DownGoesFrazier
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Posts posted by DownGoesFrazier
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Pretty tragic for Jean that you two never met.
On her deathbed, she was heard bemoaning the fact that I hadn't been born yet.
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My unpopular opinion:
She was a brilliant comedienne, and a fine all-around actress.
But "Bombshell" Jean Harlow isn't the timeless beauty that many attest her to be.
She was very much a product of a look and style that was in vogue at the time, and her own magnificent ability to pull the act off. (She like Bette Davis, was such a great actress that she could convince the audience she was far more beautiful than she actually was.)
Now, I know "beauty" doesn't come strictly from the physical form. But for the sake of my argument, I use a purely aesthetic barometer, one that doesn't factor in character, mind and personality. And Jean Harlow just doesn't do it for me in that metric.
She didn't do that much for me either, but If I could resurrect an expression from the past, I wouldn't kick her out of b**.
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The husband was very important in recorded music. He was responsible for leading one of the most outstanding record companies in the 1950s and 60s.
The wife was a star actress of a decade, mostly starring in comedies and musicals.
Goddard Lieberson and Vera Zorina?
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She did not.
Wasn't Harry Karl also Jewish?
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I saw that today too. In later episodes, Beaver talks of wanting a surfboard. Can't surf on Friend's Lake.
In one episode I recall, Wally is supposed to have a summer job as a lifeguard, but he winds up selling ice cream. There was a beach, but I don't think it was at the ocean.
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Okay, here comes a comment about Seinfeld that may prove to be unpopular.
Much as I loved the show, what's with the fact that pretty much any time Kramer (okay, he's an eccentric), but even George or Elaine show up at Jerry's apartment they start rummaging through his frig or cupboards and help themselves to any food they find? - Without asking!
And Jerry NEVER objects!
Sorry, I've always wondered about that. Does it make me a less than perfect host to object to a friend just casually helping himself to any food I have without a word of thanks or "May I"?
Was there an unwritten food bond on the show, an "Any food I have is yours" agreement that I missed?
Jerry was a pretty thin guy. Maybe this is the reason why.
He made a lot more money than any of them, so they were sponging off of him.
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See what I mean about what strikes one as funny. Those more over-the-top episodes I find very funny, for the most part. By then Jerry, George (especially) and Elaine were starting to rival Kramer in their eccentricities. I think that after Donald left the series they found it more difficult to make it funny with the characters being more realistically portrayed, as in the earliest episodes of the series. So the situations became more extreme.
To me the experiment usually paid off in the laughter department, whether it was George napping underneath his desk at work or Kramer forced to tell maneater Raoul Welch that she was fired from a show and the men ogling the thought of women in cat fights or a bizarro world in which Elaine starts hanging out with three guys the exact opposite of Jerry, George and Kramer. That episode was particularly strange.
One of my very favourites of the entire series was the Chicken Roaster episode, with Kramer unable to get to sleep at night because of the red sign of a Kenny Rogers Roasters opening across the street from his apartment. Jerry switches rooms with him, also having to fight the red light at night (and suspecting that a large puppet of Kramer's is scampering around the apartment after the lights go out). Meanwhile Kramer gets addicted to the chicken (sending Newman over to pick it up for him) but doesn't want Jerry to know. Completely crazy stuff but hilarious to my laughter taste buds.
Who is Donald? You must have Trump on the brain.
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TV shows can take a lot of geographic license. If Mayfield was
in the Midwest, howcum it never snowed or even got very cold.
OTOH when Beaver and his pals called up Don Drysdale in LA,
it was an expensive long distance call. I always figured they
lived somewhere in California, whatever the confusions.
I always thought the Cleavers were upper middle class mainly
because of the very spacious house they lived in and the fact
that Ward seemed to be a well paid white collar guy. And wasn't
there some talk of Aunt Martha sending Beav to a private school.
Yep, these folks had money to burn. If the working class drink is
beer and the upper middle class drink is scotch that would make
a boilermaker the perfect middle class tipple.
Very spacious house? Sounds as if you are used to living in shotgun shacks.
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So what? I can't think of a sitcom that didn't have weaker episodes, including Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. The series are still classics.
As a matter of fact, I just finished watching Seinfeld Season 8 (the first post Donald one) and I found all the episodes good to outstanding. As with everything else, humour is very subjective.
I found most of the later episodes, in which Seinfeld was in charge rather than David, to be too over-the-top, whereas most of the earlier David episodes were tighter and more subtle. IMO.
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Yeah, I always thought Mayfield was just down the road from "Boone City".
(...uh-huh...you go past that airfield boneyard where they dismantled all those B-17s a decade earlier, and then take a right onto Old River Road where you'd see the DeSoto dealership, and then from there straight on to Mayfield)
Er, that's 20 miles, not mikes. Also, being 20 miles from the ocean is inconsistent. When the boys wanted a small, close body of water, they went to Miller's Pond. For a larger body of water, they went to, I believe, Friends Lake.
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In "Beaver", wasn't Mayfield supposed to be in Ohio or somewhere in the Midwest? In the episode I saw this morning, Ward mentioned that they were 20 mikes from the ocean.
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So what? I can't think of a sitcom that didn't have weaker episodes, including Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. The series are still classics.
I saw a really bad MTM episode this weekend, with John Schuck as a former football player looking for a job.
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I dunno....
Considering the amount of beer, wine and now distilled liquor commercials on TV, I'd say the problems of alcohol and alcoholism aren't taken as seriously as they need to be. Getting drunk and drunken behavior is still socially acceptable. People have become more frightened of GLUTEN then they ever were of alcohol related tragedy.
Sepiatone
I guess you don't see many glutenaholics in current movies or TV.
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Definitely the right thread for that opinion.
Probably the best 30-minute comedy of all time. When it was first-run, there was nothing I looked forward to more on network tv than the weekly airing of Seinfeld. Brilliant show.
However, it was very inconsistent, especially after Larry David departed. There were a lot of brilliant monents, and the casting, even the minor characters was perfect. Jack Klompas, Kenny Banya, Mr. Lipman, and on and on. However, there were a number of groaners, just like on these boards.
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I'm too long in the gold tooth to get into rap. It's a young person's
game. If I still had asthma as I did as a child, I could call myself
Huff n Puff Daddy.
Some hip hop is good. All rap is not.
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So, are we DONE here now?
If you wanna discuss '50's lifestyle in movies, did we cover how many concentrate on "white collar" upper middle class families?
Are there many in which Dad comes home from a hard day at the plant or mill and just grabs a beer or cup of coffee? Instead of a "hard" day at "the office" and heads straight for the scotch? And mom all "dolled up" in spite of the strain of dealing with the MAID all day long?
Sepiatone
Speaking of drinking, I don't think "Mary Tyler Moore" would be done the same way today. Lou Grant is a very heavy drinker who is always taking belts in his office. That wouldn't be considered quite so funny today.
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Well, seein' as how you must be sittin' at a computer in order to have responded to my post here DGF, I take it you can't be any kind'a Technophobe then.
(...just your garden variety Luddite in that case then, eh?!)
I just don't want to look like all those people who I think look ridiculous.
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Should've never left the game, DGF.
I mean, we're talkin' the Patriots here, remember.
(...and you should have known..ahem..♫ "They're going to come back after all" ♫ )
Somebody should take away my remote.
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And thus the very reason why Steven Wright has always been your favorite stand-up, right DGF?!
I still haven't gotten an answer to my question about whether a one-legged man can go into a shoe store and buy one shoe.
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After playing the cold blooded Tom Powers in Public Enemy Cagney's image was softened by Warners into playing charming hot tempered man childs for a good number of years (still evident as late as 1938 with Angels With Dirty Faces or even 1941's Strawberry Blonde, for that matter).
I think that Taxi is one of the most interesting of his pre-coders. There's his rough housing treatment of Loretta Young, as James mentioned, but Cagney was rough housing dames in other films as well during that period of time (most notably Lady Killer when he pulls Mae Clarke out of a room by her hair).
The most interesting (and startling) scene in Taxi, however, I think occurs in the scene in which Cagney thinks he has the man responsible for his brother's death hiding behind the locked door of a closet. This is the same scene in which he calls him a "dirty little rat," an expression borrowed by Cagney imitators for years minus the word 'little.'
But it's in this same scene that Cagney's violent temper clearly gets the better of him and he fires bullets through the door, clearly hoping to kill the man inside the closet. Since the studio wanted Taxi to have a happy ending and if Cagney had succeeded he would have been a murderer, the script had the man within the closet (played by David Landau) slip out the back of the closet before the bullets fly.
But the point is Cagney doesn't know that when he fires the gun at the closet door. His character has really flipped out in this scene and, law be damned, prison be damned, capital punishment be damned, depending upon the state, he's trying to kill the guy, even though the manner in which he is doing it is, in fact, cold blooded murder. Remember, too, Cagney is a "good guy" in Taxi, not a hoodlum.
This frightening dark side of Cagney's impulsive man child only ever showed up one time in any of the films in which he was not playing a hood - this one scene in Taxi. In retrospect the explosiveness of Cagney's portrayal here can be seen as a forerunner (though no one knew it at the time) to when he would play one of the screen's most famous psychopaths, Cody Jarrett in White Heat 17 years later.
The Super Bowl was really exciting.
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Why drednm! In this day and age, how you ever live without a cellphone?
The same way I do.
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I ain't paying diddly-squat to comment on a message board.
Does any message board have a per post charge? I'd be broke by now.
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If you dislike seeing comedians laugh at their own jokes, don't ever watch the Bill Maher show. He makes Skelton's delivery seem positively stoic.
A good stand-up comedian shouldn't laugh at all. Many do not even smile. I even find sitcom laugh tracks annoying.
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This couple were a comedy team in vaudeville, radio, and movies. They divorced after twenty years of marriage, but still worked together occasionally.
He became a screenwriter, but still continued to act in movies in supporting roles.
She also continued acting in movies in supporting roles until she got into television in her later years. She had a career rebirth when she landed one of the starring roles in a sixties TV sitcom.
Can you name them?
Hint?
Share your unpopular opinions here!
in General Discussions
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Marilyn couldn't have carried Ava Gardner's or Sophia Loren's G-string.