sewhite2000
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Posts posted by sewhite2000
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I think it's worth noting that those celebrated WB musicals of the '30s were ABOUT making musicals. Usually, only at the end would you get the all-out production numbers, and although Busby Berkley's numbers were clearly impossible to present on a regular stage, we were supposed to believe that was what was happening. There was a distinct lack of a fantasy element to them, unlike MGM and RKO, where music came out of nowhere, and characters broke into song and dance with no logic or explanation. They just did it because it was a movie musical. There was always context behind a musical number in those early WBs.
I don't know that I can offer a definition of what exactly a typical RKO movie was, but I would add in addition to the things you listed that they had Katharine Hepburn for the first eight years or so of her movie career, and she usually did pretty prestige/highbrow fare, the occasional screwball comedy aside.
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One last point, and then I'll shut up (at least for now!): I feel like I would have had Robert Osborne on my side! If you look at his very fine books on the history of Oscars, which he was still updating until about 10 years ago, I think, he always very clearly labeled the years for which the films were considered to have won or been nominated. And he ALWAYS listed them by year of release. So, for example, he would have the year 1955 in big, black print (and then in italics underneath, he would indicate the ceremony took place in 1956). And under 1955, you would see Marty listed as the Best Picture winner. And he was the official historian of the Academy Awards! But the people who run the Academy today would say that Robert was wrong! I don't know that anybody is still writing those books like Robert's anymore, but I think any modern book on the subject would have the years completely screwed up, because that's how the Academy wants it now. I wonder if Robert in his lifetime ever commented publicly on this change, which surely he must have been aware of. Maybe I'm an egomaniac, but I feel certain he would have shared my point of view about it.
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My understanding is that, by Academy rules, it also had to screen in LA, which it did not until January or February of 1943, for whatever reason.
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So, if this question was asked on Jeopardy! or some other game show today, Herbert would actually have gotten the RIGHT answer!
Sometime over the last 60 years, there was a paradigm shift in what year an Oscar winner is considered to be "from". I have no idea why it changed. Clearly, the Academy wanted it to change. I don't think they were "wrong" on Oscar night be repeatedly saying this or that movie won Best Picture for a year other than the year in which it was released. It's how they think of it now, and it's how they want US to think of it now. Probably just for simplicity purposes. It's easier to think of the year of the ceremony being the year of the picture's release. Even thought it's totally inaccurate, the Academy wants us to believe this "fake news" they're putting out is true. And Google, Bing and Wikipedia all are playing along with the Academy and calling Casablanca the Best Picture Winner of 1944. That will never sound correct to me, but clearly the world doesn't care what I think.
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And, indeed, if you do a Google search for Best Picture Oscar Winner of 1944, here's what you get:
Academy Awards/Academy Award for Best Picture/Winners (1944)CasablancaThe reason I mentioned the movie Quiz Show in my original post, a movie based on real-life events, is that Herbert Stempel agrees to lose on purpose by mis-answering the question "What was the Best Picture winner of 1955?", saying On the Waterfront instead of Marty. He begs the producer to let him lose on a harder question, but the producer thinks there will be greater drama and irony if he loses on a simple question.
SO ... in 1957, when the movie takes place, no one even thought twice about the year for which a picture was considered to have won an Oscar. It was the year the picture first screened in LA, not the year of the award ceremony.
BUT ... in 2018, if you do a Google search for Best Picture Oscar Winner of 1955, here's what you get:
Academy Awards/Academy Award for Best Picture/Winners (1955)On the Waterfront -
As far as I can tell, you can view the schedule by individual days and see every day of the month except May 1.
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4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
I'm not getting week one to show up, but that should be corrected soon.
Or ... not
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2 hours ago, Fedya said:
I thought it was a game of Twister.
It was both!
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I saw The Black Cauldron in the theater. I was a junior in high school, and heavily into Dungeons & Dragons, and one of my gaming friends and I went and saw all the '80s movies that seemed to have any medieval fantasy elements at all, of which there were quite a few. We were mildly embarrassed as we were pushing legal adulthood, but we took some comfort in that it was Disney's first-ever PG-rated animated feature, which I think was even part of their advertising campaign. Since Disney animated films never air again anywhere except the Disney Channel (which I don't have) or if you buy them, I saw the film that one day and have never seen it again. As such, I barely remember anything about it. Looking at some stills on imdb are jarring my memory just a little bit but not much. All I really remember is we emerged very disappointed that is was still very Disneyesque with animal sidekicks and whatnot. We were very sure we were too grown up for all that.
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A Barnes & Noble employee once suggested to me that the collectible cover editions are sometimes a problem: that they will sell out very quickly or not even reach their destinations. This collectible-cover obsession was one of the primary factors that helped ruin comic books for me in the '90s. I would like to think magazine readers aren't as obsessive about them as comic book readers, but I don't know. I'm beginning to feel like, Oscar nostalgia aside, Entertainment Weekly is geared toward the very young. Another poster on here, I've forgotten who, said the magazine fired every writer over 30 a few years ago. I'm not sure that's entirely true, but I've noticed the writing is beginning to introduce hipster terminology without even offering a definition. They just assume their mass readership already knows what they mean. I've learned the words woke, cisgender and bougie all from reading EW. (I have the latest iOS on my iPhone, and Autocorrect lets all three of those words fly by without getting upset. On my laptop, however, those last two words set off my spell check when I type them in on the TCM message boards. Heck, iOS, Autocorrect and yes, even TCM all set off my spell check!)
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2 hours ago, TomJH said:
I haven't seen The Seventh Seal in years but I have to admit this image puts me in a mood to take another look.
Or you could just watch Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey in which the title characters challenge Death to a game of Battleship!
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Gonna bump the thread again, because it appears the Korean spam is about to once again completely overwhelm Page One right now.
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Distribution of Entertainment Weekly has been incredibly poor in my city for about five months now, as well. Maybe half of all the issues that should have arrived in my city over that time ever actually showed up. I don't know if they're having financial troubles or distribution department troubles or what. Although the last two issues have arrived when they were supposed to. I'm hoping for the best.
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
I think a big part of it is that when we go back to earlier times to search out films, we usually look for the best films from those years, whereas when we actively live through them we become acutely aware of all of the dross and dreck that comes out each year, too, stuff that people will forget and not look into in the future. It's the same principal with foreign films. Some people complain that critics seem to just "love every foreign film that comes out", when in fact it's that they're only viewing the best movie or two released by a country, and not the garbage that also got released by that same country.
I would add the caveat that if you check out boxofficemojo's top grossers each week, you'll see in recent years there are foreign films, especially from India, but sometimes from Mexico, that are screening in the US and making not a crazy amount of money but enough to be among the Top 20 grossers for a week or two. Some of these movies are grossing as much as $6 million or $7 million in their American release, usually in a very short time. I've never actually seen them at any theater near me, not even the arthouse ones, but they're playing somewhere in America where there are large concentrations of Indians. Everyone who wants to see them sees them within the first two weeks, and then they're gone again.
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It was a Newberry Award winner, and I feel reasonably certain it's never been out of print. I would say the height of its popularity (until now, as the movie will no doubt spark a whole new generation of readers) was in the 60s and 70s, maybe on into the early 80s. It was popular enough L'Engle wrote, I believe, three sequels continuing to chronicle the weird adventures of the Murry family on into the next generation of Murrys (I read at least two of them. They didn't do as much for me). Disney has actually adapted the novel before! As a made-for-TV movie in 2003.
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1 minute ago, Princess of Tap said:
As an adult I almost exclusively read Agatha Christie for pleasure because it seems as though in one lifetime you never run out of something to read. However, I never like the film adaptations that I see after I read the story and vice versa.
It simply may be a result of the very intimate experience that you have when you personally read a book Alone by yourself.
I found that her stories that I loved the most were the film adaptations that I liked the least.
The only way they could have satisfied me would have been if I was the one directing the film adaptation and had done all the casting. LOL
I read all the Hercule Poirot novels in chronological order when Waldenbooks stocked every darn one of them and sold most of the paperbacks versions for $2 each! (The longer ones were maybe $3) In a relatively short time, began when I was 11 maybe and had finished by the time I was 14. Along the way I also read a few Mrs. Marples and one or two of the stand-alones like Ten Little Indians.
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Check out the evolution of the book's cover over its first 50 years (all the present editions have photos from the movie, of course). I had the original edition, with that evocative blue cover with the white silhouettes. Note also the depiction of the three "Mrs." characters on the second version, which is way closer to the way they're described in the book than the glam-rock/Cher outfits that they're wearing in the movie.
http://odysseybks.blogspot.com/2012/02/many-covers-of-wrinkle-in-time.html
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This is more or less a response to what Princess of Tap was saying:
They have indeed "multiculturalized" a novel that contained only white characters (on Earth, anyway). I would like to stress I don't have any issue with those kinds of casting decisions. Used to be white actors took a lot of the minority roles! So, now the pendulum has swung the other way. Not that minorities are now playing white people! But roles that have been long-established as white are occasionally being rewritten as other races. It happened with the latest version of Annie with both Annie and Daddy Warbucks. There has been buzz that Idris Elba is going to be the new James Bond. I don't know if that will happen, but they already made Moneypenny a black woman. There are a number of others, but I'm just not thinking of them right now.
Anyway, yes, I'm old, and I've read many books and seen many movies and seen many movies that were adapted from books, and sometimes I've read both the book and seen the film adaptation! I'm well aware the film adaptations almost always take their liberties. I'm more of a movie watcher than fiction book reader (easily 90 per cent of my reading material for the last 20 years has been nonfiction), so if it's a book from the last generation or so, I'm very unlikely to have read it. But yes, people who do read the book first seem to almost always favor it to the movie.
I had a very distinct vision of A Wrinkle in Time in my my head as a child, more earthy, dark and mysterious than this very bright, splashy, Vegas stage outfit version this movie appears to give us. It's rather unsettling to me. I'm not even certain if I'll see it.
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23 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
I actually liked John Carter, as well. There are a few on that flop list that I liked.
I talked about John Carter in another thread. I saw it in the theater, and I liked it well enough. But I said in that thread there probably hadn't been any new John Carter material in any form since the Marvel comic adaptation was canceled in 1978 or so. Since there' probably wasn't any name recognition or "Q-factor" among any viewer under 50, I don't even know why they thought they should revive the franchise, other than they just had the ERB rights, so what the hell? I noticed they also did a new Tarzan not long after. But they might as well have just created a new science fiction hero.
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2 hours ago, EricJ said:
I actually blogged on this at one point--
Because actors now ask for Points and salary instead of grosses, the big money for stars is Character Representation. Meaning, that in the final poster, every actor with an agent to say so demands that they be featured in the final marketing poster, which is why every poster now looks like a class picture. (Also why, for a big summer blockbuster, why we get six or seven lobby posters with one of the main characters EACH--It's their Award For Participating.)As for why some are bigger than others, I made the comparison to the old days of medieval European religious art:
Before the Italians had discovered 3D perspective, the size of the flat 2D characters depicted was a symbolic representation of their social importance we were meant to be aware of: The ginormous saint would always be just slightly bigger than the king/patron, who was bigger than the normal-size priests, who were twice the size of their churches, out of which little teeny peasants would be exiting, and so on.
As for why some actors in the poster happen to be closer (bigger) than the minor new ones in back (smaller), I merely quoted Grover's observation of "Near....Fa-a-a-a-ar!!"
Grover is a genius.
In the novel, the three children are the main characters and are in every scene. Well, Meg is alone in a small handful of scenes. The three "Mrs." characters serve as their spiritual guides and only show up sporadically, usually to offer cryptic advice that only makes sense later, if at all. I don't recall any of them ever actively participating in the "rescue mission", per se. They're never there when danger is around. But of course they're played by well-established adult actors, so they get "big heads". The father is the center of the quest, so he's symbolically well-positioned, but he's pretty much an afterthought in the book. I don't think he appears until the final 50 pages, maybe. But again, big-name star playing him, so ...
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4 hours ago, Princess of Tap said:
About time
Fair enough! Wasn't complaining. Just noting.
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Here's an interesting quote from that review that pretty much confirms my fears:
Believing in yourself is a valuable lesson, especially for young people, but it is delivered so heavy-handedly that it prevents viewers from discovering it for themselves. At every juncture of the story such messages are imparted to us in the most obvious way, as if they were spelled out in neon.
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Noticed this ad with all the female character's heads enlarged and made more prominent and the male character's heads smaller and/or obscured:
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I thought maybe Tomorrowland had done all right at the box office, but maybe it didn't make back its massive costs.
I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
This is the movie that allegedly caused uncontrollable laughter everywhere it was shown because every time McLagen said Yasmani, he pronounced it "Jazz Minnie". I will have to leave it to you whether it actually sounds like he's saying that or if it's just one of those urban legends that has taken on a life of its own after 90 years, because I've never seen it. But if you ever read a John Ford bio, or anything about the foibles of the early sound era, that story ALWAYS pops up.