[Overload of Japanese films]

1 hour ago, HoldenIsHere said:

If Sepiatone couldn't get into RASHOMON,  maybe he should check out "Rashomama," an episode of MAMA'S FAMILY where there are three different versions of how Mama got hit in the head with a pot when the family gathered to make gooseberry jam.

Just about every sitcom's done at least one "No, I'll tell you how it REALLY happened!" Rashomon episode, with the other characters acting like the teller's goofy skewed stereotypes--I believe All in the Family's was "Everybody Tells the Truth", when the black repairman came to fix the refrigerator.

(I first remembered it from a Jackson Five cartoon from the 70's, long before I'd ever heard of the movie.)

3 hours ago, Sukhov said:

Probably not the best place to vent but the Criterion Channel's audio commentary for Stray Dog won't load. It really irritates me when this happens.  

I originally rented Stray Dog and Drunken Angel during the same week, and I keep getting confused as to which postwar-Tokyo-black-market/poverty/Yakuza drama is which.

One thing helped me remember Drunken Angel:  If you thought happy zither Muzak helped add "irony" to  postwar 40's European malaise in The Third Man, Kurosawa has something even more insidiously annoying to ironically establish postwar 40's Japan malaise:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdlpi5dlIXc

[At Home With The Kids]

8 hours ago, hamradio said:

"The Bluebird" has absolutely nothing to do with "Heidi", both are different stories. "The Bluebird" is about what really makes one happy / unhappy in life.  Characters are to be taken symbolically i.e. Mr Luxury whom represents money, wealth as the movie shows doesn't love you back.

Think you're reacting to the fashion,  the clothes both Mytyl and Heidi wears are called dirndls (or Tyrolean) which are common even up to this day within the Swiss,  Austrian area.

That, and Shirley singing a Swiss-yodeling song during the Memory scene, and what seems almost like a THIRD of the film devoted to Shirley causing hijinks in the rich, stuffy Luxury mansion (without a monkey).  At 12, Shirley was getting near the end of her tot years, and Fox was playing it safe.

If you want the real Maurice Maeterlinck, the more play-accurate 1976 Russian Elizabeth-Taylor version is available on disk, but the lite-classics 1940 Shirley version is....much easier to take, especially for kids seeing it for the first time.

(And for those who thought Oz's "No place like home" was supposed to be 1939 anti-war isolationism...hoo-boy--Get a load of what Fox does with it in 1940:  "The war is over!  Napoleon signed a treaty!"  😄 )

[At Home With The Kids]

20 minutes ago, vidorisking said:

I have young kids and with the way their attention is, the only film on that list that will be watched is The Wizard Of Oz. My son won’t even watch till Dorothy enters Oz. I love the movies on the list but I don’t think you have a shot other than The Wizard Of Oz. Just my experience.

I don't think he HAS kids, that's why he was asking...   🙄

As for Chitty/Bang, it's still the greatest thing the Sherman Bros. did outside of Disney, but growing up, it just seemed heretical to watch this on any other day besides Thanksgiving.  (Not because of the movie, but because the networks and local stations would always show three-hour family movies, so more employees could take the day off.)  However, like the Wicked Witch, this one has been known to have its own traumatizing villain...

And even if you don't have a high Shirley Temple tolerance, The Blue Bird was always another favorite local-station tradition at Christmas.  It takes great liberties with the classic play (even to the point of flat-out ripping off "Heidi"), but it's a good Hollywood-ized Classics Illustrated condensation of the story for those who've never heard of it...Seriously, the original was bigger than Peter Pan, in its day.  Fox wanted to "out-Oz" MGM for not hiring Shirley as Dorothy, and even if you don't know the original, it's a nice serviceable Oz-Lite.

(And hey, wait, should Disney+ have some of these classic Foxes, by now?)

[♣ MORE New York-based movies of the 1970s ♣]

7 minutes ago, Mr. Gorman said:

 (I still have no idea how to do an 'apple' emoji!).

It's in the Emojij under the smiley-face in the top bar.  You can do a word search for all their emoji, and typing in "Apple" brings up 🍎.

[I Just Watched...]

15 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:

PLEASE TELL ME YOJIMBO IS JAPANESE FOR "STAUNCH"

EDIT- WAIT, IS IT JAPANESE FOR "BODYGUARD?"

Yep--Like his Clint Eastwood gun-for-hire doppelgänger With No Name, we never know the Mifune Samurai's name, and he's looking for the job of bodyguard.  Samurai had to work for an employer, or they'd be dirty ronin, like the Seven Samurai.

He calls himself Sanjuro in Sanjuro, but we get the impression he's just throwing out an alias.

4 hours ago, SansFin said:

Have you ever watched:The Hidden Fortress (1958)? It is Toshirô Mifune in a true comedy by Akira Kurosawa. The humour ranges from broad to subtle and it has moments of truly endearing warmth.

And the baldfaced comparisons to Hidden Fortress as "Star Wars:  Episode 0" have been expounded upon at length, but are still fun to note:

Throne of Blood is also arguably THE greatest movie version of Macbeth ever made, and Mifune depicts his fall from hero to coward to tyrant even more scarily than Shakespeare intended.

[♣ MORE New York-based movies of the 1970s ♣]

On 4/2/2020 at 1:31 AM, Mr. Gorman said:

If TCM has a notion at some time of doing another series of films set mostly -or- completely in NYC and its surrounding areas, well, here are more movies.  Can anyone think of some titles I missed?  It's hard to remember all of the New York City-based films released from 1970-79! 

But, first, here are some 'movies around the edges' released in 1968 and '69 and 1980-82.  (I wish I knew how to do an emoji of an apple!)

Nocturna (1978)  Most of it takes place in NYC.

Can we assume they've ALREADY done Love at First Bite?  🍎

[Overload of Japanese films]

1 hour ago, Princess of Tap said:

A lot of older Americans experienced a great deal of racism against Japanese Americans and Japanese during World War II. Some still may retain some of those hostile feelings.  So for some older people, it might be particularly unsettling to be watching a whole evening of films dedicated Japanese Cinema.

Yvonne, I'm sure that's not the case with your seniors oh, but considering reality it just simply had to be said.

No, from the sound of the complaint, they likely just thought TCM was becoming a "snooty" foreign-film Bravo, even though the real Bravo now shows "Project Runway" and "Real Housewives".

And I'm old enough to remember 80's corporate-boom Japan-phobia (remember back when Sean Connery was in "Rising Sun", and red-state and West-coast jokes on TV about sumo wrestlers were considered hysterically un-PC?), but jumping onto the first late-80's Anime wave in college quickly cured me of that--And anyone who was there knows who did it:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twZUNOFUwH8  😁❤️🌩️

 

[Overload of Japanese films]

4 hours ago, Vautrin said:

I thought the schedule and the intros made it obvious. It was a celebration of Toshiro Mifune's 100th Birthday. It did last all day.

Yep--Criterion Channel, of course, had the whole collection.

Quote

In my mind I'm picturing the reaction of old ladies as they watch Mifune scratch himself and kill dozens of people with his sword. Yikes.

Which, of course, makes me think of the sweet, civilized ladies who don't want nasty old Mifune to kill people, from Sanjuro.  That, and:

Sort of disappointing--I read the title and wondered whether TCM had dug into the other stash of Japanese films now PD'ing on streaming/Prime, like Beautiful Dreamer, Project A-Ko and Galaxy Express 999.  😎

[I Just Watched...]

10 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:

i remember this one pretty well.

an intriguing NOTE is that THE MURDERER IN THE FILM IS NOT THE PERSON WHO DID IT IN THE BOOK.

I also remember a David Suchet episode set on a desert tour,  where the presumed time setting of the murder was the deceptive red-herring, since the victim had been given a paralytic drug to die of exposure in the sun long before the presumed "murder"--I always thought that was this story, but if it was, one of the two got it wrong.

And CtToI, I remember hearing of Ordeal By Innocence too, but the G/G "Ten Little Indians" seems to have dropped off the map, like most of Golan's more ambitious movies from their '87-'89 "Running out of money" phase.

[I Just Watched...]

Appointment with Death (1988) - 👍

I'd been searching for this one, since it'd dropped between the cracks, right between the last big-screen period-setting all-star Agatha Christie of Evil Under the Sun (1983), and the later contemporary late-80's TV-movie Hercule Poirot adaptations on Warner Archive.  Nobody seems to remember that in between, there was a brief, unnoticed period where the formerly big-budget Christies had been reduced to international Golan/Globus productions (there was also reportedly a "Ten Little Indians" relocated to an African lodge), and with Cannon Pictures now joining the MGM/Orion orphans on streaming, I finally ran across this one on PlutoTV's on-demand catalog.  It's serviceable--Loyal Christie fans don't consider it one of the better Poirots, and it doesn't have the filtered opulence of the original '74 Murder on the Orient Express or the winking 30's humor of "Evil", it's more somewhere in the middle, like the '78 Death on the Nile on a Golan/Globus budget. 

The mystery here has Peter Ustinov's Poirot investigating a murder on a Middle Eastern tourist archeological dig (yep, Menahem Golan had to pick the one story he could film in Israel), with Piper Laurie--still in "Twin Peaks" Catherine Martell mode--typecast as a wicked-stepmother matriarch who ends up as the victim, with Carrie Fisher, Jenny Seagrove, and a grown-up Haley Mills among the suspects, John Gielgud showing up as the usual spear-carrier, and Lauren Bacall repeating her "Orient Express" typecasting as the Comic-Relief Loudmouth American.  But even serviceable Agatha Christie still looks good on a period budget...The only complaint is Ustinov:  Yes, he's not David Suchet, and he's not Albert Finney, and while he's lovable and cuddly, he's not much of a Hercule Poirot, either.  Ustinov spends much of his time being lovably cowardly, fussy and preening--and er, aha, avoiding anything dangerous--and not the "Irritating little man" of Christie's books who offhandedly brags about his genius and constantly annoys innocent suspects by suspecting everyone.

Even watching it for the sake of completism, it's still a fun diversion.  Now, I should probably look up "Nile" again, now that it's hit orphan-streaming, I don't quite remember that one as well as the others.

[The Godfather, I and II long overdue?]

They're Paramount, you can watch them every-freakin'-where ELSE.

[Hilarious Movie Titles]

4 hours ago, lydecker said:

Teenage Catgirls in Heat?? A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell?? Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death??  You have got to be making this up!

Many of these are deliberate camp from Lloyd Kaufman at Troma Pictures, who only WISHES his grade-C goof-off movies were as funny as his titles.  And that includes Surf Nazis Must Die.

(Which, to be fair, is what it claims to be about...)

[Hilarious Movie Titles]

Y'know, sometimes you almost MISS the high-concept 80's, when just a first-person title sold a studio comedy pitch:

    

[BOMB 💣]

2 hours ago, Rudy's Girl said:

The story makes little sense because the writers tried to use songs from the album and Abbey Road to create characters and a story instead of being original. 

Actually, the story comes from a disastrous stage musical Robert Stigwood salvaged for the movies after trying to produce it off-Broadway.  And even then, little of the original survived:

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-sgt-pepper-musical/

44 minutes ago, Rudy's Girl said:

Steve Martin and Alice Cooper, who I usually like, are not that great in this. Plus, I just can't see Barry Gibb punching out Alice Cooper. Besides that, the music is fine. It's the movie itself that needs work.

Late 70's Jerk-era Martin's basically the only reason for watching the film--Except for the big-backlot circus-y spin on "Mr. Kite", and Alice Cooper's Snidely Whiplash cover of "Because".

Donald Pleasance's singing debut, however...not so much:  Imagine a comic routine of "What if Donald Pleasance sang Beatles songs?"--That IS Pleasance trying to sing "I Want You".  😆

[So What Really Was the Best Movie Year?]

2 hours ago, CinemaInternational said:

Its a topic that has been discussed many times before, but I feel that following the release of a new book it should be resurrected.  I was reading this article last night about a new book suggesting that 1962 was the best movie year of them all

Oh, whew, thought it was that Millennial idiot again who wrote a book about how 1999 was the "best movie year ever" (because it had Fight Club!)

All of them failing to see the truth:  Packed for volume, 1982 was the Best Movie Year Ever:

• E.T.
• Blade Runner
• The Thing
• Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan
• Tootsie
• The Road Warrior
• Das Boot
• First Blood
• Tron
• Conan the Barbarian
• Victor/Victoria
• My Favorite Year
• Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
• The World According to Garp
• 48 Hrs.
• Pink Floyd: the Wall
• The Last Unicorn

...And a dozen other purely cult titles that, if listed here, would be even longer than 1981.

[I Just Watched...]

10 hours ago, Hoganman1 said:

We took the advice offered here and ditched TWIN PEAKS. 

We didn't say "Ditch it", we said "Ditch it after they finally figure out Laura Palmer's killer."

(I'd have said "Ditch it after the first season", but the second-season opener has its good moments too.)

If you've at least gotten through S1:E3, "Zen & the Art of Catching a Killer", you've gotten your minimum requirement of Iconic TV History.

[John Candy]

Okay, where do you want to START with the original post?
I'll just throw a dart at random, and hit "Most of his movies were for Universal"...What did everyone else pick?

[I Just Watched...]

2 hours ago, YourManGodfrey said:

The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972)

It was my first time seeing any of the Magnificent Seven films. I guess it was an odd choice to start at the end of the series, but it caught my eye and Lee Van Cleef looked like a rugged, old gunfighter. It was an okay film with a dark theme. I’d like to see the others in the series now.

The sequels were ehh, but THE original Magnificent is good if you know it's trying to be the genuine Kurosawa Seven Samurai.  Complete with the downbeat Twilight-of-the-gunfighter theme that was supposed to reflect Kurosawa's deconstructive Twilight-of-the-samurai theme in the Japanese version.  CtToI, the original B&W Kurosawa isn't too darn bad, either, if you don't mind swords instead of guns.  🏯

(James Coburn always told the story of how he took the knife-thrower role after hearing "Wait, is my character going to be that cool silent-swordsman expert?...I'm in!")

56 minutes ago, Rudy's Girl said:

The first is by far the best. The cast, the excitement, and the soundtrack make it one of the best Westerns ever made. Yul Brynner makes a surprisingly good cowboy.

How many people wanted to remake Westworld hoping to be the cool Gunfighter, without realizing that was "supposed" to be a nasty version of Brynner's Chris Adams?

 

[I Just Watched...]

2 hours ago, TikiSoo said:

If it's anything like the OS it goes nowhere. Ever.

It is, and it doesn't.  

The classic first season is iconic TV history, but as for the second season...now you know why those "Season arc" series TP invented always change their arc after the season finale.

Still, nice to see everyone trapped in the house long enough to start discovering CLASSIC TV again, When Episodes Were Episodes.  Now, let's see who discovers The Prisoner reruns on Amazon/PlutoTV...

[I Just Watched...]

1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:

Noah's Ark (1999) - Robert Halmi tries to make one of those TNT-style religious miniseries only to unleash an abomination upon the earth.

Er, no, Halmi was trying to make one of those classic [what "Hallmark Channel" meant in the late-90's/early-00's before Christmas romcoms] miniseries that used to show on TNT, like "The Odyssey", the Ted Danson "Gulliver's Travels" and the Patrick Stewart "Moby Dick".  (They're everywhere on streaming now, like kudzu, since TV-movies go PD more quickly.)

BUT, when he starts trying to do non-book stories, or make up original fantasy, like "Merlin", "Voyage of the Unicorn", "Magical Legend of the Leprechauns" or "The 10th Kingdom", and is left to his own screenwriting devices,  then a seal of unwatchably coy, precious and overdone abominations are unleashed upon the earth.   😱   

The need to make up a subplot-line and original dialogue for Noah would certainly be in the latter category.

[I Just Watched...]

8 hours ago, LawrenceA said:

I've been watching a lot of TV mini-series from the 1990's for the past several days.

First up was World War II: When Lions Roared (1994), with John Lithgow as FDR, Bob Hoskins as Winston Churchill, and Michael Caine as Joseph Stalin. This was fairly dry, and largely comprised of dialogue lifted verbatim from the official correspondence between the three. Caine made for a more effective Stalin than I expected. 6/10

And John Lithgow memorably broke the traditional barrier of always having to cast Edward Hermann as FDR--Three good performances all around.

[I Just Watched...]

1 hour ago, CinemaInternational said:

I love Peggy Sue Got married. Such a lovely film, and very underrated today. Kathleen Turner was touching, and it was such a moving film. (Also loved seeing Barbara Harris and Maureen O'Sullivan again).

It would have been a sleeper hit if "Back to the Future" had never existed, but, well...

Quote

And I'll always remember Bette Midler's K-Mart line from Ruthless People......

Although that's not QUITE the particular line that springs to people's mind when we now talk about "a Ruthless People moment":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waf46eBajkw

["Dial M For Murder"]

11 hours ago, Ray Banacki said:

When it is shown in its 3-D version, it is a great film - its claustrophia is overwhelming.

Not to mention when it's watched on Blu-ray 3D, with the right sets.  😎

[BOMB 💣]

8 hours ago, Rudy's Girl said:

I love Gene Wilder in most everything he does. However...

Have you seen Rhinoceros? Don't. It's kinda dumb. People are losing their humanity and turning into animals?

It was part of the American Film Theater Productions string of trying to bring important playwrights to mid-70's movies, and discovering that Eugene Ionesco doesn't necessarily film well.   😳

Versions of Eugene O'Neill (the '73 The Iceman Cometh) and Bertold Brecht (the '75 Galileo) fared only slightly better, but not by much.

[Salem's Lot 1979]

On 3/18/2020 at 1:36 AM, Rudy's Girl said:

I liked Kolchak. We have the movies and the complete series on DVD. Some episodes are better than others. I especially loved Simon Oakland and Ruth DcDevitt who played Emily. 

Kolchak was MY Friday night, growing up--Mostly because Kolchak didn't seem like a "real" reporter, McGavin made him seem like the "Scoop" reporter out of an old 30's B-movie transported to the modern era.  

Which gave the monster material a more 30's-Universal quality, in polyester 70's clothes.  

having said that I'll take kolchak over the modern x-files crud any day.

You mean the X-Files knockoff 00's version, I assume, that also happened from too many people using Kolchak and X-Files interchangeably in the same sentence?

(You know, the one that had to give him a female sidekick because Agent Mulder had one?)