EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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30 minutes ago, spence said:
Jakeem, seemed to coverthis jazz the best just in case my test & given the websie is again, acting nuts today, wasn't
Enough for now, cannot function on ur faviorte sitewhen it gets like this WIRK IB PRIOGRESS
Really? No website problems on this end.
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48 minutes ago, Dr. Somnambula said:
I posted the trailer of this somewhere, not too long ago. LawrenceA said you don't want to know how it was made. The best part of the movie is the narration by Dudley Moore.
Since, technically, it was an imported Japanese movie, "Koneko Monogatari" (the then #1 all-time hit), in a country where you can actually MAKE movies about cute kittens and get away with it. 😕
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9 minutes ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
for many of us out there, the SWAN LAKE theme will always evoke classic horror- also this and DRACULA are the only two times UNIVERSAL used it. the only thing that the RESTORATION OF DRACULA done by Universal a few years ago did that I did not like was to "fix" the garbled quality of the soundtrack playing SWAN LAKE, I think the soundtrack inexplicably sped up in the version originally {even in it's release?} and they made it sound more normal and not so "ghostly" and "wobbly" as it was in the un-restored.
(Are we using Red bold because Black bold is too identifiable with....You-Know-Who? 😅)
1 hour ago, TomJH said:I like the 1932 version of The Mummy though it is a slow moving production and, in that respect, would be a test of endurance to modern audiences are used to the fast edits seen with so many films today, in particular of the horror genre.
But, for me, the most horrifying scene in the film is not the minute or so in which the Mummy opens his eyes and moves, but the flashback scene in which Imhotep is buried alive. In particular it's that shot of Karloff bound and helpless and we see the gauze being wrapped around his face that causes me a case of the shudders.
It's hard for a lot of pop-cultural poseurs to realize the difference between Imhotep, of the Karloff era, and Kharis, of the Universal B-era. That's probably why so many first-time Monsters watchers shrug off the Karloff movie and say "What was that??"
The Karloff movie is a good attempt to "create" another Lugosi Dracula out of made-up mythology and the still popular Egyptian trend, but like most pre-code Universals, it's better in creepy isolated MOMENTS than taken as a whole. And I'd still take it over the too-in-love-with-themselves 90's Brendan Fraser movies, let alone Tom Cruise.
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And we may have to disqualify the big-budget Elizabeth Taylor flop version of The Blue Bird (1976) from the list--
Which, while having never been available outside of TV airings in the US due to its Russian co-parentage, is available (in English) on a rather nicely restored all-region Russian DVD.
(Okay, but I liked the story, and it's more text-accurate than the Shirley Temple version I saw as a kid.) ☺️
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(reads title)
...My thoughts exactly.
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58 minutes ago, Brrrcold said:
I'm rather indifferent to the 'auteur theory' of film directors, but as much as it applies to anyone it should apply to Preston Sturges - whose THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942) is showing on TCM as I type. It's my favorite of his list of films. He was most in demand for his screenplays, but strove to be a director too - and in this he succeeded with 12 (or 13, depending on who gets screen credit.)
I'd heard Preston Sturges mentioned in 40's film discussions, and thought it was another name film historians tossed around, like Howard Hawks's comedies. Until I sat down out of curiosity with "The Great McGinty" and "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek", and saw occasional moments of absolute screwball silliness break out. 😄 (The spots!!)
34 minutes ago, TopBilled said:I also like THE GREAT MOMENT (1944), despite it being a flawed effort. It's interesting to see how Sturges tried to do a serious drama in his heyday.
There seemed to be a stock and trade for studios to dabble in "Great medical/science biographies" every time they wanted a little responsible Epic Oscar-bait, in the wake of Louis Pasteur and Madame Curie.
I'd rented Moment on disk, and even Fox's own description mentioned "Even when Sturges tackles serious material, the humor still comes out..." The movie wants to be some kind of protesting historical validation to give credit to the inventor of anesthesia, who had to give up his patent to see it used (the climactic "moment" of the title), but the minute William Demarest shows up in a Preston Sturges film as the doctor's first patient, you can see the true instincts emerge.
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36 minutes ago, Det Jim McLeod said:
Nashville (1975) 9/10 in Film Forum Theater
Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton-he is a veteran country singer with old school thinking. Gibson wrote a few songs himself for the character and they actually hold up as good country songs.
Actually, ALL the actors in the movie were asked to write their own songs--Keith Carradine got the Best Song Oscar for writing "I'm Easy" to wow Lily Tomlin with. Which means Altman, as with most of his 70's movies, wasn't really doing a movie about Nashville or rightwing patriotism, so much as a movie about the struggling folks in the entertainment industry, three thousand miles away.
Still, it's nice to see the iconic "Freeway jam" scene before every quirky indie filmmaker copied it (ahemlalaland).
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17 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
Anyone else eager to see the new version...?
Anyone eager to see the other three or four versions we've already gotten in the last TWO YEARS?
We've had the indie version, the BBC version, and...wait, the contemporary version already opened, right?
ENOUGH ALREADY!!...How many times can we watch Beth get sick? I can understand the "education-and-empowerment metaphor" fascination with Jo--most of the new versions practically ignore the other sisters, and reduce them to obligatory sister-hug BFF's--but read some other danged "empowerment" books! (What about "Little Men", where Jo was already a teacher? Haven't had one of those since the 90's wanted to follow up on Winona Ryder's version.)
Unless this is another one of those "We're not Victorian heroines anymore!" trending, like when satirizing Jane Austen was the big thing about seven or eight years ago.
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(And frankly, I don't think it's so much a matter of whether WE are, but particularly, why you are...)😄
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6 hours ago, calvinnme said:
World of Brothers Grimm (1962)
("Wonderful" World, thank you...My one obsessive holy-grail-of-disk.)
Unfortunately, Grimm seems to be hostage to Warner's stubbornness and DVD's early-00's insistence on "only the best": While the original was Cinerama, a theatrical print (with some converted "squash" in wide scenes) did play the small-towns and revival matinees; that's the one shown on TCM, and the one that was released on MGM/UA VHS. But Warner said it was "unfit" for DVD, and that they wanted to restore the original; unfortunately, there's some industry debate about whether the three original Cinerama sections are still in any condition to be restored--The latest restoration played a film festival about six years ago, and the jury's still out. And even if the original three-screen print could be restored, Warner has no idea how to market it: They tried "Smilebox" conversion with How the West Was Won, the audience was confused, and Warner, being Warner, never got back on the horse. 😞
And since Movie Movie has been available on Blu/DVD since '16, I'll just add my other obsessive Holy Grail of disk to the list, Electric Dreams (1985)
One of the most imaginative and infectious soundtrack-musicals of the 80's (it's methadone for Xanadu fans 😄 ), and released overseas, but mired in North American music-rights limbo for its Culture Club songs.
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7 hours ago, TopBilled said:
Thanks Thomas. I think it's a very dense film, like most of Welles' films...since it has multiple layers open to interpretation. However, in this case, THE STRANGER seems to be more audience friendly, more like a typical Hollywood suspense drama. Having Edward G. Robinson in the main role helps tremendously, and casting Loretta Young as the wife gives it added commercial value.
I'd only first seen the movie a few months ago, and I put it in more of the historical context, that it was 1946, postwar US was putting the war behind it, and even mentioning what was going on at Nuremberg was just not allowable conversation in prime-time. When Robinson mentions the German camps, they had only recently been shown at newsreel theaters--it was the first time pictures had been shown in a narrative film--and was still a shocking topic. The insertion into the story, and depicting Welles as a war criminal, feels more like those late-80's/early-90's "Torn from today's headlines" thrillers that put an innocent suburban woman in jeopardy when she finds out her husband is secretly (pick one: K-K-K/Iranian/militia-member/inside-trader), and that's certainly Loretta's role in the story.
Take the war out, and The Stranger is pretty much your standard shadow-of-a-doubt story, but as bad-boy provocateur Welles knew, mention Nazism and the romantic unrepentance of the party when nobody else would talk about it, and...GASP!! 😱 The idea that ex-Nazi fifth-columnists would be out there still trying to sell their dreams of glorious Siegfried to a new generation of impressionable football-Aryan college students was an unspoken boogeyman to the postwar public, years before Communism would be--Certainly, it's hard to depict ex-Nazis without suggesting there was "something there" in their romanticized fondness for sword-dueling at the boys-schools of old Vienna, as that sort of came with the party, but Welles knew whose sore-spot he was setting out to poke. Much like his Mercury Theater putting Julius Caesar in Weimar was also leftwing-poking at 30's isolationist prewar see-no-evil...Oo, if Orson doo'd it, he'd get a whippin'! 😉
For a second, I'd thought the "subtext", and the '14 date of the original post, was from our former friends on the Filmstruck blog, who thought they had the Internet sandbox all to themselves to find the Subtext™️ in just about EVERY classic film ever made. (And then kicking off, quote, "hateful" board members who dared say there wasn't any such nonsense there.) There seems to be a need for the community to dig up every closeted writer in 30's-50's Hollywood, buddy up to any classic work they produced and click selfies next to it, to play up some historically "persecuted" image to try and look like they hadn't just started marketing themselves into pop-culture since the 80's. But too often, it comes off like some horse-blindered hobby nut who completely misses the script/directorial intent, and just insists on talking about the classic cars that were in the movie, in the hopes he can have a conversation about that.
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7 minutes ago, Vautrin said:
Ben did mention that the recent space flicks were at least part of the inspiration for Moonraker.
In fact, the "Bond Will Be Back" credit at the end of '77's The Spy Who Loved Me suggests they were originally planning to go straight on to '81's For Your Eyes Only...Somebody got bumped up in line for '79.
I'm not a Bond fan, and I find Connery's Bond mean and misogynistic (of course, he's supposed to be that way, and I do realize that these are entertainments designed by and for men). However, I enjoy Roger Moore and saw most of those when I was going to movies with dates in the late 70s and the 80s; I have fond memories of them as being a pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon or evening. Viewing these movies last night, I still found they had great entertainment value because Roger Moore is constantly winking at the audience as if underneath it all he knows we're not expected to believe all this stuff.
The late 70's were more popcorn fun than the "major motion picture" 60's or the gritty early 70's, so the Moore movies made him more of an implausible comic-book hero, which is what most of us remembered growing up on watching the Connerys on Sunday night TV.
It's only after the 70's, in the early 80's, that Moore was showing his age, and, like Fred Astaire, they had to stick him with younger and younger girls to give him that "father-figure" appeal. And sitting down to watch Octopussy, I'd always had theater memories of that being one of the "fun" Moores, until we got the circus-clown scene, and telling the tiger to "Sit!" That was stretching the populist appeal a tad.
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1 hour ago, Sepiatone said:
I remember reading somewhere(and at the time) that Moore, an old friend of Connery's, came up with the idea of having him, at the end of NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, which Connery made despite some years earlier swearing he would "never!" make another Jams Bond movie, walk past Connery's Bond on the street, then after several paces the two turn around to face each other and have Moore say to Connery the title of the film, "Never say never again." and give a bit of a grin. Connery was reported to like the idea, but the producers were dead against it. Having not watched it all the way through, I don't know if it did actually happen or not.
NSNA, of course, was only the result of Kevin McCLory's legal trial as the disgruntled screenwriter of the unused "Thunderball" script, and it was filmed outside the 007 canon--And Connery agreed to come back knowing it was NOT an official Albert Broccoli & Harry Saltzman-produced 007 film, who were the reasons he'd left the series after big blowups on the set.
And (yeesh)...boy, is it ever not a Broccoli/Saltzman Bond film. 😱 There's an overhanging feel of sliminess and jokey dopiness to the entire story, and Connery winks through most of the story knowing they're rolling the entire movie's carpet all out for him. I can take John Cleese as Q in the Pierce Brosnan movies, but Mr. Bean (as department comedy-relief "Nigel Small-Fawcett", no less) pushed into a swimming pool?...Even the Roger Moore movies never went THERE.
It's been since bought back into the franchise, but it's the red-headed stepbrother.
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8 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
Not many from Disney's experimental early 80s phase I see.....
They seem to have lost the rights to many of the Silver Screen Partners movies that were distributed by Touchstone/Hollywood, except for a few they wanted to keep Disney-branded when they caught on.
So while we can see Arachnophobia and Pretty Woman, I'd give up hope of seeing Big Business or Outrageous Fortune. -
Doctor Doolittle? I'm guessing it's the Eddie Murphy version. 😞
For a second, thought they were actually going to start becoming creative with that library of Fox classics they spent so much to get.
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2 hours ago, NipkowDisc said:
a remake of Overboard would be too politically incorrect today.
who would you cast as the spoiled heiress in a remake of Overboard?
Ohh, I don't know: If I was so desperate to get out of bankruptcy that I was going to re-film all my old 80's hits I had lyin' around (heh, see what I did there?), I'd probably try to follow Ghostbusters' lead in kissing up to the Chik-Flik-Comedy demographic, switch gender roles, and have an obnoxious male--and glass-ceiling--businessman put into the dopey unthreatening control-fantasy Goldie Hawn role.
And then I'd cast some really big name-star draws like Eugenio Derbez and Anna Faris, and it would probably end up looking like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563742/ .
...That's IF I was ever going to make one, of course.
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23 minutes ago, laffite said:
I've never owned a flat-screen TV but that's interesting they have those extra perks, but I wouldn't go into that kind of money just for that. If you buy a flat-screen you still need cable, right?
Nnn-noo, not really: There was a lot of confusion about that in 2008, when the FCC changed over from analog broadcasting to digital broadcasting on the free channels, and those with "old" sets had to get a digital converter to continue receiving signals if they got their channels over the air rather than cable.
If you live in an area where you can get the regional channels over the air, though (I don't ☹️), most channels in the eleven years since have been broadcasting digital, which requires a digital set. That doesn't necessarily mean "HDTV flatscreen", but since those are the only sets being made nowadays, they're common enough to be the same price as regular box TV's were back in the 90's. Just that flat sets can now reach all sorts of screen sizes, but if you're conservative in your requirements for viewing, there's still plenty in the affordable price range.
The cheaper ones don't come with the "perks", of course, but a basic attachable Roku, Fire or AppleTV box device with all the subscription streaming services can be found at Best Buy for about $50-$99...Plus the subscription of your choice, of course.
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5 hours ago, sagebrush said:
How about just bringing the 1987 film back into theaters every now and again instead? I saw it at the Fathom Events showing for the 30th anniversary and it was a full theater on a Sunday afternoon.
As one of the Five "Old" 80's Movies Millennials Remember, it's pretty much shown every round of Fathom old classics, since it makes up for all the folks who didn't go to the Double Indemnity screening.
And before we all bust blood vessels, and trot out our creaking, well-worn "Has Hollywood run out of ideas?", let me ask this Socratic question, with a touch of movie trivia--Leaving aside Ghostbusters and the Disney remakes, think of the minor pointless remakes we've gotten since, say, 2005. Now think carefully...What is ONE thing you can name that all the following original films had in common?:
- Child's Play
- Overboard
- The Magnificent Seven
- Ben-Hur
- Robocop
- Total Recall
- Red Dawn
- Clash of the Titans
- The Amityville Horror
- Carrie
- Rollerball
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels ("The Hustle")
- Back to School ("Life of the Party")
- The Princess Bride
...Can you spot it, folks? You've got thirty seconds!
(Here's a hint, for those who want to cheat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAglo3Ohpes )
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3 hours ago, laffite said:
I watch via a desktop computer with Wifi. No TV involved (I don't have one). I close all programs. It I try to navigate to a part of the movie, it may be okay but it will freeze shortly. Trying to navigate results in continuous buffering or a moving picture that will freeze shortly.
Not sure if there's some nagging non-conscience reason why you don't have a TV (small apartment, sharing?), but if you're willing to forego large screens or 4K, a Smart TV screen in the 40-50"'s will often have Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and/or YouTube already native-installed, for good few hundred less than they were selling back when I had to buy one. ☹️
(Although the in-TV Smart apps in my '13 Panasonic all became obsolete some five years ago, leaving me with nothing but Amazon and the weather, while my Playstation 3 serves as the streaming set-top-box for most of the big channels with freshly updated software. I'd wondered about getting an AppleTV or Roku back when we were waiting for a Filmstruck app, but that's not a problem anymore.)
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1 hour ago, laffite said:
I have Netflix DVDs but not streaming, not for me. I would consider another streaming service but i don't know anything about Amazon Prime or Hulu. Any recommendations? Mainly interested in foreign, old classics (TCM type) stuffy British dramas. I don't care for mass appeal blockbuster type movies with well-known actors. The bore the hell out of me.
Hulu's stock and trade is current network reruns, for those who cut the cable--There's the usual repertory stock of movies that play the other services, and even a few surprises that show up now and then (mostly from Disney's ownership), but you have to be more interested in last night's NBC than in movies.
Amazon Prime is in love with its own programming at the moment, but the real fun is the fact that Amazon, being a seller at heart, streams whatever's not nailed down. For those who like pot luck, or used to browse the back shelves of those little independent mom-and-pop VHS rentals to see how forgotten a title they can find, Amazon is the service that brings that experience back, and you literally never know what rare public-domain ephemera you can dig up on a late night. Also, since Amazon is in the selling business, they also offer the new splinter "sub-channels" that let you in on Showtime or Britbox (the BBC/ITV all-stuffy-British-drama service) or Broadway or Shudder's channels, etc., for a small extra fee, for those who want extra commitment. I'm guessing most people with Prime subscribed for the free mail shipping for their Blu-ray disks, and just started watching it as a free bonus when Netflix wasn't showing anything interesting?
PlutoTV, which is free-with-ads, has become my new go-to, which is a series of Viacom cable channels, Paramount/MGM Orphan movies, Shout Factory rarities, online Internet channels, and other public-domain ephemera, organized as themed mock "cable" channels broadcasting on schedule, rather than on demand. It's amazing how much those of us raised on old-school TV miss the experience of sitting down and flipping channels to find something randomly airing at that moment, as a preliminary opening act, before getting down to the evening's entertainment.
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I'm just responding to see whether the Autocensor will let us say "Peacock".
1 hour ago, MovieCollectorOH said:I think they mentioned the TV show The Office about 10 times in that article.
For some reason, the big Announcement War between the studio services has been over which studio has the "exclusive" reruns--The announcement quickly followed HBOMax's update that they'd be the one place to tune into "Seinfeld".
Either we're THAT desperate for vintage reruns since they disappeared off of cable (except for TBS), or a streaming generation really has never heard of DVD boxsets.
And to compete with Netflix's nostalgic "Fuller House", the 'C....er, NBC's service plans to bring us the NBC-owned nostalgia of a grown-up Punky Brewster update. Correction, I'm going with the "desperate" theory.
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23 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
No Twitter link, but details here: https://news.avclub.com/nbc-s-streaming-service-has-a-name-lots-of-revivals-in-1838181107
No word on whether they might put all those Universal movies TCM rarely or never shows on there.
Universal kept a lock on its movies to try and spin off its own Fox-style movie cable channel/streaming service, which explains why we haven't seen that many Universal Orphans on streaming...Or Fox Orphans either, FTM. (Except for the care packages of Jaws, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park franchise-bundles sent out to Netflix and Amazon for "charity".)
It's likely they'll get in the game once Warner gets HBOMax going, but like Warner, it's easier to brand a streaming service with a TV brand like NBC or HBO, than a big exclusive studio name like Warner or Universal.
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1 hour ago, hamradio said:
My downtown movie theatre manager told me (some time back before it closed) he worked for a 70mm outlet in Richmond, VA. He showed "The Sound of Music" for a year. If I done something like that, would had lost my sanity. The songs, over and over and over again!. Oh the humanity.
Most of the "Sappy G-rated Julie Andrews" jokes we grew up with in the 70's, which was retroactively piled onto "Mary Poppins" (sit down, Lawrence...) was pretty much the product of a 1969 culture driven screaming out of its gourd by Sound of Music playing in some big-city theaters for FOUR YEARS. When Mel Brooks made an offhand joke on the "Twelve Chairs" set that he was making "a musical romp about Adolf and Eva", guess which annoyingly happy WWII musical he was likely thinking of at the time.
But back then, of course, you could go back to a theater and see it again (and again...), since the tickets were a dollar, home theater didn't exist, and you couldn't wait for the movie to show up on TV. Even in the 90's, before production cut back, most movies you went to once or twice, and wondered whether to buy the disk. Except in the cases of movies you didn't realize were that good the first time, and had to take someone else to go see it, like "The Gods Must Be Crazy" playing in big-city arthouses for two years.
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And keep in mind, he already asked us, his "Loyal readers" and Buddies", the question back in October '18:
In case anyone was confused by his asking whether we'd been there YET...Y'know, anyone else?
Lists of unavailable films
in General Discussions
Posted
One last favorite movie--too long to burn onto disk--now sits on my shelf only as a VHS tape, as I'm now afraid to put it back in my old player, fearing each last play could actually BE its last... 😥
I'm assuming ham's comment was humorous, though, as the only real defense of the format I've ever heard from VHS-comeback hobbyists is "But the horror/B-movie covers used to be so cool on the shelves at Blockbuster!"