EricJ

When the whole plot revolves around whether Whale can trap a date with unsuspectingly goofy-dim straight-hunk boytoy Brendan Fraser--while feeling tragically self-loathing about it--the entire plot excuse was pretty much a gay-cinema "We had famous gay people TOO back then!" attempt to grab credibility off of classic Hollywood-cultural references. (Rather like the "Celluloid Closet" documentary, which keeps rubbing every single 30's-50's "subtext" in our faces saying "Oh yeah, how about 'Dracula's Daughter', how about them apples, huh, breeder, still think we 'don't exist'??") If it'd been nominated for an Oscar today, we already have so many overlooked-historical-closet-gay movies (most of them with Ian McKellen), we'd barely blink, but since we didn't when it came out, this just fooled us into thinking we'd actually learn something about Whale. Which is too bad, since yes, Jack Betts absolutely nails the elegant offscreen Boris Karloff, for those who only came for the film history.

No one ever quite GOT it, but the "Our little Halloween prank" has all the earmarks of a last-minute downgrading of Welles' original intentions, to avoid even further trouble: Leaving aside that there was no "panic"--there were calls to local police, but reports of "Panic in the streets" were largely smear-stories against radio by the local newspapers, who feared the rise of "fake" radio news--Welles in the Mercury stage-theater was as leftwing as they came. And the Left's big cause in 1938 was to criticize American isolationism as hypocritical, saying that we had a duty to get in there and help Britain stop Hitler, or we'd be fighting him over here before we knew it. Most people who gush over the WotW broadcast don't even realize the Mercury Theater did other stories, for two whole seasons of Orson playing Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Phileas Fogg, and that the concept of the show was a unique stage-style directness to the adaptation. In WotW's case, Orson knew EXACTLY what he was doing putting Americans into the middle of HG Wells's attack by giving America news bulletins of an invasion on the north Atlantic coast, and it's safe to believe that a lot of people calling in about Martians subconsciously thought they were calling in about Germans. (The link, btw, also has an 1940 interview with Orson and Herbert on a local radio station, and HG clearly got the joke.) Could he, however, admit that in war-unpopular 1938 on a national NBC broadcast without being fired by the network? That would have been a little harder. (And yes, usually I save that annual bit of historical un-revisioning for October, but, y'know...seriously. Let's put a stop to the "Halloween prank" myth within our lifetime.)

I'm sorry, but Harpo Marx in Technicolor and wearing normal clothes is simply Martin Short.

A big problem is that theaters have changed: Say "Movie theater" to anyone literally under the age of thirty, and you'll hear complaints about cellphones, cineplexes, and commercialism thrown at them in the lobby and theater ads. You can not explain to them what was the appeal of going to a local theater on Friday night in 1976 or 1984...Go ahead, try it yourself. One of the things that made "80's Movies" so nostalgic in the minds of survivors--every movie was "bigger" then, in the theaters--was that the majority of theaters in the 70's were one-screen and most in the 80's were still small local 3-5 places, either downtown or close by. Seeing a movie was more of a local night out, whereas today, it's another trip to the Big Box Mall, and if it's not in the same mall as the Big Box Wal-Mart, it's probably just across the highway. In the old days, theaters with only 3-5 screens had to keep their movies rotated often to keep the folks in town or nearby towns interested, and there was something to see almost every week; today, 15-screen cineplexes offer your One-Stop Shopping Location, we stop in to "pick up" this weekend's big opening, and go home. That not only hurts our moviegoing and our perception of being in an audience, it hurts the movies--We used to root for a movie being "worthy" to be remembered as best of the year, now we typecast it as relegated to "those" movies over in the college-town arthouses. Most of whose theaters DO have 3-5 screens and more relaxed lobbies. (Okay, I must ask: How the flippin' heck is Happytime Murders "diverse", unless we're still in automatic Ghostbusters-avenging mode of considering anything Melissa McCarthy still stars in as an "achievement for women in film"? Unless maybe they meant puppet diversity, a woefully under-represented demographic?) They're literally complaining that "If we had more female movie critics, THEY'D have liked Oceans' 8 and Spy Who Dumped Me!" Which is so close to the disgruntled "RottenTomatoes critics are old guys who hated Batman!" DC comic-book fanboys, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Me, I'll laugh. It's true we don't have many female movie critics--there was Pauline Kael, but she's dead--just as we have only a small affirmative-action minority of female TV football commentators and car-repair technicians. But every time someone asks WHY there can't be "more female movie critics", I tell them old war-stories about that terrible '99-'00 year when Roger Ebert was trying to audition a new replacement for Gene Siskel on his TV show...And was convinced that a "He said, She said" male-female critic duo would be the one thing that would pack in new movie-fan viewers. No, it wasn't the producers who thought that, HE thought that, although he probably had a major co-producing role at the time. Mostly, he tried to groom the role for one of his best offscreen press-junket acquaintances, Boston "entertainment reporter" Joyce Kulhawik, who--how shall I put this?--the "Spunky female TV news reporter" from an 80's TV series made a more convincing movie critic than Kulhawik did. You will find more female "Entertainment reporters" on local TV stations than critics, watch Joyce and Roger on screen and you will know which is which and why. The S&E "Auditions" were starting to get a loyal American Idol-like fan-following of rooters and pool-bets--the lead favorite was Harry Knowles from AintItCool.com, until Joel Siegel did a great turn on his own--but once it became clear that the race was fixed and Joyce was Roger's Little Darling for the role, fans exploded. Ebert was besieged with "What the (bleep) were you thinking??" outrages from fans--Even I, who'd exchanged one or two messages before, wrote in to say, "Look, we didn't even like her in BOSTON!!", and Ebert was nice enough to write back and say, "Well, what did you think of Lisa Schwarzbaum from Ent. Weekly, how well did she do on the show?" There was NO CONVINCING HIM back to sanity. I know it's one of the most sexist cliche's in the world to say "If females want to be movie experts, ask them whether they preferred Curly's Stooges shorts to the Shemp ones" , but to be a critic, you have to love taking things apart just to put them back together again...Not because the movie characters "spoke to you as a person". There's only a certain group of people whose brains are wired to do that, some for the last 10,000 years, and don't look at us, we didn't do it!

Nice to know there's another Librivox.org fan out there: https://librivox.org/mcteague-by-frank-norris/ With most Audible.com current bestsellers being insanely overpriced even on audio, I've been using the good volunteers at Librivox to catch up on the classics for my iPad at bedtime. (I'm not familiar with the book apart from the movie, I just wanted to plug the site.) ?

Y'know, to be fair, it technically wasn't JUST Rob Lowe & Snow White that killed off the Oscar Opening Production Number... They did have a little help from Pat Morita, Dom DeLuise and Telly Savalas (who was doing a series of Vegas-club spokesman ads at the time), too, two years before: That was 1987, and Rob & Snow was 1989. Billy Crystal was 1988. What, the...wait!! The whole Panther-mania was just a network ABC Disney-plug?? Aww...Well, that just stinks. And here I was thinking that the big push to "recognize" Black Panther was the Academy voters' own "Marvel is the New Pixar" attempt to try and get, quote-fingers, "validation" for being grownup voters who liked, quote-fingers "kiddy" films, and tried use some big social pretentions to give it some importance---Like they did with Beauty & the Beast, Mad Max, Driving Miss Daisy, and ten years of Pixar movies! Y'know, the first ray of hope, a subconscious zeitgeist display that even the voters were getting sick of Sundance, and wanted "their" movies to be nominated again! If it is ABC's meddling, it only emphasizes the one basic rule of fixing the Oscars or the hosts: FORGET. THE FREAKIN'. TV. Just go out on stage, praise the winners, entertain the attendees, and rhapsodize about their industry, that's what you're in the theater to do. Up to the 50's or 60's, they never even used to show us that, except on radio or newsreels.

We've had actors who've been nominated for comedic roles: Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Peter O'Toole, Steve Martin, Madeline Kahn, Cher, Jean Hagen, Charles Durning any unholy number of times--And when, like John Gielgud, they win over their dramatic competition, it only shows the talent and discipline of just how much harder Comedy really is than Dying. (And I still say Tim Curry was robbed of a BSA nom for "Clue", even though everyone was pushing for one from Sylvester Stallone's "Oscar".) That's as important as a comedy Best Picture competing on the same playing field as a dramatic Best Picture, since the issue is which movie did a better job of producing itself to please the audience. Unfortunately, today, that's something we also lost when universal mainstream farce-humor niche'd and fractured itself into non-existence sometime during the GWBush era.

Every year. Even when I don't care about movies I haven't seen (or, like Moonlight or Room, wouldn't see), I at least know I'll get some excerpt in their defense to persuade me why I should consider it--One year ago today I couldn't tell you from the title or poster what The Shape of Water even was; a few clips and acting awards later, I at least knew. And even if they're not using Chuck "100 Years of Movies" Workman anymore for the In Memoriam or classic-clips salutes, at least he's set the bar for the style. My earliest memory when I was a kid was seeing TV Guide list the nominations in their "Close Up" sidebar: Even if I didn't know Cabaret or Clockwork Orange or Godfather II or Towering Inferno (or even, at ten, what the words meant) I at least knew the movies by reputation from Mad Magazine satire. The 70's Golden Age Oscars--back in the prehistoric Bob Hope/Johnny Carson days before Rob Lowe & Snow White, when the show was still a Vegas-y whitebread entertainment spectacle, and Billy Crystal hadn't started CGI'ing himself into movies or making Jack Palance jokes--was a referendum on what movies would be chosen for this year's Pantheon..It's not like we'd have a year that no movies would ever be remembered for, so which five, and which one, were going to have a reserved seat on the cultural Noah's Ark for the next twenty to fifty years? Of course, I was only allowed to stay up for twenty or thirty minutes of it, so I would only get to see a bit or piece of it--hopefully the Best Visual Effects winner, the only one that mattered to a kid in the 70's--so I might only see an opening number or some Best Song presentation, or Art Direction and Costume from one of the Irwin Allen disaster movies. Movies took their time to get to theaters in those days, so I got to see Frankie Laine singing the "Blazing Saddles" Best Song theme, and Richard Kiley going full-LaMancha on "The Little Prince" before ever getting a chance to see the movies they came from on our own screen, but that at least fit in with my idea that movies were great things that came from some famous place somewhere. In those days, our theater was a comfy little downtown hole-in-the-wall in walking distance from our house (everything was), so movies existed mostly as Coming-Attraction posters to me, and the Oscars were the first glimpse to hype at what was Coming. And if, like "All the President's Men", I had seen it, all the better to root for. And oh, if you're going to make a joke about James Franco and Anne Hathaway, don't worry: After thirty years writing the ceremonies I remembered, that was the one that finally officially got Bruce "Star Wars Holiday Special" Villanch fired as resident permanent writer. Our long national nightmare has been over for at least seven years now, in case you hadn't noticed.

And then...they take it out on the TV awards. They think "The audience would love it if we got an 'edgy' host who jokes about how much we HATE the awards!" Which is always fun. ? Until they forget that the host's job is to entertain the stars and directors sitting in the live audience who don't hate the Oscars--or this year's movies--and they're the ones we hear boo'ing the host's jokes first. Listen to Ellen, Jimmy, Johnny, Bob and Billy, future hosts: Shmooze or Die. Still, we're in our second year of liberation from King Harvey the Terrible...It'll take us a few years to figure out how we'd ever do an awards year without him, but believe us, we'll figure it out. If we couldn't have Hugo, Toy Story 3, Dunkirk, Mad Max or Inside Out as one decent commercial populist Best Picture winner to "bring us back" to sanity again, I say, at this point, whatever does the job: Wakanda **** FOREVER!! Now that Chris Rock has a successful hosting gig, I'm sure we've all forgotten that one terrible year of "Best Sound Editing can stay in their seats, and we'll bring it out to you." (Oh, why bother, let's just get a big T-shirt cannon!)

ToP123 is probably a lot more visible now that it's one of the "MGM Orphans" that's been wandering around every streaming service lately with their bowl in hand, saying "Please, seh...Can I have some rotation?" (Also, for some reason, Columbia's lately been doing that too, including, ironically, "Oliver!") That's where I saw the glorious 70's Matthau/Robert Shaw version (we're pretty much down to Vudu Movies on Us showing the same two dozen MGM/UA/Cannon pictures over and over, so get used to Teen Wolf and Legally Blonde), and yes, Matthau is a darling even in a 70's NY-action role. One critic at the time pointed out that the story was rooted in NYC's 70's malaise, and "haunted by Abe Beame"--no prize for guessing who the hated sick-in-bed mayor is supposed to be--and as an "honorary" NY'er who barely remembers how bad things were in the 70's, I have to take my sentimentality from whatever gritty 70's Golden Age movies I can get it from.

With a triple waterski flip. The problem isn't "The nominees are boring", it's what MADE them boring, by cutting voter time and grabbing all the nominees from the two extremes of the Hollywood-buzz-rumor Golden Globe lists, and the indie-snore National Board of Review and festival lists. At least we don't have Weinstein/Miramax's nagging to kick around anymore. Frustrations about why mainstream Hollywood movies don't make the cut have become "Why can't they be as fun as the Golden Globes?", but let's just say imitating the GG's is not exactly the direction you want to go. Ladies and gentlemen, the REASON this category was made. End. Of. Story. It's Pixar and Disney's "Beauty & the Beast" all over again*: A cult of progressive minded mainstream-grownup voters who'd never seen a Marvel movie in their lives, or at least publicly didn't want to admit they had, wanted to find some excuse to push Black Panther (which frankly wasn't even that good a Marvel movie, compared to Civil War), because the big symbolic social push behind it had validated it as "important"...And not just because they were surprised they liked it. (Guys...it's okay: The Oscars are supposed to be about admitting you thought a Picture was Best. How do you think Field of Dreams and Driving Miss Daisy got up there in the same list with an Oliver Stone Vietnam pic back in '90?...And Daisy won!) The "historical justification" they'll try to throw out is that the very first Oscars tried to give two Best Pictures, one for a studio-industry Picture, and one for best independent Artistic or Unique Production-- Which was pretty much just an excuse to give another award to FW Murnau's "Sunrise" in 1929 (beating out "Chang" and "The Crowd"), while "Wings" beat out "7th Heaven" for the BP. The idea was not repeated for "Broadway Melody"'s win in '30. ------ * - Ie., the year the Academy had to come up with a dozen "grownup" reasons for why B&tB "had" to be the first Disney-animated Best Picture--not just because they couldn't publicly admit they liked it--or when the Academy had to change the entire BP rules in '09 because everyone agreed Wall-E could have beaten the pants off of "that Indian movie"...Unless "The Dark Knight" had been up that year!

You can see Redford trying to get his politics into his acting/directing as early as his role in "Three Days of the Condor"-- In directing, "Quiz Show" certainly wants to blame someone for the 50's and today, but apart from Martin Scorsese's Snidely-Whiplash baddie-speech as the sponsor at the end, it's hard to say quite who. And, then, oh, dear lord..."Lions for Lambs": The movie that officially made 00's Iraq-War movies box-office poison. Every politically idealistic director wanted to do THE definitive GWBush protest movie, and nobody, nobody tried harder than Bob. Unless it was maybe Tom Cruise. ? And Redford absolutely nailing Fitzgerald's jumpy insecurities of the book character inside and out. (Unlike a certain recent party-distracted remake we could mention...)

Redford as a 30's con man in "The Sting"? Not quite believable. Redford as a Babe Ruth-era magic baseball player? No one MORE believable.

Right now, you're in the same live-action Treasure Island/Story of Robin Hood phase where Walt couldn't get his overseas money out of postwar England, and said, "Well, let's spend it there!" on a series of live-action English classics on location. Which helped develop the live-action division in time for the Disneyland series to come along. So if the early ones look like they were made in bulk, most of them were.

As for: there is this (in honor of Basil in Bert I. Gordon's "The Magic Sword"), also debatably worth the joke effort: (Note the culinary use of "Bay-sil".)

Got surprised with it one Christmas...It was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo43hFP8nqc (At least, before computer screens came along, and our electronic toys didn't have to have blinking LED lights.) I'll see your wine commercials and your Standard Rich & Famous Contract, and raise you Welles constantly voiceover-ing cheap tabloid documentaries like "The Late Great Planet Earth", or doing host-intros for PBS and syndicated film series, where he's rather visibly had a bit too much of the Gallo.Naturally, I associated Welles with "Washed-up star", as there were quite a few of in the 70's, and I never saw the appeal until watching Citizen Kane in college. After the "I'll probably go bankrupt in, oh...70 years?" scene, it is forever impossible to think of Welles as uncool.

I remember seeing a stripped-down high-school play of it, so I knew the story and the general allegory--But the play I remembered was missing most of the second act, where they put on the trial scene, and Danny Kaye gets his big serious-dramatic moment. Basically, either you go in knowing it's supposed to be 60's-counterculture-era fantasy from a French playwright, or...you don't. Look what happens when you don't. (Although the opening disclaimer, to play down any hint of politics, pretty well clues the audience in: "This is a story of Good defeating Evil...Naturally, it is a work of fiction.")

Yep, PRETTY sure that's the one. Vegas, not Disney.

I remembered the scene where Belloq (the French-archeologist baddie) holds up the South American idol, the natives bow down, and Indy makes his run for it, was borrowed from the same scene in another Egyptian-adventure serial, as the Muslim call to prayer saves our heroes at the very last second from a hundred Arabian-thug scimitars, but I was blanking on which movie. Also, reportedly, "Marian" was originally going to be Professor Jones' lovestruck student, who stowed away and followed him on his adventure, but story revisions decided to give Indy an old flame who knows the Himalayas better...And who, of course, was the daughter of an old archeologist friend. (Um...it wouldn't hurt? ? )

Basically, Tennessee Williams' plots, characters, and general potboiler style can be explained by that Williams in his own life WAS what wouldn't pass muster with film censors in the 40's and 50's. It would certainly explain Blanche duBois, Maggie the Cat and pretty much all of "The Glass Menagerie", for starters, never mind Elizabeth Taylor in "Boom!".

It would certainly be better than the short-lived "InterFilm" theater gimmick, where audiences watched a choose-your-own-adventure movie on projected laserdisc, and had to vote on choices with their seat buttons. Unfortunately, as Roger Ebert pointed out, it never felt like you were choosing your own adventure, and most of the gimmicks involved just choosing which character to follow with choose-your-own-edit sequences. And, of course, starting with Bob Gale's "Mister Payback" didn't help its future either.

Actually, we've never been sure of the ages of Sesame's Bert & Ernie, beyond the acceptance of their Felix & Oscar rent sharing. The only reference we have is the sketch where Ernie pretends to be a doctor ("Either there's no pulse or my watch is broken...Uh, that's an old joke."), and when Bert asks what's the result, Ernie replies "I won't know until I graduate medical school--And I'll have to finish grade school first."

And the Star Trek: Next Generation series/movies, as far back as 1987, imagined a future where paper was no longer used, and maps, blueprints, reports, and even mail and classic books would all be displayed on personal handheld mini-computer touch-screens, called Padds:

And for the record, Spam isn't "Physhing"--That's the attempt to extract personal data from the user by fraudulently pretending to be the bank, PayPal, Publisher's Clearinghouse, or your Microsoft virus-warning system. (Or, as one ad for Internet marketing put it: "(flashing, alert-sounds) MICROSOFT WARNING: Nobody falls for this anymore." ) -- As for the meat product itself, it may not actually be Honey-roasted Spiral-sliced Easter Ham, but with the "SP" standing for Spiced, I appreciate it for what it is, when grilling up a slice with over-easy egg. In my post-college single-guy-cooking days, I've known many a Stir-Fried Rice with diced Spam taking the place of pork, and with right bit of dark-soy sauce, canned peas, imitation-seafood crab and a bit of bacon (yes, some recipes do call for it), dang, it's addictive. I've known times when the Monty Python sketch actually HAS given me weekend cravings for Spam-Spam-Spam-Baked-Beans-and-Spam. or least in a more economical two-ingredient variation. In fact, just reading this thread has given me an urge to go out and see if the local Stop & Shop has the Low Sodium/Lite cans on discount this week.

You watch Son for the first time wondering whether it was the YF inspiration, and then when Inspector Lionel Atwill and his wooden arm play darts with Rathbone, you're practically quoting Mel Brooks dialogue. A riot...iss...an ugly thing...