EricJ

As much as Polanski can direct eerie paranoid suspense...his idea of "comedy" is something that seems to have come from some remote alien Baltic eastern-European country, where they love clowns and slapstick, and never quite translated to the Western Hemisphere. Much like the English-impaired foreign actors he hires for it, before loading them down with wigs, teeth and makeup. Even knowing the best-known scenes, I tried to get halfway into TFVKoPMBYFAIMN, and now I'm actually afraid to watch Walter Matthau in "Pirates" (1986). Which, from what I can gather from the reviews, wasn't much improvement, even though Matthau actually can speak English.

Of course, Seth Myers has always been an insufferably snotty SOB even when he was still on the show, but it does nail the basic problem of why we CAN'T find a solution to our current movie problems: On one hand, we have neurotic studios "under siege" from the audience, trying to cannibalize the last emergency storehouses of their old franchises without actual new screenplays--and the complaints from the public are getting loud--and on the other, we have obnoxious poseurs whining about the 3D, CGI and remakes, and trying to "strike back" with "new indie cinema" that nobody ever wants to watch, even on streaming. Is there a middle ground?--Yes. We had it back in the 80's and 90's, in the form of screenwriters who just wanted to sell a decent script, and producers who made it marketable and attached a star to it. Now, all the independent screenwriters know that the studio script market has become extinct, get together to film their script ideas themselves, set out to become Bold Independent Filmmakers, and end up sounding like this guy. No one even remembers how "old" movies were made anymore. Even book authors have stopped hoping for a movie sale, and "Based on the NYT Bestseller" that used to guarantee a rousing popcorn movie in the 60's and 70's is more likely to be attached to a Nicholas Parks romance or a dystopian YA wannabe. But if there is one thing to take away from the sketch, then, yeah: The "Hollywood's run out of ideas, it's all superheroes and CGI now!" stuff is gettin' OLD.

Over on the MST3K discussions, that bit of Mike-era smug paper-target bigotry usually brings up a discussion in defense of "Masque of the Red Death", "The Intruder", and "X - the Man With the X-Ray Eyes", and an appreciation of how Corman, working for Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson, knew he wasn't expected to deliver art, as long he could deliver ahead of schedule and under budget--And was savvy enough to experiment with his own small self-indulgent attempt at art or Important Message anyway, because as long as he was lord of his own independent production domain, he could. And then, from the more core Corman fans, a defense of tongue-in-cheek screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, and how the "mad" gravedigger in "The Undead" was supposed to be comic relief (Griffith originally wanted the medieval scenes to be in Shakespearean pentameter, and Corman wisely held back), which inevitably gets sidetracked off onto cult praises of Griffith's satirical scripts for "A Bucket of Blood" or "Death Race 2000". But yeah, even though Lawrence had just seemed to have found a box full of Amer.Int'l's, by the time we got to Terror5K, I was wondering whether he might've been a Mike-era MST3K fanboy talking about all the titles he was "supposed" to talk about. Just kept waiting for that other shoe to drop.

Yes, announcing the movie is pretty much the entire masturbatory experience for Del Toro--It never really matters if he never actually gets around to filming it. He's had a few arthouse discoveries, two flops, one Oscar, and helped destroy one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood, why are we supposed to get excited about him, again? (And pretty sure the Fantastic Voyage project is an ancient relic left over from sixteen years ago, when everyone was so excited about the news that somebody was remaking "Rollerball" at the same time as Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" opened, they thought there would be a new "craze" for 60's-70's scifi remakes: Bryan Singer spent years threatening to still do that "Logan's Run" remake nobody else wanted to do, and after every single narcissistic action star in Hollywood wanted to play the Gunfighter in a new "Westworld", we know what eventually happened to that one. )

So, Sir Lancelot appeared in a NON-Val Lewton film? Although this was the B-movie 50's, and a good ten years after "I Walked With a Zombie" and "Curse of the Cat People".

That's getting a little too much into interpreting Milner as the "main character" of the movie, which he clearly isn't. The song's one of only two Beach Boys on my iTunes just for its American Graffiti use, namely that the song over the credits conjures up the ultimate idea of personal nostalgia (and not just George Lucas's) for the era, and the 50's/60's That Will Never Die. Any other sentimental BB song--just try putting "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" in there--just wouldn't have created that mythical "Where were you in '62?" summer.

I mentioned the '11 Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus only because it slipped through the arthouse cracks when it was released--The marketing wasn't helpful, and few outside of Shakespeare enthusiasts had even heard of the play. Director Fiennes streamlines the play too much for action over dialogue--even pretty much cutting out all of the last scene's speeches, just so he could end it on the tragic "confrontation" note--but actor Fiennes is just spooky/unearthly enough to play the obnoxiously-arrogant war-hero legend, in a modern pseudo-Serbo-Croatian 00's war-state "city of Rome" that looks a lot like Kosovo. I only mention it as a good example of new Real-Shakespeare for the way that all the conversations between Roman citizens in the street are now updated to panel discussions on CNN, and Coriolanus's failed attempt as a people's Senate candidate is instead done as an unfortunate TV-debate experience.

One of THE most gorgeously iconic symbols of the 80's-Fantasy Summer of Love (and poster child for "Why 'real' soundstage 80's movies were better before CGI"), and all you can say is "Eh, it was better than the book"?? But, as I already had it on Blu, I digress: ----- The Merchant of Venice (2004) - With Sony joining the MGM and Paramount Orphans on streaming, more of the rare Sony Classics indies have started turning up on the Usual Streaming Suspects, and after constantly missing this disk at the library, I finally managed to find it on Vudu and PlutoTV's free-download movies. Ever since Kenneth Branagh moved on and went commercial, there's been a new push for more indie directors to be the next generation for restaged or period-accurate "Real Shakespeare" movies that "translate" the dialogue into English with more natural settings, and this is one of the better ones. (Just barely ahead of Ralph Fiennes' modern Baltic-war version of Coriolanus (2011), and I still haven't gotten around to Ethan Hawke's street-gang version of Cymbeline (2014).) "Venice" is one you don't often see revived, since modern productions can't quite get around the squicky question of "Was Shakespeare serious?" in the play's implied anti-Semitism (Shakespeare was a hardcore Catholic, but if so, why do we get that famous "defense" speech?)--But "1984" director Michael Radford takes the question off the table by putting it in accurate period setting, and saying that even if Shakespeare wasn't, 16th-cty. Venice was: We get a realistic historic depiction of the religious fanaticism of the Venetian geto, almost as bad as Berlin's, and get a sense of how many times our hero had "spit upon" our antagonist in the street. Shakespearean actors say there's really only two ways to play Jewish moneylender Shylock, either as conniving stock period-stereotype villain, or as tragically sympathetic victim. Radford's historical setting certainly plays up "Victim", but aging Al Pacino is absolutely electric in the role, since he's played that combination of roles before (and played the role onstage), and knows how to do BOTH--Watching Pacino's mix of "Righteously wounded revenge", we're basically watching him play old Michael Corleone from Godfather 2&3 with a period-accurate Jewish accent. You literally expect Pacino's Shylock to confront Jeremy Irons as the Merchant with "I knew it was you, Antonio..." (As you can see, the modern problem with post-Branagh "Real Shakespeare", is that new 00's-10's actors are trying to make Shakespearean dialogue so "conversational", it's all thrown about in quick natural mumbles. If you're watching this on disk, English subtitles are highly recommended.)

Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing was literally the Tom Cruise's Mummy of its day--Every few years, Universal peeks out of its hiding-hole to see if the coast is clear to rebrand their "Monster Universe" for a new series of off-canon franchise pictures, and this was the 00's version. It all dates back to 1994, when Forrest Gump meeting JFK started a craze for "Digitally resurrected actors", and somebody proposed the idea of having digital Boris Karloff fight digital Lon Chaney Jr. in a "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman" remake...But first they had to rebrand the Universal Monsters for a franchise, and that's been the tough part ever since. The '99 Brendan Fraser "Mummy", the '98 Gus Van Sant "Psycho", the '10 Benecio Del Toro "Wolfman", all were being carefully observed to see whether it was "safe" to go ahead with more Universal Monsters remakes toward the greater goal. (When they always start dropping hints about Black Lagoon and Invisible Man remakes next, you know they're back on agenda again.) As to the question, yes: Peter Cushing for the win. Not as "mad" and determined as his Baron Frankenstein, but more of an innocent academic with a private side-passion.

I assume the header was SUPPOSED to be a Roman Polanski joke? (And yes, the humor sounds about as subtle as Polanski's...) ?

Filmstruck was going to be a TCM & Criterion service when it opened, and then when it did, the TCM part was mysteriously missing, and we put up with a year of the Criterion Channel. Until Warner Instant Archive folded, and then we got the glorious mix of Criterion arthouse with all the vintage Warner classics that had been banished to Mad King Ludwig's Dungeon. This seems more like a combination of: AT&T finally throwing in the towel over creating their own corporate-branded smartphone-friendly streaming network (yes, with original programming), after the Time-Warner sale, Warner's ultimate failure with Ultraviolet DRM making them twice as eager to pursue the new "streaming future" for digital movies, without having to go crawl to Amazon or Netflix, A new streaming-fatigue-era move for corporate-branded networks to consolidate instead of splintering off a dozen vanity favorites, so most of the new shows being produced for the "DC Universe channel" will now have a more central home. ...Give 'em time, they're getting it. It's possible--I only had time to start vintage Maverick reruns on Starz' Cowboy Channel, before they left Netflix in '13--but Warner being Warner, they'll probably stick to more recent 90's-00's fare. Not sure if Filmstruck will go back to being an all-Criterion channel, or whether they'll let the Archive stay in "exile" over there (all the 70's/80's TV movies are semi-PD Archive fodder, and FS's territory)--But if it does get a few corporately-branded Warner "audience favorite" series back into the general ether, where they show up at the common watering-hole of Amazon and Hulu, it'll be nice to have vintage reruns back to show the new kids what they're doing wrong.

(No, I don't know why the new guy necroposted this from last December either, but hey, while we're on the point: ) The big penny was dropped one year when ABC needed an Oscar-themed ad for the ceremony, and used the big expensive spot to show off their CGI-effects budget for "Once Upon a Time": Yes, even the addicts themselves admit it: We watch binge-era cable/streaming TV, and call it the, quote, "new Golden Age" ( ? ), because it's just like the MOVIES!! Well, there's a problem with that: We've already got movies on our TV's. Used to be, either nobody watched the old movies on local stations, or it was a big deal when a recent movie showed up on ABC Sunday night. Something still TV-shot but professionally production-mounted on the scale of "Roots" or "The Day After" could be an event, but they were still TV. Then, in the 80's, we had cable, HBO, VCR, DVD, and now we're not only pretty much slopping over with recent theatrical movies on our TV's, but we're getting our movies and TV shows from the exact same trough. HBO and Showtime in the 90's tried making "cinematic" hot-button series that networks wouldn't show, networks got jealous of their Emmys, tried to make them too, and they've been trying to one-up each other ever since. Even sitcoms have gone so far in trying to find the Next Level of Bold, Challenging Television, we literally don't even know what's fun TV anymore. Unless it's summer, and the networks try reviving an old classic game show from the 70's...Usually with a black comic/rapper host, since they're the ones that still remember what universal common-denominator free-TV looked like in the 70's and 80's. Warner's a recent example: Ever since studios shut the door on spec scriptwriters, Warner--who lucked out back in '01 with seven years of Harry Potter and three years of LOTR that had already been pre-written for them--tried to lead a new industry that only makes "franchise" movies the audience has already heard of...That's why they can only put a logo and a date on teaser movie posters, and audience expectation does the rest. They thought they were set for life with their "Holy trinity" of DC Comics, Harry Potter and Tolkien, and then the cupboard went bare: The Hobbit trilogy ended on a sour note, DC Comics has had only one successful film in three years and is watching its "Universe" implode, and all early indications of "Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grundewald" are that Johnny Depp will go down in history as the Man Who Killed Harry Potter. Warner just lost a bundle on a very big hat-trick. So what do they do?...They're WARNER, dammit! They're now in the process of digging up their "Wave 2" of Warner House Icon Franchises, and trying to see what new audience cult-loyalty can be mined on stage, screen, merchandise, and TV over the next three to five years out of The Matrix, Beetlejuice, Wizard of Oz, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey version), Elf, and Willy Wonka (Depp and Wilder versions.) And when they burn those out the same way they burned out Batman and Frodo?....Um, well, Casablanca, I guess?

Or, as the we-only-wish-it-was-a-joke observation put it, TV and Cable are knocking their brains butting their heads together trying to make their binge-series "cinematic", with epic budgets, dramatic! acting, and ponderous humorless CGI-laden storylines designed to make us feel as if we're supposed to be watching "one" epic cinematic story all season...And movies, desperate to only sell the audience titles they already know, want their franchise-based movie series to be identifiably released on the same date every year, so we know we to expect a sequel every December the way we expect a favorite Tuesday-night sitcom: We have TV wanting to be overproduced Oscar-bait movies, and movies wanting to be comfort-food TV series.

They've announced everything but the PRICE... ? (And the guest lineup, but that's to be determined.)

Actually, few guessed Del Toro's true remake inspiration: ?

I remember them re-releasing this in theaters on the initial Gods-mania--It's okay for a kids' nature documentary for the first hour, until Uys gets into more documenting Bushmen life in the last half hour, and then it feels like a "prequel" to the first TGMBC. (The Bushmen's way of finding water by trapping baboons could have come out of either of the Gods movies.) Sort of as if the first movie had spent more time on the introduction before dropping the Coke bottle.

This is back when Spielberg was still being hired out for TV work at Universal because of his "unique camera angles" (which even he's embarrassed about today)--I tried watching this one time when I was looking up his early Universal TV episodes, and...I still have no idea what this movie was about. I got past their removing the Pennsylvania Dutch charm symbols, and then, anyone else's guess is as good as mine. ?

Wes Craven's The Serpent & the Rainbow (1988) also pays more direct tribute to the cultural Haitian respect for zombies (while also skeptic-deconstructing it, from the original book source). But yes, it's hard to realize that it wasn't until George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" in 1978 that culture first popularized the idea that so-called "zombies" were caused by contagious toxic plagues--Anything dated before then usually had a Caribbean voodoo priest/ess in tow, unless it was one of the Italian B-epics about cursed Knights Templar. (Back when William Castle's estate was trying to do cheap 90's remakes of "House on Haunted Hill", the current owner of RKO's properties wanted to do name-only remakes of Val Lewton titles, and was all set to remake "I Walked With a Zombie"...Until they apparently saw the movie, realized it wasn't those kind, and yes, the title was referring to A singular one.) ?

So, this's the evil Mirror-Universe one, with the beard?

Ha!--See, I was right: The reason Digital Movies flopped was that NOBODY EVER bought anything from Warner and the studios' big push for Ultraviolet. Those undiscerning enough to get a quick digital and not the disk didn't really care where they got it, and got their movies from whatever service happened to be built into their device--Those with Androids got GooglePlay, those with iPads/Phones got iTunes, and those with Alexas got Amazon Video. Problem is, every one of those services wanted to be their own sovereignty and NOT play along with Ultraviolet's new network, while Warner kept trying to push their UV-app Flixster with every free disk-code download. And then, when customers wondered why the "free movie" they got with their disk wasn't on Google, Amazon or iTunes, but was on the crappy non-intuitive app that didn't work, they went back to where they were used to buying movies. And the final indignity, Disney, which was also holding out its own service, rounded up the lone Google, Amazon and iTunes for its own network, and they're now still standing while Ultraviolet has been dead for over a year now. Not that I harbor any lingering hostilities toward it, mind. It's one of the few comedies to make it onto the AFI100 list--probably one of the few 80's comedies to get up there--and I wouldn't argue that. You can talk about other iconic 80's comedies like Arthur, Ghostbusters, Police Academy 1, etc., but Sydney Pollack's direction on Tootsie actually feels like an old-school 30's/40's screwball comedy. (More so than Peter Bogdanovich's intentional attempts, eg. "What's Up Doc?") You find yourself trying to guess who'd play George Gaynes' dim lovestruck fool in the 30's version. We get loads of loaded wishful social online analysis tacked onto the movie as "Tolerant pro-gay statement" on "Hoffman learning to appreciate his feminine side"--the Criterion set is probably slopping over with it--but truth is, by the time we get the chaotic soap-opera climax, we feel like we're watching Preston Sturges directing Cary Grant in "I Was a Male War Bride". (I was going to go into a whole "What Made 80's Movies '80's Movies'?" analysis sub-essay in an IJW piece on having just seen the not-too-bad "Jumanji" reboot, but didn't think it would fit in after all of Lawrence's pre-codes. ? )

Exactly: The idea that YOU have to take your dog to the vet creates the image of "Looney pet-doter", which is probably what Sam thought, but a star like Grable didn't have a maid/personal assistant to help with off-set household emergencies? Which, of course, a family member's problem always is.

Attaboy, TCM!

Well, Spielberg has handled horror before, but apart from that scene in Ready Player One, he's never really taken on anything on the level of the zombie scares of the original 1960 version: ?

That's just it--There IS no "Original score" for Dracula, since early-30's talkies couldn't mix sound and dialogue. Either we get music over the scene, or we get "Swan Lake" over the credits, but most of Todd Browning's movies are nightmarishly eerie because there's no music as Dracula and his brides awaken. The idea that it "needed" music is a nice experiment, but whether it does, is the whole artistic debate. When Glass decided to do an encore, and wrote a score for the 1944 Jean Cocteau "Beauty & the Beast" which already HAD music, that's when we decided he should wisely move on. If only Warner still cared about their back-catalog, we might have had a chance of asking them to do one more Superman-style third-draft-cleanup "hybrid" PG-13 cut of Amadeus (1984), rather than the quote-fingers, "Director's Cut" (which Milos Forman hated) that permanently ruined it. But no, that was the one they spent the money on mastering for 4K, so that's the one that's in their vaults; it's their story, and they're sticking to it. ?

And which also explains the above-mentioned story of who got custody of Untitled Lambada Project after Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had their bad breakup in '90, after new ownership. There was a race to see who was first, and Golan with his new "21st Century" company tried to get The Forbidden Dance (the Brazilian-princess one) into theaters first, but ended up opening the same week as Globus's Cannon Lambada (the schoolteacher one). True to form, when Golan heard there was a documentary being made about him, he tried to produce his own autobiographical documentary, and tried to get that one into theaters first.