sewhite2000

These series have almost replaced Hot Spell as your endless, eternal go-to demands.

Season One was a "summer replacement" series, originally airing from April to June, and as such was contracted a limited number of episodes. When it generated incredible buzz, it aired again, and a second full-length season was approved. The language was definitely rawer in Season Three, which was not restricted by FCC broadcast standards, and the violence was probably slightly more explicit, though if there was nudity, I don't recall it.

He was asked but has been living in retirement for a number of years now in Hawaii and had no interest in participating. Just want to make it clear he was not excluded by Lynch/Frost and the other creative personnel.

I need to continue my Popcorn Champs posts, because Cleopatra, even though I think it ultimately lost money because of its extraordinary expense, was the highest-grossing film of 1963.

Well, okay, a lot of snarky anti-Matrix hatred around here, I see. But please let me say this. For anyone who tries to keep up with modern mainstream films (which may constitute fewer than one per cent of the populace around here, so I understand the blank stares and question marks over everyone's heads), The Matrix is seriously the most influential film of all time. That fast/slow thing they did in the combat scenes, where the action warps slow so you can see the bullets whizzing over Keanu Reeves' head in slow motion? That's been done in EVERY mainstream action film that's come out since. I seriously think in that regard it's probably the most influential film of all time in the direct impact it's had on every film of its genre that's followed for 20 years and counting.

Hey, everyone, I've been out of town for six days and didn't travel with my lap top, thought I'd see if I could live without it, so I haven't posted during that time. But I did check in on the TCM Message Boards on my phone (which doesn't contain my login information, so all I could do was read other people's posts), and it occurred to me that I had made a list of all the "out of library" films that were airing during SUTS on another thread. I guess there have been two different threads about the exact same topic - TCM September programming - that have never been combined. But as I looked at the Moreno schedule on THIS thread, I started getting an incredibly strong deja vu, and I started thinking was there a Moreno schedule already set up for some other time that got moved to SUTS, because I've definitely seen this schedule before. It took some doing, because the other September/SUTS thread had fallen to Page Four, but when I finally found it, I realized the SCHEDULE HAD ALREADY CHANGED when I made my list of "out of library films" on May 10! I didn't realize it at the time while I was plowing through the lists of films. But if a Natalie Wood schedule was ever posted online, it was already gone, replaced by Rita Moreno by May 10. Thought inquiring minds might want to know.

I'm literally about to leave town and am not taking my laptop with me. I'd better vote right now. The thread will be closed before I get back. I loved all the schedules, but I'm voting for Skimpole. I haven't time for elaboration on my reasons. It was just my favorite schedule. Thanks to everyone who took the time and effort to participate.

Wow, what?

Good distinction!

Once in a blue moon, you stumble across an article dedicated to classic film on the AV Club website. A contributor named Tom Breihan has started a series of articles under the heading The Popcorn Champs. He proposes to deliver a detailed essay about the highest-grossing film of each year, beginning with 1960. I don't know when he started, but so far, he's only gotten through 1963. I'm having to adjust to the fact that I'm now at an age where current pop-culture media commentary is almost always going to be provided by people younger than myself. Part of that is having to accept that exposure to older material that I'm long familiar with is going to be brand new to most of these writers. For example, Breihan expresses early on this essay grudging surprise that virtually every big hit movie of the 60s is at least three hours long, something he apparently had no idea of until he began this project! But otherwise I found the essay pretty insightful and thought I would share https://film.avclub.com/our-new-column-on-hollywood-hits-launches-with-stanley-1834012710

Lawrence, you seem to have a rather staggering personal record of every movie you've seen, subdivided into categories like year of release and genre, I think, not to mention a personal rating you've given each. It sounds like the mad sort of thing I would attempt, but I guess I would have had to have started earlier in life. The number of movies I've seen are lost in a dizzying spiral. Sometimes, I'll be watching a movie on TCM and I'll be well over an hour into it when I start to get the deja vu sense that I've seen it before. But I think the era that would most confound me is the height of the Blockbuster days, say 1985-2005, give or take a year or two on either end. Anyone who lived through that time knows the feeling of going to Blockbuster at nine or 10 at night, and every big-name release from the previous six months is checked out, but you're in the store, by God, so you're going to rent SOMETHING! I couldn't even begin to reconstruct any reasonable facsimile of the hundreds of straight-to-video releases I watched during those years, some of them quite good, many ranging in the total crap to mediocre range.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending the title of the book, merely reporting! As I said, I'm finding it a good read. I think the title is a bit misleading, as the author isn't necessarily promoting every title discussed as contributing to 1999 being a great year. But 1999: An Okay Year for Movies was probably not deemed an acceptable title for purposes of trying to get people to actually buy the book.

The 10 Best Films of 1952: 1 Angel Face (Otto Preminger, USA) 2 Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, Japan) 3 The Quiet Man (John Ford, USA) 4 Forbidden Games (Rene Clement, France) 5 Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, USA) 6 Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy) 7 The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minelli, USA) 8 The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, USA) 9 High Noon (Fred Zinneman, USA) 10 Cry, the Beloved Country (Zoltan Korda, UK)

Ha ha ha, I've actually watched some of this on MTV. I have no idea what it's doing on there, but MTV and CMT I assume are probably both Viacom properties.

Some of the movies discussed in the book you didn't mention include Eyes Wide Shut, The Iron Giant, Election, The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix.

I have to remind myself not everyone on here has seen every movie I have. Someone - Hibi, I think? - was stunned I'd never heard of Ruth Roman, which made a little self-conscious, so I will try not to overreact to your never having seen Heat. I can kind of take or leave Steiger myself. He has a SUTS day this year, and I'm going to try to watch at least one of his movies I've never seen before to get a better appreciation of him. I think he definitely overacts for lots of Heat, but there are also some interesting moments of subtlety - note his reaction when Poitier slaps the white guy and his indecision about how he's going to react to it. Also, when he laughs about Poitier's attitudes maybe aren't so different from the **** he's surrounded with. One of my favorite Steiger performances is in Dr. Zhivago, actually. Edit: I'm leaving the autocorrect censorship intact, in case people think I made a really shocking comment. In fact, what I said was red necks, but put together as one word. That's censored, why? Racist to white people?

Davis is this year's Hersholt honoree, which is strictly for one's charitable endeavors and not for their body of work.

How much is Jimmy Stewart in it? Just one scene, like the guy in the Bogie version?

"Nasty woman" I believe was the phrase.

James, have you ever checked out the "Western swing music" of Bob Wills? He was clearly influenced by black jazz orchestras - he worked side by side with black men in the West Texas cotton fields and was exposed to the blues along with traditional fiddle music and the pop songs of the day. Sometimes, his band would feature a large horn section, and the fiddle, piano or guitar at any given moment might go into a solo not entirely dissimilar to something you might hear from a member of the Basie Orchestra. His band even did a cover of Goodman's "White Heat". He had to find his audience where he could get it. He was mostly too eccentric for mainstream hillbilly tastes, and jazz fans probably looked down their noses at him. But "New San Antonio Rose" became enough of a pop standard, even Bing Crosby covered it.

I am really unsure what I'm saying that you've felt the need to "correct" me twice. We are having some kind of "failure to communicate", to steal a line from another Newman film. All I'm trying to say is the novel The Drowning Pool was written in 1950, so the filmmakers could have chosen to set the movie adaptation in 1950 if they wanted to.

In the spotlight on Cooper narrated by his daughter that often runs between features on TCM, it's mentioned that Hemmingway, after seeing Cooper's performance in A Farewell to Arms, specifically created the character of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls with Cooper in mind. I'm guessing this connection was the motivation behind this particular double-feature selection.

Colonel Blimp is terrific. I love pretty much everything Pressburger and Powell ever did. I'm unfamiliar with all those foreign films, but hopefully I'll catch at least one or two of them.

Well, I'm pretty excited about the lineup. Poitier I can take or leave, but to be fair to Sidney, I've never seen a single one of these post-1969 films except A Warm December, whcih TCM aired in the last year or two. I'm particularly curious about the two Tibbs sequels. I'll try to catch at least a couple of these. I'd like to be excited about 100 years of United Artists, but my gosh, I've seen virtually every one of these films multiple times. I'd like to have seen a few more surprising choices in this category. Certainly the most surprising theme of the month is the Bond films. I always figured there was some rights hang up about these, because I don't know that TCM has shown any in more than a decade. Probably there will be some grousing around here that TCM showing Star Wars and 20 or so Bond films in the same calendar year is a sign of the apocalypse. Too modern, too commerical, blah, blah, blah. No doubt someone will make a joke about when is the Harry Potter marathon going to air? Hopefully, I beat someone to it. I'm pretty excited they're getting a spotlight, though.

Coming Home, with an Oscar-winning performance from Jon Voight, making its TCM premiere on Sept. 25 as part of the 100 Years of United Artists spotlight. I didn't remember it was a UA film (I've seen it once in my life, I think. I rented it from Blockbuster when I was a college student). Since TCM has never shown it before, I just always kind of assumed it was from Paramount or Universal.