misswonderly3

Well said, ChorusGirl. That's kind of what I was trying to say in my post about it. Ascotrudgeracer, methinks you can't see the spaghetti for the pasta. Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 14, 2011 2:18 PM

I like Ohio . Good song. Moving on, I hate to be obvious, but I thought I'd post Springsteen's Valentine's Day today. It's not true that you can find anything you want on youtube, I could not get the original studio version, last track on the album "Tunnel of Love". So I've substituted a live performance, just Bruce accompanying himself on the piano. It's ok, but just not the same as the original, which is very lovely and hypnotic. If you can find anywhere on the net the original version, I recommend you check it out. Anyway, here's The Boss, live, with Valentine's Day : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkka1SP1l9c&feature=related

A cliche about great comedians -but, like all cliches, it has some truth to it- is that many of them rarely smile or laugh themselves. Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 13, 2011 6:13 PM

Nice to see you back, mark baby. I saw *Meet John Doe* recently, and really enjoyed it. I don't know why people like to diss Frank Capra. He did what he did really well.

Gentle TCM poster, do you not want any degree of complexity or moral ambivalence in your movie-watching activities? What makes *The Godfather* great is that the characters in it know they are doing evil things, but rationalize it to themselves that "the end justifies the means". I had to watch this movie five times before I completely "got " it. The plot alone is very difficult to follow (at least I found it to be so, the first two or three times I saw it), but it's one of those movies that rewards the viewer with its richness of story and character and with the questions it raises for us to ponder - questions about how people who regard themselves as "good" can do terrible things and justify it to themselves. *The Godfather* posits one of the universal problems in life- what is the nature of evil, and how can we recognize it in all its forms? How can people who do evil things think of themselves as basically "good" , how can they lie to themselves as they do? Ok, I'm getting a little grandiose here, sorry. But to dismiss the film as rubbish because "hey, they're just a bunch of bad guys, what's so interesting about that?" is just a tad silly. Besides, even if you don't like the story or the characters or even the movie's subject matter, you have to admire the cinematography, the mise en scene, the acting. Even if you don't agree that it's a great film, surely you have to concede that it's at least well-made. Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 13, 2011 6:11 PM

Neil Young came and went in his relationship with Crosby Stills and Nash. But I believe he was there for some of the tracks on Deja Vu ("Helpless" for sure, it's his song. ) I've heard that Young sometimes got fed up with some of the egotistical bickering that went on in CSN, particularly between Stephen Stills and David Crosby, so now and then he'd up and leave for a while. Whatever, I'm not a huge fan of these guys, although undeniably they made some great music. From the soundtrack to *O, Brother, Where Art Thou?*, I Am Weary Let Me Rest :

tracey, I too pointed out that scene in *Modern Times*, the one with the eating machine, as an example of how funny and also how critical of contemporary working conditions Chaplin could be. However, your video says it better than I did , since "a picture is worth a thousand words" -and that can certainly be applied to silents movies of all kinds. But as several people here have said, Chaplin was so much more than a comedien. As MovieProfessor put it, Chaplin's Little Tramp character was: a universal symbol of joy, laugher and a few moments of heartbreak that in essence defines what being human is all about . There is so much humanity in his pictures. Nobody has yet mentioned *City Lights*, which of course was made after sound pictures had been well established. But Chaplin still makes this a successful film on many levels - I do not even think about sound or dialogues when I'm watching it. *City Lights* is funny, it's touching, it manages to do something very difficult in film, whether it be a silent or a movie from 2010, and that is to strike a perfect delicate balance between a genuinely moving story, and rank sentiment. I don't know how he does it - something to do with his facial expressions, I think - but Charlie Chaplin manages to make me cry sometimes (and I rarely cry at movies) without being maudlin or emotionally manipulative. It just seems so genuine, so sincere. There's nothing quite like that final scene in *City Lights*, in which the formerly blind little flower girl touches the "Little Fellow's" hand and realizes who he is. Chaplin's face is a masterpiece of love, uncertainty, and hope. (Woody Allen pays homage to that scene at the end of his film *Manhattan*, by the way.) Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 13, 2011 6:15 PM

THE WILD THING BUNCH Pike Bishop and his gang are on the run from Pike's old partner, Deke Thornton. They decide to pull one last heist, a train robbery, but are distracted by their compulsion to drop everything and start dancing whenever they hear the Troggs' simple but infectious tune, "Wild Thing". Both Thornton and the Mexican militia realize this weakness and exploit it to the full, blasting out "Wild Thing" at 150 decibels whenever it looks as though Pike's bunch is going to score. "Ok. was that begin with the left or begin with the right foot?" "It doesn't matter, this isn't the "hokey -pokey" Bonus feature: song, "Wild Thing" :

"What is funny?" is a great question, and yet one that is impossible to answer. But it's still a fun and interesting idea to discuss. The reason of course that it is impossible to answer is, possibly more than any other emotion, it is unique to every individual. Most people can agree more or less on what (- for the sake of argument, let's restrict this to films - ) is "sad" or "mysterious" (not really an emotion I guess) or "frightening" . But what makes a person laugh is almost impossible to pin down and analyze, and if you start to do that, you somehow make it less funny by the time you've finished deconstructing it. Sometimes it's word-play, sometimes it's slapstick, physical humour, sometimes it's situational, sometimes it's absurdist (although that last tends to be too cerebral and conceptual to make me laugh outright.) I love Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, the Naked Gun movies. These are all wildly different, but they all make me laugh. *Bringing up Baby* makes me laugh. The Bowery Boys don't. Dan Duryea makes me laugh, and he's not even a comedian (it's his dead-pan face and sarcastic vocal tones that do it for me). Screwball comedy, nine times out of ten, does not (so dumb, most of the time.) As a matter of fact, *Dr. Strangelove* makes me laugh and shudder at the same time. The Sterling Hayden character is both scary and hilarious ("precious bodily fluids", oh, ok...), and so is Peter Sellers in his multiple roles, especially as Dr. Strangelove himself, attempting to keep his (mechanical?) arm from flailing up into a "Zeig heil" salute. It's also a profoundly frightening film, and I don't like to watch it because it scares me -and it's supposed to. But "dark" comedies can be funny; they have to be very well-written to "work". I like comedies, but after this post, I still can't really define what makes me laugh and what doesn't.

Thanks for the suggestions, fredb, I'll have to watch out for those films. Especially *Backlash*, since I"m a hard core Richard Widmark fan. I noticed that for you Americans, *Stagecoach* is airing on TCM today at 4:00 pm. I love this John Ford Western, (and I'm not a huge Ford fan). It's got such an interesting story, with all the disparate characters travelling in the stagecoach. Love the Claire Trevor character. But for my fellow Canadians, there must be some rights issue, we don't get *Stagecoach* , we get *Love Affair* (a film I very much dislike, for reasons I won't go into, since this is a "Westerns" thread.) Go figure.

Sounds good, but I might just end up sticking around Skip's place, who for some mysterious reason I find oddly attractive. Must be that microfilm he carries around with him...

Kinokima and gagman, I love Charlie Chaplin's work, and I think he was hilarious. The OP wants some examples? Ok, what about the scene in *Modern Times*, where the factory Charlie is working in is so mechanized, even the meals are run by machines. I think Chaplin's futile efforts to try keeping up with the "feeding machine" is hilarious, plus it's making a statement on working conditions in factories of the time. How about the scene in *The Great Dictator*, in which he's pretending to be Hitler, bouncing the globe on his body and smirking to himself? Very visually funny in its own right, and a pretty sharp comment on Hitler and his goals. Besides, it's not only what Chaplin does - it's little finesse things, like his dainty movements and his facial expressions. I don't think silent comedy is outdated at all, funny is funny. It's also very subjective, of course.

Wichita Lineman is a little "spooky", or at least evocative, and I like that. Thinking about hippies today - maybe because it's the 9th anniversary of my seeing Crosby Stills Nash and Young at a reunion concert in Toronto. I'd always thought I didn't like them -just sooo hippyish -but they were really good that night. Maybe all those years off performing together sharpened them up or something. OK I'm blathering - what I'm trying to say is, I've never really liked CSNY, they wallowed in hippydom like no other group, not even the Grateful Dead. Songs about not getting your hair cut, songs about menage a trois (two women, one man, of course, not the other way around -David Crosby liked that kind of stuff), songs about - well, hippy stuff. Anyway, my favourite song by them is not very hippyish at all, probably because it was penned by the least hippyish member of the foursome, Graham Nash. Legend has it that Jerry Garcia played the lovely steel guitar bits on this -even though he'd just learned that instsrument ! You'd never know. Here is the very pretty and only slightly hippyish Teach Your Children : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQtRsSmU-6k Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 12, 2011 11:45 AM

Well, maybe...perhaps that story is apocryphal. Although I kind of like the idea of the Beatles' forgetting the words sometimes. For sure, John Lennon did on occasion, certainly when he was performing live.

People, people, oh why can't we all just get along? I kind of have fun making fun of hippies, but sometimes they had something. Hippy time: "Come on, people now, smile on your brother Everybody get together, try to love one another right now." (some hippy group from 1967. I think the "Youngbloods", whoever they were...)

Depends who's the date (Ben M., for instance...) What is the real name of that restaurant, again? motley crue's ?

Nice pic, kyle. I'm a heterosexual female, (I think ) and even I'm going "huba huba" at the sight of Babs there. I did think of *A Foreign Affair* , it is another great example of the theme I was talking about. Seems to be a pet theme of Billy Wilder's.

*Caught* ! ? Thank you, Jonas, I've been trying to "catch" that film for years. I just asked TCM to email me a reminder for it. Robert Ryan, James Mason, and a rare major role for Barbara Bel Geddes ! A bona fide film noir ! Great stuff !

There's a version of the Beatles doing Kansas City, and Paul forgets the words at some point, so he just goes "And it's a one two three four, *five six seven eight nine* !!" It works fine. Still cold, still snow, lots of it. Makes me think of the Pixies' cover of the Neil Young song, Winterlong. I found one or two live versions of it, but not only does Francis look a little over the hill and I like young, mean Pixies, but (and this was my main problem, I don't care if Francis and Kim are a tad tubby now) it wasn't loud enough. So you'll just have to put up with the record cover and the original Pixies take on this tune: Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 11, 2011 2:15 PM miss-spelled "Neil" as "Neal"

Go, filmlover ! Good luck - some people, even our beloved Fred, just love to find something to get cranky about. (sorry Fred, but the TCM statement on "Classic" makes sense to me. )

I guess this is a little off-topic, but someone brought up *Member of the Wedding* earlier on this thread, so what the hell: Fedya wrote: The earlier Allen movies (before Annie Hall at least) aren't bad, although parts of them get really grating. Sleeper, for example, goes off the rails when they get the the plot involving the leader's nose. But that's when it starts to get really funny. Julie Harris' character in *Member of the Wedding* (what was that kid's name, anyway?) and Woody Allen may both display signs of "obnoxious neurosis", but as I said, Allen is fully aware of it and he's kidding about it, making fun of it. Plus almost everything he says in reference to it is a joke (whether you think a funny one or not.) The Julie Harris creature goes on and on, her speeches are way longer -and more boring- than Woody Allen's "neurotic" asides ever were. Still, leaving Woody Allen out of it, at least we agree about this. This is what I said (in part) about the wretched *Member of the Wedding* : Which brings me to the gratifying part of your post: I too, hate, hate, hate Member of the Wedding . Why *doesn't* Ethel Waters strangle Harris' character, I'm with you there. Ethel Waters was by far the best thing in the movie, which was otherwise by turns overwrought, boring, self-important, and just plain annoying. The young girl was so selfish, so self-absorbed, so self-dramatizing, and so completely lacking in a sense of humour, or indeed in any joy in life, that she was completely unsympathetic. Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 11, 2011 1:24 PM

What's disgraceful, the films, or the fact that you haven't seen them? No point making yourself watch something you're pretty sure you won't enjoy, just because you think that as a serious movie fan, you "ought" to. Look at all the other great movies there are out there that you probably will like. As I said in my original post, the only reason I started watching Westerns at all was because I had to (was taking a film course that included a segment on Westerns, and I didn't want to end up with a D in the class.) So many movies, so little time.

I agree, healthy debate is always a good thing. I don't want to hush anybody up. And yeah, the criticisms of TCM programming do make me wonder if these people remember a time when tcm did not exist and you had to comb the tv guide, as you say, to find something good . Actually, I only write in a complimentary way about TCM because I'm hoping to win a date with BEn Mankiewicz. I don't know what's the matter with these TCM officials, I've been clamouring for this for months. I'm a loyal fan of both TCM and Ben, and I've promised I'll dress up for the occasion. So far, no response. Now that's something to complain about !

Hey, look at all those noir films - films in general, as a matter of fact - where the guy takes the girl out to "dinner", and it turns out to be a hot dog stand. And they usually have a great time !

Best "classic" Westerns: (in no particular order) *Shane* *Stagecoach* *High Noon* *Red River* honourable mention: *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance* (but its focus is on how the "wild west" is changing, how law and order are gradually but inexorably coming to the West, Stewart's lawyer vs Wayne's gun slinger , so it's not "traditional" the way the other three are.) Some would want to include at least one Western about Wyatt Earp, probably *My Darling Clementine*. Sure, fair enough, Somehow the Earp story has never really grasped my imagination the way it's supposed to, and I always get bored watching *My Darling Clementine*. Plus, Henry Fonda always seems to look kind of sulky in this film (actually, in quite a few films). But I suppose we ought to include *Clementine*; not a personal favourite, but I can see a case for its being on this list. Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 10, 2011 10:56 PM