EricJ

...Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!

It's because Scarlett's Esther has gas, yuk yuk. And the Gene Kelly sailor dance has vaguely unintended home-erotic dance moves as they sing about how much they miss girls, get it, they're sailors, oh the unbridled hilarity. Oh, and wait, we still haven't gotten to the parody of Ben-Hur and other 50's Biblical epics having to "approve" their religion with consultants. And don't miss the parody of studios trying to groom Gary Cooper for non-Western roles, the fun goes on forever! Basically, the "highlight" of the movie for the Coens seems to be watching Brolin sock Clooney in the mouth, in much the same way Barton Fink said "I'm a writer!" and got his lights punched out...We're not sure whether they're "symbolically" belting Hollywood communists, actors, or just Old Hollywood in general. The Coens seem to have...issues with old movies, in that they want to show off how many of them they think they know, and also deconstruct as much superiority as they can to them--Old Hollywood, for all its charm, is something to be millennially punched in the face; they want to show off their knowledge of Preston Sturges, and how cleverly they can spit on him. Otherwise, like "Barton Fink"--and it's "We know this and you don't" parodies of Clifford Odets, Louis B. Mayer and William Faulkner, two sold-out frauds and a psycho--we get the Coens trying for a Wikipedia rundown of Every Embarrassing Old-Hollywood Scandal, from the Hollywood Ten to the Louella-vs.-Hedda feud, and treat them with the usual Coen warmth and compassion. What, did a film can of "Gone With the Wind" run over their dog when they were kids??

I saw the one with Scrooge McDuck, if that's what you mean...Duck tales, you know, woo-hoo. (And I haven't seen Kelsey Grammer's musical version, but I've heard it's not the best.)

Y'know, I WAS going to get into the whole Seymour Hicks/Reginald Owen/Alistair Sim/Albert Finney/George C. Scott/Jim Carrey debate as I do every time this year, but, at this point, um...Think I'll sit this one out, thanks. 😉 (And no, I didn't grow up with Mr. Magoo as my first one--In those days, they still had the 70's Hanna-Barbera "Kenner Classic Tales", and was disappointed that Dickens' version of Jacob Marley was a little different from the one I had seen.)

It helps if you saw Hugo in 3-D (or ahem, the Blu 3D, if you have one of the old sets or a Playstation VR ) , since that was Scorsese's whole point in making it: This was a year or so after James Cameron went on his big misunderstood-artist phase of "Directors can use 3D as a new tool if they want to!" to defend Avatar's Oscar nomination, and Scorsese and Ang Lee were the first to leap to his defense, start the new "revolution" and play with it. While the original children's book worked Melies into the 20's-Paris plot, Scorsese unsubtly mentions two or three times in the script that "When the Lumiere Bros. first showed their 'Train Arriving at the Station', audiences jumped out of the way." New film technologies and a directorial touch of "Film magic" creating greater and more wondrous imaginative realism for film audiences, hint-freakin'-HINT. Even if it turned out to be Scorsese's only 3D film (which it was), it's his film tribute--Whenever we got the "Where're the gangsters, Marty, huhuh?" jokes, I would point that that's the other Scorsese: This's his twin brother, the movie-history buff that does TCM documentaries, and that's pleasantly obvious by the last half hour. Of course, if you're willing to settle for watching it in (ick!) 2-D, you won't have any trouble finding it, as it seems to have joined the new Paramount wing of the MGM Orphanage, at just about every single one of the Usual Streaming Suspects: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BFSFQMT

Like Billy Wilder, Scorsese is a director who tries out pretty much any genre that strikes his fancy, and makes a good competent stab at it. He still wants to do another musical (not counting that Liza/DeNiro thing), and the fact that he could do in-concert rockumentaries inspired that Rob Reiner character from "This Is Spinal Tap". It doesn't surprise me when he does a period piece like The Aviator or Age of Innocence, or a comedy like After Hours or King of Comedy--But how many were chewing upholstery when none of the Oscar voters went to see "Hugo" because they thought it was a "kiddy movie", and some voters at the time thus literally thought Marty was making it an "animated mo-cap CGI movie", because Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were making them? After about the Nth joke of "Hey, where're the gangsters, Marty??" joke at the '11-'12 Oscars, you just wanted to start taking hostages, tying them to seats and MAKING them watch the Georges Melies finale of "Hugo". (Okay, am I still a little resentful about "The Artist" winning, you ask? Oh, a tad. 😡) Taking "The Aviator" for itself, thought it was okay--this was around the post-Titanic time when we were just accepting Leo DiCaprio as a real Actor, and we should stop hating him for being King of the World--and that it was as good a Howard Hughes biopic as we were likely to get, although Alan Alda was starting to play evil-corrupt-senators in his sleep. Alan, if it bends, it's funny...

When they get new seasons, Netflix puts the earlier seasons last on the list, so you'll watch the new ones first--That's why they have Season 1 & 2 indexes on the side. And (mostly) fixed problems aside, "Avalanche" is a not-too-bad episode (note how tastefully the host segments skated around jokes of "Gee, I wish I could be as manly as 70's Rock Hudson!"), but the aforementioned "Cry Wilderness" and "Carnival Magic" are now the established fan favorites, and Starcrash (1979) is goofy fun with good riffing. Unfortunately, the streaming-era strain of doing a whole 14-ep. season in one package for Netflix took its toll, and, sadly, "At the Earth's Core" and "The Christmas That Almost Wasn't" at the tail end of the season were surprise weak/disappointments for the fans...Darn, those were the movies I was most looking forward to. That was another problem fixed in S2, as they're now doing 6-ep. half-seasons at a time, to keep from "riffing fatigue".

The first New season had a few...problems to be ironed out by New Season 2. The "speed" of the jokes namely the biggest, caused by producer Joel Hodgson thinking it would be easier to record the comics' riffs separately than wrangle them into the same studio for a group session. Okay, note to ourselves. The celebrity cameos are also missing in NS2, since those were mostly "Me, me too!" participations by fan celebs, to help sweeten the Kickstarter donations to produce the series. (Oh, and because Felicia Day used to be on whatever that "Dr. Horrible" thing was, so they wanted to have a "reunion" with Neil Patrick Harris.) None of the celebrities in NS1 particularly survive their self-indulgent cameos, least of all Jerry Seinfeld, but the always-a-nut Mark Hamill livens up the "Carnival Magic" episode...Which, btw, as a movie/episode itself must be seen to be believed. 😱 When the comics do movie-related segments, the sketches without self-indulgent cameos manage to knock it out of the park, as other unbelievable movie/episode "Cry Wilderness" will demonstrate. As for New Season 2, I'm only three episodes in, and my opinions on "Mac & Me" (1988) have already been recorded. The season also tries doing Asylum knockoff "Atlantic Rim", and Roger Corman Abyss-knockoff "Lords of the Deep", but the first is made-for-cable mediocre and the second just barely ends up goofy enough to escape 80's Corman homemade-budget.

And welcome to Streaming--Where not every movie shows up anywhere. 😡

It should be "dedicated", it's the original Cabbage Patch where the Kids were first invented--Back in '80-81, Babyland General in Georgia was one store selling the dolls as homemade OOAK prestige items, which made them the Lexus of dolls for collectors, before the toy company bought them out. (Like Build-a-Bear, the whole immersive idea of being "delivered" with your new baby at the "adoption center" was part of the sales experience.) That's why we had the mania in '83, in that now anyone could get one, where before only the extremely dedicated elite could. In case you're wondering, that's also how the Beanie Babies craze started, back when those were also a homemade item selling off the radar for collectors, and then the craze cooled when they went mainstream.

At least, unlike other directors, he lives on in song (which TCM will probably beat into their tributes): (Guess we don't have to worry about "Don't Look Now" spoilers in the lyrics... ) And mentioning Roeg's "Walkabout" only brings up the point made in the documentary "Not Quite Hollywood", that before the 70's, the only "Australian movies" were other directors making movies about Australia, that usually depicted it as one endless Outback wilderness of desert, wild dingos and Magic Aborigine. Which only emphasized the lack of cultural identity the country was feeling in the late 60's, before the Sydney Opera House put them on the map.

I wasn't watching TCM, but I did manage to catch its comic-heckling debut on S2 of Netflix's "Mystery Science Theater 3000" reboot. (Which is funnier, and truer in the original show's spirit than some of the, ahem, later incarnations.) The heckling was mostly over the unexpressive rubber suits--The aliens communicate by whistling, and have a "cute" marketable 0.0 expression, which, when they first see the NASA probe that abducts them, prompted "Our permanent expressions of shock finally come in handy!" Another running joke is over the scenes set on the alien desert, and our heckler comics pretending to be the off-camera crew--"Okay, Bobby, I know you're a 12-yo. dancer in a rubber suit and it's 101 degrees, but we have to shoot this scene, stay with us!" The biggest laugh, however, was in the climax, where the "misunderstood" aliens are cornered in a police shootout after causing disaster at a shopping market--Our young Me hero rolls his wheelchair in the middle of the fight to explain things, and the comics heckle, "Okay, NOW we get the big scene where the hero tells all the grownups that we should get along and we're all alike on the inside..." Instead, in the movie, the police accidentally start shooting, which causes the market to blow up in fiery explosions, and our hero is caught by a friendly-fire bullet (guess how the movie handles that one). As the comics react at the movie going so suddenly Wrong: "Nooo, wait!...He's supposed to...tell everyone we're all alike...!"

Sounds like some film student didn't quite have a grasp of the N-word, and thought it referred to "Moody B/W cinematography with lots of shadows". And yes, credit where it's due, the Sim Scrooge certainly has THAT. ...But, as two pages of discussion have pointed out, that's not necessarily what the film term means.

And also that Sleeper and Love & Death were seen as specific genre "parodies" of sci-fi and Russian epics, which only increased the 70's Coke-vs.-Pepsi discussions of Mel vs. Woody for who was the better genre-spoofer in A-list 70's comedy directing on the same ballfield. Then, of course, Annie Hall and Manhattan came out, and we accepted that post-Early-Funny Woody had taken his ball and went home.

Actually, they haven't--The three crazes stores historically remember were 1) the dolls, 2) the iPhones, and 3) the video games. (And yes, there was just as big a rush for Atari's E.T. cartridge in '82 as there was for the ColecoVision console, but only one of the two is remembered fondly.) Which is why you'll see only THREE things deliberately sold every Black Friday: 1) The new "toy craze" that's been groomed for December fame all year, like Hatchimals was last year, 2) the new game system to make core gamers hate their old one immediately (Playstation's still plugging away at VR headsets, like they were last year, but this year it's more about the consoles), and 3) the electronic device (usually Apple or Google) that you have to buy because it Just Arrived, like Apple Watch, for those too young to have kids, too old to buy toys, and prefer buying things for themselves. The fact that we now only have Target and Wal-mart, and not Toys R Us, isn't helping 1) any either, and the prices on 2) come in handy for sales rushes--Which is why the big-box electronics chains, which don't really move bigscreen TV's any other day of the year except Super Sunday, try to persuade you why the holiday is FOR buying expensive big-ticket bigscreen TV's. Yes: You're watching marketers now literally being sentimental for the days when you could count on irrational panic, mania and injuries to make up for fourth quarter sales, and wonder why they can't be so lucky every year. If only there was a way of convincing the public how traditional it was, then they wouldn't feel so guilty about going rogue. Yep: You can argue about the ColecoVision and Trivial Pursuit a year earlier, but in the public's mind, the DNA tests put the parentage of Christmas buyout crazes straight in the Cabbage Patch. The reason we remember those, and not the other two, is that the sickening, obnoxious cuteness of the dolls ended up symbolizing in our minds everything that sad stressed-out grownups hated about Christmas: Shopping, overpriced toys, buying for other people, especially rugrats who'd throw meltdowns if you didn't get the Present X they asked for, and the whole idea that the "Holiday was for kids" anyway. (Which is why Black Friday eventually kept selling the idea of "Buy something for yourself, before the rest of your list!" when it came to computers and TV's.) The megaparents-from-Hell who would buy three or four dolls, and then auction the others off for $1000 on eBay, were backhandedly trying to show the world what "Great parents" they were by showing off how much they were "beating the system" for toy crazes for the little ones. ...But, that's grownup stuff, that's not why third-graders trended for the Garbage Pails. Mostly it was having a laugh at the obnoxious cuteness, and satirizing the oversaturation of the cultural marketing that followed, the same way that 10-yo.'s will make up new stupid-gross lyrics to songs they hate.

We've never had a straight Rudyard Kipling biopic, but we've had two where the author "biographically" wanders into his own stories, as, of course, he was only reporting--Groucho Kipling's cameo obviously inspired Christopher Plummer running into Sean Connery and Michael Caine, in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). My Nancy doesn't nag, and Cianelli does make a classic movie villain, but let's be honest, nobody looks convincing in brownface in this movie. Sam Jaffee as Din means well, but his standard most-excellent-Indian performance makes you wonder whether we couldn't we have waited a few years for Sabu instead. Ciannelli pumps up the Brown Peril, but all I could think of was how much the movie deliberately homage-inspired the horrendous offensive depictions in "Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom", which did get some complaints for dopey stereotypic offenses at the time. (Although those, I put in the category of "What did you expect from the Howard the Duck screenwriters??")

Oh, you mean:

Yeah, thought the thread was going to be "Holiday of the week" movies about Black Friday, and "Jingle" was pretty much the Cabbage Patch Craze satire for the adult-cynical comic sake of doing one. (Tickle-Me Elmo hadn't happened yet.) From the mid-late 80's to early 90's, when we literally thought there was going to be one every YEAR after ColecoVision and Cabbage Patch in '82-'83. So did the news media and store chains, and that's how Black Friday, and, quote, "Doorbuster sales" were artificially invented ever since...What, you thought it was some old European tradition, like the Christmas tree? 😛

If you mean that Blazing Saddles is as much an inappropriate satire of 70's-era racism as it is of 70's old-film-deconstructionist Western cliche's, yes, but then that could also be a product of Richard Pryor's screenwriting. (And Pryor's own attempts as a director were much less successful.) As for Young Frankenstein, a whole subplot in Gene Wilder's script, about Wilder's, um...frustration at not being able to get a roll in the hay with Teri Garr, was left on the cutting room floor, except for a few scenes at the beginning and end. But as for Gene Wilder as a comedy director, "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" is barely tolerable, and "The World's Greatest Lover" is excruciating physical pain. 😡 ...Comedy is old jokes, after all, but it's all in the art of telling them. (And yes, Mel had his best stuff in the 70's, and so did Woody Allen, which is the only reason anyone's still using them together in the same sentence anymore, like we used to back during the days of Annie Hall.)

(More accurately, it wasn't released in theaters by Atlantic, which contributed to the movie's "legend", and made everyone so curious to try and track it down on home video.) 😛 Technically, Orion acquired most of the defunct 80's indie-release companies--including American Int'l, Empire, Atlantic, Hemdale, and Cannon Pictures--before also going bankrupt early in the 90's. All were under MGM's umbrella label, before MGM itself went into yet another bankruptcy in the late 00's. That's what constitutes most of the "MGM Orphans" you've heard me speak of late, which have sunk into a near-Public Domain state, and are now growing like kudzu on every streaming service, cable channel, ad-supported movie site, and third-party Blu/DVD disk label. (In Atlantic's case, for example, on how many danged services can you watch "Teen Wolf 1 & 2"?) United Artists also repeatedly went under in the 80's and 90's, and has also now joined the Orphans--Which explains "Broadway Danny Rose"'s availability, not to mention the entire 80's Woody Allen catalog, to go along with the compleat Pink Panther, much of their 60's-70's epics (throw a rock in any direction without hitting "It's a Mad^4 World" or "Fiddler on the Roof"), and the entire 007 canon up through Pierce Brosnan.

And why shouldn't it be? Back when we suffered the "Scary Movie" and "Disaster Movie" plague, Brooks made a comment on "Young Frankenstein"'s disk commentary--"I've been called the 'father' of modern movie parody, and...I'd like to apologize." After Brooks, nobody really seemed to get the idea, except for maybe Zucker & Abrams, and they never held onto it. If you go back and look at the golden one-two of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein--and maybe High Anxiety, although the comedy was a little Borscht-ier when he starred in them--they're the perfect skewerings of beloved old-film mythos, with bad jokes so perfectly timed, they're their own commando attack, that just needed the right general to orchestrate them. And, of course, "The Producers" is nastier fun when you consider the number of real Broadway flops that Brooks worked on during his post-Sid Caesar years--Only an insider could tell those jokes. I didn't realize Benecio del Toro had turned to directing, maybe Guillermo del Toro (and yes) will put him in one of his. Oh, and it's BAZ Luhrmann who wants to be Australia's Next Ken Russell, and definitely. Christopher Nolan had one hit in a genre he hated, and one Oscar nomination plagiarizing a Japanese anime remake he turned down. James Cameron will make you cringe every time he puts Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton into his own misogynistically fetishized view of all female characters, Quentin Tarantino is on the list of directors you would rather hear talk about movies than demonstrate it by copying them in their own (qv. Joe Dante), and I liked Ron Howard before he did the Grinch movie, went loopy, and turned into a raging Codie who believed every book--Hey, even "Willow" wasn't his fault. And sitting through the third "Hobbit" movie will make you ask a LOT of questions about Peter Jackson's personal life that "Lovely Bones" and "Heavenly Creatures" can't answer. But "Overrated"? Once in a while, I like to sit someone under 30 on grandpa's knee, and tell them what we all REALLY thought of John Hughes in the day. For every "Breakfast Club", there were three "Weird Science"'s...Usually in the same month. And then, if they're not traumatized yet, I give them a long history of the OTHER movies Bob Clark directed... 😈

I know--THIS, however (again, when Classic Media had to produce "new content" in the early-early 00's to establish property ownership of Rudolph, Frosty and Peter Cottontail) is best handled only with toxic gloves and extreme caution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH_FhAw-PY (Oh, and it's "Claus". With an S. Join our new mission to eradicate the "Tim Allen spellers" by the end of 2020.) (Oh, the Gene Dietch-animated years...What corner of Eastern Europe did they come from, and why were they such inexplicable nightmare fodder?) Bill Thompson. The same voice he used for Mr. Wimple on radio's "Fibber McGee & Molly", and for the White Rabbit in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland".

And those with Netflix can see "Mac & Me" officially given the MST3K treatment on Netflix's "MST3K: The Return" S2, debuting on Thanksgiving weekend.

Seuss introduced the Grinch in an early magazine story, "The Hoobub & the Grinch": Where the G is a slick salesman (Seuss was working in advertising at the time), who tries to sell a big, contented Hoobub on the idea that a $.98 piece of string is better than the Sun--Since, of course, the Sun is harmful, only works part-time, won't work indoors, only comes in one color, and isn't portable. When Seuss gave the Grinch his own book, it stood to reason the Grinch would see Christmas only as a commercial excuse to buy tringlers and trappings, and the Whos would all cry boo-hoo if you took it away. Which, in Seuss's story, they don't--since That's Not What the Holiday Is About--except for the Ron Howard/Jim Carrey movie, where they DO. 😡 I don't recall the story having fat reindeer in it either, but then, I also remember Cindy Lou only having one line. Well, since Audrey Geisel doesn't own them, probably never. She also said "No more live-action Seuss!" after that Mike Myers "Cat in the Hat", which is why Universal can't exploit the Jim Carrey movie with more prequel/spinoffs. Although, Rudolph was CGI'ed in that "Island of Misfit Toys" abomination, when Classic Media had to create a new CGI direct-video sequel to cement their ownership of the Rankin-Bass Big Four. (Warner owns all the other B-titles, which is why they keep trying to ram "Year Without a Santa Claus" down our throats. And yes, they did do a live-action version of that one.) You..."preferred"...Tom & Jerry?? Oh, you were sophisticated at that age, weren't you? 😛 (On our channel growing up, T&J was right between the Bugs Bunny and the Flintstones, and the only reason for tuning into T&J was the Tex Avery/Droopy cartoon they'd always show in the middle. I was raised on the classics.) As for Rankin-Bass, the first Rudolph had a different style, back when they were "Topcraft" with Japanese stop-motion animators, and looked like a department-store window display. But then, by the time they were doing Frosty and Santa is Comin' to Town, they'd sunk into a rut with their Romeo Mueller scripts, Jules Bass songs and Paul Coker artwork, and every special started to look and sound alike. Which, sadly, was true of the Thundercats as well, although those were miles ahead of Filmation's static He-Man.

Well, that's probably because I didn't know which direction it was going... I assumed you were referring to the book gimmick of Chan having a family of twelve kids, whom we never see onscreen until he brings them all along in Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936): Or, in some Republic movies, by Yung and "No. 1 Daughter", who was just as dimly impulsive and determined to solve the mystery herself as the previous Son was. (Me, I already knew Charlie had a big family from the old 70's "Amazing Chan & the Chan Clan" Saturday-morning cartoon: )