EricJ

Yeah, I'm probably getting them confused: I remembered Henry being frustrated by Stan Laurel's fingers in The Devil's Brother from 1933, and he's listed as Armetta. Serves me right for not IMDb'ing before posting.

If it's the 30's actor who invented the stereotypic Italian-waiter sloping walk as he carries a tray, always thought that was Henry Armida. In the wartime 40's, it wasn't popular to be Italian, so some actors either disguised their heritage, or, like Sinatra, went out of their way to do onscreen patriotic stunts--It's possible Armida became Armetta, though it's hard to tell from the picture.

As we learn from the "Electric Boogaloo" Cannon Pictures documentary, Menahem Golan kept saying through the '85 version, "Get me that Stone woman!" to play the heroine. Everyone thought he meant Sharon Stone, who turned out to be a pain on the set and no one ultimately liked, until they finally realized too late Golan's overenthusiastic lack of English had meant Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone.

Think Burt knows that if Hal Needham can get a Life Achievement Oscar, he's next, and trying to sort out his feelings about it--He had a promising start, and was active in theater off camera, but on camera, smirked and good-ol-boy'ed his way through his 70's success, and didn't have the chance to be considered a Serious Actor until his late-90's/early-00's "Boogie Nights" comeback. At which point it may have been too late. I don't know whether a rib-nudging fictional indie comedy would be more disappointing to watch than one of those consciously faked-up "Retired star" mockumentaries where he parodies his image and his retirement, but I'd have rather seen a movie about Burt Reynolds than about Vic Edwards.

Our house never sprang for Premium channels, so we never got to know AMC until the end, when it had to go commercial-- By that point, TCM had tied up everything from Warner, MGM, UA and RKO, which left the old channels with everything from Universal, Fox and Paramount. And while "Backstory" alone was reason enough to watch--and provided Fox with some of its better DVD documentaries--by that point, the studio "starvation" was giving AMC the nickname of "The All-Jaws, Blues Brothers, and The Omen Channel".

Since NbNW has already been mentioned (do I get to mention To Catch a Thief, instead?): I'd just finished slogging through Ryan's Daughter (1970) and thought "How many nature images can David Lean CUT AWAY to?", while Sarah Miles gets hot and heavy with Christopher Jones (when we get "symbolic" images of their respective horses standing out alone on the Wuthering-esque Irish moors, I triple-dog-dare you not to make "Stud" jokes...) As for Best Metaphor, however, Monty Python has that covered:

On most cable networks, the three-hours-later rerun is usually for the West Coast, where their clocks are all messed up.

There's more to be said about it, but this is a family board. Short version: They couldn't get veteran SW screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan back to bring that "old-fashioned" feel that he brought to SW: the Force Awakens (since Kasdan is who you call if you want to write dialogue for Harrison Ford, but Kasdan was too busy doing that Han Solo-spinoff movie for Disney), so they let director Rian Johnson indulge all his Empire Strikes Back fandom all by his widdle self. And since the one thing any Empire fanboy who wasn't alive to have seen it in a theater remembers about Empire was "Oo, what it must've been like back when audiences first found out the twist!"*, he was determined to put as many "shocking" off-character twists of motivation in it as possible to--in what has become the latest bit of studio and defender anti-flop industry psychobabble term--"subvert fans' expectations" about the series. Well, that's not quite an accurate description of what Johnson does: What he does, could be described as, imagine if Johnson, as a screenwriting experiment, wrote the story as he went along, and at every key plot point where a character has to take action, flipped a coin as to whether the character would do the Good Thing or the Bad Thing, and continued the story from there. And he flips the livin' hell out of that coin with every single character for TWO AND A HALF HOURS... If any fan (and I'm not asking) can give a decent scorecard explanation of whose character is on what side by the end credits, I'll give them a buck-ninety-five. ----- * - (And as one who actually was in the theaters in June 1980, What We Thought was "Don't be a freakin' idiot, Luke, what do you think he'd tell you??")

Yeah! THAT'LL show 'em, for trying to be different from other cable networks! Whadda they want us to do, tell them apart from HBO and Showtime?

I've always wondered about that: Yes, the networks show it every Easter just like (they used to) with the Christmas specials, but it's a PASSOVER movie. Y'know, Moses, and the Pharaoh, and the pita-pockets, 'n stuff. Me, I try to keep on topic--Managed to get the very good The Jesus Film (1979) on Blu-ray, even though it's not as unique anymore now that the producers were able to regroup as the Visual Bible Society and produce the possibly even better The Gospel of John (2003). Most of their direct-videos ended up on Amazon Prime, and last year I sat through Dean Jones (yes, he sank into inspirational movies after Herbie) in The Book of Acts...Also not too bad, considering.

The most lasting image that stuck with fans about this movie: (Little did we know how METAPHORIC that opening image would become... )

That's fairly likely--Both were actively left-leaning and vocal about issues: Zero, of course, was Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, while Vincent was only "gray-listed" from studio work because of his 30's support for war against Germany. (Which is considered to be one reason why Price took up horror B-movie work in the 50's, where he had more of a niche than he had at Warner.) Yeah, there's a sense of "The president we haven't done yet" coming off of this movie, regardless of the facts-- I missed it, though, what were the liberties taken? Thought Johnson's impeachment was historically a Clinton-style opposition-party "payback" by opponents of Lincoln's more lenient Reconstruction strategies.

One of a whole string of British epics that post-Treasure Island Disney made in the early 50's, when they couldn't take their money out of postwar UK, and decided to spend it there on British period productions like "The Story of Robin Hood", "Kidnapped" and "Rob Roy". All standard generic would-be Technicolor Errol Flynn, but with a Walt touch. Disney trying to make 20,000 Leagues happen again with more Jules Verne--And while this one doesn't have giant subs or Kirk Douglas, as noted, it does have a good never-a-dull-moment round-the-world Verne adventure, and Chevalier.

Monk: "Would you believe I once ran the biggest advertising agency in NY?" Felix: "I shot one of your layouts for you, remember?: 'The Talking Bra'!" And you mean you just walked away from all that?" Monk: "(nods)...Said goodbye to the Talking Bra." -- "The Odd Monks"

Richard Matheson, basically, though I don't know whether it was in his book. The book also goes into a lot of related Profound Issues that, um, couldn't be in 50's Universal International movies.

We have "Utopia" as one of the topic tags, and no discussion of Laurel & Hardy or Hope/Crosby "Road to Utopia"? (And darn, I thought the other tag said "Fantasy IS-land".)

Just finished watching that on library disk less than 24 hours ago... A prime example of how Inishiro Honda's kaiju movies pioneered the idea that the monster was usually only the sub-plot to a B-movie thriller about crime, espionage, or alien invasion. In this case, the monster spoils a gangster heist in the opening scene, police have to protect the moll against the gangster's "disappearance" while a scientist tries to float the "radioactive monster" theory, and there ends up being actually MORE screen time in the movie devoted to an anti-narcotics police procedural stakeout, than to the threat of killer nuclear slime. ...Usually it would be an even 50-50 in Honda's Godzilla movies, but Godzilla had more screen personality than wall-climbing mucus.

That's okay, I've learned to check whether the new post shows up on the NEXT page... Me, I just fix multi-posts by using the Editing button, and rewriting something else clever.

THAT we officially have on record: Bruce wasn't a popular hero name in the 70's...'Nuff said. Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo were properly named, however, as Marvel is loyal to its sources. ...You're deliberately baiting these questions, aren't you?

Besides the obvious, the other marketable gimmick of She-Devil at the time was "Gasp! Meryl finally does a comedy!!" (Well, yes and no...This is Susan Seidelman and Roseanne we're talking about.) Postcards From the Edge wasn't until a year later, and Mike Nichols' Heartburn from '86 was classified as more of an "Ironic comedy-drama", although it's hard for a Nichols film not to have cheap ironic gags. By the time she did Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks in '91, we pretty much took it for granted not only that Meryl wanted to do comedy, she was pretty good at it (when given actual good material), and was visibly getting as bored with the French Lieutenant's Woman as we were by the time Sophie's Choice got the Oscar. Nowadays, after that Disney rant*, seems like, apart from the odd real-life historical-bio figure, she's content to just sit back, choose her projects more self-indulgently and feminist-flipoff the industry, and it's sort of appropriate that we now remember her for getting Jack Nicholson's reserved star-schmooze seat at the Oscar ceremony. ---- * - Since I don't live in Hollywood, I'll never actually get to bet Meryl a $100 bill over whether "King Louie in Disney's 'Jungle Book' was a racist Louie Armstrong!", and I'll just have to settle for profiting off her feminist defenders.

Raise the Titanic (1980) Don't know why exactly, except that: A) I've been on a kick for mid-late 70's Decline-of-Roadshow epics, and I've been through the good ones and down to the bad ones (started when "A Bridge Too Far" turned up on streaming, and now I'm down to "Ryan's Daughter" on DVD), B ) Was curious about this one ever since seeing the uber-hype teaser trailer in theaters, in probably one of the greatest blitz of summer trailers I ever had to sit through in '80, and C) I'll watch anything with a sweeping John Barry score, and boy, could he pick 'em throughout the mid-late 70's. (Although even his score to Disney's "The Black Hole" was listenable.) In addition to being "The movie that killed Lord Grade", it's mostly remembered today as "No, not THAT Titanic movie...", and in fact plays as, "What if James Cameron just forgot about Kate and Leo, and just stuck with all that opening submersible-exploration footage for the rest of the movie?" Although this was made back in 1980, when deep-submersibles were still the stuff of fiction, and we thought the Titanic wreck was still in a lot better shape than it turned out to be. Richard Jordan plays Clive Cussler's all-around-action-bestseller-hero-guy Dirk Pitt, a sort of Navy version of Jack Ryan, who acts pretty much as you would expect from the name, who oversees Jason Robards' mission to recover a rare Defense element from the Titanic's vault--the hard way--before the Russians can get it. At least, we think the Russians are after it too, the subplot handles it so lackadaisically, that bit of tension is resolved within minutes, and in much less time than Ice Station Zebra would have done it. Most of the movie, however, is spent with deep-exploration subs wandering around murky water, trying to shine flashlights on murky wrecks, and no real indication of where or how deep they are until something happens to the subs at certain plot points. Alec Guinness also shows up for two scenes near the beginning, to steal the entire movie as an old survivor salt, and gives the movie the dash of misty-eyed gravitas it needs to get through the rest. But it wouldn't be a movie unless they delivered on the title: In probably the best-reason-for-viewing climax, the budget's biggest expense finally arrives in NY with its sentimentally epic John Barry theme, and the first person to say "Better late than never" gets hit over the head with a copy of Ghostbusters II (seriously, have you no shame?) But wait, we forgot about that element--Which brings the movie to one of the anticlimactic "So what the heck did we just watch??" endings in movie history, that probably played better in Cussler's book than in a movie of this budget, but to be fair, if you couldn't see it telegraphed in the first half hour, you deserve to be frustrated. Still, I couldn't help it--Even bad movies were bigger in the 70's. (And 1980 still counts as "70's movies", because "80's movies" didn't officially start until 1981.) Had to search it out on a rare unwarped, unsped, pristine full copy on YouTube, since the DVD's been hard to find for a while. Let's see, what's next...Somebody's probably got "Inchon" on the Tube.

I could take a standard whitebread 40's Hollywood-imitation Arabian Nights, if it was, y'know, "Thief of Bagdad", or Harryhausen's Sinbad, or something like that-- But when we not only get Shemp Howard as a low-comedy-relief shipless Sinbad who annoys everyone with bragging about his travels, but also teamed with John Qualen as low-comedy-relief Aladdin who has to take co-stooge jobs because he lost his lamp...This movie not only slaps you in the face for expecting the book, it directly slaps you in the face with the book for expecting it, just to be nasty about it.

(TL;DW version: What if you replaced Sally Hawkins with Eugene Levy?)

Yeah, like maybe you need to watch the clip first--It's funnier that way. (Remember that "Forrest Gump vs. Curious Case of Benjamin Button" one a few years ago when that one was up for Oscars? This is worse.) At least, more human than Del Toro's last soulful/sensitive Black Lagoon fish-dude-in-love, but at least that one already came from a comic book:

Del Toro seems to have seen Splash: ("But he directed Pan's Labyrinth!"...Yeah, and let's not get into those Spirit of the Beehive discussions, either. Gil was probably kicking himself that someone else stuck Universal's 30's Frankenstein into some kid's Spanish-Civil-War childhood.) Oh, so now that they finally got the Columbia UPA cartoons on DVD, Del Toro's moved on to classic musicals, and doesn't have to have Gerald McBoingBoing playing on every background set like in Hellboy and Blade II? Well, like Marilyn Monroe said, maybe he just wanted a little love.