Palmerin

My cable service is Bright House, which unfortunately is not one of the providers allied to TCM.

I just tried to use it, but I do not understand how to navigate that section; please help me.

where can I see online the movies that have been shown on TCM?

This is indeed sad news. My mother, who loves WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?, also suffers of Parkinson's; I pray she may keep me company a few more years.

A few of the forgotten 30s movies the station has been playing this year are surprisingly good and deserving of being rediscovered. The overwhelming majority, however, are such poorly produced cliché loaded pieces of schlock that I can only conclude that the only reason for which they were made was that their stars--even legends like Mary Astor and Lionel Barrymore--were heavy gamblers who had to film those clunkers in order to be able to pay off their debts.

What about NATURAL BORN KILLERS, one of the WEIRDEST movies I have ever endured?

It works! Thank you so much.

Pasternak won the Literature Nobel, remember?

Jose Cabiya, the husband of the younger sister of my mother, loved SHANE so much that he gave to the second of his five sons, Jose Luis Cabiya, the nickname Shane.

How about a discussion of this, one of my favorite movies? Sienkiewicz wrote the novel as an allegory of the oppression suffered by Poland (Lygia) under Nicholas II (Nero). This movie from 1951 is an allegory of the oppression suffered by Christians under the Nero of that time, Stalin. One of the notable weaknesses of Nero was that he could not take criticism, and accepted only flattery. Ironically that was the downfall of Saddam Hussein, who idolized Stalin. Any one who expressed even the best intentioned criticism to Saddam was immediately executed; as a result his advisers did not dare to tell him the truth about how the American army was wrecking the Iraqi forces which he led so ineptly.

... so I need to know the reason for the unprovoked attack of the cavalry detachment on the demonstration. I also would appreciate your opinion of the other filmed versions of this story.

... I lose my password, and I have to register again. What is the solution to that annoying problem?

My childhood was not as idyllic as it should have been, so I'm trying to make up for that by doing now everything that I did not do when I was a chronological, as opposed to an spiritual, youngster.

I told my mother about the death of Mickey Rooney. She replied: Yes, I loved that muchacho=boy. Rooney was born on 23 Sept 1920; Francisca Roldan was born on 30 Nov 1929. Like many old people, my mother is not good at judging people's ages. She described the handyman who is painting her bedroom as a young man; that young man has a 29 y/o son. At what age do men and women stop being young people? Compared to Francisca I am young, but that does not detract from the fact that a man of 59 and a half years of age no longer qualifies as a boy.

Poirot is based on a Belgian police officer whom Christie met while he was in exile in UK during WWI.

is he based on a real person? Don't laugh. Even a character as fantastical as Don Quixote is said to have been based on a real person whom Cervantes knew personally.

As long as mention is made of THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN, let me point out a blooper in it that is one of my favorites: in the scene where Don Juan is mistaken for the bridegroom of an English lady there is a big display of flags. They are all very beautiful, all very well designed--whoever designed them obviously knew his heraldry, something very rare in the movies--, and all very fictional, because they do not represent any real noble house or civic entity. Later, when Don Juan works as the fencing master in the royal Spanish court, he takes Queen Anne to a trophy room that keeps what are supposed to be the flags of Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Garay, Valdivia, Jimenez de Quesada, Ponce de Leon, Coronado, Nun~ez de Balboa and others. Look carefully at those flags: THEY ARE THE SAME EXACT FLAGS OF THE SEQUENCE WHEN DON JUAN IS MISTAKEN FOR THE BRIDEGROOM OF THE ENGLISH LADY.

What is your opinion of the different shows inspired by that most breathtaking of real life stories?

Without a doubt what dates a movie most is the social mores it depicts. Take THE BIRTH OF A NATION; what is one to make today, 99 years after its release, of its unabashed admiration of the ****, an admiration that was far from universal in Griffith's time, even among the white people?

Paul Walker and Philip Seymour Hoffman died so soon, just when I was getting used to the prospect of seeing more of them in the coming decades. On the other hand you have someone like Charlton Heston, with whom I grew up, and who played so many larger than life characters--even his villains, such as Richelieu and Long John Silver, were full of charm and charisma--; someone whom you cannot believe will ever die! That is a good question. Whose loss do you feel most keenly: someone young who still has a lot of achievement ahead, or someone who has been around so long that mortality seems not to apply to him?

That is why the humor of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! often gets lost in time: people eventually forget the political and societal basis for many of their sketches. Abbott and Costello, on the other hand, are timeless because their humor is based on an eternal subject: how silly people can be in circumstances that they do not know how to handle, such as meeting Dracula, the Wolfman and the Frankenstein Monster.

Ultimately this story would be a parable for a timeless subject that is never dated: the hostility towards Judaism. Certainly the Jews today are as persecuted as they were in the 1st Century, so reminding them of their valiant struggle in the siege of Jerusalem would be both timely and inspiring.

Back in 1983 I was enjoying RETURN OF THE JEDI until the horrible dastardly Ewoks made their foul unwelcome appearance.

In the miniseries THE BORGIAS--which stars the very skinny Jeremy Irons, who does not look one bit like the very husky Pope Alexander VI--, the soundtrack music for his coronation, which takes place in 1492, is one of the coronation anthems of GF Handel--not only an anachronism, but also music that the Catholic Church has never used for a papal coronation.

SERIOUSLY!: an story as dramatic and significant as the Jewish Revolt deserves the attention of someone like Spielberg. MASADA is good, but only one episode of the full story. That story demands the kind of treatment that BEN-HUR and other similar stories have gotten since the times of such as Griffith.