Fedya
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Posts posted by Fedya
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[Apparently, I double posted.]
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Crap, I missed the raunchy x-rated documentaries! I would have enjoyed them!Specifically, the raunchy, x-rated documentaries that were aired.
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Leisurely paced romantic comedy has inveterate traveler Poole (Astaire) returning to San Francisco to give away his daughter Jessica (Reynolds) at her wedding to Roger (Hunter). Poole stays at the home of his ex-wife Katherine (Palmer).
Sounds like the not particularly funny McLintock!.
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Those film canisters look mighty beaten up.
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Isn't that part of tonight's night of Roland Young movies?THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES (1936) w/Roland Young
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Some Like It Hot (1959).
OK, as for movies that would likely be TCM Premieres, or that haven't been on in ages:
Schtonk!, a comedy about the Hitler diaries forgery.
The Unknown Soldier, a Finnish movie about the Continuation War with the Soviet Union
Puttin' on the Ritz
Just Imagine, a 1930 movie set in the distant future of... 1980
They'll never be able to clear up the rights for All This and World War Too, but it would fit for TCM Underground.
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The ushers didn't clear the theater after the last showing?
Perhaps they should have watched
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Adam Had Four Sons (1941)
Adam (Warner Baxter) is a stockbroker in 1907 with a wife (Fay Wray) and four sons. They hire a governess (Ingrid Bergman) who immediately becomes another member of the family, like Katherine Freeman in the short Annie Was a Wonder. But Mom dies, there's an economic downturn, and the governess has to be let go.
Fast forward several years. Dad's rich again, and brings the governess back, despite the fact the kids are all grown up and World War I is on. Obviously Dad is in love with her (and she in love with him) but neither wants to admit it.
One of the sons brings a wife (Susan Hayward) home, not realizing she's perfectly comfortable sleeping her way through all the brothers. Bergman is nuts enough to take the fall for one of the affairs.
The acting is OK, but the script is nuts and pretty much brings down the movie. Helen Westley gets another chance to shine, and Fay Wray dies before the script goes to pot.
6/10.
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This would be when they made the second Philo Vance movie, I presume.On my blog, I always to place the historical cutoff date at which point studios stopped looking for original scripts and started selling marketing "franchises"--
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And William Powell shaves his moustache.6:15 p.m. "Love Crazy" (1941)--Fast moving comedy that slows near the end, but is still a fun watch.
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Danielle Darrieux, however, is still alive, and has about 4-1/2 months to go until she turns 100.
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All six of the Thin Man movies will be on TCM Friday in prime time. (Well, extending into the wee hours of the night.)
I like the second one for the presence of Elissa Landi. I've mentioned before that Landi died in my hometown and has a street named after her, so I always have a soft spot for her movies.
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How could you forget Queen of Outer Space.
And she was the former Mrs. George Sanders, which I did not know.
Zsa Zsa was survived by her ninth husband, to whom she was married longer than the first eight combined.
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The only reason they use first-person in Dark Passage is so that after Humphrey Bogart's character has his plastic surgery, they can have him look amazingly like Humphrey Bogart rather than having to do a make-up job.
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Actually, Wednesday is Disney night. Tuesday is another installment of the spotlight on the elderly; of the movies in that batch I'd recommend The Sunshine Boys (2:00 AM Wednesday).
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The Phynx (1970)
Somebody's stealing the celebrities of Hollywood's Golden Age, and that somebody is in Communist Albania. Our Super Secret Agency spies get the idea that the way to bring the celebrities back is to create some new celebrities, in the form of a pop band who will get invited to Albania themselves. Thus the band "The Phynx" is created. (The less said about the music of Lieber and Stoller, the better. Although, there was one song that kept reminding me of the Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up and Away".)
The movie is normally considered a bomb, although I found it not quite as bad as that. The build-up is exceedingly slow, and most of the celebrities are underused. Thankfully, most of the celebrities -- at least, the ones in Albania -- are introduced red-carpet style so nobody will have trouble putting names to faces. The people playing the band members, of course, have no acting talent, although they could probably dance as well as Ruby Keeler.
There are a lot of celebrities in this one. Maureen O'Sullivan and Johnny Weismuller; Rudy Vallee; Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, the latter looking like death warmed over (he died before the movie was released); George Jessel; and even Col. Sanders are among those in captivity in Albania. Joan Blondell plays the First Lady of Albania. Martha Raye is one of the few who gets a chance to shine as the Agency's contact in London. James Brown comes next closest to shining. Richard Pryor is woefully underused.
One other good thing is the sequence in Rome. The band members are looking for a piece of a map tattooed on a woman's abdomen; they're given x-ray glasses to look through people's clothes. This sets up several opportunities for sight gags, some of which actually work. There's one of a man chatting up a woman in a club, where it turns out that both of them are actually men, and another of two young women talking to two nuns.
If you like "so bad it's good" movies, this one is actually worth watching; you'll find a whole bunch of "What were they thinking?" moments. 7/10 on that scale; 3/10 on a regular scale.
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I can't blame Universal for not wanting to fund the restoration of Inferno, seeing as it was a Fox film.
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Lawrence, you omitted three of the 25 movies:
The Beau Brummels (1928),
Suzanne, Suzanne (1982), and
a selection of historical footage by Baptist minister Solomon Sir Jones, documenting Oklahoma's black Baptist communities of the 1920s.
The last one shows how the registry isn't about preserving Hollywood, but about preserving things that are culturally significant. Somebody else mentioned the Zapruder film; home movies from the first year of Disneyland and the New York World's Fairs have also been selected. I'd argue that The Lion King (not that I care for it) certainly is a culturally significant part of the mid-90s.
They also let people suggest movies for the registry, which I did a couple of years back, although I don't think any of my suggestions were adopted. I recall picking:
The Cat Concerto, since I don't think there were any Tom and Jerry shorts on the registry at the time;
Night Descends on Treasure Island, a Traveltalks short about a 1939 international exposition on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay; and
The Case against the 20% Federal Admissions Tax on Motion Picture Theaters. It's a look at how the small-town theater owners styled themselves as being important to their local communities.
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But I kept thinking "Where have I seen Richard Carlson before (aside from constantly mistaking him for Darren McGavin)?"
Perhaps you saw him romancing Lucille Ball in Too Many Girls or dancing with a young Lana Turner in Dancing Co-Ed?
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The Search (1948)
Ivan Jandl plays Karel Malik, a young Czech boy who survived the Auschwitz death camp and now that it's 1946 is being transported with lots of other children to UN refugee camps. He's particularly afraid of people in uniform, so he flees at the first opportunity, eventually being discovered by GI Montgomery Clift.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Malik (Jarmila Novotná) is going from one refugee camp to the next searching for her son, who she just knows is still alive. Of course, we all know that he's alive too.
The movie is filled with excellent performances, by Jandl, Clift, and Aline MacMahon as a refugee camp administrator. Even Wendell Corey acquits himself well as Clift's friend and the guy billeting him. The movie also used authentic locations in the American sector of occupied Germany for verisimilitude. If the movie has one problem, it's that we know from pretty early on that mother and son are going to wind up together at the end. If the studio had tried to have an ending that didn't have mother and son reunited, there would have been riots. But that's a very minor flaw.
9/10.
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I enabled Flash for the site, but the videos still don't load.
Edit: I don't even get any indication that there's a Flash video being blocked, the way I do on other sites that use Flash to embed, say, Youtube videos. Just a big blank white space.
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The films don't show up on my browser (Firefox on Linux).
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Lots of people like Justin Bieber, too.
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TCM is changing ....
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