EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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1 hour ago, GGGGerald said:
I am curious. What sort of programming would interest you ?
In the old (mail) days, "Netflix" was still a verb, but not in the sense of "Netflix 'n chill", as in, hang out on your couch with your girl and watch
TVstreaming--If you were mentioning some old classic movie or TV show, as we do here, and the other person never heard of it, you told them to "Netflix it"--Meaning "Look it up at the library", but since, back then, almost everyone with a DVD player HAD a Netflix subscription (which is how Blockbuster went out of business), you knew that they basically could look it up with a click that weekend without even having to bother to check the library. You could even send them the link, if they didn't know the title.
...That's what we lost on March '12, on the great "Netflix-pocalypse" when StarzPlay pulled a thousand or so recent feature movies off the early Netflix streaming catalog. Many of that generation have never recovered since.
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We lost Broadway (as in, the "third" arm of American mainstream entertainment, back when show tunes were #1 songs, and singers sang them on TV variety shows) when we lost Prince. 😢
I remember on the PBS history-of-Broadway documentary, Prince told the story of how he'd first heard Andrew Lloyd Webber's reading for "Cats", and didn't quite get it: "I'm missing something, is there some metaphor here, like it's Victorian England, and there are rich cats and poor cats, and a Victoria and Disraeli cat?" And was told "No, they're...just cats." That's what we lost, especially when Stephen Sondheim went out and found other directors.
(And yes, Hal Prince is the REASON heterosexual people of my 70's-childhood generation can discuss Broadway musicals with such interest. Even Prince's commercial work on "Phantom of the Opera" was ten times the musical that "Cher", "Tootsie" or "Kinky Boots" is today.)
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5 hours ago, hamradio said:
Episode IV, 42 years old and not rebooted - I'm stunned.
Nope...Just "Legacy-quel"'ed. 😓
(Ie. the new Warner/Disney word for new revival-franchise movies where the old 70's/80's actors show up just long enough to break in the new trainees, and then Epically Die, so they can retire from any future "reboots". With Blade Runner: 2049, and the new Indiana Jones movie coming up, Harrison Ford's become an old hand at these.)
5 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:There are also many visual and thematic references to Kurosawa's samurai films.
And the obvious one in particular:
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13 hours ago, laffite said:
During the couple or so months I had the streaming plan, this was the best movie. There were three foreign TV shows that I rather liked, two seasons each of The Paper (Croatia), Faud (Israel) and Occupied (Norway).
Yes, most of Netflix Original either seems to be foreign imports that have nowhere else to go--
OR, personal projects (like David Bernard Shaw Letterman's talk show) that are essentially self-produced vanity trips by stars that left networks, with no other broadcast network or cable channel to buy them, now that cable channels are feeling the pinch and sticking to just their own corporate marketed franchises.
Think Reed Hastings' galactically expanding ego has painted himself into a corner: Netflix went digital to save on disk postage, but then had to start grabbing "Original series" when Starz and the studios pulled their movies out. And then once the industry press was dazzled by "New streaming studios!", and created the market-glut, he had to show Amazon and Hulu that he was still top dog by outdoing them!...And then every other studio, like Warner and Disney, tried to create their own Netflix-rival streaming services with the movies and shows they did own, which only emphasized how Netflix was making up for what it didn't have.
We never did get that "Bright" sequel/possible spinoff-series that Netflix had been hoping for the last time they told us "Look how much MONEY we spent on Will Smith!", but now he's trapped by the Frankenstein of his own reputation.
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2 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
It's most likely going to be the remastered version that appears on other TV channels from time to time.
Rumor has it that George Lucas, wonder of wonders, did NOT burn all the 1977 prints after all, as fans for years suspected he had (every time core fans would go on Change.org and demand "Lucas release the hidden UOT!"), and that a rare restored print screened last month at a film-event showing double feature with (ick) "Rogue One".
I'll believe it, though, when I see it verified by additional sources. Apples and bananas, and all that.
1 hour ago, Mario500 said:I had found a certain disc having what I had believed to had been the original version of the movie in a package with an image similar to this one:
\
Yes, the Limited Edition DVD's of the original trilogy--in response to said demands--included a second DVD with upscaled versions of the original 80's laserdisc sources, before all the changes made to the '97 Special Editions. Including the non-Episode "Star Wars" where Han shot first.
When fans asked "C'mon, quit cheating, couldn't you do a really nice remastered version from the original film sources?", Lucas remained strangely silent, and later went on his big persecuted-director tantrum that "They're MY films, and I have the right to cut them as I see them"--Complaining that the fandom had become too demanding to deal with, and that they, quote, "kept asking for something he couldn't give them anymore".
....THAT was a curious choice of words. 😔
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Prof. Bernard Quatermass was considered to have inspired Jon Pertwee's third Doctor Who (the fancy one who worked with UNIT and the Brigadier), so if Ham's having a little trouble parsing the Quatermass series try thinking of it that way. Nigel Kneale would have made a great Classic Doctor Who writer.
(Kneale also contributed the uncredited screen story to Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)--at fanboy John Carpenter's request--which has the vestigial remains of a good creepy apocalyptic Quatermass story about it.)
And yes, I've had the Blu-ray on my Amazon queue for months--After years of waiting for the OOP DVD to come down to an affordable price. 😞
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972) - 5/10
I am in no way the target audience for this, not being a fan of this particular book, children's stuff in general, nor musicals. I watched it for Sellers (as the March Hare), and Richardson (as the Caterpillar).
Source: Screen Media DVD, a terrible quality pan-n-scan version.
I, OTOH, love the book (and the '72 version's 90% text-faithfulness), and it's second to the Disney animated as the best version yet done, but it's PD, and there are plenty of terrible-quality pan-and-scan versions on streaming and in the $5 bin.
A better looking full-color BFI widescreen restoration was done for British TV, but apart from one gray-market DVD, it still hasn't come over here yet. 😞
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9 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
The foreign markets (especially China) are guaranteed to eat up whatever Disney churns out. Even the mediocre movies that don't do as well as expected in the US, make it up through the foreign market.
Remember back when we didn't even care about the Chinese market outside of Hong Kong, and were too busy trying to court the Japanese market, with "47 Ronin"?
And then..."Warcraft". (Which, TBF, was just being discovered as an online game in China at the time, so they at least remembered it.)
The Columbia Ghostbusters remake not getting a proper China release is a major reason that it bombed. China alone is bound to keep Disney happy for a long time.
Even though the State decried "Zootopia" as "Western propaganda", for its dangerous and unscientific metaphor that lowly working-class rabbits and sheep could outwit their predators...
The complaint was laughed off by all the gushing Chinese Disney fangirls, but does sort of emphasize that just because a Communist country wants to sell things to the West, that still doesn't make them free Capitalists.
(And of course, that's why Pirates, Ice Age and Transformers do so well--The Chinese state-controlled theater market doesn't allow political films or specific depiction of life in Western countries, so whizzing robot gears, CGI-laden fantasy films, and wisecracking cartoon characters make a nice change from the historical epics, squeaky-clean working-couple romances and Monkey King sagas. Although recent news says that even those Franchises are starting to Fatigue with rising ticket prices...)
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5 hours ago, Det Jim McLeod said:
It's definitely a great business move, it's certainly paying off. Artistic? Well, that's up for debate...
Although it's also the same problem for why Pixar and Marvel movies do well as the reliable "default" movies to go see in a summer where the "blockbusters" turn out to be high-profile duds--
Usually the first week in May is the big summer movie! everyone has to rush to, but this year, Marvel Endgame came along in the last week of April, and stole the thunder. This year's Big May Summer consisted of "Ugly Dolls", "Detective Pikachu" and "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" (which didn't turn out to be the audience doorbuster Warner was convinced it was going to be), and for all the people saying "what's the point?" about Aladdin, by that Memorial Day, it looked like, well...an oasis in the desert.
As for Lion King...I've loathed and despised the movie for twenty-five years--for artistic reasons, mind you, not just because they stole Japanese anime red-handed in the loopiest and most Linda-Woolverton wrong way possible, and then Jeffrey Katzenberg filed off the serial numbers by convincing a lot of gullible anime-illiterate dopes that he liked Shakespeare--so I've never quite UNDERSTOOD the hypnotic obsession the words conjure up in its fans. Yes, you were kids in the 90's, and/or it was the first Disney movie your parents showed you on disk, and now you want to show your own trophy-kids (all the parents going to the 3-D version a few years ago acted like they were Mufasa showing their young Simbas the kingdom they would inherit), but seriously...a meerkat in a **** hula skirt singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"?--THIS was "better" than Robin Williams?? 😮 Or was it just "okay" by '94 to finally admit that you liked Disney films, since it was hit and trendy and getting Oscars, and you didn't have to worry that anyone would call the cops?
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Consider me not amazed that foreign countries went to see talking CGI animals. 😐
(After all the desperation of Warner/DC fans to say "But...Batman v. Superman was a hit if you count the German audience!", it's become a joke among movie fans to say "Only flops, fanboys and studio execs care about 'Worldwide box office'".
The China-mania for Transformers and Pirates 5--and Lion King--pretty much knocked the credibility out of that one for good. And let's not even start on the "Ice Age" movies.)57 minutes ago, TopBilled said:They're turning out a lot of remakes this year: DUMBO, ALADDIN and now THE LION KING.
There's a reason for that--Okay, two, if you count Dumbo:
Originally, the whole "point" of their doing remakes for no immediately apparent reason was that these were originally going to be prestige "Artisan" remakes by famous directors--You know, like when Kenneth Branagh did the Cinderella remake? And Tim Burton counted as one of their "famous" directors after the Alice movies. Of course, by the time he actually directed it, "Pete's Dragon" had taken the bloom off the rose, and now they just went with the quick title-fan money that "Beauty & the Beast" had brought in. By that point, there was no need to get Sofia Coppola to direct a "Little Mermaid" remake, when their Mary Poppins Returns director could do the job in half the time.
As for why Aladdin, Lion King and Little Mermaid in direct succession? First, A) it's because "It's all about FRANCHISES!" in 10's movies, and Disney doesn't actually have one. Oh, they have Marvel, and Pixar, and Fox, but those all operate by themselves--They can't make a Mickey Mouse movie, and, thanks to new rules set in after those annoying direct-video sequels, they can't make a franchise "universe" of Cinderella prequels or "Legacy-quels" either. At least (muahahaha)....not animated ones, anyway. 😈
Also, B ) the sad truth (at least as they see it) about the 90's Animated Renaissance is that there were really only four of them: Mermaid, Beauty, Aladdin and Lion King, '89-'94, period. The '95-'97 three-punch of Pocahontas, Hunchback and Hercules traumatized the studio for life, into believing they "never had another hit" after Lion King, until after Chicken Little and Michael Eisner's resignation...Or even, in fact, until "Tangled" came along in '10. (As disgruntled fans of "Bolt", "Meet the Robinsons" and even "Princess & the Frog" well know.) But wait, weren't Mulan, Lilo & Stitch, Tarzan and Emperor's New Groove fairly well-received with the audience?--Shh, not so loud, you'll spoil it.
So, wherever one of the Big Four gets a new market, the other three must follow: Beauty gets a Broadway musical, give Lion King and Aladdin one. (And how many even remember Mermaid getting one?) Beauty gets a big-screen IMAX conversion after "Fantasia 2000", give Lion King and Aladdin--oops, sorry, LK didn't do so well. Lion King gets a hit 3-D conversion, give Beauty and...well, Mermaid did get one, even if it went straight to disk. If one of the movies ever goes to VR, you KNOW which three to expect next.
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G.I. Blues (1960) & Roustabout (1964) - 👍/👍
Thanks to Viacom now part-owning PlutoTV, and giving us an entire 24/7 channel of classic vintage Paramount-Orphan movies, I've found myself surfing streaming late at night and wandering into any one of a number of early-60's color Elvis musicals (and searching them up later on library DVD)--It would be an understatement to say that I didn't consider myself to be the target audience, and maybe it was the late hours, but that's probably why I didn't expect to like them so much. When I was growing up, the King was in his tubby, sequined Las Vegas years munching on peanut-butter and bananas, the words "Elvis fan" conjured up swooning over-madeup trailer-park housewives from Texas, and by the time I was in my pre-teen years, Elvis's death had started a campy industry for kitsch merchandise and equally tubby Vegas imitators. My teen years missed out on why a generation found the young version, whose hips were banned from Ed Sullivan, such an influence.
In his B&W years, Presley was still playing the back-alley "Hoodlum with a heart of gold" in "Jailhouse Rock" and "King Creole" (which I also looked up for the Michael Curtiz pedigree), but after the Army, he'd been seen to have been "tamed" into a more mainstream young-people's-favorite for the studio, like Pat Boone with a beat. GI Blues is often snubbed by fans as "the movie that Killed Elvis" (and all I knew about his years in Germany came from "Bye Bye Birdie") but maybe I'm just square enough to like the new version. The color films were often kidded for reducing the same formula to different locales and backdrops (qv. Val Kilmer in "Top Secret")--the blue-collar car-mechanic or boat captain who just happens to solve any problem by picking up a guitar, and wants to raise the money his stubborn girlfriend needs to realize her dream--and Presley was starting to realize fluffy studio musicals wouldn't make him the smoldering, breakout Marlon Brando he wanted to be, but his earnestness comes across and gives a believable, approachable screen image at playing the well-meaning panhandle goof who doesn't quite have the background to live up to grownup society but knows how to handle things his own way. In "Blues", he fictionalizes his West German army years, as his character's army buddies play Cupid with Juliet Prowse for a bet, and while core Elvis fans might cringe to see the King singing with a puppet show, or having to handle babysitting, he handles the studio humor as well as he handles his music.
I was going to leave it at just the one review, but then Paramount's streaming Orphanage also happened to dig up Roustabout, from his later "Singing Temp" formula: It's a little closer to the cliche'd image of the default story--our hero's motorcycle breaks down in a small town, he gets a job with a carnival, is discovered as a singing barker, and then gets to show off his cycle skills--but this one threw a little something extra into the mix. Most of his movies never put a big star up against him--usually just a new discovery like Prowse or Ann-Margaret--but here we get silver-fox Barbara Stanwyck as the carnival's tough-cookie (of course) struggling owner, who takes on the job of tough mentor to Presley's character, and puts a challenge up against the bankable star. It's rare that we ever watch anybody else in a Presley musical, but having the young would-be actor up against an old pro, you can't take your eyes off of either.
By 1960, the fluff no-commitment variety of original big-studio musicals for Frank Sinatra or Fred Astaire was starting to be considered extinct, and if studios thought that giving the new teen idols studio stories was "appealing to the young people", they actually ended up helping preserve it--Ten years earlier, we'd have seen an old Astaire trying to help the girl, only he wouldn't be driving a race car in the climax to do it. Of course, by '64, four British lads would come along with their comedy-musical, bring in a new clean parent-friendly image of Teen Rebellion and change everything, but here, we should give Paramount's no-longer-teen star some credit for helping keep musical variety in the movies.
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25 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
it was that way for a while. Warner Archive, which still occasionally introduces films on DVD (and does rereleases of discontinued titles), and does release Blu-Ray debuts does indeed focus on what you mentioned.
The others are a bit blurred. Olive mostly focused on Paramount/Republic titles, but ended up handling a few modern day MGM (you know post 1986 MGM and most UA) titles. and Kino Lorber started originally with MGM/UA titles, but branched out to also tackle some from Universal, Paramount, and Touchstone/Hollywood.
Criterion originally owned Janus Films (and theatrical restoration/re-release company Rialto), and mostly did the foreign classics from that all-encompassing catalog, except when they could rescue a famous out-of-copyright public-domain classic like Charade, Carnival of Souls or His Girl Friday. Now, with most of MGM and Paramount's "Orphans" up for grabs, they've been able to get more US titles in, although the MGM/UA are a grab-bag for ANY of the companies. (Darn, Olive had to go and get that PD MGM print of Carroll Ballard's Nutcracker, and used MGM-HD's cropped widescreen cable-TV print, since the film source had been lost...So much for years of nagging Criterion to get it. 😞 )
Twilight Time originally had the Columbia and United Artists Orphans, and still does a mix. (Not all the Columbia Ray Harryhausen's have sold out yet, since they still have a few copies left of The 3 Worlds of Gulliver.) But after TT attracted attention for selling out their entire run of Christine and Fright Night literally within HOURS of release--twice--Columbia sat up, took notice, and released their own versions on disk. Now TT focuses on UA, and often includes "United Artists sales" of studio-specific titles, like the Woody Allen classics.
Touchstone/Hollywood fell into limbo after Disney's 80's-90's Silver Screen Partners company broke up, and Disney's disowned all but their most iconic hits (Roger Rabbit, Pretty Woman, Journey of Natty Gann, etc.) The catalog's also up for grabs, and bargain-basement Mill Creek has gotten most of the more disposable movies even 90's fans have forgotten, like "Disorganized Crime" and "The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag", while Kino Lorber has picked up the more fondly-remembered slack like "Big Business" and "Straight Talk".
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4 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
Wow. If discs are dead, I've got an enormous graveyard in three rooms of my house. I thought Warner Bros was doing a pretty good job of keeping their films "alive."
Warner was the one who WANTED to literally wipe retail disk sale off the face of the earth--They've never exactly been the "Get back on the horse" type, after a bad experience with some big retail rollout that didn't sell. With one exception (it really all started with Microsoft losing HDDVD), everything in the "Disk is dead!" history to try and gossip disk's premature "demise" has had Warner's fingerprints on the bloody knife.
Of all the Ultraviolet digital-locker companies, only ONE was owned by a major studio: Vudu was owned by Walmart--in the hopes you'd try their "Disk 2 Digital" service in the store--and CinemaNow was briefly owned by Best Buy, same reason. But if you tried to redeem one of your free Digital Copy codes from your Blu/DVD combo, you probably had to register a membership with Flixster, the service that Warner had bought out, a few weeks before the industry officially adopted Ultraviolet as the industry digital-movie standard, back in 2011. Over seven years, Warner reduced their in-store retail sales down to just their "Holy Trinity" of Batman, LOTR/Hobbit and Harry Potter, and then usually with some plastic-figure bonus...If you want to get your tinfoil conspiracy-theory hat on, it's very possible they were deliberately trying to schmooze the industry a message "not to bother" with physical disk buyers, who everyone knew were either "Hoarder-collector eccentrics", or "SDCC fanboys who just wanted the Harley Quinn statue". When they tried releasing a no-extras LOTR+Hobbit set with Collectible Bookshelf for--no typo--$799, fans began smelling a big fat conspiracy, or at least a very deliberate smear job.
Of course, happy ending, the Digital bubble popped, Ultraviolet went out of business in early '18, and Warner now directs its free digital codes over to Vudu VOD, the last remaining Ultraviolet survivor who joined Disney's MoviesAnywhere service. (Ultraviolet's post-closing grace period ends this month, if you want to keep your titles before they disappear.) Meanwhile, the Warner Archive, which was meant to be the "exiled" home of MOD Blu disk releases for all those "eccentric hoarders", strengthened its social media cult, became known as the home of great obscure re-released restorations and vintage Hanna-Barbera cartoons (a label the studio now wants to revive), and helped keep Blu disk alive all those years...Yes, in trying to wipe Blu out of existence, you just helped save it--Hurts, don't it, Warner? 😈
3 hours ago, speedracer5 said:I can say that I don't own any Twilight Time releases. Those films are expensive.
They are, but they're limited releases (there's periodic website sales on Going-Fast titles, and you might find a few now if you hurry), and I've found that out the hard way a couple times--I managed to catch First Men in the Moon on its second release, but I can probably give up hope of ever seeing Golden Voyage of Sinbad again. 😞
They don't seem to be doing as many of the Columbia Orphans as they used to, but they've got just about all the United Artists/Orion Orphans, including the 70's-80's Woody Allen canon--My copy of Love and Death is safe, and I managed to get hold of Rollerball, Remo Williams, the '56 Moby Dick and the '73 Tom Sawyer before realizing most of those would already be all over streaming for the same reason.
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2 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
I think he's asking if they are going to show the Criterion touch up of the movies in October. My guess would be yes.
Criterion print restorations are usually permanent archive restorations, so if they're not already Toho's studio restorations, my guess would also be yes--One time, a minor cable channel was showing the Universal Horrors for October, including Island of Lost Souls, and we got the good then-recent Criterion restoration, which one can assume is now in Universal's vault.
2 hours ago, LawrenceA said:I like the cover art on these:
Still, for every Local Hero that they get right,
there are at least three or four The Brood's that they get so....oh, lordy: http://www.cinephiled.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Brood.jpg 😰
(Here, btw, is the icon Hulu's Criterion Channel had before the Blu-ray cover--Which one LOOKS like the iconic David Cronenberg classic?)
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8 hours ago, sewhite2000 said:
That ... didn't answer my question at all. But thanks.
I...don't know what's showing on TCM in October, but now you know what's part of the boxset and what isn't. You're welkies.
8 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:Olive Films, to me, is where it's at in the CLASSIC DVD WORLD.
I take it we're being facetious about the rescued full public-domain titles with the monochrome red and green covers and occasionally TV-cropped prints? (I mean, I'm glad that "A Bucket of Blood" now has a respectable good-looking Blu-ray from a good home, but...)
5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:And as someone else said, no one pays the list price. I have nearly 300 Criterion discs, and none were bought at full price, even new releases.
I've had some Criterion titles waiting in my Amazon queue for years for the price to drop under $25. (Do I still want that copy of "Topsy Turvy"?...Aw, heck, sure I do. And once I get Chaplin's "Circus" and Bergman's "Magic Flute", I'll be up to eight.) I'd finally figured out how to get in on the annual Barnes & Noble sale, order online and pick them up at the local strip-mall without the hefty shipping, but...now our local B&N has eliminated their full-MSRP-priced disk area, so they can devote more space to board games and culty FunkoPop figures.
5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:As for the Olive comparison, I don't see it. Olive does a good job of rescuing films that Paramount would not have released in the format otherwise, or that had fallen into Out Of Print (OOP) status. However, they don't do as good a job with the restorations or with the supplementals. The only companies that rival Criterion for that are Arrow and Shout/Scream Factory, and they mainly focus on genre fare. Criterion does foreign language films like no other.
When the disk community went into "exile" during the terrible seven years ('11-'18) of the Grand Delusion, the indie labels like Shout/Scream and Kino Lorber basically went back to being the Free Blu-ray Underground Resistance that they used to be during the HD-vs-Blu war, keeping their titles and customer community visible on Twitter and social media, and uniting folks to say "Yes! Scanners on Blu-ray, I so totally have to get this!!"
Which became their own customer cults, kept disk companies in touch with their customer base, and only strengthened the fight among disk fans that you buy disks because no matter how strange the movie may be, you buy it because you secretly love it--While big-studio Digital was trying to sell their current franchise-blockbuster hits because, what...it was easier? And you could get them "first"?? (Oh, wait, I remember, you could "take them on the go", that was the big thing.)
Criterion has the loyal cult that raves "Finally! Do the Right Thing on special edition!", and buys out the entire stock of titles every month sight unseen on label reputation alone, but the company tends to TELL their audience what's a classic and what isn't...While Shout/Scream, which has the obscure B-movies and faded 70's/80's cult hits which get either swoons or giggles, has to rally their crowd, pump up the midnight-audience loyalty, and get them working with the company as a sort of treehouse club. Olive, however, doesn't seem like it does a blessed darn thing.
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1 hour ago, TikiSoo said:
If "disk is dead", isn't the the mega-companies biggest threat free streaming?
Well, yes, it was for a while--That "competition" to digital VOD is why movies disappeared off of the paid streaming services like Netflix, that were essentially "free" if you didn't pay for each individual movie. (And why Disk Isn't Dead, but we knew that.)
And then...people, and studios, started getting confused about what exactly "Digital" was, with all the press saying how "Popular!" it was becoming, but it wasn't quite following the script--Digital VOD was still planting its face into the sidewalk, but Amazon and Netflix streaming subscriptions were going up with Stranger Things fans, and by that point, the industry thought the "New digital revolution!" they were trying to create was streaming. That's why Warner and Disney found such new dedication in trying to start their own channels--Wasn't so much "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", as convincing themselves "Er, yeah...THAT'S what we meant!"
QuoteMy philosophy: If you don't give someone what they ask for they will end up "taking" it anyway.
Or, in the case of the Big Four indie labels, if you don't sell it, someone else WILL.
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2 hours ago, sewhite2000 said:
Area all the Godzilla films TCM is showing in October also part of the box set? If not, how many films are not part of the set?
Accdg. to press release, the Showa Era, 1954 - 1975 Collection (ie. the real GZ films, before "Godzilla 1985" and that nutty '91 "Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah") :
https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/2648-godzilla-the-showa-era-films-1954-1975
- Gojira (JP)/Godzilla, King of the Monsters (Raymond Burr)
- Godzilla Raids Again
- King Kong vs. Godzilla
- Mothra vs. Godzilla/Godzilla vs. the Thing
- Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster
- Invasion of the Astro-Monster/Godzilla vs. Monster Zero
- Ebirah, Horror of the Deep/Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
- Son of Godzilla
- Destroy All Monsters
- All Monsters Attack/Godzilla's Revenge (yes, the one where Minilla has the Barney the Dinosaur voice)
- Godzilla vs. Hedorah/Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (the psychedelic one)
- Godzilla vs. Gigan
- Godzilla vs. Megalon
- Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla
- Terror of Mechagodzilla
Worth noting is that "Sea Monster", "Son of" and "Smog Monster" were never in Classic Media's original run, and got not-too-bad restorations from Sony instead, and "Megalon" has been in public-domain hell for years before being pulled back by Toho. (As MST3K fans well know.)
And no, "Mothra", "Rodan" and "King Kong Escapes" don't count.
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35 minutes ago, skimpole said:
As already pointed out on another thread, Criterion's 1000th release is the Godzilla box set:
After having thankfully loosed it from the tyranny of Dreamworks' ownership of Classic Media--If they got everything from those old releases, it's worth the $175.
The CM DVD's not only had the original restored Toho widescreens and the UPA original dubs/cuts, but some great commentaries, including input from some of the original 60's dub actors. (Apparently, that strange clipped dub delivery was intentional, not only to keep up with the onscreen actors, but also to suggest a Japanese "accent" without actually doing one: "Godzilla?...But...that's impossible!")
QuoteUse this thread to comment on Criterion's overall importance for film fans.
...You're not the boss of me! 😡
Seriously, though, think we've come full circle: Remember back in '97-'99, when no studio in the world cared about DVD, and Criterion could dig up its old Voyager laser restorations and commentaries, and had the whole playground to itself to do definitive editions of Armageddon, Time Bandits and This Is Spinal Tap, back when Disney and MGM didn't want to bother?
Now we have four major studios with half their recent-vintage catalogs sunk into near public-domain, because MGM, UA and Orion are bankrupt and Warner, Sony and Paramount are still convinced "Disk is dead", and let their entire vintage-title stock go hang. Which means a treasure-crapload wealth of golden-age 70's, late 60's and 80's titles are up for grabs for the cheap-company taking, and the Blu-disk industry is back in the hands of indie labels like Twilight Time, Shout/Scream Factory, Kino Lorber, and...Criterion. It's a nice change of pace from Ingmar Bergman and Wes Anderson, when cheap access to the Paramount and MGM Orphans can let Criterion do definitive versions of "Shampoo", "Klute", "Princess Bride", "Some Like It Hot", and "1984".
What goes around--and kills off Digital--comes around. 📀✌️
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6 hours ago, hamradio said:
Never seen "Fatherland", hope it showed a decimated nearly extinct mankind at the very end because a pandemic killed 99.9% of mankind because the lack of genetic diversity. Bye-bye master race.
Nnnnnnnn......nope.
It was based on a bestseller, which played up a detective mystery, with Hauer basically replaying William Hurt from "Gorky Park", as a sympathetic SS officer who delves into high-level corruption to uncover some shocking hidden crime the Reich has since covered up, which could damage their new peace talks with the Allies...If you think you know what, and you're already miles ahead of this one, that's why it went to HBO, but it's one of Hauer's better "good" characters.
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On 7/22/2019 at 7:56 AM, Sepiatone said:
Yeah, this is another of those movies I tune into whenever possible whenever its on. And truly, First time I saw the movie I thought they made the whole thing up!
But learning there really was an AAGPBL I was intrigued.
Hardly surprising, as Garry Marshall's entrepreneur character ("Whaddya going to do after the war, give them chocolate bars?") is clearly AAGPBL founder Philip Wrigley, who'd inherited the gum business and the Chicago baseball park from his father.
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57 minutes ago, laffite said:
Has a movie been made of "The Lottery"? It might not fly, even today. The short story was originally published in 1948 and the New Yorker lost a third of their subscribers due to sheer outrage.
An 90's NBC TV-movie, where they basically played up the standard "New folks move to sinister small-town with a secret" plot with Jackson's twist, and the big message of our heroes trying to stop it.
...Well, you did ask.
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53 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
Kuroneko aka The Black Cat (1968) - 8/10
Several years later, many of those samurai have risen to positions of importance, only a pair of ghostly women have begun killing them one by one. Gintoki, unaware of the fates of his wife and mother, is ordered to investigate the killings.
Loosely based on an ancient tragedy about the love triangle between a priest, a princess, and the ghost/demon he's been sent to exorcise, and later develops feelings for.
A well-known story that was later updated/parodied into the better-known "Tenchi Universe" anime series.
It was explained in the interview in the DVD set extras with Charlotte Rae and Hank Garrett the only two surviving cast members. Joe E. Ross's (Toody's) "Ooo-ooh" is what he said when he forgot his lines, much like Curly Howard used "Nuck, nuck, nuck" for the same thing.
Or Jackie Gleason patting his stomach on The Honeymooners.
TBH, I was unaware exactly what Nipsey Russell HAD done in his early years before Match Game. 😮
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
As for Corbucci, I've also seen The Slave (1962, 6/10), Castle of Blood (1964, 7/10), and Super Fuzz (1980, 5/10). So he covered all of the Italian genre film bases.
I'm no fan of spaghetti Westerns, but Super Fuzz has a particularly fond place in the hearts of latchkey kids who grew up with HBO in the early-80's house. Or the theme song does, if nothing else. 🎵😄
(Now streaming on the PD backwaters of Amazon Prime, under its original Italian title of "Super Snooper".)
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7 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
This movie poster reminded me of this... did you see the trailer for the new movie version of the Cats musical?
I've never seen the Cats play, but I thought it was just dancers dressed like cats. I didn't realize that they were actually supposed to be cats? The movie version seemingly is about anthropomorphic cats, some who wear clothes and some who don't?
Yes, they're supposed to be cats in the original (and not just any cats, but the T.S. Eliot cats that Peter Ustinov talked about in "Logan's Run"), since Broadway allows us that abstract suspension of disbelief. Movies....not so much.
plus James Corden and Rebel Wilson in the same movie. Not for me.
The Internet reaction to the trailer seems to be divided down the middle: Half the audience thinks James Corden's cat disturbingly resembles Mike Myers' "Cat in the Hat", while the other half think Rebel Wilson's does. 😱
But learning there really was an AAGPBL I was intrigued.
Hal Prince, a giant of the theater, dies at 91
in General Discussions
Posted
There's a good home-movie archive look at Sondheim & Prince in the Netflix documentary The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, about the musical that nearly broke up the team in '81:
The musical's since been rediscovered in the past couple years, but S&P's idea to cast young college-age actors (including a young first-break kid named Jason Alexander) in adult versions of their college-aged characters basically created Broadway's most expensive college-theater musical.
Back then, Broadway was still affordable for any songwriter to get into, and they could do stuff like that. Nowadays, only self-struck corporations can afford the union salaries, and a musical like "Rocky" or "Little Mermaid" flops for being TOO corporately marketed, and coming off just nutty.