EricJ

You CAN say "damn" on television...However, you can't say G.D. Perhaps this might have caused the confusion.

When Judy Garland is having apples thrown at her in Oz, look carefully at 1:04 and watch her ruby slippers turn to sensible black Mary Janes in one shot:

John Landis covered it neatly, if giving away unsatisfying hints of the good stuff, on Trailers From Hell: (Particularly the climax: "All of a sudden, looks like George Pal directed the movie!" 😄 )

The songs are...sort of what you would picture if someone said "Burt Bacharach musical", and that always keeps me from absolutely liking it, even though I have a secret taste for 60's-70's roadshow musicals. (Well, okay, having Bobby Van in it doesn't help much either.) Much of the legend was around a silly extended cut from "Living Together, Growing Together" which critics guffawed about and the Medveds' Golden Turkeys drove into mythical status, but never made it to the theatrical cut, and left audiences thinking "Oh, yeah, it flopped because it was bad, pretty much." I can't find the scene as described on the current remastered Blu-ray, although heard it was restored, and wondered whether it was another case of the Medveds' bad memory telling tall tales again.

The problem is, 00's and 10's Hollywood spent two decades imitating three blockbusters, two of which had pre-written finite endings, and the other which built up to a famous climax you can't really top. In '01, Warner was lucky enough to get Harry Potter and Peter Jackson's LOTR in the same year, one promising to deliver a pre-filming serial of seven movies one a year, the other promising to deliver a pre-filming serial of three movies one a year...Only problem was, they all came from books, and those books ENDED. Most books do, as did Hunger Games and Twilight. And I don't have to tell you what happened when they tried to make more Harry Potter and Tolkien, when there wasn't any more to make. After '08, the codeword was "Marvel-style Universe!", and studios, who didn't read comic books, thought you could thrown ANY old pop-culture-property movies together in solo epics and have them all meet together in the big-hyped group film...And Godzilla was only one of the reasons why that just wasn't the case, and why you just don't do it overnight when Marvel and even DC had been doing it for fifty years. Audiences have become harder to fool, and that's why studios are amazed that the 10's aren't like the 00's anymore. With Warner now realizing that their "Godzilla v. Kong: Save Mothra" crossover picture they already had filming is, like Justice League, not going to have much coming after it, the landscape for DIY-House-Franchises is looking barer and barer. Warner's only got the Young Willy Wonka movie and another Gremlins revival left--and maybe that Beetlejuice sequel they've been tossing around for thirty years--and then Old Mother Hubbard will have to file for food stamps.

A lot of 70's-80's catalog movies Paramount sold to Warner in the late 00's after they "lost interest" in vintage back-catalog DVD sale, and Warner...well, three guesses what Warner did with them in the 10's. That left a lot of 70's-80's titles, like "Clue", "The Untouchables", "The Conversation", "Patriot Games", the '74 "Murder on the Orient Express", etc., joining the same Orphanage that the MGM/UA and some of the Columbia titles have been floating around, selling matches and wilted flowers on street corners. That semi-PD status apparently now makes them fair game for anyone to show, including TCM. (They've already been turning up at third-party disk labels, like Criterion.) Viacom now also owns free-with-ads broadcast-streaming site PlutoTV, and--in addition to 24/7 channels for their MTV, Nick and Comedy Central reruns, and a 24/7 Dora the Explorer channel to plug the movie 😮--they've also added a free-with-ads "Paramount Classic Channel", which has been showing quite a variety lately, from the Elvis musicals to the Jerry Lewis comedies, and a few of the wartime-Pacific Cary Grant comedies in between. (Not even a, y'know....little one? 😕 Or are we also supposed to roll our eyes painedly and cry o-tempora-o-mores at the very sight of Mark Ruffalo in CGI, even though they got the character right from the current comics?)

Although, of course, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" wasn't technically "his"--That was Henry J. Saperstein's idea, back when UPA had US rights for all Toho-Godzilla dubs, had the notion to dub the funny Japanese spy film, and hired the new flavor-of-the-week from that hit "Pussycat" film every 60's comedy producer wanted to get his hands on. Still, a good remnant of Woody's "non-sequitur" humor from the Bananas/Take the Money & Run days, which we wouldn't see again after the Bergman phase until "Zelig".

The mixed reviews were mostly over the ending, where, in the book, our hero sees the rioting underclass as the "locusts" of his painting, that will sooner or later rise up and destroy the modern Sodom & Gomorrah--In the movie, he actually sees the rioters with masks of the characters from his painting, which, although it saves a lot of literary prose, critics thought was a bit words-of-one-syllable interpretation. Still, Burgess Meredith deserved his Oscar nomination as the old vaudevillian. 👍 The mid-70's had a cottage industry for soft-focus period-nostalgic 30's-Hollywood pictures, and this one always gets neglected.

...And yet, we're still allowed to see "Critters 3":

It's not Disney's fault, and in fact, with some exceptions, the screenplay plays like a respectful adaptation of Baum's books-- Coppola sound engineer Walter Murch, however, NEVER, EVER directed another major film, for Disney or anyone else. 😓

Now there's one movie that definitely has not aged at ALL-- As those of us know who've ever had to explain to the young kids why Trump's latest unhinged tweet-storms keep getting jokes about "Strawberries" and "Eh, go click yer lil' ball-bearings". 😄

Characters in mid-late 70's, and even early 80's, serious Woody Allen films are always going to revival theaters, which only the intelligentsia in NYC were seen as going to at the time, apart from the college students--Allen grew up with local movie theaters, and the characters in his movies are constantly walking in and out of art-film screenings, like the numerous scenes in Annie Hall where Woody and Diane are in line discussing Marshall Macluhan. Before the VHS age ('82 and after), foreign films were for the upper urban elite, while old-movie revivals were depicted in movie/TV shows as for poor naive dreamers who couldn't handle the modern world, spending their afternoons watching Fred Astaire, or Casablanca, like Woody's character in "Play It Again, Sam". Going to a classic Bergman or Godard at the Metro 99th was seen as some indulgence of the upper class, before the rise of classic movies on home video later pretty much gutted the entire revival-theater industry out of existence, and forced Woody to admit VHS existed.

It's his Bergman-Chekov-Tolstoy-ish movie, only not in the sense of "Interiors", "Hannah & Her Sisters" and "Crimes & Misdemeanors". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QWjpfCjXSI

In fact, his parodies of Bergman in Love and Death alone are more pure Bergman-expert than his entire "plagiarism" phase of the early-mid 80's, eg. "Interiors" and "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy". ("And his string. He saved string...As you know." "Yes...(pause)...I loved him for that.") It's hard to NOT use Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman in the same sentence.

Yes, but by the "Old-Hollywood-dismissive 70's", I mean back in the days when we thought Esther Williams' "Smoke" number from Million Dollar Mermaid was literally every musical ever made. By Busby Berkeley, of course. (Look up any Hollywood parody of 30's musicals made between 1969 and 1981, and see how many of them DON'T use the panning shot of happy faces diving camera-right into a swimming pool--"Y-M-C-A...") It's easy to dismiss anything (Lewis Carroll, Monty Python) as "on drugs, huhuh" if you don't take the trouble to understand it, but fact is, Carmen Miranda's tutti-frutti hat at Fox was the first time Berkeley was ever allowed to cut loose with his crazy abstract ideas since the Warner days, after MGM had clamped down on his creativity. Even though Golddiggers of 1936 was Berkeley's first "cleaned-up" post-code Warner musical, I remember watching "Lullaby of Broadway" with a film class, and the end of the number brought first a laugh, and then a "Whoa...What? 😮 ".

(No, it's just that I still remember the sad fate of when the Movie Morlock blog became the Criterion/Filmstruck blog, and how the new bloggers played "No soup for you!", and banned all the, quote, "hateful" posters that didn't want to discuss the "subtexts" in every movie that they wanted to talk about, or who kept trying to steer the discussion back onto the more obvious directorial intent...Which soon became almost ALL of them, and the blog was eventually ghost-towned onto Tumblr. And I should add, this is not the only movie-discussion forum I've ever been on...I could say "There's one in every crowd", but if it's only one, you're lucky. 😓 ) Those born after the Koch era just can't appreciate how much NYC was viewed as Hell Bubbling Up on Earth by the late 60's and mid-70's. I remember doing the Buck "I'm from NY" act myself when I took a semester at NYU in the early Koch 80's--long before the Giulani years of a Disney Store in Times Square--and even then, the city certainly wasn't what it was before the '77 Son of Sam/Blackout. It's easy to appreciate "Dog Day Afternoon", "The French Connection", "Taxi Driver", "Saturday Night Fever" or "The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three" from a distance, but only those who were there can appreciate the mindset of those who stayed there.

But not the dark, filthy precode Busby Berkeley ones coming out of "street-gritty" Warner! We're enjoying Golddiggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade a LOT more than we were able to back in the old-Hollywood-dismissive 70's!

Yes, as in "Me, and my fantasy world". That's plural.

(No, see, David, "We" is a plural pronoun, it refers to a large group of people besides you.)

Seriously, how many directors have done that Bergman-fan shot at some point in their lives? I keep looking closely at the picture to see if she's smooshing his nose to the side. 😅

Okay, so you're "not" gay-obsessed with the movie--let alone, heavens, one of those "outpost colony" posters on ANY movie forum who horse-blinder hijacks the thread with "Why wasn't this movie more gay? Why isn't every movie with two male or female protagonists more gay? We had them back in the 30's all the time! It's a fascist state!...Silence = Death!"--you're just putting it under the broad-brush category of every general movie made under the 30's-70's Tyranny of the Status Quo. 😆 But, basically, yes, the Sexual Revolution didn't happen until the 70's, any "hooking-up" was handled by the free-love hippie community (as we see with the Warhol artists, where Joe is clearly out of his element), and most frustration in the upper high-rises was with the Sylvia Miles character, who just wants something to break up the discontentedness of shallow upper-middle-class business-wife living. The whole 80's romance-novel-cover fantasy Joe pictures, where women swoon into the arms of Fabio in a cowboy outfit, just didn't exist yet in upper E. 75th St., who thought that key parties, or just talking about your relationship, were the height of urban decadence. Bragging to your upwardly-mobile friends that you were going downtown to see "Deep Throat" in a theater (as Travis Bickle tries to impress Betsy with in "Taxi Driver") wouldn't be for another four or five years.

There's a long, long story about why Cars 2 was made, what movie it was originally SUPPOSED to be, and why the one we got evokes such feelings of murderous frenzy, but--as I started to type it out then deleted it--that's for another time, or on request. Cars 3 was an intentional "apology" for Cars 2, but I found that one...ehh. (The new girl-car was just Dory With an Engine.) FMM, Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014) was the enjoyable Cars sequel. 😃

Always thought that was John Barry's, too, because of the soaring strings in the background, and was disappointed to find out it was "just" Fred Neil. As usual (ahemcriterionblog), there's been a lot of Jlewis wishful analysis of the, quote-fingers, "gay relationship" with Ratzo, but there's nothing of the kind-- Hoffman, in his 60's Adam-Sandler-voice loser phase, starts Rizzo out exploiting Buck for his ticket to Florida--just like Buck wants to exploit a lot of nameless NY housewives for his ticket out of Texas--and in the end, each realize they're the only friends in the world either one has, even if that's not saying much. That's not even "bromance", that's just lower-depths gutter-pal desperation, and the city's reduced them to it.

I remember, back in the 70's, everyone who HADN'T seen this movie saw the rating and thought it was some big-studio softcore porn about a male stud bed-hopping in NYC. Obviously, it's not--Buck doesn't have much luck in his career, and the 60's X-rating came from the only paying customer he did get. It's a time-capsule cross-section depiction of Nixon-era NY as the City of Broken Dreams (as we see Joe wandering Times Square after hours to the John Barry theme, along with the rest of 42nd St.'s lower depths), and whose dreams end up broken.

Also, back in the late 80's, we were literally just discovering wacky MGM Tex Avery (I remember being in a college-town theater seeing some of Tex's cartoons for the first time when it had cartoon festivals in the early 80's, and you can imagine the audience's reaction), and attaching them to our Childhood Boomer Craze that was being celebrated with Mid-80's Classic Reruns. Zemeckis apparently believed that EVERY cartoon ever made was a shrieking, eye-bugging, anvil-dropping Tex Avery cartoon, and when he had to fit Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into that view (we can believe that Bugs wouldn't help Hoskins as he was falling from a building, but Mickey??), the gimmick seemed even more hollow. "Roger Rabbit" felt like the Space Jam of Disney characters. 😰