EricJ

Finding Neverland was, eh, good--at least that Miramax had infamously been planning to go another Weinstein Bribe that year instead, until an actual popular populist favorite emerged ("Hey, we got one, we really got one this year!") --and was riding on folks' brand new discovery of this quirky Depp fella that was so funny in that pirate movie, and that he was Really Acting this time. But it's riddled with cornball tropes and Ebert Little Movie Glossary entries, and wouldn't have really been a major contender if Miramax had to settle for a more artificially forced contender. As for MDB, it was basically that the other three were all Best Acting performances upgraded to Picture, so the idea was to let Best Actor sort it out, and give it to Eastwood, because Clint was still riding the Oliver Stone "Everything he does gets Oscars" train after Unforgiven, until Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil derailed it.

At one point, there was even a Fritz Lang "Metropolis" musical in London, but didn't bear much resemblance to the original, and didn't even hold a candle to Giorgio Moroder's version. (With Brian Blessed as Rotwang, who also did a great Baron in the London "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" musical.)

Also...who told Rod McKuen he could sing? It's not composer's privilege. Although '69 also gave McKuen a nomination for Best Song Score in his theme for "A Boy Named Charlie Brown".

Greatest Winter Olympics movie ever? Miracle (2004). End of discussion. And I don't even like hockey or Disney inspirational-sports Saint-Coach movies (although this one might have started out as a less corny ESPN movie, and Kurt Russell's character, like real coaches, is no saint).

Tweety's actually male--in one cartoon, Sylvester sets a girl-bird decoy, and Tweety zooms to the bait: "I tawt I taw a (whis-tle!) "--but Friz Freleng's watered-down mangling of Bob Clampett's original idea of a Red Skelton "I dood it!" Mean-Widdle-Kid baby bird. As you may remember when TCM shows his debut in "A Tale of Two Kitties" at public-domain opportunities: Clampett's Evil-Tweety was quite a change from Freleng's so-called "good" Tweety. You're probably just confused because Warner got confused too, and tried to sell their "female" Looney character to the girl marketing demographics. (Before they made up a girlfriend for Bugs.) As for Scooby, Hanna & Barbera almost couldn't sell the show past the network for years, because the network Saturday-morning heads locked down on the idea that the show would be "scary" for kids with "ghosts" showing up--Which not only explains why there's so much comedy-relief with cowardly Scooby gags, but also why EVERY SINGLE episode had to be resolved by showing that it wasn't a real ghost, it was just Farmer Slade in a rubber mask trying to scare folks off of his property. And he would've gotten away with it, too, if...

Raindrops is less historically embarrassing, even if Saturday fits in with the film. Back in the 60's-70's when you had a mix of "Love themes" and pop standards, there was a sense of what was the one song that would "outlive" the film--Saturday and Jean became Muzak staples and fit in with the film, but date themselves horribly. And, of course, hum a few bars from the other two. Now, in '84, you had a pop battle-royale: I Just Called to Say I Love You, The Woman in Red Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now), Against All Odds Footloose, Footloose Let's Hear It For the Boy, Footloose Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters Like most of the 80's winners, Stevie Wonder took it just from sheer radio-overplay hypnosis, but it's a fairly interchangeable 80's-comedy end-credits song. But out of all the four, the idea of giving Ray Parker a nomination was treated as "What? You can't do that, that's an MTV song!", even though Phil Collins's song dripped with his movie's bitterness, Kenny Loggins captured his movie's youth and energy, and those one or two earworm Ray Parker riffs just captured Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd's offbeat goofiness in a bottle and took you along for the movie's ride. ...That's still the standard by which I judge Best Songs of any year.

The only thing--literally, the ONLY thing--that critics or audiences praised about the '02 movie was Matthew Lillard's dead-on imitation of Shaggy, in both voice and spirit. So good, in fact, Lillard got the job taking over for the late Casey Kasem's voice in more recent Warner direct-video animateds. (And not sure if they're supposed to be HS or college, but rumor has it they're supposed to have been based on the four Dobie Gillis characters--Shaggy as Maynard G. Krebs being the least subtle.) That season's on disk now, but thanks to greedy intervention from Viacom, the S&C and Addams episodes are missing from the set.

Yes, the "new" 2002 movie (and yes, I had to wonder about that one, as the last idea Warner had for the franchise was to try and sell the new "empowered-female" demographic and do a Velma & Daphne solo) came out of Warner's '00-'02 days when Cartoon Network was literally trying to "school-bully" Hanna-Barbera reruns off their network-- Not enough that CN should bump the vintage reruns off to Boomerang to make room for more Dexter's Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls, but that we should have an organized re-education/indoctrination propaganda campaign to make sure we all knew that 60's-70's Hanna-Barbera Was Evil (you literally could not go ten minutes on the network without an openly hostile joke toward Velma, Jabberjaw, QuickDraw McGraw, Ranger Smith, or Aquaman and the Wonder Twins on "Superfriends"), and wouldn't do anything frustrating to their plans, like writing in to asking for them back. Did anyone fall for the campaign? Yes: Warner did--Which is why they were utterly convinced that Scooby (and cartoon fans' loathing of Scrappy) had to be played for cathartic mean-spirited cult-kitsch pop-deconstruction yoks. That was fifteen years ago.

11. Inside Out, Best Picture 2015. We know why it was, quote-fingers, "snubbed", and it's the smoking gun for why the 10's Academy voters should become aware of the current voting problems and stop worshipping the Golden Globes' November word as ape-law. (Was going to put in one for "Patrick Stewart in Logan" for the same reason, but that's farther down the list.)

Spense, easy rule of thumb: If you "think" you posted an Oscar or "GP" question before....you DID. Trust us, it'll be true 99% of the time.

If you still are, we just haven't been getting through.

Here, spense! I'm responding! Now you don't have to post a "Where is everybody? Doesn't anybody wannan tallk about Oscars some more?" post three hours later!

So...lemme get this straight: Y-you're saying that IMDb ratings are UN-reliable, because they're user-submitted, and ballot-stuffed by niche fanboys? Well, gosh...That's ungrounding. And here I was, thinking that The Passion of the Christ really WAS the greatest movie of the 00's, and Space Mutiny really was the worst movie of the 20th century. Now I don't know what to believe anymore.

So, spence posts a Wild Bunch thread, and then Nip posts one... Either it's just aired, or now we know why you never see the two of them together in the same place.

Since I can't get TCM, I guess I'm not into the whole Tiff-Bashing thing. I just keep reading "The End of TV?" and thinking it's going to be a discussion on "Remember when watching TV was actually fun, back when we watched one episode a week, before Game of Thrones came along? "

And seeing as John Huston was also in "Tentacles", it was also a quick excuse to get money for an independent project they were trying to raise money for. Obviously Huston was more interested in directing "Under the Volcano" than he was in "Annie", but one paid more. Also, with retiring stage actors, it's a excuse to create royalties, which RSC stage productions don't pay, and doesn't tax the memory as much in old age--Although Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud had considerably more luck with their 70's and 80's retirement film-roles than Laurence Olivier did.

It was probably because of his dynamic Jam.

Well, you've got George running to the office, and trying not to be fired by his boss, Mr. Dithers Spacely. That, and Penny Singleton from the original Blondie series voicing Jane.

The Flintstones was pretty unapologetic in its love for the original Honeymooners, even remaking classic episodes: Although the Flint's "Love Letters on the Rocks" episode did a much sillier spin on the H'mooner's episode where Alice/Wilma finds one of Ralph/Fred's old love letters, and Ralph/Fred thinks Ed/Barney is the other man. (Ralph never hired a parodic "detective Peter Gunnite" to track down the other man. ) In one episode, Fred loses a game of Scrabble to wiseguy-newsboy Arnold: "He kept coming up with words like 'Esoteric', and 'Polopponies'" "That's 'Polo ponies'!" (And then, of course, there's the Top Cat/Sgt. Bilko connection, and the Jetsons/Blondie connection, but that's for another discussion.)

I saw Ishtar in a theater--And since I couldn't find a clip of the only funny moment, where Warren & Dustin improvise the terrorist weapons auction, all I had left to post was this instead. Or this. ...It's BAD. (Specifically, the kind of bad where the stars are so big, the studio believes that Movies Are About Stars and that star names will rescue anything, and never dare to tell them no--Or even ask "What are you doing??") Heaven's Gate, meanwhile...you can actually look back at the late 70's and early 80's, and see where our national obsession with movie budgets and grosses, and "karmic" punishment of which films tanked at the box office, first began. HG's big premiere was in 1981, and in '82, "Hollywood gossip" first became "Industry news"--Something happened to suddenly get us all very interested in numbers.

While OTOH, all the way into 1960's Let's Make Love, with Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe, there's a last-days musical that fairly drips with passive-hostility at changing 50's entertainment: The "nightclub" musical now has to be one of those new struggling-actor Off-Broadway theaters (where all the shows were now), the show in question is a "Parody of today's trends", with wacky jokes about Elvis, Frankie Laine, television, and songs about what happened to old fashioned entertainment--And Montand, playing the older-Astaire character, tries to get into the show for Marilyn, and has to go back to study with Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby and Milton Berle cameos to learn how to be an "old-school" entertainer. ...Nope, no one's bitter. That one's generally the yardstick standard to apply when you want to talk about WHAT factors killed off the 50's original-studio musical by the early 60's.

Spence should be used to backlashes EVERY time he posts about his momentary brain synapses, for no reasons known to the functional outside world... And if YouTube had the appropriate clip from Honeymooners: the Lost Episodes, I'd be posting the specific clip here. But as it is, you'll just have to look up 23:33 yourself, and assume it was that that set him off this time. Now, as to whether Ralph & Ed were more directly funnier than Fred Flintstone & Barney Rubble...

OH, has that been my teeth-grinding grumble every Christmas: "Well, the song must have come from WC, it's in the title!" That, and "It's a real movie 'cause it's in Technicolor!" While Holiday Inn was a 40's musical about nightclub entertainment, White Christmas came from the waning 50's days when original studio musicals were reaching their end, and so were nightclub shows--The Big Show now has to be a Big TV Broadcast, as most were by that point. And the writing-on-the-wall jokes about changing tastes in mid-50's entertainment, as Danny Kaye gets to make fun of those new beatniks and their "alternative" dance. And what roots WC squarely in the post-Korea 50's is that it spends more time on sentimental GI reunions than on sentimental plots about inns or snow, or even Christmas...We don't even get a White Christmas at all until the very end of the movie. So why is the song in the title? Because, with the death of Tin Pan Alley, it was harder and harder to get songwriters to write new songs for movie musicals, and studios assembled "jukebox" musicals out of songwriters' old collections of hits. Like, Irving Berlin songs he'd written twenty or thirty years earlier, with the best already known song in the title. Fortunately, Paramount's been bringing Holiday Inn back for "equal time" marketing this year (and trying to plug the Broadway-show revival) so we can help the educate the dim.

IMDb doesn't seem to know it exists either-- And considering "The Horn Blows at Midnight" was four years earlier, sure you're not funnin' us with Wacky Captioned Stills?

Well, nice to see we've worked out our post-site-revamp bugs and found the site again, Lorna... And as for the question, I remember the producer of the "My Favorite Year" Broadway musical (with Tim Curry as Peter O'Toole) saying that the original movie felt like a musical with the songs removed--"You just kept expecting them to break into song." Applying that standard, Lost Horizon does seem like it would be a good musical. Just....not...a Burt Bachrach one. (And I'd go with the joke and say "Rocky", except, um, we actually got one: I'll let someone else post the "Carrie" clips.)