EricJ

I would never punch the Hallmark Channels by mistake. It would always be on purpose. ?

And the Dr. Kildare movies, seeing as Lionel's wheelchair wasn't fictional. (As Bugs Bunny imitated, the last time he was in a hospital: "'<snrrt!> I'M the Mayor of the Town!...Gen-tlemen of the the juryyyy, YOU can't send that poor boy <snrrt!> to prisonnn!...'")

Even though it was deleted for time, can we say that SNL has now officially retired the jersey for Annoying Hallmark Christmas Cable Movie gags?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzytvDsPfo It's starting to become a trendy enough gag with female TV watchers who still think television revolves around cable, but it's finally getting attention.

Goes back to the turn-of-the-century days when soda was still considered "Tonic"--as in, a health tonic--and you went to drug stores to get one. Even with ice-cream or cherry-coke. "Rexall" reminds me of our local store growing up in upstate-NY, that still had a working snack and soda counter...Of course, so did K-marts, in those days.

But OTOH, you have Gert "Baron Bomburst" Frobe as Auric "Why no, Mr. Bond..." Goldfinger, vs. Skyfall's wispy-lispy toothless (literally and figuratively) Javier Vardem, who looks and sounds uncannily like SNL's Al Franken "Stuart Smalley" character turned Bond-villain: "You left me behind on that mission, but you know what? That's okay...I decided, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, I LIKE myself!" (I agree, however, on Skyfall successfully modernizing Moneypenny without getting obnoxious about it, and Spectre for avoiding temptation and not making her the new Jinx of the series.)

Originally, Jackson and Del Toro announced two movies, "An Unexpected Journey", and "There and Back Again". But Warner insisted on a NEW TRILOGY, which was fine with Jackson, as Creeping Subplot was setting in with enough new improv material for three. (And you want "pointless", wait till you get to the third movie, where we not only get whole central subplot arcs devoted to characters who aren't even remotely from the book, but there as PC "political metaphor" ones as well, with a distinctly fruit-flavored nyah-nyah low-comedy "punishment" to them...I'm tellin' ya, it's starting to make you think about PJ, and just why the heck he did do "Lovely Bones", never mind that gender-surgery movie he wanted to do at one point.)

The Warner Blu-ray has the 3-D included*, and it's not too bad, especially at depicting dancing on the rooftop, or the big cavernous space of the stage set...Jewel, indeed. (* - If you managed to buy a 3DTV or Playstation VR headset, that is.)

Be prepared for some MAJOR hurt, especially if you're a fan of the book-respectful first trilogy. If the original LOTR was the Star Wars of the 21st cty., The Hobbit is its Prequel Trilogy. AUJ is watchable for, yes, the first third, when Martin Freeman nails his role and Jackson sticks faithfully to the book events of the Dwarves dinner party. (They even sing Tolkien's own tune for the Plate Song.) But once they leave Bilbo's house to set out on the book's journey...hoooo-MAMA!! That is the last bit of book-faithfulness you will see for the next nine hours, period. We're talking until the end of the trilogy. When ex-Doctor Sylvester McCoy shows up with bird poop on his head, that is the official cutoff point between the book-faithful movie, and the beginning of Jackson's self-indulgent insanity, and it don't ever come back. The problem is that Peter Jackson literally isn't interested in the title hero of the story--When the Dwarves show up, Jackson develops a very, very, very, very...very questionable preoccupation with our company of rowdy, belching, manly Dwarves, and for the next two movies, is more intent on exploring his own screenwriter variations-on-theme. Particularly his need to flesh out the running subplot of Thorin getting his kingdom back, until that becomes THE central climactic arc of the series. Freeman's Bilbo is all but reduced to an audience spectator, and not to go into too-long details, but in the climax of "The Desolation of Smaug", you will see--I do not exaggerate--an entire half hour of invented Jackson Subplot jammed in between two lines of dialogue from the book...Half hour, two lines. (When the first movie came out, I was stuck on a movie-discussion forum where a couple of the regular gay posters had their usual discussion of "Who was the hottest dwarf?". From the amount of attention the director lavishes on them in this series, I seriously believe they weren't the only ones--I've been looking askance at Jackson's work ever since "Heavenly Creatures", and even if you might not have been up until now, "The Battle of Five Armies" will cause you to start.) Basically, imagine that Cecil B. DeMille quote of "Give me two pages of the Bible, and I'll give you a picture"--Only in Peter Jackson's case of trying to flesh out one short book into three films, it's "Give me two pages of Tolkien, and I'll give you a new character, a videogame-ready CGI battle scene, and a trilogy-long running subplot arc". And he goes through every single blessed pair of pages in the book. (Honest Trailers had the best laugh on the movie in their review of the trilogy, where they had Bilbo finally presenting the book he'd been "writing" to Frodo at the end of TBo5A, and Frodo asking "I don't understand...Who's this 'Thorin' guy, why do you spend so much time going off onto all this other material for no reason, and then forget to mention yourself for almost two-thirds of the book?" )

I've had to use more of a wheelchair/old-person's scooter to get around nowadays (not that old, just a few of my own genetic burdens), but I like to keep a positive attitude about it: When going to job interviews, I would joke: "C'mon, you've seen those cop shows--The department guy in the wheelchair is ALWAYS the brilliant crazy-genius computer hacker who can dig up any information anywhere!"

Although, of course, blind girls are usually good-hearted and virtuous, since they're able to love our hero for himself without shallow appearances-- How else could we have gotten Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark"?

Even without any "casting couch" rumors as implied above, I blame George Pal's "Tom Thumb" for driving Russ Tamblyn to drugs and Easy Rider in the 60's. ANYBODY would want to get away from that.

It was trying to suggest they were rich techies enough to afford the Frank Lloyd Wright "Waterfall house", but that wasn't in NC.

I've often thought that theory--It would explain a LOT.

The Young People's Concerts are considered rare, revolutionary bits of television history, and thus "historical" enough for TCM to dig up and premiere for their library. That said, I'm also smelling Warner stirring the Spielberg-promotion pot. Broadway wants to do another big revival so I'm guessing Spielberg will be shut out on West Side Story film rights, and he'll end up doing that historical "Leonard Bernstein biography" he wanted to do instead as a backup. Probably with Mark Rylance.

I guess I'm not the only one who keeps opening this thread expecting it to be about "Amahl & the Night Visitors"? (For which the 1955 kinescope finally surfaced on Amazon Prime, after being considered "lost" by the Museum of Broadcasting.)

Basically, in layman's terms: What Trumbull WANTED to do was film the Walken/Wood scenes in normal film, and the SFX headset footage in his cool new Hobbit-style 60fps-HFR Showscan. Even if theaters had the projectors to do that, switching back and forth would have burned them out in minutes, so he just switched to the "screen ratio" trick: The audience would be used to seeing the normal actor scenes in an "average" movie-screen 16:9, until the headset footage suddenly switches to a big widescreen 2.35:1, and then back to normal again...Oo, what just happened, it looked so immersive? We didn't notice it on Brainstorm, but we did start noticing the trick once Tim Allen was launched into space in "Galaxy Quest".

I knew the Lollipop Song from TD&tDF, so I was aware of the problem in 60's-70's Western-Comedies, but have to admit, I was unaware as to the extent of the problem with the others. Certainly no human being would PUT a song with "Marmalade", "Butterflies" or "Rainbows" into a western ("Lookie here, we got us a Brony for a sheriff!" ? ) unless they were intentionally after B.J. Thomas's "Raindrops" money. His song was everywhere at the time. I've always been soft on Brainstorm, A) because it was one of the first movies I saw during my college years in the Big City, and B ) because of James Horner's early score (along with Krull and The Dresser, he put out some of his best ones in '83), but looking at it now...yeah, it's a bit of a mess. It was SFX guru Douglas Trumbull's attempt to sell his idea of Showscan (a short-lived gimmick-screen version of what became "The Hobbit"'s High Frame Rate), but 80's 3-D had just come and gone and theaters weren't interested in another gimmick that required new projectors, so Trumbull had to just play around with changing screen ratio to create the "oo!" effect of the visuals. And yes, this movie is a tourist vacation travel-video for coastal North Carolina, if no other is. ? I never realized Kitty Hawk had such a good-looking monument until the end of the movie.

I'd grown up seeing Airport '75 before seeing "Airplane", so I don't know if I was one of the few people who GOT the joke parodying Sister Helen Reddy and her guitar singing to Linda Blair. On a whim, I went back a few years ago and caught up with '77 and '79, where I developed a new 70's nostalgia for disaster films: Dogged professional Jack Lemmon gives Airport '77 a little more respectable drama than it deserves, and while '79: the Concorde's still a mess, I found myself sighing for the pre-regulated days of air travel, when flying was still considered a "luxury" and 747's still had lounges. Disasters always had to strike the rich and famous, nobody would go to see a movie about an earthquake in Brazil. Do a back to back watch of "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" to get an idea of the reason why Peter Jackson's first LOTR trilogy is considered the classic. With the first LOTR, there was so much culturally at stake in permanently enshrining "the" version of the books on film, it's a sort of fan-religious quest by everyone involved with the film--You have as much sense you're getting 20th cty. Classic Literature from the film as you would from reading the book in high school for the first time. While Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy, OTOH, coasts on its laurels, assumes it can do no wrong because of its reputation, and that it's carte-blanche license for the director to be as goofy and self-indulgent as he wants to be, book be darned...And given Jackson and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro, that's saying a heck of a lot. Like GWTW, Wizard of Oz and, yes, the first Harry Potter, LOTR was one of those cases where everything came together at the right time to do "the" version of an impossible book for posterity.

It's usually the, ahem, gee-ehh-aye critics that tend to adopt the "Rollicking dogpile" style of colorful epithets about a bad movie for epithets' sake (just check out any of Lorna's "I Just Watched" reviews... ?), and that's how Rex gave the public image of movie critics such a black eye back in the 70's. Remember back in the 70's, when we read critics hoping they would give a movie a good review, and thought they were being "mean" if they panned it? Roger Ebert, in his print reviews and later in his TV work with Siskel, popularized a new style of critical panning, where you weren't so personally pee'd off about a movie being bad, but rather had a bit of heckling fun poking at how and why the movie came up short, on a savvy moviegoer level--As Ebert often quoted Siskel, the critic shouldn't say he "hated" the movie, he should ask "Why wasn't it better?" And once Siskel & Ebert's style entered pop-culture, Reed's career outside of NY theatrical reviews was as good as over. (And not to bring up the obvious question, but Rex Reed hated the Mamma Mia movies?? I didn't think anybody else saw them!)

The two-part 1987 movie has its good points--Alec Guinness as Dorritt's father, for one--but completely cuts out the "unnecessary" subplot with Rigaud. So, there's that. Similarly, I'd watched the British concert TV-miniseries of the nine-hour Royal Shakespeare stage "Nicholas Nickelby" with Roger Rees before ever having seen the two-hour condensed '02 movie version, and there is a difference--The Dickens is in the details. The RSC version's out of print on DVD, but YouTube's got it.

Why not ask your DVD?--I'll bet they have a whole menu function for that!

Probably in the 50's, when teens started having spending-money, they were more likely to go a diner on Friday night, and they weren't coffee drinkers. Unless it was one of those places where you could only get a cheeseburger and a Pepsi. "Ya got splinters in the Windmills of Yer Mind!"

Or, as Mozart (the movie version, anyway) said when told his opera had "too many notes": "Just tell me which notes to cut, and I'll cut them." Taking the movie in "chapters" doesn't help? Sorry you feel that way, as the condescending office blow-off says. Many great epics are based on books, and while it's nice to read an entire 300-pp. book in one sitting, very few people ever do. People in the original roadshow audiences had to, because that was the price of the ticket, but if you're sitting at home with DVD, you've got control over your schedule, snacks and bladder. Don't like it?--Well, I don't like okra, so there. It's being forced to think differently about a new technology, to turn epics into miniseries, but how can we say on one hand "I'd hate to watch Lawrence of Arabia, it's three hours long", and on the other hand, gush about our "addictions" to the linked season-arcs of Game of Thrones and Westworld?--Why not watch a linked serial story that actually IS one story? Also, was this the BBC TV serial version, or the 1987 movie version that was filmed in two parts? Dickens is a good example, since his novels were originally published as serial books (back in the 19th-cty., you bought books in three or four parts on subscription) and he KNEW how to keep his readers strung out and buying the next installment. Dickens' novels are so labyrinthine, interconnected among the minor characters and constantly cliffhangered, you know you're reading the literary equivalent of a prime-time soap opera. Get hooked on a "SIX HOUR!" BBC Dickens adaptation--try the TV version of Little Dorritt, or one of the two versions of Bleak House--if you think you can't get yourself hooked on a story piece by piece. There's a chapter in Bleak House where the central villainous manipulative lawyer is shot by an unknown assailant, any of our five or six major characters could be the prime suspect, and I dare you not to think...no, basically it is: It's the 19th-cty. "Who shot J.R.?" (There's the story about customers waiting at the dock for the last installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop to arrive, and shouting to the sailors on the cargo ships, "Did Little Nell survive?" Change that to Jon Snow or the Man in Black, and you have your average weekly Internet binge-TV adult-fanboy conversation.)

And here's a vault pole, so slayton can get over himself. ? But seriously: A movie should be just as long as the story it needs to tell--Any good story has legs, and ask Mr. Lincoln how long those should be. A movie like Seven Samurai is three and a half hours long and feels like an hour, while some comedies are an hour and a half and feel like three...Like Al said, time is relative. Back during the fever-pitch hype just before the first Harry Potter movie came out, movie analysts hoping for a big flop at this point in the "script" pointed out that, gasp, it now beat Chitty/Bang and Mary Popppins as the longest 2-1/2+ hour "kids" film, would it backfire? Would kids' patience give out, or would their brains explode? (Or their bladders?) Had the movie's hubris finally taken the mania one step too far, and was about to kill the franchise overnight?...I think history has since answered those questions, and made them sound just as ridiculous. Certainly nobody's bothered to ask them since. To be generous, I will say that yes, we got an entire HOUR of Sherman Bros. songs before anything remotely plot-related happens in Chitty, but that was more the fault of the producer and the songwriters than the film structure.

There was also a 90% text-faithful '73 BBC version of Through the Looking Glass that's an acceptable Cliff Notes companion piece to the Fullerton version, green-screening the characters onto Tenniel backgrounds. Not as good looking as the film version or Disney, though.