EricJ

Although, like other whatever-happened-to 80's stars, she did get her brief featured episode on Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goLLpzST0JY 😀

Well, you didn't have to be that excited about it... 😁

II, IV and VI--the legendary "Even-numbered Treks"--all had the same ingredient, writer and/or director Nicholas ("Time After Time") Meyer. And Meyer's the reason you can show an Even-Numbered Trek to a non-fan and get them hooked on the Original series...That's what a good TV-series movie should do. Paramount wanted Meyer to come back and finish the TNG movies on a high note with Nemesis, but Meyer wanted to rewrite the entire script, so the studio (contractually obligated to the original writer) went for a first-time director instead, and...oyyy: http://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/10/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-star.html

VI is pretty darn good, and would be my pick, if II didn't happen to be the classic. (II being not just best of the Treks, but possibly "Best TV-series movie adaptation ever made", just beating out The Untouchables, The Addams Family and the first X-Files movie.) IV, and its "nuclear wessels", is usually third, but gets heavy competition from First Contact. Beyond and Frontier, however, are usually interchangeable as Worst of Series (Frontier at least had the catgirl, while Beyond had the Space-Monkeys), with the plot-removed Insurrection just up from bottom. Except for The Motion Picture, of course, which most disqualify as a false-start. And then admitting that he didn't even WANT to post comment-free Up-to-the-Minute Headlines [NBC News fanfare] about Hanks as Mr. Rogers, and didn't even like the film, but apparently felt he had to post them because Spence was. That's when it becomes a problem worthy of interventions.

Although likely the MGM canon, since the pre-Opera classics are owned by Universal. (And even those started to suffer after MGM lost Irving Thalberg around the time of "A Day at the Races".)

Most of us gave up starry-eyed pre-release Oscar predictions some time after our junior-high love affair with cineplex movies--And that was back when they were still five-nomination awards, and not the meaningless voter-distorted nine-nomination awards we have today. The cold water that got us out of the addiction created terms for the SPECIFIC kind of Oscar-Bait that ultimately comes up with a bare hook: "This year's 'Beloved'" - The movie with the high-profile book source, the Oscar-worthy cast, and the controversial subject matter, that couldn't even get an audience to look in its direction. "This year's 'Green Mile'" - The movie with the assembled spare parts of several previous winners (Tom Hanks, in another Frank Darabont prison story by Stephen King!), that's groomed for Oscar competition literally from the moment it's announced, and pre-reserved reservations in the major categories that...the voters soon wish they'd left open after seeing the movie. "This year's 'Nine'" - The unkillable belief that ANY major musical released during the Christmas season is a surefire sweeper, because nobody still remembers why Chicago got Best Picture. (Okay, maybe a little dated, if you'd prefer "This year's 'Into the Woods'" or "This year's 'The Greatest Showman'".) "This year's 'The Postman'" - The belief that any strong title with a collection of past-winner pedigree talent must not only win, but sweep the awards in Picture, Director, and/or Actor, pick a minimum of two...And then the movie opens. "This year's 'Catch Me If You Can'" - The still unexplainable superstition that if Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg makes a movie with Leo DiCaprio, it will be the unstoppable awards juggernaut that "The Departed" was, solely for that reason. Even if, yes, the movie happens to be "Wolf of Wall Street" or "Gangs of New York". "This year's 'Stan & Ollie'" - The belief that any historical biopic performance must mandatorily net a nomination for the actor, if not win. Why? No one quite remembers. You'll notice most of these terms are from the 90's. There may be more current metaphors, but that was about when I gave up. It's just one more step in growing up. 😞

Originally, Kelly only agreed to the movie by saying "NO dancing!"--But then, after talking with choreographer (and worshipful fan) Kenny Ortega, they worked up a few low-impact dances, and even let Kelly set up his own number with the 40's-flashback scene. I'd showed the scene to another non-Musehead, and they could immediately see everything in that scene was taken straight out of Kelly's own 40's-MGM musicals...Right down to Gene losing the girl at the end, and the camera dollying in on a big smiling closeup. And in the crazy-costume scene, there's a brief moment where Kelly is in an old-fashioned suit, tap-dancing through a giant pinball-machine room, setting off the bumpers--I double-took for a moment, looked at the scene again, and realized: "He's deliberately doing Fred Astaire's penny-arcade 'Shine on your Shoes' from The Band Wagon! 😄 "

In answer to his question, no, movie posters died out some time around the 00's. (Not to mention, the marketing industry already has its own industry awards, as do trailers.) Used to be some creativity back in the 70's and 80's, but now there's literally no room for creativity, as actors now negotiate for "Lobby representation" for their characters in lieu of profit percentages. (Which they know now they won't get, thanks to "Hollywood accounting".) Basically, all major movie posters now follow the exact same pattern, based on whether the actor can license his image: The "Teaser" image, where we only see a franchise logo, or never see the actor's face, because we only see some iconic part of him, he's out of sight in a distant silhouette, or he has his back dramatically to us, The multi-series of "Character" images, a lobby setup of five or six posters for one of EACH of the main marketable characters, to give them equal billing, and The "Class Photo", where we see a head-collage of all the major actors who negotiated to get their face Represented, or see the actors standing at relative distances close or back depending on billing. ...I miss movie posters. 😞

- AND Don Bluth cartoons, which weren't even a thing yet in the early 80's. (And Los Angeles's late Pan-Pacific Auditorium, which is why tourists love to take shots on roller skates in front of Disney Studios' Florida theme-park gates.) And I continue to fight this movie's unfortunate umbilical-cord to being linked with the Village People's "Can't Stop the Music", which was released within a month: There is no actual "disco" music in Xanadu, thus disqualifying it from being a "Disco musical". There's a disco in the plot, but it's playing Olivia's mellow pop or ELO's 50's-infused rock, which, as we can see, takes new viewers by surprise. 😁 The original test screening was two hours long, and a disaster--Whenever you see a flashy graphic or stylistic screen-wipe in the movie, which is often (I'd love to have seen what the "All Over the World" number originally looked like), it's usually covering for some judicious edits. In the longer version, the big ending production number was almost twenty minutes long (Kelly was reportedly going to do "Singin' in the Rain" on skates), and the choppy flying-graphic "medley" we get in the final cut is literally Edited Highlights. Hokey, yes, but, like the rest of the movie, throwing everything into it--I've tried watching Skatetown USA and Roller Boogie, but both were drive-in B-fodder, and not the classy big-studio production that Xanadu was. Only fans who've watched the movie know that. Well, how would you know if you've never SEEN it? That's what trend-musicals are for. (Silly fad, yes, and never survived the 70's, but who doesn't like the drill-team carhops?) 😁

But was it the short with Sterling Holloway narration, or Ludwig Von Drake? (Covering for Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy in the original "Fun & Fancy Free" segment.)

Also JUST WATCHED (as GGGGerald put it): 😀 --- JoJo Dancer (Your Life Is Calling) (1986) - 👎 Found this overlooked 80's footnote while searching Crackle to see if they had any real Columbia movies this month. I wouldn't say that as streaming services go, Crackle is "the grindhouse of streaming" compared to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon--as that would be an insult to hardworking 70's grindhouses--but remember those theaters in the ghetto sections of the cities that would only play cheap action, martial arts and blaxploitation? Here it was '86, Richard Pryor had cleaned up his act, and his private life, after recovering from his fire accident, and was now well into his 80's career of playing "safe", less-angry PG-rated whitebread-comedy poor-souls in "Superman III" and "Brewster's Millions". And since all comics who come out of twelve-step feel they MUST do community-service by preaching in their acts that drugs and alcohol are bad and wrong and destroy lives, Pryor vanity-directs himself in a semi-autobiographical movie of a self-destructive comic who suffers a suspiciously similar drug-related burn accident and looks back at his life in a near-death experience. It's a confessional he needed to tell, but the big problem with the movie is that he told us most of these stories already, and not under a pseudonym--Back in 1982's Live on the Sunset Strip, which may very well be "the Gimme Shelter of standup-concert movies" by which all others are judged. The other problem is he told them better onstage: His standup routines were harrowing and painfully funny by finding the absurdity and embarrassments in his downward spiral but here, the story veers between standard TV-movie biopic (which it would be if they'd cast another actor) and the constant need for penance and self-recrimination about his problems--Pryor's near-death alter-ego literally lectures himself on his own hospital bed, and even the climactic accident is depicted as almost a religious ritual of penance, rather than just the result of explosive chemicals. When Pryor in LotSS told a story of his early days working in a gangster-owned strip club, it was frightening enough to make you wince; here, he not only re-enacts the story straight, but...in drag. (As his character has just come out of a comic act of imitating the strippers.) Er, loses something in the the telling somewhat. The movie climaxes with Pryor's fictional character onstage re-enacting the confessional Sunset Strip concert, it's one of the only times we see him with his old energy, and it just emphasizes what we'd thought for the whole movie--Laughing at yourself is the only way you can confess a problem, self-pity isn't. (The only real BTS revelation we get from the biopic is a scene depicting Pryor drunk and unmanageable on the shooting of 1981's Bustin' Loose, right before the edge of the cliff, and that may have been one of his funniest movies. Which only emphasizes the tragic trade-off we had to take for his early comedy.)

(looks up IMDb) Johnston, sorry--Both Johnston in "3rd Rock" and Alley in "Cheers" had the same over-the-top comic stress-frazzled-girl performance, so I got them confused. Both still funny, though. 😁 And, of course, the 3rd-Rock moment where Curtin and the aliens crash a fan sci-fi convention, and Curtin's character smiles quaintly at one fan going by in a SNL Coneheads costume...

Well, only in the sense that Chris I-Hate-Comic-Books Nolan's "The Dark Knight" tried to be 21st-century "believable" with homegrown villains, teenage YouTube Bat-wannabes, discussions of cellphone privacy vs. security, and exhaustive examinations of mob banking to the near-complete exclusion of the main plot, it was easier to believe that Tim Burton's Batman was actually based on a comic book. (Or, "Easier to believe Tim had ever read one in his life".)

It was a made-for cable TNT movie (back when there were such things, and Robert Halmi was helping 5th-grade English students everywhere by grinding out the Classics miniseries), so "flop" is relative--That may be the reason you don't remember it from theaters. And, unfortunately being Turner, it wasn't one of the NBC Halmi series that was later dumped onto the streaming ether for perpetuity, like "The Odyssey", "Merlin" and "Alice in Wonderland". It was SILLY. In a good way. 😁 You can't have a sitcom with John Lithgow, Kirstie Alley and French Stewart and not be silly. And yes, there are those who will come to the defense of Lithgow's performance in Santa Claus: the Movie (1985), for similar reasons.

Yeah, it's sure to win as many as Stan & Ollie did last year...

Jack's good, but by the end of the movie, it's hard to tell when he's just playing Jack. Still, only he, Cesar Romero and Mark Hamill captured the theatrical showoff whose practical jokes just happened to be crimes--If Hamill could read Trump's tweets and make them sound like the Joker's, he's got the character nailed down: (You could have Josh Brolin reading the tweets as Thanos, but, y'know, it...just wouldn't be the same.)

Don't worry, you're safe--Lithgow's actually...pretty good as Don Quixote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WR7ducy0rU And Bob Hoskins does a darn good Sancho Panza, while they're at it. (Of course, Mr. Magoo was my first and best exposure to Don, but Lithgow's a good second.)

Problem is, we already KNOW the Joker's origin, when Jack Nicholson fell into the chemicals. And that was a lot more believable (since it came from the actual comics), than suggesting that he was poor Travis Bickle, hoping the rain would come and wash away the scum of the city. Villain origins want us to hate the villain, but, y'know, not too much, or we wouldn't pay to see the movie.

And, for those who missed it, Furmanek's 3-D print restoration was created for 3D Blu-ray disk: https://www.amazon.com/Maze-3-D-Blu-ray-Richard-Carlson/dp/B079PHFH4X/ Of course, if you happen to have missed 3DTV when it was around, um, can't help ya. 😎 (And the "Hi ho!" frog is a bit of a major SPOILER--It is, shall we say, not what the script was leading us to expect. Admit it, you go into the story wondering "Aha, they're hiding an ancient Greek minotaur on the estate?"...)

It's basically designed to be "The movie that Warner/DC could put in the October slot that 'Venom' had last year for Sony/Marvel", and seems to be scripted accordingly: Another corporate-icon villain origin where--so that we won't hate him, you see--the bad guy turned out to be a poor shlub who didn't really start out as a bad guy, until he was forced to fight someone EVEN WORSE!! 😱 Y'know, like in Hannibal Rising, when Hannibal Lechter turned out to be just a poor average downtrodden lil' guy who liked samurai masks, until he had to fight evil bad guys to protect the first girl who liked him. (Yes, also doing the same pseudo-"Taxi Driver" Travis-loves-Iris shtick they pretty much all do.) And be glad that Disney buying Fox spared us a movie about what a misunderstood guy Victor Von Doom was, before they started working on their own movie about the mean countess who stole poor Cruella DeVille's beloved dogs. Or when young Norman Bates had to stand up to that nasty guy his mother was having the affair with...

Jake...do you REALLY care that much about this movie, or have Twitter entertainment feeds taken over your soul and will? 😮

Y'know, even if you LIKED James Cameron's neurotically misogynist depiction of Linda Hamilton/Sarah Conner in the original T2 (all Cameron females must wear sweaty Soldier-of-Fortune camo-tanks, tote sawed-off rifles, and spew dominatrix-like emasculation wisecracks at any surrounding male human), she's a freakin' psychotic crab in this one! 😮 I know it's the Deadpool director trying to be serious, and overdoing the Cameron Heroine, but I wouldn't rush for that "trilogy", Jimmy. Here, we're just attending the funeral to see the franchise repatriated to its own native soil for burial.

Beverly Hills Cop II, Towering Inferno, Thank God It's Friday, Disney's "Robin Hood", Karate Kid II, Dick Tracy, Quest For Camelot, Beethoven's 2nd... Alongside Best Makeup, the second-most most wild-card category. 😮

That depends on what you think "the DVD rental store" IS: The reason we have this current issue-laden Millennial demonization of the very act of renting physical movies from some location as "Ho ho...Blockbuster Video! SO 90's! Let's dig out our Alanis Morrissette CD's for irony, and rent Lethal Weapon IV!" is because in most areas, for a late-90's/early-00's generation growing up, Blockbuster, and its tacky highway-supermarket merchandising of inconvenient overpriced rentals with high cineplex-like overhead was literally the only game in town. That's how Netflix-By-Mail DID kill Blockbuster, may it rest in pieces. In the city college-districts and their suburbs, though, local chains did most of the business (before psychological dependency on Netflix-by-mail killed those too), since most Blockbusters were too big and overbuilt to be on Main Street except in the chain-flagship districts. When I went to college in Boston, VideoSmith was the local chain of choice in the college-towns and suburbs, with small book-nook rentals and a habit of stocking the classics and smaller titles. (We also had a Tower Records, where the first floor had a rare-title rental that staggered description 😮 , but what happened to them is another story.) It created a culture-war Blockbuster vs. Mom-&-Pop debate among disk fans of whether a "Video rental" should be a library of past classics to browse, or, like digital tried to be, a studio-sycophantic second-run theater service where you grab your bucks and run to watch "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" three months later if you missed it in theaters. We know whose side BB was on, but Netflix-by-mail appealed more to the mom-&-pop La-z-boy cineaste that liked to browse the back catalog. Most of the Free-with-ads services--for obvious reasons--can't afford to show much, and the selection tends to be the Greatest Hits of Public Domain. That's how PlutoTV started out (with a little help from Shout Factory), but now that Viacom has become its parent company, their Paramount movies and Viacom cable reruns have livened up the programming considerably. It's actually become my first-click service when I turn on the TV, since the "random" programming satisfies the ancient DNA memory of the old 80's-90's cable viewer that used to sit down, grab his remote and click channels to see "what was on". There's still a need for free no-obligation Random broadcast programming, ever since our culture adopted an "A la carte" system where you only watched the movies and shows you'd heard of, without being exposed to anything new. Now, if any of the other big houses started taking their programming to free-with-ads, we'd see some healthy competition, but with PlutoTV as the biggest/only kid on the block, they get first choice at the PD Paramount, Columbia, Warner and MGM/UA Orphans. I cannot believe that "Dogpile on the rabbit!" has now entered our culture as a meme-worthy Thing: 😅 But yes, they won't consolidate: Each new service doesn't quite understand that Netflix, no matter how far it sinks into "Standup and true crime", will still have the generational legendary association with The One Service That Provides Everything, and wonder why the attempt to replicate the Magic Formula isn't working for them. (It even had their own corporate NAME on the service, and all!) Like the last Digital-VOD Gold Rush, some will fall, some will merge, some will change their names/motif, but only a very few will be brave enough to drop out before the herd is culled. Audiences don't want "a new service", they want the New Netflix that they entrusted their blind faith to when they dropped cable, and Disney+ or HBOMax has big shoes to fill taking that role. Shame about the others, though.

Wait--The Grey Fox is SHOWING somewhere? 😮 It's been in limbo since the VHS 80's, now playing at the Bermuda Triangle's Amelia Erhardt Cineplex! I've never really thought of Donald Pleasance as "overacting"--Even when playing "good" characters, that calm, creepy, under-emotional lobotomized drone adds to the unsettling atmosphere of whatever he's in. (He mentioned that before "The Great Escape", he'd been in a prison camp during the War, and unlike gentleman-horror actors like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, I've always wondered whether he came out of it with every single marble intact.) I remember one comic joking that there's nothing Pleasance could say that wouldn't sound creepy--Imagine him walking into a Denny's and saying "I would like...the Grand Slam breakfast...with extra bacon, please." (starts to make joke about watching the Blu version in 3D) (thinks better of it 😅 )