slaytonf

Thank you for your heads up about Blow-Up, but it was not necessary. I've seen it many times before, and had recorded it, but it became inaccessible. Thus my anticipation of a long awaited airing, and my all that much greater exasperation as I pushed the record button and watched the ugly error message come up. I am not sure if Blow-Up is a great film, but it certainly is a film by a great director, and there are some great things in it. My personal favorite is the presence of Sarah Miles, who does more with the little she has than the other actors with larger roles. You were looking for a standard whodunnit, and were disappointed when the film didn't do what you wanted it to. I don't mean it to sound patronizing, but the movie is about how you know what's real, and what you use to establish reality. The murder was made unreal by the elimination of evidence for it. Even the last bit of it, the photo of the body itself, has its veracity degraded by the absence of the other photos showing the sequence of the murder, if it really happened. By the end of the film, Thomas begins to doubt his own experience. To complete the destruction of his bearings, he is presented at the end of the film with an imaginary tennis game made real by the insistence of the group of young revelers. (The same you see at the beginning of the film. The activity they were pursuing was fundraising for charity. English people would have picked up on that readily, as it is as common there as Girl Scouts selling cookies are here--have you got your Thin Mints yet this year?) Of course, there's a lot of other things going on all around, including observations about art, creativity, conformity, relationships, disappointment, futile yearning, the lack of communication, and Antonioni's characteristic indictment of bourgeois values. As for Shoes of the Fisherman, the few minutes I watched of it confirmed my expectations. Like most movies on an epic scale, especially those with a religious theme, it was bloated, ponderous, formulaic, self-important and pretentious. It's no wonder it's forgot.

Yayy Dabb!! Re twinkeee: kinda sorta, but not kinda enough.

How'd you get her!? Ok, try this guy:

Definitely one of the world's great moustaches:

Vertigo is more inexpertly praised rather than overrated. As I like to approach it, it is definitely Hitchcock's best film, but it is not the best "Hitchcock" film. For that you can look to North By Northwest, The Birds, or one of his earlier bw films, according to your taste. Vertigo is not a "Hitchcock" film. It is a slowly paced film (no, not boring) that is character driven, with extensive analysis of people's faults, motivations, and preoccupations. The standard Hitchcock film is plot driven, which moves along at a nice pace, and the characters are constructed to suit it. In a standard Hitchcock film there is a MacGuffin around which all the action swirls, an item lacking in Vertigo. Some people seeing the Hitchcock label on a film have certain expectations, which are disappointed by Vertigo, leading them to dislike the film. And some people simply don't care for this kind of film. But make no mistake, Vertigo is a masterwork, a wonderfully disturbing look into people's perverse obsessions, hang-ups, the dissolving of the boundary between hard reality and fantasy worlds, people's retreat into them, the domination of one person over another's identity, and the reshaping of it to their desires, the willingness for some to allow that to happen to them because of a desperate need for love, or emotional security. Of course, things so wildly unrealistic must lead to catastrophe.

Percy it is! I saw him in a Paul Robeson film I saw just the other day: Song of Freedom. And since you didn't post a pic, I will take advantage of the opportunity to post oneumyonwn:

We should face up to the inevitability of this series continuing indefinitely: The Die Hard is Cast.

Rita Moreno.

Smart Kid. Not too much info on her. I encountered her and her wonderful voice watching the two movies she made with Paul Robeson. She appears to be the English equivalent of Josephine Baker, although forgotten here today. I don't know about her continuing fame in England. Are you smart enough for this? (yes you are):

Bingo! you get the prize! What did you do, search black movie singers?

Just tried it with Shoes of the Fisherman, still restricted. And it appears to be only TCM. I can record on other channels.

I just tried to record Blow-Up on my DVD and I got a message saying: "This program is not allowed to be recorded." ! I have never previously been unable to record anything off my cable signal. Does anyone know what's going on? Of course, it's too late now for this.

The singing is right, but the countries are wrong.

No, not either. But Josephine Baker is on the right track in some ways.

Yes! That's her!

Thanks for your post. We get so little direct communication about important people in film. It's refreshing.

Man, you know your pics. Pic this:

Name this siren:

You got him. But can you guess what movie the pic is from?

Nobody has a clue. Do you have any?

Well, you may just be able to run this whole thread yuself. But I will say you got Miss Lisi, if'n you don't mind. But who is this?:

Dunnoer.

Hard to think that Royal Wedding, which has two of Fred Astaire's most famous dances, and a famous duo of him with Jane Powell, not being the equal of Bandwagon. Even harder to think Seven Brides, with the most famous dance and fight sequence, not the equal of any musical. Hardest to think that directing what is considered the best musical of all, Singin' in the Rain, doesn't rank him with any director, anywhere, any time.

Hard to find any director who's made more than a handful of movies that didn't make at least one that was nothing home to write about.

And that's wrong because. . . .? In any case, you only write that to cover the fact that you don't know who it is. It's not {font:arial, helvetica, sans-serif}Michelle Dockery.{font}