Sprocket_Man

> What movies of the World's Oldest Profession are your favorites? Spielberg's War Whores.

>PUNCTUATION GRAMMAR AND SPELLING HAVE GONE DOWN LIKE TODAY'S OP ON THIS THREAD. How's this, then: *T.C;M:*

>I love almost anything with Richard Widmark in it, and *Panic in the Streets* is no exception. I like Widmark, too, but Jack Palance is just brilliant. He steals the movie, his emotions swinging like Poe's pendulum as his needs dictate.

Bob is toast?

Of course, you mean GUNGA DIN, and the interiors were filmed at RKO's facilities in Hollywood (some may also have been shot in Culver City), not Studio City (where Republic Pictures' lot was located).

> Sounds like you're in for a big disappointment, baglady. Don't get me wrong. I love THE SEARCHERS. It's my favorite western after BUTCH CASSIDY. But I've found that most people, after hearing over & over how great such & such a movie is, are usally disappointed when they finally see it. That's because they can't be anything BUT disappointed because no movie could live up to the expectations they've built up in their mind. You have to know WHY The Searchers is considered great. There are many reasons but mostly I think it's because of the images the film creates. Peter Bogdanovich, before he became a director, was in charge of programming at an arthouse theatre in Manhattan. He did an experiment one night in which he ran THE SEARCHERS with the sound off. Afterwards, he found that most of the audience had been able to follow the storyline even though they were deprived of the sound. The great directors knew that movies are based on image & that if you are "telling" the story instead of "showing" the story, you are not using the medium properly. Nobody understood that better than John Ford. And THE SEARCHERS proves it. No, it's something more basic than that. Few, if any, movies are great, or perceived as such, upon first viewing. That usually comes after multiple viewings and much reflection, as was certainly the case with THE SEARCHERS. Movies could not, in fact, even begin to be considered art unless they were subject to the same process of critical reëvaluation essential to the appreciation and evolution of the arts and literature. If Bogdanovich actually performed the above "experiment," its results only confirmed the conventional wisdom upon which the whole foundation of movie-making rests (I recently got into an online dispute with New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis, who seems to have absolutely no understanding as to the nature and vey definition of cinema as a series of images, as opposed -- in her view -- to simply being the manner in which those images are shown. It's utterly astonishing in this day and age how someone with such qualifications, or lack thereof, can attain the position of film critic at any reputable news outlet, let alone at what's probably the world's most influential news organization). Getting back to Bogdanovich for a moment, the nature of cinematic storytelling has always been based on "showing, not telling," which is even the directive when learning how to write a screenplay (write visually). Silent film was, obviously, based on this. Even after the advent of sound films, a cinematically well-told film can be generally followed via the images alone. The opposite is true of television, which has never been a visual medium. Television is really old-time radio with largely irrelevant pictures, its stories told in dialogue and not images. It's meant to be followed while knitting, playing with the cat or ironing in the next room. This has always been known, and it really didn't need Peter Bogdanovich, or anyone else, to point it out.

>LFN, there was a tv series narrated by Tom Bosley back in the 80's called That's Hollywood, which was Fox's own way of doing That's Entertainment and focusing only on Fox films. Each episode had a theme, like (my fave) the one on disaster movies, etc. Mainly 1970's (1976-82).

>I detest the The Lord of the Rings movies because the orcs are all wrong and are not at all frightening. The Orcs think you're cute, too.

>*I've also been cursed with intermittent freezes, followed by the sort of "jump" as described above, for over a year. I also see the same periodic green streaks on TCM's image. I get Shaw Direct, a satellite company in Canada. Thre answer should be obvious: everything freeezes in Canada at this time of year.

To heck with TCM, the trilogy just came out on Blu-ray, and at a bargain price (I picked up the 3-disc box for $20.00).

>I always cite "Red Planet Mars" as a great example of mathematical ineptitude. Everybody in the room agrees that pi is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. Pi is the ratio of diameter to circumference. You're obviously thinking of pi times radius which, when squared, gives you the circle's area. One needn't be from Mars to understand this stuff.

The veracity of this Cheetah's claim to fame is being called into question: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/cheetah-chimp-actor-tarzan-films-dies-age-80-article-1.997718?localLinksEnabled=false I, however, believe the chimp can have been that old, based on this: And a fountain of youth it was, indeed.

>You put a , in the title of THE MORE THE MERRIER that doesn't belong there. Irrespective of whether it belongs there or not, the , is called a comma.

> As incest is the practice of close blood relatives having sex with one another I'd think that there are a lot of places where people do it much more than do Hollywood residents. I'm not sure how William Schallert starring in one film with Margaret Field and then another with Sally Field is equivalent to the repugnant activity that is incest. I'm beginning to think that anything expressed in a purely figurative sense is going to be lost on you.

No, not really, and certainly not polite. > Migsly says right up front that 'King of Kings' is his favorite movie of all time. I think it's only polite to take that into consideration before arguing over his initial complaint. The very moment someone crosses the line and blames someone's ethnic heritage for the substance of that person's opinion, he or she has gone too far. Whether Ben Mankiewiciz is Jewish or Greek or Black is irrelevant, and "politeness" has been expunged from the equation. There are those who think they can conceal and soft-pedal their bigotry in genteel, indirect language, but it's funny -- those who are being talked about always seem to figure it out. It's those who agree with the bigots, or merely turn their heads away while rationalizing that "it's only words" and not a lynching (cross burning and hanging in effigy being, presumably, a gray area) who never quite seem to grasp it.

Yup, Harryhausen & Co. were sure adept at predicting the future:

>I like the Man from Planet X because Sally Field's mother is in it and William Schallart is very young and is the bad guy. Sally Field was the original TV Gidget in the 1960s, and when the show was revived in the mid-1980's as The New Gidget (starring Caryn Richman), William Schallert played the character's father. It just proves that there is no place on earth quite as incestuous as Hollywood.

I find most of the film (unintentionally) funny.

Her name was Ann Sheridan, not Anne.

>I mean, did Sprocket say somethin' like, "Jesus was a fraud" or somethin' like THAT? Jesus wasn't a fraud...but many of his most vociferous promoters are (see: "Crusades, the").

SUNDAY DINNER WITH A SOLDIER THE SULLIVANS THE CLOCK THE MORE, THE MERRIER THE 49th PARALLEL IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Glenn Ford and Loretta Young, two actors who make it clear that the universe devotes an inordinate amount of time and energy punishing the innocent.

Huh?

> What a typical liberal hypocrite. If you thought this movie wasn't "coherent," then you are worse off than I thought. See my first response. The Mankieiwcz family are Jewish, in origin, at least, but that's beside the point. Migsly has no argument to make about KING OF KINGS' merits as a film; he can only blame any and all criticism of it on "the Jews," apparently reasoning that that's tantamount to criticism of Christianity. It's a tack so childish and ludicrous that it's almost funny but, as the above title-bar indicates, it sets this thread and discussion on a very slippery slope. That libel was the engine that drove the Third Reich to murder six-million Jews, and tens of millions more who failed to measure up to its standards of racial purity. This is a valid thread on an important subject, one that should neither be locked nor deleted; it's this Migsly who should be banned from the site permanently, and I call on the Administrator to do so.

>...you bring up an interesting point as well regarding its relevancy. There are plenty of classic movies that are all about preserving the status quo regarding race relations , i.e. 1934's Imitation Of Life , Gone With The Wind, The Song of the South as there are plenty of classic movies that seek to challenge those notions, however subtle and direct as well, i.e. 1959's Imitation Of Life, Pinky, No Way Out, and you mention The Searchers (a movie I still have to see). It's not just race relations and racism; what this highlights is a tactic those determined to preserve the status quo (which today is centered on economic inequality) frequently, if not almost always, employ to distract the public from their real goal. In the 1920s and again in the '40s and '50s it was the fear of Communism they exploited to distract the American people from the inexorable movement toward integration and educational opportunity; today it's fear of immigrants, legal and otherwise, and Islam, attempting to link both to the specter of terrorism. It's an insidious tactic, largely based on bald-faced lies, that not only clears a path for the liars' real purpose (today unfettered and unregulated actions by big business; corporate "personhood" with its freedom to contribute unlimited funds to political campaigns; and undeserved tax breaks for the wealthy, among other destructive things), but also tars entire classes of people with malevolent intent and actions they did not commit, or even contemplate. There is no one so evil and worthy of contempt as him who would undermine systems of protection for the powerless for their own profit.