Palmerin

Anybody who watches BEN-HUR attentively will notice the shadow of the looming 66-70 Jewish Rebellion against Rome. Has anyone, such as Spielberg, considered the idea of producing an epic movie or miniseries based on that beautiful and tragic story--a kind of extended MASADA?

... what movies do you find so dated that their appeal and fame is utterly incomprehensible to you? Certainly that Warren Beatty-Jack Nicholson comedy that was the debut of Stockard Channing now seems so silly and witless to me that I cannot understand why I paid good money to watch it.

Not so long ago, several basic cable stations, when broadcasting ANNIE and CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, they edited out almost all the musical numbers, which ruined the charm of those movies and made it hard to follow their plots.

When I lived in PR--I moved to FL in 1980--WAPA-TV had the irritating habit of showing movies complete only in their premieres; afterwards it went Jack the Ripper with them. The second time it showed NORTH BY NORTHWEST THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE OF ROGER THORNHILL BEING CHASED BY THE BIPLANE WAS TOTALLY CUT OFF!!!

how do movie makers manage to film reflections on a mirror without getting themselves reflected in the mirror? I am particularly struck by that amazing climax of that Orson Welles movie in which Welles and Rita Hayworth are reflected multiple times in a multitude of funhouse mirrors.

I took a stab at GOSFORD PARK; I didn't see anything that persuaded me from not changing the channel. I watch the British costume dramas on PBS when they have interesting plots and characters to go with the costumes and the sets.

I notice that CHARIOTS OF FIRE is not included in the tribute to the Oscar. That is very good, for that is one of the dullest and most boring movies ever made. Its distributors in my Puerto Rico were aware of that, so they waited until it was given the Oscar to show it. I was one of the first people to watch it; many in that public, myself included, were so angry by the tedium they had had to endure that they demanded their money back. The very embarrassed movie house owners were glad to comply. What is the chayote? A failed imitation of the potato--a vegetable so bland and tasteless that it can be very accurately described as having no flavor at all.

I chose to mention Ukraine because I am very interested in the events over there, plus I am very aware of that horrendous atrocity that was the Holodomor.

I am sorry for not being specific enough. Yes, I mean people like Sinatra doing dramatic and comedic performances that do not involve any singing.

I can think of: Dick Powell Fred Astaire Bing Crosby Frank Sinatra Dean Martin Bobby Darin Judy Garland

Thank you for your reply, which is very helpful. I have been reading the threads here since December, and the posters have impressed me as well informed and knowledgeable people, so naturally I am eager to know what they would respond to this legal question that has puzzled me for many years, ever since I saw characters in several movies and TV shows having to endure the consequences of inadvertently breaking laws that were totally unknown to them. Thelma Todd was one great beauty.

I trust that some of you work in the law, for I have a poser that has troubled me for years. Suppose that at least one of the Justices of the US Supreme Court is an angler, and he wants to take a vacation dedicated entirely to fishing. Wishing to be as far away from judicial business as possible, he goes to Guam. Naturally he is greeted by the authorities of Guam, and he obliges by participating in social events, but he soon settles down to the real business that brought him to Guam, sport fishing. Hardly has he started his fun that he gets into trouble, because he is caught fishing in an area where an old law forbids unauthorized fishing. The reaction of the authorities is total surprise and amazement and disbelief, because the law in question is a withered old piece of legal driftwood that even the Supreme Court of Guam has forgotten is still in the books. Should that Justice, or any other person, including a citizen of Guam, be penalized for breaking a law that no one, not even the Guam judicial system, was aware existed? In AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, Passepartout causes a riot when he enters a Hindu temple without removing his shoes, as is Hindu protocol. Can he be blamed for not knowing what is not allowed in a country that is not his own? It's obvious that in, say, Ukraine, it is illegal to commit murder or robbery, as is the case with all other countries, but what about legal things that pertain exclusively to Ukraine and the Ukrainians? Should a foreigner be penalized for breaking a law or rule whose existence is known only to Ukrainians? My point, as you must have deduced by now, is that there is, or should be, a limit to the principle that IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSE. Honestly, is there even ONE person in the world who can always safely abide by that principle because he knows full well EVERYTHING THAT IS ILLEGAL AND FORBIDDEN in every one of the millions of population centers of the world?

The AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS of 1956 is a serious disappointment. The original novel is very amusing; the movie, on the other hand, fails as a comedy--save for the performance of Cantinflas--, and as an adventure story falls as flat as a cake that has failed to rise.

Can you imagine Errol Flynn in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD flashing a gap toothed brown and yellow smile?

A former child actor, whose name I unfortunately can't remember right now, declared in 2013 that it is very frequent in Hollywood for child actors to get molested. I fear that might be the reason why Dana Plato had such a disastrous adult life.

Doesn't the fact that he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar count for something?

I love the SHIRLEY TEMPLE STORYBOOK; I wish I could buy it.

The appeal of drugs totally escapes me. I was around pot smokers a couple of times, and the foul stench of weed nauseated me. Back in the latter 70s I smoked two packages of cigarettes, and all I got was a taste of garbage in my mouth that I had to wash off with half a bottle of Listerine. My only drugs are candy, sweet drinks such as cocoa and soda, and sweet wine such as DeKuyper and Manischewitz which I drink for dessert and to help me sleep.

Could someone please tell the story of how difficult it was to perform in front of the Cinerama cameras? That is the one entertaining fact about this patchy and wildly uneven feature; I like the James Arness miniseries of the same name a whole lot better.

The man was very polite, and explained the plot to me in full detail.

The first time I watched GOODFELLAS I was so painfully twisted out of shape by all the F bombs that I could not follow the plot. I actually had to ask the manager of the neighborhood BLOCKBUSTER to explain the plotline to me!

I only managed to watch the second half of this adaptation of Hardy; where do I go to watch the entire film on my computer?

Sepiatone: What you say is absolutely true, but you miss my point, which is that WWI and its grandchild WWIII--the deceitfully named ,,Cold'' War--are the reason why all those countries are now free from tyrannical thralldom. In a discussion with a poster at the IMDb NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA board about the many failures of Nicholas II as a ruler and as a man my interlocutor pointed out the disturbing fact that the kingdoms and realms that made up the Russian Empire were not voluntary members of that regime, as is the case of the states of the USA, but rather occupied territories hardly different from the countries that Stalin enslaved during WWII.

Was WWI worth fighting? The two successor empires of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, fell apart after an existence of barely three quarters of a century. The fall of the Russian Empire and of its bastard offspring, the Soviet Union, on the other hand, led to the liberation of many countries: Finland, Poland, the Baltic trio, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasian trio, the stan countries, and, of course, Russia itself.

World War I. Would you watch a collection of movies dedicated to that calamity, from which the world might never recover?