AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Actually, I think Midnight Cowboy has the best shots of the old Times Square. It's actually kind of historical in a way.
That's a great movie, but an even better one in terms of depicting the New York of that period is Al Pacino's first feature film, The Panic in Needle Park.
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Hmmm...Doris Day and John Wayne... I'm wondering if, although popular enough to warrant programming as SOTM, these stars aren't as popular with TCM staff as others, so they minimize their "pain" by cramming them in a week to "get it over with."
Well, if it'd been me, I might've run them all back-to-back at fast forward speed, just to get them out of the way even more quickly. Guess I'm not that much of a fan of cowboys or virgins.
OTOH January (Crawford) and March (Astor) have been good enough to make me a bit more willing to take 31 Days of Repeats and a month of John Wayne. And after all, we've gotta give Jake in the Heartland a reason to keep coming back.
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*Instead of being outraged by the criminal activities being depicted, children identified with the criminals.*
In later years, some called it the "Ron O'Neal effect".
Yeah, and it was sure hard to tell why those stupid kids would've ever wanted to emulate that lowlife:
OTOH that Super Fly movie did have one positive impact, at least in the eyes of some conservative politicians and the local conk jockeys: It started a mini-trend away from Afros and back into hair straighteners.
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Would you rather go back to the Times Square of the 1970s?
Of[/i]TimesSquareinThe1970s+(16).jpeg]
Just point me to the nearest time machine, and I'll jump aboard in a New York minute. McGirr's and the 711, here I come!
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Patchin Place is mentioned in the movie Reds, by one of the "Witnesses." Jack Reed and Louise Bryant lived there, or near there, in the early days.
Oh, God, yes. Marnie was witness to several shouting matches between Henry Miller and Djuna Barnes, the Patchin Place writer and famous recluse whom Miller would yell at from the street in a vain attempt to get her to come outside.
And while their offices weren't on Patchin Place, the old radical feminist magazine The Masses was located just a few blocks north on W. 15th St, and Reed wrote for both that magazine and its successor The Liberator. It was in the latter magazine that excerpts from "10 Days That Shook The World" were first published. I own several dozen copies of those two magazines, and Marnie used to practically inhale them when I took them up from Washington to show her on my visits. Like many others from the Village of her time, she was active in many liberal and radical causes, which was one of the reasons she became close to so many of the similarly inclined theater people. She had also told me of the reason that Gussow never got that last step up at the Times, and it matched the reason you're giving. I think it upset her even more than it upset Mel.
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My argument is when people see characters OVER use foul words (most often the F or MF versions) like every other sentence, it normalizes these words.
In other words, it loses impact for the viewer and therefore loses impact for the movie character as well.
I see what you're trying to get at, but I don't have that reaction at all, because that's like saying that if an actor wears a leisure suit for the entire length of the movie, the "impact" of seeing a leisure suit is lost.
But what I get out of seeing that leisure suit - - - or out of hearing Joe Pesci drop f-bombs and m-f missiles at the rate of about 10 a minute - - - is that *this is an essential part of who these characters are.* The point isn't to show off leisure suits or f-bombs. The point is to use these traits (clothing and language) to help delineate the character, and to distinguish them from some of the other characters (Ray Liotta's Henry Hill in Goodfellas, for example) who were stone cold criminals but nowhere near as psychopathic as Pesci's Tommy DeVito. Without these small but significant character trait differences, the characters would be far less memorable.
*when people saw the violence and murder in old films it was fairly clean, and the villains almost always were punished for their crimes. So the audience members identified with the victims but not the criminals.*
Good point, Fred.
The two of you should read a bestselling book from 1933 called "Our Movie-Made Children", which argued that the movies of that era had exactly the opposite effect: Instead of being outraged by the criminal activities being depicted, children identified with the criminals. And yet this was when these criminals were last seen dying in gutters, or being machine-gunned to death, or having their mummified corpses unceremoniously dumped on their mother's doorstep. Which is pretty much the same fate that movie criminals usually meet with today.
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I never met Tony Harvey, but both from what you say and from what my late aunt used to say, he sounds like a straw that's stirred a lot of drinks. The only other "big name" I ever heard her mention quite as often as him was the late theater critic, Mel Gussow, another dear friend to her.
Good old Patchin Place! I still have my teapot from the Patchin Place Emporium.
If there's a single factoid that shows the extent to which life in Greenwich Village has changed, it's this: Marnie died in May of 1989 while still living at 9 Patchin Place. Her final month's rent was $99.56. The only current listing in that building is for a 500 sq. ft. studio at $2,295 a month.
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Swithin, if you know Tony Harvey, ask him if he remembers Margaret "Marnie" Cook, a dear aunt of mine who lived on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village for nearly 50 years before she passed away in 1989. She used to speak of him as a dear friend, and told me of his many kindnesses to her after she went blind in the early 1980's. She was one of the more remarkable people I've ever known - - - she also knew Katharine Hepburn and many stage performers such as Vinie Burrows and Diana Sands - - -, and I wonder whether she made the same impression on Tony as she did on everyone else.
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Hell, they would've had to shoot The Caine Mutiny with an all-female cast to get me to watch that overrated piece of tripe again.
(Come to think of it, that would have made for a far more compelling bit of drama than the original. In fact just substituting Margaret Hamilton for Jose Ferrer would have brought it up several notches.
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So TB, are ya NOW sayin' the movie THE HUSTLER wasn't "exciting enough" for ya here???
I get the dig, but that's actually a perfect example of a movie that developed the female character well beyond the book's scope, in what must have been an attempt to appeal to women with a limited interest in pool. Whereas from a pool player's perspective, nearly everyone I know wishes that the Piper Laurie role had been eliminated from the movie entirely, since it detracted from the overall story, and added nothing but a touch of phony melodrama.
Bottom line for me is that while most movies should be gender mixed in order to reflect reality, there are some cases where the gender mix adds nothing substantive and actually can detract from the story. And IMO two such examples would be The Hustler and - - - if the advice of some people here had been followed - - - The Women.
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I just can't imagine any guy finding [The Best of Everything] engrossing. About five times I have tried to get through it, but the sandman has always grabbed me. The title song is the best thing about it.
Well, you might also say it's hard to imagine any real guy liking Johnny Mathis, which makes about as much sense as your first comment. Or for that matter, liking Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby movies. But why should appreciation for movies have to fall along gender lines? Hell, I've even known women who like John Wayne movies.
I don't think TBOE was the world's greatest movie, but if you like films that get behind the scenes of working life in the 50's and depict how people related to each other in the workplaces of that era, it's more than worth a watch, in this case for the Crawford character alone. Of course there was soap to spare, but you could say the same thing about virtually every movie with a man and a woman in it during the Code era that showed them falling into each other's arms and deciding to get married in the final 30 seconds before the closing credits. This is just the way that Hollywood was back in the day, and if that sort of thing puts you off, you're best sticking to movies where the hero just marries his horse.
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I've gotta agree with Fred here. To me the complete absence of men from the 1939 film version of The Women added emphasis to the whole point of the movie, which was to show women as they are when wholly among themselves, out of hearing distance from their husbands and paramours.
Of course it's also a movie filled with stereotyped cliches and exaggerations, but that's usually what comedies are all about, and there's a reason that it's held up so well after 75 years.
*"Do come again, Mrs. PROWLER".* Best line Joan Crawford ever came out with in the 50 movies of hers that I've seen, a line which caused Rosalind Russell to sputter her way right into a clothes hamper. Claire Boothe Luce was one of the more celebrated acid-tongued wits of her time, and the dialogue in The Women+ certainly doesn't harm her reputation.
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I may just be a sucker for 1950's corporate dramas, but I loved The Best of Everything, which I'd never seen before until tonight.
Okay, the final scene was a bit too obvious, but in this case there was credibility to the cliche, along with a nice mix of younger stars like Hope Lange and Diane Baker to complement the old warriors Crawford and Brian Aherne. I'm sure it's been said many times, but there was a lot of Mad Men in this movie, only the movie was a lot less self-conscious.
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Sounds like what a poor prize fighter might have said, more or
less.
That's true, but then a poor prize fighter (which is what Brando was portraying) seldom says it with flowers.
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More recent films: NO. That's what HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz and Encore is there for.
That's great if you can afford those premium channels. Not everyone is quite so fortunate.
Not to mention that whereas TCM's more recent movies are carefully selected for quality to fit in with those of their more favored decades of the 20's through the 50's, the films on those other channels aren't nearly so carefully screened. For every first rate movie, you get ten pieces of trash and countless repeats.
Some people aren't satisfied with 80% of the programming devoted to their favorite eras, I guess, so their idea is to impose a form of "Programming Correctness" on everyone else. Thank God that TCM has been ignoring those folks' wishes ever since 1994, and will continue to ignore them in the future, no matter how many times they keep beating the same dead horse.
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That night down in the ^%$#^& Garden, Charlie. I could have beat a
&^%#$^& like Wilson. But what the &^%$^& happened? He got a
shot at the %^$^&* title and I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.
You shoulda looked out for me, Charlie. Now I'm a ^%*%$ bum.
That's all I am, a %&*^ bum.
Telling it like it t-i-iz. Brando couldn't have said it better.
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There are happy endings and there are happy endings, but I can't remember a happier ending than the one I just saw for the first time in *24 Hours To Kill.*
It even made up for every impossibly hackneyed scene and cinematic cliche that took place before it, and that's saying a lot. -
It seems there are more movies from the late 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and even the 2000's on the TCM schedule.
I would rather TCM focus on the classic movies from the 1920's, 30's, 40's and 50's.
This is a topic that's been hashed and re-hashed at least 10 times a year for what seems like forever.
Bottom line: It's simply *not true* that TCM is now showing fewer and fewer "classic" movies than in previous years. "Seems like" is no substitute for actual information. Others have time and again provided decade breakdowns of TCM's programming over the years, and there's no basis whatever for your complaint. TCM's primary focus has always been on those decades that you (and I) prefer, but it's never been the exclusive focus, nor will it ever be.
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No one's saying that. I'm saying using a plethora of bad language narrows the audience your film will appeal to, so why use so much? Don't you want EVERYone to see your movie?
Not necessarily. You want everyone possible to see *your* movie, but if you try to please everybody, it's not going to be *your* movie for long.
ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES can be enjoyed by my parents as well as my kids. Still pretty brutal and appalling without any blood or cussing. How'd they do that?
By following the Breen code. No kowtowing to Breen, no movie. It wasn't all that complicated. Certainly you're not suggesting that the G-rated language in Angels With Dirty Faces bore any real resemblance to the New York City streets of 1939. I lived on those Manhattan streets as a small boy in the late 40's and learned all those nasty words well before my 6th birthday.
Why can't anyone these days do that?
For the simple reason that a 21st century movie about street urchins who spoke with G-rated vocabulary would be about as credible as a movie about baseball that featured a woman pitching in the World Series.
Does anyone in a public or professional situation talk like that? No, only low level people in society talk like that. So if your movie is about criminals, dialogue with lots of swearing might be appropriate.
So only criminals and "low lifes" swear? Are you serious?
And I DO think casual swearing by regular people in movies "normalizes" it for impressionable teens. Ever listen in a high school hallway? (I always wonder what kind of job they think they're going to get)
If they have a sentient IQ, they'll tame their language in appropriate situations. And if they don't, the chances are strong that they didn't learn that language from a movie, but rather from their peers.
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The cartoon parody don't show anything, its mostly suggestive. I thought Grumpy hated women.
What, do you think that gang bangers *love* women?
What exactly is a *Memorial* ****??
It's a memorial to the entire sanctified Disney brand, expressed in lampoon format. (I should have used "lampoon" rather than "parody" the first time around. Sorry.)
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There are plenty of children in some of the more notable foreign movies, too, but they're often in far more substantive roles than they are over here. Bicycle Thieves; Shoeshine; The Battle of Algiers; Open City; Germany: Year Zero; Pixote; The 400 Blows; etc., just to name a few. Very few Hollywood movies ever attempt to deal with the life of children on this level.
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*WARNING:* The Disney suits didn't go for this sublime little parody of their three fingered, missing body parts family, as seen in a 1967 issue of Paul Krassner's magazine, The Realist. I could just copy the picture, but I don't want to offend anyone, so *DON'T* click on the link if you're one of those easily offended types:
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Andy, if you can ever bring yourself to watch an MGM musical, Words and Music, you might be pleased with what happens to Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen when they dance to "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue."
Is that the one where they used Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney as human shields, only to have their bluff called? If that's the one, I'm sure I enjoyed it.
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Too wholesome.
Well, originally I'd thought about using Mark Twain's famous dictum,
*"First, let's kill all the choreographers",*
but that would've been going a bit too far, and I wouldn't want to lose the soft shoe vote.
John Wayne as SOTM April 2014
in General Discussions
Posted
Hell Yeah!
You do support the premise all views, diversity, should be allowed
even if you might find some of it unsettling for you, don't you?
Jake in the Heartland
As long as they keep showing plenty of movies I like (noirs, pre-codes, foreign, silents, underground, general dramas), I won't complain about Doris or the cowboys. I may snark a bit
, but I realize that my own tastes aren't universal. TCM should be about *all* points of view, not just yours or mine.