misswonderly3
-
Posts
12,768 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
36
Posts posted by misswonderly3
-
-
This was the other song I was thinking of posting for Valentine's Day. It's only the day after, so maybe it can work retroactively. Sam Cooke had to have one of the most appealing voices in the world. Here's his sweet appeal to Cupid :
-
Prince, the thread about hard to find titles is a perfectly good thread, but it doesn't have anything to do with this thread, nor with all the complaining that people do around here. Sure, many are saying there are films they'd like to see that are not being shown on TCM or anywhere else for that matter, rare film titles that are their "holy grail" of sought-after movies. None of the posts I read on that thread sounded "complainy".
I find it ironic that this thread, which I started almost as a joke, to kind of point out how many threads there were about "issues" and criticisms people have with TCM - and surely you have to agree that there have been a lot of these kinds of threads lately - has been labelled as a "complaint" thread itself.
The only thing I'm complaining about is the complainers.
As for Fred saying I started this thread because I was "bored with the movie", I don't know what he's talking about, and neither does he. I was bored with all the "Why can't TCM be exactly what +I+ want it to be ?" threads, that's all. I wasn't even watching a movie at the time I started this thread.
Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 15, 2011 9:23 AM
Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 15, 2011 10:17 AM
-
You're actually making me mad, and I rarely get mad on these boards.
A) Why was my comment deserving of a "yawn"? You were suggesting that *Rachel Rachel* ought to be a novel set in the deep South, and I was enlightening you as to its origins. Ok, yeah, you were most likely joking, but why is it boring to find out where the idea for a film comes from?
I started this thread half-jokingly myself, simply to point out all the complaining that goes on around these boards and to question if it's all really necessary. My only "complaint" was about all the complainers, amongst whom you play a major role. -
"..Just look at these shoes, I've only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through...and I'm sick and tired of this office..."
-
> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> Oh no! Another complaint thread!
>
> Why don?t you guys chill out.
Fred, you're missing the point of this thread...that's exactly what +I+ am saying. (At the risk of sounding a little grouchy, you actually complain a lot more than I do .)
ps *-Rachel, Rachel* is based on a novel by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian writer who set all her novels in Canada, including the book upon which this film is based, A Jest of God.
So there wouldn't be any Southern Gothic stuff.
Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 14, 2011 10:33 PM
-
Just out of curiousity, I counted up the threads in "General Discussions" whose topic is some kind of complaint or criticism of TCM programming. Just on the first two pages of "General Discussions" alone, I found five, count 'em, five (5). And those are just the recent ones. I honestly do understand that it's kind of a love/hate thing, that if people didn't care about this television channel they wouldn't bother to post about it at all. And I'm sympathetic, up to a point, with some of the "issues" people have,
By "sympathetic" I don't mean I necessarily agree with them, just that I feel they can and do have a right to air their grievances about their beloved station; it gives them a way to "vent".
But do we have to have so many? These threads take up almost half the space on the boards sometimes, and often the complaints are duplicated in more than one thread.
Surely the main purpose of this TCM fansite is to discuss movies, actors, actresses, directors, character actors, cinematography, themes in movies, etc. etc. Why do we want to waste so much time "venting" (a less offensive word, perhaps, than "complaining".)
Maybe the "mods" should integrate all these complaint threads and roll 'em all into one big "Feel free to diss TCM here" thread. I'm half serious, half joking.
What's my own pet complaint? Hmm - I wish Robert Osborne, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Mankiewicz would get up from their chairs and dance now and then, maybe kind of like a 7th inning stretch. But then we'd have endless arguments on what they'd dance to...
Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 14, 2011 8:05 PM
-
A fine little scene that beautifully demonstrates what we Chaplin fans have been talking about. What a graceful and economical way to make a statement about what was happening in the world at the time *The Great Dictator* was made. And Charlie has just nailed it, the vanity of the Hitler figure, his arrogance, and the trademark Chaplin finesse, the delicacy with which he "dances" with his globe balloon.
Edited by: misswonderly on Feb 14, 2011 7:39 PM
-
> {quote:title=LonesomePolecat wrote:}{quote}
> ... Basically, it's not that it's a bad movie, it's more that I don't think it's as great a movie as everyone else seems to think it is (i.e. AFI and other critic people), so mostly it's that I'm sick of hearing about it. I know a lot of people adore it, and that's cool, but it doesn't mean it's the greatest movie ever made. There are a lot of better movies that don't get as much praise, and that makes me sad too.
That's exactly how I feel about a lot of movies, but not *The Godfather*. It isn't so much that I detest them, I would just leave them alone if everyone would just shut up about them and stop going on about how great they are.
At the risk of de-railing this thread (which is a very interesting topic in its own right), some films I feel the same way about are : *Dr. Zhivago, Gone with the Wind, A Star is Born (pick any version), Laurence of Arabia*...as you can see, I have a problem with "epics". Anyway, some of the films I list I don't really mind, but I'm irritated by how people rave about them, how "wonderful" and "great" and "profound" they are. I really just hate them in reaction to everyone else who loves them (to a degree that they don't deserve, IMO.)
So, even though I personally think *The Godfather* is a great movie and deserves its praise, I can understand what you're saying about it, how it bothers you that the critics are always putting it on "best film" lists, etc. Chacon a son gout.
-
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 :
-
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 ?
I started this thread half-jokingly myself, simply to point out all the complaining that goes on around these boards and to question if it's all really necessary. My only "complaint" was about all the complainers, amongst whom you play a major role.
Was Chaplin Funny?
in General Discussions
Posted
red, you demonstrate good taste. Glad you mentioned the roller skating scene in the department store, it's full of that special kind of physical humour Chaplin could do so well.