EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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4 hours ago, Vautrin said:
The reason people don't know about this "true" story is that it didn't happen. Just another urban legend.
Neither Frank or Dino were with Sammy when the accident happened. Joey Bishop wasn't there either.
Strange but Tre.
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48 Hours (1982) - 👎
In my search for completion of all the great 80's classics I was either too young or uninterested to see in the theaters, this decade classic somehow slipped between my cultural cracks--Most iconically remembered for singlehandedly inventing the 80's Buddy-Cop Comedy, but that seems to be ALL it's remembered for. (A sequel, like most action-comedy sequels, flopped horrendously several years later.) The novelty of the genre was just invented, and critics were taken by surprise that there was a "sweetness" of the characters getting along by the end, but compared to the later entries, it's pretty short on charm, courtesy of Walter Hill: It doesn't have the snappy humor of Running Scared, it doesn't have the gonzo action or plot of the first Lethal Weapon, it doesn't have the odd-car-fellows cop-and-crook buddy-camaraderie of Midnight Run, and it doesn't even let Eddie Murphy cut loose as in the first Beverly Hills Cop. It had car chases, Walter Hill neon streets, a hit 80's-soundtrack single, Murphy doing his early-80's sea-lion laugh, and...that's it.
The idea of tough cop Nick Nolte freeing convict Eddie Murphy on a 48-hour custody pass, to track down part of bank robbers' missing money, should have the makings of a good standard entry, but Hill didn't have a genre yet, and thought he was making another gritty cop film--Nolte has charm, but his character is combative, grungy and potty-mouthed, and doesn't seem to get along with anybody let alone his unwilling partner or the audience, and Murphy here, despite one or two ad-lib scenes (during his great "motormouth" early-80's phase) is reduced almost to either a hip black stereotype of trying to get girls, or a plot convention of stealing someone's gun at useful moments. Of course, this is the Reagan 80's, so the crooks have to be near superhuman bulletproof animals--and, need we mention, ethnic, with a Native super-assassin as the hired-gun--with implausibly complex robbery/escape plans, and the ability to steal buses and lead car chases down San Francisco with a minimum of collateral damage.
And...that's about as much of what passed for a linear plot as I could fathom. To those who also want to try, good luck.
13 hours ago, LawrenceA said:I also watched another Doctor Who serial, the 4-part Warriors' Gate (1981). The fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companions Romana (Lalla Ward) and Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) are still trapped in E-Space, a pocket dimension where the previous 2 serials (Full Circle and State of Decay) also took place. They try to figure out a way back to our universe, which may involve helping a race of lion-like humanoids being exploited by others trapped in E-Space. The story was original, and the meager effects were pushed to their limits. This serial marked the last for Romana as well as the robot dog K9.
Bad weather swooped in last New Year's Eve, so I had to stay home and watch the Times Square countdown on TV (after the usual obligatory Stooges on streaming).
Since the recliner and popcorn were comfy, I switched channels to stall off bedtime, happened upon an entire Doctor Who arc I hadn't yet seen just starting on PlutoTV, and sat through the whole thing. (State of Decay, as I recall.) Darn if it wasn't the best NYE I'd had in a few years...That was the late-night vintage TV I'd always dreamed of staying up for, as a kid. 😋
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10 hours ago, Dargo said:
One of the best I remember watching in recent times, would be this 2001 Billy Crystal-directed made-for-TV movie...
If it wasn't a made-for-TV, I'd put it in the "Holy trinity" of baseball movies, alongside The Natural and Eight Men Out.
And looks like I get to be the one who remembers The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), about the looser, more homespun days of 30's Negro-league baseball:
(Back when 70's black movies starred both Lando Calrissian and Darth Vader.)
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12 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Yeah, the mini-series boom seemed to kick off with Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) and especially Roots (1977). Two other major mini-series of the era were The Winds of Wars (1983) and its sequel War and Remembrance (1988/89). It's hard to imagine today's audiences watching those kinds of shows in the same way, with 2 or 3-hour installments each night, 5 or more nights in a row.
(angry Boomer mode) Oh, what, you mean as opposed to BINGING THEM ALL IN ONE NIGHT, and then bragging about it online?
But then, it's hard for anyone born after the 70's to remember a time when TV was an event you worked your schedule around, or at least remembered to tape once the VCR was invented.
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Our Davey is growing up so fast--One day they're watching the Muppets, the Flintstones and Sesame Street, and next day, they want to check out the cool horror films.
Even the ones from Fox, that Disney owns now, and probably won't show outside of Hulu, if they haven't "Fox-vaulted" it already.
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4 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
WOW! That is some INSPIRED casting, and I would love to see what my highlighted choices were like in their parts!!!!!! (HARRY MORGAN, in particular, seems like perfect casting as TRUMAN)
I'm in Northampton, MA, where Calvin Coolidge is the local town hero, and from what I remember from the series, Ed Flanders was perfect.
(Although I kept confusing him with Robert Vaughn's Wilson.)
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On 12/31/2019 at 6:13 PM, sagebrush said:
I loved the school house rock series, and the "Bill" was my favorite.
~RIP, Mr. Sheldon.
I'll admit, I did not know who did the voice of the Conjunction Conductor or Bill.
With the Multiplication and Grammar songs, I assumed most of them were songwriter Bob Dorough either doing his Paul Simon voice ("Three is a magic number...") or his Leon Redbone voice ("Mean ol' Number Nine..."), so I figured he must have had his Growly-Jazz/Blues voice, too.
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I am deeply ashamed to be the one who remembered Tanya's Island (1980)
Call it the product of a misspent Cinemax-watching youth. 😔
(SPOILER: And no, they don't get it on until a fadeout implication at the very, very end, which turns out to be the All-a-Dream concession to the censors. Just the first of many disappointments to my pre-adolescent self.)
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1930 - Animal Crackers
1940 - Pinocchio (hon. mention The Blue Bird)
1950 - The Third Man
1960 - The Magnificent Seven (hon. mention The Time Machine)
1970 - M*A*S*H
1980 - The Blues Brothers (hon. mention Xanadu)
1990 - Ghost (hon. mention Darkman)
2000 - Toy Story 2
2010 - Tangled (seriously, I looked, and wow, was '10 a wasteland--And that especially includes Black Swan and Inception. We didn't even have a decent Harry Potter.)
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3 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Bottom right - not US Grant, but Robert E. Lee with a black eye = "bruised Lee" = Bruce Lee box set
Which for some reason keeps reminding me of the joke about a discussion over "Blue 3":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSBj3p7LgIM
(Which wouldn't have made a bad clue either.)
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It's not so much "Throwing money", as studios still trying to indulge their Marvel-era belief that studio "Franchise strategies" would automatically provide brand-name blockbuster hits just by slapping a logo and a date on a poster, without having to hire nasty old screenwriters for them--
Not only did we see Charlie's Angels and X-Men: Dark Phoenix thrown on the bonfire, but also MIB: International, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (the one that was "supposed" to set up '20's Kong vs. Godzilla), Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Doctor Sleep, Shaft, MGM's nonsensically off-book "Child's Play" remake, Blumhouse's nonsensically off-book "Black Christmas" remake, and Lego Movie 2.
...And they're going to get a lot MORE nervous by '21, with or without "Ghostbusters: Afterlife". 😈 (So, is Warner still planning that "Young Willy Wonka" movie?)
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4 hours ago, Dargo said:
While not a good ol' 'Merican flick, I'm waiting for SansFin to pipe in here and mention the 1976 Russian romcom (yeah yeah...who knew those Ruskies could be romantic let alone funny, huh
) The Irony of Fate, and which since its initial broadcast on Russian TV that year, has become a much loved film within that country with a New Years theme. It's popularity among the comrades over there is said to be akin to how Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has become a beloved American story but with a Christmas theme.
Although, of course, in the then-Soviet system, Christmas had been state-expunged, and New Year's was commercialized as the joyous holiday season--With lots of homilies about "Making new starts", and jolly old Father Frost bringing winter New Year's presents to good/non-subversive little children.
Last year on Amazon, caught an early-60's Russian kids-animated "holiday" movie of The Twelve Month Brothers. From the Hans Christian Andersen tale, except that instead of having to serve the traditional fairytale wicked-stepmother, our heroine had to satisfy a spoiled princess who hated making New Year's resolutions, and who protested that if she couldn't get what she wanted, there wouldn't be a New Year--It'd be Dec. 32nd, 33rd, 35th, so there! Basically, your standard Christmas matinee for children of the Motherland, about How the Grinch Stole
ChristmasNew Year's.-
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7 minutes ago, Fedya said:
Finally, The Poseidon Adventure is set on New Year's Eve/Day.
The Time Machine, beginning on NYE 1899, you'd think would be a TCM tradition.
(Of course, I grew up in Boston, where the Three Stooges were a local until-midnight tradition on UHF station WSBK-38. Until the station was taken over, and now they still do the marathons, but now as a goofy slacker-guy event.)
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3 hours ago, shutoo said:
Notably, it remains the only Desi Arnaz Jr. film I've ever...or probably will ever...see.
Well, you may have to track down the obscure kiddy-musical Marco (1973), just for the bizarre follies of watching Rankin-Bass try to make a real feature film during their stop-motion heyday, but I digress.
Story on HoLS goes that Menahem Golan, who tried to make any movie he could think up, kept saying "Get me those monster men!", and the crew eventually realized nobody had told him that Boris Karloff was dead. Still, even on a Cannon Pictures budget, the last four gentleman-horror actors don't disappoint.
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Neil got the Python gig from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band being the goofy Monkees-esque kids-rock-group working with Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and David Jason on the proto-Python BBC "Do Not Adjust Your Set":
In the early days, fans who didn't know what to make of Python thought, "'Dead parrots'? Dood, they must be on DRUUGZ!" But the Pythons said they always thought of themselves as upper-class Oxbridge twits from the Variety club, and that it was Innes who was the "cool hippie" for having his own goofy rock band.
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2 hours ago, cmovieviewer said:
As hosted by Leonard Maltin, Treasures from the Disney Vault has been a quarterly programming staple on TCM for at least the last 5+ years, with specials typically scheduled during March, June/July, September/October and December.
Now December is almost over this year and no Disney Vault has been seen. As a bit of an alternative, Leonard Maltin was used as a co-host with Ben to introduce Christmas classics for the last 4 weeks.
Leonard Maltin's going through some rough medical times at the moment, but there's no one else with the personal Disney-history credits.
(And ten years later, we're still nagging him for those two Disney Treasures DVD archive boxsets we never got...)
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5 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:
1. I have gone to Galaxy's Edge. Right now, if I'm not mistaken, all they have up and running is the Milennium Falcon ride. It is pretty fun though.
They just opened "Rise of the Resistance": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBQHVTU2430
(And plan to open the original version of Disney Paris's "Ratatouille" ride in Epcot's France pavilion sometime in the next two years.)
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12 hours ago, hamradio said:
Along with the most odd card playing scene in movies. Game called Sabacc
But even Solo couldn't handle a man's game of Fizzbin:
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I can't believe I was the first one to post it--I kept trying to think of other scenes:
(And for those who thought Margaret Dumont "never thought" the Marx Bros. were funny, watch her try not to break up at Harpo's shuffling: )
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2 hours ago, Vautrin said:
Probably. And as the old saw goes No one plays Cary Grant like Cary Grant.
Welllll....maybe Tony Curtis.
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The Nutcracker & the Four Realms (2018) - 👎 [abandoned]
I'll admit it, every year, I start my Christmas viewing with readily available ephemera from Netflix and Amazon, and--trying to catch one sporting bit of pure kitsch every year--wanted to get this off my Netflix queue before it made its inevitable relocation to Disney+. With big-budget Disney box-office megaflops, there's the temptation for John Carter Syndrome to kick in, and rush to its rescue as some under appreciated "martyr" (so, like, is "A Wrinkle in Time" really that bad?), but beware: This one's BAD, and richly deserved what it got, in spades. Disney so believed their '10 Tim Burton's Alice machine would chug forever (qv. "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), that they could pump out a "third" movie for the Christmas season--After all, hey, Clara's sorta like Alice, only with sugarplums instead of mushrooms, right?
I won't say it's "So bad it beggars description", because in fact, there is only one description for this entire movie for the whole two hours, and not one single deviation from the train track: The story is only watchable if you treat it as a parody--not a ha-ha funny parody, but a cynical, sardonic observational parody--of every pandering Mary-Sue feminist-revisionist trope Linda Woolverton ever put into the two Alice movies, the two Maleficent movies and the two Beauty & the Beast movies. Remember the Alice who literally wore Joan of Arc armor and wielded a silver sword for
FranceWonderland in the first Tim Burton "Alice", and then became a pirate queen on the high seas in the second one? (Okay, you probably don't on that one, but just go with it.) Here, in the first fifteen minutes of this movie, we get a Clara Stahlbaum, to the tinkly music of Tschaikovsky, explaining Newton's Third Law of Momentum to her little brother Fritz, as she singlehandedly set up a Rube Goldberg mousetrap she thought up all by her underappreciated-genius self (get it, it'll be the obvious plot-point later), and who complains that she can pick any kind of locks except pin-tumblers, when given a mysterious locket by Drosselmeier. (Morgan Freeman, the only actor to emerge with his dignity intact by staying to the original story). She's led to the fairytale land, meets the Nutcracker Prince--now a goofy, stumbling well-meaning "fixer-upper" non-threatening male interest--and is told she is to follow in her mysterious mother's footsteps inheriting the title of the new queenie-wahini-Mary-Sue of the "Four Realms", as soon as they can defeat the villain. "The Mouse King?"...Er, no, although he's a minor villain in the story. Instead, Mother Ginger (the one with the kids under her skirt, from the ballet) has now been upgraded into the "Villain trying to take over the kingdom", apparently because she was the only character in the story who resembled a Queen of Hearts. Ali...er, Clara is aided by the Sugarplum Fairy--who seems to be lovingly homaging Carol Kane's interpretation from "Scrooged"--and who has the difficult girls'-script duty of playing both Wise But Timid Mentor and symbolic Non-Empowered Fluffy-Girly Parody, depending on what the story requires...Namely to "rally the troops" for war, and guess who'll lead them? Well, okay, him too.And then, the height of hypocrisy: As part of her Hail-ye-glorious-Mary-Sue arrival at the palace, Clara is shown a ballet...Noooo, not THAT ballet. The movie had to have some way of explaining the MUC backstory about her mother Mary Sue Sr., so the scriptwriter found a uniquely quick/lame excuse to put "See, see, it is the ballet!" scenes in the trailer. At that point, I gave up. No, not because my sensibilities had been pushed over the edge, but because I was able to watch only five or ten minutes of this movie at a stretch, time was getting short and there was a long list of Amazon ephemera, so I bailed early and washed my brain out with my Blu-ray of the 1986 Carroll Ballard/Maurice Sendak version. (Ah, that Arabian peacock-babe...She wasn't in the original either, but a lot easier to take. 😊 )
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9 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
I just went to the 5-screen theatre in town today to see Frozen II before it left town after tomorrow. Why am I bringing this up? Well, Cats was playing in the theatre right next door. I was essentially sitting only 10 feet removed from Cats.
(sigh) You still have a local 5-screen? 😩 I miss those!
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1 hour ago, Swithin said:
Katharine Hepburn should have made The Lady Eve.
And Paulette Goddard should have passed the Scarlett O'Hara audition.
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(So, this is sort of the antithesis of Jake Holman's "Joker" box-office obsession, then?)
) The Irony of Fate, and which since its initial broadcast on Russian TV that year, has become a much loved film within that country with a New Years theme. It's popularity among the comrades over there is said to be akin to how Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has become a beloved American story but with a Christmas theme.
I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
As another one who's watched the earlier Doctors, I found the New series literally INSULTING. Maybe it's that I didn't get past the first three seasons produced by Russell T. Davies (who also produced the UK "Queer as Folk", and I mention this as a reason that will become painfully apparent to new viewers watching the first two seasons, not to mention its spinoff "Torchwood"), but it's also a problem with 21st-century BBC. The "Golden Age" Beebs of the 70's didn't have the budget for anything above humble little videotaped soundstage productions of sci-fi as well as history/literature, which made us feel as if we were watching a live "play" of the Doctor, and made him more real to the viewers--If the alien costumes looked a little, um, homemade, that was just part of the (non-camp) space-pantomime fun at the age you were watching it, and it also meant that the scriptwriting had to do double-time to compensate with a MORE imaginative story and cleverer dialogue to make up for it. And with four to six afternoon-serial cliffhanger half-hours for one story, they had room for it. Once a snarky Tony Blair-era BBC got their hands on an 00's CGI budget, there was more of a need to "out-Hollywood" the action-blockbuster slickness of cheap American action/sci-fi shows, while layering on more of current Britain's self-loathing sarcasm about its own dying sacred cows. For both reasons (Davies and UK hipness), this is the only series where you'll see the Doctor trapped in a future-TV episode of Big Brother. And it's not a proud moment for the series.
Don't get me wrong, the 9th-12th Doctors themselves are good: Chris Eccleston plays a smart but rowdy-rugby Doctor, and David "Bertie Crouch sent his own son to Azkaban" Tennant is one of the all-time greats, with just a creatively-mad enough edge to homage a Tom Baker-ish Douglas Adams-y style to the Doc's offbeat thinking. But here's where Fan Gentrification set in, and a show that was originally meant to show the Doctor cliffhangered by Daleks to 10-yo. mid-1960's kids at tea-time has now become a slick "binge-ready" show for grownup cable-streaming series fangirls. And how do we know?--The way we always know: "Romantic serial subplots". Now, back in the 60's-70's, 10-yo.'s at tea time did not want to see whether the Doc would will-they-won't-they with his new romantic Companion Rose (more on her later), they wanted a funny identifiable sidekick who would keep up with being chased by Cybermen. That's why the Doc was usually accompanied by a viewer-identification orphan protege', like Leela, Ace or Jamie, or a troublesome comic reluctant-stowaway, like Sarah Jane, Tegan or Ian & Barbara. But kids aren't running the New show now, and we can't have any non-equal time, now, can we?
Which brings us back to the first three seasons with Rose, played by Billie Piper, possibly the most narcissistic actress on the face of the earth...Oh. Good. F***IN'. Lord. An actress who was convinced that the show was literally about her jaunt around the universe with her new every-girl's-fantasy dream-squeeze, sees every adventure as her own empowered globetrotting thrill, and plays the role accordingly: If you can get through a S2 episode where the "comic" subplot is her bet with the Doctor that she can make Queen Victoria say "We are not amused" (snicker!), you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din...If you're annoyed with shallow European-vacation millennials taking smug cellphone selfies of themselves in Venice, one of them has just found the Tardis. (As in, yes, Rose actually does get a time-traveling smartphone, to show off her adventures to the folks back home). I'm pretty sure that's the point where I dropped out, so I can't offer detailed opinions on the third season, I have no idea who River Song is--although I suspect she may be similar--and I can not fairly judge Matt Smith as Doctor 11, Peter Capaldi as Doctor 12, or the new What's-Her-Name Because Somebody Thought We Should Have a Female 007, Too.
Also, in one of the classic-arc DVD's, there was a featurette about how the Classic writers tried to keep the original "educational" idea in by having the Doctor use his obscure knowledge of science or history to get out of a jam, like the rewritten Sherlock Holmes he is. (Well, you did notice on the old show, right?--The Companion is Watson, the Brigadier is Inspector Lestrade, and the Master is Professor Moriarty?) For comparison, they showed one of the New episodes, where Eccleston's Doctor, with the benefit of Adams-esque Hitchhiker-wannabe made-up science, suddenly remembers that, wait, this is a rare element only found on Gallithrumpian III!
Just one example of a New Britain that literally doesn't know whether to honor its cultural roots or hiply camp-knock them, and I don't even know if they know the difference anymore.