Vidor

"Casablanca" is one of the best scripts ever written but it has one line that just clangs. During the Paris flashback Rick and Ilsa hear the German artillery and she says "Is that the sound of cannon fire...or my heart pounding?" Or something like that anyway. Just a dreadful line in a film that is filled with magnificent lines from beginning to end.

"Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed," is exactly the same principle as "The same thing that happens to everything else" in X-Men as quoted above. Lines that would have worked if they had been delivered with snark/sarcasm, but land with a thud when they're delivered straight. Here's an example of a line which I thought was great but which a lot of people thought was dumb. In "Vanilla Sky" Tom Cruise is asking Penelope Cruz--something, I guess, and she says "I will tell you in another life, when we are both cats." Of course, Cruz being naked when she said it helped.

That's not stupid at all. That's brilliant screenwriting. As for stupid lines, you could go with the whole screenplay of "The Conqueror".

Once upon a time, I used to work at a place very close to Phil Spector's mansion where he murdered Lana Clarkson. Weird place to have a mansion. Outside of the Spector mansion, Alhambra is pretty run down, with bars on windows and the like.

Glad someone had time for their Two Minutes Of Hate.

Somehow it seems appropriate that this post is made by someone with the username and icon of a blind old man.

No one cares.

"Evangeline", an original song by The Band and Emmylou Harris for 1978 concert film "The Last Waltz", not nominated.

See also "The President's Last Bang", a terrific black comedy focusing on the assassination itself.

I'm gonna say Raft, Crawford, and Hearst above are total nonsense. As far as Errol Flynn goes "pervert" is a loaded word and what was supposedly "covered up" when he very publicly stood trial for statutory rape?

And a non-villainous role as Mrs. Dreyfus in "The Life of Emile Zola". Won an Oscar for "Anthony Adverse" but for the life of me I can't remember what she did in that movie.

Eh, the Rose Bowl then. Any large outdoor venue.

Natalie Wood! And Jodie Foster who was already mentioned. Anna Paquin springs to mind but she's a bit of a lesser star. A while back I was watching some of Shirley Temple's later movies. Various impressions were 1) she grew up to be really good-looking, 2) she was quite bad as a grown-up actress, and 3) the films were terrible, "Fort Apache" excepted and she was sort of an extraneous character in that one. I watched "That Hagen Girl" with her and Ronald Reagan and it is just weird and bad and creepy.

This would have been a better thread if it had just been titled "Nazi Cinema". Overall Nazi cinema wasn't very good for the obvious reason that their best artists mostly left. I watched "Opfergang" just a couple of days ago, actually. It kind of felt like Douglas Sirk somehow managed to sneak back into Germany and make one of his big dumb melodramas under an assumed name. It was decent and that Kristina Soderbaum sure was good looking. There's an interesting movie called "The Four Companions" from 1938 about four young ladies who start an advertising business. Bec

Wacky idea: hold the Oscars outside. See if you can book Dodger Stadium.

In 1999 the Academy could have picked Aimee Mann's "Save Me", which is a really, really great song. Or they could have picked "Blame Canada", which is a hilarious musical number. Instead they picked that awful Phil Collins song from "Tarzan". The "South Park" boys later made a whole episode about how much Phil Collins sucks.

That William Randolph Hearst story is nonsense.

"Hamlet" was...OK. I've never liked Olivier's habit of giving soliloquies as inner monologues while he looks pensive. Jean Simmons is terrific in it. The obvious pick here is "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" which is still a great film that hasn't lost a bit over the years. It is also excellent to see Humphrey Bogart's descent into madness. I think I'd take it over not just that field but all the movies released in 1948, including, say, "Bicycle Thieves".

I can write out what it got wrong! Namely, the idea that you can breathe on the Moon, and not just that, you can walk around in your regular Earth clothes. Other than that, as you say, spookily accurate. Liquids in zero G, staged rocketry, a countdown, giant rockets on giant launch pads, and the concept of constant acceleration in order to have "gravity" in space. Lang consulted with rocket scientists and really nailed the hell out of "Woman in the Moon". Well, except for being able to live on the far side in a tent.

Never been able to get on the Norma Shearer train. I liked "The Divorcee", and "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg" is a legit classic, and "The Women" was interesting. The rest, meh. She was the worst Juliet ever.

"Stars" in the age of the superhero movie really don't count for much. Does it matter who wears the Captain America costume? Would it have mattered if they'd picked some different good-looking brunette to play Wonder Woman? How often are these Marvel stars headlining non-Marvel movies that turn into big hits?

Similar to Harold Lloyd, who always controlled production but never took a director credit.

"The Divorcee" is one of the few Norma Shearer movies that wasn't annoying and also has a couple of scenes set at New Year's. IIRC Shearer gets back with her husband at a New Year's party at the end.

I seem to remember reading that "Woman in the Moon" also invented the "ten...nine...eight...seven" rocket launch countdown.

I've read that Olivia de Havilland was embarrassed by "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" but she's terrific in it, and it's better than anything else she did in the otherwise forgettable latter part of her career.