EricJ

Darn, I was going to cite the guy on Monty Python who could give cats influenza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXuCiEWc_7E [Note: May bother some current Pandemic-era sensibilities.] 🙀

...Well, what OTHER musical is in free United Artists public-domain right now? They're not going to remake "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", so...er, hope not, anyway. 🤫

So, if you haven't read this thread before, it's NEW TO YOU! 😄 I also know the feeling I get watching Marvel's Black Widow and Warner's Wonder Woman 1984 trailers: 😞 Widow seems to double and triple-down on "Captain Marvel"'s Lifetime-Network female audience, taking the print-comic plot of Natasha's old training-rival Yelena Belova, and turning it into so much of a "Sister-bonding" story, you expect Widow to sing "Let It Go". WW84, OTOH, from the trailers, doesn't seem to know what about its "Period 80's setting" to show us except the occasional "Oo, look: A shopping mall!"--Apparently, the story is trying to homage the late 70's/early-80's phase of the comic, when the writers wanted to make Diana "liberated", threw her out of the Justice League, had her dress in trendy track suits and That-Girl polyester instead of Amazon armor, and take up learning martial arts...If you don't remember that, Gloria Steinem was pretty ticked off about that version, too. I can make absolutely no head or tail out of the "World-domination motivational speaker" plot the early trailers are selling, since they don't have enough footage yet of Kirsten Wiig as WW's enemy, the Cheetah. (And why wacky female-humor sitcom star Wiig? Got me...Although we also seem to be getting an another nerdy zero-to-villain plot, where Wiig's character is an old friend of Diana's, and jealous of her career empowerment. Yes, folks, this is what women see when they try to read comic books.) I will admit, however, to being curious about Artemis Fowl being busted down to Disney+, since I couldn't really see that one playing theaters.

Which cone? The one where they couldn't hear each other, the one where the echo reverberated too much, or the one that kept lowering all the way to the ground? 😄

If Terry Gilliam has ever non-ironically SEEN a Katherine Hepburn-y, Ethel Merman-y movie in his life, it's more than I expect from him.

Hey, Gloria Steinem did put vintage Wonder Woman on the cover of the first Ms. Magazine. (That's because women don't read actual print/digital comic books, y'see, only the boys did that, growing up--The girls would go into big Symbolic mode whenever a heroine becomes famous enough for regular people to have heard of, and didn't start going around in Cap-shield T-shirts until they got binge-grrl hooked on ABC's "Agent Carter". They don't care so much about Marvel's "Captain Marvel" or "Black Widow", or whether Wonder Woman was better than the wrist-slitting Zack Snyder movies, just so much as we actually have one.) And yes: If you work for Warner, you work for ALL of Warner. If they say you show "The Shining" and "Willy Wonka" to promote their latest new would-be house franchise, you danged well show them. Speaking of which: It appears to be the same Filmstruck mix of WB and Criterion from before the breakup, only WB didn't lose custody of the Truffaut, Kurosawa and Godzilla movies. The Cartoon section not only has a (partial) selection of Looney Tunes--both the classics and two different awful new-generation impostors--but also the entire six-season run of The Flintstones. If you haven't seen it in at least twenty years, let THIS be your new streaming-binge discovery thing....Trust me. 😎 (Even though it pretty much jumped the shark in Season 4 when Fred became a dad.) Also, in addition to getting custody of the Studio Ghibli films (Disney abandoned them years ago), Warner/AT&T is also trying to cross-promote their Japanese-anime Crunchyroll channel, with a "highlight" selection of series, but you can get a bigger selection free-with-ads on the original channel itself. (HBO's selection doesn't have the first season of "Kemono Friends??) Or, just stick to the "Cells at Work" English dub on Netflix.

For those distracted from Danny's tragedy by dancing hot dogs, Amazon Prime's talent for digging up any content-provider's repackaging of old public-domain content has also unearthed several full-length collections of 50's-70's Drive-In concessions "countdowns", from the old days when you had...TEN MINUTES left to enjoy our sizzling hot dogs, cool refreshing drinks, and crunchy popcorn--Everybody's favorite! 🍿🌭 I've actually taken to playing one of the ten-minute countdowns before putting a Blu-ray in the player, while getting the microwave popcorn and bottle of Coke Zero from the kitchen: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Movie-Ads-Sprocket-Flicks/dp/B079Q5VGND

And, considering what the story was about, ohh, so THAT'S what happened to Kleiser. Wondered why he sort of dropped off the map after Flight of the Navigator. That would also explain why the LGBT have "adopted" Grease as one of, wink-wink "their" films, for no other immediately apparent reason. (Claiming it's a wild parodic "hetero fantasy".) Ever since the first Wonder Woman made money for Warner/DC and Justice League didn't, Warner's put all their DC-superhero eggs in one female-empowerment demographic basket. And then promptly dropped it, as last February's Birds of Prey (or the Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn) left a big omelet on the sidewalk. If it's TCM, meaning Warner, who's still house-franchise doubling down that movie theaters will be back open in time for WW84...count on it. (BTW, is anyone getting the proverbial Really Bad Feeling about this? The more I see of Kristen Wiig's villain, the more I'm afraid we're going to get another "Hopeless loser 'empowers' him/herself by turning science-villain" origin, like Uma Thurman in the Joel Schumacher "Batman & Robin", or--ick--Jamie Foxx in "The Amazing Spiderman 2" 🤢 . Every time I see Wiig's character, all I can hear is Jim Carrey from the Schumacher "Batman Forever": "...You were sup-posed to under-stand!!")

8. Parallels have been raised between Hitchcock's Psycho and William Castle's Homicidal (1961): Castle's movie borrowed a similar "twist" reveal for the killer, while Hitchcock borrowed a patently Castle-style "ballyhoo" theater gimmick for his "No one will be admitted late" promotion.

I remember the old Lego Indiana Jones videogame, where each of the IJ Lego characters has a different weapon/tool to solve puzzles (Indy has a whip and gun, Sallah has a shovel for digging, etc...) What's Kate Capshaw's character's power in the first game?--I quote: "Willie's voice can break glass! Press Square button to scream!"...The prosecution rests. (Rumor has it both Spielberg and Lucas were going through difficult divorces during the pre-production of Temple of Doom. Nnnnno kidding. 🙄) No one who ever sat through IJ&Temple of Doom in '84 ever thought George Lucas had "written" or "directed" Howard the Duck. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz became, erm, household names overnight. No Howard indignity could ever match the experience of seeing the "Monkey brains" or "Primitive mating rituals" scenes in a first-run theater. Lucas seemed to owe them some sort of loyalty for writing the first American Graffiti, even though they also wrote the second one.

Peter Cushing recalled that young Carrie Fisher was so cute on the set, he struggled to keep from cracking into a smile whenever he had to play a scene with her. That was the first time I found out what I'd always thought was that little sinister Cushing-style half-crack of a smile before "Charming to the last" wasn't intentional. 😄 And how did we get through an entire SW thread without another poster's entry for Greatest Classic-Movie Entrances of All Time?:

It's getting more love now, now that 90's Disney fans recognize it was the first co-directorial work for John Musker & Ron Clements in '86, before they got their own big break next with Little Mermaid and Aladdin. As such, Disney fans notice a new energy and humor (especially coming a year after the fallout of the creaking Ron-Miller-relic "Black Cauldron"), and it's considered by fans to be an early "Disney 90's-Renaissance, Year 0". (Reportedly, late-80's M&C kept bugging Jeffrey Katzenberg to let them do their "space-pirates" movie, and Katz kept giving them other projects to work on to keep them busy.)

And industry folk complaining about 1980's The Blues Brothers inserting the briefest of don't-blink nude scenes in the hope of getting a "cooler" R-rating for their audience, the same year The Blue Lagoon lost its potential tween-teen audience because of one. Both were mild enough to get an easy PG-13 today.

Although I defend the Landis TZ segment as the only part of the movie that almost obligatorily managed to capture the original gritty, jittery, speech-moralizing tone of the original Rod Serling episodes, for those who'd never seen them (the first job of a TV-adaptation movie)--and Morrow could have aced a real Serling script--while Spielberg, Dante and Miller were...just doing themselves. If I see a TZ movie, I want Rod Serling, not the Amazing Stories version of "Kick the Can". Vic's story had to be shuffled around into incoherence out of the existing footage they had, but Landis still proved he was the loyal student of cult classics.

Landis started out as a stuntman in his early days before "Shlock"--He even cameos in AAWIL as one of the Londoners sent crashing through a window. (My complaint with the TZ incident is that Landis seems to have soured on directing after that: Apart from the Eddie Murphys, his work after '83 seemed lazy, contemptuous, self-indulgently idiosyncratic and with just a bored oddness to it--"The Stupids" is practically a work of brilliance compared to "Innocent Blood" or "Into the Night"--and even his most enthusiastic film-historian interviews on cult-movie documentaries has a faint hint of snark to it.) It's not a good film (hoo-boy) but of Philippe Mora's two would-be Howling "sequels", you literally just can't take your eyes off of it as the work of a deranged schizophrenic lunatic. And not even in the good way. Howling III: the Marsupials was his more deliberate Australian attempt at Ozploitation "camp" tongue-in-cheek, and.......oy. Australian for "subtle", mate.

Well, IIRC, it was Gremlins and Temple of Doom within a month of each other, but only ToD took hearts into hand... Gremlins was only the delayed-reaction after-effect.

It was based on a psychological-symbolist story by Angela Carter, who delves into the feminist writings. Neil Jordan tried to capture the "Psychological" aspect by shooting the entire movie as a Freudian "dream"--Roger Ebert claimed it "perfectly captures the style of a nightmare onscreen"--and boy, did he capture the style. 😱 The plotless, episodic stream-of-consciousness flow of the scenes, the just-slightly-artificial wooded sets, the twilit lighting and the slightly "off" music that turns disturbing just before something scary's about to happen, and a general sense of unexplained hysteria to the acting...It's not a great werewolf film when put next to John Landis (or Sybil Danning), but it's alongside David Lynch's Eraserhead and Orson Welles' The Trial as one of the three great I've-had-ones-like-that examples of "REM-state filmmaking". THIS was the movie that got me to watch more Neil Jordan.

I was in that first-release audience, and oh, how I love to tell the kids: The moment we got the revelation, everyone in the audience thought..."Don't be a freakin' IDIOT, Luke, what did you think he would tell you??" (Which may have prompted the Mel Brooks "Spaceballs" joke: "Evil will always triumph because Good is so stupid!!") Even James Earl Jones, who got the first non-decoy script with the correct line, claims he thought, "Aha, what will happen when Luke falls for this ploy?" One of the others being screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who always knew how to write Han Solo dialogue, for both Empire and Jedi. (And Indiana Jones.) And why The Force Awakens was the only tolerable good one of the New films. Solo: a SW Story, OTOH, was doomed from the start.

That was my choice, and the "Hey, that worked!" look on Chewie's face when he scares away the robot "mouse" in the Death Star corridor. And the late 70's NEEDED that ending Medal scene. You wanna talk about what part of SW changed our Carter-era culture? 😁🏅 Leia: "Your friend is quite a mercenary. I wonder if he cares about anything...Or anyone." Luke: "....I care!" I also remember one Oscar host segment, where the presenters for Best Original Score asked us to imagine Empire's asteroid scene without John Williams' music...Put it on mute, and see what they meant. (And I assume this is being posted in honor of Real Star Wars Day, May 25th, while the little kiddies play with their cute-joke holiday?

The only problem is--since the studios still dream that the in-home quarantine will "save" digital rental from the humiliating consumer-pantsing it took from '11-'18--they're NOT the same price. The studios usually wanted to push sales, and usually bulk sales, of digital titles over rental, and with the new "In-Home Premieres", many are either sale-only at $19.99, or for "special theatrical-exclusive" rent also at $19.99. How long would a Blockbuster that charged $20 rentals stay in business? (We will now hear from the diehard defenders trying to demonize multiplex theaters with "Yeah, but they charge $20 for the popcorn, so it works out even!")

And it was years before my Old-Radio passion discovered that was Jim "Fibber McGee" Jordan, just coming out of retirement in the 70's, as Orville the pilot...Had to straighten up his hall closet, one of these days. (Albatross Airlines, absolutely the A-one adventurous avian acrobats ever to ace the aerial airways above the American amalgamation from Alaska to Acapulco; an acme of artistry in action, as we all agree, with an accent on agile aerodynamics, and adding no affectations against ambitious amateurs, as advertised, to their admirable accumulation of accolades, aficionados of air-conditioned admiralty ahead of the mean, and how the heck did Jim only get one dad-dratted scene?) 😆

Just the Warner/DC ones. (Which this very DEFINITELY was, as it was supposed to stoke the fires for Justice League's solo-spinoff "universe", and then later, was supposed to pull it out of the fire...And nobody over-does it like Warner/DC.) And wait, Sony's still trying to make them too, aren't they? Oh, and Marvel's Black Widow. Let's face it, the poison's in the system, and they're just not going to recover after Captain Marvel...Condition fatal. 😪

And don't forget Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), And, of course, Xanadu:

Don't miss it, don't even be late! 💲💲 🍩🍩 (Although the 1962 Pat Boone version may have been trying a little too hard to be "contemporary", and cash in on the Seattle World's Fair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9jMCQGFftM )

Just remember, hospitals are overworked for the moment, and do not recommend that patients come in faking illnesses or trivial complaints: