EricJ

"...Try again--Then give up. No use being a danged fool about it." - WC Fields

Well, that's because we were so real-estate-boom thrilled about building multiplexes, and how MANY movies we could see, in the big early/mid-80's movie boom, we forgot the thrill of going TO a movie. In the old days, not every movie opened at the same time in every town. Since most theaters had 1-3 screens, and were independently owned and operated, you went to your local theater to see if something good was playing...And if by chance the movie you wanted to see was playing in the next town's 1-3 screen theater, you packed the kids up in the car, and traveled to a different town, maybe stopping off for dinner on the way. And since the local theater owner was only concerned with what would sell the most tickets*, if a movie didn't deliver, another one would be on its way next week, and you dug out the newspaper on Friday to see which movie would wend its way to your own town. ...Am I talking about the glorious tinsleltown 30's and 40's? No. I'm talking about the late 70's to the mid-80's, when you wondered where you'd have to go to see Empire Strikes Back and E.T. But since MULTIPLEXES! had to be big, rambling, cavernous and labyrinthine, they had to be built where big spaces of real-estate were cheapest: Five miles out of town on the highway. Or, built into the local five-miles-out-of-town-on-the-highway shopping mall, that offered you the convenience of stopping to "pick up" your movie on the way back from Target. And what selection, too--Every movie in release that week available, for your convenience! ----- * - Back in the early 80's, before chains took over every theater to pay the bills that independent owners couldn't, theater managers had to actually bid for movies, based on some actual judgment about whether or not any sane person would buy tickets for them...Hey, even that slasher movie might get some teenagers on a Friday night! Which meant theater owners had to watch "sizzle reel" sale presentations or early screenings, and know ahead of time what they were showing...One time, back in '81, I ended up in a conversation with someone's friend who ran a theater, and insisted on bending my ear with early advance warnings not to go see the movie he had to sales-screen that afternoon: Something about time-traveling dwarves, worst thing he'd ever seen in his life!

Most delivery was in the wee morning hours (hence song lyrics about "Milkman's on his way", and if they weren't, the housewife would be there to accept, er, delivery. Our old neighborhood, growing up in the 70's, used to have dairy delivery, and our house even had a silent-butler hatch from the outside to put the milk/bread deliveries into. Of course, the milk always froze in the winter, and then as a kid, I would always be sent through the hatch, whenever we came back at night and it was easier than getting out the keys to open the door.

Oh, so you missed Star Wars: the Last Jedi in theaters, then? Don't worry, it'll be on disk soon.

Ehh, Peter Jackson ruined the Galadriel scene-- In Ralph Bakshi's animated '78 version, she's clearly making rueful fun at herself for ever thinking she could be tempted...Who could think she was being serious?: Nowadays, though, I have to search the public-domain backwaters of Amazon Prime to find all my undiscovered Psychotronia. Streaming-Netflix has turned too Big to be goofy and obscure. (And when the heck did disk-Netflix ever have Criterion titles??) Caligula is basically two movies that were prevented from meeting--Malcolm McDowell and an all-star cast in an R-rated big-budget Roman epic, who weren't told about Bob Guccione's X-rated Penthouse sex scenes being filmed separately. As they say, never let the left hand know what the....er.....um.....right hand is doing.

On a holiday weekend, I'm guessing?

Except that it backfired so badly with audiences, that Warner ended up re-selling it as a comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7VTgm7OYUM (No, this actually aired. This is NOT a YouTube comedy-edit trailer like the "Feel-good-comedy Shining" one.)

Most people are still in love with Instant Netflix for movies because they either A) remember the mail service, or B ) joined in 2010, when it was a free bonus with your mail service, and there actually WERE a few movies on the catalog. Although half of those were on loan from StarzPlay, which had a nice healthy catalog of mainstream Hollywood features, but in very shoddy SD that customers always blamed Netflix for. And in March 2011, you may remember the industry press suddenly panicking over, quote, "Netflix-geddon": StarzPlay broke their ties with Netflix and took their movies with them, and more than 200 titles disappeared off the service overnight. Guess what, folks...Thought Netflix was digitizing all their own disks and they'd all be there forever? First hard lesson. You literally heard people a year before saying "I sold my disk collection because Netflix has it all!", and a year later, there was screaming and tearing of hair. Of course, up to that point, the industry had literally been ignoring the idea of streaming. Streaming wasn't very good quality in 2010, almost nobody owned a Roku, and Amazon, Hulu and Crackle were all trying to sell their own service on desktop-browser, thinking we'd watch them on our hip, trendy young cellphones. If you got a "Digital copy" with your DVD, it was usually a little downloadable file to play on your iPod Video or other portable device, because that was all there was for video before the iPad, and back when Kindle was still black-&-white. Netflix had come up with the idea of putting their streaming service on game consoles, smart-TV's and AppleTV's for the living room, and once the studios discovered streaming, all of a sudden the idea of only getting paid for them once a month, while everyone watched them as many times as they wanted for free, got a lot less popular. Now, let's be honest, NOBODY's bought digital-purchase movies: I didn't, you haven't, and let's see a show of hands of how many people never even got around to redeeming those free disk codes from their Blu-rays, because they didn't know why they'd ever need one. But studios had to blame somebody, and all of a sudden, "the popularity of Instant Netflix" was the main scapegoat, and the chief threat to the future of studios selling all their movies on Digital. So they stopped licensing their movies to the Enemy...Starve the camels, they thought, and they'll come find the watering holes on their own. I could go on, but basically now you know why the Con: The selection IS awful, because the gold-rush town went bust when the mine ran out--We have four or five services that all wanted to go big-time, but are now stuck with one big pool of public-domain movies to choose from, and all scramble to be the one to sell the same product as the other. Until Disney starts their own service with their own movies in their own pocket, we have third-party services the studios won't talk to anymore, and have to run the same limited package of MGM/UA movies that also fell into public domain. Unless you're Netflix, of course, and can also dig up some British, Mexican, Indian and South Korean programming for lack of anything else to show. And maybe Adam Sandler will make some more Original programming.

He also lives and works in Hollywood. He's ready to deal, lie, parasite and compromise, if it'll get "his" movie made and get him up a few ladder rungs at the studio, no matter how nice a guy he is, because every wannabe screenwriter in town has to. Everyone sells out once they come to Hollywood, and for some reason, no one ever leaves. That's the central metaphor, of putting a current studio not-yet inside the home of a past great-Hollywood has-been, and showing how the desperation and self-delusions of the town never change from one generation to the next.

Non-members can't see the catalog, but if Netflix is still keeping the mail disk service going eight years after the streaming service became the Favorite Child, I'll give them ninepence--I'd need a lot more solid evidence than that. Reed's distaste for it, his full-tilt gullible grasp of industry "Disk is dead!" propaganda, and his wish to wrap up the snail-mail service was frequent, vocal, and hardly disguised. I have other distant family members, who aren't really into streaming enough to know the difference, who still hang onto the mail service because that's what they've always known, but I haven't grilled them yet on just how many titles on their queue are now in "Saved" limbo. (Or whatever other disclaimer the old-school pre-'01 Netflix would use to cover up the fact that a title disk was now OOP and unavailable...Oh, you should have been there at their previous low point in '00 just before they went national, you would see a full 60% your queue titles MIA.) I'm not saying "Disks are dead"--in fact, the tide of "battle" has turned this year, and we now have the enemy in retreat --on the contrary, I'm saying that we gotta kick this guy out before he can do MORE damage to himself and others, even leaving aside what he's doing to the streaming service. I haven't read Hardy's book, and only used the movie as Cliff-Notes--How much of it did Polanski throw away? AIUI, the theme of Hardy's novel was the ruthless "business" of inherited family names in 18th-19th cty. English class system, but Polanski pretty much used the movie as his own personal mea culpa confession-penance to Natassja Kinski--As he puts the "Wronged and raped" subplot front and center in the story as the main plot tragedy, and pretty much jams the "Unhappily marrying for title" aspect into the first and last twenty minutes, and here and there when the book-plot remembers it. It's still gorgeous-looking and Philippe Sarde's score is reason alone, but guess you can't use every movie to cheat for lit-class.

One of the reasons Netflix put so much behind their streaming service was that Reed Hastings (who's starting to become a dirtier and dirtier word in the disk-vs-digital-vs-binge debate that we now have a name to our pain...) was very happily looking for a reason to get rid of the old fashioned mail service: Yes, mail-Netflix was manna from heaven in the 00's, and may have singlehandedly driven Blockbuster out of business as they deserved to be...But for the company, it also meant paying postage and return postage on hundreds of thousands of disks a day, and they were looking for a way out. Remember six years ago, when everyone (including SNL) threw that tantrum that they didn't know what "Qwikster" was, and accused Reed of "Splitting up the company to make his customers pay twice!"? https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/qwikster-dead-netflix-kills_n_1003098.html Actually, that was Hastings' attempt to separate Netflix from its mail company, permanently create the label as the streaming service, and "Qwikster" was going to be the disk-by-mail service that was going to take on Redbox personally. ("But what's a Qwikster?"--Well, that's because they were also originally planning to include game rentals, if they were going to compete with Redbox, so there was no reason to put "-Flix" in the new name.) And, of course, because of the Big National Tantrum, Reed cancelled the two-service idea, split the combined disk/streaming service into two, and started ignoring the disk service. Nowadays, if anyone is still sentimental to have stayed on the disk service, it's as hard to find an available disk on as it was back before 2001, when it was still just one office, and it's not going to get any better from here. The company's not exactly in a mood to keep their shelves stacked if any titles get lost or break. Me, if I want the Ultimate Cosmic Power of looking up any DVD ever released, I do what you have to do nowadays: I check the library. (That's the good thing about living in walking distance.) And if ours doesn't have it--and in our case, that's one big "If" --I can either reserve it, or track it down on the statewide computer library-transfer service. But yeah, I still gotta make that danged old-school trip to return them.

Before twelve more posters join on, er, noooo, I was NOT debating "The death of culture at the movies." Since the poster asked, I was trying to outline history of ten years ago by pointing out how Roger Ebert--and just about every other major critic in the industry--THOUGHT it was, because they just couldn't understand why audiences hadn't gone to hunt down Hurt Locker in arthouse theaters twenty miles away in a competitive summer, instead of rushing to the worst cineplex movie of 2009 that same week. Point is, the critics took it hard. Personal hard. The trauma just didn't go away after seven months. (And if you've seen Transformers 2, we do mean "trauma". If Hurt'd been beaten by a Marvel movie that weekend, they might have shrugged off the eventuality and not so overreacted.) In case you've wondered all these years why voters praised Hurt Locker to the skies, all the way down the red carpet. (And the reason why District 9 and Inglorious Basterds were nominated was that 2009-10 was the first "Multi-nomination" year, causing the first great Golden Globe-ization of the Oscars, where nominations are now assembled out of "buzz rumors"--As voters used to picking five nominees now had to rack their brains for another five, and just dredged up early fan-buzz rumors from August that "Yeah, Quentin's probably going to get one this year, and that South African scifi movie's allegory-stuff, it's probably going to spark debate across the country!")

Uh, that's not why Hurt Locker won: The one cause that enraged critics throughout 2008--even causing Roger Ebert to declare "the Death of Culture"--was the fact that Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen had had a record-breaking opening weekend (you'll be sor-reee!) the same week that Hurt Locker had a minor arthouse rollout with a rather difficult-to-fathom title and ad campaign. The fact of which one happened to make more money that summer was an injustice that felt like the cinematic equivalent of the Trump election, and for the rest of that entire year, critics were determined to drag anyone into a showing of Hurt Locker that they could find, or else sociologically lord it over them why they didn't. That said, apart from raging Q-Boiz that can't understand why "Quentin Gets Confused About WWII" didn't get anything, I've never been able to understand the rage issues against Hurt Locker winning, especially from people who've never seen it. (Those who have, manage to put it in a little more perspective.) The rage issues from Tolkien fans who've never seen Chicago, I can understand, but seems like a majority of the Deep Hurt-ing--besides just "Huh? It doesn't seem to have a plot!" (neither did Iraq, and unlike other Bigelow-in-Baghdad films, we hadn't caught Bin Laden yet)--is just holdover from the late-00's days when we were just starting to wonder why the Best Pictures were getting "too arthouse". Oh, it's only 2009, people, you ain't seen nothin' in Oscar-decline yet...Seven or eight years from now, you're going to consider yourself lucky we got this one. Not to mention, this was one year BEFORE Hollywood wanted to buddy up to their new rich friend, and support James Cameron's embattled and persecuted "3-D is art! Directors can use it if they want to!" campaign, by honoring "Avatar" with lauds and nominations. If you're waiting for them to "turn against the hack", I wouldn't lose more sleep.

Castaways is one of the Good Forgotten Ones: Disney tried to make Jules Verne lightning strike twice after "20,000 Leagues", and (apart from a baobab tree) didn't, but it's a fun old-school live-action, and with a chuckling Maurice Chevalier into the mix. As for TOaOGOFB, that's one of your more bizarre entries of the confused Ron Miller days, that wanted another Sherman Brothers musical epic but didn't have Walt's faintest ideas of how to make one: They wanted an old period Main St. USA piece that would harmlessly try to tap into "America's divisiveness and political generation gap" for 1968, and got...something where John Davidson and Lesley Anne Warren's forbidden romance was divided by the Grover Cleveland v. Benjamin Harrison election, and the fate of statehood for North and South Dakota. Yes. (As for the Popeye cartoons, they're all ancient early pre-Jack Mercer, where William Costello muttered ad-libs, but never really said anything funny.) Also, the title just refers to vengeance in general: Oh, and it has almost little to do with Upton Sinclair's book, as Paul Thomas Anderson was so role-model smitten with the book's "dark" supporting character, he turned the entire plot over to him, to indulge his own directorial preoccupation against "Fraud preachers". (Which, in Anderson's mind, is all of them.) In Sinclair's original "Oil" book, the plot follows the deaf son, as he wanders off on his own into the oil industry, discovers the shameful industry corruption and pre-union treatment of oil workers, and turns noble activist. What Anderson did to the story, imagine if some later Star Wars director turned the entire saga over to following Boba Fett, just because he was so much more of a "wicked kewl" character than the main hero.

Consider '04's "Return of the King" for Best Picture as officially taking back '02's "A Beautiful Mind".

(Heheh, Halloween III, the first of John Carpenter's love-letters to the Quatermass series...At least you didn't whine that the Shatner-faced killer wasn't in it.) Again, it helps to have seen Rosemary and Exorcist in the early 70's: Getting back into Sociology 101 for a moment, one thing we noticed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Russia was that after a traumatic disillusioning collapse of any country's national identity, there's a competing sudden-interest in old-fashioned religion vs. occult and new-wave mysticism...Science and politics failed us, maybe our horoscope will have something to say. In the late 60's/early 70's, urban malaise, with the war and the rise in crime and pollution, caused people to question their religion--Some factions of the hippie movement became disenchanted with drugs, found religion to clean up their lives and become "Jesus-freaks", unquote, while the successful Italian, Irish or Jewish upper-middle-class uptown urbanites were stuck with their own "stagnated" Vatican or Hebrew dogmas that told them little more than to follow old traditions Or Else. The big trendy hipster-atheist argument around the pseudo-intellectual cocktail party at the time wasn't paranoia about televangelists burning books and taking over politics, it was about If There's A God, Why Doesn't He Stop All The Bad Things?, followed by more whines about big corporate "establishment" churches keeping people in their old-fashioned conservatively repressed places. Sort of like Maurice Evans does in the party scene, that we're supposed to think is just another uptown cocktail party. ("I think we're offending Rosemary." "I was brought up a Catholic, now I don't know...") The Exorcist and The Omen--two more stories of the Devil in rich privileged uptown brownstones--had the good timing to hit right around the fallout of the 1973-74 Watergate troubles, when we now had war, pollution and the inability to trust our very leaders' patriotism, at which point, we WERE like abandoned Russians trying to figure out their lives without a flag or central party. We looked for any answers that seemed more awe-inspiring and neater than the ones we knew about--hence the ESP and astrology crazes, and UFO's just in time for Star Wars to hit--but it couldn't get away from the old Catholic bedroom-closet fear that if God Was Dead, who else might still be around with no one to stop him? Looks like they couldn't get away from all their "old outdated beliefs" after all.

I put FVKOPMYFAIMN in the same category as Pirates, ie. Polanski's taste for "comedy" might be improved considerably if he gave the scripts to actors from English-speaking countries, and kept them away from the makeup box. Rosemary's Baby, OTOH, like The Exorcist, works better when you take it less as a straight occult thriller, and more as a time capsule of late 60's/early 70's religious insecurity during big-city urban malaise, at a time when city dwellers wanted to blame religion (ie. the Vatican) on the Establishment and dismiss it as the reason for the bad headlines...But since most sophisticated uptown city dwellers were also Catholic, it didn't take away their own fears that there might still be demons and ghosties out there. Polanski made sure the famous Time magazine "Is God Dead?" cover was in full shot when the seemingly "sophisticated" urbanite begins spouting off on the "irrelevant" church, without our having the faintest suspicions why he might be holding those opinions...Heheh.

...Ever get curious enough to turn on PlutoTV's app? Except for Hard Days Night, whose restoration fell out of Miramax and into Criterion's lap, the rest of the Beatles catalog is now safely back in Apple Corps' hands, through Capitol Records. (Including "Let It Be", which is still locked away in Sir Paul's dungeon.) As for the 007 movies, if you've noticed why they've shown up on Amazon Prime and other services a lot more lately, think most of the other independent MGM, UA and Orion (including Orion ownership of Cannon and American International titles) have fallen into a sort of public-domain limbo since MGM went under sometime around '10 that makes them easier for services to fish PD titles out of the same collective movie watering-hole. Nowadays, if you're looking on streaming services--including the aforementioned PlutoTV--take a count of how many "real" theatrical movies just happen to be from MGM/UA's catalog...On how many different services can we watch "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2", "1984", "Robocop", the 70's-80's Woody Allen catalog and "Curse of the Pink Panther"?? I'm not sure if that impacts on Warner/Turner's ownership of the pre-1980 classic MGM catalog, but the channel still shows what it owns, including its new partnership with Criterion.

Although he does make a rather handsome pig. (Oh, come on, Mods, it's from "Alice", read a book! )

I pretty much knew Nanette only from 70's TV appearances and game shows. It wasn't until the old-movie renaissance of the 80's that I ever first found about her triplet siblings:

(Sorry, I'm just seeing some kid standing up in class and reading this off of lined paper for his school report...)

Also, on the radio show, Britt Reid was the great-great-etc. grand-nephew of John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger, and was still in the present day family business of masked-avenging, with faithful ethnic companions and "silver" steeds. (And on the 60's TV show, he fired a paralyzing dart from his gun as "Hornet sting", although I don't know if that's canon.)

Hardly, Kissinger didn't rise to political power till the end of the 60's-- Strangelove was based (not personality, obviously) on Werner Von Braun's background in wartime German rocket research--"Our Germans are better than their Germans".

Tracy's worth seeing for what it could have been, but it was much better in the theaters back in '90: Right on the heels of a brief Bat-mania comic-movie renaissance, and within a year of Disney's other unappreciated big-budget visually stylized period-indulgent would-be comic blockbuster, The Rocketeer (1991). Neither one is what they could have been, but I'd trust Joe Johnston with another big-budget movie long before I'd trust Warren Beatty with directing one. (If you want to go for the Unappreciated 90's Comic-Misfire trilogy, rent both, throw in Universal's The Shadow (1994), and wonder whatever happened to Alec Baldwin and Russel Mulcahy.)

Warren did ALMOST everything right, in the look, his performance, the casting, the visual over-the-top stylizing for the sake of iconography, and the squarejawed 30's comic sensibility, and even sticking his Ishtar buddy Hoffman in for a bit part-- But then he had to turn into Director Warren Beatty, who rarely creates an action sequence when an artistic musical montage would carry the scene along so much better...I remember we were all led in by comic-strip action scenes in the trailer, only to find out that those scenes would all be covered over by a slow Madonna torch song.