EricJ

Not even as Mr. Pricklepants (the actor!)?

And it's only now, with the UA Pink Panther movies blanketing the streaming services like crabgrass, that we can stop and appreciate that "Trail of the PP" and "Curse of the PP" weren't "two greedy cash-in movies" after all, but was, in fact, Blake Edwards' Infinity/Endgame-style two-part serialized finale wrap-up to Peter Sellers' Clouseau, with the plot continuing over both movies. Helps explain the Roger Moore gag even clearer if you watch them back to back...If you can.

Whether to choose Connery in The Great Train Robbery, Time Bandits, The Untouchables, or The Name of the Rose... Eh, Rose was too weird--I'll go with Robbery. I'll second Timothy Dalton in The Rocketeer (and Flash Gordon), but my Pierce Brosnan pick goes to The Tailor of Panama--Brosnan's 007-fatigue led him to play nasty characters ever since. I so wanted to like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, if only Connery hadn't been in pre-retirement get-off-my-lawn mode for the entire picture. 😥 And I'll see the poster who mentioned Roger Moore in "Cannonball Run II", and raise him Roger Moore talking in a suspiciously familiar French accent at the end of Curse of the Pink Panther. And if I mention Daniel Craig in The Golden Compass, half the readers here will remember for the first time in 12 years that such a movie existed.

Expecting OUaTiH to be about the Mansons is like expecting Inglorious Basterds to be about Brad Pitt wielding a spiked bat. Tarantino likes to change his ideas while filming, and never likes to stay on one urge too long. (Although he technically first announced Basterds would be about the theater girl, and then played up "No, wait!" in the later press releases.) I can't help wondering whether he'll try and tie the stuntman into Kurt Russell's from "Grindhouse: Death Proof", although 1969 is too early for Pitt to be doubling Dan Tanna from "Vega$".

I have the same weakness, and seek them out of occasional curiosity but....how are you holding up so far? The "Stranded in the desert" metaphor was never more appropriate than for this movie. 😫

It's the video customers who made it a hit (because it sure wasn't the theater audience), and if I harp on it, it's because The Myth symbolizes WHY a VHS-raised generation thinks that Chunk & Co. was the "definitive 80's movie": Judging from the mania over "Stranger Things", "It: Chapter One", and JJ Abrams' "Super 8"--which all descended into a mania for marketing 80's iconography--when the Generation Who Wasn't There symbolizes Big-80's Movies as literally its own genre, they mean one thing: Misfit junior-high kids on bikes, who can't tell their parents about aliens/monsters. When you hear somebody in their twenties talk about "Great 80's movies", you can bet a jelly donut they're not talking about The Killing Fields or Terms of Endearment. I've theorized the reasons why, but when you look at something like the Goldbergs sitcom, the Transformers "Bumblebee" movie, or the 90's jokes in "Captain Marvel" (and I can already guess half the jokes from next summer's 1984-set Wonder Woman sequel), there's a conflicted love-hate relationship the generation has for the 80's: They WANT to snicker-snag on their parents' decade for wearing neon colors, listening to Rick Astley, believing that Russians were scary and a 50's actor was really president, wearing headbands just like Ralph Macchio, and watching (ack!) TV sitcoms--But get them talking about 80's songs or 80's movies, and there's...just that little bit of jealousy there that sitting through "Back to the Future" for the first time would have been a lot more fun than sitting through "Justice League" or "Godzilla: King of the Monsters", and that Huey Lewis was a lot more fun to drive to than Beyonce'. Which, in turn, only manifests itself in even MORE sour-grapes jokes about "ALF", followed by more Bruce Springsteen songs, and so on, and so on...

Never mind Ferris Bueller, if you told me back in my Class of '83 days that John Hughes and Bob Clark would be considered film geniuses, and "The Breakfast Club" would be considered the Voice of Its Generation, I would be...........skeptical. (We were grateful, however, that "A Christmas Story" was more watchable than the Porky's movies or "Turk 182".) Oh, and kids? We were there: We HATED "The Goonies". It flopped in theaters with a murderous passion. And "Labyrinth" almost put Jim Henson and George Lucas out of business, Ridley Scott was laughed off the screen for "Legend", and I can think of six reasons "The Lion King" became a hit that had absolutely nothing to do with the movie itself.

Darn, I was JUST about to review that (having found it on Amazon Prime)-- And yes, looked like the push for non-Broccoli 007 knockoffs led one producer to think "What OTHER British queen-and-country action heroes have had classic adventure-novel series?". As Bond-wannabes go, it's got the better British feel that all the "foreigners" didn't, but it's no "The Poppy Is Also a Flower". 😁

And if it were the former, a hundred cheap Italian 007-knockoffs in the 60's would have been smash hits. Heck, even George Lazenby would have been a hit, and he WAS the specific character. It's okay to end a series with the storytelling convention of "And the new generation takes over", but if producers' dreams of continuing the series from there were actually true, we would have a fifth Indiana Jones movie with Shia LaBeouf, a new Pink Panther series with Ted Wass, and an entirely new Star Wars trilogy with Daisy Ridley.

At the same time as Warner was trying to dig up old memos to try and get Batman jumpstarted again, and found Tim Burton's old memo of giving Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman her own spinoff. In case you're ever wondering how Halle Berry ended up playing Catwoman (2004)...Warner sort of got the two memos confused. 😀 (It's called "Elektra syndrome", when studios don't really want to do a sequel to a troubled action film, and instead fall back on "Eh, fans really just wanted to see the SEXY BABE!--And the girls will think she's EMPOWERED!", and they go off and make another kickass-babe movie for Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansson...Yes, I'm looking at you, "Marvel Black Widow spinoff that Paramount wanted to fall back on when they tried to explain why Iron Man 2 hadn't been a hit".)

I stopped liking them as a kid (like the joke about Hot Pockets, "A different temperature in every bite!"), and preferred frozen burritos. But a few years ago, somebody who knew I liked to bake gave me 7" "single-serving" pie tins--And now, in addition to single-serving apple and blueberry, I use my own recipe and some ready-made pie-crusts to make homemade chicken and beef pot pies when I have some spare chicken breast or stew beef left over (or turkey, after Thanksgiving), and put those in the freezer. There's no frozen indignity you can't improve upon by yourself. 😀

She was in Foxy Brown, everyone knows that. 😎 (And not Cleopatra Schwartz, that was someone else.)

Only now it's starting to sound like Peter Sellers or Woody Allen taking over for "old" David Niven. We've been there, thanks. 😓 And wasn't "You killed the girl from the last movie!" "Well, I'm getting revenge against you for killing the killer of the girl in that movie!" pretty much the same still-Bourne material that ultimately sank the Craig movies? If it wasn't for Skyfall-mania, Quantum of Solace would have thrown the last shovelful on the franchise like Timothy Dalton and "Licence to Kill" ended the "old-school" Broccoli years. They tried to have Moneypenny as the partner in "Spectre", but her character said at the end she wasn't cut out for the agent life, and was happy to be....Bond's flirtatious ultra-enabled secretary back at HQ. With "Spectre" trying to tie all the Broccoli-Bond canon into the post-Skyfall Bond, that was a good touch, and "modern women's roles" without being obnoxious. 👍 (The snotty young Q still needs work, but at least it's less painful than John Cleese.)

And putting the colonel's mother on the nose of the bomber was somehow different from putting Mickey Mouse, Betty Grable or Popeye?

If it's true, it means they finally DID dig up that old memo about spinning off a side movie for Halle Berry's Jynx from Die Another Day (2002). (Which was one of the things that killed off the Pierce Brosnan run in the first place, and almost the entire series, before Daniel Craig came along.) And also, that it makes us feel less guilty about those "Did Craig break the series?" and "Is it about time to just wrap up the whole darn thing?" discussions we had after "Spectre". 😥 Pers., I always thought if 007 needed its own Endgame-finale, you couldn't have written a more perfectly realized one than "Skyfall" (🎵 "This is the end..."), but the two twists in "Spectre" tied full-circle loose ends up nicely. There's every reason to believe it ISN'T--like "Loopy British tabloid-clickbait rumors", Variety somehow missing out on the "scoop", and "Hey, guys, it's gonna be that cool black girl from Captain Marvel!"--but if it is, we've had the "What if Bond was a woman/black?" argument for twenty years, and like they say, you can't throw out the dirty diapers until you give the baby his bottle. Me, I'm going with "Loopy British tabloid rumors" until we hear better--Dear gods, they do get loopy.

Not sure if it still works (think it's since been shut down), but when I watched the ST:S1 Remastered set back when it was one of the first things you COULD watch on Blu-ray, studios were still trying to get a handle on this new Internet-connected "BD-Live" thingy that they were selling the players with before completely figuring out: Disney thought it was going to be a MySpace page with home shopping, Universal used it to rotate new trailers into old disks, and Warner had a good idea to have live commentary chats, and keep them as permanently downloadable options...But Paramount had the neat idea of downloadable "Trivia games" for ST:TOS episodes, that would freeze the episode at various points for an onscreen fan trivia question ("What does the Klingon in the bar call Captain Kirk?"), to give the viewer time to guess before continuing. It was the bad ideas that sank BD-Live, but we lost the good ideas with it. 😥

You can tell when Shyamalan is WRI-ting! a unique concept idea he had, when the idea starts taking over any sense of realistic plotting or real-world plausibility-- When I pointed out that Giamatti's average-guy character in the script is named "Cleveland Heep" (yes), a friend joked "Well, it's nice to see that Uriah managed to marry and have descendants after all..." 😁 (Unfortunately, it was this movie--plus the tie-in children's-book-within-the-book, AND the genius-director autobiography he published alongside it--that WROTE! Shyamalan out of his contract with Disney.)

(Uh, we get the IDEA, Larry--You've found a new classic rerun to watch, and have started the Teaser-Trailer campaign, with review to follow. Just be warned, one more Trek ****-slap .GIF, bereft of any remote understandable context whatsoever, and it'll start to give us dangerous ideas... 😈 )

Probably because the films listed are all the Classic Sci-Fi that Warner and MGM OWN. Everything else that springs to mind from the 50's to the 70's was Fox, Amer. Int'l and Universal. (Well, okay, and Rollerball, think that was a United Artists, and Forbidden Planet, but think the listed block was focusing on the great 70's Golden Era.)

I was suckered by the DVD-cover copy into thinking I was going to watch a historical biopic about FW Murnau and Max Shreck, and How Murnau Boldly Invented German Silent Fantasy-Expressionism, and was able to appreciate John Malkovich's and Willem Dafoe's performances appropriately. As a film, it may not be a classic, but at least I wasn't holding it to other genre-fanboy demands. --- And yes, I liked Mission: Impossible S1, even without Peter Graves, and with "Please dispose of this recording in the proper manner". (Had to watch them on DVD/Amazon, since I never got to stay up as a kid, and only remembered the one later-season episode where they tried to convince the bank robber he'd been cryo'ed into the future.) Steven Hill as "Mr. Briggs" came off as more of a cold CIA company-man than Graves' squarejaw-hero, and the genius plots manage to be more diabolically complex than most of what we got in the revolving-door-cast later seasons. And anyone who only knows the Tom Cruise movies--or even the sequels, apart from the first DePalma one--I prescribe an emergency IV of TV episodes....The movie series went chronic, fast.

I didn't even see the resemblance until the side-by-side picture-- Yes, they were both Jones, but as they came from the same background, that wasn't a surprise, so I'd just thought of them as Jones the Dune and Jones the Captain America.

Like all great "mad" Welsh actors, Jones had a memorable AC-ting! style that turned every one of his mainstream 80's supporting parts into some Shakesperean delivery that King Arthur would call "What an eccentric performance..." But that's what raised "Krull", "Dune" and "Young Sherlock Holmes" up a quality notch or two, and added creepy surreal atmosphere to the opening of "The Elephant Man".

I tried to look back and see just when Torn had his big 80's-90's mainstream comeback, and had completely forgotten him as a very effective, if low-rent, evil-overlord fantasy villain in the under-appreciated The Beastmaster (1982). He was already typecast as the jolly-company-line bureaucrat by the time he played Albert Brooks' unhelpful heavenly defense-attorney in Defending Your Life (1991), and when "The Larry Sanders Show" came along a year later, it stuck. (It's nice to see this is the only obit so far that hasn't mentioned Zeus from Disney's "Hercules", and when 90's Disney casts you to type, consider it official.)

And stubbornness to upgrade to new browsers/systems, as everyone else is seeing the pictures and YT clips just fine. 😓 ---- As for subways, a New York Magazine article took on the subject, including most of those iconic titles already mentioned: https://www.vulture.com/2016/02/best-subway-movie-moments-of-all-time.html (Forgot about the '76 King Kong, and was wondering who'd be The Guy to post "Spiderman 2".) Also, not sure if the deleted scene was included on the disk, but I remember the TV broadcast of "Love at First Bite" including a lost scene where George Hamilton's Dracula--not quite up to speed on 1979 NYC trends and slang--is riding the last subway alone at night (of course), and the only other passenger in the car is a mousy-looking NY single girl hoping to experiment with the new 70's-sexual-revolution trend of no-commitment one-night taxicab affairs: Woman: "Hi...I'm a totally liberated woman." Dracula: "Oh, you are a...'flapper'--A 'boop-boop-be-doo girl'?" The girl tries to push herself onto Hamilton, but from that start, you have some idea how well that goes down. 😄

Also, saying audiences prefer Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli to CGI (whether Chinese or American) is like saying that audiences preferred Disney's "Pinocchio" to Universal's "Secret Life of Pets 2". (Unless we're talking about "Howl's Moving Castle", in which case nobody preferred that to anything, unless it was the first Ghibli they ever saw in the US.) Wouldn't it be nice if we someday got new cartoons that WEREN'T passive-aggressively hipster-inspired by classic Fleischer cartoons from the 30's?