EricJ

Yeah. Hip-hop and basketball...Nnnnno kiddin'. This is the less funny side of Why Millennials Don't Watch Old Movies: The indoctrination of "Everything your parents did was bad, icky, racist, sexist and wrong" is too deep and too wired into the brain cells, that Righteous Progressiveness conveniently makes too shining golden a shield to protect one from the accusation of Intellectual Uncuriosity, and make them feel all the better for it--If someone accuses you of never having seen Gone With the Wind, simply claim it's a horrible, racist defense of slavery, and launch a high dudgeon of wanting to see it banned, so that nobody be exposed to it! If they say you've never seen Casablanca, raise a fuss about Dooley Wilson, and call him "stereotyped"! If they claim you've never seen Fred & Ginger, pull out the old righteous saw about Ginger doing everything backwards and in high heels! Remember, if you've got a holier-than-thou reason to be mad at the world, you won't ever have to be burdened with thinking challenges again! 😓

Which is Warner-ese for "We're too terrified we can't sell non-Casablanca vintage movies unless TCM serves as the House-Franchise Brand Name for it." They've fallen back on that a couple times before, no big deal. Just as long as TCM continues to be left to do what it does, and keep the Brandname Banner flying.

Just mention the original Valley (even if it's in context of Beyond The), and you can see which posters' eyes will light up. Sooner or later the Patty Duke meltdown will be mentioned for its film immortality. 😛 But at least the original got a Carol Burnett parody...Sort of: (Ah, the days when 70's Mad Magazine writers wrote Carol Burnett sketches...)

Okay, someone got the Wag the Dog reference in before me, but for those in on the joke, Hoffman's motormouthed let's-do-lunch imitation was reportedly dead-on--Having never seen The Kid Stays in the Picture, I'll take their word for it, but Hoffman was robbed for the Oscar.

Given the large font, I expect so. As we see, links are so much easier.

Yeah, that's from the sequel-- The one where the family moved from the farmhouse to underneath an amusement park, that looks like something out of a Joel Schumacher Batman movie, and sheriff Dennis Hopper acts like he's still in a David Lynch film. Ohh, lord. 😓 Russ Meyer was making a lot of underground money with his cult films, and attracted Hollywood, who...didn't quite know what they were getting. And if they didn't know what to expect from the director of "Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!", it's their own fault. Ebert did know, he'd written a few cult-film essays on Meyer's distinctive, um...storytelling style, and if Fox had a Dolls sequel in mind, Ebert was working with Russ and clearly had a Russ Meyer film in mind. (Oh, and Ebert claims he came up with the climactic "twist" in the script.) If you look up the disk, there were two distinct trailers when it was released--They both use the identical copy, "Fox had two great ideas: One was to do a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, the other was to get Russ Meyer to direct it!" But in the early trailer, it's intoned as an epic Major Motion Picture, and in the later trailer, it's delivered as a campy, groovy hippie freak-out. Think Fox finally found out what they were getting.

And, being North Korean, produced by Kim Il Jong. Yes. (And looks like it, too, with the plot more focused on ancient traditional villages besieged by foreign conquerors, making it closer to the Daimajin movies than Godzilla.)

Channel 5? "Eastside Comedy", Sunday afternoons right after Wonderama, if my hazy 70's memory is correct. 😄 And yeah, the Boys weren't as interesting as the Kids, who at least had a distinctive act in the Warner dramas. After that, in B-picture adulthood, it was mostly "local" humor for Bronx and Brooklyn-ites, like the New Jersey fans who swore by Jerry Lewis comedies.

Uh-oh...That list is practically Fathom's entire retro-screening season for an entire year! What will they show, if they can't show Fight Club, Moulin Rouge or Princess Bride? Next thing you know, Paramount's going to vault Grease and Ferris Bueller, and Fathom may have to go out of business! (Seriously, though, if there's an upside to "vaulting", it's that it kept disk sales alive--Now that Disney eliminated the Disney Vault, so that they could show off how many classics were streaming on Disney+, it put the whole "Culture of expectation" of waiting for a collectible classic on retail Blu-ray in danger.)

Better than that--I remember when Siskel & Ebert shocked the industry by not only being the only two critics (oh, did we mention they were from Chicago? 😄 ) who DIDN'T put The Blues Brothers on their 10 Worst of the Year list like conventional wisdom was supposed to, but actually putting it on their 10 Best of the Year lists. Back in 1980, that was unheard of, you see, since weary, militantly frustrated audiences and critics were trying to find some way to wipe the plague of Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds comedies off the face of the earth after sitting through "Smokey & the Bandit II", and here were Jake & Elwood crashing all those police cars on the highway... (Am I secretly applying a contemporary allegory here? Mayyyy-be.)

They have the Fox family films (for those, thank you, who spent the 90's thinking Ferngully was a, quote, "Disney" film because it had songs and Robin Williams was in it), and Star Wars Ep. IV has now rejoined the rest of the Disney Lucasfilm canon.

I have difficulty picturing Groucho as the Queen of England. 😛

Every Halloween, in lieu of John Carpenter or Boris Karloff, I look up one great iconic 70's/80's horror classic I was too young to see in the day ("Carrie" two years ago, "Chainsaw" last year, and getting through "Black Christmas" this year)-- And getting through Chainsaw, I discovered what horror experts and film historians love to point out: Unlike the cheesy name-only goofy reputation-smitten sequels (oh, lord, avoid Hooper's own consciously-goofy Golan/Globus sequel)...NOBODY ever actually gets cut up onscreen with a chainsaw in the original '74 movie. There's a few nicks of blood, and somebody gets a gash with one in the climax, but the rest is the Element of Implied Imagination that low budgets did so well, which ends up being even creepier. The last half hour is another story, of course, but the first hour could almost be PG-13. The original has what I refer to as "Nightmare logic"--Namely, our own nightmares tend to look like low-budget productions: Sparse, disturbing visuals/audio, a grainy lack of color or music, dialogue that doesn't make sense, and a general internal dread of things that haven't happened yet. And in the original movie, that dread sense is there...Even before the scary stuff happens, when the crazed Hitchhiker takes the photo and asks for cash, there's that uncomfortable dream delay-buildup of thinking "Okay, just give it to him, or something's going to happen." And when the characters walk into the empty house, and see no one around but a living room artistically decorated with bones, and a big steel door that something might be behind, we've all had that dream moment of thinking "Okay...Turn around, and walk back out the door NOW, and if I make it just past the property fence in time, no nightmare plot will kick in. 😲 "

Which two? I haven't checked to see whether Playstation 4 has theirs yet.

A few of the recent 00's found-footage exorcism movies claiming to be "based on true stories" were actually based on court cases trying to determine whether a case who received harmful treatment from a Catholic exorcism may in fact have been a psychiatric case of religious hysteria. Much like the cases of "bewitchment" in medieval days, back when the Church was breakfast, lunch and dinner--The victims believe in the "devil" as much as the priests do, and it becomes a self-delusion. Like the modern schizophrenic who thinks he's getting secret messages from Beatles albums or the TV news, the medieval peasant who thought the devil climbed in his window every night to give him instructions was just a product who everyone talked about the most. Basically, like the victim at a stage hypnotist show who can be so persuaded that he's a UFO abductee on Jerry Springer that he fills in entire details out of his imagination, self-delusions can create the idea of a Devil who sounds like a foul-mouthed Tasmanian one that spouts Internet-Troll insults.

Actually, I don't recall any serious exorcism ceremonies in most Protestant religions either, except for the more hardcore conservative ones--Ie., the ones that also believe in actual physical hellfire, as opposed to our own irresponsible human failings. At least, there aren't any Lutheran exorcists in Minnesota who compel with the power of green-bean-casserole dinners, that I know of. Which explains why most of the horror films are Catholic: A) They actually believe in this stuff, and B ), they believe it can be conquered with holy objects. (That's another problem with conventional Catholic teaching: They teach that there are no other Judeo-Christian religions, and raise a whole group of traumatized adults who smugly believe there aren't. 😅 )

What a lot of folks trying to use Prohibition-era metaphors to defend their embattled-substance problems fail to understand was that back in the 30's, it was considered normal to want a cold beer or glass of champagne. It took some figuring out, but if somebody in a pre-code movie went to a speakeasy and friends laughed, "Hey, how 'bout that, he's a REGULAR guy after all!", to be "Regular" didn't just mean he was a nice everyday pal-about-town. (Nor did it mean he'd gotten enough fiber in his diet.) 😁

It's not Chuck Workman's "100 Years of TCM Disney", but most of it is arranged chronologically, for those who want to see the classics in order-- And, for the curious, to see EVERY obscure movie given the same Workman-like trailer-bite of classic moments, with "Flight of the Navigator", "Journey of Natty Gann" and "Emil & the Detectives" given every bit as much screen time as Frozen and Lion King. So, yeah: IF you have three hours. (Or just want to fast forward over the movies you do know, and keep it down to two hours or ninety minutes.) 😁👍

Okay, Marty, you officially lost me at "Wes Anderson directs 'real' films". 😓 (And I was even willing to give some benefit of the doubt after "Noah Baumbach".)

I think that covers it--Studios were ready to give a LOT of big mainstream projects to Boorman based on Deliverance's reviews and box-office, and probably hadn't seen enough of Zardoz to judge on whether he'd be good at inserting fantasy into his stories. It was another case of studios thinking a sequel was audience-proof enough to give to anybody, so they decided to give an off-center director a shot at the big time...Sort of like Marvel did, giving that Thor sequel to the director of "Jojo Rabbit". As for the first Exorcist, most people forget that William Friedkin was the go-to Action (and book-based Action Blockbuster) director at the time, after his big discovery two years earlier on The French Connection. Which, of course, led to the big confusion that sank Friedkin's Sorcerer in 1977, the "Wages of Fear" remake that had everyone expecting more wizards and demons, and only getting dirty rain-soaked truck drivers in South America. In Hollywood--and sometimes audiences--you're not only as good as your last film, you are your last film.

Really? What else does your imagination tell you? 😛 And as for Coppola, I'll take his sterling criticism of the cinematic oblivion of "Captain America: Civil War" (he did see that one, right?) as wise words from the director of Jack and Supernova. ("Shooting the messenger"? Maybe. But a bit more rewarding when he's unarmed.)

Think Daffy Coppola (they're despicable!) is just responding to the same zeitgeist that a lot of non-readers--y'know, the ones that think the SAME studio created "Avengers: Endgame", "Deadpool 2", "Venom" and "Joker"?--are suffering just through their fatigue with four studios creating what one qualified studio should be doing. Just recently, I'd been going through vintage Siskel & Ebert review clips from '79-'82, and got to relive their entire moral crusade against the golden years of 80's teen-slasher movies--The ones we thought were "evil", and "sexist", and "puritanical", and "fatalistic", and "a depressing view of the teen experience", and not so much in protest of onscreen violence or low budgets, as just that the loudest critic voices were danged sick of having to sit through so many. (We weren't quite up to that point with found-footage-exorcism movies in the early 10's, but close.) And then, the big camel's straw that we thought was going to make them all go away for good, when parents groups tried to ban the killer-Santa movie, and after that backed down, we knew we had the evil genre on the run, and we'd chase it out of town for good, so that it would never, ever come back if it knew what was good for it. Do we have a tipping-point equivalent like that for the superhero movies? Welllll...I happen to notice this didn't start after "Dark Phoenix", or even the wretched '14 Fantastic Four movie. This seems to have all started when somebody asked Martin Scorsese what he thought about "all the Taxi Driver stuff" in Joker. If any movie has to go down in history as the One That Killed Them, it couldn't happen to a more deserving film, and certainly not a more deserving studio...At least the Marvels were safe, and were due for retirement anyway.

Too bad we can't get John Belushi in a Godzilla suit, as when he hosted the network premiere of "Godzilla vs. Megalon" on NBC, back in the 70's. ("Yeah, can somebody get me a pizza?...Half Kyoto, half Osaka?") 😁

Why, no, as a matter of fact. Nobody has. Next question?

Movies used to be at 2am because stations needed to sell the cheapest local airtime to local businesses (usually used cars), and, before the VCR, "no one was watching anyway". Until Informercials came along and paid all the station's bills and programming out of pocket, just in time for studios to decide "no one was watching" their movie package and grabbed them back out of syndication. Of course, the single-digit network affiliates were safe, since they had the network all-night news feed. And that was just the independent UHF stations, that were already struggling by the end of the 80's. (In Boston, we had THREE stations defect to home-shopping or Spanish-language in two years.) The rest ended up bought by the new "Fourth-network" rush to create Fox, WB and UPN, until there was no longer any need for stations to create any programming of their own, apart from longer and longer blocks of the news division. I remember, back in 08, finally getting that big HDTV, and sitting down with microwave popcorn and Coke Zero, to finally indulge my 10-yo. fantasy of staying up to watch old movies on TV, and...it was news and infomercials across the board. So I put in a library DVD. 😥