sewhite2000

Your post is very funny, and I think your heart is in the right place, but in 2018, I cringe at the use of "Uncle" in front of any stereotypical name that's obviously meant to imply a specific race.

Henry Jones in The Bad Seed. Martin Eric in a small part as the handyman in A Summer Place. In fact, gardeners and handymen in lots of old movies seem to be a lot more snoopy than humanity in general! Also, I would say every male Mongtomery Cliff talks to in the middle third of A Place in the Sun. People asking him all sorts of weirdly specific questions, eavesdropping, and making mental notes of everything he says and does as if they were already rehearsing their testimony for Raymond Burr even before a murder has been committed!

You never know what direction threads are going to take around here! I opened up the thread to say something about voting, started reading the recent posts, and like the last dozen posts are about the fate and future of jazz. I got wrapped up in reading and within 90 seconds, I was asking myself, "Why did I want to post on this thread about jazz again?" and then after a very long pause, something surfaced from the back of my brain and I was like, "Oh, yeah ..." What I was going to say is Powell is surely going to win. My sense is he's much better-known, even to a presumably reasonably knowledgeable Backlot member. Let the jazz talk resume!

I was pleasantly surprised to see Geraldine Chaplin in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, of all movies. Nice to know she's still working.

I thought this was very well stated. I wanted to write something similar, but you've done it so eloquently, there's nothing to add.

Well, now, just after I posted my ultimatum, this actually sounds reasonable. But I'm just letting you know that Ben M.will never change. Ever. So getting all angry about it is probably not going to accomplish much.

marimari, everything you've said expresses that you're utterly and completely incapable of even considering to understand any point of view besides your own, so I'm done talking to you. Your complaining is not going to change how it works on TCM. I've suggested you just turn on the movie after the commentary. TCM will always be like this forever. You can accept it, or continue to complain about it, and your complaints won't change the commentary on TCM ever. Have a nice life.

Oh, Jesus Christ, I didn't really specifically call you names. I said your post had the profile of being a troll, and if you knew about the history of this board, you would know my statement is accurate. You haven't been here for 10 years. You don't know how many people have made one post saying "The TCM hosts are too liberal, and I hate them" and then never post again. Your post was EXACTLY like all those many, many dozens of posts. I've tried to say there was absolutely nothing personal in my heart - you're the one who's full of righteous anger.

Please try to think from the perspective of a 25-year-old who has no freaking idea that blackface was ever a thing, and they randomly come across TCM and see Holiday Inn. They've got no context. They've got no perspective. It's a shocking image for them. Thus, TCM feels it's necessary to apologize for these images and put them in context. They can't assume everybody comes in armed with a wealth of knowledge that this is the way it was in 1942. They've got to think about 2018 and not bringing down a sandstorm of criticism on themselves. At least they're brave enough to still show the movie. There's been speculation on here that at some point, TCM will just stop showing all movies with blackface altogether.

Well, you'll just have to trust those people to think for themselves, as you believe you have the ability to do.

I have no idea what the first sentence means. The commentary by the hosts is such a tiny part of the overall TCM programming, I'm utterly exhausted how angry people still get about it after all these years. You have advice for me? I've got advice back atcha pal. Turn on TCM two minutes later and turn it off as soon as the movie ends, and you never have to get angry again! Or stop watching TCM if you hate it so much.

Nothing personal. I don't know you! You just made your third post ever, so I assume you can't possibly know how many dozens or hundreds of people have come on here, made one angry post about why they hate TCM and then never posted again. The fact that you made a post exactly like these other people who posted once and disappeared forever made you a very likely candidate to be just like them. I was just playing the odds. I still wish somebody would report exactly what was said, rather than just expressing a lot of hate and not being able to specify. "Painting the white soldiers as some kind of villains"? Please be more specific!

Um, could you elaborate on what was said exactly about white soldiers that made you feel the need to type in all caps and use four question marks? (though I will be stunned if you actually do this. Your post has all the markings of a one-and-done troll who will never be heard from again) Without knowing specifics, I would still venture to say "we can't offend anyone" is more than a routine and "that's the way it was" is not going to be a sufficient answer for someone too young to remember firsthand that was the way it was. I actually don't see anything wrong with trying to put things in context for people who might have no idea.

Well, gosh, Revolution is starting in like four hours. I just got a new machine and would have to set it up if I wanted to record it, but I just don't think I have the energy to do that. Think I'm going to bed in the next 15 minutes. If it's available on Amazon Prime, maybe I'll watch it there sometime. I wonder how it compares to The Patriot with Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger. I assume more realistic? Is it R-rated? All the people who used to come on here and complain that TCM was trying to suck in the hipster kids with their post-1980 movies, I hope some of them hung around long enough to see TCM just bury this thing in the middle of the night. Edit: Wow, Annie Lennox is in it in the coveted role of Liberty Woman, who I can only hope is a Golden Age costumed hero transported in time!

Okay, so I was really bored and watched the 2010 version of The Karate Kid, filmed on location in Beijing and starring Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson and Jaden Smith, the then-12-year-old son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. There will not be much new to anyone who watched the Ralph Macchio-Pat Morita movies. It combines plot elements of the first two films, often putting some little twist on each plot point as if to say to the parents who had to come watch this new version with their kids, "See? We didn't do it exactly the same as the one when you were a teenager!" The antognist is played by a boy named Zhenwei Wang who just looks sadistic and evil and seems to be taking great pleasure in tormenting the hero. They go to the same school, so there are lots of scenes of school bullying. I guess I will say Spoiler Alert, if no one watched the original movies, but the real villain turns out to be the "bad" kid's out-of-control militaristic coach. There is a scene that feels very tacked-on at the end where the kid who's just been horrible to Jaden for 99 per cent of the movie bows to him honorifically after being bested in the climactic match and then glares at his coach as if saying, "See, I don't have to be evil anymore!" I wouldn't mind that scene if it came on with some foreshadowing or subtlety, but it doesn't.

Ha ha ha, your username made me giggle. I saw this movie on YouTube two or three years ago, good-looking print or whatever you call it on YouTube. It's a fun, trashy noir. Have no idea if it's still available.

According to Albert Brooks, who conversed with Kubrick by telephone over the course of many years, Kubrick was very hard on Scatman Crothers. Possibly Nicholson was reacting to that as well. You think Nicholson working with Brando was weird, how about Nicholson working with Adam Sandler in Anger Management? Surely Jack didn't need a paycheck. His kids must have liked Sandler or something. Some very deep deja vu memories are being stirred up in me about a movie I saw on TCM in which I was surprised at some point in the movie that James Dunn was intended to be a romantic interest! Reading the above descriptions, I feel like it probably was That Brennan Girl, but I remember almost nothing about it, so I need to see it again. Ishtar predictably gets trashed on here a lot, but I like it! Yes, it could (and should) have been better given the incredible amount of talent involved, but many scenes still make me laugh.

I took a History of Rock & Roll Class in college which a few years later made a Rolling Stone list of the 10 Biggest Blowoff Classes in American Universities. So, I'm a little embarrassed I made a B in it! Although I have to say in my own defense, the tests were all essay. A friend of mine took the same course the year it made the RS list, and the tests had changed to 80 per cent multiple choice/fill in the blank and 20 per cent short answer. Anyway, we weren't given any heads up on what the one-question final was going to be, so there was no real way to study for it. The question was, "Is Madonna rock & roll? Defend your position by citing examples you've learned in this class." I guess the professor didn't like my answer, because I had an A going into the final, but was given a B for the semester. I actually really liked my answer and wish I had saved it. I said yes, because even though her music veered to the pop side of the spectrum (especially in those days), she embodied a rebellious spirit, a defiance of convention and a willingness to let her music and her image evolve, as opposed to a genre performer in say blues or country whose fans expect them to look and sound pretty much the same even 10 or 20 years later. I think I took the class the same year Truth or Dare came out, and given that I called Madonna a rock & roll artist, I would also say this is a rock & roll movie! It's a very watchable combination of life on the road and backstage during a world tour (that part is all black & white) and performance footage (color). I found particularly touching Madonna's role as mother hen to her mostly male, mostly gay, really young troupe of dancers. Some cynics may say Warren Beatty gave the greatest performance of his career as Madonna's prickly boyfriend. An interesting scene has Madonna scheming like a teenage girl to meet and possibly seduce Antonio Banderas, which turns out to be a letdown for her. And when Madonna and her posse play the titular game, Sandra Bernhard (whatever happened to her?) asks her who the true love of her life was, and maybe the most human I've ever seen Madonna be, she very quietly says, "Sean". And that's the only time he gets mentioned in the movie. I've read she pressed director Alek Kesishian to take it out, but she had given him creative control and couldn't force him to. The performance numbers are all eye-catching, though they're the least rock & roll thing about Madonna, being structured and coreographed to the nth dregree, they're more like seeing a Broadway show than a rock concert.

Nice pic, but that's John Romita artwork! Got anything from the first 38 issues?

Well, I would call that polarizing, but look ... If you see snark in my comment, I would like you to know there was no intent on my part. What I wrote was utterly sincere. I believe Objectivism to be essentially conservative, and I believe it to be polarizing in that it's usually either loved or hated. You think my opinion is full of doo-doo, which is certainly your right. I'm sorry I said anything about it all, except given that it's impossible to talk about Ditko's life and work without mentioning Objectivism, I tried to summarize what I think it is in as few words as possible and get back to what I was really interested in talking about, the man and his art. If it felt like a throwaway line to you, it's probably because I didn't put too much thought into it, but it definitely wasn't intended to be snarky. It was really the sentence I was least interested in writing ... so, of COURSE, these being the TCM message boards, it was the only sentence anyone on here felt like commenting on. Anyway, I'm glad you took the time to read my thread. You had to put some effort into it to find that once sentence you objected to!

She wasn't that old, I guess, but if she hadn't gone on to do Bewitched, Agnes Moorehead would probably be best remembered for playing busybodies and gossips. I'm thinking immediately of Since You Went Away and Dark Passage.

While McPhatter was lead singer on most of the group's material of that time, the lead vocals on this particular record were NOT by him but by the group's bass singer Bill Brown.

You don't think Objectivism is polarizing?

Your post makes me think of another actor with "two" careers, and how some people might not have known about one of them, depending on when they were born. That would be Joel McCrea. I'll never forget the reaction I got from my dad when we watched Sullivan's Travels together a couple of years ago. He was absolutely gobsmacked to see McCrea in a suit and tie and in a contemporary, urban setting. "I didn't know he ever did anything but Westerns!" he exclaimed. I don't think he was ever really able to get into the movie because the presence of McCrea in a non-Western so threw him for a loop. Curiously, my dad is old enough to have been alive when McCrea was making his early movies, but he would have been elementary school age, and witty Preston Sturges farces probably held zero interest for him at that age (h'ed never heard of Sullivan. He would have been in about third grade when it came out). But he'd seen all the McCrea Westerns, which were a favorite genre of his youth.

Well ... not really the point of my post, but I don't want to start an argument and take the focus away from Mr. Ditko.