Palmerin

I never refer to specific people, only to general subjects. Would that keep me safe from receiving warnings?

I just love the shorts that are featured between the movies of TCM, particularly the musicals and the Pete Smith comedies; would you like a month to be dedicated to the best of those shorts?

... how come the fashions and hairdos are from 1947?

Back in the 1920s there was a poll about what reading material you would like to read on a desert island, with the Bible and Shakespeare as the top favorites. A pollster put the question to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who promptly replied: a manual on how to build a seafaring ship! Chesterton's razor sharp wit reminded those idiots that a desert island is not a relaxation center for idle reading, but rather a purgatorial prison from which you have to escape as soon as possible. Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore should be reminded of Chesterton's bon mot, for even a movie as much fun as the original THE PINK PANTHER would not prevent anyone from nearly losing his mind, as happens to Tom Hanks in CASTAWAY.

As long as we are talking about how we choose which movies to watch, I surf IMDb.com regularly; I like to be able to talk knowledgeably about the latest films and stars, especially since at present I don't have the opportunity to watch shows as often as was the case in the 1970s, when I had my pick of several nearby movie theatres. Speaking of the 1970s, everybody in that decade wanted to be Fellini, Herzog, Pasolini, Visconti and Wertmuller, so it's a miracle I didn't end up hating all art house films. I suppose it's my fondness for fantasy that allows me to be moved by such movies as WILD STRAWBERRIES and the visual poetry of Jean Cocteau.

When I was a teenager==mid 1960s to the 1970s==I actually took seriously the opinion of critics. However, I soon learned to intensely dislike Rex Reed. Of every twenty movies he reviewed, he liked ONE, and maybe another one would get a passing grade, albeit with reservations; the other EIGHTEEN or NINETEEN would get a flunk. Eventually the guy got such a deservedly bad reputation that producers quit inviting him to their premieres. In my Puerto Rico THE SAN JUAN STAR, the newspaper I delivered, had a whiner who never stopped complaining about the lack of art films in the country. Once he published an obviously contrived anecdote about how he complained to a distributor about the lack of movies of WERTMULLER and INGMAR BERGMAN, and the distributor assured him that he had all the movies of WEISSMULLER and INGRID BERGMAN. If I had had that precious pedant in front of me, I would have made him drink a full liter of printer's ink.

how did you like it? Mankiewicz showed no enthusiasm for it; I thought it a solid plod, but sadly lacking the dash that David Lean would surely have given it.

why did her career flounder so badly after being one of the major stars of the 1930s?

Fresh off his triumph with LAST TANGO IN PARIS, Bernardo Bertolucci planned to film an epic about Tupac Amaru. The government of Peru was at first very enthusiastic about the project, but its attitude changed when BB revealed his choice to play Tupac, a choice obviously based on the politics of the actor, rather than on his rightness for the role: MARLON BRANDO Hardly had the Peruvians recovered from their shock and dismay at this absurd casting choice, that they nearly fainted at Bertolucci's choice for the Inca princess who would be Tupac's love interest--again, a choice based on the politics of the actress, rather than her qualifications for the role: JANE FONDA The Peruvians were so outraged at this grotesque miscasting that would have turned the epic saga of Tupac into a ludicrous travesty that BB had to cancel the project. Who do you think might have been Bertolucci's original choice to play THE LAST EMPEROR? Paul Newman? Robert Redford? Ryan O'Neal?

You are into heraldry, too? Oh, thank you! THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH: that was SABLE, A GRIFFIN GULES, right?

Thank you. UNIVERSAL has certainly had a very impressive set of emblems based on the planet Earth; WARNER BROTHERS' initials, on the other hand, don't win any prizes for originality.

I am a self-taught heraldist, and am interested in all sorts of symbols. Naturally I am interested in the emblems of the movie studios, such as the roaring lion of MGM. Why did that studio choose that symbol? The Columbia of COLUMBIA, the mount of PARAMOUNT, and the lion of LIONSGATE are pretty obvious, as they are examples of canting symbols: symbols that illustrate the name of the institution that has said symbol. So what does a roaring lion have to do with MGM?

How did Brent get cast in his against type role in THE SPYRAL STAIRCASE? Did he want that role?

Speaking of cultural traditions, THE YOUNG LIONS stays true to a strong tradition of the 1950s: dressing the females, and, to a considerable extent, also the males, in clothes and hairdos of the 50s rather than of the movie's historical period. For example, one of the female characters wears a dress with a Peter Pan collar that rightfully belongs in GREASE rather than in an story of WWII. Did the film makers of the 1950s actually believe that those dowdy frumpy tacky fashions were anything like attractive, elegant and sexy???

Are high schools really as full of bullies and mean girls as they are shown in the movies? I don't recall my high school being that socially stressful--although I was self-absorbed to the point of obliviousness.

At this moment EPIX2 is playing BEST DEFENSE, one of the absolutely rotten comedies that totally ruined the career of Dudley Moore after his big success with ARTHUR. Moore should have fired his agent, who obviously did not have his best interests in mind.

Westerns, science fiction and comic book adaptations are always appealing because they have an universally appealing subject: virtuous heroes fighting for the true and good. Humor, on the other hand, is more elusive; apart from the slapstick of such as Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, whose appeal is timeless, most comedies age so fast that they might as well have an expiration date. I was born in 1954, so I grew up with movies like THE APARTMENT and SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL, but even then their appeal went way over my head.

At this moment TCM is broadcasting THE APARTMENT. Jack Lemmon is still charming, but everything else in that movie is perfectly mystifying. What is so funny about an office employee renting his apartment for illicit liaisons? And the women look so HIDEOUS in those tight dresses in which they can barely move and those puffy hairdos that look like birds' nests!

Of course it matters! I find it difficult to relate to comedies such as SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL because the basis of their humor is now almost lost in time; a full explanation of what is supposed to make them funny is very necessary. Plus there are propaganda movies such as those of Eisenstein, which take historical events and then distort them to the point of turning those same historical events into falsehoods. Brian de Palma may have been very impressed by the Odessa steps sequence of THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, but in point of fact that event never happened; it was all a fabrication.

Speaking of the Jewish experience in the USA and elsewhere, has anybody noticed how, when the Jews are victims of persecution, they are universally pitied and admired, and everybody is ready to chant the mantra NEVER AGAIN! NEVER AGAIN!--but when they defend themselves and beat up their many persecutors, suddenly everybody changes their tune and starts accusing the Jews of behaving like modern day Nazis?

Do you recall that happy time when MTV was so big that every romance movie had to have a music video sequence? Then there is the less happy result of the Code being abolished: foul mouthed characters of crime movies who only know one adjective: f u ----g.

And let's not forget how often teenage heroes and heroines are into rock, sometimes even organizing bands that practice in their garages, thus attracting complaints from their families and neighbors.

Then there is the Hannibal Lecter cliché: a detective in search of a serial killer takes the advice of an imprisoned serial killer. It takes one to know one.

Shall we even start to count the thrillers in which the protagonist, obviously not a professional driver, nevertheless performs stunts that are way beyond the skill of 99% of the world's drivers?

Yesterday night I watched BAD BOYS on FLIX. Among the many clichés I caught in this 1982 production are the following: the Hispanic characters speak such poor Spanish that you cannot guess which is their ethnicity. In TRAFFIC my fellow Puerto Rican, Benicio del Toro, speaks such bad Spanish that nobody would recognize him as a Puerto Rican; the background music for the Hispanic characters is salsa, obviously the only Latin music known in the USA. If this story were set in, say, Germany, the background music would undoubtedly be the German equivalent of salsa; the tall blonde villainous boy of Nordic ancestry is nicknamed Viking; apparently the only thing that most people know about Scandinavia is that it was the home ground of the Vikings. A producer famous for his silly statements once said that what the movies needed were new clichés to take the place of old clichés. What new clichés can you add to this list?