EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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21 minutes ago, speedracer5 said:
I think it's funny that in the 60s/70s Peanuts cartoons, Peppermint Patty was voiced by a boy actor. Her real name is Patricia. I can see how people might misconstrue Patty and Marcie's relationship, seeing that Marcie calls her "sir," but I think Patty is just really awkward, nothing else. I think Marcie's "sir" is her way of making fun of Patty's masculine tendencies.
(Patricia Reichardt, to be accurate.)
No, it dates back to the '71 strip arc when they first met at girls' summer camp, and even with her glasses, Marcie was rather slow on the uptake:
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to be precise.
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3 hours ago, CaveGirl said:
I'm assuming the connecting link here is Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher?
Took me an hour, but I finally Kevin-Bacon'ed it. So, um, I'm going with "Yes, coincidence", Alex, for $100.
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45 minutes ago, CaveGirl said:
How far back do the foreign and art house films go on FilmStruck, Lawrence?
You know I don't watch any films made ideally after about 1970...As Lawrence points out, Janus pretty much owns THE foreign/arthouse catalog back to the silent days, Criterion owns Janus Films, and Filmstruck is Criterion. Not sure what they're showing at the moment (I've given up waiting for a PS4 app, and I'm just going to buy an Amazon Stick next month to even get a look at the darn thing), but if it's foreign-classic, they have it.
(And wait, you're not watching films from 1969-75, where maybe a quarter to a third of all Great American Movies happened? I'd have put the cutoff date at around the 90's, m'self.)
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55 minutes ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT GEORGE!
(the Peppermint Patty before there was a Peppermint Patty)
Oh, good lord, still think Patty was "lesbian" because she wears flip-flops, plays baseball, and hangs out with a mousy girl with glasses? (Who happens to have an even bigger shy girly-crush on "Charles"?)
...You drive me crazy, Chuck. That's why romance never happens to girls with big noses.
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Apart from the title, I wasn't even sure from the post what question I was supposed to chime in and answer--
All I can say is, I remember when Blade Runner (1982), Clue (1985) and Xanadu (1980) all flopped in theatrical release. (Not as badly as The Goonies (1985) did, though...Lord, did we all hate that one.)
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1 hour ago, Dargo said:
Seems one of Bronson's forgotten better ones(although later in his career and so by then an A-list lead in films) is 1977's Telefon.
I remember liking this one he did with luscious Lee Remick anyway, and which is sort of another take on the whole Manchurian Candidate theme.
1977 also had probably one of his best and most forgotten from his declining 70's A-list period, The White Buffalo:
Basically laughed off in theaters, since Dino DeLaurentiis, with his usual taste, marketed it as the third in his "When Big Animals Attack" trilogy after King Kong and Orca--But away from the marketing, it's actually a good 70's deconstructionist "art"-western, with Bronson as an aging, syphilitic Wild Bill Hickok near the end of the West, who can barely tell which of his enemies are real anymore, driven into a "spiritual" quest to stop a rampaging white buffalo that might just be another one of his hallucinations. He teams up with an early pre-fame Crazy Horse, who also has to avenge its attack on his tribe, and it's all gritty, mystical, portentous and historically revisionist from there.
Fortunately, it's been a LOT easier to find in the last two or three years, now that streaming only shows 70's-90's United Artists films.
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19 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Hmmmm...well CG, gotta say I always got the distinct impression that the ending to the movie San Francisco (1936) was pretty much attempting to convey the thought that withOUT a strong belief in a Christian God, that that beautiful city by the bay (which ironically it seems many self-professed and dyed-in-the-wool Christians throughout many parts of the rest of this country now days seem to think of as some sort'a "modern day Sodom and Gomorrah") would have never been rebuilt at all!!!
I mean, ya have bad boy Gable even gettin' down on his knees and praying at the end of THIS one, for gosh sakes!
(...so does THIS one count at all here???)
Probably not more than any others--From prewar 30's isolationism up through wartime handwringing, and on into the contented 50's, there was the general idea that if we would've just started going to church more, none of these terrible things would have happened, crime and divorce would go down, and maybe those funny other countries would finally get their heads on straight, see us as a role model, and leave us alone. And, of course, once we were into Korea and the Cold War, well, you could see how godless those Red folk were...
Going My Way (1944) isn't specifically a Catholic propaganda film, but it does relish the smugness of seeing poor confused modern folk having their lives singlehandedly turned around for them by warm, approachable (unlike Barry Fitzgerald or Ingrid Bergman) priest Bing Crosby, once they're convinced to go back to the local (city) cathedral again--If Bing could be a priest, hey, how bad could they be?
And then you have the more extreme "God's country" politicizing, in The Next Voice You Hear (1950) and Gabriel Over the White House (1933)
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Getting into less socially progressive/loaded choices, there's the dread pirate Glenn Close from Hook (1991):
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3 hours ago, limey said:
1 US dollar = 49.62 Dominican pesos, so that's about 8 US cents!
(The Dominican peso also uses the $ sign)
I like that stamp design.
Although they could have picked anything, and they picked Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde??
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10 minutes ago, CaveGirl said:
Please don't ever compare him to Crispin Glover though, who truly seemed like a psychopath, but I must say I still enjoy thinking about the time he was on Letterman and almost kicked David in the teeth at his desk. It was fun to watch Letterman trying to act cool, all the while he looked scared to death that Glover was going to deck him. And yes, I do have a sick sense of humor. Glover also looked like he had a wig on backwards during the appearance. I just go to Youtube to rewatch this oddity.
Glover was trying to plug his "quirky" character from his upcoming indie Rubin & Ed (1991), and...nobody got it. So much for selling indies to the mainstream.
Haven't seen the YT clip, but I remember the original appearance, where they broke for a commercial after the kick, and when they came back, there was a sense of on-set chaos having just calmed down, there was an empty guest chair, and and Dave turned to the camera with a knowingly audience-in-joke insincere "......Hi!
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(Three days later was the other infamous appearance by a visibly smashed and uncooperative Oliver Reed, and Dave finally warned him, "Y'know, I've bailed on these before...You might end up flying this plane alone.")
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1 hour ago, TopBilled said:
Collectors.
It's kind of like asking why getting a "classic movie" would be important. Who looks at those?
(hides sheet of Star Wars 30th Anniversary stamps from 2007)
Why, um...NO ONE, really! ☺️ And I never bought those Cat in the Hat or Disney's Aladdin stamps either!
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14 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
The Shanghai Cobra (1945) - Another middling entry in the mystery series, from Monogram Pictures and director Phil Karlson. Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), accompanied by son Tommy (Benson Fong) and chauffeur Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland), investigate a series of murders that were committed using cobra venom. The case leads to a bank that's holding government secrets in its vault, as well as a fugitive from Shanghai. Also featuring James Cardwell, Joan Barclay, Addison Richards, Arthur Loft, Janet Warren, Joe Devlin, James Flavin, and Gene Roth.
Wasn't sure whether to interrupt a string of Monogram Sidney Toler Charlie Chan reviews with my report on having just found 1981's Peter Ustinov Charlie Chan & the Curse of the Dragon Queen resurface out of limbo on Amazon Prime--
The reason I wasn't sure whether to call attention to that one was that while the movie itself is genuinely a "movie from Mars", and is physically painful to watch for more than ten minutes at a stretch, Ustinov is not only the least bad thing about it, he's a treat to watch in the movie if you're going in as experienced Charlie Chan fan.
The producers had some strange notion they were doing an "old-film spoof"--likely trying to spend "Murder By Death"'s Peter Sellers coin-of-the-realm--and have the characters calisthenically camping it up (Angie Dickinson's titular villain is sub-high-school-theater) and tripping over every available piece of furniture to create the illusion of "Wacky slapstick comedy", to the point of inexplicably bizarre. But for most of the movie, Ustinov plays Warner Oland's "classic" Chan note-perfect and without the least bit of irony. You almost pity him for being TOO good in the movie, and come out of it wanting to dig up more of the real thing.
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The Great Gatsby (1974) - Continuing on my recent quest to put all my Netflix affairs in order and clean off my queue before dropping the late lamented service like a bad habit (and preferably the mysterious golden-age 70's Paramount titles I never got to see in theaters), finally got around to this one after having it in my queue forever. Every high school and freshman Lit class I had seemed to have avoided the book, and I'd hoped to use a movie as Cliff Notes, so I don't have the actual F. Scott Fitzgerald to compare it to, only that recent freakishly-wrong Baz Luhrmann/Leo DiCaprio wishful gay-spin on the story. ("Y'see, he wears a pink suit, hangs out with Nick, throws wild parties, and has to hide his true identity!"...Okay, Bazzie, enough of that. ?)
So I can't comment on critics at the time thinking the '74 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version was a "flat" pedestrian adaptation, but director Jack Clayton (who had directed The Innocents and went on to Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes) does do an effectively atmospheric job of contrasting glamorous soft-focus mansions in the Hamptons with Nick's (Sam Waterston, who doesn't get to do much as the observer character except effect an occasional regional accent) alien and unsettling view of the other-half's 20's decadence. Clayton knows how to do creepy, even when it isn't, and this is definitely not the glitter-showered Beyonce' party DiCaprio threw.
Redford also does a definitive job of showing the twitchy insecurity behind Gatsby's slick, aloof manipulation of his hollow "titan of finance" image, nervous as a high-school kid around Farrow's Daisy one minute (Farrow in full crazy-vulnerable-Rosemary mode), clinging to Waterston's Nick for one decent moment of shared humble-background friendship the next, and trying to get out of both with big insincere displays of showered wealth. Bruce Dern, during his 70's heyday, gets to be properly despicable as philandering Tom Buchanan, and Karen Black has a few good scenes as the catalyst that gets the ironic-tragedy ball rolling.
I remember the movie when it came out not for the story, but for a big trendy marketing push at the time for flapper-era fashions, double-breasted suits, whitewall tires, and other displays of "fashion from the Gatsby Era", which rather quickly disappeared after the movie came and went from theaters--A big buzzword at the time, likely from people who had never actually READ the book, and didn't realize they were in for bitter social deconstruction, morally ambiguous tragedy, and other hints that it wasn't exactly as nice as it was supposed to be.
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"The Ghost Writer" was also adapted for a PBS American Playhouse drama, back in the 90's (during the Claire Bloom phase)--
Up to that point, I would have said Roth was unfilmable, going from the 60's counterculture Richard Benjamin features, but his short stories have apparently translated well.
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10 hours ago, hamradio said:
that's the most repulsive nun I ever saw...
and I'm not talking about the gun.
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She looks like someone Mike Jagger would kiss.
It's Ms .45, and the problem wasn't exactly who kissed her before she became nun-with-a-gun...
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5 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
All of these are available at my local library.....they can't be that "rare". Then again....my library also has several Alice Faye & Carmen Miranda 20th Century Fox movies on DVD, another thing you rarely see on TCM.
Back in the heyday of DVD, Universal released all their "series" in big bulk boxes: Francis, Ma & Pa Kettle, and three or four authoritative volumes of Abbott & Costello, even the ones without the Monsters in them.
But, that was the 00's of DVD, before studios (like Universal) decided they didn't like Catalog anymore, so, yeah--Unless you have a pretty BIG library system, the Francis box can be pretty rare. Our system only had two of the A&C boxes, and I'm still trying to track down the others.
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11 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Just saw a Wagon Train episode with Cox as a man-out-of-place-in-the-west, and I couldn't stop laughing. Cox was just so good in this type of role; authentic and pushing the envelope but not into camp territory.
In other words, humble and lovable.
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1 hour ago, CaveGirl said:
Technically that would be, Wally Cox, Marvin Kaplan or Arnold Stang.
Wally Cox was reportedly a bit of a creep offstage--He hated his personas, was a bit antisocial, and was known to go out and raise some off-set heck with Marlon Brando on occasion.
(And Richard "Les Nessman" Sanders from WKRP in Cincinnati also got a few off-set complaints from other cast members. Throw in Crispin Glover after "Back to the Future", and you start to wonder about what drives the mentality of the "dweeb actor".)
Still, I give Arnold Stang the favoritism points for doing that killer Phil Silvers/Sgt. Bilko imitation as "Top Cat".
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3 hours ago, jimmymac71 said:
Then Dolly Parton says she has a gun in her desk, and can change him from a rooster to a hen with one shot.
Even though one critic correctly pointed out that a rooster with that one strategic shot would technically be a capon, not a hen.
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17 hours ago, CaveGirl said:
Name your favorite tongue in cheek film and extra points if it was not made in the UK!
If you mean "Tongue in cheek" must = "Mockumentary", then I don't know that many.
If you mean "Tongue in cheek" as in, a slightly less serious, self-aware spoofing, or deliberately and intentionally campy-in-the-good-way approach to its material, then a few spring to mind: The 1966 Batman, the 1980 Flash Gordon, or my own particular guilty favorite, the 1994 Street Fighter.
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9 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
misswonderly said: What's wrong with filmmakers who clearly love old movies making allusions to them in their own films? what you seem to perceive as snarky, mocking, and smug I perceive as affectionate and respectful.
Woody Allen's been paying homage to classic screwball movies & the music of their time for decades. I could see how some critics would view this as some kind of "crutch" of unoriginality, but I too see it as an affectionate "homage" to the past.
Even when Woody did a true homage to SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT '55 into A MIDSUMMER NIGHT SEX COMEDY '82, it wasn't just a lazy remake, but an entirely new story based on the idea of the original. I really like Allen's filmmaking style and can't deal with violence/super hero/CGI movies - glad there's something out there for everyone.Woody Allen was personally homage-respectful to Buster Keaton and Bob Hope in Sleeper and Love & Death because he admitted those were from his childhood, and while there's some sentiment to be found in his Fellini-cribbings of Stardust Memories and Radio Days, that was around the same time as he was playing atheist "martyr" about why he would rather ponder mortality with Bergman than make his Early Funny films. And yes, I'm in the "Lazy" camp about his 80's work. (There was the theory about why you never quite saw a VCR in any of Woody's 80's movies, even though they existed everywhere else in the real world...)
But he rarely--I wouldn't say "never"--expressed this wishful desire to embrace Old Hollywood with one hand, and cathartically sock it in the teeth with the other, that we've seen from the Coens in Barton Fink and Hail Caesar:
They certainly seem willing to tell us all the old films they know about (look, they even remade True Grit!), but they don't appear to LIKE it very much. I wouldn't single Hollywood out, as in most of their films, they don't appear to like ANYONE very much--They just don't seem to be comfortable praising Old Hollywood without a good hip deconstructive sniggering at everything that was wrong, or foolish, or freakish, or hypocritically un-PC about it for a decent superior-voyeuristic laugh, before moving on to explore the superior-voyeuristic comic possibilities of other funny deluded people, like stoners or funny-talking Minnesotans. Yes, we've heard of Clifford Odets, look what a self-delusional loser he was going to Hollywood, just like every other wannabe-screenwriter! Wait till Mr. Golden-Boy gets a taste of that psychotic Louis B. Mayer and finds out how William Faulkner ended up, that'll wipe the smile off his face!...Yes, we've heard of the ugly Hedda Hopper vs. Louella Parsons battle, let's make them a wacky catfighting dual-role!...Yes, we heard that studios would have to approve their 50's Biblical epics with religious consultants, what rich comic possibility for a ten minute gag scene of more funny self-deluded corporate suits!There's "love", and then there's the "love" you intermittently get from someone who spends the rest of their time slapping you around (in the Coens' case, literally), to work out his own personal issues. Quite a few people never escape the second kind, telling themselves utterly that they're enjoying the first kind.
On 5/21/2018 at 6:46 AM, TikiSoo said:While I find Coen Bros films hit or miss, I enjoyed that one enough to buy it. It seems along with Lebowski to be their most universally enjoyed films.
Er, let's just say that there are a lot of Coen "fans" who never bothered to find out whether the Bros directed any OTHER film besides the one where Jeff Bridges plays a lovable philosophical cool-dude stoner. 'Nuff said.
QuoteAs for the music, I never understood why if I play classic bluegrass music CDs, people scatter but everyone enjoys the exact same music in this movie!
While I might listen to bluegrass, I'd never listen to Southern blues or Old-Time inspirational--just as I might never listen to Chicago R&B/soul outside of The Blues Brothers--but it's a job of a movie musical to make it look amazing with the right staging.
THAT, at least, the Bros manage to do, not just in the concert climax, but in the Winkie-guard K-K-K scene, and the "ironic" Big Rock Candy Mountain opening. Yes, I've got a few of the soundtrack songs on my iTunes, as the scene where the guys encounter the baptist group singing "Down to the River to Pray" is as visual and stylized as the rest of the movie wants to be...Until we're back to more self-consciously wacky regional/time-period gags with Tim Blake-Nelson as the dopey brain-damaged Depression-era Southerner.
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The Poppy Is Also A Flower (1966) - Not sure if this came up on a recent discussion of the three United Nations-produced 20th-anniversary movies, but I'd always been curious to see it since coming across descriptions way back in TV Guide. I'd remembered clicking onto the beginning years ago as a kid, with the informative "educational" prologue by Grace Kelly, and thought the entire movie was a public-service documentary on the UN's efforts to stop international drug trade.
Nope--The producers had hired Ian Fleming to write the screen story, Terence "From Russia With Love" Young as director, and a host of charity-benefit stars (who were reportedly paid $1 each for services rendered), and if that sounds like they were setting out to do a faux-DIY 007 Bond film, they succeeded. There were a lot of bad international Bond-knockoffs at the height of its 60's mania, but this one got the right ingredients, and captures Young's exact feel for the first three Sean Connery 007's, which were as much about the procedural investigation and globe-trotting locales as the car chases.
Apart from E.G. Marshall and Trevor Howard as the central heroes tracking an illegal opium shipment to its dealer, the entire cast wanders in and out of bit parts like a sort of 007 version of Around the World in 80 Days: Omar Sharif shows up as a scientist, Marcello Mastroianni has one great scene as a too-clever-by-half investigator, Trini Lopez shows up in a nightclub singing his hits, Angie Dickinson comes and goes as mysterious Bond-girl, and Yul Brynner practically runs away with top billing in a few scenes as the operation's military leader, etc., etc.
Think the movie must have fallen into meddled-with public domain, since the version I caught on Amazon Prime was the foreign version, different opening title, and without the Grace Kelly prologue. Still, if it's somewhere in the backwaters of video's underbelly, I've learned the joys of tracking it down on Prime.
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11 hours ago, TopBilled said:
Are you asking if I condone violence that supports a feminist cause? LOL
No, was just asking if you were a gay misogynist doing cheap "You go, girlfriend!" jokes. If it was Lorna, I wouldn't have to ask.
5 hours ago, TopBilled said:Does this mean you are not the president of the Julia Roberts fan club?
I consider myself lucky just to get half of the dated/obscure "Towel" jokes in Carl Reiner's Zucker-wannabe parody Fatal Instinct (1993). Neither movie has since aged well.
But since you asked, yes, I would rather see the aforementioned Dirty Pair than Ms. Roberts, any day.
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Unsinkable Molly Brown/Star Wars Anniversary
in General Discussions
Posted
Oddly enough, she does look like Kathy Bates.