EricJ

While, as Honest Trailers pointed out, last summer's "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" sequel to the '14 film tried to overcompensate TOO far in the other direction, and still managed to underwhelm ("Because Godzilla-forbid we should see a monster fighting in broad daylight...") 😂 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdAlV8zqTBw

Now that the Digital Wars are over (and Disk won 😁 ), my newest Movie-Activist crusade is "Burn the Cineplexes": The overbuilt chain cinemas--which have to build themselves out on the highway shopping-mall fringe, or IN shopping malls, just to support their size--were the product of an optimistic boom during the 80's and 90's, when studio output was high. But with studios cutting back to a third of their releases from twenty years ago, there's not enough product to fill a 15-screen theater, and failed movies from two to three months ago have to continue on in "zombie release" simply because there's nothing new during a slow January or April to keep the theater filled. (And chain theaters aren't independent enough to rotate out the movies for something else, since they basically "work for" the studios to keep their current product exposed.) Back in the 80s', a "wide release" of Back to the Future was in 1500 screens, while a hit current studio release like It: Chapter Two is released in 4500--That's also literally cutting movie lifespan to a third of what it can expect, which is why successful movies now have a #1 run of two weeks at best, before pretty much every single person in the country has the chance to see it. And, why studios have now reduced the entire box-office industry--and pressured the audience's psychological mentality--into a flash-paper series of one-off elimination "Box-office weekend record!" competitions to outdo each other on opening, while letting the Mon-Thurs. and second-week business basically go hang. Like the late retail chains, that's a lot of empty business a very LARGE brick-and-mortar overhead has to pay for, and ticket prices can only pass on the expenses so far every week. The solution would be to bring back local 1-3 screen micro-theaters on downtown main streets (yeah, maybe your movie will be sold out on Friday, have you tried seeing it on Monday?) where not EVERY single movie opens in your home town on opening day...Gosh, you might even have to go out of town to see it. In the old days of small independents, if a movie didn't prove successful, the manager would be rotate it next week for another new title that did, which meant there was usually something to see every week without going too far out of your way. Unfortunately, the reality of that is the rising cost of downtown real-estate, which is already causing too many college-downtown art-theaters to close, assuming we had any left in the early 10's. ...Sorry to vent, but does hit at the MoviePass Dilemma that while users fell into a rabid honeymoon for going back to theaters, we should be rekindling audiences' interest in movies by thinking about what theaters CAN show (how about filling up those empty Lion King screenings with a few more manager-picked novelties/revivals?), than about how big we can show the few we have and how to pay for them.

One of the big problems that sank Ultraviolet's hopes for Digital is that most people didn't really much care about exploring the wonderful new frontier of digital movies, had no idea where they would watch them, and pretty much used whatever their tablet or STB was connected to--Those with iPads and AppleTV's bought iTunes, those with Fire sticks and Alexas bought Amazon. Most people still use Amazon for paid rentals if they've got Prime, but redeeming free disk codes now brings you onto Vudu, which is about as good and reliable a service as there is right now, if we have to have one. (And "one" is pretty much what it became.)

Back in my late-70's/early-80's formative years, when theaters were still local downtown independents, our local art-theater used to offer a prepaid punch-card of ten $3 tickets for $30. That was about half my moviegoing childhood, since it was an arthouse that scheduled its movies, rotated them weekly, and even threw in a few classic-revival double-features on Wed-Thurs. when things got slow. I always knew what present I'd get at Christmas and birthdays, and I watched more classic movies at the age of thirteen, just because they were free, then I've been able to find on Netflix in the past year. That's a little different from offering a service to give free pre-paid $10 admissions to already overbuilt and cash-strapped studios and cineplexes, and users so in love with it, they knock themselves out to wring every last psychological penny out of it. I remember the Abuse-By-the-Faithful was this bad back when disk-by-mail Netflix first started back in the birth of DVD--with disk-struck early-adopter fans bragging about how they were able to "beat the system" and wangle eight rentals a week on a 2-title subscription--and that actually was the proverbial Nice Thing, and the reason Why We Can't Have Them. I never got into MoviePass for the same basic reason: Every time someone bragged about their mega-watching, I would stare...."There actually ARE two or three movies you'd go to see this month? I have enough trouble finding one! 😮 "

And remember to light it correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQ-3IMJ_uw 😁

And even though Bela's career took a sad downturn after horror fell out of fashion at the studios, the only other time he actually played Dracula onscreen for Universal was in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and even then, his old-school dedication provides a nice believably in-character counterpoint to all the wacky comedy. Everyone else may be silly, but Bela's Dracula is still the creepy serious monster in the room.

😉 MoviePass had a disturbingly loyal cult at the beginning, for pretty much exactly the same reason that Bitcoin did: A 21st-century generation that believes homegrown online startups can solve any problem in the world, without quite stopping to figure out that one nagging question that sank a previous generation of Dot-Com startups twenty years earlier: "Where is the money coming from, and/or how exactly does this plan make a PROFIT?" And, like Bitcoin, the only answer offered was more evangelism about how "their" new service was going to change the world as we knew it. If it came and went in the first year, that wouldn't have been so bad--But by the second year, they were bleeding money, and half the cult was STILL loyal, hoping it would dig itself out, while the other half felt "betrayed" and rabidly started painting the service as "Greedy!" and "A swindle!" if it had to cut back on the free movies it could dish out. By the end, almost everyone had left it, and the company was struggling to stay out of bankruptcy just to annoy all the analysts claiming it was over. Anybody remember Toshiba clinging onto HDDVD until the bitter end?...Yyyeah. That's what we were talking about. 😓 One NYT article on the rise and fall of "Internet Unicorns" (a term which became popular once Moviepass started becoming a more high-profile failure than all those shopping/food-delivery services) came up with the perfect metaphor I've been quoting ever since: "I've got a great idea for a new startup: I'm going to sell dollar bills for $0.75! If it catches on, I might be able to buy them in bulk from the Treasury, and sell them for $1.25! I can also make a profit by selling customer data to third-party agencies...What can go wrong?" 😁

It's the only one of the Scorsese Republics most of the audience had heard of, from its St. Patrick's TV tradition, besides the fact that it was the movie E.T. was watching when Elliot kissed the girl at school. Wake of the Red Witch is the only other widely recognizable title, but it's not your basic top-ten.

Protesting a little too much, Jake? 😓 (That would account for the Rip Van Tweet, apropos of...well, only he knew what it was apropos of.) Even so, Twitter helped save Blu/DVD's hinder, by keeping the "Disk underground" alive during the Digital Wars. Warner Archive, Criterion and Shout Factory knew the value of maintaining an active Twitter community, since most of their goods were sold online, and the minute any new disk title was announced, a fan-nostalgia discussion erupted among the faithful. By the time the disk actually hit shelves, fans considered any new hard-disk release an event. You...didn't much see that happening with Digital, which was pitching itself to "People who didn't really care much either way", and ultimately found that audience.

Also considering this is iTunes' list--Among those (ahemilliteratemillennialcavephilistines) who don't have a serious browsing interest in tracking disks at the library, and stick to digital/streaming for their entire movie input, iTunes has the slightly more "upscale" edge, since it's usually through the AppleTV set-top box or the iPad tablet, and in more of a "Browsing" form than the usual search on YouTube. AppleTV doesn't have a future as a programming network, but it continues to be the living room browser of choice. Like Sophie and Forrest, the two other names that haunt young viewers told they have to see "famous films" are Citizen Kane and Casablanca. And young viewers might see them on the front page and deliberately walk across coals to get those movies out of the way, to shout down any snotty Elder who accuses that they "haven't seen them". Not to mention--taking Kane, GWTW, Casablanca and Singin' as a group entity--Warner made their core classics available as an over-displayed goodwill gesture after losing the Digital wars. I got an entire package free on my Vudu courtesy of the retiring Flixster, and throwing in the '33 "King Kong" and the Judy Garland "Star is Born" to boot. As is the proliferation of Westerns near the bottom of the list (True Grit, Butch Cassidy, Blazing Saddles), which might have also been a temporary sale. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance isn't normally a top seller the rest of the year.

Apart from the core and Disney classics, 15 out of 25, Friday included, seem to be Paramount's catalog, across the board-- Stalag 17, Chinatown, Ghost and Rosemary's Baby (what, no Sunset Boulevard?) are four of the most omnipresent Paramount Orphans, popping up around every corner of streaming, so you couldn't throw a rock in any direction and not hit one of those. Rosemary still has a classic film reputation--and looks the most rentable since it's, oo, a horror classic!--and Ghost and Chinatown never get old, but Stalag is only recently getting the "Ohh, THAT'S why they made Hogan's Heroes, I get it!" re-appreciation, after being out of the ether for a while as only one of an anonymous group of 50's-60's Best Pictures. Sophie's Choice (which was Universal), I can only speculate: Even the very name conjures up old 80's memories of the ponderous, punishing Critically-Acclaimed Oscar Nominee, With/Without Meryl Streep--the one that usually lost to the more popular film, back in the five-nomination days--and I fear it's being rented on name value as a symbolic act of self-flagellation by younger audiences told they had to see more "Great movies" from the 70's and 80's. Just surprised that Shawshank Redemption wasn't up there as millennial Great-Movie Oscar-Boogeyman as well, but Forrest Gump (also Paramount) managed to fill in. Ferris Bueller AND Grease. To a generation, only six great movies were ever made--They'd already seen Back to the Future and Princess Bride, Lion King was too fresh in the memory, and Disney already owned Empire Strikes Back. 😓

Now, based on the poster, what would you think Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis's sweet-quirky fantasy Made in Heaven (1987) was about?: 😕 Okay, now how about Clive Barker's Nightbreed (1990)...Yes, the studio was trying to bury it, but had they even SEEN it?: http://www.impawards.com/1990/nightbreed_ver1.html

I'll forever associate this movie with the critic who once described "1981 - The Most Depressing Christmas Season in Movie History". Although it also had Ragtime, Reds, Ghost Story and Taps to help it out, all paled in comparison to Steve Martin in a noose. (Don't...try to figure it out. A line word-associated itself in his head at the very mention of P&M, and he wanted to show off what a Beloved Film Fan that he could quote it to us fellow Beloved Film Fans, in the exact same context as it was in his head. That's the nature of the disease.)

There's one case where a comic fan is stealing "Captain Lightning" merchandise from stores and theaters--And while Webb and Morgan do plenty of 60's head-shaking about "What happened to our heroes?", given the timing, it's pretty obviously fictionalizing a 60's-Batman obsessed fan. And whether the 60's Dragnet was "corny" depends on your own opinion of the Hippie movement, which the '66-'68 LA-set series set out to address. Looking at it today, there's a lot about the movement that now seems like showy, hollow combative psychobabble from "lazy kids", and as rightwing as Joe Friday was, none of it fooled Webb for a second. You know you're officially your parents when the episode where Friday lectured a snotty privileged kid throwing around "Death of materialistic society" cliche's, and stealing hardware/grocery supplies for his "new commune", actually starts to make SENSE: (Darn, and they cut out the line about "You haven't 'given up on our materialistic society', you've given up on paying for it...And that makes you exactly what you said you weren't.")

Not to mention, this was at the height of '01-'03 Shrek-fueled anti-Eisner/Disney frenzy, and Disney spent so much time trying to defend their new character, they forgot to explain what in tarnation a "Lilo" was. (We saw her at the end of the parody-trailers, but that didn't answer audience's questions.) So, audiences at the time not only wishfully believed they were seeing actual clips from a 90-minute movie about a blue alien crashing Disney classics--with no Hawaiian girls in it--but the more pipe-bomb faithful went on blogs proclaiming "Disney's decided to make fun of their own legacy! They've finally taken a clue from audiences' success of the Shrek movies!" ...Ohh, things were bad, back then. 😞

Yes, but as United Artists orphans (like the Woody Allen and Pink Panther movies), they're currently available everywhere on streaming... ...EVERY. @%(&IN'. WHERE. 😡 The entire UA Connery-Brosnan canon (plus the "illegitimate" Never Say Never Again, which was also MGM/UA) seems to have taken up permanent residence on Amazon Prime, and this month, PlutoTV even has a month-long free-with-ads 24/7 Bond channel. I don't know if your complaint about "unavailable" 007 films is from North America or just TCM-exclusive, but on the rest of the net, we've got a glut of surplus. Huh...Thought most of the "Teddy bear suits?--The HECK??" complaints from the movie was from young kids who, similarly, hadn't seen the original, and didn't know the series was supposed to be that silly. The TV fans politely recognized the good intentions, but that Ralph Fiennes was too mumbly and mannered to capture Patrick Macnee's self-parodying wink, and Uma Thurman was too snarly to capture Diana Rigg's trig flipness. Oh, and that Warner had chopped a half hour out of the movie into helpless incoherence. Still, Fiennes' opening introduction as John Steed was two spot-on series-perfect minutes of what the rest of the movie SHOULD have been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjGKv209gAE 😄

If we had to have one Roger Moore, The Spy Who Loved Me just somehow hit all the right notes to boost the Moore canon out of early-70's obscurity and into the late-70's popcorn renaissance. There were TWO big box-office hits of summer '77. (Shame about the other Moores, though, and even Live and Let Die never quite lives up to what it should be.) As for the Connerys, if you try to describe or make up a 007 plot out of thin air, chances are half of it will be taken straight out of DNA memories of Goldfinger. That's how Essential it is. Still not sure which is the Essential Pierce Brosnan, though--My leaning is to the slickness of Tomorrow Never Dies, since Goldeneye was icky, violent and misogynistic, but made a good video game.

First Contact is just about as good as it gets for the TNG movies. (And directed by Jonathan Frakes, aka Cmdr. Ryker, who has as good an instinct for the New series as Nicholas Meyer had for the Classic one.) Insurrection, OTOH, was a mess of several different story drafts, which ended up in pieces, but none in their complete form. Even the title refers to a draft from three scripts before. Any goodwill the first JJ Abrams film generated was quickly dispelled by Into Darkness's continuing quest to homage every single last remaining geek-fan Wrath of Khan reference that JJ hadn't used up yet in the first film. Okay, JJ, we get it. Which meant that Beyond had to follow as the JJ-era "Search for Spock", with the characters running around stranded on the planet surface for no real apparent reason, fighting a generic villain whose name and grudge we'd forgotten by now. Guess this means we're due for the Whale movie in the next one.

Before the TV series ever surfaced on cult PBS Friday nights, Columbia was originally supposed to distribute Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different (1972), which had been meant to be the first export, and didn't quite know what to make of it-- They eventually pulled the distribution, as they didn't know what an Upper Class Twit was, and thought the movie was making fun of the mentally handicapped. As for studios that didn't know how to sell their movies, anybody remember Disney nervously trying to explain who or what Stitch was in Lilo & Stitch (2002), and rather over-defending his right to be a "real" Disney character?

(VHS??) There are some running movie lines that root themselves so perfectly for the situation into your subconscious, you look for excuses to use them in the real world. For me, such a line would be the two baffled Eskimo hunters, every time Smith explained his experimental theories: "He say.......'Good idea'."

In addition to radio and TV, Eve Arden had one or two bigscreen spinoffs for Our Miss Brooks (1956):

With movie acquisition on streaming and Blu/DVD now down to what studio-abandoned Paramount, MGM/UA, Warner or Columbia "Orphans" now make their way to availability, we've actually come FULL CIRCLE to the 70's days when your only hope of seeing movies on TV was in what overlooked studio package of titles was sold to which station, to be shown because they didn't have anything else to air. Congratulations, Millennial cord-cutters, you've come all the way back to your parents' Million Dollar Movie! 😄 Unfortunately, in this case, sounds like it was an exclusive prestige buddy-deal between Scorsese and AppleTV for streaming-only, accdg. to the Digital Bits site: (Fortunately, we've already got The Quiet Man on restored disk anyway, so there's that.)

On disk, I take it, but I've still been searching for the other titles with Joe Bob commentary--His track for "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter" was a hoot, but haven't seen that since the days of mail-Netflix.

And, for obligatory Just Watched content: --- Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) - 👍 Even I remember this one from the theaters as being one of the laughingstocks of the early 80's: Partly due to it being the other of two fatal big-budget disasters that ultimately sank Lord Grade, and mostly due to a lot of audience bricks deliberately thrown at would-be new star Klinton Spilsbury after the high-profile rights trial that "took the mask away" from TV star Clayton Moore. But nearly forty years is a long time, and--particularly after audiences briefly came to the movie's defense to throw it back in Gore Verbinski's face after his lil' 2013 psychotic Johnny Depp episode--clunky as it is, it almost seems like a movie ahead of its time, and due for a re-appraisal, after a load of 70's Lord Grade ITV movies were dumped on the streaming ether. (And thanks to Shout Factory, caught this one resurfacing out of limbo this month on the wilds of PlutoTV). Pop-culture heroes were coin of the realm in the post-Star-Wars 70's, after Christopher Reeve's overly-earnest Superman, and the tongue-in-cheek '80 Flash Gordon. This one's definitely in the "Overly-earnest" category, to the point that critics called it downright "Wagnerian"--I remember audiences audibly snickering at Merle Haggard's "balladeer" narration, but propelled by sweeping Monument Valley scenery and John Barry's sweeping Western strings, it almost adds to the naively innocent attempt at retro-serials...As the benefit of hindsight teaches us, things could always have been a lot worse. Spilsbury (who turned out to be no actor, and ended up overdubbed by a serviceable enough James Keach) shows no lack of sincerity as the hero, and--no need to put a bird on his head to placate the native audience--Michael Horse, before he became Deputy Hawk on "Twin Peaks", also plays a revisionist full-sentence Tonto with not a drop of irony, delivering realistic loyalty and plenty of contractually-obligated speeches on the white-man's treatment of the West. And even though it takes literally the first ponderously earnest, overwritten hour of the movie to dig the tenth grave for Texas Ranger John Reid and put him in the mask, the heavy air of gravitas still works to give a chill when--no CGI elephants here--we get the first big William Tell Overture reveal: The movie's biggest problem is coming up with an episode story big enough to match the long buildup, but they come close enough: An unlikely and very pre-Doc Brown Christopher Lloyd makes an effectively cold-blooded baddie, turning series outlaw Butch Cavendish into a full-on black-caped Western 007 villain, and Jason Robards adds a fresh note of weary cynicism to the fourth act as Lloyd's target President Grant. It all requires a heavy and sporting suspension of disbelief, and as such, it probably wasn't what 1981 audiences were expecting...But put next to the all-in straightforward telling of the first MCU Marvel movies like "Captain America", there's a lot that taking the material seriously can do. It's no classic, and hope springs eternal that we'll someday get a better one (as soon as Hollywood stops blaming "It musta been too old!" for the fate of Verbinski's post-Pirates looney-bin bibbity-bibbity), but for now, if it's not necessarily the feature-movie Ranger we want, it's close enough to being the Ranger we deserve.