EricJ
-
Posts
4,879 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by EricJ
-
-
1 hour ago, HoldenIsHere said:
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
I love this movie and have seen it a few times, but I still find new things to like. For example, in the recent viewing, it just registered with me that Igor takes only the small bag when he picks up Frederick Frankenstein from the train station.
There's a deleted gag where Igor shows up at the big "Puttin' on the Ritz" assembly also in a snappy tux, without his hump--"Not with THIS tux!" he replies, when Frederick asks the obvious question.
You can still see fancy hump-less Igor briefly in the final film, as he tries to calm the Monster down when he breaks up the show.
29 minutes ago, TomJH said:The idea of the parody was Wilder's original idea, of course, the final screenplay a collaboration of both Gene and Mel (with a little bit of help from Mary Shelley)
Gene Wilder as a writer has a good sense for old-fashioned slapstick, but also for an odd, self-aware "quirky" style that doesn't quite deliver. (There was a lot more of the "Sexually-frustrated Frederick" plot that ended up on the cutting-room floor.)
He's also no director without Mel's timing--The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975) is tolerable, but The World's Greatest Lover (1977) is pure physical torture to sit through.
-
40 minutes ago, NipkowDisc said:
how did nick fury become a negro when for decades he was white???
It's a code name for SHIELD, that white David-Hasselhoff Nick passed on to black SLJ Nick in the comics when the old one retired.
Sort of like how there was no actual "Joe" in the GI Joe team.
2 hours ago, Princess of Tap said:Cassandra Crossing
I've never heard of this movie. It sounds like it is a more legitimate entry then those stupid "Gun" movies he starred in with Leslie Nielsen.
It's on Amazon--One of those great 70's ITV epics designed for international release, with, as Roger Ebert often joked, "Little pictures of the stars at the bottom of the poster". And yes, Richard Harris is the hero and Sophia Loren is in it, so that's how you know.
5 hours ago, SunAndMoon said:I don't like superhero movies, either, but this just reeks of snobbery. Did he miss how Iron Man spent nearly as much time on letting viewers get to know its main character as it did on action sequences?
Because, like most folks, he doesn't know enough about them to tell one studio's from another's. (Quick, who released "Spiderman: Far From Home"?)
The buzzword of "Superhero fatigue" used to be even worse when we still had Fox and the X-Men to kick around, but now we've still got Warner just throwing any DC hero--or villain--at the wall to see who'll stick, and Sony having another lover's-spat with Disney/Marvel over who gets custody of the Spider, and, like most divorced parents fighting over the kids, trying to competitively show off how cool they are on their own.
We had this EXACT same problem back in the early 00's, when nobody could tell one CGI-animated studio from another, all five or six studios were throwing them at us, and all we wanted was "That one good studio that made Toy Story and Shrek![sic]" And everyone else who didn't just played Hip Victim and said "They ALL stink, throw 'em out!"
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, nakano said:
I remember something Gene Hackman said' I wanted to do meaningful films,i did Scarecrow and it died-1973.After that one I looked at the paycheck ONLY
That's the Greatest Criminal Mahnd of Our Tahme for ya...
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, HelenBaby2 said:
My late sister and I loved Paint Your Wagon and it’s panned by everyone I know who’s seen it. I find the non-singers charming. I still get a kick out of watching it. I also quite fond of Camelot with Richard Harris & Vanessa Redgrave.
I can take Lee Marvin's "singing", and even Clint's, but Vanessa Redgrave singing the cheeky "Lusty Month of May" in a languid funereal Marlene Dietrich drone is just.....so wrong.
-
17 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Shin Godzilla (2016)
"Inspiration for the film was drawn from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami."
And ended up as a rightwing sounding-board for Prime Minister Abe's attempts to revive Japan-can-say-no militarism and isolationism.
In which Godzilla (we're told that he is, although he looks absolutely nothing like) literally sleeps through the middle third, so that defense ministers, Diet ministers, and the token rude/duplicitous Japanese-American pawn of the bad guys who ultimately chooses to show her loyalty to the honor of the Rising Sun by the last reel, can discuss more political UN/America paranoia about turning the JSDF's responsibility over to international forces.
(The "Evil American future-men" who wanted to destroy Japan's boom economy in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) at least managed to be goofy about it...)
-
45 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
To point 1, I could also say that applies to you and your comment about not knowing who Shang-Chi is. Maybe it's because my comic reading days were mainly in the 70's and 80's, but I'm fully aware of who Shang-Chi is, and even had some issues of his comic a long time ago. I believe that there's been quite a bit of character ret-conning since then (he used to be the son of Fu Manchu, and now he's the son of the [real] Mandarin, and he now has superpowers instead of just being a BA kung fu master).
Yes, but my point was "Ya REALLY wanna see Disney kissing up to Beijing, Calvin? 😁 "
As Shang doesn't really fit into any long-range plan, most of Disney's current post-Endgame movie plan are either one-off sequels, or cleaned-up memos from other abandoned Phase IV ideas from three years ago. And, since they needed another excuse to send China Shang-Chi (as Iron Fist was still too tied up with Netflix's producers at the moment), they used the Mandarin connection to tie into the old memo about "Okay, fix the, quote-fingers, 'Mandarin' from Iron Man 3, and find a way to write in the real one before Tony kicks the bucket."
They're living so hand-to-mouth at the moment without the glorious 10-year plan they had earlier, they're...no, I don't want to say it, it's the most unforgivable insult to Marvel movie fans...okay, but you made me do it: They're acting like WARNER/DC!! 😱
-
12 minutes ago, MovieCollectorOH said:
Could very well be that these movies are neither made for us to see, nor the Chinese to see. I smell a rat.
No, they're made for the US. Just because YOU never heard of Rocket Raccoon & Groot...
What nobody else--especially including other studios--understand is that the very business of print comic books is in serializing stories and crossing over with other stories. That's what movies like "Steel" and "Howard the Duck" got WRONG for thirty years, when they tried to take superhero movies out of their comic-canon context and make concessions in trying to tell their stories to people who'd never heard of them before. If you want Batman, you can get Batman, but if you want Marvel, you get the whole universe, or it just don't make sense.
Now, the real problem is just convincing Marvel/Feige to get off the stage, now that their one biggest story is over and two of their three biggest heroes have been killed off (and the third about to be replaced).
That being said, the Joker movie isn't really a tights-and-superpowers movie. In fact, with a character name-change, and maybe a title change to Clown or something similar, it wouldn't have any comic book vibes at all. And I do think having Joaquin Phoenix in consideration for an Oscar for it is not out of bounds, much as I thought Heath Ledger deserved his Oscar for The Dark Knight.
No, really--Is THIS what this is all about? Somebody asked Marty about Joker because it "looked sorta like Taxi Driver" (or, at least, Warner desperately, desperately wanted to convince the Venice Film Festival that it did), and Scorsese thought it was a Marvel villain??
-
5 hours ago, Sepiatone said:
Sorry. Never heard of NOR seen it.
Oh, well, here:
3 hours ago, Stoopnagle said:You make an excellent comparison with the American teen comedies at the time. Where so many of them played on stereotypes, the characters in Gregory's Girl seemed like real people that I could recognize from my own high school years. I never did get a chance to see the sequel, Gregory's Two Girls, which came out much later.
I like a lot of Bill Forsyth's work, and his next film, Local Hero, is one of my all time favorites.
Local Hero was discovered, gushed over, and hailed, because nobody had seen Forsyth's work earlier in Gregory. (And of course, that's teen Gregory as the masked motorcyclist roaring through the village.)
It was only afterwards, after the popular of Gregory and Local Hero, that distributors dug up Forsyth's earlier first-draft work in That Sinking Feeling (1979) which was much closer to Gregory than Local.
Unfortunately, Forsyth snapped, turned depressed, and started looking for some Universal Cosmic Philosophy and World Awareness sometime after Comfort & Joy and before Housekeeping, and Gregory's Two Girls is (very definitely) the depressed, neurotic product of the Later Forsyth. Yes, including the one who directed Robin Williams in Being Human.
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, laffite said:
You may not get a reply once in awhile but you sure have become enBOLEDen of late.
And thankfully, it was another poster, not me, who pointed out "Begging for replies is not cool."
(Frankly, begging from total strangers for anything as if they were your imagined best friends is not cool. Try it on a streetcorner sometime, and see.)
-
1
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, calvinnme said:
Disney/Marvel doesn't care what American audiences think. 75% of the box office for these superhero films is outside of the US and does not speak English. So the dialogue is kept intentionally minimal and the films concentrate on being visual spectacles. If Disney can churn out cinematic oatmeal for the masses of the world and make one to two billion a pop, they will continue to do so.
Foreign audiences don't even UNDERSTAND American superheroes. That's why Black Panther, the first Spiderman and Batman v. Superman tanked in China. And why Disney's sending them Shang-Chi (who????) instead.
Among other reasons, because foreign audiences like the action but pass on the red-white-and-blue shields, while Asian audiences either don't quite warm to or just plain understand the idea of an individual vigilante fighting crime himself, when that's what the state's fine security police is for.
China did, however, go nuts for the dialogue-free Transformers and Pirates CG-heavy epics, and lord help us, they still love the Ice Age and Minions movies.
-
5 hours ago, NipkowDisc said:
I remember seeing two other Godzilla movies as a Kid. Godzilla vs. The Thing which genius ben says was an alternate title for mothra vs Godzilla and Godzilla vs. the sea monster.
anybody please clarify.
Do you mean "Thing" was an alternate title for Mothra (which it was), or for Ebirah, aka the Sea Monster?
...If it wasn't Ben, I wouldn't have to ask. 😓
-
5 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I've never seen Grindhouse. Tarentino is not one of my favorites, so I don't actively seek out his films.
Grindhouse was only--and I repeat, ONLY--interesting for the between-feature pastiche fake-trailers by the other directors, who seemed to have a much better instinctive idea of what the movie "should" have been about than Tarantino and Rodriguez did.
(Namely Edgar Wright https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lttrIPDFplU and Eli Roth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8bWLrmk3kE
When Miramax was trying to bluff and downgrade their way out of a crushing box-office flop, they originally thought of going with the audience and following up with an all-trailer "Grindhouse: Trailer Park", but...ah, the road not traveled. 😥 )
-
2
-
-
On 10/3/2019 at 12:37 PM, LawrenceA said:
- Godzilla
- Godzilla, King of the Monsters (the American dub/edit of Godzilla)
- Godzilla Raids Again
- Mothra vs Godzilla
- Mothra
- Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster
- Invasion of Astro-Monster
- Son of Godzilla
- Destroy All Monsters
- All Monsters Attack - There seems to be a hole in the schedule here - They have this 70-minute movie scheduled from 8PM until 1AM! My guess is they will show Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Godzilla vs Hedorah/Godzilla vs the Smog Monster in this time slot.
- Rodan
- Godzilla vs Megalon
- Godzilla vs Mechgodzilla
- Terror of Mechagodzilla
War of the Gargantuas, another Toho giant monster film, is scheduled after Terror of Mechagodzilla.
IOW, the same roster as on the big Criterion Blu-ray mega-set at the end of the month. (They still do the half-price sale in November, right?
)
It's nice to see that Criterion and TCM still have the same mutual non-aggression treaty they had back during the happier days of Filmstruck.
-
The Milky Way (1934) & The Cat's Paw (1934) - 👍/👎
Found both of these on a (now OOP) big disc volume-boxset of Harold Lloyd at the library--Which I had rented for the silent shorts, but since two of the early Talkie features were included, thought I should take a look at for completism. Lloyd was ahead of his time in adjusting his character to the sound era, and in retaining the rights to his films (in the day when studios thought the public "wouldn't go for" silents anymore), and although Milky is one of the ancient traditional Public Domain favorites, the Lloyd Estate still had it in good condition for the disk collection.
I'd only seen the 1946 Danny Kaye The Kid From Brooklyn version of Milky, so I knew the story, as Adolphe Menjou plays up milkman Harold accidentally knocking out the middleweight Champ into a fixed series of fights. And what strikes the viewer is that--unlike poor Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin's Tramp suddenly sounding like an English butler in "The Great Dictator"--Lloyd was perfectly cast in playing the nice likable sound version of his nebbishy Clark-Kent hero, even if he was getting a little too old to play the young twenty-something go-getter of "Safety Last". The script was based on a then-hit play, and director Leo McCarey, who would try to wrangle the Marx Brothers two years later in "Duck Soup", handles the right mix of the play's Front Page-esque late-20's rapid-fire wisecrack snark, and Lloyd's own physical comedy, as a "fighter" with an amazingly developed personal talent for ducking punches. (And, like all Lloyd characters, his embarrassingly ambitious delusions of grandeur once a few fixed fights go to his head.) I may have only two to judge from, but if you had to see ONE Harold Lloyd talkie out of curiosity to see how the sound era treated him, this is the one that will relieve the most worry.
The same, sadly, cannot be said of The Cat's Paw, where Lloyd's own standby silent director/scriptwriter Sam Taylor tried to adapt the typical silent story to the big-city rapid-fire snark of stage-based early talkie comedies. Here, Lloyd plays a missionary who's grown up in a sleepy Chinese village, and has never seen civilization since childhood, has to come to the city for business, only to be wrapped up in a crooked scheme to run for mayor. (And, after the usual comic misunderstanding, winning.) We're supposed to find his character innocent and Capra-esque, as he faces every fish-out-of-water situation with "quotations from Ling Po" ("One of them C**** sayings", his antagonists grumble way too many times in the script), but instead comes off SO gratingly clueless and unaware, it's downright pathetic. In every Lloyd comedy, there's the climactic moment of Pathos, where he suddenly discovers that everyone had been laughing behind his back all along--But here, the big-city folks, including wisecrack-spewing "romantic" interest Una Merkel, are incredibly unpleasant, rarely laughing behind his back, and spending the rest of the movie as straw-man symbols of corruption. ("You can't fire the commissioner, what about our sweet graft??") But even this pales before a jawdropping last act, where, in a "Gabriel Over the White House"-like act, Lloyd, on his last day before being framed for corruption, has the police round up every single gangster in town without probable cause, so he can clean up the town "his" way by having his Chinatown friends threaten them with ancient tortures in the antique store's basement. It's meant to be the silent hero's unique way of resolving a situation, but if we weren't already sympathizing with the mean folks laughing at Harold's character, now we're sympathizing with their terror that he's finally snapped nuts. (And who does THAT sound like with approaching Impeachment, folks?...)
I've been watching more Lloyd realizing he was ahead of his time in appreciating the changing film industry (and a big fan of 3-D years before it became a Thing), but I've still got that copy of "Mad Wednesday" to track down at the library. As much as "Cat's Paw" tried to suggest some Great McGinty-style Preston Sturges farce, I have the feeling that Sturges came in right at the point that Lloyd left.
-
1 hour ago, Hibi said:
Friends of Dorothy, you mean? LOL.
Well, if you're counting her Bob Fosse Get-Happy outfit in "Summer Stock", it's more popularly referred to as Friends of Judy in general.
(Which has spun off the "Friends of Kylie" in the UK, and "Friends of Nicole" in Australia.)
-
10 hours ago, hamradio said:
I have "Tron Legacy", the one thing bugs the heck out of me in the film. In Flynn's old arcade basement, where is the rest of the laser dematerializer???
That's 1982 computer space. Today he could do it with a Playstation 2. 😁
-
1 hour ago, Roy Cronin said:
Yeah, Bernie Sanders had a heart procedure today.
"Listen...It ticks!" ❤️
-
3 hours ago, hamradio said:
Tinted film suppose to be properly used.
Blue to imitate a night scene like in "The Phantom Carriage"
Red for fire.
Green to reflect the ghoulish atmosphere like in "The Golem".
And Gold to reflect outdoor daylight, history or flashback.
I remember when purists (including those new audiences too young to have seen many restored silent movies) howled over the adding of songs, and occasional neon or moving clouds, to "Giorgio Moroder's 'Metropolis'", and, as if that weren't bad enough, complained "Ted Turner must have gotten his hands on the print...They COLORIZED it!"
...Err, no. Somebody needs to do a little more research. 😓
-
3 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
You know I believe I might 'get it' based on my being 30 miles from Hollywood and getting the L.A. Times on daily basis;
1) these have been the years-of-the-women and this has impacted Hollywood; #metoo, women not getting equal pay, women should be given more opportunities as directors, screenwriters, women being exploited etc...
2) Judy Garland is iconic and represents a women that Hollywood turned into a fragile women where many in the industry exploited her.
3) A movie is made called Judy. Hollywood (especially the L.A. Times), pushes the film big-time due to the above. Times pushes the project as one of the biggest events of year. As a must-see picture with a performance by a women that takes courage, strength, fortitude,,,,
And then...Judy has many friends in Hollywood. Which is how the movie was made in the first place.
No, correction: That should be "Friends". With the capital F.
(Apparently, she has her share on the Internet as well. 😓 )
-
15 hours ago, hamradio said:
Need to add another film to this thread , "Tron" (1982) thought also it was the film I only liked. People in my area hated it - couldn't understand it along with the theatre manager! It was the film that peaked my interest into computers. One thing I done on the CoCo that was in "Tron" was to date / time stamp without the End of Line by the MCP.
I was going to put Tron on my list too, but...I didn't feel "alone" in liking it, since it got sort of a long-overdue renaissance (and a Blu-ray!) during the big '10 hype buildup for "Tron: Legacy". And then was appreciated that much more when Legacy turned out to be a dreary, downbeat self-important slog with no sense of humor known to man, which made the '82 original seem even retro-cooler....As, indeed, most 1982 films were.
And yes, I still find myself with the urge to say "END OF LINE" in an MCP voice, in the places where most kids would say "(drop mic)".
Nowadays, I tend put Tron in the "Successfully rehabilitated" category, along with "Clue" and Disney's "Hercules".
-
17 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
For someone not interested in this film, you appear very obsessed with it.
Almost as if a film being so mean to Judy seems to symbolically mean something ELSE that even one drop in BO points becomes such a personal vindication, to cheer on the schoolyard...
(I suppose next we'll hear "The failing Fake-News Variety claims it made $3M this week...More Renee-loving media!") 😁
-
2
-
-
I don't really see how they could continue--
But if this is the "Do-Over" we asked for, where we could have six or seven less episodes of Agent Cooperhands stumbling around an insurance building, and let him actually do his JOB this time, at least Dave listened to us.
(Although I have a sneaking suspicion how this one will end...)
-
3 hours ago, GGGGerald said:
You obviously have some issue with Judy Garland or Renee Zellweger. Why not just say what you feel.
I have never wished a movie nor actor fail. If I don't like them, I'd rather discuss someone or something I do like.
I think the poster already did, in dropping the H-word, and going ballistic over a Judy Garland movie, with or without RZ. 'Nuff, as the saying goes, said. 😓
I don't recall whether s/he was around when "Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again" opened, but I think I could guess the general drift.
-
1
-
-
40 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
If I'd have to guess myself and I'm going with ones with low average scores on a movie website, and one thing I notice is that most classics have solid scores, so most of these tend to be in the 80s and 90s...... (and yes, you can tell I like romances and musicals):
Finian's Rainbow (1968)
The Great Gatsby (1974)
Kiss me Goodbye (1982)
That does it: I have GOT to rent Finian's Rainbow again--which I confess I hadn't seen since multiple TV viewings as a kid--as I've never understood why critics and historians have such a murderous grudge against it, apart from being the "embarrassment" on Francis Ford Coppola's career (just wait till "Jack" shows up), or the general financial audience fatigue with Big 60's-70's Roadshow Musicals. I didn't think it was possible to hate a Tommy Steele musical, and I've seen "Happiest Millionaire" and "Half a Sixpence"...You want Roadshow-Musical Excess, get a load of those.
I'd already theorized in an IJW that The Great Gatsby was an innately depressing book trying to sell itself as a period glamour film (everything in '74 fashion was "Gatsby" without apparently knowing what the word meant), but that wasn't the film's fault, and Robert Redford retires the jersey for the character.
And even though I knew it was an Americanized remake, I remember Kiss Me Goodbye as a long, painful belief that if you just cast James Caan as a Broadway playwright, somehow, magically, Neil Simon will come out at the other end.
GODZILLA, King of the Kaiju....
in General Discussions
Posted
Speaking of Shortest Godzilla Battles Ever-- 😁
Would be remiss in not mentioning the time when Japan--now bitterly regretting their big pre-release-hype promise to include Dean Devlin's '98 Godzilla, now aka "'Zilla", into the official Toho Kaiju canon--finally let the two duke it out in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004):
("I knew I couldn't depend on that tuna-head!"...Yes, the idea of Godzilla eating tuna cracks the Japanese up, as does Devlin's utter psychological obsession with telling us this non-existent fact in his script.)