EricJ

Odd Couple II was basically "Grumpiest Old Men", which basically retreaded the previous two by getting Neil Simon and attaching the character names. One thing you notice watching the play-friendly original movie is how different Felix Unger is from his later TV-sitcom incarnation: Jack Lemmon's Felix was standard, NY-neurotic Jack Lemmon, worrying over nitpicks and psychosomatically hacking his sinuses, while Tony Randall turned Felix into NYC's last buoyant, theatrical optimist, bursting into stentorian dudgeons, and giving everything a helpful over-the-top "flair" that annoyed the heck out of basic-bachelor Oscar.

I was quoting that same image right around the time we were wondering about Kim-Jong Un's current unverified state of health. (And why couldn't he afford something as cool as that?)

I was so tech-struck an Early-Adopter as a kid, one year, for my birthday, we got to have a big weekend splurge, rented one of those VCR thingies from the local camera-hobbyist store, and rented two or three Fotomat VHS's (for $12 each, in 1980 money!) for the weekend! In our own HOME, no less! And this, only a year or two after Magnetic Video Corporation had literally invented the concept of Movies Already On Tape by putting "The Muppet Movie" on VHS. (If you can look up PDF copies of TV Guide's short-lived '80-'81 snooty industry/tech-analysis spinoff magazine "Panorama", you can have yourself a WEALTH of nostalgic full-page VHS-sale, Sony Betamax, Pioneer LaserDisc, early personal-computer, HBO/Showtime and Activision game-cartridge ads, for the nostalgia bingefest: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Panorama-TV-Master-Page.htm Those interested in TVGuide history, check out the Jan '81 Panorama issue, for the Esquire-like "J. Fred Muggs Awards" for dubious achievement in television, that became an honored tradition before Rupert Murdoch messed TVG up.)

Weasel? Oh, you mean James Karen, of The China Syndrome (1979), Poltergeist (1982) and Return of the Living Dead (1985) fame: If some weaselly executive has cut one corner too many, you KNOW who's responsible. And a definitively weaselly Polonius, in the Richard Burton "Hamlet" production.

Nnnnno. 😑 Michael Gore. Might have wanted to look that one up. In fact, restoring Metropolis was largely his idea, as a labor of love, back when film restoration and nitrate-rescue was still just a NEW concept in 1984. (Real restorationists today still howl at the idea of colorizing clouds or replacing the dialogue intercards with subtitles, but darnit, they worked, for their time.) Note that it was co-arranged by Harold Faltermeier, who would go on to carve his OWN niche in iconic 80's movie synth-music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2gvHjNhQ0

The one time he got his name above the title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkdwUgd6iMA And even though it was trying to "Americanize" the movie, he added a cool synth-fantasy vibe to The Neverending Story (1984). The same YEAR. 👍 And Electric Dreams, the same year as THAT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEc8z5aP4B0 (That's Giorgio as the radio manager, btw.) Disco started out as basically the smooth black soul-funk of groups like The Commodores, trying to go "elegant" with backup string-sections in the mid-70's, before Moroder attached a Euro-techno beat to Donna Summer and invented the genre. To this day, no song more creepily captures the hellish seven-deadly-sins Studio 54 vibe of the real disco era than when a period movie (can't recall if Looking for Mr. Goodbar used it?) puts Moroder's arrangement of Summer's "I Feel Love" on the soundtrack.

If Reed Hastings hadn't personally killed off Netflix-by-mail--because "Streaming was the future", by which he meant, the postage rates were getting too expensive--it would have been around a lot longer. There was a mania for streaming Instant Netflix when it arrived in '10, but that all came to a COVID-like crash when Starz took 1500 of their catalog movies off the service in '13, causing what became known as "Netflix-pocalypse": The day all the trending folks discovered, gasp, Netflix wasn't digitizing the movies themselves, and movies DON'T stay on streaming services forever! 😱 (Which came as a shock to those bragging "I've finally thrown out my DVD collection, since Instant Netflix has it all!") Ever since then, we've had those "What's Leaving Netflix in May!" articles on trendy news-blogs every month, rather like the pollen warnings in the weather report. But fact is, a la carte VOD digital rental on Amazon and Vudu seems to have caught on, in the same places where digital purchase infamously plummeted off a cliff throughout the 10's. A), Since we're only renting it overnight, we don't have to worry about "What if they don't keep it forever, like they promised?", B ), rentals are about the same $5-7.50 price they were when Blockbuster closed, and C), being able to delete the movie with a click saves ex-Netflix-mail viewers that long trip to the mailbox to return it. (Don't laugh, that's a plus for us urban apartment folks who don't get their mail picked up by the postman, and have to go to the corner box.) Nice to know that the technology FINALLY found its own appropriate niche, since it didn't belong trying to barge into any other. I still prefer strolling down to our own local public super-library--since I live a block away--but it can be a month or two before a current hit arrives (and then, only if it's an "unwanted" title that somebody bought sight-unseen and then donated to get rid of after they watched it), so if I'm absolutely itching to watch last summer's hit I didn't get around to, I'll sometimes plunk down the $3-5 to rent it on Amazon or Vudu. And then, only on Amazon if I'd gotten one of those "Free bonus digital dollars" they give you when you choose the cheaper package shipping.

By the same token, are Disney's Artemis Fowl and Warner's Scoob! still "movies", if they were intended for the theaters, but spring/summer lockdown means they get bumped down to their respective streaming services? (Oh, wait, I'm sorry: "Exclusive digital premieres"... 😆 )

If you want 70's TV movies (like Mr. Gorman does, bumping his old '14 thread) just take a stroll through Amazon Prime--TV-movies tend to turn public-domain once their network abandons them (and their production companies have long since drifted away to renew copyrights), and if it's PD... Me, I'm currently rewatching the "exile" years of Wes Craven's pre-Elm Street TV-movies, such as Summer of Fear, and the not-too-bad-IIRC Invitation to Hell. Oh, and they say "Killdozer"'s coming to disk, but I'll wait and see. They're TV, and back in the 70's-80's, that actually MEANT something. Movies were in the theater--or on Sunday nights--TV-movies were things the network showed on Tuesday nights, especially during sweeps-week. Back then, TV didn't try to be the Movies, and Movies didn't try to be annual TV-series episodes.

Mom-and-pop stores were a great place to socialize, if you found one where the bored checkers liked to talk about the movies. In Boston and the suburbs, we had Videosmith, which were like small cozy bookstore-nooks, without the neon, blaring ads, and high pressure to rent the summer hit from six months ago. The rise of Blockbuster created a philosophical rift between movie fans: Were rentals places that served the studios, with one more go-round for the big recent hits, or libraries where you could pick old movies off the shelf? Unfortunately, BOTH became psychologically obsolete once Netflix-by-mail hit: Once you had the ability to rent with a computer click and return at your mailbox, the "hunting instinct" was gone once you walked into the store. There was almost literally nothing you wanted to watch, if you knew you'd have to make a second trip to return it. 😕

And okay, I'll say it: I LIKED The Adventures of Tintin (2011): (Which is currently streaming every-darn-where as one of the most visible and traveled of Paramount's Orphans.) That wasn't a very popular opinion, back when #ImpeachRobertZemeckis became our national frustration as moviegoers; we took one look at Spielberg's uncanny-valley-mocap and howled, "Oh, not you TOO, Steve!" I even heard people who--no joke--thought Martin Scorsese's Hugo was "computer animated", because they couldn't understand what other conditions would imaginably drive an Oscar-nominated director do to a, quote, "kiddy" film. If Zemeckis hadn't had Mars Needs Moms to give his karmic comeuppance closure, things would have gotten ugly. (But I liked Tintin, because I'd seen the 90's Nick cartoon, and used to read the comics in a kids' magazine at the dentist's office as a kid. I still haven't seen any of those live-action French Asterix movies, though, with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, and a wildly French-hamming Roberto Benigni in a supporting part.)

(facepalms tragically at a generation that asks, "Say, didn't Netflix used to, like, have a disk thing?" 🤦‍♂️ ) Netflix singlehandedly saved DVD's bacon, back in '97-'98 when DVD was still a struggling little techie format absolutely no one understood--You could barely find it at retail, and unless you had an unusually understanding local mom-and-pop rental that might stock four or five of them, you couldn't rent them at all. By '99, if you wanted to enjoy DVD, you searched the Internet, and that united a lost generation: There was ONE Netflix office in Santa Clara, CA, that rented them by mail, and there was the online DVDExpress.com store which always had discounts for those who wanted to buy them. When the DiVX Wars were over, DVD exploded in '99-'00, everyone jumped on, and the good folks manning the Santa Clara watchtower were infamously overwhelmed, until they took the big step in '01 to open regional branch offices and go national....And the rest is history. We techies used to have the same thing back in '10, when one online CA rental site would rent Blu3D disks by mail, when nobody would stock them for us lost-in-the-wilderness folks to buy, but fortunately, that site is still around.

Given our leader's latest health recommendation: The Man With Two Brains (1983). Recommended by the lurking Windex Killer. In the kingdom of CORONA! ☀️ (Don't blame me, that alone made it viral a month ago.) 😁

Over the years, I've seen my remaining VHS collection upgraded to DVD, Blu-ray, bootleg-DVD, and even online .MP4, to the point that I literally keep my VCR around because of ONE remaining VHS tape on my shelf. (An old MGM TV/standard release of "Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm"...Okay, two, the other's a Tex Avery collection, but Warner Archive's working on those for Blu as we speak.) And--since there's little hope it will, or can, ever get a big Warner studio restoration--I'm terrified to play it again, on the fear that the next play will be its last. 😱 I don't have the same fears about DVD or Blu. And maybe I brag about our local college-town library's DVD section, since our downtown used to have a beloved favorite VHS/DVD rental just off of Main St. for thirty years--one that appealed to the college kids, with more of the hard-to-find art/cult titles--and when it finally folded about six years ago, there was a big charity "Adopt a Movie" push to help pay the store's bills: The store would donate one title to the public library for every $5 donation. It was not only a smash hit, we now have a third-floor DVD section of the town's public library that's about the SIZE of a small college-town storefront mom-and-pop DVD rental, and still growing. Price for 7-day rental: Free.

Oy. It's...arguably better than Chuck Jones's soppy 70's TV-special, and it gets the major voices right, but not much else. (Jimmy Breslin as P.T. Bridgeport, the bear who spoke in circus-poster font? Did the filmmakers even read the strip??) And, of course, any series of comic strip movies will just end up as ONE MORE excuse to show the Robin Williams Popeye as a PD Paramount Orphan. I still say the movie is under-appreciated, but now this might be a little too hypnotically saturated...Oh, and the '96 MGM-Orphan Billy Zane The Phantom, which wasn't even that great the first time around. The last two--Race For Your Life, CB, and Bon Voyage, CB--also seem to be floating around the PD ether at the moment, but neither one has the '69 psychedelic stylizing of the original A Boy Named Charlie Brown. And as for any of the live-action Garfields, with or without Bill Murray, or any of the Dennis the Menaces, with or without John Hughes...no. Just NO.

Nowadays, we use these-here "Disk" thingies, and--since Netflix-by-mail deservedly killed off all the Blockbuster videos (and the mom-and-pop stores like Boston's Videosmith)--we do the act of Friday-night browsing at our local libraries. The only people who miss VHS, FWIH, are horror/B-movie fanboys who miss the cool covers. But, y'know, they were sorta cool.

One time, Carol aired the blooper-reel of a cut semi-ad-libbed sketch--where Carol plays Houdini's daughter, about to escape from a trunk thrown off the docks--that fell apart so disastrously in the first taping, they had to cut it from the final show entirely. ("Here's what the first taping looked like, and...please forgive us!") I always wondered whether that was what was referred to in another sketch, where Harvey Korman plays an insurance salesman trying to sell Tim Conway's Boss Tudball disaster insurance (Carol's Miss Wiggins being the disaster), and Tim breaks Harvey up by ad-libbing "You...wouldn't happen to have Comedy insurance, would you? We sure could have collected on that last one."

The "plague" aspect is covered more effectively in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: the Vampyre (1979) remake, where eastern European vampires were more a symbol of rat/bat plague before they became smoldering Christopher Lees.

I had to go all the way back to the beginning of the thread to remember whether anyone had posted Vincent Price in Masque of the Red Death in THIS thread. (ISTR everyone going around quoting it back when Quarantines and lockdown-parties didn't seem like a good idea yet...) I've also seen discussions of "This is starting to feel like a Twilight Zone episode!" turn into discussions of which Twilight Zone episodes (The Midnight Sun, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street) to watch during the lockdown/pandemic. And with the recent wishful-Trumpist-thinking "Anti-lockdown" protests of Florida beaches, Georgia bowling-alleys and the Tianmen Square-like "Land Free" photo, sit down with TZ episode "The Old Man in the Cave" for a nice chilling bit of serendipitous metaphor: (Which was technically supposed to be as much Serling's "faith" metaphor as nuclear scare, but those who remember the ending will find it particularly news-appropriate. 😷 )

"...I don't need a brick to fall on my head! (brick falls on head)" Ah, the early-mid 70's, when "Old movies" were a curiosity to be explored AND mocked, and Mad Magazine writers like Rudy deLuca and Dick DeBartolo still wrote Carol Burnett spoofs with the same exhaustive scene-specific gags they wrote for the magazine's current-movie parodies. The parodies I can't find--now that I've actually seen the originals, which I hadn't when sketches like "Rancid Harvest" and "The Enchanted Hovel" aired--are Babes in Barns, a Mickey-&-Judy parody, with Carol doing a dead-on spoof of Judy Garland's tragic vibrato every time she sings a sad song, and Little Miss Showbiz, a scene-specific parody of Shirley Temple's "Little Miss Broadway", with Carol (of course) doing a note-perfect imitation of Shirley's chirpy-wirpy delivery: "Isn't it sad for you, being an orphan with no parents? "Oh, no, I just think of my mommy and daddy as gone to some faraway land where the sun is always shining and the birds are singing!" "Where's that?" "(wwww-wikktt!)" 😄

Eyes Wide Shut singlehandedly REDEFINED the boundaries of "Least favorite Kubrick"--Lyndon's a slow-cooker, but if you have a good eye for Bitter Kubrick Irony, it doesn't disappoint fans of Clockwork or Strangelove. Most three-hour movies do better on disk/streaming, where you can take them a little at a time as serial series.

For a second, thought the thread was about Grover Cleveland, the twice-president, whom I've rarely heard even mentioned in movies outside of Disney's The One & Only Original Family Band (1968). (Apparently, a president CAN run for separate terms if another president is in between, and, um...what's Obama doing, lately?)

I have it on my Amazon, as I remember it from 80's HBO as starting out as a cheesy 70's-Japanese disaster movie with the American-cameo presidents, and then, once they get to Antarctica, the ending turning into some artsy Kurosawa film. What happened in between, I'm...still not sure. I may have to watch this now. I've WANTED to watch this since the days of local TV stations, but the movie's MIA status has become legendary...Does anyone know where it is? Warner Archive?? Seeing the flashback scenes of Anthony Zerbe in "Omega" as the national TV newscaster pretentiously covering the outbreak, before he became leader of the Black Zombie Panthers, there's a LOT of CV material there. (Or, as I remember joking when they showed this at our all-night college-town sci-fi festival some years ago, "Wow, Dan Rather's really gone over the edge, this time...") The Will Smith version originally wanted, and later cut, an entire subplot where the pandemic panic starts an entire religious movement for the population to think the disease is "God's punishment" (and snarky-hipster Smith, of course, is the rationalist doctor who sees through such nonsense), and graffiti of "God Still Loves Us" was supposed to appear all across the ruins of NYC, as reminders of those last panicky days--In the final cut, that whole subplot was reduced to one line of dialogue. Back in the 00's days when studios were just experimenting with online-viral marketing, Warner wanted people to take Instagrams of real-life God Still Loves Us graffiti, to post on their "real" website, and....nobody got it. For a while, the site attracted fundamentalist Christians, and then, after people found out it was from the movie, the site became a hangout for virus-Zombie fan-cosplay photos. Okay, so much for that idea. 😄

It's bad-memory factor, like "Harry Potter star Richard Harris". Apart from Cocoon and Gorky, I don't remember any of those, but Bryan Brown's sharp (if potty-mouthed) detective partner in F/X (1986) was what put him on the map for me. (The sequel?...Err, not so much.) And one disk company was exhaustive enough to remember Dennehy with early sleazy-era James Woods in the Larry Cohen-scripted Best Seller (1987). ("Tommy Boy", indeed!...Phah!) He was appearing in so many supporting parts in the mid-late 80's, Entertainment Weekly did a humorous sidebar on "How to Tell Brian Dennehy Apart From Charles Durning". Various comparisons were made (Durning had Oscar nominations, Dennehy didn't), but the clincher was "Which Archies character most resembles:"--Durning was a dead ringer for Principal Weatherbee, while Dennehy suggested Big Moose. 😀

Bruce Davison, of course, would grow up to become more famous as nasty Senator Kelly of the X-Men films. There's a BTS making-of scene for the first X-Men, where Davison and Rebecca Roumjin-Stamos in makeup are waiting around the set in cold water at night on the set, joking about the poor conditions, and Davison jokes "I've already had rats, I'm used to this..."