EricJ

Aside from the 90% text-faithful 1972 Fiona Fullerton/Michael Crawford Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*, Disney's version is probably the best version of Alice on screen, for two reasons: 1) I've never seen an adaptation that makes Alice the most entertaining character in the story. As in the book, most versions have her as the proper little straight-girl, but Disney (who didn't really like the Lewis Carroll story that much) knew that we'd be following her as the "normal" heroine--And both the animation and Kathryn Beaumont's delivery perfectly suggest a slightly playful Alice who wants a bit of silly fun, but develops a comically frustrated slow-burn at just trying to have a straightforward conversation with the Caterpillar or the Mad Hatter. 2) As writer Linda Woolverton demonstrated in the misbegotten Tim Burton version, there are TWO ways to ruin Alice, and they both involve Not Getting the Jokes: If you can't understand Carroll's sense of logic-twist (like Alice's conversation with the Cheshire Cat) or play at Victorian parody (eg. the Father William poem), there's this overcompensating need to either play the mysterious rubrics about "Muchness and things that begin with an M" as sacred Shakespearean text and hope the audience knows it if you don't, or just throw it all out and make up cutesy crap by yourself. Most generations I talk to remember the cutesy 80's Irwin Allen TV version, and there was never a worse example of the latter. (Unless it was Johnny Depp in the Burton movie doing "the Futterwacken Dance"...Since when did we suddenly become Dr. Seuss, Linda??) What makes the Disney version funny is that they're one of the few film versions in existence that GET THE JOKES. In the book, it's technically the foggy King of Hearts who says "Begin your story at the beginning...Until you get to the end. Then stop.", and the Red Queen in "Through the Looking Glass" (who is not the Queen of Hearts, Tim) who says "Lost 'your' way? All ways here are MY ways!", but a few Disney liberties still managed to give them to appropriate characters and translate them for young ears. _____ * - That's the second time in three days I've had to cite one of my favorite guilty-pleasures, so rent immediately before I'm forced to do a third. It only appears in this country as bad 4:3 Nth-generation VHS-source Amazon Prime public-domain kiddy-video, but there's a beautiful widescreen color-restored version for UK satellite-TV that's surfaced on DVD.

And then that ending, that suggested that Mature's Sullivan discovered Rin Tin Tin...I can appreciate a little gratuitous historical license, but, the HECK?? ? And the one cultural-symbolic "Happy MGM musical number" (ie. the Smoke water-ballet) that's singlehandedly been straw-man parodied by more films over the last forty years-- When you watch the Village People sing "YMCA" in "Can't Stop the Music", think back to a time in the 70's when people actually thought every MGM musical had Busby-style tracking-closeups of diving girls and reverse-footage sparklers that come out of the pool...

Actually, the direct-video market in the late-80's and early-90's was the final nail in the coffin for slasher films, as well as other B-genres like soundtrack musicals or Rambo-wannabes: Because there were no more B-theaters to attract short-run audiences on Friday nights, there was less need for chain A-theaters to risk money on B-movies, and less need for cheap movies to spend money on print distribution and exhibition. Which took away some of the quality that 80's films used to have--they may not have been classics, but they sure knocked themselves out trying to be--in that there was no longer any mainstream audience appeal at stake, and they could just create their own lazy fan-fodder, with no higher studio authority to worry about the profit line. That's the difference between Jamie Lee Curtis in "Terror Train", and six dozen micro-horror demon-in-the-woods titles on Netflix.

Or maybe he got confused and watched John Wayne in The War Wagon instead.

So, we stopped using "Boston Quackie" as a suitable euphemism?

Some of the 60's-70's Fox and Universal movies' cable rights may still be owned by AMC, back in the pre-Mad Men days when they used to show movies (= The Omen, Jaws and The Blues Brothers). There's no hope of them ever coming back, but that doesn't mean AMC's letting go of them just yet. That may include Cleopatra and Sound of Music, unless TSOM is still owned by other networks at the moment. And while the ten Vaulted Disney animated titles (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, etc.) aren't let out in public except for home-video sales, TCM's shown just about every other Disney short and live-action rarity. Who else had never heard of "In Search of the Castaways" before it showed up on TCM Disney-event night?

Like Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, it was Combs' quirkiness that made Stuart Gordon's odd little horror films--even the otherwise icky "From Beyond"--into such offbeat watchable B-classics. But the first Re-Animator (not so much the others) was the performance that made a cult-star. He's mostly descended into cartoon voices along with his Trek characters and TV roles, but once quirky, always quirky.

Odd to see Last Dragon show up, as that was an 80's Sony/Columbia classic--And it was no classic even when it came out, but if you didn't know DeBarge's song coming from The Last Dragon, you, sir, or ma'am, are incomplete on your 80's Summer-of-Love movie lore, and are unworthy of the Glow. What was the other 80's Vanity movie, btw?--Purple Rain? Well, we KNOW what happened to the slasher films: Gene Siskel's campaign against the Friday the 13th sequels/clones being "fatalistic" and "misogynistic" in their "hypocritically puritanical" formula of teens slashed for having sex in the back room--which led all the other critics to get on high social horses to try and get rid of their most frequent annoyance (think of "Found-footage exorcism" movies today, or James Wan home-invasion Purge movies, and you sort of get an idea)...Until we had parents objecting to the killer-Santa movie, studios gave in on that one, and the first blood was struck. By that point, it was '84-'86, the local drive-in/B-theater market was fading into big chains, and it left only the more imaginative Nightmare on Elm Street movies to clean up the rest. (Check out the '06 documentary Going to Pieces, for an absolutely spot-on social and cinematic overview of the genre from beginning to end.) As for what happened to the teen sex-comedies?: Cable. Next question. An underrated Dennis Quaid movie, IMO, although that may be sentiment at the time, given that it was later upstaged when the aforementioned Elm Street sequels took the "Dream playground" ball and ran with it. Writer Chuck Russell even went on to direct the good Elm Street #3, which changed the whole series into the aforementioned powerhouse that finished off the slashers...Consider this movie a first draft.

If any human being in recorded history was born to play a live-action John Tenniel illustration... ...it would have to be Peter Bull as the Duchess, from the 1971 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

And while we're on Disney-princess inaccuracies, since it wasn't covered the last time the film came around: The other princess that gets all the clueless-misinformation loaded-issue guff (it's still annoying even in the current Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer) is Snow White--Who, as any crusading feminist will tell you, is cruelly damaging our empowered daughters because she A) loves cleaning house, and sings happily as she works, and B ) sings about waiting for a prince to come out of nowhere and sweep her away to domestic bliss, rather than determine her own life. Both of which are bzzt-thanks-for-playing wrong: In A)'s case, Snow at first doesn't know anyone lives in the empty cottage, but sees the small chairs and unwashed mess and thinks "It must be orphan children, with no one to take care of them!"...And the only reason she cleans is to hope to "pay" for shelter for the night. In B's case, she already has a prince--They met in the first scene, remember? She can't be sure if he knows where she is by now, since she could use a little protection while in hiding and on the run from a jealous psychotic, but it would be nice if he did. (It's sort of embarrassing that it's always guys who clean up the Disney-princess arguments, because our brains aren't wired to think "symbolically" and don't take every movie character personally...)

Unlike the invented horse and bartender, Toad's character is from the book, but Eric Blore as a cheery Toad wasn't as lovably flawed as David Jason's manic upper-class-twit from the Disney Channel 80's British stop-motion series: Disney's Cinderella takes so much cultural-baggage guff from target-shooting feminists who haven't seen the movie, it overlooks the fact that Disney's version captures the message of the story--Cindy is helped because she's good to others. She's not, as cynical female self-loathers like to portray her, a "doormat", or "psychotically happy" as she scrubs floors, and the story's not about "How to Marry a Millionaire": She knows how bad things are for her, and even says so, to the dog ("You'd like to chase that cat, wouldn't you?...But we shouldn't!") but even stepsisters are family, and she believes in the power of returning good for bad. That moral optimism is literally torn up in her face when the Steps savagely rip her mouse-present dress to shreds, and she's just about to permanently crisis on her one belief when, as in every fairy tale, Karma Happens.

I don't know if anyone's caught the documentary Chuck Norris Vs. Communism, about the underground influence of American pirated-VHS in 80's Romania just before Ceaucescu's overthrow, but it does rather shed some light on why China is "so crazy about American movies"--Like the old saying, if a starving man wants food, he doesn't care whether he gets a steak dinner or a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast. And, like most Chinese products, now that they've developed big Hollywood-wannabe studios and animation divisions of their own, and have learned how to copy American action films and Dreamworks/Illumination cute-critter CGI movies, how "starving" will they be over the next few years?

As Karloffan points out, mainland China may watch Western movies, but they don't really KNOW Western movies. Recently, a lot of gold-rushing studios have discovered that not every Hollywood movie plays out of context over there--Hollywood was at a loss to understand why the new Star Wars films tanked in mainland China, even when it was pointed out that A) Beijing was closed off to the west in 1977 and couldn't care less about George Lucas, and B ) the Rebellion doesn't exactly play well with a population happily living under the State...Some polled even said that they sympathized with the Empire trying to restore order. There's similar theories for why comic-book superheroes like Batman and Spiderman don't quite take off in Asian countries (let alone Black Panther, in countries with almost no black people), ie. that collective Asian societies don't understand why someone would try to fight crime himself rather than go to the police. And, of course, that glorious bit of karma when the "Ghostbusters" remake thought they'd recoup their losses overseas, and had their invitation revoked for promoting the supernatural...At one point, the State was even trying to pick a fight with "Zootopia" for its "unscientific" suggestion that rabbits and sheep could outwit foxes. With the amount of State crackdown on cultural properties--no government criticism, no sex, no life in glamorous foreign countries--the only American movies that do well are shiny action/sci-fantasies in no real-world location and CGI animals...Dreaming is the opiate of the masses. As for Audrey Hepburn iconography, they may know her Breakfast at Tiffany gloves or her My Fair Lady derby-dress as "Western-film" icons, but few deep discussions of Roman Holiday, I'm guessing.

Not to get too far out of topic, but even given the twist (we sort of expected there was a reason Harrison Ford even bothered to come back), I dare you not to get misty-eyed when we see our first shots of the 1977 crew. Last Jedi was a train wreck careening off a cliff into a mass of twisted, molten metal, but Force Awakens almost plays like a metaphor of the New Generation trying to take the Original Trilogy back from the Lucas-insanity of the prequels: The war is now mythical history, Tie fighters lying about in ruins, a teenage would-be Jedi and a teenage Stormtrooper on the run from a would-be teenage Peter Cushing and a literally cosplaying teenage Vader...And then in walk a few characters from forty years ago to show them how the ORIGINAL was done.

If you'll take persuasion, you can see Force Awakens; it's got a "genuine" Lawrence Kasdan screenplay, so it's not too bad. (And considering it was never really followed up upon, it makes a good one-shot epilogue.) But no SW fan jury on earth will convict you for missing out on Last Jedi and Solo. In fact, we're the ones now talking about wrapping up the franchise and burying it on hallowed ground while we still can.

Classic movies and classic books are like your mom's Brussels sprouts...How do you KNOW you're not going to like them until you've tried them? It's perfectly okay not to like a classic movie after watching it (I still hate Gone With the Wind), and I don't actively seek out romances any more than I seek out noir, but if something has a classic reputation, I at least challenge myself to find out the parts of it I don't know before passing judgment. After that, I can watch something else, and with a clearer, more self-justified conscience.

There's a difference between Internet posting a YouTube clip, and building an entire theme park of bad (bad) off-the-rack Disney party-mascot characters miles from Hong Kong Disneyland. The park's slogan? I kid you not: "Disney is too far, try us instead!" That pretty well sums up the entire Chinese mentality toward western properties--Who cares about paying them, they're too far away to know our business!

And then there's Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass, where the entire cast was hypnotized into their roles, and wanders about like it actually IS a Dr. Caligari remake. It's not exactly Barbara Streisand and Yves Montand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, but curious enough for a look.

Given the amount of Disney appropriation that happens in China's theme parks, I've often wondered: Do Communist countries--even those trying to go commercial--even UNDERSTAND the idea of "Copyright"? Generations have grown up without the idea of "personal property", are still trying to get their heads around the subtleties of Capitalism, and are just managing to get past "Grab something popular and sell it." Seems whenever there's a sleazy scam that doesn't really bother with breaking the rules, treating its customers like gullible idiots, or selling second- or third-hand goods from the West with the serial numbers filed off, it's always Russia or China.

"What there is" is the operative term: The appeal of the show is that it's largely improvised on a bare set with found props, and never the same show most nights. That made it just about unfilmable, which is why we get the weird concept of finding disenfranchised NY folk dropping out of the Establishment and causing all time and people to disappear from NY, for an entire city of found sets and props. It's a nice enough record of one show, but apart from the songs, doesn't really conjure up the appeal of the show. The whole "Jesus hippie" (or "Jesus-freak" as the hard-hats called them) movement basically threw Superstar the musical and movie so far out of context, most today still don't get the basic idea-- Even director Norman Jewison thought it was a peace-and-love Sunday-school Bible-musical for the flower-child 70's, and although there are some hints of Andrew Lloyd Webber's sociopolitical spin (the Romans and the people are wishfully spinning Jesus' naive messages into anti-Roman revolution, and Judas is the only one who can smell the powder keg), the whole spectacle of the hit-songs and the location-filming pretty much takes over the movie. Judas was always played by a black actor, which was considered "ooo!" at the time, and also threw wrenches into most folks' discussions of the show. When Webber was putting out his own direct-video productions of "Cats" and "Joseph/Dreamcoat", there was a not-too-bad '00 DTV "Superstar" production that put the setting into a future fascist dictatorship, and left much less ambiguity about the lyrics of Judas's opening song.

Howes's voice is so amazing in CB2, it just heightens my rage issues at people who think Chitty was a "Disney movie" or that Julie Andrews was Truly, just because Albert Broccoli wanted to steal everything from "Mary Poppins" that wasn't nailed down. And that includes people who thought since childhood that "Lovely Lonely Man" should have been cut from the film because it "dragged things down"...Them's fighting words! ?

When the Blu-rays first came out, I remember watching going back through the whole series to watch the making-of featurettes-- Apparently, the Croc-step took five takes for the stuntman to film. Even worse, the crocs had no idea what was happening at first, but by the fifth take, they were starting to catch on...It just adds to the drama that they were ready for him. ?

I caught this one on a DVD clean-up collection of post-code Universal horror, which also included the '41 name-only version of "The Black Cat"--Which, by that point, was also a Scooby-Doo style whodunit-mystery of running around spooky houses with some cloaked villain after them. After the Lugosi/Karloff '34 Black Cat helped usher in the Code and almost finished off horror at Universal, seems like a lot of things were out at the studio, like dark tones or supernatural elements, and they were back to seeing how many variations of The Old Dark House they could do.

And the scene where he tells an Indian tiger "Sit!", and it immediately does...Ohh, the humor.

You can almost draw generational division lines between those who can't hear "Tim Curry" without making a Rocky Horror joke, those who have to make an "It" joke, and those who have to make a "Clue" joke.