AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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I generally can't stand musicals, but I happened to catch the part where Tex Beneke and his backup chorus were gathering around a table, singing their classic version of "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", followed by another version by the Nicholas Brothers with Dorothy Dandridge. I'm now thoroughly disgusted with myself that I didn't record it, but as Jack Webb used to say, "In America, there's always a tomorrow."
And for anyone who hasn't seen the sequence I'm talking about, you *have* to see it:
P.S. Does Beneke have a twin brother or something? Look at the scene right at the beginning of the song and check out the guitar player to the left of the pianist. Until I then saw Tex playing a saxophone before whistling his way over to the table to begin the vocal part, I thought that he was the guitar player.
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TCM has had a lot of very good co-hosts, and Baldwin's right up there with the best of them. His respect for his craft, for the history of films, and for Robert Osborne comes through with every viewing, and I only wish he'd return more often.
As for the paparazzi, they're the scum of the Earth and whatever they get in the way of a few pimp slaps or broken cameras they richly deserve. They're about on the level of dumpster divers, and the world would be much better off without them.
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I know somebody is going to second this choice (somebody always does, for anyone who is mentioned), but it's not going to be me.
For SOTM Red Skelton would be somewhere around 987th on my list of possible choices, well below Wheeler & Woolsey or Eric Blore, and barely above Bob Hope or Bing Crosby. Once you get past Preston Sturges's top half dozen or so films, plus To Be Or Not To Be, those comedies and comedians from the 40's went stale faster than those from any other decade. They were the equivalent of wartime baseball with one-armed outfielders, better than nothing but not something you want to keep around after the war was over.
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I've already laid out my case for Angi Vera back on the first page of this thread, but if I'd want to see any movie called Law and Order, it'd be this:
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James,
Yes, a TCM staffer posted here awhile back that Warner Archives has a moratorium of at least a year, in some cases longer, before the films can be shown on TCM.
Warner Archives wants to sell as many discs as possible before the films are broadcast. Once broadcast, they tend to show up on Youtube and cut into the number of discs that can be sold.
That explanation makes a lot of sense, and I can't exactly say that I blame Warners or TCM for such a policy. And since I've always had a lot of luck waiting for my favorite books to be remaindered, for similar reasons I certainly don't mind that TCM tries to maximize its DVD revenue before showing these new releases on TV for easy recording. After all, that DVD revenue is part of what keeps TCM going.
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This is a pitch for a movie I suspect few if any people here have seen or even heard of: A 1979 Hungarian Film, Angi Vera. It had a brief run here in the late 70's and early 80's, to generally outstanding reviews, but quickly disappeared after that. You can see it in its entirety on You Tube, but alas, only in the original Hungarian. There was a Region 2 subtitled VHS available for awhile, but I've never seen any English subtitled version available in the U.S. since it had its brief theatrical run.
I've probably seen well over 100 "political" movies, from Traffic in Souls through Eisenstein through Rossellini and up through the 21st century, including many of the magnificent American films that Warner Brothers produced in the 30's. And I've never seen one quite as pitch perfect as Angi Vera.
The plot is set at the outset of the Communist takeover of Hungary in the late 1940's, and the central protagonist is a young nurse, Angi Vera (played by Veronika Pap), who openly criticizes conditions in her hospital during a community meeting, and is recruited by the Communists for one of their many cadre training schools. The Party sees her as a young and idealistic woman, a natural leader, whose relatively unformed views can be shaped toward their desirable "socialist" ends with the right sort of guidance.
In the cadre school, Angi Vera meets several key players. The first is an older woman who seems to be some sort of a Party plant, placed there to guard against incorrect thinking. The second is a free-spirited young woman who seems impervious to all the Party's preachings, and at one point openly mocks the older woman. When Angi Vera steps up to defend the older woman, she is quickly given favorable treatment.
The third person she meets, a young instructor whom she falls in love with, almost proves to be her downfall. They have a brief overnight affair, in clear violation of Party rules, but when she is leaving his room, the older woman sees her, and subsequently denounces her in an infamous "self-criticism" session. What follows is perhaps the most magnificent minute of acting I've yet to witness in all my years.
The camera focuses on Angi Vera while the charges are being voiced by the older woman, and at that moment the younger woman has to choose between truth and survival. She chooses survival. Quickly she protests that the affair meant nothing, that her instructor means nothing to her, and that she realizes she was wrong.
In response to Angi Vera's "confession", her instructor counters her by calmly stating that none of this is true, and that they love each other sincerely. If ever there were such a thing as "socialism with a human face," it's embodied in this character.
All the while, the camera is mostly focused on Angi Vera, and as her instructor speaks, her face starts to well up with fought back tears, as she knows in her heart that he speaks the truth, and that she does love him.
But *THEN.* An internal switch is thrown, extinguishing her heart and reviving her survival instinct. *NO!* she says. I don't love him. And this split-second transformation on her face is one of the most magnificent jobs of acting I've ever seen on the screen. Barbara Stanwyck couldn't have pulled it off any better.
Postlude: Angi Vera's lover is never heard from again. Her accuser now accepts her repentance and sets her up for a cushy "journalist" job in Budapest.
And that free-spirited rebel girl? In what may be the most horrifying (if bloodless) final scene I've ever seen, we see Angi Vera and her patron roaring down a rutted country road in a limousine, when all of a sudden they pass a hunched-over figure of a woman in a heavy overcoat, struggling to pedal her bicycle up a hill. When Angi Vera looks through her rear view window, she recognizes that woman as her formerly free-spirited friend from the cadre school, cast aside by the Party for her lack of submission.
At that instant, the look of sheer horror on Angi Vera's face serves as a metaphor, both for her sudden realization of just what she has become, and for what her country is about to become. Both this final scene and the movie as a whole succeeds on so many levels that it only reminds us of the nearly unlimited power of film to portray truth. You can almost see Angi Vera as a human counterpart to the donkey Balthazer in the great Bresson film that played here on Sunday night: To paraphrase Godard's comment on that 1966 movie, it's the story of Communism's reality told in just 96 minutes.
I don't know what the one time TV rights for a subtitled screening of this magnificent movie would cost TCM, but I'd personally put up several hundred dollars towards acquiring it. These few feeble words can only begin to describe the emotional impact of this film.
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Here's what I found on TCM's schedule for January 15th:
*Philadelphia (1993)*
*A lawyer sues his firm for firing him because he has AIDS.*
*Dir: Jonathan Demme Cast: Tom Hanks , Denzel Washington , Antonio Banderas .*
And here's Leonard Maltin's's review that directly faces it:
*D: George Cukor. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Roland Young, John Halliday, Virginia Weidler, Mary Nash, Henry Daniell, Hillary Brooke. Talky but brilliant adaptation of Philip Barry's hit Broadway comedy about society girl who yearns for down-to-earth romance; Grant is her ex-husband, Stewart a fast-talking (!) reporter who falls in love with her. Entire cast is excellent, but Stewart really shines in his offbeat, Academy Award winning role. Donald Ogden Stewart's script also earned an Oscar. Later musicalized as HIGH SOCIETY.*
No comment necessary, only a
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One headline I liked, and too bad I haven't a picture of it( wouldn't know how to post it anyway), was in the Detroit Free Press back in the late '90's during the Clinton administration. It read:
"LEWINSKI TO FACE SENATE"
In the interest of journalistic accuracy, shouldn't that headline have been. . . .
*LEWINSKY KNEELS DOWN BEFORE SENATE*
(Sorry, I couldn't resist; that was too easy a straight line.)
The all time greatest groaner headline, however, was in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the death of Charles de Gaulle. It set an all time record for klutziness:
*DeGAULLE KEELS OVER AND*
*DIES WHILE WATCHING TV*
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I sort of disagree. I really like NBNW, FHTE, and SLIH (though Wilder has done much better), but I'm still annoyed at how much they are shown on TCM. Maybe I just get annoyed easily.
Finance, your type of complaint isn't really what I was trying to lampoon in my clumsy way, and I also wish we'd see more Premieres and fewer repeats. I could even do without any more showings of Out of The Past for another year or so, even though it's on my top 10 list of all time. It's when those complaints about repeats get combined with nonstop whining about "too many movies after 1960 (or 1970, or 1980)" or "stop showing my personal definition of non-classics" that my cynicism kicks in.
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Color me cynical, but I always find a strong correlation between the complaining about repeats and the complainer's opinion about the movies being repeated.
Not saying that I'm immune from this. If they showed The Killers or Bombshell or The Battle of Algiers once a week, it'd be no more annoying than being served a pint of Haagen-Dazs Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream for dinner every Sunday. I might want to switch to Java Chip or Butter Pecan for a bit of variety, but whatever complaint I had would be muffled after that first bite of heavenly mint.
OTOH whenever I see some worthless musical or costume drama on the schedule, when it played as recently as last April (the outrage!), I feel like I'm being strapped into my chair and forced to swallow a bunch of codfish balls dipped in mayonnaise, washed down with a big glass of vinegar.
And you know what? This sort of feeling happens to all of us, *until* a little light goes on and we realize that TCM isn't a movie version of our own personal iPod. If you want something like that, just record the movies you *like* and play them back when TCM is showing the ones you *don't* like. Works every time, and you'll never have to watch a "non-classic" (whatever that means) ever again.
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I've been tempted more than a few times to ask for refunds, most prominently by Putney Swope, The Music Lovers, That's Entertainment, and My Dinner With Andre, but I figure you take the good with the bad.
OTOH I once had the refund phenomenon happen *to* me, and it was one the funniest things I've ever seen. Back in the early 70's my former GF and I were touring the mid-Atlantic with a collection of bootleg 16mm films that we titled "An **** of Cartoons: 69 Years of Sex, Violence and General Bad Taste in Animation".
In truth there was exactly 1 film out of 16, the blue cartoon **** Island, that fit that wildly exaggerated description, and of course even that one was was little more than a lampoon, and not in the least bit erotic. But on our flyers we goosed up the writeups in order to appeal to people's sense of humor. Thus, What's Opera, Doc? was described as "An award-winning cartoon featuring Bugs in drag, with Elmer as his lover." I can't remember exactly how we described Gertie The Dinosaur and Moving Day, but it wasn't hard to make Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man sound vaguely pornographic, even if it was purely a parody. And once we got on a roll, twisting the synopses to make all of them sound vaguely perverted wasn't really all that hard.
Of course anyone who really thought that this collection of classic cartoons was anything remotely resembling the title had to have been a few bricks shy of a load. And whenever we showed the series on college campuses, the students took it for what it was and raved about it all. And in fact it was about the best 150 minute survey of cartoons you'll ever see, far better than anything I've seen on TCM. Stupid copyright restrictions!
But greedy as we were, we then rented the show to the old Paramount Theater in Charlottesville for a midnight screening, a venue with about 2000 seats that we filled to well over half capacity. Since we were being paid on a sliding scale percentage of the box office gross, we naturally stayed by the turnstiles with clickers to make sure we got an honest count.
When we got past the 1000 mark which gave us 50% of the gross, we were feeling pretty sporty. But then, about 20 minutes after the show started, a small group of maybe half a dozen middle aged men in overcoats came storming out to the ticket window and angrily demanded their money back, which they promptly were given.
We couldn't figure out what it was all about, until the night manager told us, "Those are what we call 'the *old men with newspapers'.* They sit in the back rows when we show stag movies, and I guess they read your flyers and thought that we'd discovered some secret vault of Dirty Disney." Personally I thought his explanation was more than worth the money we lost on those refunds.
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Occasionally when I click on a thread it will either lock up or slow down, BUT, if I click on the back arrow, and go back to the previous page, then I click on the new page again, it usually loads fast the second time around.
That's about the only way I've managed to load a page for the past few days, and as this is the *only* website where it's been a problem, I have a hard time thinking it's my computer. Just to get to the point where I could respond to your post has taken me a good 2-3 minutes.
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Ever since early Thursday, pages on the TCM Forums have made me feel we're back in the dial-up days of the 90's. It's been taking me FOREVER to get from one page to the other, and sometimes the only way I can advance to the next page is to back up and then go forward.
Ordinarily I'd blame my computer or my browser, but it's like this on both Chrome and Firefox, and the problem is only on TCM. Every other site I visit is loading in normal times.
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Like I said Andy, I am no holy roller. I let loose my inner Samuel L. Jackson on occasion, but as you pointed out, it is most effective one on one. My issue about MF and F-ing is when I overhear it ad nauseum in public. You are not a puritan if you are upset when a group of 20/30-somethings can't have the courtesy to clean it up at a Golden Corral or Village Inn. Plus, the real crime is that most people are such narcissists that they think it is an infringement on their First Amendment rights to ask them politely to cool it. You are right that it has no relevance in writing. If you cannot formulate a coherent sentence without using the aforementioned words, buy a thesaurus or enroll in a beginning composition class at the local community college.
As in most things, context is everything. That 12 letter word for an incestuous relationship can used to provoke a fight, and it can also be used as a term of maximum respect and even endearment, but those nuances tend to be lost when you're trying to explain them to a five year old who overhears it in a subway.
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Yeah, but why do no other undisputed noirs, such as OUT OF THE PAST, appear? Wait a minute, didn't THE KILLERS (1946) do well, and didn't LAURA get votes?
See my two lists just above your comment.
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They are noirish non-noirs. I'm surprised that SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, which IS considered a noir, didn't get votes.
Here's the thing: There are *SO MANY* great movies to choose among, even if you restrict your choices to "Studio Era Hollywood" and leave out more recent or foreign films, you're going to leave out perhaps a hundred or more movies that last year or next week might have been, or will be on your top 10.
Here's what I listed in my Top 10 Studio Era Hollywood movies when this thread began:
The Penalty (Lon Chaney)
Greed (the four hour version)
The Crowd
Bombshell
The Killers (Lancaster / Gardner version)
It's A Wonderful Life
Out of the Past
Nightmare Alley
A Star Is Born (Garland version)
Vertigo
And yet if I'd just come from seeing any of the following movies, I'd say "That's a top 10 for sure".
Libeled Lady
While The City Sleeps
All About Eve
The Asphalt Jungle
So Big (the Stanwyck version)
Baby Face
Stella Dallas
The Search
Time Limit
Three Came Home
Gilda
The Big Heat
The Godless Girl
A Raisin in the Sun
Nothing But a Man
The Best Years of Our Lives
Heroes For Sale
Life in the Balance
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Red-Headed Woman
The Steel Helmet
The Naked Kiss
The Night Holds Terror
Laura
42nd Street
The Story of Temple Drake
Thieves' Highway
The Light Touch
The Big Clock
That's just off the top of my head, and there are many more - - - - I'm *very* susceptible to recent impressions.
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Bile like that sure doesn't sound like the Louise Brooks I've come to know and love. You might consider changing your handle to "Ginger Rogers' Mother" or something more appropriate.
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Isn't Sunset Blvd considered a noir? And The Letter ? They are at least noir-ish.
My bad, I should've re-read the previous pages and realized they'd also been mentioned several times each. And yes, I'd certainly consider them at least as "noirish", and in fact I'd say The Letter was about as noir as it gets, from the very first scene right down to the end. It's right up there with All About Eve in the Bette Davis pantheon.
EDIT: So nice I guess I had to say it twice.
Edited by: AndyM108 on Dec 19, 2013 11:07 PM
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Isn't Sunset Blvd considered a noir? And The Letter ? They are at least noir-ish.
My bad, I should've re-read the previous pages and realized they'd also been mentioned several times each. And yes, I'd certainly consider them at least as "noirish", and in fact I'd say The Letter was about as noir as it gets, from the very first scene right down to the end. It's right up there with All About Eve in the Bette Davis pantheon.
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*Vocal inflection is pretty important to its usefulness as a communicative device.*
...and something of which it appears one Matthew Broderick never learned, eh dark?!
But Joe Pesci's repeated use of it in Goodfellas was every bit as poetic as that society dame's fish in The Lady Eve.
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Also American are known for liking 'happy' movies (or at least movies with happy endings) more so than dark ones (generally).
And they also clearly prefer fantasy over any semblance of realism. Guess they get enough of that in real life.
e.g. Casablanca over a movie like Sunset Blvd. I guess noir trumps all!
Except that Casablanca is hardly "noir" in any usual sense of the word. It's more like a White Hat vs Black Hat movie set in wartime with a sometimes noir actor in the leading role.
And so far here it seems like the only noir with more than one or two mentions for Top 10 is Double Indemnity, whereas several musicals and "adventure" movies have gotten multiple shout-outs.
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I have found the word to be enormously versatile - useful as a verb, an adverb, an adjective, a noun, even a pronoun. It can be a very descriptive shorthand for the exact and perfect conveyance.
Not only do I agree, but I'd even argue that its 12-letter cousin is perhaps *the* most versatile and poetic word in the entire English language. Depending on the person using it, the person on the receiving end of it, the syllable that's accented, the tone of voice, the relationship between the two people, and the amount of alcohol that preceded it, it can be anything from the highest praise to the fightingest of fighting words. In fact it's so versatile and poetic that there's even been a first rate book written about it, with the word itself as the title. You can buy the book on Amazon.
It rarely comes across properly in print, though.
Oh, God, yes. A thousand times yes. And it should only be used around non-literalminded people who understand and appreciate the intention behind it. You wouldn't want to use it at a Daughters of the Confederacy cotillion.
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Since the old December 29th schedule is still showing on the calendar as of the time I'm writing this, when are they going to post the revised one? And are they also scrapping the post-midnight silent and foreign films?
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With her sister Olivia still alive at 97, before today that had to be the longest surviving pair of actor or actress siblings in Hollywood history. Is any other pair of siblings even within 20 years of them in combined ages?
Red Skelton
in General Discussions
Posted
*For SOTM Red Skelton would be somewhere around 987th on my list of possible choices barely above Bob Hope or Bing Crosby. (snipped) those comedies and comedians from the 40's went stale faster than those from any other decade.*
I agree somewhat...for many, it's the viewer who grew out of them.
I think Red Skelton, Danny Kaye & the Harryhausen movies are a logical and decent stepping stone for kids interested in classic film once they grow out of the silly or insipid children's movies.
I'd like to think that a much better stepping stone would be W. C. Fields or the Marx Brothers or Laurel & Hardy. There's a reason that younger moviegoers of the 60's and 70's took to them rather than the Skeltons and the Kayes and the Hopes and the Jerry Lewises. The latter group of comics seemed as dated as vaudeville once their time had passed, whereas the type of humor embodied in the former group has always seemed timeless.