EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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4 hours ago, sagebrush said:
I was working at a preschool when FROZEN was released in 2013. You have no idea how many times a day I heard little 4 yr olds singing "Let It Go". Even little kids couldn't make it cute for me anymore! ?
A couple years ago, I was on a Disney vacation, and Anna & Elsa were on the list of princesses to "meet", so figured I'd get a photo for completism.
Behind me in line, one little girl was so excited when the two came out, her mom was prepping her, "Look! There's the one that sang 'Let It Be'!"
(I almost wanted to pass that along to the two--"Er, no, I think somebody else sang that one."
4 hours ago, sagebrush said:I like the "Fixer Upper" song with the trolls. I also like the reprise of "For the First Time In Forever" with Anna and Elsa in the ice castle. That version is sung in Broadway format, with both performers essentially singing in counterpart
Errr, yeah. A LOT of the movie is sung in "Broadway format", which was the problem. You can almost see the climactic first-act break after Anna meets Elsa at her new ice-castle, and I'm sure that's where the Broadway version we now did get breaks.
But that was because the movie was produced by gushing Broadway fangirls, who wanted to turn their "Disney musical" into the ultimate Wicked/Book of Mormon fan-fiction. The same problem almost brought the 90's Renaissance to a screeching crash, when "Beauty & the Beast" was doing so well on Broadway that '96's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" claustrophobically looked like they just drew over the future Broadway rehearsal. Both movies had the same "Coming soon to the New Amsterdam, tickets now on sale!" feel to them onscreen, it just brought a feel of cynical merchandising to them...In addition to Hunchback being corny/PC, and Frozen being male-bashing/stereotypic.
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Since "Right Stuff" has already been mentioned--
I'll dig into my SegaCD gaming past, for the brief, very short-lived, and almost under-the-radar buried attempt to make "CD+G" the new home entertainment format.It was going to be related to the new Karaoke craze, where everyone would soon presumably have a TV monitor attached to their player, with either lyrics onscreen, or 16-bit CGI graphics to watch, which would be coded into the normal audio CD that you could play in your normal stereo. (Even though it hurt the volume, IMO.)
As has been the same story every time a company tries to release a new hardware player without explaining it to the audience, it never caught on, nobody had even heard of the format outside of crosspromoting it with Sega Genesis's new CD-ROM peripheral or Philips CDI, and almost very few quirky-cult pop CD+G's came out, but there was a healthy industry of classicals.
Most of those were either operas with lyrics, or "academic studies" of the pieces onscreen as the music played, but the all-time never-duplicated gold standard was a version of Holst's Planets, with 16-bit "video collage" music videos to fit the movements.And now, thanks to YouTube poster "The CD+G Museum", I've been able to find them again. ?
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23 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I also love the creepiness of the scene where Aurora pricks her finger on the spindle of the spinning wheel. I like the music and the green light.
Of course, the "gimmick" is that the music in the story all comes from the Tschaikovsky ballet, with lyrics now to the Waltz--
Those who know the ballet will recognize Puss in Boots' dance from Act 3 as Maleficent's shuddering theme, and the Blue Bird's pas de deux as the tune that Aurora warbles in the forest.
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36 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) won Best Picture. It was the third film in the series.
Going My Way (1944) was also technically the sequel to Bing Crosby & Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells of St. Mary's", but was released first, since Bing had more songs in that one.
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6 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
Oh please, like The Prince of Darkness would be caught dead in an electric car.
Well, technically... ?
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13 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
I like SLEEPING BEAUTY too, because of the more modern, streamline design. The backgrounds are more fanciful "patterns" in unnatural colors, creating a fairy tale atmosphere. Even the figures are more streamlined making them look pretty while sadly perpetuating the unattainable Barbie fantasy woman figure.
Actually, Walt's idea going in was to create an "Animated medieval tapestry", and you can see the "flat" medieval-art style posing of the characters in the thin, tall figures, angular faces and wide castle-court shots.
Contrary to popular belief, Walt wasn't that big on princesses, and didn't want to typecast the studio for it--Snow White was their icon, he liked Cinderella's animation but wanted to make her look "contemporary" 50's, and he...didn't really think there was anything they could do for a third happily-ever-after tale. Which is why he let the story, fairies and visual style basically take over, and Aurora never seems to have any distinct memorable personality that stands out from the other Walt-era or 90's-Renaissance princesses.
3 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:I love when Flora is baking the cake, and she folds the eggs into the batter, shells and all.
Reminds me of the old "Flintstones" line, where Fred is trying to deal with "Fold in one egg" in cake instructions:
"(squeeeze!)...(splat!) And I say it can't be done!! ? "
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44 minutes ago, Hoganman1 said:
I'm hard pressed to name another except maybe Lestat. I know we've had movies about his brides etc. but Vlad is the king. Who else could even be "vampire of the month"?
Yeah, was about to say, "Gee, Count Yorga must be disappointed, and Blacula's asking for a recount..."
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16 hours ago, hamradio said:
I hate posters that MISLEAD!
Yeah, calling the DeLaurentiis Kong "Exciting"...
Still, if we're talking Misleading: Anyone who's discovered Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli anime through the dubbed Disney DVD's (or occasional TCM airings, or if they're good Fathom supporters), it wasn't always that easy to promote--
Take the time Roger Corman tried to sell an early dub of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) as more of an early 80's sci-fi matinee:
It's Nausicaa (there, at the back, all grown up)! It's Clash of the Titans! It's Dune! It's Parasite! It's...what the heck is Skeletor doing there?? ?
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6 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
More corny then a field in Iowa. One thing I did notice was that in the one with Malden, at the end when the nice looking blonde is hit by an arrow, Malden ends his sentence with "Doctor", and the blonde says "NO".
I assume this was in reference to the 1962 Bond film.
True story--I remember when kids' shows aired in the morning before the network housewife shows, and at preschool age, somebody not only had to turn the channel for me, but tell me when the show ended.
I remember watching some morning babysitting fare, and the station moved into the morning housewife network fare, so I didn't really know where the show ended when the network showed a promo for that night's Matt Helm movie. (Think it was "Murderers' Row", with the Helm girls holding their "funeral" for presumed-dead Matt.)
Umm......okay?? ?
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11 hours ago, CinemaInternational said:
By definition of the year of my birth I am a millennial, or depending on what you read, perhaps at the very beginning of the generation after that. Despite that, I don't feel at all like what is defined here, maybe because I always found history interesting or because I was raised around adults or because I never believed the slander against previous generations and actually respect them immensely. Maybe I'm the exception. One never knows.
Still, the one thing about "Old films" they do know--from babysitter movie-night on DVD--is that all the great "Old films" they did enjoy came from the 80's: Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, The Goonies (which our generation hated). Check out the one kid in the clip who saw Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: "This is old, it's got to be from the 80's--It's from before the 80's?? That's old."
1982 is the "cutoff date", all right, not for "Millennial birthdays" (that's 1995, hence the name, and anyone born then is approaching the Big 24), but for "The first year when any good movies were made...Except for the Star Wars ones." There's a reason for that too: The 80's were probably the last great perfect-storm for feel-good commercial movies--Star Wars and Rocky had gotten us out of our 70's Golden Age Ford-Carter Malaise in 1977, and it wasn't really until 1980, and the "Forget the icky news and be happy for your president!" Reagan years that entertainment turned into a major shopping-mall industry and movies finally started outdoing TV. Tickets were still $5, so it was easier to repeat-view your favorite, since VCR's were too expensive to own for another six years. But, also it was the last decade of on-set physical soundstages and effects, which made a movie seem more "real", before CGI took over in the early 90's, made producers overconfident, and audiences cynical about lazy producers.
Clip time again--Watch a batch of college kids now try to identify movies from posters. Obviously, they're better at identifying classic 70's Horror than classic 70's Comedy, but that's not to say they A+ the quiz:
Note that every movie that they haven't seen that looks "good" HAS to be put in cultural-historical reference with the 80's, when it was okay to watch them--If Mel Brooks did a comedy, it must have been "Spaceballs", and if a Little League team played baseball, it must have been "The Sandlot".
The problem with getting them more exposure to at least the 60's-70's classics, never mind the B&W, is that that's exactly what the studios believe, too: Following Warner's "Nobody buys catalog disk anymore!
" persecution-complex, other studios have dystrophied their "classic" catalogs to just a few iconic five or six that the audience can already quote dialogue from memory--Paramount just makes their money selling Ferris Bueller and Grease--and refuse to release anything else for disk or Fathom screening. Well, mean...why else would anyone go to see it if they couldn't?
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On 9/25/2018 at 1:22 PM, LawrenceA said:
It's easy to forget when discussing classic movie sources that YouTube has literally hundreds if not thousands of classic films, and at no cost beyond the internet connection. There are several ways to watch them on your TV, too, so one doesn't have to rely on your desktop/laptop/phone or tablet for viewing, although that doesn't seem to be an issue for younger people, which is who we are targeting with this discussion.
So...you actually FOUND one that wasn't glaucoma'ed, chipmunk sped-up, 2X zoomed into the characters' noses, and/or pushed into a postage-stamp corner, in accordance with YouTube "Fan edit" copyright loopholes?
On 9/23/2018 at 12:28 PM, TomJH said:I recall once talking to the head of personnel of a small company. He was, at a guess, around 30.
At one point in our conversation I made reference to Captain Bligh.
"Who?" he asked.
"You know," I said, "Captain Bligh. Mutiny on the Bounty."
"Sorry," he replied, "Before my time."
Well, you could have imitated Charles Laughton saying "Mis-tah CRIS-chunn!", he would at least know that reference from Bugs Bunny cartoons... ?
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On 9/26/2018 at 1:46 AM, speedracer5 said:
I like this Millennial cut off date being 1985 instead of 1982 (as is usually cited). As someone born in ‘84, can I consider myself Gen X now? I’m tired of being lumped in with all the generalizations attributed to the Millennials. I have a very long attention span and can watch the slowest paced films, if they’re interesting. There’s nothing wrong with superhero movies. People greenlighting the sequels, remakes, etc. are most likely older generations—not millennials.
People born before the Internet existed are not "Millennials". People who pity those who mythologically lived before the Internet existed ARE.
And there's something we've been seeing in Millennial humor, namely that all the great films they do know about, or at least have been told about by "Oldsters"--Citizen Kane, 90's Oscar winners, documentaries that played actual theaters in the 70's and 80's--need to be comically "taken down a peg", as they've clearly got overblown reputations put on them by other people. Old ones, obviously. There's the "Documentary Now!" comedy on cable, that parodies specific-reputation documentaries without ever really having seen them outside of reputation, there's at least a dozen "What's so great about Forrest Gump/Shawshank Redemption?" video bloggers on YouTube that don't quite understand the point of them, but think they were unjust to get Oscars instead of better movies, and if you tell a Millennial to "Watch more classic movies", he WILL immediately think you're referring to Citizen Kane...Ten bucks if he doesn't. Unless you tell him to see a foreign film, and then he thinks he has to go watch Death playing chess and talking like the Swedish Chef.
There's something more at play here than just "attention span" or "preferring color to B&W"--It's the key to the whole Millennial mindset, which is the same reason there's been more of an angry upturn in parodies of Great History: Millennials do not like to be told that something from before their time is worth their attention, because what they've been fed for breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout their entire formative school years is historical revision that everyone in America for most of the 19th and 20th century acted like racist chauvinist baby-murderers, and that the burden of civilization is now completely on them to Fix Everything Right Again from scratch. Their generation has been told that nothing good came before them, and now people who did come before them are telling them that something did...Yeah, right--They would, they were in on it. Fortunately, the Millennial is armed with his magic weapon: TECHNOLOGY! That mysterious thing that people over 30 will hopefully "puzzle" over, scratch their heads, and slink away in baffled awe at the merest mention of "Online social media" like jungle natives seeing the explorer Make Magic Fire with his lighter. When cornered, the Millennial will immediately concoct fantasies that anyone his age is the only generation alive that's ever heard of the Internet, Uber or smartphones, and where else would you look for classic films but YouTube? And what classic films are there besides the one our video/DVD generation discovered?...Are you saying there's a more classic film than Princess Bride? If a movie doesn't have color, or sound, or has old-school effects or soundstage backgrounds, it was clearly an earlier generation's fault for lacking Technology, and still pretending to be an actual movie, because people back then were more gullible and believed stupid things.
There're some great videos on YouTube's "React Channel" (the same one that has "Old People React to Fortnite"), where high-school students react to classic films--Watch the reaction always turn out to be the same: 1) Sniggering at its Oldness, 2) Baffled disorientation ("What...are they...?), 3) Bemusement, 4) Creative Individuality ahead of their peers for liking it ("I have got to rent this, even though it's old, but I'm, like into this stuff!"), and then 5) Instant Expert, lest any old person suspect they were a clueless teen before the lesson--"This is one of the great classic Oscar-winning films!" Oh, thank you for telling us that, good thing you knew and we didn't.
("Everything I know is from Glee!" "I know this song because Family Guy parodied it!")
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1 hour ago, TopBilled said:
That's obviously your opinion. I agree it's a very good film but some might not think it's the best or even most accurate film about the Amish community.
At least it's a...little more accurate than the current Red-state craze for Beverly Lewis's "Bonnet-ripper" Amish-romance novels (for those who want a nice wholesome heroine in their novels, and basic values), which bestsellers have already worked their way into the Inspirational-film and Hallmark cable-movie industries.
("From Hallmark, the channel that will try to make you grateful for all those danged Christmas movies the rest of the year!" )
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1 hour ago, mr6666 said:
-Sounds funny.......Anyone seen it??
Ladies & gentlemen, the only actual funny scene in the film:
Yep, and that's just two minutes of the white-stereotype blame Robert Townsend lays on us--Otherwise we get Townsend--who's better at serious atmospheric-drama than trying to mix social preachiness with comedy in "The Meteor Man"--trying to blame said black-comedy-stereotypic white-people industry for bad black sitcoms and stereotyped roles, in a long-ago naive late-80's before Tyler Perry, the Wayans Brothers' "White Chicks" and UPN's "Homeboys From Outer Space" re-pointed the finger of blame...And back before Eddie Murphy did "Norbit" without white people asking him to.
Even stranger, half the jokes seem to have been time-warped from 1975, as apparently Townsend is one of the only OTHER people besides our board who remembers "Mandingo". That he also remembers the blaxsploitation "J.D.'s Revenge" from 1975, too, and for some bizarre reason uses it to criticize late-80's black film roles, however, just made me feel too danged old.
(And so help me, I swear I actually know the specific show that Townsend is parodying in that bad "Batty!" sitcom parody, as I remember seeing the pilot for it...Also from 1974. It can't be a coincidence. ? )
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1 hour ago, Brrrcold said:
Duh... WITNESS (1985)
Oh, right, "Witness", and "Friendly Persuasion"--oh, wait, those were Quakers--and "High Noon"--oops, that was another Quaker, and...um...
Also, in The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968), the "true story" of dancer Mary Dawson, who came from a progressive Quaker family, inventing the burlesque striptease, is 60's-counterculture mangled into repressed-naive Amish girl "Rachel Schpitendavel", in full Pennsylvania gear, coming to the theater to do "Interpretative Bible ballets" before becoming a pawn in the theater manager's plots...Some, ahem, slight historical liberties.
(And then back when 90's Disney was grinding their Touchstone/Hollywood pictures out like sausages, we had the declining Sidney Lumet's A Stranger Among Us (1992) with Melanie Griffith investigating a murder in the closed Hassidic Jewish community, that was so obviously studio-concocted derivative, critics almost unanimously referred to it as "Witless"...)
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8 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I MAY catch a well-deserved Hell for this, but...
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES used to show on HBO all the time when I was growing up and I liked it, so i read the "book" years later and was underwhelmed to say the least. It's a 60 page story outline bloated into 120 by being double spaced in size 14 font and every new chapter (of which there are several) begins on a page with two lines of type- a profound waste of paper.
I have not read THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, so I might ought to keep my yap shut til' then, but between SOMETHING WICKED, FAHRENHEIT 451 (which really did not impress me) and some of his radio scripts, I am of the very strong opinion that BRADBURY was an idea man who was able to come up with some intriguing story outlines, but when it comes to the actual execution of said ideas: YAWNSVILLE.
He was poetic, which works well in print, but comes off ridiculously implausible if you try to film it as straight adaptation. Up to that point, the only successful Bradbury on film was the Twilight Zone episode of "I Sing the Body Electric", which even then was not exactly on the same level as Rod Serling...And as for what happened to "A Sound of Thunder" without him, let's not even get into that. ?
"The Martian Chronicles" was a...good-not-great 70's-TV miniseries of seven of the individual stories, but tried to "fit" the disconnected anthology stories together with a central narrative plot that would justify "The Million-Year Picnic" at the end.
But yes, Bradbury's SWTWC script was a much tighter second-draft than the book, made Jason Robards' character more believable, and even came up with a better, more appropriate fate for "ol' Tom Fury". (Royal Dano walking away with spooky Ray Bradbury dialogue again, just as he had in his two minutes in "Moby Dick".)
16 hours ago, speedracer5 said:I've seen the preview for this movie a couple times now. I didn't really have high hopes for it. I think what turned me off the most about it is the title. Granted, I see that the movie is based on a book, so the title probably comes from that; but it's so lame. The House with a Clock in its Walls sounds like a working title that you'd use until you thought of something better.
Hollywood Hates Books, and if you see a "Classic children's adaptation", you know it's going to be mangled past its marketable title into Whatever the Studio Wants It To Be. (Ahem, "Peter Rabbit", 'nuff said...Or do we need to go into Jim Carrey taking "Mr. Popper's Penguins" naively hoping it would be a faithful adaptation?)
John Bellairs has a nice spooky pre-Harry Potter attempt at whimsical gothic kids' fantasies, director Eli Roth wanted to do the pet project, and Amblin' productions wanted to pay for it because Spielberg thought he'd have more childhood nostalgia. But I looked at the trailer, saw Jack Black and Cate Blanchett trying to guard some ancient relic and running from hordes of funny/spooky CGI creatures, and immediately pictured another studio trying to make their own marketable Halloween-kid-lit "Goosebumps" on demand. Which, considering we get an actual Sony franchise-hungry "Goosebumps 2" next October without Black, makes it that much more deliberately confusing.
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1 hour ago, kjrwe said:
Sequels: In almost all cases, the sequels aren't nearly as good as the first film. Over the years, I've noticed that, with sequels, the filmmakers are trying to beat a dead horse. Some of the worst sequels are the sequels to the original The Pink Panther. Oy...what were the filmmakers thinking? What was Peter Sellers thinking? The first film is a masterpiece...
Actually, the Inspector Clouseau character was created in the original French play of A Shot in the Dark, and Blake Edwards created the first Pink Panther as a sequel. Then, for some reason, decided the jewel-robbery story would be better released first.
Return of was a fair attempt to revive it for the 70's (after Alan Arkin was no Sellers-replacement), and Sellers grudgingly needed the work. Strikes Again was a hit, so they thought Revenge of would be, and not too many people ever found out that the posthumous Trail of and Curse Of ("Why is Blake still trying to grind them out without Sellers??") were an intentionally connected two-part finale movie for Clouseau. Probably because nobody ever bothered to WATCH them. ?
Of course, Edwards had gotten so used to Sellers just letting the improv roll and creating the scenes out of nothing, Blake seemed to have forgotten how to direct, and couldn't get used to finding another actor to write his own movies for him. He lucked out when he wanted to be the first to bring Roberto Benigni to the US in Son of, and he was even luckier that Benigni already had a more competent knowledge of how to direct comedy by that point to take over for him.
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31 minutes ago, cigarjoe said:
The Illustrated Man (1969) Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, and Robert Drivas. Unimpressive. I don't think I've seen a great Ray Bradbury adaptation yet other than The Martian Chronicles on TV.
Try Disney's adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), scripted and narrated by Bradbury, followed by a Warner Archive copy of Hanna-Barbera's 1993 animated-special of The Halloween Tree, ditto. An early PBS adaptation of short story "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickelby is a Friend of Mine" also seems to have resurfaced on the public-domain backwaters of Amazon Prime. ?
Outside of those few exceptions, yeah: You won't find good Bradbury on film, and that includes Francois Truffaut's mod-foreign Fahrenheit 451. There was a Canadian TZ-style anthology series of his short stories, and that was also a less-said-the-better example of why Bradbury is too abstract/poetic to film literally.
Except for the ones he adapts himself, of course, like John Huston's 1956 Moby Dick, even if that wasn't his book.
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7 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I love Grumpy Old Men. I just can't with the remake.
I've also read that they're remaking Bewitched. Except for instead of a witch married to a mortal, it's going to be an interracial couple. I haven't figured out whether magic is in the show?
A remake of The Twilight Zone is coming. Jordan Peele who wrote Get Out is set to narrate. Why he couldn't just start an original anthology series is beyond me.
That's pretty much for the reason for half the "Black-washed" remakes:
First, that black urban audiences are more in touch with the media available on free-TV than on Cable and streaming, but second, the idea that these were, quote, "white" shows, and would be funnier in a more FUBU context. Which was pretty much the reason that Cedric the Entertainer bought up an 80's limbo-hell movie remake of "The Honeymooners", and made Ralph Kramden a ghetto bus driver...Before trying to do the Rodney Dangerfield "Back to School" remake that Melissa McCarthy ended up getting instead. As for why Chris Rock wanted to remake "Heaven Can Wait", think he had some "social" race-relation point he wanted to make.
The all-white 00's Bewitched remake we got with Nicole Kidman was back when Sony was (still) trying to find their "House icon"--in addition to selling UA's Pink Panther with cartoons and Steve Martin remakes--and thought their collection of Screen Gems TV series would conjure up nostalgia. We got two "Charlie's Angels" movies, an Eddie Murphy "Fantasy Island" spoof died in limbo, and it was Nora Ephron making a bizarre feminist-apology breakfast out of "Bewitched"'s plot (see, Samantha's not really a housewife, she just plays one on TV!) that stopped us from getting Lisa Kudrow in an updated "I Dream of Jeannie". Oh, and franchise-hungrier Sony is reportedly planning to take ANOTHER bash at Charlie's Angels, only now Charlie is part of an international spy organization.
As for Jordan Peele's TZ, settle in for at least five meal-ticket years (or three films, whichever comes first) of flavor-of-the-week "100 Ways to Try and Make Get Out Happen Again for Whoever Hires Him", both on TV and movies. Will he be a One-Hit Wonder?--Let's wait and see.
QuoteLast night, I just read that Hollywood is going to produce a live-action version of The Jetsons. I'm sure so much CGI will be involved, that they may as well just re-air the original cartoon from the 60s and 80s. It'll have about the same amount of realism.
That one's been in limbo since the 80's: Warner's Hanna-Barbera originally wanted to produce a trilogy of the live-action "Flintstones" we got with John Goodman, the live-action "Jonny Quest" we almost got with Dwayne Johnson as Race Bannon, and that darn live-action "Jetsons" that's frustrated every poor producer for thirty years. When last we heard, Robert Rodriguez was planning to tackle it, fresh off his obnoxious CGI-fetish "Spy Kids" kiddy-films, but looks like one more brave warrior has fallen by the wayside.
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Took me a while to remember this one:
Thanks to the MGM/Columbia Orphans on streaming, every time streaming-service listings are showing The Fan, I can now already know ahead of time that it's the 1996 movie where sports fan Robert DeNiro blackmails Wesley Snipes,
and can stop raising my hopes that they've brought the sleazy but oddly atmospheric 1981 slasher film with Lauren Bacall out of Warner-Archive limbo: ?
,445,291,400,400,arial,12,4,0,0,5_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
(And yes, the two "Black Sunday"'s drive me up the wall, too.)
6 hours ago, Feego said:Actually, the play that inspired Here Comes Mr. Jordan was titled Heaven Can Wait, so in 1978 they just went back to the original title. To confuse you a little more, Mr. Jordan was followed by a 1947 sequel called Down to Earth. In 2001, Chris Rock starred in yet another Mr. Jordan remake called ... Down to Earth.
To confuse even further:
Mr. Jordan was based on a play, but the 1943 Lubitsch Heaven Can Wait was based on a play called "Birthdays" (a drawing-room comedy taking place over a series of birthdays, with Lubitsch only using the "devil" plot as a framing device). Thus permanently leading to confusion over which play Warren Beatty's 1978 film was "based on".(And no, for the Nth freakin' time, "Xanadu" was not a "remake" of the 1947 Jordan-sequel Down to Earth. Seriously, they're not even close.)
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1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:
I don't know, but I can't ever bring myself to try and watch "My Man Godfrey" (1937) in color.
I have enough trouble watching those repellent lunatics in B&W.
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4 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
Getting back to the topic at hand, maybe we can say Jack Oakie & Roscoe Karns' characters in ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933) were of the man-child variety:
Eww... ?
The Trying-to-be-Tenniel makeup (which worked better on the stage than in closeup) was but one reason why Paramount's movie was an early studio-crippler. The script's complete at-sea unfamiliarity with Lewis Carroll was another.
5 hours ago, TopBilled said:The baby voice was probably chosen by Radner because of the letters in Walters' name, which were fun to mispronounce. But she still could have mimicked and caricatured Walters without the baby voice.
Barbara Walters' hints of a non-rhotic impediment was a comic-target trademark all over TV in the 70's--with or without Radner, we still today joke about "If you were a twee, what kind of twee would you be?"--and that she was NBC's most "prestige" news star at the time made her an even richer biting-the-hand-that-feeds SNL fodder.
It wasn't "baby talk", it was just more in-house NBC heckling, like Dan Aykroyd's Tom Snyder imitation.
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Correct. During the early 1930s, Pickford held a great admiration for Disney and wanted to work with Walt on some innovative projects he was toying with. One of them was a feature length movie based on the Lewis Carroll whimsical novel that would combine live-action elements with animated elements. There are actual test photos that still exist of Pickford dressed as Alice next to a Mickey Mouse doll. Ultimately the test shots indicated that Pickford would not be able to pull off another ingenue role no matter how much she dressed the part. The project ended up being scraped by Disney and eventually he did create feature length films that combined those elements together. Disney's Alice in Wonderland ended up being just a full animated film. Pickford ended up retiring from acting after Secrets(1933) but continued producing pictures until the 1950s.
Darn, beat me to it--
Also, by that time in '33, Paramount had optioned the popular Broadway production for their all-star disaster, so there was no hope of anyone else doing a version.
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I was going to say that I first saw Keaton (Cops) and Chaplin (The Pawnbroker) in a college class--Okay, I first saw Buster on a local-station Saturday-morning airing of Seven Chances with wacky narration when I was a kid, but didn't connect the name...
But do I have to talk about "Witness" now?
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" persecution-complex, other studios have dystrophied their "classic" catalogs to just a few iconic five or six that the audience can already quote dialogue from memory--Paramount just makes their money selling Ferris Bueller and Grease--and refuse to release anything else for disk or Fathom screening. Well, mean...why else would anyone go to see it if they couldn't?
HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM
in General Discussions
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If this's the one that ends with Popeye switching Fleischer characters, and ending the cartoon on "Boop-a-doop-a-doop", good--That means that the classic Jack Mercer-voiced Popeyes should be next, with King of the Mardi Gras.
And then you're in for some good stuff.