EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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On 6/6/2018 at 12:33 PM, jakeem said:
Jerry Maren, the diminutive actor who had a long career in films and on television, has died at the age of 99. He was the last of the adult Munchkins from the 1939 classic picture "The Wizard of Oz."
His television credits include: "The Beverly Hillbillies" (1966, he was one of the "little green men" who vexed Granny in the episode "The Flying Saucer"), "Bewitched," "The Wild, Wild West," "Get Smart," "Here's Lucy," "The Odd Couple" and "Seinfeld."
And in the 70's, of course, the midget who would run in and toss confetti on the Gong Show winners at the end.
On 6/6/2018 at 12:33 PM, jakeem said:Maren was 19 when he played one of the three Lollipop Guild representatives who officially welcomed new arrival Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) to Munchkin Land in the beloved MGM musical/fantasy. His character -- flanked by actors Jackie Gerlich and Harry Doll -- presented Dorothy with a large lollipop.
IIRC, "Harry Doll", in blue, was actually Harry Earles, better remembered as the tragic hero of "Freaks" (1932).
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30 minutes ago, jakeem said:
I wonder if today's viewers get the Jerry Colonna jokes and cameos in Bob Hope movies. Colonna was Hope's sidekick and foil on radio in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Oo, almost forgot Jerry Colonna as a vintage cartoon-reference staple (ahh, yes--Neglectful, wasn't it?), and probably never would have known there was a real one if not for the March Hare from Disney's "Alice in Wonderland".
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27 minutes ago, Dargo said:
(...and I'd say even the name "George Arliss" is now days probably forgotten by the general public and to those with little interest in cinematic history, wouldn't ya say?!)
For years growing up, I only knew George Arliss, Ned Sparks, Hugh Herbert and Edna Mae Oliver from Hollywood caricatures in early 30's Warner Bros. cartoons.
When I finally caught them in movies, it was a case of "Oh, THAT'S who that was!"
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Huh. Must've worked, I'm still one of those folks that thought it was Karloff and Lugosi in Universal's "The Black Cat" that did it.
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1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:
To be fair, Fantasia almost made me give up.
If you can make it past those never-ending dinosaurs, it's all clear sailing...
Me, I can take or leave Night on Bald Mountain, but will always rush to the defense of Ave Maria:
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2 hours ago, slaytonf said:
My only excuse is it was late and my brain was tired.
I HOPE that's the only excuse, and not "The Tim Burton version was the one I saw first as a kid." ?
There's been a recent shakeup over MGM/UA films suddenly being more accessible on streaming--may have even fallen into a sort of Public Domain after MGM finally went under again in '10--so I know I've seen They Might Be Giants turn up on Netflix at one point, back before things got worse. Unfortunately, the American Int'l copy of Dr. Phibes fell into ownership limbo with private DVD companies, so that's a little trickier.
And thanks to music rights, we have every other orphaned 80's MGM/UA film showing up on streaming, cable and disk but not Electric Dreams (1985), which hasn't even been seen on TV since local stations showed movies.
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That's nice.
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41 minutes ago, CaveGirl said:
I have never seen this, but thanks, Jimmy!
If you've ever been on a road trip, and someone insists on making the joke about "Bear left" "Right, frog!", now you will know WHY.
The same reason why any discussion about myths will invariably get someone answering "Yethh?".
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49 minutes ago, jimmymac71 said:
Victor/Victoria, my favorite, is on both FilmStruck and TCM in June. Is that by chance a coincidence, or having access to the title?
If you mean does FS have access to it, MGM/UA's V/V has been "banished" to Warner Archive for quite a while now.
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3 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
People Are Funny (1946) - The radio show itself consisted of Art Linkletter challenged average Joes and Janes to complete silly tasks or stunts in exchange for prizes. The concept is simple enough, and the show lasted 18 years on the radio and 6 years on television.
The show itself is cute, and the TV version seems to have disappeared off the rerun landscape, except for literally one or two public-domain 50's episodes surfacing on the backwaters of Amazon Prime.
Although, up until now, I knew Art Linkletter from endorsing board games and opening Disneyland, but PAF only from a Bugs Bunny cartoon reference:
"...Just goes to show ya, folks, that People Are Phoney."
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How about Alligator People (1959), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), Swamp Thing (1982)?
First Ham beats everyone to the punch with Southern Comfort, and then Cid has to get in the '82 Swamp Thing:
That's the culty-offbeat Wes Craven original, of course, not the goofy sequel/cable abominations in the 80's, after the title went up for grabs...Do not bring your evil here.
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7 hours ago, Sepiatone said:
And missing from SCSU's list of "people who played American Indians" (as opposed to Italian or GERMAN Indians...
) was:
(Or East Indians, like Peter Sellers, in every other of his 60's films...)
QuoteAnd( half-breed) STEVE McQUEEN
And blue-eyed half-breed Paul Newman.
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4 hours ago, scsu1975 said:
How about mentioning some of these people who played American Indians?
And Elvis Presley.
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I will just say:
Even if it was "yellowface" for a Broadway actor to play a persnickety comedy-relief Korean out of an already-dated pulp-novel series...Joel Grey was ROBBED of a Best Supporting nomination for stealing Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins (1985). ? -
6 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
Trigger warning: they are showing what I assume is the complete BOSTON BLACK I.E. series tonight, and if so there is one that features a really racist and offensive blackface routine near the end (Chester Morris and a pal both pretend to be hotel maids, so it manages to be both racist AND sexist and also incredibly UNfunny even by 1940-something standards)
Like, just beyond what even goes down in WHITE CHRISTMAS.
Yes, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye looked awful as a sister act.
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4 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
One other thing that I like about Halloween II, and apparently John Carpenter directed the scene on the QT, there's a scene very close to the beginning of the film that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie and doesn't move the plot forward in anyway whatsoever, but it's really well done.
Carpenter reportedly hated having to do a sequel, he thought it spoiled the "boogeyman" tone of the original--Even though he handed the directorial job off, he did take an interest in individual scenes.
But the original Halloween's studio had gone under, Universal bought up the name, and this was back in the pre-VHS days when theaters still actually showed theatrical revivals every year--Which meant that the original Halloween would show up in theaters every October like clockwork, and Universal wanted a sequel to break up the monotony. In case you ever wondered why "All-New!" was on the poster, as in "No, really! This isn't the old one back again!"
Which Universal scheduling tradition also explains why we got Carpenter's anthology non-Michael Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and seeing as it's one of the great unsung cult movies of 1982 (now, you want to talk about "unfair" knee-jerk fan-trashing), I'm always standing by ready for a discussion of that one. ?
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(My threads end up a bit late--Is it wrong that I was still stuck on "What creates cult films?" before the topic drifted to "Male genitals and mandrill-presentation"?)
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20 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
Nobody said her life wasn't worth exploring. But a TV series doesn't seem the best way to do it in my opinion.
And I don't get your need to scold others to refrain from humor. Actually there was a current of seriousness in my joking. Frankly I think Hollywood lacks ideas so now they are going through the lives of Oscar winners to create new series. There is no way they will be entirely accurate and people will end up complaining if they take too many dramatic liberties. Her portrayals of southern belles have nothing to do with this.
Except that there was actually a published BOOK that wrote Leigh's biography. You can take it up with the author, but the producers thought there was subject matter there, if the author did.
And besides, the Surviving Gilligan's Island (2001) TV-movie did a much better job of dramatizing why nobody liked Tina Louise on the set. Adam West already got his own documentary, which was a bit better than the "Back to the Batcave" TV-movie.
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1 hour ago, Bogie56 said:
Tuesday, May 29
4:45 p.m. A Night at the Opera (1935). My favourite Marx Bros. movie. “If you lose a leg we’ll help you look for it.”
I was on a cruise a year ago, and when the discussion came to shipboard room-service, some of my cruise-mates had never actually heard of "And two hard-boiled eggs. (honk!) Make that three hard-boiled eggs."
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On 5/25/2018 at 9:51 AM, Det Jim McLeod said:
Roger Corman, who was responsible for cult classics like "A Bucket Of Blood" and "Little Shop Of Horrors", once said that the filmmakers do not make cult films, the audience does. I agree with that, if someone consciously tries to create a cult film, it fails. A recent example would be "Snakes On A Plane", it was released with great fanfare, but the only thing people recall about it is the title.
That, and that they had to put in a dopey self-conscious Samuel L. Jackson joke in the script because the audience had already gone ahead and made a pop-cultural "Pulp Fiction" Internet meme out of the fact that Jackson was in a silly-titled movie. Did they actually SEE it?--No, but they laughed at the Pulp Fiction joke a lot, or maybe rented the movie hoping it would be there. (And the movie wasn't released with "great fanfare", it was a standard Asia-ready action movie that thought it now had enough audience identification for great fanfare, now that everyone was giggling about it.)
Bigger examples from the 80's would be Shock Treatment (1981), Richard O'Brien's next musical after Rocky Horror, which was shown in midnight screenings for all the Rockies to immediately flock to, and...they didn't. (I've rented it, btw, and it's certainly O'Brien, but it's no Rocky.) W.D. Richter also practically made a public nuisance out of promoting Adv. of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) as an instant "cult film" on day one, since it had a goofy title, hipster script and sequel-ready characters, but it's now pretty much remembered only by 80's-affectionate fans who think any film they can quote from that decade is a "cult film".
Corman's "Bucket of Blood" and "Little Shop" have become cult films from fans who pick out certain things normal moviegoers don't--Like screenwriter Charles B. Griffith (who later went on to write satirical cult-staple Death Race 2000 (1975) for Corman's New World studios), who turned Bucket's simple B-horror premise into a hilariously tongue-in-cheek savaging of pretentious beatnik art-culture. While Corman's ads promoted both movies as "You'll die laughing!", and made no secret of the movies being tongue-in-cheek, it's still nothing you expect going in, and takes actually butts-in-seats SEEING the movie on its own terms to appreciate.
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8 hours ago, Fedya said:
That doesn't look like Fred MacMurray.
Well, it doesn't look like the Apartment, either.
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And, of course, what WWII documentary would be complete without the Army's destruction of Nuremberg's Zeppelinfeld Stadium?
Or, as MST3K put it, "They blew up the Hitler building!"
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20 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
This board has piqued my interest in seeing XANADU, a film I avoided like the plague as a hardcore punk. Now that my anger has calmed, I'm super curious to see what the glitter of disco was all about. I love that films are like mini time capsules that way. It's the only way we can convince our kids that anyone actually wore spandex pants.
First common misconception to remember, Xanadu is not a "disco musical": There's a disco in the climax (a roller disco, no less), but the music is divided between the mellow mainstream-pop songs John Farrar wrote for Olivia Newton-John, and Jeff Lynne's funky 50's-infused Electric Light Orchestra hits, at the group's heyday. The "disco musical" you're PROBABLY thinking of was the Village People's Can't Stop the Music, which opened in theaters a month later, also had a plot about Steve Guttenberg opening a disco, and seemed to have hound-dogged this movie everywhere it went, from theatrical re-releases to the Razzie Awards. Oh, and also contrary to popular belief, Xanadu didn't win Worst Picture that year--Check what did, and you'll see what I mean.
Most of the camp and critical dogpiling on both movies together--mostly from the gay-niche gag-dogpiling Razzie fans--was over the general Disco is Dead frustration of 1980, and the desire to hammer on any pop-soundtrack musical with big nailed bats. However, there is a distinct musical difference between "YMCA" and 70's ELO.
Second, it is a musical time capsule--So is "42nd St.", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "Footloose" and "Fame". Every musical has the tastes of its decade, since its first job is to deliver current songs and variety entertainment to the paying audience of its time. You wouldn't fault a 40's musical for being "too 40's", so why would you think an 80's musical is "too 80's", unless you were bringing your own subjective demons to it already?...Which isn't exactly the movie's fault, now, is it?
Like most early studio-concocted musicals, Xanadu went through a half-dozen different storylines before patching itself together, and when they finally got Gene Kelly to play the Token Old Classic Star in the movie, the film believed it was now a 70's "tribute" to what it thought old MGM musicals looked like, whether it had ever seen one or not. When Gene Kelly directs a tap number in one scene, and gamely struts it up in the kids' goofy 80's new-wave-fashion number in another, it brings up the question, what IS the difference between a 50's musical and an 80's one, apart from the clothes, hair and songs? The movie even rams that question down your throat in a funny number where dueling dreams of 40's swing zoot-suiters and 80's new-wave bands meet each other head on.
And the reason I'm listing all this out is, to answer the question: When you have a small niche of audiences that go against the mass zeitgeist or critical conventional-wisdom of when it was released, and can scene-specifically discuss the movie's good points or director's intent from having watched it, acceptable or not...that's Cult. (Especially when there was a LOT of zeitgeist and critical-wisdom against it at the time.) Any questions?
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1 hour ago, speedracer5 said:
Exactly. I do not think that Olivier was as great an actor as he was made out to be. His talents might have been better suited to the stage. I did like him in Rebecca.
Given John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, David Niven, Rex Harrison...Olivier's the only Great English Actor who's never shown an actual sense of humor in his entire onscreen career, has he?
That's not exactly ideal casting if you're going to be doing romantic comedy with Marilyn Monroe.
) was:
I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
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In Jodie's case, even more so.