EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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Rex represents the "old-school" movie critic of the 60's and 70's--When movies were less established in the culture, big movies still played Roadshow Engagements, and big-city papers would often have the theater critics moonlighting on reviewing the big movies as city cultural events. Dedicated film-loving movie-only critics like Richard Schickel and Pauline Kael were relatively rare, but theater critics, especially in NY, went in with their own Broadway-town "Make or break" mentality that bad movies had to be Punished with a sarcastic sledgehammer, and close overnight.
It wasn't until Siskel & Ebert went national in '78 that movie criticism escaped the "chablis" image and started making its image more populist for just-plain moviegoers, just in time for the post-Star Wars movie renaissance, and the VCR home-theater age. Not to mention, we no longer had the nyah-nyah stereotype in movies and TV shows that all critics-at-large were effete whiny sniffy-gay elitist snobs...Gee, wonder where they got THAT impression?
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Is he still ALIVE? Now that we're out of the 70's, and can recognize that some movie critics might have been a bit...flaming (Michael Medved, Peter Travers), Reed's old-school throwback sort of fell out of fashion after the 80's.
That would be right around the time they tried putting him in as one of Siskel & Ebert's replacements, when the two left their previous incarnation of At the Movies. "Sad, really..." doesn't even cover it.
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9 hours ago, NipkowDisc said:
are the surviving prints in danger of deterioration from excessive repeated tcm airings?
Since TV doesn't run film prints, no.
Quote
(....OHHHhhh! He was kidding! Let's file that away for future reference, Nip actually has what he considers to be a sense of humor, and not all his questions are as weird as they sound. )
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3 minutes ago, RipMurdock said:
Just thought of a couple more. Seems like boxers often were playing themselves in movies with people like Joe Louis and Max Baer and even the glass jawed Primo Carnera. ONe movie that had both Baer and Carnera was with Myrna Loy called The Prizefighter and the Lady, but the funny part is Baer was playing a character and Carnera was playing himself.
Carnera also played himself when he faced off against Mighty Joe Young.
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1 hour ago, drednm said:
No. They were in an earlier stage version which was also filmed....
They were in New Faces of 1952, the version that was filmed, and that would have helped the correct period setting if Man For All Seasons wasn't there.
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8 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
Lawrence-thanks for your opinions about IT (2017). It's been so long since reading the story, I'll be seeing it "fresh" as you suggested. My only recollection is how incredibly good Tim Curry portrayed Pennywise in the first movie, it's burned in my brain. I'll give the new one a go, but am ready to scoff at the new clown portrayal.
Skarsgard's portrayal is good--and more importantly, better than Curry's in keeping with the book--it's just the new generation fanboy OBSESSION with the character, at the expense of King's metaphor, that I have problems with. Given that so much of the fan zeitgeist at the moment seems to be centered around a decidedly subjective appreciation of 12-yo. kids with suburban-neighborhood bikes seeing scary things in the 80's (with all the "Stranger Things" fandom on Netflix, us real kids of the 80's have been telling the new "fake" ones, "Face it, you envy us..."), the It fandom seems to be treating the character as some independent Freddy Kruger--"When are we going to see his backstory?"--and not the book's metaphoric plot idea that the kids are seeing their fears. Frankly, with so much pop nostalgia, I was surprised the director bothered to do the second Adult half of the book at all.
But, have to admit, director Andy Muschietti did a cracking job of creating a nightmare mood, when the kids see their fears--There are scenes that will literally have you saying "I've had ones like that.
" King originally wrote the book because he wanted "the ultimate Universal monster bash", put the kids in his own 50's childhood and had them see the Teenage Wolfman and the Creature From the Black Lagoon, but with 80's kids, the director did a good job updating the imaginary monsters to real psychological fears instead.
11 hours ago, ChristineHoard said:I watched Don't Bother to Knock on the Fox Movie Channel last night with Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe and, in her movie debut, Anne Bancroft plus a supporting cast full of familiar faces like Laurene Tuttle, Jim Backus and Elisha Cook, Jr. It's early in Monroe's career (1952) and it's a dramatic role about a babysitter (Monroe) with mental problems.
And the scary effectiveness of it is, she plays them a little too well.
From personal experience growing up, I'm guessing from her bio.
If this had come out in the 90's, it would be passed off as yet another Babysitter-From-Hell movie--but they didn't know what those were in the 40's, so they try to pass it off as "Film noir"--but show this to any fan who wants to symbolically diss Marilyn as a 50's-created dress-flipping airhead. Her one note of breathy earnestness is absolutely creepy when turned evil.
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10 minutes ago, NipkowDisc said:
star wars: disney's money awakens
(That not only doesn't make sense, it doesn't even fit the last few posts.
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3 hours ago, calvinnme said:
The Brute Man (7/10) 1946
The poignant part of this is how art so imitated the life of the man who plays "The Creeper", Rondo Hatton. Mr. Hatton was also a popular athlete during high school who was injured by poison gas during his service in WWI. That chemical exposure later caused acromegaly, a slowly progressive deforming of bones in the head, hands and feet, and internal and external soft tissues.
However, he was average height, so the film had to use very noticeably short actors to play the police in chase scenes, to make Hatton seem more Brute.
A point MST3K made much of in their heckling.
("We represent the Lollipop Guild...")
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1 hour ago, calvinnme said:
An article in Forbes as to why the new Star Wars film is a flop in China.
As the article points out, China was still closed off from the US before 1980, meaning they didn't get the first '77 SW along with the rest of the world, which is why it doesn't really have as much sentimentality over there as it does in Japan or Europe. And that's sort of bad news if the New Trilogy is going to spend ALL its creativity on bringing back sacred beloved OT Boomer lore, and showing Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in their 60's. Chinese audiences may be sick of state-approved rom-coms and historical epics, which may make a big non-political Hollywood CGI-blockbuster carpetbagger look like a novelty, but at the end of the weekend, "The Ex-Files" is better known in Beijing than Chewbacca, which is why local audiences like local films--Quick, what's the most popular Chinese film in the US?
And not to twist a well-deserved knife six months later on the other issue, but:
So, first "Wolf Warrior II", and now Star Wars and Spiderman can't pull 'em in in China...I'm sorry, Paramount, (fiddles ear), w-what was that about "It's a new world market now", and "Maybe we should stop selfishly waving flags and looking at US grosses", and such-like, after Transformers 5?
And wasn't Disney saying something about how it "didn't matter" that the US didn't like Pirates 5, something like that? Or was that Universal with The Mummy?--Gee, they all seemed to be saying it a while ago.
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21 hours ago, ChristineHoard said:
Yes, that is a funny bit. I like that scene where James Gregory's characters says (paraphrasing) he needs one easy number to remember while he's holding the Heinz 57 bottle and the next scene he says there are 57 card-carrying Communists. It is an excellent film.
My history professor in college quoted the ketchup story as fact about Joseph McCarthy, and testament to the movie, most people believe it really did happen.
Even I'm not sure...Did Joe ever say "57", or did the movie just stick in our heads?
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On 1/7/2018 at 7:50 PM, Bethluvsfilms said:
Does XANADU qualify for the 'so bad it's good" category?
I've never seen the movie, so I wouldn't know....but I know the critics clobbered it (not that I care what they think) and it does seem to have a cult following.No one seemed to know what to make of it when it came out--Even the movie itself didn't know what to make of itself, as it went through five wildly and completely different stories at the script stage, all of which end up in the final plot.
What they finally decided at the last minute was that, since they had Gene Kelly, they were obviously a 1980 "tribute" to naively optimistic 40's MGM musicals, without ever having really seen one. Still have to give it points for trying though, its eagerness to please, and the fact that there are no bad movies with Electric Light Orchestra on the soundtrack.
(And that's just the opening.
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15 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
I thought it was cool of Franco and the film's producers to get Tommy an invite to the show, and to even call him up on stage, when neither one was expected. But I also have seen a lot of interviews with Tommy Wiseau, and read a lot about him, and if he'd gotten a hold of that microphone, I'm not sure they would have gotten it back.
You have the proverbial No Idea.
On that point, I was just waiting for a spence or Nipkow thread to usher Franco's "Yeah, whatever, Tom..." moment into metaphorical Internet Meme-Gif immortality:
Too bad we all had to start discussing it literally.
8 hours ago, Sepiatone said:Not having seen any of the films up for an award, nor really caring who's wearing who I passed watching it this year.
And once again, as every year, I have to post the history lesson of how back in the 90's, nobody CARED about the Golden Globes, except to laugh Ted Turner off the screen for airing them instead of the Oscars he wanted.
He would.
And that we only pay worshipful attention to them nowadays because we can't think of any Oscar nominations either, and hope someone will tell us. Even though the Globes--awarded by Hollywood press-junket reporters--represent the sort of people who would want to give "The Greatest Showman" a Best Picture nomination six months before we got an actual look at the darn mess...IOW, gullible star-sycophantic idiots who believe every studio rumor they hear.
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18 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I've seen Flying Down to Rio (with the ridiculous airplane number), Follow the Fleet, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and The Barkleys of Broadway. I haven't seen Shall We Dance, The Story of Vernon & Irene Castle and Carefree.
You say "Ridiculous", I say "Classic". ("But it's so fake! They're not sitting on a REAL airplane!")
My first F&G was Shall We Dance, and that one feels like the "definitive" RKO Astaire & Rogers, not just for the use of "Can't Take That away From Me" and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off". The plot involves Fred as a hoofer who changed his name to Russian to dance in the ballet, and when Ginger hears she's working with "the great ballet star Petrov", at first thinks she'll be working with some insufferable Kirov diva. Leading to the classic scene where Fred heckles her by pretending to be an egotistic Russian-ballet diva, and in the process doing one of the most dead-on intentional imitations of Bela Lugosi before it became cool.
It's not something you see Fred Astaire doing every day.
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49 minutes ago, laffite said:
I'm not sharing my thots with anyone. How rude can you get?
Isn't Thots supposed to be one of the Egyptian gods?
11 hours ago, Swithin said:Eartha Kitt had great success as a young actress/singer in New Faces of 1952, in which she sang "Monotonous" and other songs. I saw a revival of that show in 1982, presented by Equity Library Theatre, which gave young actors the opportunity to appear in limited productions. One of the young actors -- the one who played the part that Eartha Kitt played -- got a higher paying gig during the run, so ELT let her go and got Eartha Kitt to reprise her performance of 30 years earlier.
I'd only seen NFo52 when the low-budget movie version surfaced on Amazon Prime--
So, the actors in the new production imitated tributes to Kitt, Robert Clary, Paul Lynde, etc.? I don't see anyone actually wanting to revive the actual sketches or songs themselves, and as a revue, it was never exactly designed as a plot-central show.
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48 minutes ago, jakeem said:
How many times has this gent played himself in a movie or a television series?
Not many, IIRC.
And before Alex, there was Art Fleming:
"Ted, you're putting everyone on that ship in jeopardy!"
Passenger: "I'll take 'Air Shuttle Disasters' for $40, Art!"--Airplane II: the Sequel
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31 minutes ago, calvinnme said:
I'm with TB on this one. This is so much corporate-speak claptrap. You are not going to see Martin and Lewis on this channel, and if a Paramount film does pop up it will be considered a moldy oldie if it was made before 2000.
UPN promised "Movies from its Paramount library" the last time it started up its own network. A few months later, we found out that meant "A Night at the Roxbury at 2am Saturday on affiliate UHF stations".
(WSBK-38 Boston used to be the home of the Movie Loft, for the 60's-70's and recent classics, before becoming UPN and then later abandoned for MeTV. The station tried to bring back the Movie Loft, but now with two "guy" slob-slacker hosts introducing Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell comedies....'Cause, y'know, it's guys who watch late-night movies!
)
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5 hours ago, sewhite2000 said:
Okay, here's one that hopefully no one else has already said. Whenever a character sneezes or coughs in an old movie, it's never just incidental (unless it's for comic effect). Someone else will say, "Are you all right?", and the character will say, "Oh, I'm fine. I just have a little cold." Then within 20 minutes, that character will be dead! (Or alternately that character will just barely and miraculously survive being deathly ill and his/her loved ones will weep and hug when the doctor announces the danger has passed).
And whatever you do, even if they have the Killer Cough, don't send them to a hospital--
If you see an old dad, or the cop's partner, on a hospital bed, presumably with IV tubes and machines going ping, they won't make it to the end credits. In movies, people check into a hospital, but they don't check out.
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On 1/6/2018 at 2:01 PM, NipkowDisc said:
I mean if you wanna see an old lady whacked on the skull with a hammer by a pervert and then finished off by having a hippo like shirley stoler finish her off by strangling her with an electrical cord, this is your film.
Well, good thing you didn't watch it, then.
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On 12/31/2017 at 3:47 AM, skimpole said:
I saw five movies this week. I have distinct memories of seeing a preview of Xanadu on July 3, 1980. And now I've actually seen it. It's hard to deny Dave Kehr's comment that "it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste," with a climax in a roller disco coming out a year after Americans had become sick of both. At least Gene Kelly dances (all too briefly) and Olivia Newton-John can sing, adequately enough. But poor Michael Bell is given nothing to do by a weak script and fatuous direction.
(Michael Beck, the good Warrior who came out to play-ayy.)
For thirty years, I've been pointing out the mistake most people make due to the movie opening in theaters within a month of the Village People train-wreck "Can't Stop the Music", and most people to this day who haven't seen either literally can't tell the two movies apart by title. (The fact that end-of-summer promotional theatrical re-releases would show the two movies together in a double-feature didn't help the issue any either.) The Razzie awards dogpiled on both movies for the cheap disco-bashing joke--even though there's no actual disco music in "Xanadu"--and testament to the confusion since, quick, which one won Worst Picture of 1980?
And Gene Kelly only took the role on the request that he didn't have to dance, but after talking with choreographer Kenny Ortega, he agreed to do the one tap number, if Kelly got to direct it. Play it next to any one of Kelly's own MGM-directed musical numbers, it matches up shot for shot, right down to focusing on himself at the end.
I've also heard rumors of a longer abandoned two-hour version that previewed badly, where Kelly also sang "Singin' in the Rain" on roller skates, but that's only hearsay. My one eccentric film-Ahab quest since seeing it in the theater has been to track down more evidence of the "lost" two-hour cut--In Olivia's big song medley at the end, with artsy screen-wipe edits aplenty, we're literally seeing Edited Highlights, and the "All Over the World" number must have been even loonier before it was chopped into hash.
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And Martin Scorsese proving his unrecognized talent for self-deprecating comedy in Albert Brooks' "The Muse":
"I'm remaking Raging Bull, only it's a really thin angry boxer!...'Thin and angry', can you see it?"(Although not as funny as his American Express commercial:
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And to Rob Petrie's sleepwalking brother Stacey, we say, so long, Burford.
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23 hours ago, Thenryb said:
There is always Ed Sullivan as "himself" in The Singing Nun. When that movie came out Brendan Gill reviewed it for the New Yorker confessing that he had not even seen the movie. In that review, he noted that Ed Sullivan appeared as "himself and not as a singing bishop". He concluded the review by saying something like "The Church has endured much these 2000 years. This too will pass."
Ed Sul-li-VAN! played his TV self in Bye Bye Birdie, also, didn't he?
And while a list of movies where Jay Leno makes late-night monologue jokes about our fictional character in the news is too long to mention, why was the first thing that occurred to me seeing the title was Kurt Vonnegut writing college essays for Rodney Dangerfield's son in "Back to School"?
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2 hours ago, Thenryb said:
In classic movies, if a woman is being pursued, she will always fall so that she can be caught by the pursuer regardless of how slow he is.
Here's a fun bar bet to try: Ask a male and a female movie fan to name their "favorite" worst-movie cliche', and seal your prediction in an envelope. The guy will usually pick one of the easy ones Siskel & Ebert used to joke about, like "Every confrontation with the villain takes place on a skyscraper", or "Every car chase knocks over a fruit vendor"--But for the girl's prediction, you make a great show of your "psychic" abilities, putting a hand to your head like the Professor from X-Men, and witness her astonishment as she opens the envelope and it reads "I hate when the girl always trips when she's being chased!"
...Let me know if this ever doesn't work, it's never failed so far.
Fortunately, movie couples in bed have the Couples Blanket: It's irregularly shaped, so as to cover the woman's chest in bed, while leaving the guy's open to the waist.
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1 hour ago, Dargo said:
Okay, now this bit of news is reminding me of a scene in one of the Hope and Crosby road pictures, and where Hope looks up and sees a snow-capped mountain peak in the distance which looks a lot like the Paramount Pictures logo and says something to Crosby like, "There's our bread and butter".
Anybody remember this, and which of the road pictures this is in?
Since they're in a Klondike dogsled talking about gold-mine mountains, I'm guessing that's "Road to Utopia".
" King originally wrote the book because he wanted "the ultimate Universal monster bash", put the kids in his own 50's childhood and had them see the Teenage Wolfman and the Creature From the Black Lagoon, but with 80's kids, the director did a good job updating the imaginary monsters to real psychological fears instead.
From personal experience growing up, I'm guessing from her bio.
("We represent the Lollipop Guild...")
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HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM
in General Discussions
Posted
If you have a 3DTV (or a Playstation VR), why wonder?:
http://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com/product-p/inferno3d517.htm
If you don't...suc-kerrr. Enjoy your nice flat 4KTV.