Fedya
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Posts posted by Fedya
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[shirley Shirley bo birley/Banana fana fo firley/Fee fi mo mirley|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJLi5_dyn0]
It's a good thing nobody here is named Tucker.
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> I think *Madame X* may be the champ -- filmed around a dozen times.
Does that include movies like *To Each His Own* which are very similar but don't claim to be remakes?
I think there have been about ten versions of *Brewster's Millions*, under various titles.
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> That should have been a night of screwball comedies not death and destruction.
Why? Are you suggesting there's only one appropriate kind of movie to show on New Year's Eve?
As somebody who finds the holidays a very stressful time, I liked that TCM decided to eschew the "sunny side of life" theme for some of their programming choices at the holidays (eg. the airing of *Make Way For Tomorrow* on Christmas).
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Unfortunately, I can't pick up the AntennaTV channel out of Albany. So it's just This, Retro, and MeTV for me.
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> Did he ever make a dud?
*Doctor Zhivago*.
I find *Lawrence of Arabia* tedious too. Erich von Stroheim would have had those desert shots 40 years earlier if wide-screen photography had been available when he was making *Greed*.
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I vote for *Around the World in California*, if only for James A. FitzPatrick's line that "Los Angeles has a population of several thousand Mexicans". :-)
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I for one like the idea of movies obliquely about apocolypse and disaster showing up on New Year's Eve.
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I'm trying to figure whether I should resolve to be nicer to the usual suspects who complain about the same things over and over, or resolve to be even snarkier to them. :-)
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Stay up late for *War of the Planets* -- 1960s Italian sci-fi, complete with mod set and costume design!
Too bad they couldn't come up with much of a plot or acting. It's also too bad they're not showing the even more hilariously awful *Wild Wild Planet* with the same director and cast.
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Where's Robert Greig? ;-)
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> Can you think of any religious films that basically end the story on Dec. 26?
*Star in the Night* ? :-)
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I think they should have shown *The Apartment* and *Night of the Hunter*, since both have Christmas scenes. :-)
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*Bunny Lake Is Missing* uses a couple of songs by the Zombies but amazingly enough, not "She's Not There".
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I was really enjoying *Cover-Up* until the end. Awful dialog, implausible characterizations, a few bizarre characters (the maid!), and plot holes so big you could drive a truck through them!
Did I mention musical themes reminded me of the main theme of Bernard Herrmann's score to *Marnie* ? Oh, this was one screwed-up little movie.
And then they came up with a cop-out for an ending.
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> At whom could she have been waving her arms if she just ran right by the bus into the store?
Harvey? ;-)
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Pepe Le Pew consistently lusted after a cat. That's much more than just different races. ;-)
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> I haven't seen Island in the Sun, where it's Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine.
They only hug, not kiss. I believe the same holds true for the Dorothy Dandridge character and her English boyfriend, whose name escapes me at the moment.
The cinematography is better than the rest of the movie.
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> Notably his "signature"(my opinion)of while playing a presumably tough guy, he'll hitch a beer or whiskey bottle to his mouth and chug from it WITH HIS PINKY LIFTED!
Alex Trebek pointed that very thing out when he was Guest Programmer and selected *The Professionals* (I think that was the movie) as one of his films.
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> I love that Siobhan is pronounced (at least I thought it was) Sheh-vaughn. Lovely name, btw, I only first heard it in the wonderful television series Ballykissangel.
Siobhan Fahey was a member of the 1980s British group Bananarama; their song ["I Heard a Rumour"|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IddaRTuYRW4] featured in the Ralph Bellamy movie The Disorderlies.
> and a wonderful character actor who was in a lot of movies whose name I can't remember right now. Thin, wiry guy with glasses - I think he did the do we not bleed speech in To Be Or Not To Be, or sigh I could be wrong.
Felix Bressart?
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>> Yes, I love Maria Ouspenskaya. That's another one. I am guessing the emphasis is on the third syllable...?
> Da
I say Nyet. If she's Russian and the name were stressed on the third syllable, that would imply that the masculine equivalent would be end-stressed, which would make it Uspenskoy.
(Technical diversion: Russian men's surnames like this ending in Y or something similar depending on transliteration are based on adjectives. If they're stressed on the final syllable, that syllable will be -OY, as in Tolstoy. Other names will end in something that's a different diphthong in Cyrillic; see the Wikipedia articles for [boris Spassky|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Spassky] and [Andrei Bely|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Bely] for the actual Cyrillic spellings if you really care.)
As for (O)Uspenskaya, the masculine form is Uspesnky, which means it's not stressed on the end. See [the Wikipedia page listing all the Uspenskys|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uspensky]. Now, there's a problem if you only see a woman's name ending in -aya and you don't know the masculine equivalent.
As for the O at the beginning of Ouspenskaya, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts her name first got transliterated into French. The French letter U is not pronounced "oo" as in "moon" the way the Cyrillic letter is; instead the French U is pronounced like the German ?. It's the French diphthong OU that's pronounced like the vowel in "moon", hence the odd transliteration of Ousepnskaya. Likewise, the French CH is pronounced like the English SH, so for a Russian whose name starts with an English "ch" sound, when their name is transliterated into French we got something odd looking. (Obviously I'm talking about Tchaikovsky here. You should see the German transliterations on some of these names.) Twardowski, whom somebody mentioned above, is either of Polish or Russian descent through German, where the V sound is represented by the letter W. Note that he's also stressed on the second syllable.
Sorry to be a pedantic bastard, especially since I don't know how much most of you even care. (More than Rhett Butler, I hope.)
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I find it interesting that with all this talk of the auteur theory, I don't think there's been one mention of Orson Welles.
To me, the impression I've always gotten of the auteur theory is that people will give a movie more praise than it might deserve if the auteur director was working against the wishes of the studio, which is evil because it's a Big Business while the director is an Artist. (Well, I'm exaggerating a bit.) I found *Mr. Arkadin* impossibly muddled, but so many people seem to think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. And don't get me started on *F For Fake*.
There was probably also a good two-hour movie to be made from the novel *Greed*, but Erich von Stroheim didn't let anybody making it by selfishly directing a nine-hour film and then forcing the suits to cut it down. Because really: who the hell was going to watch a nine-hour film? (Some of the shots are great: I've argued that if wide-screen photography had been available in the 1920s, Stroheim would have anticipated David Lean's highly overrated desert shots from *Lawrence of Arabia* 40 years beforehand.)
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And best of all, Bobby Vee isn't Canadian. :-p
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Well, I majored in Russian in college, so I don't have any problems with those names. :-p
I don't know who did the transliteration on "Ugrjumov", but that J ought to be a Y.
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be anybody in Russian Wikipedia who fits the name A. Ugryumov, unless it's the vice-admiral.
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In my case, it turns out that the site isn't Opera-friendly. I posted my problem on an Opera forum, and all the other Opera users who checked (regardless of which version they're using) couldn't see the photos either.
People need to learn to code web-sites properly.
Abraham Lincoln Meets Count Dracula.
in General Discussions
Posted
But if it's based on work by Doris Kearns Goodwin, will it really be historical?