Sprocket_Man
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Posts posted by Sprocket_Man
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> {quote:title=joefilmone wrote:}{quote}
> The movie is still a terrifying classic because they took the story seriously.
Agreed, even though the film still has its share of gallows humor, it's never at the expense of the story or characters, but is always in character. The film's black-and-white, semi-documentary look also adds greatly to the sense of verisimilitude, and it all builds to a really splendid, edge-of-your-seat climax.
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Edward James Olmos was nominated for his performance in STAND AND DELIVER; the Oscar was won that year by Dustin Hoffman for RAIN MAN.
It should also be noted that L.A.'s Garfield High School math teacher Jaime Escalante, whom Olmos portrayed, is now dying of bladder cancer, with only a few weeks or months to live:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-escalante7-2010mar07,0,6159259.story
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Youuu...amoeba!
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I agree with everything you say, except that it was Union Carbide's toxic chemical leak in Bhopal, India, and not Monsanto's.
The point is made, but credit where credit is due.
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The film is actually a loose re-make of SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS's Joel McCrea movie-director character's opus, "Ants in Your Plants of 1939," only without the musical numbers.
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> {quote:title=JarrodMcDonald wrote:}{quote}
> *THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES*...I'm surprised Harold Russell was cast. It lends an air of authenticity.
In Robert Sherwood's original script the Homer Parrish character was a **** whose spasms were caused by battle trauma. Director William Wyler felt that there were a thousand actors who could play that part, and that that's all they'd be: actors playing a part. He decided that if the character were an amputee, it couldn't be faked; he could only be played by someone who had really lost his arms/hands, and that would bring a sense of realism and immediacy to the character and his situation. The only problem was that the Screen Actors Guild didn't have any young male amputees on its roll.
An Army informational film about the rehabilitation of amputees featuring Harold Russell was brought to Wyler's attention. Russell, who'd lost his hands in a training exercise (he never managed to see combat), proved perfect, as his two Oscars (one honorary) attested, though it was never explained in the film how Homer came to be the only person in Midwestern Boone City to have a Boston accent (he was actually born in Nova Scotia, Canasda, but his family moved to Massachusetts when he was five).
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Sean Connery - Sidney Lumet
Spencer Tracy - Stanley Kramer
Bette Davis - William Wyler
Teresa Wright - William Wyler
Henry Fonda - John Ford
Tyrone Power - Henry King
Errol Flynn - Michael Curtiz
Gene Kelly - Stanley Donen
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> {quote:title=Big_Bopper wrote:}{quote}
> It'd be nice in a perfect world if companies like Kino who sell "restored" or "authorized" versions of
> movies which then turn out to be not quite restored or authorized would take these items back & offer new versions as an exchange when real restored or authorized versions become available. If you really understand what I'm getting at, then this activity would more or less show responsibility towards the purchasers of such items by the company rather than the alternate attitude "oh well it was the best at that time"... which gives way to people stealing these items by downloading or buying bootlegs etc. I am wondering if Kino decides to sell the new "metropolis" if they would accept returns of their previous "restored" version. Please bear with me cuz I'm new on this board.
So, do you think that, say, auto manufacturers should also take back their old cars when technology improves and offer brand-new vehicles in their place?
Kino's earlier restored version of METROPOLIS was marketed in good faith; no one can anticipate when something like a better film negative or print shows up. We're also not talking about medication needed to save someone's life. DVD's are something a person wants, not needs. If a better version comes along, you can either buy it, or not. No one's forcing you, one way or the other.
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Years ago, the political writer, Richard Reeves, evaluated the presidents in an article for the Los Angeles Times. One passage he wrote about Reagan has always stuck in my mind:
"Ronald Reagan is a man who knows what he knows, and he's disinterested in, or distrustful of, everything he doesn't know."
That actually describes a lot of people the world over, and everyone has the right to be that insular and parochial -- except elected officials in whose hands the trust and welfare of the rest of us is placed.
It was true of Reagan, and even truer of G.W. Bush, and we all end up paying the price for their view of the universe's being frozen in amber.
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> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=PrinceSaliano wrote:}{quote}
> > > {quote:title=Sprocket_Man wrote:}{quote}
> > > The real point is being missed here.
> > >
> > > Instead of trying to do things that will benefit the living in this country and this planet, a group of people, including some in Congress, are wasting time and energy and money in the pointless pursuit building monuments to their hero, Reagan (whether he actually accomplished any, or all, of what they said he did is, in the end, irrelevant).
> > >
> > > The ancient Romans were also obsessed with glorifying heroes, real or imagined, and what is their Rome now? Piles of ruins in the center of the capital city of a fourth-rate country.
> > Well said. And never mind that Ronald Reagan was probably exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's before his second term expired. What ailed Caligula?
Expanding on what I wrote earlier, there's also an unfortunate tendency in the American psyche to form attachments to symbols while ignoring substance. Like the inhabitants of Imperial Rome, we love monumental architecture, topped by eagles and chiseled mottoes that most citizens honor, at best, in the breach even as they go out and do what they want, the consequences and effects on the larger society be damned.
Americans will weep at the sight of a bust of Millard Fillmore but, show them a copy of the Bill of Rights and they think it's the Communist Manifesto. They nod approvingly when a few politicians proposes a Constitutional amendment to criminalize flag-burning, yet they stand by apathetically when those same politicians trample their Constitutional rights on the specious grounds of "keeping them safe."
Few people in this country seem to understand that every nation has a flag, and every nation's flag is just a piece of cloth. That cloth won't keep you warm on freezing winter nights, stop bullets or keep one citizen from another's throat or the state from throwing you in jail without probable cause or a warrant. If the flag stands for all those things Americans like to hold dear -- Valley Forge and Washington crossing the Delaware, the Doughboys coming home from WW I and the the GI's returning in triumph from the battlefields of WW II -- then it also stands for the worst this country has to offer: slavery, Jim Crow laws, the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during WW II, the Dred Scott decision, the Gulf of Tonkin deception, and on and on and on. The flag is, therefore, only as good or bad as everything that's even happened under it or has been done in its name.
The Constitution, on the other hand, is only as good or as bad as the words contained in it. It's the product of ten-thousand years of human suffering, and an honest and detailed attempt to address the chaos and injustices that arise in any society in which the powerful have unfettered control over the lives of the powerless. If I could ordain any improvement in the society in which I live, it's that every schoolchild be inculcated with the firm and imperishable belief that the protections of Constitution and Bill of Rights are their birthright, and that Patrick Henry's words about Liberty and Death should be theirs.
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The real point is being missed here.
Instead of trying to do things that will benefit the living in this country and this planet, a group of people, including some in Congress, are wasting time and energy and money in the pointless pursuit building monuments to their hero, Reagan (whether he actually accomplished any, or all, of what they said he did is, in the end, irrelevant).
The ancient Romans were also obsessed with glorifying heroes, real or imagined, and what is their Rome now? Piles of ruins in the center of the capital city of a fourth-rate country.
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!img src=http://ras60.webs.com/tcm2.JPG!
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> {quote:title=sineaste wrote:}{quote}
> The change in the attitude of the Soviet Union didn't coincide with the presidency of
> Reagan, but with the appointment of Gorbachev as General Secretary. Without that
> change it's possible the Soviet Union would have continued.
True, but not by much. If Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell had never been born, we'd still have the electric light bulb and the telephone, though the timetable would have been altered somewhat. The momentous events in history are ordained by history, itself, and the weight, momentum and pressures by civilization for something to happen.
They happen, in short, because they can't not happen. Thomas Carlyle's "Great Man of History" theory is, therefore, so much bunk.
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I frankly find the magazine and its name rather offensive.
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It's actually called overscanning, and it's often a problem. The trouble is that television networks are usually loathe to let there be a slight gap between the edge of the program material's frame and the edge of the viewer's TV set. It's less of a problem with modern flat-screen televisions, since their sides are perfectly straight and the material's frames can be aligned very precisely -- if the entity doing the film scanning takes the trouble.
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> {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}
> >The belief, held by most Republicans, is that Ronnie is responsible for bringing down the USSR by out-producing them militarily, and they bankrupted themselves trying to keep up. The "tear down this wall" thing was just window dressing. Since this in not the place for politics, I'll stop on that subject.
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> Ha, Ha, Ha....
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> The Great Man brought down the Evil Empire with our military might and dogged determination.
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> SDI scared Gorby and he knew his system was on the way out. They were broke and with no energy left.
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> Ronald Reagan beat 'em...
>
> Edited by: JakeHolman on Mar 7, 2010 12:27 AM
As Franklin Roosevelt used to say, you can repeat a lie a thousand times, but that won't make it the truth...
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From yesterday's Salon.com:
"The Oscar": Greatest terrible movie of all time
It destroyed careers -- and won no Oscars. This 1966 spectacle of wretched excess must be seen to be believed
By Erik Nelson
"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity," wrote Vladimir Nabokov, and if there was ever a better description of the Oscars, well, I?m still looking.
On this 82nd Oscar weekend, the world prepares to once again pretend that we care about who wins and who loses. We swear that this time, we?ll set the DVR to record an extra hour, no matter how many promises are made about keeping the event to a trim three hours.
But the essence of everything we secretly love about the Oscars, the essence of everything we not-so-secretly love about movies, the essence of exhilarating philistine vulgarity, can also be found Sunday night, and this time, you can trust your DVR, as you must trust me.
And that essential item would be "The Oscar" -- perhaps the greatest single movie ever made.
Now, I know what you are thinking.
That?s kind of a bold statement, Sparky.
Well, yeah.
But this rarely shown, not-available-on-DVD masterpiece has a hypnotic power and glory that can transform lives, conjure up its own language, and transport you to a land of surrealistic fantasy. Let a writer who has charted that borderland, Neil Gaiman, tell you just one of the reasons why. "'The Oscar,'" says Gaiman, "is the kind of film where enough little things go wrong to produce a film in which something huge goes strangely right -- but in a way that nobody who set out to make the film could ever have wanted."
The original writer of "The Oscar," Gaiman?s close friend Harlan Ellison, attended the 1966 premiere. Ellison recalls: "I practically wept. I saw this film for which I had worked for a year, and people are laughing in the theater and they're laughing at dramatic moments. And I'm sinking lower and lower and lower in my seat. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I said, 'This is the end of my feature film career.'"
* Continue Reading
Time magazine concurred with Ellison?s assessment, writing that the film "should be shown exclusively in theatres that have doctors and nurses stationed in the lobby to attend viewers who laugh themselves sick." The New York Times castigated "this arrantly cheap, synthetic film, which dumps filth and casts aspersions upon the whole operation of Hollywood -- a community that may not be perfect but is not so foul as hinted here."
Well, we?ll save that last bit for later dissection.
But even with this disastrous reception, the movie still might have managed to pull out of its death spiral, but it had the misfortune of coming out in the exact second that the Old Hollywood it celebrated was expiring. In a way, "The Oscar" was a barge at its own Viking funeral, dead on arrival.
Yet, here I am, staking my nonexistent critical reputation on this film being some kind of masterpiece.
It is.
Some background.
Last week, Der Spiegel published an article documenting the last four minutes of Air France Flight 447, lost at sea on a routine flight from Rio to Paris. This catastrophe was the result of a cascading series of small events that, when added up, created one of the worst manmade disasters in recent memory.
See where I am going here?
"The Oscar" was based on a trashy not-so-bestseller by Richard Sale, documenting the rise and fall of an unscrupulous heel, Frankie Fane. This is one of the few novels I have read that include footnotes, where the ludicrous action above is contextualized, or disclaimed. Somehow, someone thought this book would make a great movie. They were wrong. And in a decision that would forever haunt the Academy, it allowed its name and Oscar?s likeness to be expropriated. The film?s producer, Russell Rouse, and "director," Clarence Green, were now cleared for takeoff.
Then, the system failures began. Casting, story and script for starters. The original cast was to include Steve McQueen, who was just coming of acting age, as the unscrupulous Frankie Fane, with Peter Falk as his long-suffering best friend, muse and whipping boy, Hymie Kelly. Instead, we got Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, in his one and only dramatic role.
More on that later.
Next, the script. In 1964, when "The Oscar" was on the runway, Ellison was blazing a reputation as the fastest gun in Hollywood. Using his experience in the pulps, and ferocious talent for both writing and self-promotion, Ellison?s screenwriting potential seemed limitless. Swinging for the fences, he wrote "The Oscar" as if it were the last big studio feature he would ever get a chance to tackle.
He had that part right, at least.
During the writing process, the script was taken out of Ellison?s hands and "improved" by the director and producer, both of whom would ultimately receive screen credit. According to Ellison; "There were three offices at Paramount in a row. I was in a little room with my typewriter and my desk. In between was the foyer, and there were two secretaries there. I would write a page, and I would put them in the out basket on this side of my desk. My secretary would come in, she would take the pages, she would retype it and take it over and put it on the desk of the secretary over there. That secretary would pick it up, take it into Rouse and Green. They would work on it. They would give it back to her. She would retype it, give it to my secretary, who would bring it in to me. And I would see the same page I had just done. I would say, 'I need you like an extra set of elbows.' Which has got a little something to it. And it would come back, 'I need you like a hole in the head.'"
The end result of this hijacking is one for the ages.
Here are only few of the film's embarrassment of verbal riches, a jumbled remix if you will.
First off, "The Oscar" has its own private lexicon, its secret language. Not content to call hitchhiking, well, hitchhiking, it is called here "busting thumb." "Fat honey-dripper" or "soft in the gourd" is a term of apparent disparagement. "Birdseed," an expletive. People don?t just endure stress in "Oscar"-speak; they have "thrombos," a phrase later expropriated by Austin Powers. They don?t flatter, they "spread the pollen around." And "like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver" into our veins, this "Oscar"-speak eventually transforms into actual dialogue.
And what dialogue!
What?s not to like about using the line "You lie down with pigs, you come up smelling like garbage!" not once, not twice, but three times? And there is so much more. In a bedroom argument with Frankie, German then-bombshell Elke Sommer delivers the following gem almost phonetically: "You should put that speech on tape, It?s gotten to be a fireproof, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted excuse for never talking to me."
Frankie, or as Hymie refers to him, "Snarly Fane, the boy-faced dog!" has weighed in earlier. "You free-thinkers confuse me. Put a little chlorophyll in the conversation!" Over to Elke. "Take one from column A and two from column B, you get an egg roll either way. I am the end result of everything I've ever learned, all I ever hope to be, and all the experiences I've ever had." Frankie has had enough. "Will you stop beating on my ears! I?ve had it up to here with all this bring-down! I?m me! If you don?t like what you see, then change the scenery!" And of course, there is Hymie, watching it all go down to the wire. "You finally made it, Frankie! Oscar night! And here you sit, on top of a glass mountain called Success. Ever think about it? I do, friend Frankie, I do..."
And in conclusion, Hymie puts it best. "Man, what a scene," he notes. "Forget it!"
If only we could.
There is a very thin line between Clifford Odets' script for "The Sweet Smell of Success" and Ellison?s for "The Oscar." But one had a producer who knew how to cast (himself, in Burt Lancaster?s case) and a director who knew how to actually, well, direct. "Oscar" director Clarence Green clearly knew only one word.
"More."
And more is what you get.
It is one thing to read dialogue like the above, but to hear it, see it, live it in a garish, grossly overlit cheesily decorated set, with every verbal crescendo matched by Percy Faith?s melodramatic score, with a "who?s who" cast of cameos, many of them Oscar winners, is a kind of cinematic satori. And then, there is the rest of the cast, from Ernest Borgnine to Jill St. John to Peter Lawford to Walter Brennan to Joseph Cotten to Broderick Crawford to Hedda Hopper (!!) and Edith Head (!!!), all dialed to 11 on the performance scale. The written word, even in "Oscar"-speak, can only go so far.
Imagine if Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" were played, not as a climax, but 73 straight times. That would be "The Oscar." Just about every scene is a shrieking climax, with every available piece of scenery chewed and spit out with insane commitment. And that commitment is the key to the enterprise. It is clear that everyone felt they were making a masterpiece. From Ellison, who crafted every single line as a "too smart" bomb for maximum dramatic impact, to the feral Stephen Boyd, who seems to be having a thrombo in every single scene, to poor Tony Bennett, who bears a striking resemblance to an incontinent basset hound, everybody brought his or her A game. And when the most restrained and dignified performance in a movie is by Milton Berle, you can be assured that you are in the presence of something that seriously warps the space-time continuum.
Despite its criminal non-issue on DVD, "The Oscar" lives on. Years ago, SCTV brilliantly parodied the film in a sketch called "The Nobel," where Dave Thomas possessed the soul of Stephen Boyd possessing Frankie Fane. But the real thing is beyond parody. One anonymous commentator wrote on "The Oscar's" IMDb site that Boyd?s performance is what would happen "if one of the 'Thunderbirds' marionettes had been cast in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' His body language is quite like some poor puppet being randomly jerked around while the puppeteer tries to shake off LSD-conjured spiders."
Uh, precisely.
As another, less anonymous commentator wrote, "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
T.S. Eliot said that.
"You?re making my head hurt with all that poetry!"
Frankie Fane said that. Game. Set.
Match.
What makes "The Oscar" so mesmerizing is the consistency of its deranged vision. All its monumental problems and excesses somehow lead to a critical mass that defies all criticism. If it were any better, it wouldn?t be nearly as great. Like Hitchcock?s "Vertigo," it conjures up its own reality, and somehow, the insane parts make the whole less of a movie, and more of an immersive experience. James Cameron?s Pandora has nothing on Frankie Fane?s Hollywood. Neil Gaiman began watching "The Oscar" by himself but was soon overwhelmed. He had to bring some friends in to complete the journey. Which, of course, is why TCM?s showing Sunday night should make the perfect Oscar party.
Consider yourself warned.
At the same time this Viking barge burned down to the waterline, taking professional reputations with it, the film?s executive producer, Joseph E. Levine, prepared his next project. Levine had optioned another minor 1960s novel, also set in Los Angeles.
Only this time, everything went right, with the script, director and cast aligning perfectly.
Still, especially on Oscar night in Hollywood, I?ll gladly take Snarly Fane, the boy-faced dog, over Dustin Hoffman?s "Graduate."
"If you?re looking for a bruise," Broderick Crawford?s venal sheriff blusters to Hymie and Frankie, "keep scratching!"
If you?re looking for a cinematic revelation, well, you now know where to itch.
You?ve heard the lecture, now, experience the lab. "The Oscar" will get a rare public showing on TCM this Sunday night (8 p.m. EST). What is your favorite "Oscar"-speak moment or line? Come Monday morning, I?ll be waiting to hear from you "honey-drippers" in the comments section.
Remember, you do not judge "The Oscar."
It judges you.
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...REAGAN ACTUALLY MEANT TO SAY, "MISTER GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS MALL!"
> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote}
> Well, this may be true, but he was still the one world leader who, rightly or wrongly, received most of the credit for having taken on the "bad guys" and demanding publicly that they tear down the Berlin Wall.
It's not as though there was any political price to be paid for having done it, so what's the big deal? It was just empty rhetoric that he and his advisors knew would play well on the evening news programs.
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> {quote:title=JarrodMcDonald wrote:}{quote}
> Incidentally, I had another thought about this...
>
> I bet if a well-liked actor portrayed Hitler in a film, in a positive or sympathetic light, that would definitely overshadow the technique. And that could conceivably wreck the actor's career. Especially in Hollywood where there are a lot of Jewish craftsmen. It is fashionable to use Hitler as the uber-villain. There can be no psychology applied to him, no lines of gray or compassion...or presentation of him as a multi-layered individual with a multi-layered psyche.
There's a big difference between a dramatization of Hitler's life showing "compassion" (of which he obviously deserves none) and acknowledging that, like everyone else, he had an active psychology and a line of reasoning, however twisted, that led him to say and do the things he did. I do think that you'd find that that twisted reasoning is incrementally quite small from anyone else's reasoning; a little resentment here, and a bit of narcissism there can contribute mightily toward altering the trajectory and momentum of a life toward something almost unrecognizable as human, or humanistic.
The most important point is that it's not only intellectually lazy to merely toss the Hitlers and Stalins into the basket marked "evil," but dangerous; to do so is to abdicate the essential responsibility we all have, both as individuals and as a society, to know our adversaries, how they came to believe what they did, manipulate all that they manipulated, and wield the immense destructive power whose terrible price the world is still paying.
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...AND ALL THE KING'S HORSES, AND ALL THE KING'S MEN COULDN'T PUT THE STASI BACK TOGETHER AGAIN
> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote}
> I think a lot of Germans since the late 80s would be grateful to Reagan, actually, for helping bringing down the Berlin Wall.
Oh, not that old myth again. By the late 1980s the political and economic instability in the Warsaw Pact countries that had been gaining momentum ever since the Truman Administration instituted the policy of containment of the USSR and its satellites reached a point where it was going to happen, come hell or high water. Reagan's apologists, who obviously hated the Soviet Union, and Communism in general, still can't see -- or, more precisely, won't admit[/u] -- that the Soviet system was so bankrupt -- economically, spiritually, morally, that it collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiency and injustice, and didn't need Ronnie Reagan's political posturing to make it happen.
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> {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}
> Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter's administration which was an economic mailaise of high inflation and unemployment.
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> Jobs and prosperity resulted from Reagan's actions.
A lot of Germans say the same thing about Hitler.
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> {quote:title=casablancalover wrote:}{quote}
> I don't see why the don't put him on the $5,000 dollar bill. People who see those are the ones who Reagan was most indebted to.
And, thanks to his tax-cuts-as-welfare-for-the-rich, they were the ones most indebted to Reagan.
And let's not forget that Reagan eventually signed into law the biggest tax increase in U.S. history.
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Now, if only members of Congress could be barred from entering the Capitol Building for telling lies.
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Mervyn LeRoy's I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG
in Films and Filmmakers
Posted
> {quote:title=TikiSoo wrote:}{quote}
> Is it my imagination, or does Chain Gang have a similar theme to Les Miserables? If so, it may be considered a "modern" version of the same story. Has either story been remade lately?
It is largely in your imagination. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is really about the joined-at-the-hip relationship between an essentially innocent convict and the policeman, Javert, obsessed with bringing him to justice (as Javert defines it in his own mind). I AM A FUGITIVE has no character analogous to Javert, or situation analogous to that.