EricJ

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know it's fifteen years old, and was first posted two weeks after we caught Saddam Hussein, but, FWIW...) It brought down UA, which is where most of the independent "Roadshow engagement" epics were still being made, and made producers think twice about letting Last Year's Oscar Flavor do whatever he wanted. Has anyone seen it? I tried once--I couldn't get past the waltzing. Ohh, the never-ending rich-privileged Harvard waltzing...This is one of those movies that you watch the "Uncut Director's Cut" and realize WHY they cut it down for the theatrical release. As for Michael Cimino's attempt to do a deconstructive "Real historical-revisionist western", that later became coin of the realm after Unforgiven, and think what he was aiming for was already done sometime between The Assassination of Jesse James and the Kevin Costner/Lawrence Kasdan Wyatt Earp...Oh, and Dances with Wolves. It's not like Cimino ever gave us anything else worth looking up.

Talking to ghosts again, Sarge? Yep, those old war memories from fifteen years ago hit hard... 😛 As for other posters with the same grievance in our new modern era: Yes, the full Kino-restored uncut mess of Lang's movie was boneheaded Weimar-era pro-labor-union propaganda, which is why he left for the US. But me, I was raised on the "MTV version" of Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis--back in in 1984, when that was considered "big" for Film Restoration--and I would agree with the critic who said "There's the version of Metropolis that's 'good for you', and then there's the version you actually enjoy watching." (Ie., the slightly-less-incomplete one where most of the propaganda was still missing, they focused on the Fred & Maria story and the cool robot, and Moroder managed to put some actual emotion back into the score without beating the story over our heads.) Your "sacrilege" may vary--Me, I think Moroder actually improved the workers' revolt and the catacombs chase than from Lang's original score.

Just opened this thread to see who'd get to mention Lucille Ball's 40's career as a "glamour" actress:

They say that about EVERY musical that opens up in December: "Les Miserables", anyone? "Nine"? "Into the Woods"? "The Greatest Showman"? And since that's the loudest buzz, Academy-screening voters, who only have time to visit the "essential" screenings, pick that one for free. As for real-world Oscar chances, it's still got to fight the fact that, yes, ten months later, it's still trendy for grownups to shout "Wakanda forever!" as a progressive racial slogan, pretending it's an actual country somewhere near South Africa. (Also, Disney has been flooding the trade press with infomercial "articles" about Mary's "Oscar-buzz" for a month now--"Fake News" might not be at CNN, but it's alive and well at Variety and Hollywood Reporter.) --- On a side note, it's nice to see that we've found some actual USE for this thread--Started out as just one poster's "Here's all the movies coming out this year, which ones will be nominated?", but if the rest of us are indulging opinions, nice to have it as a contemporary backup to the "I Just Watched" thread. I was going to do an IJW about sitting through library Blu-rays of both Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner:2049 in one week--and how they were the exact same movie!!--but looks like this would be the more appropriate thread for it.

Since people in the UK never grew up watching Happy Days, what's the equivalent British expression for a long-running TV show "Jumping the shark", which causes cancellation to loom?

Yes, V/V was probably Edwards' last sane one--Julie Andrews Edwards should probably have been a little concerned about Blake's inexplicable obsession with drag nightclubs or wacky scenes of male characters waking up together in bed (to be fair, he would have aced the La Cage Aux Folles Broadway movie that died in limbo), but V/V was Edwards' ultimate clockwork-orchestrated tribute to classic French Farce. Unfortunately, all those years of letting Peter Sellers improvise the Pink Panther movies for him had made Edwards sort of forget how to direct actors who stuck to scripts, and after Sellers was gone, he just let them sort of roam about the scenes trying to figure it out in the same way. Throw in a growing misogyny in his movies, and you could end up at the end of his career with something like John Ritter in "Skin Deep". Yikes. 😮

Yep, and he didn't "screw up". As for Hart, you're probably confusing him with Chris Rock's two hosting gigs--The first a disaster, and the second not so bad, since he got to satirize the #OscarsSoWhite craze.

And directed by a rapidly declining Blake Edwards, into a confused mess that, as Roger Ebert put it "seemed to be at cross-purposes with itself: Half of it wants to be cheerful, and half wants to be morbid and depressing".

Actually, it was Tex who said he never cared much for him, leading to his rather limited filmography. I'll take the more stylized Tex-frenzy of "Magical Maestro", m'self. Tex at Warner, OTOH, had a completely different style, making his jokes more smooth and surreal, in "Cinderella Meets Fella". Ah, that was back when Bob Kane was still passing himself off as the "creator" of Batman, and hired into creating other heroes for 60's cartoons--Although, if it weren't for streaming services having to depend on cheap public-domain toons, we probably never would have remembered Cool McCool, either.

I always associated the song with Danny Kaye trying for a Red Skelton-like escape from another overeager female, which is why I never fell for the "sexism". And FWIW, the undiscerning Mexican audience loves Speedy--Not just for desperate cultural validation, but because he always beats Sylvester/Daffy in the end. ("Speedy is friendly with everyone's sister!") And, they probably like him being shrill, loud and annoying, too.

Uh, that's nice--But could you take a break from the OUTRAGE!!! to explain why you necroposted the darn thing in the first place?? Last year would be one thing, but '02? The GW Bush era? Back when Cartoon Network still SHOWED Looney Tunes cartoons?? (Wasn't that way back when a then non-senile Ted Turner dumped a whole load of nonsensical CN "bans" on the Looneys, like banning "Frigid Hare" because Bugs told the mean Eskimo "Get off me, ya big ape!", or "Bewitched Bunny" because they thought "Sure, I know, but aren't they all witches inside?" was supposed to be nasty, sexist and misogynist?)

You mean In the Good Old Summertime (1949), or You've Got Mail (1998)?

Koch in the early 80's cleaned up (to a degree) the mess that Abe Beame made of New York in the Ford-era mid-70's. Back when Travis Bickle still drove a taxi, Gene Hackman was looking for drug smugglers, and Walter Matthau ran the subways. Before Koch pushed tourism as a new industry for the city, even if you were a hundred miles away upstate, you just didn't go to NYC. PERIOD. 😱 And you sure as heck didn't hang around Times Square.

I grew up in upstate NY during the late 70's--The last era of "real" Annie-era classic mainstream Broadway, pre-"Cats", pre-pre "Lion King", and pre-pre-pre-"Kinky Boots". And we couldn't watch the Star Trek reruns on WPIX-11 without seeing at least one local commercial for "Grease", "A Chorus Line", "The Fantasticks", or that I ❤️N Y commercial where Frank Langella's Dracula loves it especially at night (swoop!)...Oh, AND seeing the original Stephanie Mills cast of "The Wiz" show up on WNEW-5's Wonderama. Unfortunately, this was still the pre-Koch era, and actually going to NYC to see said shows would have been like going to the moon--And the moon would have been safer, less expensive and more scenic. So smell freakin' ME if I happen to remember a time when Broadway didn't circle its tribal wagons, sell international logos, or let big studios remarket their cult movies, back when they were the "third" arm of American mainstream entertainment, and provided TV variety shows with their musical content. And on topic, just be glad they're not showing the sequel, "Bring Back Birdie". (In which the older Vegas-comeback Conrad Birdie was played by a professional Elvis imitator, who, it turned out, just couldn't parse the whole "Broadway" thing.)

They either seem to be going with niche "gay" musicals (ie. Rocky Horror, Hairspray, and Rent's reportedly next), for the core network broadcast-TV audience--Or just falling back on existing musicals that have already been done for recent movie/TV, and which the audience already knows. Can't sell the audience anything new, y'know.

Darn, this thread is reminding me I have to rewatch the Christmas Carol episode of "The Odd Couple" ("Scrooge Gets an Oscar") before dropping my HuluPlus--

That's pretty much it--Gritty directors from the 70's, like Sidney Lumet and Sydney Pollack, were down to just generic action dramas by the time they hit retirement in the late 90's and early 00's, and Frankenheimer was down to TNT cable movies, Robert DeNiro in "Ronin", and taking over for that disastrous Marlon Brando "Island of Dr. Moreau". ...It happens, sooner or later. 😥

"Vin Diesel" has practically become a codeword among the audience for "The star that studios and press agents insist on strategically promoting as the next A-star, despite never having a success with the public". (It used to be "Heath Ledger", but that changed.) I knew "xXx" and "Chronicles of Riddick" were the more infamous examples of this, but I didn't know how far back Operation: Diesel went, as Universal--like other studios who think their expensive A-stars are the reason why a movie did well at the box office--tried to credit all of the "Fast & the Furious" series' success on Vin Diesel & Dwayne Johnson. (When "Chronicles of Riddick", the sequel to Diesel's minor-cult "Pitch Black", came out with full mega-budget studio push, Universal pumped the first movie back on TV stations with "The movie that started it all!" Um, "started" what, exactly?) We know what happened to Dwayne, but last year's "xXx: the Return of Xander Cage" also reminds us what happened to Vin. 😛

But at least FilmStruck left with a present, to placate all the "End of the world for classic films!" fans: I'd only subscribed for the free introductory month, on the tablet, way back when it was still just a Criterion service, and just today opened my e-mail to get a bonus code for 5 free digital-library movies on Movies Anywhere. (Which would normally have been Ultraviolet, before Warner saw their Flixster service go down the drain.) Robin Hood, Casablanca, King Kong, Singin' in the Rain, and the Judy Garland "Star is Born"--The Five Classic Movies (apart from Wizard of Oz) that Warner thinks they can sell to "real" people anymore outside of the Archive. That now brings my "digital library" up to 50, twenty of which I've redeemed free from Blu-ray disks, and only one of the other thirty that I've ever paid for in my life.

They gotta be sincere. They gotta feel it here. 'Cause if they feel it here, they're gonna be honestly sincere.

No. It's on Hulu, go there.

And now they reportedly want out of their partnership in HuluPlus-- I'm already watching the vultures circling over that service, and have already started cleaning off my queue to drop next month--I suspect the service may not live to see '20.

There's a new movement among religious scholars to say--since our idea of Jesus as a long-haired "hippie" only comes from assumptions off the Shroud of Turin, and that he had long blonde/brown hair comes from medieval European tastes--that an actual first-century Judean would have looked much different, more Jewish/middle-Eastern with short dark hair, and yes, rather like Kenny Loggins. "Serious" Biblical depictions on film are now trying to fall into line with that theory--Recently, I was watching the Visual Bible series on Matthew, and their depiction of the Sermon on the Mount gave us a historically-approved Son of Man who unsettlingly resembled Yakov Smirnoff, with a John Ritter grin. Yeah, I read through Lorna's review saying "Oh, I see...You were just making that up, weren't you? " But then, after getting the joke, thought, wait a minute: In the Callahan-canon, wasn't the avenging-Sondra-Locke plot in "Sudden Impact" from '82 (the "Make my day" one Reagan loved), and the '73 Nixon-era "Magnum Force" was about the secret police-vigilante group? Granted, I've only seen "The Dead Pool" (no, not the superhero one, the one where Jim Carrey lip-synchs Guns & Roses), but I'm confused...

And, of course, being a cheap direct-video playing on Amazon Prime, already has made its way to Rifftrax, FWIW. (They seem to grab up whatever Public-Domain title shows up on Prime from week to week, like salesmen checking newspaper obituaries. I've often checked out a B or C-title on Prime, and take bets what will be the next one Rifftrax will claim they've "discovered"...And two or three times, I've been right.) There's a rule in cheap movies that if you see a genuinely cynical, bargain-basement, thrown-together backyard "kiddie matinee", it's usually from a producer trying to diversify and branch out of his background in either A) grindhouse horror, or B ) porn. With director David DeCoteau--and a quick reading of his IMDb listing will bring up more public-domain direct-videos than Roger Corman could grind out in a lifetime of drive-in movies--it's both. Mostly niche-audience gay porn, however, which is why he directed it under one of his many, many female screen names, in this case "Mary Crawford". 😕 For the record, 60-yo. Johnny Whittaker gets to be the washed-up ex-name-star in this one (in addition to usual standby Eric Roberts), and despite some problems in his past, he actually...doesn't look too bad these days. And that's coming from someone who's got the old 70's "Tom Sawyer" on disk. Well, if we're talking "blame", we do have to put some of both Baby Geniuses squarely on Bob Clark's head. (Who, yes, also started out in cheap grindhouse horror. And ended his career with kiddy direct-video "Karate Dog".) If you're of that generation that only remembers Clark for ONE movie about a Christmas leg-lamp--and then historically-revises "Oh, and then he made that shower-peeping movie that everyone loved in the 80's!"--son, let Grandpa sit you down and tell you a little story...

Or even a decent eye-roll. I've heard one critic mention the rule that bad drag (qv. Martin Lawrence) isn't funny, while good drag by someone who doesn't WANT to do it (qv. Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman) is. Probably because the former is either too misogynistic or too self-indulgent, while the latter is just one more comic obstacle for our protagonist. Only straight guys can make drag funny, everything else is vanity.