EricJ

It was--Paul Pressler, during his stint as 90's parks honcho, had an infamous fear and loathing of Walt-era attractions, and thought they should all be "updated" to new-movie attractions. Disneyland got the SFR Treehouse turned into Tarzan's, while the Florida WDW kept their Treehouse but (briefly) got "Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management"...Don't ask. 😱

That much I knew--I knew it wasn't a book, like "Kim" or "Man Who Would Be King", but I hadn't read the poem either, and wasn't sure whether that had a plot. Up to that point in my upbringing, I only knew Mr. Magoo as Gunga Din. And for some reason, I'd been looking for the movie under the misapprehension that it was one of Michael Curtiz's action epics for Warner, not George Stevens for RKO (who'd gotten his start working with Laurel & Hardy, as we can see from the sped-up punch-out scenes)--Y'know, 'cause everything ELSE from the Great '39 was. So, there was that bit of first-view disorientation, too.

At least she's not the PC Lisa-Simpson from the Ron Howard/Jim Carrey movie. My turn: ---- The Post (2017): While catching up with recent movies via the Library, tried to get through this one out of curiosity, and ended up returning it halfway--If it gets better, tell me, but if this HAD been the "Spielberg remakes 'All the President's Men' for the press-embattled Trump era" epic he wanted to be, it probably would have been better than what we got. Although Steven Spielberg, with Jeff Skoll's activist Participant Media bankrolling his projects, has been on a kick for sentimental "Great Progressive Moments in History" epics with Lincoln and Bridge of Spies, this has to be the least emotionally invested 00's-10's Spielberg epic since...oh, how far back do you want to go?--"The Terminal"? (Even "Adventures of Tintin" had some Indiana Jones fun, and "Catch Me If You Can" played with its 60's-retro.) When a 10's Spielberg gets shut out at Oscar nominations, I immediately know something has to be wrong: The story follows the drama at the Washington Post as the Pentagon Papers were activist-leaked, and Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee (not quite sure who/what he's trying to do with his artificially gravelly voice and padded pot-belly--He's not imitating Jason Robards, but he's doing a killer Lou Grant) wonders whether to break the rules when Nixon bars the NY Times from publishing. Problem is, Liz Hannah's screenplay doesn't want that to be the main plot: The story instead focuses on the glass-ceiling female-executive drama of whether owner Meryl Streep will hang on to her family ownership of the paper, in the face of new (old white male) investors...And boy, do Liz and Steve pile on the women-in-Hollywood-metaphor scenes of "Women's roles in the 70's". (In a scene of Washington dinner parties, where the Washington wives all retire to the living room to gossip over fashion once "the men" start discussing politics, how loud will your palm hit your forehead?) If I didn't know what movie Spielberg thought he was making, even worse, I think I DO. 😓 Literally the first half-hour of the story is devoted to Hanks and Streep grousing about why their reporters have been barred from covering Tricia Nixon's wedding, while staff go-fers discover...some big mysterious scoop happening at the NY Times! I began to feel like that was the metaphor for this movie: Could we go over to the NY Times office and spend two hours watching THAT story, please?? We get some nice Woodward-like scenes early on of the underground smuggling of the papers, and the ex-Vietnam activist who wanted to expose the truth...Only "great historian" Spielberg manages to make none of it involving--You'd think the director of "Saving Private Ryan" could make a brief Vietnam battle scene gripping, and the director of "Lincoln" could capture the national confusion and outrage when the public first discovered the "government had been lying to them", and give them some actual import to match the John Williams music. With the focus on Streep's executive troubles, the movie wanted to cover "The business of the newspaper game", but with the hero-worship of "All the President's Men", the recent William Goldman obits just remind you how much better Goldman and Alan Pakula were at knowing where a real newspaper-movie story should be.

Unless you mean Bruce from Finding Nemo, which managed to make both the "Shark" and "Australian" jokes out of the name... (And who was voiced in the movie by Dame Edna.)

Okay, we've posted every great "Coffee" clip from movies except the obvious: And as one who just ran across the movie for the first time this week, count one more viewer disoriented to find out that "Gunga Din" was taken from a Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur screen story and turned into a Cary Grant comedy-- 😯 In fact, Hecht's whole subplot, of Grant and Victor McLaglen pulling pranks to keep Fairbanks from marrying his conventional girlfriend and retiring from the boys'-night-out, basically reduces the entire epic to one big remake of "The Front Page", relocated to the Khyber Pass... I was raised on creamy hot cocoa during the holidays, so I never saw the appeal of bitter hot brown water--Only later did I find out that Coca-cola had caffeine, and with my sensitivity, one complete bottle of Coke Zero might have me "drunk" and following caffeinated impulses into the wee hours of the night. Later, I started getting bonus-coupon incentives to try the local Starbucks (yeah, I know, our hippie anti-Walmart chain-paranoid college-town has bumper stickers saying "Make Your OWN Damn Coffee")--And one time when I was on vacation, and trapped in the early morning with no place to get breakfast except a Starbucks, I tried one of their 90% Mocha/Caramel, 10% Coffee frappucinos, drowned in whipped cream. Okay, THAT, I'll drink--I'll now drink hot mocha in the fall/winter, preferring a little bit of coffee as a mere flavoring to chocolate than vice versa, and knowingly enjoy the "benefits" of caffeine if I have a night ahead of me.

Oh, and he was sane when he used to show "Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time" three or four times a MONTH? On both TBS and TNT?? As for Mickey's 90th...do we really like "Steamboat Willie" (as opposed to, say "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") all that much, or are we just bluffing for the fact that Disney never showed us any of Mickey's cartoons in the 80's, and most of us grew up never having seen any in our lives until DVD?

Mickey's 90th, I knew about, with Disney's promotions. Ted Turner still alive, that is news to me. 😯

Although, reportedly, the only reason we got Jennifer Walters, aka the Savage/Sensational She-Hulk, in Marvel was Stan Lee's worries over Kenneth Johnson, and "We'd better come up with a female Bionic-Woman Hulk spinoff before HE tries to!" In British humor, "Bruce" is considered to be more stereotypically Australian, and therefore not befitting a "pouffter"--As no doubt springs to mind: Maybe it was deemed too similar to Sheb Wooley's "Big Sweet John"?

And this gentleman, two years earlier...

Well, he THOUGHT he was the main supporting character of Superman II: the Richard Donner Cut--which he was--when Alexander Salkind was filming both movies together (thus justifying Brando's then-inexplicable salary), but things ultimately didn't work out that way.

Well, you had better luck making head or tail of what the heck Sarge was saying than I could... 😯 All I know is, "Star" might have been less of a dour, depressing three-hour slog if they'd maybe occasionally used, oh, new songs?? (Although I disk-rented it in a "double feature" with Darling Lili, and now I keep memory-blurring the two.)

While "Princess Bride" gets all the credit, I was just mentioning his 1994 Mel Gibson Maverick script in another discussion just yesterday: Of course, William Goldman in the 70's, adapting his own novels for "Marathon Man" and "Magic", and showing his ability to put an original genius plot together, was still the last great age of the Old-School Screenwriter. In the current age, where studio producers are literally trying to make movies without writers, and screenwriters think they can become "Indie filmmakers" with no one to kill their navel-gazing darlings, classic old-school 70's screenwriters reminded us that it symbiotically took THREE people to create a classic film story, long before the actors got a hold of it.

Any word on whether it'll be the same browser service it's always been, or whether they've learned Filmstruck's advantage of reaching out to the Amazon/AppleTV set-top crowd? (Which was the one reason I could never watch Filmstruck, when they never got around to that PS4-console streaming app.)

Emphasis highlighted. Have to remember, back in '99, the Internet was JUST catching mainstream fire, and everyone thought it was magic--That was also the time that the rise of DVD had its boom, so most of PetitionOnline's petitions were against studios that weren't keeping up or "holding back" their titles. Most notably George Lucas (still infamous for being a DiVX supporter) who was "holding back" Phantom Menace on DVD, because, as we later found out, he was finishing the deleted-scenes CGI, but at least two dozen Star Wars-fanboy petitions accused him of "hiding" it. Meanwhile, Warner wasn't enthusiastic about widescreen or plastic DVD cases, and was deluged with petitions about every one of their titles. Amazon was just starting to become a Thing, too, and when they had placeholder listings for disks that weren't available, their description teased "Let us know if you want this title, and we'll pass the info along!" Fans started taking them WAYYYY too seriously at their word, and Amazon rephrased that to "We don't know when or if it'll be available." And then, in '99, we had the one big event that put Petitions on the map: Disney had flopped with their ill-fated theatrical release of Studio Ghibli's "Princess Mononoke", and was looking for an excuse to drop their deal for releasing the titles in the US. They released a bare-bones dub-only release of the disk (also, as was later revealed, to block "Reverse importation", since Japan didn't have a DVD of their own yet)...And because everything late-90's Eisner-era Disney did was Evil, fans besieged them with Petitions to release the dual-language version. Disney--hoping to generate numbers to "prove" it was all a big fanboy-tantrum without mainstream appeal and discredit it--agreed to a snail-mail petition, written directly to a specific studio representative, from customers who were committed to buying a bilingual version if it was released. It became a big thing around the anime and disk communities, and according to the guy who delivered the results, the representative had been expecting 500 letters, and was surprised to get 5000...In the first box. "Oh, and there's nine more in the car." So: Ever since, for twenty years, the myth has been created that Internet Petitions work. Despite the fact that the only one that ever did was by snail-mail, sanctioned by the company/recipient itself, had a set thirty-day beginning and ending date to deliver results--in person--and was over a specific stated goal. Both PO and Change.Org tend to overlook details like that, which is why the Famous-People's-Letters one seems to be achieving more tangible results with Warner at the moment. As for Criterion's channel, think they had that in the works for their own survival before the Save Filmstruck movement started, so if Warner gives in, Criterion may go back to seeing the advantage of not throwing money after their own startup. All announcements subject to change.

Well, didn't think it was "nasty", just more of the diehard-acolyte "Do not dare blaspheme my god!!" that we've heard from the FilmStruck-dependent, who'd turned a viewing cult into a life-hack cult, and now literally believe this is the End of the World for classic films, period, because they've forgotten where else to find them. (As I joked in my blog, saying that you don't need FS to watch classic films would often have me attacked by more sword-wielding cultists shouting "Kai-liii!" for my heresy than Ringo Starr ever got...How dare I suggest that they not make themselves better people?) And if they have forgotten...the slow recovery of the industry from the Death of DRM, and back to a comparative normalcy of film availability again, in places other than Our One Neato Club, is going to take a little longer than we hoped. So, yeah, it IS a big issue with me.

Well, now you're making me feel guilty, if I don't paste on some "Because they're low-tech Internet-illiterate dolts to still think Change.Org's fanboy site is a Real Thing, and Martin Scorsese isn't going out and starting a more influential big celebrity-activist film-preservation movement himself??" (I mean, yes, Barbara Streisand never got on the "Warner, release Zack Snyder's uncut Justice League!" bandwagon, but you'd think she'd at least have heard of the site by reputation...Celebrities may or may not be "stupid" for liking Filmstruck in their small amount of spare time, but CHANGE-FREAKIN'-DOT-ORG??????????? You would literally have more luck with one Twitter post.) Gee, sometimes these discussions can really put posters in a corner... 😯 ...Oh. Okay--THAT'S how you're supposed to do it. Whew. Stupidity temporarily averted. And while the press will focus on "They're taking away my one source of movies!!" ( 😓) if Marty, or Peter Bogdanovich, or John Landis, or Leonard Maltin, or somebody in the preservation community can get on this, they can hopefully spin the Larger Abstract Issue off of the selfish-grownup "Don't take away my Friday-night thing!", and back onto the larger unspoken corporate issue underneath that's subconsciously triggered so much of the public hysteria in the first place: Why Vintage Movies Are Vanishing Off of the Rest of Streaming, and if so, Where Are They Playing? Which is just in time to start taking on the new '18-'19 reality that Digital DRM has now been given up for dead and "replaced" by Streaming's popularity, and how much of a movie-free rival that's now going to be to Physical Media's recovery--DRM was originally going to be the "Disk-crusher", but Streaming is seen as "the new TV", and TV-broadcast movies and Blu/DVD always got along together very well. We just have to redefine the basic issues out of the ashes.

The Swarm (1978): I confess I actually go pretty easy on Irwin Allen--The idea of hating disaster movies is still rooted in our cultural DNA from our early 80's, and the group-think that "There, 'Airplane' made them all go away, so now we don't have to talk about them anymore!", that makes me want to look up the great big-studio 70's epics out of forbidden curiosity. My parents never wanted to see "Earthquake" or "Towering Inferno", and we weren't that interested in them as kids either, so a whole decade of 70's cinema passed me by, only for me to savor as a home-theater adult. I've looked up most of the Airports and the Charlton Hestons on video, but had never gotten around to Irwin's Folly until the online disk community started going crazy last month for the Blu-disk restoration on Warner Archive's site. (Just watch the social-media blog and Twitter accounts go NUTS for pop-nostalgia every time Warner Archive resurrects Looker or Supergirl, or Shout Factory resurrects Return of the Living Dead on Blu--That's what kept physical disk alive all these years. ) So, with no more Instant Archive to rent it from, figured I'd lucked out when Amazon Prime's seemingly random bin got the title for streaming without notice, fanfare, or official box-art--That's the kind of title that disappears off of Prime just as suddenly, also, ahem, without notice. I'd seen the movie giggled over since the Golden Turkey 70's, thought it was just a lot of mass zeitgeist-giggling from the era, and settled in for my usual righteous defense of culturally-persecuted overlooked titles, but no: Holy CRAPOLA, is this one bad, even by 70's Irwin Allen standards. I'm trying to find a name for movies like these..."Ozymandias movies"?--Nah, too pretentious: Movies where a name director/producer was riding so high off of a few past hits, he got the unlimited expense account and keys to the studio sandbox, thought anything his hand created next would break box-office records, ended up directing something that looked like it came from Mars, and went into exile. (For George Lucas, it was "Phantom Menace", for Michael Bay, it was "Transformers 5", and for Jerry Bruckheimer & Gore Verbinski, it was Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and the Lone Ranger.) It was instant obscurity for Allen after this movie, with "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" and "When Time Ran Out" before the end, so this is the one that shut down the chemical factory. Or, in the case of South American killer-bees, blew up the nuclear plant. Like I said, I don't mind 70's disaster movies, and the cast of washed-up ex-studio stars doing TV-style work is part of the fun. But every actor in this movie reads their lines as if they're on a day-cameo, and probably thought they were: Michael Caine, as the hero, can't even work up enough enthusiasm to do a decent Michael Caine voice, Richard Chamberlain trying to do a Texas accent, I will leave you to only imagine, and Fred MacMurray at least survives a small-town romance subplot with Olivia deHaviland, since he's comfortable with a character that seems to have been written in the 50's. (On a small-town backlot set that I kept looking at thinking, "Wait, is that Mayberry??") Although his character doesn't, as he and Olivia both ultimately end up victims of a killer-bee caused train wreck that looks 110% pure Lionel. 😮 ...Okay, so not everything from my generation survives nostalgia. But I stand by my claim that Towering Inferno wasn't so bad, and probably did deserve that Oscar nomination.

He WANTED (and said so) TP S1 to be a "parody of Peyton Place", and small-town-secrets soap operas, long before such a thing as "Bingeable season-arcs" ever existed. Possibly "Blue Velvet"--and its kinky small-town-secrets--was his first-draft audition for the idea, but TV should be lucky that that one had Dennis Hopper and TP didn't. And it's only the core fans who try to wave "art" over the heads of the mainstream and say "Your brain is too mainstream to understand his genius!" Um, how many times have I had to explain Eraserhead's "REM-state filmmaking" style, of Lynch trying to imitate the cinematic style of nighttime dreams, to other posters on the board, and then explain how he used that style for his first mainstream-studio gig in "Elephant Man"? (Seriously, the first five minutes, with the abstract shots and Anthony Hopkins at the freak show, are cribbed straight out of Eraserhead's style, not that I'm complaining. ) Lord knows I've had to explain the "Agent Cooper's midget" scene of TP S1:E3 enough times. But there's Lynch BEFORE "Wild at Heart", and there's Lynch AFTER...Although it's really TP S2 where you can first see him getting bored with himself, getting into the self-goofing jokes, and leaving the planet. From your screen name, I'll take the liberty of guessing you're one of those later-Lynch fans, who think Lynch's hearing-aid FBI chief (he shouts and gets things wrong, get it? 😓--Um, does Lynch even know what hearing aids are like today, almost thirty years later?) is one of those unique-filmmaker things, and not just something insultingly cribbed out of a 50's sitcom, because Lynch can't quite parse the human concept of "Comedy relief". When "Dune" starts looking like a work of unique, artistic, experimental early-Lynch, you know his later style is in trouble. (And does anybody else who watched the revival now keep seeing Lynch's Chief Cole whenever they see President Trump in public, and vice versa?: "What? 'Fake booze'?...No, we've got genuine Jack Daniels, the real stuff!") I'd hoped it would be something a little better than "Fire Walk With Me", where almost nobody from the first season wanted to come back--Instead of Michael Ontkean refusing to come back to the revival as Sherriff Truman, and (SPOILERING) offscreen by phone. And I remember thinking S2 would have been better if Cooper had left the town, and cases started bringing in NYC and Vegas for more complexity, while still involving the characters...But as for the Revival, would letting Agent Cooper BE Agent Cooper again have been asking too much??

The ones that Disney doesn't own, which means you MIGHT have a remote chance of seeing Sony's "Muppets From Space" or "Muppets Take Manhattan". That's it. And "remote" doesn't necessarily mean Thanksgiving. You'd have a hundred better chances on streaming, where they've both joined the Columbia Orphans.

Having watched Lynch's recent '15 Showtime cable "reunion" of Twin Peaks--where every episode now ends with credits playing over whatever art-alternative band Lynch just discovered, onstage at the roadhouse--I'm convinced that Lynch had some actual artistic vision back when he was "filming dreams" for Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Dune and the first Twin Peaks S1...But that he crawled into a desert roadhouse beer bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon sometime around "Blue Velvet", and hasn't crawled back out since. (I could take everything else about Twin Peaks '15, but wasting half the series on "wacky" scenes of an amnesiac Kyle MacLachlan stumbling around repeating everyone else's dialogue like Edward Scissorhands, is a tragic waste of national TV treasure that goes far beyond any of the crimes Twin Peaks S2 ever committed. And those were many.) I think he just wanted to make a movie about Shallow Swinging Wayward 60's Youth, and we just thought the movie was about a murder mystery...Ie., the character doesn't really care, so why should we? Brian dePalma took the 60's element out when he made Blow-Out, and the thriller was much tighter.

While we don't excuse BoaN, we DO excuse Song of the South, because sometimes we look closer and discover most of our knee-jerk outrage turned out to be WRONG. And that if we make permanent decisions for film posterity based on that, erm...we regret it later. My choice for the title, for ex., is Gone With the Wind: Do I get on my righteous PC-avenger dudgeon and hate this movie for Hattie McDaniel, or for Butterfly McQueen, or for "Implied apologias of social intolerance and the shame of our early country"? No--I hate it because Scarlett is a danged spoiled brat, and can someone explain what exactly is the story's freakin' POINT of spending four hours with her?? 😝

Well, they had to pick Stepmom, which seems to have replaced The Big Chill as THE iconic 90's-00's "Bouncing around the kitchen karaoke'ing Motown into big wooden spoons" scene, that became such a staple of chick-flick for the next decade or two. And that one didn't have as many dance moves.

There's one episode of "The Monkees" where the characters have to make their way past a couple of guards--Two of our heroes dash up to them: "Oh, hi--Say, have you seen 'Road to Morocco', with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby?" "No." "Good: 'Pattycake, pattycake, baker's man...'"

Since Black Friday wasn't really "invented" (no, why am I using quotes?--It was artificially invented) until 1983, I remember "White Friday", the day when it was official for TV stations to start showing Christmas movies. WPIX-11 would always show the Laurel & Hardy "March of the Wooden Soldiers", some would show 34th St. or Bishop's Wife, and at least three local stations would start a month's worth of It's a Wonderful Life. The reason was, everyone was home that day, kicking back, taking it easy, and recovering from Thanksgiving leftovers, and no football games were played, so it was necessary to start using that commercial time for airing Toys R Us ads. (sniffle! 😥 ) Especially for UHF stations that didn't have football teams to air, but had plenty of Christmas movies in their station package. And Thanksgiving night, of course, needed a three to four-hour family movie, to pre-program ahead of time, so that non-essential station employees could have the night off. Some people consider it tradition for Sound of Music, E.T. or Home Alone, but I consider it heresy to watch Willy Wonka or Chitty/Bang any other day of the year.

Okay, they got Nicholas Brothers from "Stormy Weather"-- But no "Moses Supposes". No "Born to Hand-Jive". No King & I. No Blues Brothers: "Small Town Girl"--Ann Miller, yes, but no hopping Bobby Van. And the only Eleanor Powell/Broadway Melody we get is the Fred Astaire one?...Oo-la-la, nononono!