EricJ

I'd say "Hail Caesar says hi", but I'd be worried I'd get paragraphs in praise of that one, too. When Josh Brolin slaps Ben-Hur in the mouth for sounding too 50's-Hollywood-Ten, or Barton Fink/Clifford Odets is also roundhoused in the face after saying "I'm a screenwriter!", maybe it's me, but I'm just not feelin' the love. It would have been nice if the allusion HAD anything to do with the movie, besides "Get it, folks, this is our big Depression film!" (oh, wait, their brother does actually turn up missing at one point), but given the Coens own, um, "sardony" toward everything in general including old films, proclaiming "We've heard of Preston Sturges and you haven't!" came off a bit hypocritical at best. Uh, yeah, I've heard of him, guys, and news flash, he's funnier. But, Coens' trademark treatment of their own characters aside, OBWAT is probably their most accessible, watchable, and most darn fun, at least since Raising Arizona. I repeat, they've put a musical scene in everything else, they just should haul off and DO a "We've heard of Arthur Freed and you haven't!" full musical homage, just for the heck of it. Just so long as it's not another Esther Williams parody from "Hail Caesar" where Scarlett Johanson gets a gas attack in her mermaid tail.

If you watch the "Walt & El Grupo" documentary, it was really more of the government's idea--FDR's "Good Neighbor policy"--as fascist-leaning countries like Uruguay and Argentina were starting to show sympathy toward Germany, and Walt had the cover alibi of a "Fantasia" promotional world-junket anyway. (And since the artists would be doing government work, they could stall the draft.) Disney continued producing hired shorts for the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs during the war, mostly public-service shorts for Mexico and Central/South America about sanitation, corn production, and even one malaria-prevention short with a familiar cameo. Disney wasn't an independent studio yet, with RKO still distributing--RKO had hoped to get Orson Welles to make a similar South America-appeasing film, but "It's All True" was famously never finished. IMO, Goofy was always a favorite, since he's the opposite to Donald's frustrated temper--No matter what messes Goofy ends up in, he's always optimistic and never fazed. Notice how, in the Goofy How-To shorts, he always tips his friendly hat after demonstrating how not to do it, and the narrator (ahem) moves on.

You're rather, um...subjective and empathetic with your recommendations, aren't you? ?

Given that the Coens were in the middle of their narcissistic "Old film homage" phase, right after Barton Fink, and before the "Ladykillers" remake (or perhaps "remake" should be in quotation marks), and the George Clooney "Preston Sturges homage" of Intolerable Cruelty, think most critics did know the Sullivan's connection, and were just rolling their eyes. ? And yes, it's pretty clear that at least one of the Coens has never read Homer, in the comic scene where Clooney encounters his "unfaithful" wife at the end and tries to win her back...Uh, what was Penelope doing while Odysseus was away, former high school Lit students? Even if the Coens, who are more interested in gawking at colorful regions and time periods than telling a story, were more focused on making an old-time-gospel musical than in Homer, it's a darn good old-time-gospel musical. I'd easily put it on any list of Best Musicals of the 00's, although, to be fair, there aren't too many to begin with. Between that and the Gene Kelly parody in "Hail Caesar", the Coens should consider sticking to musicals, it's one of the few genres they seem to have an actual enthusiastic knack for, while everything else comes off with a sort of bored sense of superiority.

Movie theater manager (Mel Blanc): "Look, mister, we've shown you The Horn Blows At Midnight three times, now will you please leave so we can close up, already? Jack Benny: "Okay...Btw, the ticket girl said you hadn't sold any. How is it the seats are all full? Manager: "When this picture's playing, we rent space out to the local mortuary." Benny: "But that's unbelievable!" Manager: "I'll say--Yesterday, during the matinee show, two of 'em got up and walked out." Jack Benny's career problem was more than just he could only play himself--When they tried to cast him as a generic variety Nice Guy, he was completely implausible, and when they tried to cast him as a snarky heel, in George Washington Slept Here and Broadway Melody of 1936, he was utterly unlikable. Here, it's the former case--They could have put any old variety comic in to play the naive hero, and even though it's self-deprecating, it's chaining down Benny's own unique self-deprecating humor he could do better, for fluffy humor that really just doesn't go anywhere. Basically, To Be or Not To Be was the only "true" Benny film of his career, and, as he joked on his show, "THE good one."

Since searching Google Images would take too long, I'll just ask: How MANY times, growing up, did we see newsreel footage of that wacky eight-decker biplane collapse in on itself after crashing into a barn?

Girls with guns? Eh: Japanese anime's been doing it for decades... ?

Although, if you CAN watch House of Wax in Blu3D (finally tracked down an OOP copy on Amazon, now that everyone's now "decided" that 3D is Dead, so it won't ever get a second reprinting), check out the climactic fight scene where sinister assistant Buchinsky seems to pop up out of the theater seats, or your living room, to jump into the frame of the fight scene. ? As for "Best", though...is playing the good, hardworking member of the Magnificent Seven part of the "early" canon?

And of course, don't forget Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver, in Every James Cameron Movie Ever Made (1984-2009)

It also emphasizes the desperation and utter childishness of a faction that stakes their very identity and unity on digging up straw-men from eighty-two years ago as sole "clinching" argument against the opposition...Yes, folks, remember, unreasonable one-sided propaganda is a bad thing! ? Rather like if I were to protest the persecution of the automobile by showing films of the Keystone Kops.

Usually it would be New Yorkers, specifically the multigenerational Latin, Italian and Irish residents, who five years earlier had the same "Is God dead, because things are such a mess and the Vatican is so repressed and establishment?" conversation in Rosemary's Baby. Exorcist takes place in the upper Washington DC townhouses, which might as well be upper-side NYC, and isn't quite as Catholic-saturated, but still has the 70's malaise feeling of "Religious questions can't happen here, we're too upwardly mobile".

Even more so when coming in at the 70's malaise, with Watergate still in the headlines-- In most countries, whenever there's a sense of social breakdown, and a mass loss of trust in the social order, all of a sudden, there'll be a spiking interest in the occult, astrology, ESP, UFO's, etc. That's certainly what happened in the early to mid 70's, just after the calamitous antiwar protests cooled, and people were looking for answers elsewhere--But not in religion, since most urban city-dwellers were Catholic, and the organized Church was seen as outdated and establishment. Which, between the two, that created the sense that even if you snubbed the church, you still couldn't know for sure who else might be out there... Protestants, of course, who don't do exorcisms, still thought the whole thing was silly. Well, be fair, "Child's Play" was also a case of filmmaking technique, in that it was directed by Tom Holland, who could push the right audience buttons in the 80's like a concert pianist. The others....not so much.

I've been meaning to watch it, but Richard Pryor has permanently ruined it for me. Listening to it today, it's a little distracting how much the "devil" sounds like a common earthly Internet troll.

And, of course, this will be the John Sturges original, and not the later Trim-Jeans remake: ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvz1-ThCHY

The horror stories of "Anti-Semitic Walt" may have been very strategically blown up as industry-effective smear tactics during the bitter 40's strike--Organized elements were beginning to seep into the push for unionization after the Depression, and the move was on to unionize Hollywood as virgin territory...And Walt was simply a baffled holdout who had been sheltered from the Depression in the 30's, and cluelessly but insensitively tried to persuade his animation employees that the push for union was only that they were being "fooled" by Communists. (Which had also pretty much faded after the New Deal.) When you're polo friends with Louis B. Mayer, it wasn't "anti-Semitism" to joke about Hollywood studio moguls being a nearly all-Jewish industry, and yes, the Army did seem to single Disney out for the most technical animation (eg. demonstrations of proper airplane riveting), and the widest mainstream avenue for public morale propaganda like Donald Duck in "Der Fuhrer's Face". If it makes Walt feel any better, Warner was hired for the Army "Private Snafu" shorts, but Warner's studio wasn't on-site occupied by Army officials, and didn't have a feature division to be shut down because of it.

While not a good movie--by any remote stretch of the imagination ? --Roger Ebert, in his Siskel & Ebert review of Sally Field's post-Reagan Iran melodrama Not Without My Daughter (1991), recommended it be studied for the mechanics of how the specific tropes and manipulations of political propaganda are assembled even in peacetime. Innocent motherhood in jeopardy has been the big player since the days of Wm. Hearst and the Spanish-American War, the idea that your friends, neighbors, or (gasp!) trusted spouse might secretly turn out to be one of THEM, and, of course, never ever translating the foreign enemy firsthand, lest they look less alien.

Although, the reason we had Roger Miller singing that, was the original studio idea was to do a backwoods "Robin Hood in the South" (which is why Pat Buttram voices the Sherriff). But that didn't work out, and doing a straight version with Tommy Steele as Robin just didn't quite work out to their satisfaction either before they recast the character at the last minute. By the time they rushed the movie through in its final form, most of the animation infamously had to be recycled from "Jungle Book", "Snow White" and "The Aristocats": And even then, Mme. Medusa was originally imagined as Cruella DeVille returning, but they forgot she was someone else's copyrighted book character, and had to make one from scratch. Still, at least now we know what happened to all those Southern bayou villagers that weren't used in the original Robin Hood.

Bow's an absolute darling in the movie, and in the scene where she cuts down her shop dress to go out for the evening, it now and forever confirms the theory that she inspired the look of Betty Boop. "It" in the '20's was the radical theory that what attracted men was some undefinable chemistry of, not just sexuality, but self-confidence, and Clara is very much the "It Girl" in this movie--It's hard to believe just how much contemporary appeal she has onscreen, despite the 20's bob-caps. Except for the animators, who thought they based him on the scene where Clark Gable munches a carrot in "It Happened One Night". Please stop trying so hard. PLEASE.

He's the sensational SKIPPY HOMEIER!

"...It's only a model." (Shh!)

Ohh...I'd heard fellow Disney nuts expound on "The hidden dated-reference commercial joke at the end", and for years thought they were referring to the ill-fitting crown on Wart's head as an Imperial Margarine joke. Still, even just thinking of that scene emphasizes the major problem: As a main protagonist, Wart isn't so much a complete cipher, as an absolute spud. He has no personality, doesn't even appear to learn anything except for one scene, stands by as dim audience while Merlin takes over the entire movie--And when we do see him as the Once and Future King, there's absolutely nothing the movie does to convince us it really wasn't a complete accident after all. Those were for the TV series, but I got DMIBtC on disk just to fill out one more title on a Disney Movie Club subscription, and it's a good one. Although you have to be familiar with Ward Kimball as the animator with a nutty, prankish quality to his animation (he animated the cat from Cinderella, as well as directing "Toot, Whistle, Plunk & Boom" and those insane Tomorrowland shorts), to appreciate his style by the time he was directing in the 50's and 60's--About the closest thing Disney had to a Tex Avery.

(Er, technically the "Me Decade" was the hedonistic self-help 70's, not Bonfire's rich-vs-poor stocks-and-scandals 80's, although Wolfe coined that term too in a '76 New York Magazine essay.) The more that the bestseller industry started becoming more literary and cerebral, and didn't need to rely on the "Soon to be a major motion picture!" genre-novel industry of the 60's and 70's, the more that Hollywood started to fear bestsellers, and thought they'd be stuck with something audience-proof and impenetrable if they bought those lucrative title deals. If you want to know why Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) ended up as the screwball Tom Hanks comedy that it did, consider that if Warner had had its way, The Right Stuff (1983) would have originally been a goofball comedy with Dan Aykroyd as John Glenn and John Belushi as Chuck Yaeger.

Story has it that Disney was so disenchanted with animation (he'd never gotten his enthusiasm back after the war and the bitterness of the 40's strike), and so caught up with his new real-world Disneyland/Epcot-city ideas, he'd basically turned Sword in the Stone over to one of his reliable story men, Bill Peet, to oversee for him. Sword's weak-to-nonexistent story was...NOT one of the classics; Walt hated the movie, regretted his decision and fired Peet, and made sure he went back to having personal hands-on overseeing of the company's next big animation project. And as it turned out, it looked like "Mary Poppins" was finally going ahead after all. Bluth was reportedly hated by the other animators at the studio, who thought he was narcissistically trying to foster his own mentor "cult" among the newer animators. Even though his group walkout to go make "Secret of NIMH" crippled the studio right in the middle of "Black Cauldron", there was the general feeling of good-riddance. And that was BEFORE his movies turned creepy, disturbing, out-of-touch and borderline p-e-d-o.

Er, yes, you do. What you meant to say is: Ie., that this one seems to have caught on as a sort of fan-cult film even among those who hate most Dreamworks movies, because it's so much more huggy and feel-good and epic, and doesn't "feel" like this year's latest Boss Baby, Penguins of Madagascar, or Turbo. Well, that's because it basically isn't one. (Back in the early 00's, when everyone wishfully thought the first Shrek movie was their "favoritest movie ever made" because they latched onto all the anti-Disney preaching and anti-princess kissups, there was a whole cult among the animation-fan community that would speak no wrong against Dreamworks because '98's "Prince of Egypt" had been so freakishly and uncharacteristically good for the studio, those fans stood by faithfully hoping it might make another one someday, if they waited long enough. Those fans weren't nothin' compared to the post-'10 fangirl cult of "Dragon Ladies" who rabidly shouted down any evil spoken about Jeffrey Katzenberg, since he was the "saint" who had given us Hiccup and Toothless...TWICE!) If you look back over the post-Shrek Dreamworks CGI movies, most of them leave rather a sour taste in the mouth, because, disturbingly, most of the plots are about....Bullies. The protagonist, like Turbo, Megamind, Sherman Peabody, or Ginormica, are usually the poor, self-delusional picked-on victims of an entire world of shallow, annoying jerk-holes, and their one dream is not to follow their own audience-sympathetic dream, like the Remys, Wall-E's and Wreck-It Ralphs of Disney and Pixar movies, but simply to not be poor picked-on losers anymore. And we know the Dreamworks heroes are "sympathetic" protagonists only because everyone picks on them...Including the sitcom gags in the script, which want to establish just as many star-shtick gags of kung-fu panda Po making a big fat fool of himself as of his trying to be better. (Hey, they paid for Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell, they're gonna use them!) Knowing what Katzenberg went through in his "feud" with Michael Eisner before leaving Disney not only helps explain all the schoolyard Lord Farquaad "midget" jokes in the first Shrek movie, it also backs up the old saying, "A bullied child grows up learning only how to bully others." It also offers a few hints about why the studio rarely had any other hits resound with the public, and is now out of business--Nobody pays ten bucks to watch a schoolyard. So why are the Dragon movies so gosh-gushy-wonderful? Well, that could be because they're, quote-fingers, "not" technically Dreamworks movies--They're hired ringers. Katzenberg, desperate to get his hands on any of Disney's weapons to, like Boromir, use against the enemy, found out that Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois were fired from Disney after their "American Dog" (which was later heavily salvaged into "Bolt") just didn't look like it was going to be the studio's followup to "Lilo & Stitch". Once Chris & Dean were out the door, guess who was hiding around the corner to offer them a job. I'm no L&S fan, but I could see that that movie was at least trying for a little bit of sentimentality where we see the family bond developing for a weird little girl learning how to train her alien. At WDFA/Pixar, they don't teach bullying....And, apparently, it showed, especially at studios where they do.

If you look carefully as Robert wanders through the Maquette room (and displays a little unhealthy interest in one of Bacchus's African zebra-taurs from Fantasia), you can see rare figures from a then-planned but abandoned 30's-40's Disney version of "Peter Pan" that ultimately didn't survive wartime production, and the aunt and Siamese cats from "Lady" (no Tramp yet, and only beginning to have that central plot): ...As you can see from the designs, they were better off waiting. ?