1960s clothes and hair styles on women who are supposed to be living in the 1920s and 30s.
Last week, TCM showed *Back Pay* from 1930. It's supposed to be set during World War I, but the cars, fashion, and hair styles were obviously 1930 vintage. What a non-classic movie. I don't know why TCM bothers showing such non-classic crap as *Back Pay*.
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> I'm sure we can all compile lists of our own, but I'm sure that every one of them would meet with at least a few objections. I've even heard there are still a few surviving fans of *The Jazz Singer*.
Why would anybody think Neil Diamond was a good actor?
Anyhow, my vote goes to *Dondi*. Painfully unfunny.
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> And movieman, what dramas are you thinking about? I do seem to recall a few of them like Blackboard Jungle starting out with a song, but other than those godawful widescreen spectaculars I can't think of a lot of others.
My first thought was *High School Confidential* (assuming you believe it's not a comedy), which has Jerry Lee Lewis singing the opening theme on the back of a flatbed truck as the students come to the high school which doesn't look anything like a high school.
More seriously, I remember the first time I saw *Autumn Leaves* and heard Nat King Cole doing the opening theme, since I only knew the Roger WIlliams piano version with the 4783215409874321807832547 extra notes.
I believe there's also a vocal theme song at the beginning of *Imitation of Life* as the diamonds pour down the screen.
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> Thank you for pointing out my misuse of the word liberal, MrRoberts. I was wrong and apologize if I offended anyone.
You didn't offend me so much as bemuse me, since I'm a libertarian and not a liberal in the sense that you were using the word. :-) If you go and read the last thread on *The Fountainhead* when it aired a week or two ago, you'll see I was one of the people generally more sympathetic to the ideas Ayn Rand was presenting. (Not that she could write a screenplay, which is where the movie really falls flat. But I don't want to start that discussion again.)
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You're lucky if you've got a full day timed out.
I've got somewhere between 50-60 movies selected and put into various themes, but I haven't even started donig the dirty work of getting prime time to start at 8:00 PM every evening, or even figuring out whaich themes are evening themes.
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Bland as gruel?
I for one was especially happy to see *The Set-Up* on the schedule. *Bad Day at Black Rock* is quite good too.
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I'm thrilled they didn't run war movies today and decided to honor Robert Ryan on his birthday instead. Enough with the glorification of serving the government.
Perhaps in the future they can honor people like my father who had 18 months of his life stolen courtesy of the peacetime draft by airing a day of movies starring fellow peacetime draftee Elvis Presley.
(Dad spent most of those 18 months at White Sands Missile Range, preventing the missiles from falling into the hands of the Ernst Stavro Blofelds of the world.)
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A version of *Milk* in which Jim Jones is given the prominence he really had in San Francisco at the time.
Lyle Talbot's son (or, one of Talbot's sons; I don't remember which one) wrote a book on San Francisco that covers Jones' connections with the municipal government; he could do the story if not the screenplay.
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See, I had a bigger problem with his use of the phrase "murder mystery".
I was born in 1972, and for a long time I've been sick of the romanticizing of the Kennedy era and family, and how so much of what goes on in our (political) culture has to be compared to events that happened between Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Can we finally get rid of the !%$&^%@ "-gate" suffix already?
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It's not as if Hollywood was ever accurate with its courtroom scenes. At least, not before *Anatomy of a Murder*, and I don't know how accurate that is.
Watch Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten in *Half Angel* sometime, for the court scene at the end. Ludicrously unrealistic. Or all those movies with somebody suddenly having a change of heart on the stand.
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> I believe the implication is that they abrogated their ownership by failing to honor their contract with him and by acting in bad faith. A court of law would likely have ruled in his favor and ordered the destruction of the property
Which reminds me of the failed pet cemetery in the first section of Errol Morris' *Gates of Heaven*. Speaking of which, is the philosophy of *The Fountainhead* really that much more juvenile than that in [*Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe*|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081746/]? But Herzog says things the "right people" like, as opposed to Rand.
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> The only problem is that both the book and the movie consist of cartoon characters,
Archetypes would be more accurate, I think.
> Which isn't too surprising, giving that "Little Orphan Aynie's" primary audience is teenagers and overgrown adolescents.
Which is far more mature than most of the political analysis we get out of our infantile elected officials these days.
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> The buildings of his they showed in the movie were ALL ugly.
They're ugly to you. But it's made fairly clear that there were enough people who found Roark's work beautiful/distinctive enough that he could eventually make a living at it. A niche market, to be certain, but it's there. Ironically, we've reached a point where much of modern architecture is attempting to be different for difference's sake, and the traditional seems to be what isn't wanted.
I tend to agree that the movie has serious problems, although I'd also add that I also agree with FBT's assessment of Toohey and his understanding of the danger the Roarks of the world presented to collectivists like Toohey.
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Gail Wynand was only giving the people what they wanted, or what they indicated they wanted through their purchasing decisions. (And Toohey was leading a coup from within by hiring people of his philosophical bent.) When it came time for Wynand to try to get what he wanted for himself, Toohey and his acolytes wouldn't let Wynand have it.
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> Well, of course, if his stuff was wanted, then that is different. But his stuff wasn't wanted, yet he expected other people to pay for it.
There's a scene in the book that isn't in the movie that indicates there were enough people who wanted his stuff to make it profitable. In that scene, a couple of unscrupulous financiers hire Roark to design a bunch of cottages, each unique, for a vacation resort. The financiers are acting *Producers* style, in that they've oversold the thing, expecting it to be a financial disaster from which they can walk away with a bunch of money. But the business turns a profit, and they have to pay the investors more than 100% of the profits.
> That's like asking you and me to pay for something that is ugly and that we don't want.
You mean like modern "art" that's funded by the state? :-) You might want to read [David Thompson's|http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/10/and-then-of-course-theres-this.html] blog; he talks quite a bit about modern "art": how it's supposed to be "challenging" and "transgressive" -- but only against the right people -- and how often it's being funded by the state despite very low attendance.
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I thought it was a construction site, not a finished building. And the scene of Neal driving up to it makes it look like it's one of those outskirts of the big city housing project type buildings, not a downtown building.
The bigger point I was trying to make is that if we look at it as a creative type against some horrible corporation -- which is why I mentioned a director going up against the studios, although I could also have mentioned *Heroes for Sale* -- a lot of people get the point and side with the individual. When it's somebody going up against the government, suddenly everybody's views change.
Also, my understanding is that Ayn Rand based Howard Roark on Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings can be fantastically useless in spite of their beauty or originality. (Falling Water being a prime example.) There were people who wanted Wright's stuff, so I'd guess there would really have been people who wanted Roark's stuff too.
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> How can one not laugh at scenes as ridiculous as the old society dame and her napkins declaring that the Banner must be stopped? Meanwhile her friend fired her cook because she caught her reading the Banner.
Substiute "Fox News" for "the Banner". Alternatively, I know a lot of people in the UK make a point of saying contemptuously that they don't read the Daily Mail.
The funny thing is, there's a fair bit that I think Rand got right in The Fountainhead, such as the slow capture of the media by an interested party, or her attacks on modern "art" (which are in the book but not in the movie). That having been said, she definitely didn't know how to write a good screenplay, which is where the film ultimately fails, although most people want to blame the movie having the wrong political philosophy.
Imagine a variation on The Fountainhead in which the Roark character were a movie director/screenwriter who mapped out everything for a movie: let's call the movie *The Magnificent Ambersons* for the sake of a hypothetical. And then the studio goes and edits the movie beyond recognition, so the director responds by destroying all the rushes. It's still somewhat unrealistic, but I think a lot more people would be championing the individual who stands up against the view of mass culture than champion Howard Roark.
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Just once I'd like to see Robert or Ben call out a poster here in one of their intros. Even if it were to make fun of my views on *Member of the Wedding* or *I Want to Live*. I know it'll never happen, but it would be fun to see.
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November 22 is also the death anniversary of Sterling Holloway (1992), Shemp Howard (1955), Moroni Olsen (1954), and Lorenz Hart (1943).
I should watch my DVD of *Picture Snatcher* tonight.