EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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3 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
I always enjoy when this kind of thread gets created, every three months or so, and I get see how many movies I really enjoy get listed as "just the worst ever."
So far we have Goin' South, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Brazil (you can always count on Swithin to trot that one out!), and Reservoir Dogs.
Keep 'em coming! Your hate makes me stronger.
Hah! Let's see you stand up to Dreamworks' Shrek series!
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24 minutes ago, sagebrush said:
In my book, Up and Toy Story 3 are as good as any other films nominated in those years.
Well, keep in mind, the '08 multi-nom rule wasn't introduced just because a lot of Dark Knight fans stomped their feet and threw tantrums (sort of like the Lego Movie, Wonder Woman and Creed fans did)--But because of the general disappointment that Wall-E could have whipped Slumdog Millionaire's hinder down to Chinatown in a fair Best Picture fight, if the former hadn't been "ghetto'ed" into the Best Animated category. After five wins, it seemed like Pixar coming to "pick up" its annual Best Animated win was more an insult to Pixar movies, than it was unfair to the other Animated nominees.
And while there was a momentary craze for Slumdog among people (like the director) who'd never seen Bollywood before, with only Slumdog, Frost/Nixon and Curious Case of Benjamin Button to root for, the '08-'09 Picture race had a distinct "This is all we've got?
" malaise to it.
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The Academy does. After 2014's Boyhood vs. Birdman got the disastrously lowest TV ratings in Oscar history, they tried to move it back to five noms in 2015....EXCEPT for the little clause in the rule that said that the multi-nomination voting allowed voters one choice for an animated Best Picture, which is how Pixar's "Up" and "Toy Story 3" made the cut for the first two years after the new Picture voting rule was introduced. And there was a certain Pixar movie in 2015 that had been considered the de facto Best Picture front runner for six months, since the week it opened.
Fresh off the disaster, the Academy said they were "considering" going back to five nominations, but suddenly in June--as in, after May--announced they were keeping multi-nominations for one more year, and see. We'll never know how they arrived at that decision.
Until, of course, the Golden Globes didn't nominate Pixar movies for Best Picture, and well, there you go, their word is law... (Yes, I'm still bitter.)
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8 hours ago, Dargo said:
Hmmmm...well ham, considering you said "Any" here, I'll pressed to say I always at least thought Pee-wee's Big Adventure was a pretty funny film, anyway.
Both Paul Reubens and Tim Burton pretty much peaked at PWBA. It was the magnum opus sum-total of everything each of their careers were about, and it was all downhill from there. I can't even think what one post-Scissorhands Tim Burton movie I would put on a "Most insufferable" list.
As for me, people's delusions that "The Greatest Showman" was going to sweep the Oscar nominations (b-but, it's a musical! In December! With the Les Miz guy!) brought back all those eye-twitches from seventeen years ago, when a lot of fans who had never seen real musicals in their life thought the genre revolved around Moulin Rouge. Oh, the horror, the horror...
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2 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
A matter of opinion. I thought The Dead Zone was very good, and one of the best movies of that year.
And boy, did we all go back and rewatch it during the Trump campaign...
At least this time around, we have Pentagon generals talking about tackling the president if he launches the missiles, hallelujah.
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Just to break up the string of Cave Girl threads
, it's a snow day, so I thought I'd try one of my own favorite no-reason film questions:
Have there been any memorable examples of actors given a special "And introducing [...] as [...]" screen credit that's even remotely recognizable and actually gone on to a second role you've heard of?
The Altman "M*A*S*H" probably holds the record, for Introducing Fred Williamson, John Schuck, Bud Cort, and a dozen others you haven't heard of, but otherwise, there's:
- Jamie Lee Curtis, "Halloween" (1978)
- Jane Seymour, "Live and Let Die (1973)
- Jessica Lange, "King Kong" (1976)
- Peter O'Toole, "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)
- Michael Caine, "Zulu" (1964)
- Kirstie Alley, "Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan (1982)
- Shirley MacLaine, "The Trouble With Harry" (1955)
- Paul Newman, "The Silver Chalice" (1954)
(And that's not counting Steve Martin being "Introduced" in 1978 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, while he was still the #1 standup comic, Haley Joel Osmont being "Introduced" in Disney's DTV Hunchback of Notre Dame II, two years after he'd gotten an Oscar nomination, or Julia Roberts being "Introduced" for a gag in '01's Ocean's 11, ten years after her biggest 90's hits.)
It's a short list, but I like to keep it up to date...Any other entries?
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58 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
I'm a Cronenberg fan going back to Shivers/They Came from Within, followed by Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash and Existenz. A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are good, but I prefer the earlier, more transgressive Cronenberg.
Long live the New Flesh.
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I was going to say Harvey Keitel in The Piano, but dang. All you left me with was Graham Chapman in "Life of Brian".
That, and Julie Andrews in "S.O.B.", which you'd think you'd be curious about when you heard it, but...
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9 minutes ago, CaveGirl said:
If one is a fan of films a bit off the wall, that feature thanatoptic visions of eros, then you probably are already a fan of J.G. Ballard.
Not if I only remember him for Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun".
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33 minutes ago, CaveGirl said:
One of my favorite films to watch is..."Zontar, the Thing from Venus".
Now firstly, it stars John Agar and that always makes for great viewing. He is so earnestly mundane, that I love watching him not emote. This was directed by Larry Buchanan, so enough said on that front.Meaning, it was a garage-made "remake" of some better known American Int'l B-movie, in this case Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef in Roger Corman's "It Conquered the World".
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56 minutes ago, Mozart1791 said:
An ability to read is no protection against poor judgment, a failing of both famous and obscure. More insulting is to assert that EAP was in only for the money, a slander of which that rag, MAD, has accused such as THE SOUND OF MUSIC and Disney.
If you mean "The $ound of Money"* (yep, I got that "50 Years of MAD" CD-Rom collection), keep in mind TSOM had been in theaters for almost a year and going on four. It was the unstoppable Titanic and Twilight of its day, combined. Among other things, that frustration is what caused the popularity of, and contributed to the death of, the Late-60's G-Rated Musical, not to mention piling all that weary misdirected audience guff on "sweet, sappy" Julie Andrews in Disney's Mary Poppins. (Which, coming in at 1964, would have been arriving near the middle-end of Maria-mania.)
As for Disney, other kids' films were relatively unknown in the Ron Miller 60's-70's. Maybe the odd Hanna-Barbera, or a few low-rent Italian or Japanese oddities trying to steal Pinocchio's thunder, but Disney basically had the monopoly on G-rated entertainment. And, as we moved into the "gritty" late-60's and early 70's, Disney, owner of the biggest cultural property in the world, and theme-park political sovereignty to honor it, was not only seen as an easy-target mega-corporation on the level of IBM and DuPont, but the symbol of safe, G-rated "establishment" culture to pacify the masses. There's a reason we got all those danged Ralph Bakshi films, and why the Blue Meanies in "Yellow Submarine" looked like evil Mickey Mouses.
But I digress. And if you're trying to throw this into an Elvis/Fabian/Ricky Nelson discussion, so do you.
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* - Mad's satire also did a funny poke at TSOM perpetuating the Sally Field convention that nuns in movies have to be "cute", and do funny and crazy things like fix cars or play guitars, to get the audience's mind off of less cute things like Catholic-school memories or Vatican dogma.
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13 hours ago, Stephan55 said:
So he strolls up to his apartment, paper in hand. Puts a TV dinner in the oven and changes into his PJ's and plops down to read the funnies while his dinner heats up.
While eating he accidentally spills some gravy from his Hungry Man onto the paper that looks strangely like a Rorschach Inkblot Test with one of those images that can either look like the silhouette of a pretty nude girl or a really ugly dude depending on the angle and how long you stare at it... The longer Frank looked at it the more it reminded him of an image of his girlfriend Cathy behind the curtain in the shower. However at a glance it also kinda resembled Delghetti in the shower!EDIT
*disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, Everything in this post is "fake" news....Ha!...I KNEW it was fake! Swanson didn't introduce the Hungry Man dinner until 1973!
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9 hours ago, Thenryb said:
Interesting discussion about why so few songs from Broadway musicals lately are "hits". I recall many of the songs referenced by Princess. At the time I heard them as a kid, I did not even know they were from musicals (eg Watching all the Girls).
Probably the biggest reason for no new songs from Broadway musicals are, we haven't HAD any new Broadway shows in the last twenty years that weren't picking the bones of existing movie musicals--The last time we had anything with a new song to break out, Andrew Lloyd Webber was writing them, and nobody had a cast album in their record collection like we did in the days of Camelot and West Side Story. (And if you go around remembering songs from Rent, La Cage or Kinky Boots, there's, ahem, probably a reason for that...)
The other is that, like the old shows with the "strange" songs, shows became tighter and the songs were more in context, they just didn't make sense outside of their shows--How many remember sniggering over the "dirty" lyrics in "One Night in Bangkok" in the 80's, without realizing it came from Abba's "Chess" musical, and that the "ultimate test of cerebral fitness" and the "queens we use would not excite you" was referring to the international chess tournament from the story? Apart from the Big Webber Three, think one of the last times we did have a legitimate all-purpose breakout Broadway "standard" for Streisand or Mandy Patinkin to sing was "Putting It Together" from Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George", and quick, hum another song from that musical...
(Although there have been some covers of "I Am Unworthy of Your Love" from Sondheim's "Assassins", but they're a bit out of context.
) After that, we'd be talking about "Popular" from "Wicked"...'Nuff said.
And, of course, with the rise of songwriters in the 70's and music videos in the 80's, causing the death of TV variety, there was no more need for the "independent" lounge singer who crooned covers of other people's songs, including other show's songs
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On 1/13/2018 at 10:35 AM, Mozart1791 said:
what some casting directors saw in F Avalon, P Boone and R Nelson.
We still have to work on tightening those "hook" thread titles, though--
Those of us who weren't picturing an Eddy/McDonald thread, you KNOW we were picturing Madeline Kahn...-
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On 12/27/2017 at 7:55 PM, NickAndNora34 said:
I agree with you about another "A Star is Born" film. There are 3 versions of this already. Although, I would like to see Lady Gaga in a movie musical or something, as she has demonstrated her vocal prowess.
It's another pop-singer story, for people who believe Barbara Streisand's was the ONLY version ever made.
...Nuff said about Gags.
On 12/27/2017 at 12:35 PM, LawrenceA said:That's 3 superhero movies leading off the list, and that's not even all of them. There's also Ant-Man and the Wasp, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The New Mutants, Venom and Aquaman.
Quick, which one is the real Marvel movie?
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27 minutes ago, Fedya said:
Since I have to edit out a bunch of multiple posts and can't delete them, here's some more Mancini not covered by Andy Williams:
And before you post the theme from "Santa Claus: the Movie", how the heck did we GET on this multi-tangent, anyway??
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5 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
A man or a woman is willing to be stuck with the fussy, uptight, boring mate they've settled for until someone more unpredictable and/or wild and crazy comes along to open their eyes.
Unless they're divorced, and now planning to marry their new fussy, uptight boring fiance' (who must also be richer and a self-centered jerk), but are willing to break the engagement if the goofy ex can prove himself more creative, by accident or design.
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2 minutes ago, NipkowDisc said:
I think gregory peck sounds a lot like charlton heston in moby dick.
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....That's nice.
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3 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Sorry, but what I've always loved about cover songs done my Joe Cocker was that he DID always put his own unique and distinct spin on the songs.
Cocker's style wasn't easy to imitate, but it could be done:
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2 hours ago, Mozart1791 said:
what some casting directors saw in F Avalon, P Boone and R Nelson.
The obvious intention was to create ,,wholesome'' competition to Presley and JL Lewis; how well did those directors succeed?
Pretty well--About as well as boy-bands succeeded in the 90's, with pre-pubescent girls who didn't always WANT to rebel against their parents with bad-boy pelvis-twisters, and just wanted to open the door for their (sigh!) Mystery Date.
F Avalon and A Funicello were pretty much the High School Musical of their day, showing kids a teenage world where you could spend all your time at the beach without any overt hint of sex, and R Nelson was literally the Boy Next Door, if you happened to live next to O & H Nelson on your TV set.
...Anything else, or do we go into an analysis of the Partridge Family?
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25 minutes ago, TomJH said:
I tend to think of Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears as when the great Jones cartoons began. I don't recall The Draft Horse.
Obviously doing wartime morale/propaganda jokes bumped Chuck out of his Disney ambitions, and got him back into the Warner business of doing jokes people going to see a Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis movie would get:
The quick "sloppy" production of wartime toons contributed to the anarchic comedy spirit as well. At least Chuck credits Draft Horse as the First Funny One, not sure whether that predated "The Dover Boys at Pimento University" or Bugs Bunny and Ala Bahma in 1942's "Case of the Missing Hare".
21 minutes ago, Dargo said:I've always gotten the idea that it might have been his more zany fellow Termite Terrace coworker Tex Avery who might have contributed to Chuck Jones finding his comedic side.
As he tells it, the other animators, Tex and writer Ted Pierce included, were pretty much ALL saying "Be funny, fer crissakes, Chuck, that's what we do!" but it was between '43-'44, when they had to pitch the Snafu cartoons to servicemen who didn't want gags about adorable Disney-clone mice, that it got Chuck in at the deep end of making adult-audience gags for gags' sake. By '44, you could see his comic timing gel with the wartime-rationing gags in "The Weakly Reporter".
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15 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Yep Tom. In most cases I can pick out a Paul Frees dubbing fairly easily, as I've found there's a subtle but consistent certain tonal quality in almost all his work.
If you can hear Boris Badenov, Inspector Fenwick AND the narrator of War of the Worlds by ear, you can pick out just about any Paul Frees voice anywhere. In 50's-60's low-budget American Int'l foreign-film dubbing, the leads were pretty much divided between Paul Frees and Marvin "Robbie the Robot" Miller.
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1 hour ago, TomJH said:
Bugs Bunny and The Three Bears (1944).
Chuck Jones, who directed it, was evolving at this stage in his career, from some earlier sentimental cartoons into animated shorts that were increasingly character based.
Interestingly Wikipedia says that dopey Junyor was voiced by Kent Rogers, rather than the often credited Stan Freberg. Yet the Warners DVD release of the cartoon has a second audio track by Freberg in which he talks about his experience in playing Junyor Bear on this Bugs classic. I'll take Freberg's word on the DVD over Wiki on this one.
Chuck claimed his first "funny" cartoon was 1942's "The Draft Horse", which would have predated 1943's Private Snafu by a year. So yes, he was just getting the hang of this "comic timing" thing, unlike 1940's "Good Night, Elmer", which has the reputation of being THE unfunniest Warner cartoon ever made. ("Old Glory" was a PSA and doesn't count.)
And I'll take Freberg's word for it too, even though voice artists sometimes have to stretch the truth about their credits or imitation-gag sources. BTW, pretty sure that Billy Bletcher (Mickey Mouse's Pete) was Papa Bear and Bea Benederet as Mama in the later cartoons, but not sure who's playing it here--Think that's still Mel Blanc as Papa at this point.
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9 hours ago, slaytonf said:
but I have to admit, Julie London does it just that much better. It's not by chance this was her signature song. For a movie connection, she sings it in The Girl Can't Help It (1956).
True, true. Those of us of a later generation only knew Julie London as Nurse McCall on "Emergency!", so the fact that she had an ultry-sultry torch hit came as a surprise to us later on.
And yes, I would've beaten Fedya and Dargo to the punch, been That Guy, and posted
except that the joke's already been beaten to death in the news and political cartoons with the whole Trump-Putin thing.
" malaise to it.
Hate, Detest, Despise and Abhor Movies
in General Discussions
Posted
We already have them, they're called Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.