EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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6 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) - I was unaware of Kellerman, who went on to be a silent film star, before watching this. Like most biopics, it's fictionalized, with Mature's Sullivan character said to bear no resemblance to the real man.
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?? ?
QuoteThe movie is mildly amusing, with colorful costumes and blandly likable characters. The water ballet sequences are nicely done, if more than bit silly.
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...
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12 hours ago, Looney said:
The only thing that happened to them is there are not as many released theatrically. THEY ARE STILL EVERYWHERE!!!!!
And as someone else said, slashers aren't quite as prevalent right now because other horror niches have proven to be more profitable for the moment. If you look on different streaming sites you can find both of these types are still being released. There is actually still a Family Video store near me and they get them all the time. I don't know if people realize how many movies get made every year with the semi-ease of video. I am shocked when I walk in there and see big name faces on covers of movies I've never heard of that were released straight to the home market. Of course you don't really see too many big names on current slashers or teenage sex comedies unless their career took a nose dive more than a decade ago.
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.
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2 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
NipkowDisc hasn't returned from watching Caligula, maybe his head exploded.........
Drum roll..............
Maybe he's disavowved the far right and has become in touch whith his inner Gaius Augustus Germanicus..... or become human. ?
Or maybe he got confused and watched John Wayne in The War Wagon instead.
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2 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
****Ma & Pa Kettle????
I'm not following...
So, we stopped using "Boston Quackie" as a suitable euphemism?
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7 minutes ago, Gershwin fan said:
Lots of Twentieth Century Fox titles haven't been shown. Under Two Flags and Jesse James are two popular ones that come to mind.
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?
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3 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
You're talking about Jeffrey Combs, I assume, who plays Herbert West. I like him a lot, and while he never achieved marquee status, he's very well known in genre and cult circles, and has continued to work steadily in film and TV.
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.
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7 hours ago, sagebrush said:
Last Friday night's Underground featured two films starring beautiful Denise Matthews ( aka Vanity). I remember the titles from way back, but never bothered to go see them during their release. I didn't know, however, that the DeBarge song "The Rhythm Of The Night" originally came from one of those two films, THE LAST DRAGON.
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?
5 hours ago, scsu1975 said:Hollywood ran out of teenagers. All the teenagers had sex, then were killed off in the slasher films.
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.
7 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:There's literally one 80s movie (Dreamscape) coming one in the next week and it's part of the TCM Underground series. As everyone else in this thread has said it's a series dedicated to intentionally dark and/ or cheesy films from the 80s.
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.
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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:
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1 hour ago, Feego said:
It's also interesting that so many accuse the Disney princesses of lying around waiting to be rescued by a prince, when in fact Cinderella doesn't do that at all (neither does Aurora, but I'll let NickAndNora34 get to that one first). In fact, the prince couldn't seem to care less about her. It's the king who pursues the owner of the glass slipper rather than the prince (a change from older versions of the tale) because his biological grandfather clock is ticking, and the only reason she is able to try the thing on is because her animal friends help her. As EricJ says, it's a case of being kind to others and others being kind in return. Not a bad lesson for children. The prince is basically her reward in the end, a nice piece of man candy for all she's been through!
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...)
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1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:
#15: THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD (1949)
Score: 2/5
t is discovered that Toad may actually be innocent for once, and his friends come to his rescue and attempt to prove his innocence. I, personally, am not a fan of Toad as a character. I am also not a fan of Cyril, his equine servant/friend who speaks with a severely grating Cockney accent. Toad is a completely immature and obnoxious character who, despite going to jail, doesn't even change for the better at the end.
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:
1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:It's really too bad that once Cinderella's father died, she became an indentured servant whose only friends are rats and vermin. Quick question: Was Cinderella actually able to speak to and understand these animals, or was she so starved for normal human interaction that she imagined they were really talking to her?
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.
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1 hour ago, karlofffan said:
Only since the 90's, or later. They aren't watching old Audrey Hepburn films. They're watching CGI-laden action film blockbusters, with as little dialogue as possible. Before the 90's, Hollywood films were available in the PRC only as pirated VHS tapes. And only in the past 10 years has the quota of 20 Hollywood films per year in theaters been increased.
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?
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2 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
AH and Hollywood films in general might be 'big' in Hong Kong, but yea, not on mainland China as a whole.
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.
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5 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
Think I am still going to pass on FORCE AWAKENS....especially since I already know what's going to happen anyway (one of the die hard STAR WARS fans spoiled quite a few twists for me). I prefer to remember the original characters going out with a heroic, more happy finale with RETURN OF THE JEDI.
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.
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2 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
I can totally relate.
I still haven't watched the latest batch of the newest STAR WAR films (and that includes FORCE AWAKENS) and when I mentioned this, some folks I know go "And you call yourself a STAR WARS fan?!"
I still don't have any intention of going to see them. I felt and still do that the original trilogy should have been the end of the story (or at the very least the prequels should have been). No one is going to guilt me or pressure me into going see a renewed installment of a trilogy that I feel has run its course by now.
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.
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7 minutes ago, SunAndMoon said:
The other part of my brain, the rational part, whispers that I'd really be a fake if I forced myself to watch movies I don't want to watch, just so I could fit someone else's perception of what a movie fan is. But it's not loud enough to drown out the self-doubt and self-hatred. There are genres I prefer over other genres, and that's fine. That's human nature. It's called taste. I should be able to enjoy what I enjoy without worrying that my taste is terrible. But I can't. There's always that sadistic little voice in the back of my mind, saying, "You're choosing to watch that junk instead of this movie you should be watching, just because you don't like the genre it's in? Don't you know you're doing it wrong?"
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.
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8 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Many of the Americans under 40 that I know feel the same way as it relates to intellectual property. E.g. I see this at the Jazz Guitar Forum website. People will post something (e.g. a video of a concert, or a music lesson plan, etc..), and we will ask 'did you get permission to post this from the owner \ creator? 90% of the time we just get the finger with a 'what are you the police' type reply.
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!
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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.
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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.
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On 6/28/2018 at 7:20 PM, Pastiche said:
I became familiar with the music through the cast album, but seeing this film now was a disappointment. Does it closely follow the stage show, or what there is of a stage show? If you like this film, what do you like about it?
"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.
On 6/29/2018 at 1:55 AM, Charlie's Girl said:It was released on the heels of the Jesus Movement in 1973 along with Jesus Christ Superstar so there was a good deal of talk in "Jesus People" circles about both films and a lot of comparisons were made. Superstar is, I think, the superior film and I watch that one at least once a year, but since I saw Godspell only once, I was hoping to watch it again during this course to see if my opinion would be any different. I hope to watch it before the course concludes.\
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.
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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! ?
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19 minutes ago, jakeem said:
Still not as bad as Bond's escape from menacing alligators and crocodiles in "Live and Let Die" (1973)
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. ? -
13 hours ago, scsu1975 said:
Horror Island (1941) youtube
Despite the title, this is not a horror flick, but it is an entertaining quickie comedy-mystery from Universal. Dick Foran, along with sidekick Fuzzy Knight, get mixed up with peg-legged Leo Carrillo, who claims to have a treasure map from Henry Morgan (the pirate, not the television personality). When an “expert” (Hobart Cavanagh) tells them the map is phony, Foran, who owns a boat, demonstrates his entrepreneurial skills by charging passengers $50 for the chance to find the treasure anyway. Once the assorted suckers arrive at the island where the treasure is supposed to be hidden, somebody starts bumping them off. Who did/done it?
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.
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3 hours ago, TomJH said:
and Octopussy are my two favourite Moores (in spite of that scene in which Bond is disguised as a circus clown in Octopussy - demeaning to Bond's smooth image
And the scene where he tells an Indian tiger "Sit!", and it immediately does...Ohh, the humor.
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1 hour ago, hamradio said:
Creepier in drag.
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.
And as someone else said, slashers aren't quite as prevalent right now because other horror niches have proven to be more profitable for the moment. If you look on different streaming sites you can find both of these types are still being released. There is actually still a Family Video store near me and they get them all the time. I don't know if people realize how many movies get made every year with the semi-ease of video. I am shocked when I walk in there and see big name faces on covers of movies I've never heard of that were released straight to the home market. Of course you don't really see too many big names on current slashers or teenage sex comedies unless their career took a nose dive more than a decade ago.
NickAndNora34's Disney Movie Journey
in General Discussions
Posted
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.
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.
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* - 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.