EricJ

I felt Disney was constructing the movie--again, turning it into the same "Parents, learn to be closer to your kids by finding your inner child...The one that was a Disney fan!" metaphor that "Christopher Robin" was--but for all the movie's attempts to replicate an equivalent from each and every number from the '64 movie, it felt surprisingly small in its ambitions: The "Turning Turtle" number with Mary's Uncle Albert Cousin Topsy, on the ceiling in the upside-down room, is obviously the X=Y equivalent of "I Love to Laugh", but--even for the fact that both numbers take place in one single London flat, which one FEELS like a "bigger" musical number? That was the size of Walt's, and Robert Stevenson's, imaginations when they had a whole studio factory to play with. If New Disney was "constructing" the movie out of new songs and old references and hints of Sherman Brothers on the soundtrack, Walt was throwing the original at us all by himself: All the CGI thrown at us in "Can You Imagine That?" can't match the single out-of-nowhere bit of Walt Disneyland-neato of Julie Andrews dueting with an animatronic Tiki-bird robin in the first movie. EASTER EGG ALERT: Oh, and I assume everyone spotted the "real" Jane Banks (Karen Dotrice) all grown up, as a woman who stops by to say hello in front of the house?

Thanks to most of the 60's-70's roadshow United Artists showing up in the MGM Orphans, you can catch Fiddler just about any danged where on streaming. (And the oft-repeated commercials were from a much-hyped late-70's theatrical revival of the '71 movie, although I can't remember why.) And while Topol is a more historically believable Tevye than a lovable Zero Mostel one, for whatever else the next three hours put you through, Norman Jewison's kinetically syncopated cut of the opening "Tradition" number (with John Williams arrangement) is still one of the great film openings to post-Sound of Music 60's-70's roadshow-musicals. 👍

Since I didn't have my old "Classical music from hit movies" CD from the 80's (such collections were very popular back then), I had to search IMDb and YouTube to remember Amy Irving "playing" Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in The Competition (1980), after hearing the First Movement finale in the trailer:

Yep--Like white nationalists at a Trump rally, the K3 in the 20's literally prepared themselves for Birth of a Nation sparking a hoped-for "recruitment drive". Very few people were fooled about Griffiths' intentions, least of all Woodrow Wilson. EVEN "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" (1982)? The one "true John Carpenter" entry that only non-Halloween fans have learned to appreciate for its own self? As for the "Re-re-re-re-reboot", have to take out two of those Re's, as the new version was pretty much made just to de-historize those two Rob Zombie fanfilms/Weinstein franchise-attempts and pretend they never happened. The consensus of fans are willing to agree.

Infinitely preferable to having to go Ecky-ecky-ecky z'pang, boing...

Oops, no, I was shaming asking Det. McLeod why he admitted to never having seen them, particularly The Third Man. The Muppet Movie and the Harry Potters, we can assume, was due to "I'm a grownup, I don't watch kiddy films!", which was a very popular notion back in the pre-Pixar 00's.

So, haven't seen Harry Potter, haven't seen The Muppet Movie, haven't seen The Third Man... I know some New Year's video resolutions.

Over the last seven years of the Digital Wars--and now with a speculated coming decline of theatrical movies in the '20's--we don't have to imagine, we ARE in a current age of the Collapse of Movies (if not Civilization). Thankfully, we have disk, and the answer is, save them all.

It was originally released out of sequence as the "third" That's Entertainment film (you'll notice Gene Kelly is standing up this time), since MGM had gotten into the habit of one for every ten-year anniversary. Dancing was from '85 and That's Entertainment III was from '94--TE3 should technically be the fourth film, and by then, there was really no need for them, as everyone had VCR's by that point, and the only reason for making them was for rare studio-deleted scenes. And it's hard to think of the street-dance from "Fame" as a "classic" movie-musical scene, but looking back in thirty-year nostalgia, if you had to pick one iconic 80's-musical scene, well, what would be more appropriate to pick?

Actually, Hal Roach wanted to put L&H into his big ambitious version of The Devil's Brother (1933) operetta, since it called for two bumbling henchmen. After that, it had the two typecast in "prestige" big-studio musicals as the Two Bumbling Henchmen to put into any operetta, and Victor Herbert's had two slots open. Although with L&H, they now had to be good/duped, since we wouldn't accept them as vile kidnappers. They were much easier to accept as dimwitted but sentimental gypsy kidnappers in The Bohemian Girl (1936).

The Godfather, Part III (1990): Since I'd finally worked on watching 1&2 over the fall--yes, one of those films that you know every single moment and line from, but never actually sat down and watched in sequence--I decided to put this on the "Live" half of the Live-or-Die list of my Netflix queue titles before the New-Year's drop, for those who always spend the week between Christmas and New Year's figuring what neglected movies to panic-binge before they disappear off the lists. I'd always been curious about why the bloodthirsty critical and audience antipathy towards the movie when it came out, besides the obvious "Heretical" idea bringing back Al Pacino's post-Scarface "comeback" for a twenty-years-later Late-80's classic-movie sequel: Unlike today's studio-franchise attempts to resurrect Ghostbusters and Blade Runner, the VHS Movement of the late 80's put audiences more in touch with classic films for the first time, and it was easier for an aging Paul Newman to do "The Color of Money" or Jack Nicholson to do "The Two Jakes". Like "Jakes" pretty much depended on having all of "Chinatown" fresh in the memory, most of G3 depends on having all of Coppola's "Godfather Part II" fresh at hand, as plot lines pick up fresh immediately after a twenty-year break. We see the Corleone Mansion West in ruins, as Pacino's Michael has moved back to NY, and is now pondering end-of-the-road ideas about going straight after complicated deals with the Vatican, which, yes, start hinting at double-crosses from the inside. (And, updating the action to 1979, hints at real-world conspiracy theories over Pope John Paul I.). Son Anthony is now grown up and wants to leave the business and become an opera singer, since he has "bad memories" from the end of G2, and Andy Garcia now takes the central subplot as the family's most promising, but dangerously old-school nephew. Basically, if G2 became over-mythologized and praised as "The sequel that was better than the original!", G3 is pretty much just The Sequel You Expected, for good and bad, which could explain most of the overreaction when it came out in theaters. And the elephant in the room: The one reason why, thanks to the Razzie Awards, no one, seen it or not, can talk about G3 without giggling, namely Sophia Coppola's performance as daddy's-girl Maria. Given the Razzies' gay celebrity-gossip snickering, I thought they might be overdoing it, and thought "How bad could it be?" Yes, the legends are true: She's THAT bad. 😱 Sophia basically wanders through Coppola's Italian-opera setting like a contemporary teenager from one of her own movies--Imagine Elizabeth Berridge's jarringly anachronistic 80's-girl voice from "Amadeus", only in an emotionless monotone, even in the sudden out-of-nowhere ridiculously overwrought climax in the last ten minutes of the movie, which...no, if I told you, you wouldn't believe me. Think that may have solved the mystery of why this movie stuck in our cultural memory.

1929 - The CocoAnuts 1939 - The Wizard of Oz 1949 - On the Town 1959 - Some Like it Hot (hon. mention, Lil' Abner,) 1969 - Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid 1979 - Murder By Decree (hon. mention, The Great Train Robbery) 1989 - The Little Mermaid 1999 - The Sixth Sense 2009 - Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince (And guess we'll have movies for 2019, but not sure about 2029, unless studios can figure out what to do for a Plan B after Marvel retires. )

Our local former indie UHF station--even though it had been bought out and abandoned years ago, and is now barely a shell of its former self--still observes the sacred local tradition of the Three Stooges Marathon for background party-viewing from 11pm-1am, since generations wouldn't know what to do without one. (Or, as they called it one year, "The Larry, Moe, Curly, and Yes, We're Going to Show Some Shemps, So If You're Going to Whine About It, We'll Forget the Whole Thing Marathon".) Classic comedy seems to be the thing to have passively on TV while you're milling about on Eve/Day, and another station used to have a Marx Brothers marathon on early NYD. Me, I stayed in from bad weather and settled for "Horsefeathers" on Blu-ray. (Breaking my tradition of usually watching The Time Machine (1960), for its NYE turn-of-the-19th-century setting.)

Some of the features were cut into shorts for their featurette market, so you were probably watching a condensed version of The Flying Deuces (1939). That one's not hard to find, since it's one of their two or three that fell into Public Domain, available where all fine PD titles are cheaply exploited--Still, is one of their better features. Ever look up the original Herbert? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babes_in_Toyland_(operetta)#1903_version 😮 Both Disney and Hal Roach were pretty much making up the story from scratch, although going by Disney's use of Henry Calvin & Gene Sheldon in his '61 version, Laurel & Hardy pretty much own our impression of the story today. As for L&H, Sons of the Desert (1933) gets the most mention, mostly for being associated with the fan club, but it's one of the best quintessential images of L&H as an early 30's Kramden & Norton.

Thanks to a large collection of Golan/Globus ending up in the MGM Orphans (if you ever missed "Lifeforce" in theaters, now you'll have more opportunity than you ever dreamed possible), almost the entire Cannon Tales series from the 80s is now floating around the streaming ether for view-- It's a unique chapter in Cannon Pictures history (even the "Electric Boogaloo" documentary doesn't cover it), when any horror, action or softcore producer tries dabbling in kiddie matinees to keep a foot in his legitimate/international market, and Menahem Golan was no exception. Shelley Duvall, these are not; this is Cannon's attempt at a "musical" where most of the musical numbers are on cheap synthesizers and all filmed on the same foreign castle-backlot, but they've got a willing Israeli crew putting their hearts into the dance numbers. Between Amazon Prime and Vudu Free Movies on Us, I've managed to track down the entire overlooked/hard-to-find series, and more than half of it is...not too bad, really, considering. The Frog Prince, like the Sid Caesar Emperor's New Clothes, is okay, Snow White doesn't do too badly despite a paycheck-camping Diana Rigg as the Queen, and Hansel & Gretel even goes out of its way to pretend to be a kids' version of the opera. (Amy Irving and Billy Barty in "Rumpelstiltskin", however, still seems to be the one title MIA.) But if you have pick one reason to see the series, either it's for Christopher Walken having a lot of fun doing his own singing and dancing--unlike "Pennies From Heaven"--as Puss in Boots, or for the other strange-love couple, Rebecca deMornay and John Savage as an as-yet-Disney-uncorrupted original-tale-source Beauty & the Beast (1987). Yes: I would argue that Cannon's version is actually BETTER than Disney's flailing overpraised steamrollering, and I'll bare-knuckle defend that any day of the week.

He was also Capt. Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise, before James T. Kirk took over:

Think it's as much for his travels, since Terry Jones would be so much more deserving of the honors-- Except, of course, that Jones already got his heraldic "knight crest" as part of a documentary series: https://youtu.be/iO7YZr1U6jU?t=774 ("Messias non est")

There was a similar BBC drama on Amazon Prime, with the framing device of Laurel reminiscing Hardy through his recovery after Hardy's stroke that ended their film career--From the description, sounded like it was going to be the theatrical remake, but most theatrical stories have to end with a big comeback scene in front of an audience. Abbott & Costello once reportedly had a famous backstage quote that a comedy team should "Never let their wives meet." It's usually how the billing-arguments and the breakups start.

And now, the War March of the Priests, from Felix Mendelssohn's "Athelie". As performed on the organ by tonight's guest soloist, The Abominable Dr. Phibes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OM18mJwMDM

The 80's Summer of Love was ushered in by no less than Wagner's "Siegfried's Funeral" at the end of Excalibur (1981)--One of those moments you always remember the theater you saw it in: Also around that time, I probably saw Being There (1980) three times before I'd heard of Erik Satie's Gnossiene #5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsQ_ClWBeRI And was there ever a film that more completely and spiritually appropriate to use Khachaturian's Sabre Dance than Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaUnwmJoy4s Oh, thanks, almost forgot Amadeus gut-punching the audience with Mozart's 25th Symphony in the opening credits:

Travers' book version is just plain nasty, but when Disney wanted to sweeten the '64 version into something palatable, Julie Andrews insisted on honoring Travers' ideas by putting a little of the tartness and vanity back in, and hit the right perfect balance by accident or design. Even from the previews (haven't gotten to the malls yet), Blunt looks like she's got the book character, but yes, doesn't have the affectionately in-on-the-joke "wink" that Andrews had when she deliberately frustrates the kids' attempts to figure out her secrets.

As in, STARTING new threads that weren't already written in 2003?

CONTINUE ALERT: And when Burr confronts Stewart in the dark, the film commentaries always try to delve into the "kinky abstract psychology" of Hitchcock's "message" ("Ah, now we see Stewart's character confronted with the real-world consequences of his voyeuristic urges!"). But when I showed it to one first-time-viewer friend, they immediately picked up "Don't say anything, he's trying to find out where you ARE in the dark!" Which, of course, Burr does, the minute Stewart can't help hero-blabbing. My favorite, just because the first half of the movie's dialogue is so preciously cute, funny and wisecracking, we think the entire movie is going to be another cute-macabre wink to the audience like Hitch's TV show. Until Grace Kelly starts seeing some evidence, says "Tell me what you saw from the beginning..." and the general expressions of "Ohh, poopie... 😮 " start becoming the audience's. But if I had to pick a second favorite, I'm biased from having seen "Family Plot" in the hometown theater when I was a kid, and not just because non-crazy Bruce Dern is watchable in anything:

Once, appropriately enough, on NBC's "Supertrain", with Dick Van Dyke as the crazy one, IIRC.