EricJ

I'm a fan of Kelly MGM musicals, so I always saw this one on Warner Archive and thought, "What went wrong?...Why was this a 'disappointment' and not one of the other classics?" And even after seeing it, I thought, "Why do I not like this?" It's okay, but it feels like a half-hour of story crammed into 90 minutes, and there's only so much of Judy throwing vases at Gene you can watch before you're wondering why we're supposed to sympathize with either of them. Kelly played as many conniving ladies-man hucksters as he played "nice guys", but if there's not much at stake, his rogues just aren't instantly identifiable. Kelly just did better with Stanley Donen's light touch than he did with Vincent Minelli's "art", and the big filler Kelly Pirate Ballet seems to be the reason the movie was made in the first place. And I'm sure it was intentional on Cole Porter's part, but when Garland sings "Mack the Black", it takes a heart of stone not to sing along "Ca-sey Jones, pullin' down the throttle; Ca-sey Jones, puffin' up the steam..."

And Fantasy Island paid a lot of OTHER stars' bills after the studio system dried up (which was freshly in '73-'75 after MGM downsized)--Looking back at 70's TV, it's surprising just what a wealth of old retired stars we were getting in Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Columbo, and all we could do at the time was snicker at "washed-up" actors who needed the work. As for why not more Montalban, if we had a few more jokester citing of roles besides Mr. Roarke, Khan and the Naked Gun villain, that might explain what they could show. (And here I was fighting down the urge to reference Ricardo being smooched by Clyde the Orangutang in Cannonball Run II...) Do I sound a bit peeved? Only because in my day, Mr. Roarke was DA MAN. ?

Given how much Gregory Peck is enjoying this, I'll go with that theory. I'm just not sure how it's "Disney", though...

Actually, Kershner was Lucas's old film prof at USC. Eyes just reminded the industry that Kershner was still directing, as most had forgotten after "Return of a Man Called Horse".

In Mr. G's case, I'd say we're looking at the reason this movie was made... ? Didn't we ALREADY just have an off-topic no-resemblance-to-its-original "remake" of a better-known property, about the conflict and heartbreak of would-be rising young singers?...Only it was called "Jem & the Holograms"? (And I'm not even going to bring up Mariah Carey in "Glitter".)

Never mind the widescreen promo, is TCM still filler-showing "100 Years of Movies" from 1997, with the twinkly Citizen Kane music?

And every single one of them will think they're remaking a 1977 Barbara Streisand movie about singers. Personally, I thought Carol Burnett did the Streisand parody better:

I only saw the movie years after hearing Bill Cosby's routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjy7ptWE0N8 "Great movie, no plot, just a buncha guys chasing all the women in town..."

I assume you're being ironic, and have heard Edgar Bergen on radio? (Where he was better suited than in movies.)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) I went into this movie knowing from the plot description I was probably not going to like it, but I was cleaning off my Netflix queue (now that Warner has orphaned them, vintage Paramount catalog is starting to show up in as many of the usual-streaming-suspects as orphaned MGM/UA ones) and had to get the bit of AFI 100 required-viewing list in. I agreed that the story sort of looked like one that Truman Capote would write, and even worse, like one Blake Edwards would have directed before he found Peter Sellers, and it seems to be more famous as a matching set of gloves, pearls and a song than as a coherent character study, but I'm always a sucker for stories in vintage NYC. (One semester in college, and I felt like a "native".) And before anyone brings up the standard TCM-forum elephant in the room, no, I didn't go into righteous rages over Mickey Rooney's character, since he seemed about as "realistically" Edwards-depicted as just about every other character in the movie. Like Gone With the Wind, you're either wishfully sympathizing with the heroine for her fashion and lifestyle, or loathing her for being a self-indulgent brat, and I confess not so much to the latter (you can't absolutely hate Audrey Hepburn, no matter how looney her character, qv. Roman Holiday), but it did bring up one of my favorite quotable Siskel & Ebert-isms: In one review of another more contemporary movie of another free-spirited urban soul with her own scatterbrained "creative" ideas of life in the city, Gene Siskel was reviewing that movie's heroine as more disturbing than iconoclastic, and not generating much sympathy for the audience to latch onto, etc....After having gone on like that for paragraphs, Roger Ebert, for his turn, clarified the issue with brutal precision: "This woman is stark...raving...MAD." ? I knew going in that the story of poor blocked-author George Peppard running into Hepburn as wacky semi-employed neighbor Holly Golightly was going to be what they call the "Pixie Prom Date", where the lunatic helps the poor establishment-stiff learn to have fun once in a while, but the story doesn't seem to know whose date is whose: Is she helping him find himself and escape from his oppressive rich-girl relationship (when Patricia Neal shows up as the Stuffy Establishment girl, you know how the movie's going to turn out), or is he helping Holly face her neurotic attempts to avoid her past, stop being such a colorful party-culture slacker and do something with her life? At the end, the story tries to settle for both, so we're supposed to see her crazy flings as "tragic", inspiring us only to slap her upside the head...If it wasn't Audrey, of course.

Pointed it out earlier in the thread, but if you're looking for Bob and the studio (and the live duet between Donald Duck and Clara Cluck), the entire feature is an extra on Disney's Adv. of Ichabod & Mr. Toad/Fun & Fancy Free 2-movie Blu-ray, or, if you're just renting, it's VOD streaming-DL on Vudu and Amazon: https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/The-Reluctant-Dragon/92898

MoviePass is a nice idea--and as such, has more obnoxiously faithful evangelists on the Internet than Bitcoin--but it's facing financial troubles at the moment from its utopian ideas coming up against the reality of the greedy, strapped theater/studio market vs. its overenthusiastic fans. So much so that its current problems are being used in the business press to spotlight the current problems of, quote, "Unicorns", groundbreaking post-Uber/Blue Apron 10's Internet startups that can't quite live up to their ideas or turn profits after two years in the market--Creating a, quote, "Dot-Com Bust 2.0" (Or, as one NYT columnist put it, "I've got a great business idea: I'm going to sell dollar bills for 75 cents! If it catches on, maybe I can buy bills in bulk from the Treasury and sell them for $1.50, and collect data on the customers to sell to third parties...What can go wrong?" And as "free", it mostly seems to show the same collection of public-domain, indie-documentary and MGM movies that are already showing up on the usual-streaming-suspects of Netflix and Amazon Prime, for lack of more expensive movies. If you have a library card, you ALREADY have access to a wide catalog of real classic movies, just not streaming ones. The brief boom for more streaming services, despite the cash to license any or the will for studios to do so, has become an utter Thurber-like garden for Internet Unicorns.

For the great ones you might be interested in http://www.artofthetitle.com , which archives the great classic opening-title scenes from movies and TV-- And by "Classics", of course, we mean: and

And even then, in the 50's was barely known as the first Ronald McDonald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO8-A396Lt4

I take it we were trying a little hard this week, CG... But it always starts with the theater you first started seeing them in--If you're comparatively new around here, should probably check out some of the blog essays I'd done on the great theaters of my Wonder-Years: http://movieactivist.blogspot.com/2016/07/july-25-2016-theater-roots-pt.html What do kids have to remember today?: "Oh, man, I remember when I first saw Infinity War at the Bayview Shopping Mall AMC 12!"?

...O-kayyyyy? ?

Oh, you mean the "Hobbits and Terminators drinking game"? (One sip for "While other studios were making Hobbits and Terminators", two sips for "Terminators and Hobbits"...) And haven't yet seen IACYellow, but wasn't it mostly a sex-and-politics movie, with more accent on the latter, and only got its "bannable" X-rating for the big deal at the time of male nudity? Or am I confusing it with IACBlue?

Given the long, long (mostly) non-sexual topless/nude scenes of a girl who doesn't have breasts yet, good question. A lot of scandalous "Kiddy-porn" questions were raised at the time, but it was Malle's idea with Keith Carradine's character to deliberately skirt as close to the "Artistic nude-modeling" edge as he can, and watching it may similarly give you some very confused feelings. Back in the 70's, the one coin-of-the-realm word in "elegant" arthouse porn (later symbolically pasted onto any imported B-movie exploitation picture's title to signal an entire genre) was Sylvia Kristel in Emanuelle (1974). The soft focus, big-budget exotic locales, and lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous made it "respectable" enough to get it reviewed by critics in the wake of "Deep Throat"'s big pitch at social respectability, and even a few critics admired the general sensual-elegance of the style. Think I must have seen only the expurgated R-rated cut on streaming, since the sex was fairly average, but even then, the naivety of the whole premise was so whitewashed silly, with the characters acting like wide-eyed 10-yo. children who've just found out that boys and girls have different parts, it could only have come from the pre-Sexual-Revolution early 70's: The heroine, from the original novels, is supposed to be a sheltered kept-woman who's never even found out about sex until now, and goes around the world to "awaken" her "discovery", whereas most girls who weren't living on the French Riviera would probably be talking about it at 12. The foreign arthouse market used a lot of such elegant "Bored woman explores her world" dodges to try and puritanically skirt the idea that they were making a, gasp, sex film, since the heroine wasn't actually being immoral, you see.

We know when Pleasance is playing good, when he's playing funny, and when he's playing sinister, but it's all the one...same...measured...delivery, to go with that slightly removed stare. In the featurettes on "The Great Escape", it's mentioned that he brought some experience to the movie as an actual German-camp POW during the war, and it always seems like we're watching a bit of real-life shell-shock in his performances. Peter Cushing can do the same mix of funny or sinister, and see him manneredly put everything of his performance into both, but Pleasance seems a bit creepily...out of it. His ability to...read....lines....perfects the whole "Banality of evil" quality when he has to play sinister, and gives a certain beaten, traumatized experience when he has to play a good Dr. Loomis or other Van Helsing-type priest who's seen evil, and it doesn't look like we're seeing something artificial.

Well, "Another" would be automatically assuming the Rob Zombie versions still exist, which this new one is hoping to avoid... One comic once joked that there is nothing Donald Pleasance can say that wouldn't be creepy--Even as good characters, eg. The Great Escape. Could you imagine Pleasance in an IHOP, saying "I would like an extra serving of bacon with my Blueberry Special, please"?... Pleasance is always so into his roles, even in the cheap foreign-paychecks and Amicus movies--he's earnest even when he's not-acting--he brings respectability to anything, although there's something off-putting, not on the same field as one of the "gentleman" horror actors like Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing.

Again, John Carpenter didn't WANT to give Mikey sequels, but Universal wanted something to show every October. (An omen of what studios would do in the 10's.) Fortunately, Carpenter happened to be the world's biggest Prof. Quatermass fanboy, thought "Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass & the Pit" was one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made (which it is), and when he wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into an anthology series of Halloween holiday-related stories, he turned to an uncredited Nigel Kneale to concoct an old-fashioned ancient-apocalyptic Quatermass story relocated to SoCal. And, of course, Kneale being Kneale, had the World's Most Annoying/Creepy Jingle figure prominently in the villain's scheme: It's not effed-up if you know the backstage secrets. Most of the fans didn't, and preferred the cheap name-bought Dimension and Rob Zombie imposters that at least had the franchise-marketable killer in it. Such is the mindset of fans.

At the time, Alberghetti was all over US television, selling Good Seasons salad dressing. (Hence her name turning up so often in 70's TV comedies.) I wasn't aware there was a real one either, until she turned up as the princess in Jerry Lewis's "Cinderfella". She was reportedly a good Broadway singer, but nobody else got to sing that much in Jerry's movie.

And No Bikini Atoll, of course, is the home of the legendary singing prehistoric Dinah Shaur, who swing-scats as it sings. As long as we're getting into ancient cartoons, there's the one cartoon where Daffy Duck tries to crash the gates at Warner Bros. studios to see all the (Warner-contracted) stars including....ANN SHERIDAN!! ? After a long chase, Daffy tells the Keystone-like guard he "just wanted to see stars", the guard complies by klunking him on the noggin, and Daffy watches the glamorous parade of "stars" around his head: "Look, there's Hedy Lamarr! And Alexis Smith! And Dorothy Lamour (star in a sarong)! And Baby Snooks (little star)!" Oh, and I'm still trying to track down one good Ritz Brothers movie that's as funny as when they were heckling a similarly studio gate-crashing Donald Duck in Disney's "The Autograph Hound". ("The Three Musketeers" wasn't in in their traditional style.)

So was Reconstruction-era sharecropping after the war. (Those who don't know the difference...tend to be too excited to even try to. Thank you for demonstrating why we're waiting for Iger to retire. Well, that, and the whole Cars 3/Toy Story 4 thing.)

He thought he could take the current Cast Member Strike over to boards where they....talked about movies, I guess. Probably saw Nick and Nora's thread while he was Googling. And FTR, most of the higher ups at Disney are ready to support Song of the South, except Bob Iger, who's standing firm and won't back down on the "Remus was a slave?" goof. We've been on Retirement-Watch for five years, but he keeps moving the date...Think he's deliberately just trolling us at this point.