EricJ

I actually blogged on this at one point-- Because actors now ask for Points and salary instead of grosses, the big money for stars is Character Representation. Meaning, that in the final poster, every actor with an agent to say so demands that they be featured in the final marketing poster, which is why every poster now looks like a class picture. (Also why, for a big summer blockbuster, why we get six or seven lobby posters with one of the main characters EACH--It's their Award For Participating.) As for why some are bigger than others, I made the comparison to the old days of medieval European religious art: Before the Italians had discovered 3D perspective, the size of the flat 2D characters depicted was a symbolic representation of their social importance we were meant to be aware of: The ginormous saint would always be just slightly bigger than the king/patron, who was bigger than the normal-size priests, who were twice the size of their churches, out of which little teeny peasants would be exiting, and so on. As for why some actors in the poster happen to be closer (bigger) than the minor new ones in back (smaller), I merely quoted Grover's explanation of "Near....Fa-a-a-a-ar!!"

I detect a little deliberate antipathy, in a one-third-old year that already gave us Peter Rabbit and Fifty Shades Freed. So far, the audience reaction has been divided into "It looks funny!" from people who haven't read the book, "It looks funny!" from people who have read the book, and a general consensus on "Giant Oprah-zilla...Insert punchline here." Me, I'm in that little invisible sliver of the pie chart reading "I couldn't stand the book" (even if you liked the Narnia stories' "religious allegory", clear the dance floor for Madeline L'Engle), but can accept it's at least more visually imaginative than that 00's TV-movie Disney already gave us back when they were playing with their new ABC-TV toy. Some of them ARE: Walt had to sell Fantasia to RKO to pay back his big-city stereo costs, and RKO cut the small-town version into shreds and made a howling mess of the marketing. (Eerily similar to Fantasia 2000's fate in its later non-IMAX cineplex release.) John Musker and Ron Clements had wanted to make Treasure Planet literally since the days of Black Cauldron (but Eisner & Katzenberg thought it "wasn't commercial" and stuck them on Great Mouse Detective, Little Mermaid and Hercules*)--And it had the bad timing not only to be released two weeks after Harry Potter 2 and 007, but hit the new anti-Eisner sentiments from enraged Lilo & Stitch uber-fans who thought Chris Sanders should be crowned laurels and be made new Disney Czar. Prince of Persia is actually a respectable version of the fan-sacred "Sands of Time" video-game, if you happen to be one of the fans who already played it, and one of the arguable points in "Why can't we have one good video-game movie?". Not too many paying moviegoers had, though. The Alamo, in addition to its Disney big-budget "Remember 'Pearl Harbor'!" historical-blockbuster image, originally had horror stories of "PC historical revisionism" during production, most of which were either toned down in rewrites or were simply inaccurate. It's no John Wayne (except for a movie-stealing Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett), but its B.O. became basically an early-00's symbol of "Disney can't do anything right, so either bury them now or kick Eisner out!" I can not now, nor have I ever understood the murderous rages fans still go into fourteen years later at the very mention of "Home on the Range"--But it did come out the same month as The Alamo, when those same enraged Lilo fans couldn't understand why the studio hadn't simply dropped dead and ate dirt yet after Treasure Planet. (Yes, Roseanne actually is funny as a cow, and judging from those ABC Oscar ads, oh, we sure want her back now, don't we?) During the whole anti-Eisner campaign, you never once heard Range mentioned outside of the same sentence as Alamo. Never. Once. EVER. John Carter is...as good a version of the corny book series as you could get, and is unquestionably a labor of love--For those who love the books. It's now remembered only for being so deliberately and willfully badly-marketed during an already risky March-madness, it lost the major Disney studio exec his job. I had to substitute a few of the four, since no sane person on earth who was alive to have seen it in a theater would EVER call "Return to Oz" a good film (unless they were defending David Shire's score to the bitter end). That was one of those same rare nightmarish peeks over the cliff into the dark, swirling abysses of director/studio insanity that left analysts wondering why "Lone Ranger" and "Tomorrowland" didn't succeed at the box office. As for "Mars Needs Moms", that, like the CGI "A Christmas Carol", was one of Robert Zemeckis's own private insanities, and Carol had already made him a dead-director-walking at the studio by that point. And as for Sorcerer's Apprentice, Deedles and Around/80, those were merely in the "Ohhhhh....dear gods. " category. --- * - After Black Cauldron, Hercules beat the record as biggest studio-crushing animated flop of all time. If it's considered a fan-favorite on disk today, that's because our hot audience heads have cooled somewhat in twenty years, but most of the murderous rages against it at the time may have just been the delayed-reaction confusion to sort out our feelings why Hunchback of Notre Dame hadn't really been that good a movie...The reasons why didn't hit us until a month or two after it'd left theaters, and then we all picked up a baseball bat. It wouldn't be until after "Chicken Little", THE worst Disney animated in history, that Eisner would finally be kicked out, but it must have been the new 00's discovery of 3-D that recouped enough losses to keep Chicken off the list.

Not vaudeville, but burlesque--There's a difference. Vaudeville might be a duo routine, like their playing "Who's On First?" to a vaudie audience in Naughty Nineties. But the kind of burlesque played at Minsky's was a more improvised "comic jazz", where there were a certain number of set comic sketches, that proceeded to be destroyed by walk-ons, ad-libs and whatever random gags struck the comics' fancies to pad it out--The style generally took the form of the two characters (A as the city-slicker sharpie and C as the lovable motormouthed/obnoxious child-like nebbish who gets all the good one-liners off the sharpie) trying to do some simple task on the street corner, while bit players, like Barber, barge in, do one crazy gag, and run off again, leaving the comic to react. Burlesque was dying by the forties after LaGuardia outlawed the theaters, which were moving to movies anyway, so A&C deliberately looked for excuses to preserve their Minsky's classics by writing them into their movies--If you know the two styles, that's the appeal of A&C movies. THE classic burlesque routine every banana had to know was the "Nuthouse" sketch that Costello does in Ride 'Em Cowboy, but you can get a clearer taste of classic walk-on-traffic burley-Q when A&C used In Society to enshrine the Susquehanna Hat Company routine for posterity: The original script was studio-written, and reportedly had an ending where A&C defeat Dracula and the monsters with a mad-scientist's shrink ray. Lou makes money showing the monsters in a flea circus, but the only antidote to the ray is pickle juice, and Lou was keeping the monsters in his lunchbox... Lou reportedly took one look at the script and said "My kid could write a better one!", and A&C took over the writing, since they were thinking of doing a stage show with the Monsters already. (The bit where Frankenstein is scared by his first look at Lou was a frequent stage gag.)

(checks off "Experiment: Success" on clipboard)

The fact that we get the "mirror image" callback from the original movie pretty well confirms what the director said, ie. that he wanted to stick in as many "homages" to the original as possible, to show that it was still in the first movie's spirit. ...You know, kind of like Disney's new Star Wars movies do. Often to excess. As for the "message", you can now put this alongside the current trailer for Disney's "Christopher Robin"--another long-buried project that finally got its greenlight on the success of "Saving Mr. Banks"--and start to realize what all those 90's video-sequels were doing all along: Ever notice how the plot of almost every single one of those first few Disney vidquels was "The classic characters got married, had a kid, and had to learn how to relate to their misunderstood children, who went wayward because they didn't feel appreciated"? (Qv. Little Mermaid II, Lion King II: Simba's Pride, Return to Neverland, Lady & the Tramp II: Scamps Adventure) Disney knew what it was doing, in that kids don't buy videos or movie tickets, PARENTS do...And what Disney-indoctrinated parents bought them for was to indoctrinate the next generation on a love of Disney. That's why the plots were distinctly created to push the buttons of grownup Disney moms who dreamed about being Lady, Nala, Wendy or Ariel. Here, with the plots of "Saving Mr. & Mrs. Banks Jr.", and "Saving Mr. Milne", they can continue to hide behind "Parents should reach into their inner children, to understand their outer ones." (Or, as I always call it, the Hook Factor: Do kids really want to see stories about guilty parenting as much as guilty new-parent screenwriters want to write them?)

That's because they don't show the clips next to the technicians' face, and think that either everyone in the industry live-audience knows them, or that they don't "deserve" clips of their work like the actors do-- John G. Avildsen, Director, Michael Ballhaus, Cinematographer, and Terence Marsh, Production Designer, who cares? John G. Avildsen with clips from "Rocky", Michael Ballhaus with clips from "GoodFellas" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula", and Terence Marsh with clips from "Hunt For Red October", "A Bridge Too Far" and "Scrooge", now we start getting a little misty-eyed film history. At least June Foray, Voice Actress got to hold a little Rocky & Bullwinkle plush. (And okay, so we knew Haruo Nakajima was Godzilla, but...) If you're going to do an In Memoriam, it helps if we have something to Rememberoriam them by.

Back in '14, the nail-biting "Boyhood vs. Birdman" contest was so officially considered the "Lowest ratings in the show's history", it inspired the Academy to finally consider retiring the 8-10 Nomination rule. Unfortunately, they couldn't in '15, because the rule also allows one vote for an Animated Best Picture...And there was a certain Pixar movie that year that was the front runner for Picture, so they decided to put the change off for one more year, at least. One year became four, and if 43.6 was "Lowest ratings ever", what do they call last Sunday night? At various points, however, they did get Chris Rock and Ellen DeGeneres back to host again.

Have you even SEEN Coco yet and listened to any of the other songs from it? Remember Me so stuck out like a weak, droning sore thumb, I was sitting there thinking, "Why are they singing Frozen songs in Mexico? " (Given a choice, I would picked the song our hero sings at the end, that sounded like an actual mariachi song.) Yes, it seems to have gotten its big Annual Disney/Pixar Song push from day one ONLY for the fact that it was thematically crucial to the plot--If there was an award for Best Sentimental Plot Device, it's got a lock, but as a Song, it's lacking a bit.

Last year, I found myself multitasking between streaming the Oscars, and writing a blog column about WHY nobody's gotten excited about the Oscars since 2004: http://movieactivist.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-27-2017-who-killed-oscars.html It's still pretty much up to date, as all the problems are still in place...Well, all but ONE, of course, and his lack of presence this year was much appreciated.

And before anyone complains "Why are they doing it??", that is LITERALLY a Very Long Story: A Mary Poppins sequel has been one of the great deeply-rooted unkillable Ahab-quests for "New Disney" since the very day Michael Eisner took over--Back then, no one trusted the new change of leadership away from Walt's own appointed Ron Miller, there was still the image that the new corporately created films of '83 and after wouldn't be "real" Disney films, and the new regime had to create some symbolic Old Meets New stunt to show that things hadn't changed, and they were the same old Walt in a new package. (That insecurity sort of faded after we got all those classic cameos in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") That meant sequelizing a Great Core Disney Classic, but get this: Back in the mid-80's, they didn't know what Disney stories were open-ended enough to write sequels to, and could only think of three--The Rescuers, Mary Poppins, and Fantasia. We got "The Rescuers Down Under" and "Fantasia 2000", but bringing back Mary turned out to be a little more elusive than they expected. Everyone knew it was going to be "Mary Poppins Comes Back", from the Travers book where Mary flies back in on a kite, but as far as who was going to be the new screenwriter-invented Bert, that started to get a little more complicated. We almost had "Me & My Girl" star Robert Lindsay stepping directly into Dick Van Dyke's Bert shoes, which would have been a much better idea in the long run than Michael Jackson as a lovable balloon-seller at the park. It's sort of like the Blade Runner sequel or "Tron:Legacy": If it took them thirty head-bashing years of trying to finally get it out, we owe them that much, but that isn't necessarily a guarantee of quality.

Yep, pretty much every one of those great archival vintage-catalog boxsets Warner USED to release (Fred & Ginger, Busby Berkeley, Val Lewton, 50's B-movies), which "Mad King Ludwig" later exiled to his dungeon, as part of Warner's literal campaign to wipe physical disk off the face of retail....And which is now a lot less likely to happen. If you look at what happened to the Movie Morlocks/Filmstruck blog, this is the best thing that could happen to Filmstruck as well: When TCM didn't show up, what was originally supposed to be a mix of Criterion arthouse and TCM studio classics eventually became all Criterion arthouse, the film discussions either turned snooty or gay-cinema, anyone who disagreed (with the latter) was banned from the blog, and pretty soon no one was posting...People aren't going to pay $11 a month for THAT. But with classics on the catalog, you might get a few folk who want to look up "real" movies, just to thumb their nose at Netflix--Or Millennials, who never watch movies anywhere else but the net, saying "See, see, I AM watching 'old movies', so there! I'm even going to watch Citizen Kane, nyeah!" We never got a TCM/Criterion service, but we did get an Instant Archive/Criterion service, where all the Warner, MGM and RKO classics just happened to be anyway. Worked out nicely for Instant Archive as well, since the limited catalog they had streaming rights for on their own seemed to have permanently stagnated--I had Instant Archve for a month or two, caught up on Salem's Lot, Jupiter's Darling, The Horn Blows At Midnight, those two 70's Gene Roddenberry TV-movies and the three Peter Ustinov Poirot TV-movies, and...NOW what?? Every other of their exiled classics I'd already caught on disk!

I think Kimmel WANTED the theme of the evening to be about "We appreciate the audiences!"--I was on a chat last night watching, and every single time someone mentioned going to a cineplex, out came the standard "I hate theaters! Half an hour of trailers! Loud people with cellphones, etc.!" That's an issue with me, and probably with Kimmel and his Inner Child too, since the 20th-cty. generation grew up with actual theaters you were excited to go see, and if they weren't in an old historic place on your own main street, you probably had to road-trip over to another town to get your fix. Today, our cineplexes are built into shopping malls, and we look at our calendar, see that this weekend is Black Panther weekend, and go to "pick up" our movie on the way back from Wal-Mart. We've turned movies into a product instead of an experience, and now we complain about the stores and that home shopping is easier. That's what he wanted it to be anyway. What he got was every other presenter having their confidence artificially boosted by that kissup Golden Globes ceremony, and Natalie Portman or Emma Stone thinking "If they loved that 'male director' bit at the Globes, just WAIT till they get a load of it on the Oscar stage with the world watching!" The four nominated male directors, and Greta Gerwig, who lost... ...Of the two "causes" fighting for attention that night, I found myself sympathizing more with Kimmel. Actually, most of the discussion was fairly busy in the "Holy Do-Over!" thread-- Not exactly the kind of title that would stand out for a general discussion, but it was all we had immediately during and after the ceremony.

And is it too much to ask that the lesser-known character actors, editors, cinematographers, producers, etc., get those little silent dreamlike clips next to their photo of what movies we DO remember them for? Jerry Lewis got a nice one-quintessential-line obit from The Nutty Professor, but as for the others: Even if you do remember what movies John G. Avildsen rose to fame for directing, quick, trivia point for anyone who remembers what Haruo Nakajima (1929-2017) contributed to Hollywood culture:

Uh, Susan Lucci never won an Oscar, but she did eventually win a Daytime Emmy, bringing her one running-joke fame of the 80's to a grinding, screeching halt. And wait, I thought Boss Baby was "this year's Suicide Squad", that ended up as the disgruntled default joke-punchline for Why A Better Movie Wasn't Nominated--Or, wait, was Suicide Squad last year's punchline reason for Why A Better Movie Didn't Win [Your Category Here]?

Land of the Pharaohs (1955) - Another discovery on Warner Archive disk, from perusing the local library: Not as bad as its reputation would seem, as Howard Hawks' first and only attempt to keep up with the 50's and make a cast-of-thousands Sweeping Cinemascope Epic (he reportedly hated the experience). By doing an "Egyptian" story, basically an attempt to do a 50's Old Testament epic without the Bible, ie. a sort of Cecil B. DeMille "Ten Commandments" where Moses never shows up: Stalwart British character-actor Jack Hawkins plays pharaoh Khufu, whose aging post-wars mid-life crisis becomes an obsession with his tomb to the afterlife, and the plot details the building of the great Pyramid, creating probably one of the most architectural sword-and-sandal epics of the 50's. (William Faulkner, who gets his name up with the cast for screenwriting it during his Barton-Fink Hollywood retirement phase, claimed he wanted to portray the Egyptian court as an old Southern plantation, and Pharaoh as "an old Southern colonel".) James Robertson Justice plays the genius architect enslaved to build the interior maze passages, yet the script somehow never gets around to mentioning where any of he and his enslaved people are from, or why they don't happen to subscribe to the Egyptian gods. As you can see from the Warner Archive cover, most of Warner's marketable "cult" attention to this title seems to be paid to a young Joan Collins as the requisite Delilah/Bathsheba "Foreign bad-girl" who wants to scheme her way to the Pharoah's treasure that he wants to take with him. (And meets the predictable end that you can pretty much see coming the minute she first lays eyes on it.) For some reason, that's doomed this movie to be considered a, quote, "Camp classic"--Warner first released the retail DVD in the same "B-movie" package that gave us Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman and Queen of Outer Space--and apart from the very presence of a future 80's Dynasty star, there doesn't seem to be much reason for that until the last ten or fifteen minutes or so. Think a lot of the reputation seems to be that the very name, and the IMDb association with Campy Pop-Culture attracts the, um, er....certain faction of bad-movie fans that go into great self-indulgently superior glees of considering a movie as "Greatest cheeseball turkey ever!", for personal reasons of their own, and those reasons possibly having more to do with the actresses than the actors. ...I'll leave that for a few of the other posters here to test that theory, though.

No, that's Netflix.

Given what he thought was the "timing" for posting it, I don't get it either : "The Emoji Movie" (as expected) swept Worst Picture, Screenplay and Director, while Tyler Perry picked up Worst "Actress" for Boo 2: A Madea Halloween. (Tom Cruise picked up Worst Actor for "The Mummy", Mel Gibson took Worst Supporting Actor for "Daddy's Home 2", and Fifty Shades Darker pretty well cleaned up everything else--A surprise shutout for Transformers: the Last Knight, but voters may have Michael Bay-fatigue.) Seriously, I have NO idea what he thinks he's doing with the post, and that's just starting with the Jethro bit in the first paragraph. Not exaggerating, here: I got nothing.

Well, at least we know that K-spam will be gone in an hour or two-- Whereas we also know that Monday will be equally spammed with a certain Moderator-watched poster deluging us with "What does everoyone think of Lask knkight's *OSCAR surprises?", "That big mEmento with the *OSCAR presenter's las night!" "My early pickkks for *OSCAR 2119!", "My updated early-early pickkks for *OSCAR 20119!" and "Why is noobdy responding to my *OSCAR pests?" (half an hour after posting them) ...At least you can skim over the K-spam. (Let's just say, he ain't seen "Enough to run screaming out of the room" yet. ) Murray can't quite grasp his appeal, as he keeps either trying to be Kaufman-esque "quirky" with facetious stunts (did Space Jam have to immortalize that "I want to join the NBA" phase of his?), or move in to Indie Drama. He only did Ghostbusters as a studio concession for them to let him do the deeply meaningful/personal The Razor's Edge (1984), and I think that's officially the turning point where we lost the hip Caddyshack/Stripes Murray to the sad, gray, jowly Lost in Translation Murray: The deadpan, rebelliously laid-back Dr. Peter Venkman captured something perfectly 80's in "Ghostbusters", but lately, every time Murray does his own comedy, it has to have some Serious aspect to it--Like the whole subplot of his not being able to save the homeless victim in "Groundhog Day". Nowadays, like Jim Carrey, if Murray does Comedy, it's usually some passive-superior snub to the audience expecting him to, or a quick soulless studio paycheck (like "Garfield" or "Larger Than Life"), to fund his more active sideline in appearing in "quirky" Wes Anderson indies...And yes, he's already voicing "Isle of Dogs".

No, I'm talking about watching movies that AREN'T public-domain or MGM/UA. (As opposed to the Nth daily showing of "1984" on PlutoTV, along with the public-domain Popeye cartoons on the kids' channel.) And thank you for bringing up the "Frog in the kettle" illustration of streaming fans still so starry-eyed in love with the generational techno-symbolic idea that they can stream--and thumb their noses at cable companies--they're not aware that there's increasingly less and less TO stream. ("Whaddya mean, 'less'?...Look at all the new series Netflix is making!" )

Also, there's the theory that Fletcher Christian's family was well connected with the nobility and working-stiff Bligh's wasn't, so the family saw to it that the book account was skewed to be a "justifiable" mutiny, to keep from blackening Christian's reputation.

Still, the "twist" of Hopkins' version was that Bligh wasn't a paper tyrant, but a puritanical loyal-Navy man, who had poor management style, blamed too easily, and put too much faith in the Discipline Builds Character ethic of His Majesty's Navy to fairly gauge his jack-tar crew. The '35 Bligh is Laughton's most iconic role, but it's the dumbing-down of studio Hollywood to say that Christian was the "hero" because he was Clark Gable, so Laughton was the "villain".

It was good as an epic until Gibson's "The Passion" came out, and then the groaning noble-masochistic ending started making a LOT more sense in context with the Lethal Weapon movies. That's where we all started to put two and two together about what was going on in Mel's noggin. Patrick McGoohan does basically walk in and steal the entire movie, though, Gibson included.

We were just surprised by Tomei, and a lot of people who hadn't seen the movie were just sour-graping after tearing up their Oscar-bet pools. As for the theory that presenter Jack Nicholson just happened to announce The Departed for Best Picture in '07, most of us wished that was a conspiracy theory, since we all breathed a sigh of relief after two months of the voters going nutty for the physically-painful "quirkiness" of Little Miss Sunshine. And yeah, he was Jack, he'd have probably DONE it, too.

My Prime service rolls over in December, and every December, I face the traumatic Christmas-strapped question of whether it's finally worth saving $99 and dumping PD-Central Prime vs. the free disk-buying shipping from Amazon. Last year, I came to the even more traumatic realization that I was actually watching MORE Amazon than Netflix. I am now in the process of moving whatever Netflix titles I can find elsewhere (eg. Star Trek: Voyager) to Prime and Hulu, and finishing up my last few Netflix-exclusives (eg. the Beat Bugs special), so I can put my subscription's affairs in final order. That might not seem like much, until you find out that I'd been a disk subscriber since 1999, and then it's a pretty big, sad deal. (That said, I'm finding more and more back-of-the-shelf midnight riches on Prime's cheap selection. For one thing, if you're wondering where the word ever came from, The Psychotronic Man (1979) actually IS streaming on "free" Prime as we speak.) If Criterion had an exclusive--I remember renting their "Golden Age of TV" collection--it might be stocked, but if it was the Blu upgrade of an existing disk, like a new Criterion Blu of Midnight Cowboy, Netflix's policy was "Done that!", and they'd stock the existing studio version that was already on their catalog. Had to go to the PL for most of my Criterion, and then just for the bonus features and commentaries.

Streaming?? What, you mean the Library of Alexandria after they burned it? Still, now that Warner Instant Archive has now packed up and moved their streaming digs to FilmStruck, it'll be nice to see some of those exiled classics like 42nd St. and The Great Race, instead of all those Euro-gay Criterion films. Maybe now it'll be the "TCM/Criterion" service it was hyped to be at the beginning. (Now, if only FS would finally deliver on that Playstation 4 app they've been promising for two years...)