EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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On 4/28/2018 at 3:08 PM, NickAndNora34 said:
#3: PINOCCHIO (1940)
An enjoyable movie, if not headache-inducing from Pinocchio's constant idiocy and naivete (but then again, I guess he really doesn't have a brain or heart, and that's what Jiminy is for). I don't dislike Pinocchio, believe me; I mainly felt sad for him when he kept listening to everything strangers were telling him.
In the original Carlo Collodi book, Pinocchio is a mischievous Bart Simpson, who likes causing trouble because he can, and has to learn right from wrong--Walt didn't find the character appealing, and it took months of rewriting the story to make him more of a sympathetic naive character and give the episodic book some actual A->B plotline.
In fact, Italy nationalistically HATES us for liking the Disney movie over the book. (Check out the weird '02 book-faithful Roberto Benigni version, if you want to get some idea how crazy and incoherent the original was.) Seriously. Anything from the war?...No. But get them started on Pinocchio being nice and Jiminy Cricket as a central character in the story?
13 hours ago, TikiSoo said:I agree when watching early Disney animated movies, they have pretty scary parts. I think what makes Stromboli so scary is his large & strong movement. The evil Queen from Snow White was a quiet controlled evil that scares your mind, but Stromboli is physically scary.
When Stromboli locks Pinocchio in a cage and storms out, "Shaddup, before I knocka you silly!", at that age, we're thinking, "Whoa...This is bad. No one ever says they're going to hit a Disney character. ? "
As for the Fox, one story I'd read was that when Walt liked a character on storyboards, he would ham it up and start acting out the story in person as he got ideas--He started working out so much of the Fox's stylish cane-twirling, if you look at the character, he's got a distinctly Walt-like look to the eyebrows.
Also, can't recall the designer's name, but Snow White and Pinocchio were the two films from one Disney artist who created the production design for stories where everything was creatively carved out of wood--Just look at the Dwarves' hand-carved furniture and Gepetto's clocks.
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10 hours ago, laffite said:
Do you wear your Captain Video uniform?
Just like "Cap'n Video, and his Video Ran-juhhs!"
9 hours ago, Swithin said:TCM could have really made a festival out of it, showing all the Quatermass films and the television serials as well. Quatermass and the Pit is my favorite -- a really literate horror/science fiction film.
Any Quatermass collection without Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (which seems to be in limbo as one of the more guarded Hammer films, and probably out of TCM's grasp) is incomplete. I should track down the first two movies someday.
The movie of Quatermass Conclusion (1979), with Sir John Mills as the prof, is not great, but the better original TV serial came out on US disk back in the 00's.
And if you know John Carpenter's personal geek-love of all the Quatermass movies, "Pit" and "Conclusion" are valuable to understanding Carpenter's 80's movies--Such as "Prince of Darkness" (where, for all purposes, Donald Pleasance plays the Professor, and Carpenter credits himself on the screenplay as "Martin Quatermass, brother of the well-known scientist"), or for the world's-most-annoying-jingle in "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" that he had an uncredited Nigel Kneale write the story for.
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7 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:
#2: FANTASIA (1940)
(Not to be your nagging conscience, but...?)
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And if you need help finding some of the obscure 50's-60's live-actions, may I recommend Vudu VOD rental as probably one of the most comprehensive archive of "lost" Disney films available on the Net? (Unless you know of another place to watch "The Sword & the Rose", "Emil & the Detectives", "Moon Pilot" and "Best of True-Life Adventures"?)
And if Snow's "Betty Boop voice" and tendency to giggle bothers you, keep in mind, the character in the original Grimm tale was a little 10-12 yo. girl. The studio decided to make her 16 for more romantic interest (yes, she is technically the youngest Disney princess behind Ariel, Rapunzel and Jasmine), but that she still had a "child-like" way of looking at things, for the benefit of the original story.
Apparently, Walt Disney wrote up a strict contract for Adriana Caselotti (the voice of Snow White), in which it stated that she was not allowed to voice or sing for any other major characters due to the fact that she was recognizable (this mainly had to do with preserving the magic and keeping that character integrity intact).
Although, of course, that contract didn't apply to MGM:
"...Wherefore art thou, Romeo?"
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4 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
It's been a long time since I've seen this one, so decided to watch it again, which prompted me to challenge myself to go back and watch/re-watch every animated and live action Disney movie in chronological order (by release year). I might start a thread for this extensive challenge, who knows.
Not a bad idea, at that. There are a few lesser-known in-between movies folks haven't seen.
And if it helps, by the time you get into the War years, Disney Movie Club--which has been playing Warner Archive and offering rare MOD titles of all the back catalog Blu titles they're afraid to sell on retail--recently Blu-uptweaked that double-feature disk of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. (Walt & El Grupo documentary sold separately...Eh, it doesn't tell you much anyway.)
Darn, I read the title and thought we were in for some of the usual grownup-feminist issue-laden Disney-bashing "deconstruction" mistakes ("Snow is a male fantasy, who cleans total strangers' houses because she loves domesticity, and throws away her life sitting around to wait for strange princes to come and find her wherever she is!"), or the newly awakened discovery from actually watching the movie at close range, busting most of the pop myths, and seeing how good it was all along. Oh, well, maybe by the time we get to Cinderella. ?
Another thing I noticed: if the Evil Queen had truly wanted Snow White dead, why didn't she just stab her to thoroughly do the trick? Why did she choose a potion in which there's a loophole?
"She'll be buried ALIVE!" Oh yeah...She knows what she's doing.
Some young fans do still inquire about the Queen's motivations, though:
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44 minutes ago, skimpole said:
There was the contrast between the anarchism of the characters in Hair and the banality in the music. There was the oversimplifications in Amadeus to support the dubious contrast between sober mediocrity and irresponsible genius.
If you'd seen Amadeus on stage, Schaffer's play was highly theatrical-stylized, told entirely from Salieri's viewpoint, and Mozart is resentfully depicted as even more of an unsympathetically lunatic giggling manchild-idiot. Although a few of the play scenes are intact in the movie, Schaffer and Forman completely revamped the play into a more "realistic" biopic of a genius who, well, was irresponsible and self-indulgent, although not perhaps to the degree of the movie.
(The original theatrical trailer first arrived on the success of the Broadway play, and you can see it deliberately trying to play itself in more of Schaffer's original play-dialogue style.)
And the contrast in Hair seemed to be more about the free, cosmic principles in all the songs--and their over-mythologized decade reputations since then--and the fact that our anarchic heroes themselves close-up seemed to be such self-absorbed a-holes who were just talking a great game at the world. Like the black character who walked out on his girl to join the movement, until she confronts him again with "Easy to Be Hard"...She gets the most sympathy in the entire movie, and even if you even remotely liked the characters in the first half, it gets a lot harder to after that.
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8 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Yes, I've heard/read several instances of people calling Black Panther not only the first black-led superhero film, but referring to him as Marvel's first black superhero,
If it hadn't been for the Blade shot, I never "woulda" remembered that the only reason a Black Panther movie even existed in studio ether even back before Marvel Studios, was that Wesley Snipes originally wanted to produce a solo out-of-context Panther movie for himself, back in the old 90's "Marvel Curse" days, after the Blade movies. (And before the tax troubles.)
Again, for the obvious reason, and Snipes believing that only he was "anointed" to bring the project forward.
Quotewhich I'm sure Don Cheadle and Anthony Mackie really appreciate.
Unless you call someone on that, and then they backpedal with, "Yes, but really, Falcon and War Machine were sidekicks, basically..."
Which I'm sure Cheadle and Mackie also really appreciate.
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5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Spence was referring to domestic (U.S. only) box office.
Which hasn't really meant a danged thing since the 90's, now that tickets cost $12, movies open on the same day with 3000+ screens, and every local shopping-mall theater routinely has 10-15 screens.
It was a little different in E.T.'s "Ballpark rule" day....When was the last time you even SAW "Sold Out" at a box-office window, apart from pre-Fandango'ed opening weekends where fans bought tickets online a month ahead?
4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:Compare it to the aforementioned A Wrinkle in Time, which failed to reach anywhere near the same success, despite even more overt attempts to connect the film to social movements or political statement making.
Good point: Both were Disney's "big" movies for February and March, and both trumpeted up their ethnic/female importances (and Wrinkle even had Oprah in it, no less), but Marvel was classy, while "Wrinkle" was just loopy. Especially if you'd read the book.
Also Panther opened in February/Valentine's/Presidents' holiday, which studios are now courting as the new "medium-big" release date because they don't understand why Deadpool and Fifty Shades made all their money...But it's still February, when it's still a drought, there's nothing else in theaters, and it's usually been a month or more since we starving audiences have seen a good December movie.
As opposed to Wrinkle, which was Disney's big player in the overcrowded March Geek-Week stakes, but it hit the early week when kids weren't out of school yet, and "Ready Player One" lucked out with the big Easter week.
4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:I found Black Panther to be an entertaining superhero movie with some small messaging but an emphasis on morally righteous heroics, visual splendor and well-executed action beats. I also didn't go into the movie with a chip on my shoulder about it.
I thought it was front-loaded with all the press and "Buying theaters out for Harlem orphanages" stunts--
Mostly by a lot of activists who had never watched the other Marvel movies in their lives, still believed Panther was, quote, the "only black superhero" in existence, and thus didn't know T'Challa had more and better action scenes in "Civil War".
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Wait, they have aired Million Dollar Legs, haven't they?
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I also watched "The Funeral" which I'd never seen and thoroughly enjoyed its very realistic take on rituals concerning the moribundus.
Juzo Itami's other comedies (including A Taxing Woman 1 & 2 ) never quite got as screwball-funny as Tampopo, but were interesting looks at the crazy complexities of modern Tokyo society.
Particularly the Yakuza, which he not only effectively satirized in Minbo no Onna, but where he also provided merchants and restaurants with a series of real-life strategies to combat the Yakuza's minor-level "Refund racket" protection-bullying. A point that became less funny when Itami was found dead five years later in a suspiciously unexplained, quote, "suicide" off a tall building. ?
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10 hours ago, TopBilled said:
Not sure if political correctness has anything to do with it.
A few nights ago, before I started this thread, I watched THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT on Starz. Let's be frank-- Don Knotts was hardly an American version of Laurence Olivier (he wasn't meant to be). I'd never seen this film before. In fact, aside from his TV sitcom work, I think the only film I'd ever seen him in was THE INCREDIBLE MR. LIMPET since TCM aired it a few times. I wasn't impressed with LIMPET, and since I feel he's only ever playing variations of Barney Fife (including Ralph Furley), I wasn't expecting much when I sat down to watch RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT.
Then I gather you had a childhood on which not one TV station ever played THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN?
You poor deprived soul...
I'll grant that Astronaut was well-meaning but weak, Limpet had a concept but little plot, THE LOVE GOD? is more of a social-historical artifact, and HOW TO FRAME A FIG-G is just sad, but even for having one screen persona, Knotts deserved one classic worthy of his talent.
(And to any who disagree, double-dare knock off the chip!)
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1 hour ago, TomJH said:
And don't forget Mostel's strong performance as a scared would-be hood in THE ENFORCER (1951), (an uncredited) Raoul Walsh-directed Murder Inc. crime drama, with Bogart and one of my favourite Ted De Corsia performances.
And, of course, Disney's Chip & Dale "Rescue Rangers" foe Fat Cat, whose voice and design was patterned after a 60's Zero Mostel parody, right down to the balding cowlicks:
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3 hours ago, laffite said:
He is miscast as any proteus? He never changes.
Well, think he meant that while Trump is miscast as a computer, he's perfectly cast as the rapist that Proteus IV was--After all, where exactly did Proteus grab Julie Christie?
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2 hours ago, Princess of Tap said:
But I'm a sucker for Japanese films because it takes me a long time to figure out the stylistic humor-- and then the film's over.
This film is definitely for a mature and open-minded audience. LOL
Siskel & Ebert were utterly, albeit pleasantly, baffled by the film when it came out: They thought it was movie parody at first, with the "Western showdown" of the rival noodle shop, thought the food-sex couple was a deliberate "9-1/2 Weeks" parody, and thought that the gag where the grocery employee "stalks" the tomato-squeezer was a deliberate parody of the grocery shootout from Sylvester Stallone's "Cobra". (This was 1986, btw.)
But I didn't fall into Japanese anime fandom until around '88-'90 (back when we didn't even have subtitles or dubs), and in '86, Tampopo was our first Python-like cultural thunderbolt that the reserved keep-face nation not only HAD a working sense of humor, but a rather silly one...And this, in the middle of mid-80's anti-Japanese paranoia and resentful racist jokes over their corporate image. Two or three years later, I stumbled across the screwball anime-comedies of "Urusei Yatsura" and "Project A-Ko", and the cute Studio Ghibli movies, and got quite a taste of Japan's characteristically all-out ability to poke fun at its own obsessiveness over its hobbies, but Juzo Itami's live-action arthouse comedies were our first warning sign.
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1 hour ago, CinemaInternational said:
I also kind of wonder what made The Blues Brothers offensive.....that is outside of the mortified heads of automobile companies....
Believe it or not, in 1980, The Blues Brothers ended up on ALMOST every critics' 10 Worst of the Year list--Let's just say that after a few consecutive years of Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds good-ol'-highway comedies, let alone the same summer that saw "Smokey & the Bandit II" become one of the year's biggest hits, it was a bad time for Jake & Elwood to be pursued by the Illinois State Troopers. You couldn't get a bigger straw to break the camel's back than that one.
I say "almost", because two of the lone dissenters were....Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. Chicago's favorite sons. When they gave the movie high praise for being "a salute to the soul of Chicago", and for putting James Brown, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway in the same movie, only then did shocked public opinion slowly begin to change.
(The critic community hadn't been so shocked at such a "renegade" stunt since Pauline Kael had praised "The Warriors".
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13 hours ago, sewhite2000 said:
A Clockwork Orange is largely vanilla now? What movies has tuca been watching that have pushed it into that category?
Watership Down is "largely vanilla" today?? It was mainstream Great Literary Animation when it came out in the 70's on the heels of the bestseller, and now it's cult-hipstered today as "Bloody kid-traumatizing bunny-shredding".
As an active (though not presidential) Tweeter-at-large, esp. in the @Filmstruck channel, I had a most rollicking Tuesday illustrating AND annotating all my own personal choices in the categories and variations FS pitched all day, and on into the wee hours of the night.
Just to give folks some idea--Define Yourself:
Musicals: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986298184652722177
SciFi: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986375894292934657
International: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986381709057851392
Comedy: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986401815599214592
Horror: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986418565850062849
Cult: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986458765720465408
...Hope this doesn't burn out as fast as other Twitter-powered viral crazes, we've really started something impressive, here.
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5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Du Barry Was a Lady (1943) -
Also featuring Virginia O'Brien, Zero Mostel in his movie debut,
Interesting, to say the least, to see a young pre-Blacklist Zero Mostel being pitched by MGM as the Next Phil Silvers.
I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything outside of the post-Blacklist late-60's, as Max Bialystock, Pseudolus, or Tevye (on the cast album).
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On 7/24/2002 at 11:57 AM, Guest Jagiello, James said:
He said that today's 10a.m. Eastern movie--I forget the title--was from Warner Bros., but when the movie started, the "Turner" logo didn't appear, neither did the "WB" shield...instead we saw the lady with the torch from Columbia!LOL
Probably wasn't William Castle's Zotz, though?:
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9 hours ago, TopBilled said:
There are two reviews for DON RICARDO RETURNS on the IMDb. One of them is by a reviewer who obviously loathed the movie. The title of their review is 'The Curse of El Stupido.' I had to laugh at the clever review title but I don't think I'd go so far as to call a movie stupid.
The first thing your sixth-grade Writing teacher teaches you is how to look up a thesaurus and learn that there are other, more descriptive adjectives in the English language than "Stupid". That term tends to be used more by 7-12 yo.'s, meaning "Something outside of my own personally-sheltered experience I don't want to be obligated to think about by grownups."
And then, of course, there's the more concise illustration of a movie's stupidity by example. In the title's case, the reviewer was more likely calling attention to the idiotic decisions the scriptwriter forced the character to make, rather than the production or the actors.
And also, let's not forget, it's user-submitted IMDb. 'Nuff said.
Oh yes, definitely have I seen stupid movies. I'd say anybody who has ever watched "Manos the Hands of Fate" would probably say that. Also check out "Ring of Terror", a public domain film that is very stupid.
(Yes, I already have both those MST3K episodes on disk. And so do you.)
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8 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
The Dark Tower (1943) - British thriller from Warner Brothers and director John Harlow.
A Dark Tower and a cowboy?--You could make a great hit movie out of that!
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Some TV's have a "Status" function, which will bring up your bitrate, audio, etc.--Not sure if it works on cable, but Netflix used to have one.
Usually, most free, cable or streaming broadcast HDTV is in 720p, since it's small enough to transmit, but good enough picture quality for flatscreens without being 1080p Blu-ray. Vudu and some other VOD services offer 1080p "HDX" for streaming/download, but you gotta pay for that.
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5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Plus, he could have knocked the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline out of the park.
Instead of the Iron Man 2 version that we got.
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18 hours ago, jakeem said:
Bond moribund? I don't think so. If anything, he's more relevant than ever in a dangerous world. And the Bond films have been winning Academy Awards in recent years.
In fact, the Pierce Brosnan movies (with the exception of the squicky, misogynist "Goldeneye") pretty much redefined Bond's character for the "modern" 90's, mixing cold, trained MI6 cynicism with his "fantasy" persona, without giving into the deconstruction, British self-hatred or Bourne-worship of the Craig movies.
Unfortunately, the Brosnan Bonds were also heavy on the goofy CGI-embellished stunts, soured Brosnan on the role, and strayed too far off the subject--Sort of like "Spectre" was accused of doing.
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2 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Very fine film with most of the best African-American talent available at the time. The only thing missing is a 16 year old Sidney Poitier.
And Dooley "Casablanca" Wilson, who played Anderson's role on stage.
I'll grant that Astronaut was well-meaning but weak, Limpet had a concept but little plot, THE LOVE GOD? is more of a social-historical artifact, and HOW TO FRAME A FIG-G is just sad, but even for having one screen persona, Knotts deserved one classic worthy of his talent.
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'The Simpsons' Sets the New Record Tonight
in General Discussions
Posted
That's because 50's-60's TV series had 39 episodes in a full season, not 26.
And in Simpsons' case, it's more a case of an entire generation who've literally never been alive to know a time when the show wasn't on the air. Usually that's a compliment in Walt Disney or Ed Sullivan's case, but when you see it having practically rewritten the "Edgy" prime-time cartoon, and few generations know any other kind of sitcom or cartoon humor, it's more a case of "Oh, people, get out more! It's not some national museum you have to preserve!"
It's been probably the second-most "When are they going to pull the PLUG??" series behind SNL, and it's been suspected Fox only kept it alive as an endangered species throughout those troubled late-90's/00's years just because they still expected that Movie would come out someday. If you hear rumors of a Fox Family Guy movie still floating around, that also explains a lot about the last fifteen years.