EricJ

On the NY subway, you may meet aliens, and stranger people: Or Sylvester Stallone, back when he was a gang member: (Even Bill Cosby enjoyed the rich diversity of the subways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN2dqTF-3dI )

Still traumatized from that gay one with Jamie Foxx as the villain, huh? Yeah, I feel your pain. Don't worry, it's okay--Sony doesn't have them anymore. It says Sony, but it's still Marvel, which makes it a "real" film. They're going in declaring those movies never happened, either. Just like the Harry Potter and Twilight movies faded into yesterday's decade-film trends (although I'm having fun rewatching my new Potter Blu set), Marvel movies basically caught the same dynamic as the comic books by serving the same FUNCTION as the print comic books-- They're serials designed to get you to buy the next one, and even though you know the Big Battle is still three issues away, you're reading the stories in between because the subplots have you hooked. After the big battle, though, there's not much point in keeping them, and even if you do, they're usually locked away in collections and never reread. And that's leaving aside the "cooldown" story focusing on one character and his personal issues, right after the big climactic battle story. I'm sitting here, staring at the damage one book-illiterate Broadway musical has done to an entire female generation. (Er, "Wicked", that is, not the "Mean Girls" musical.)

I, OTOH, could watch Oliver a dozen times over (and, thanks to PlutoTV and the Columbia Orphans, now can) before the prospect of sitting through Tom Jones again. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music or Oliver, if I had to pick one movie to historically represent the glory days of the Great 60's Overproduced Roadshow Musical for Oscar posterity...Well, okay, Sound of Music would make it a tough call.

I dimly remember some dubbed European fairytale movies shown at our local public-domain Saturday matinees, including a Rumpelstiltskin--Any more info, so I can exorcise those childhood memories into something more solid? In fact, now that this thread has gotten me digging deeper, I'm not sure whether my first was Fantasia, or the original run of Doctor Doolittle (at least, by the time it'd come to the small-town engagements), and I don't think that one had reissues--I remember seeing a trailer for a Raquel Welch film around that same time, and I'm trying to place that one, to make sure.

Being hetero, and thus having no pop-kitsch grudge or unnatural preoccupation with the '39 Oz: 😛 It helps when you understand that MGM was basically turning the '39 movie into a star vehicle--The Cowardly Lion in the book doesn't talk in Bert Lahr cadences, either. Glinda in the book was just a grandmotherly bit of deus ex machina, and, unlike most people (including the producers of Broadway musicals) believe, wasn't a twittering Burke-brain. When Glinda in the movie says "Oh well, I'm a little muddled" after finding out that Dorothy wasn't a new witch, that was Burke's star-catchphrase from the Topper movies. (Frank Morgan, OTOH, managed to do his star-vehicle shticks and stay completely in book character/s. Even the two Emerald City characters that were from the Baum text.)

Crash, Broadway Melody, Gladiator, The Artist....Oliver?? 😲 Remember, never let hyperbole lead you into the temptation of the E-word. Just by strange coincidence, only the night before, I was watching vintage reruns of Red Skelton on Amazon, from an episode the week before the '68 Oscars, with plenty of corny vintage topical opening-monologue jokes on the subject: "Great movie, The Lion in Winter--Followed by that other movie about income tax, 'The Lyin' in April'....And Romeo & Juliet, I remember before we were married, my girl and I, when we went to the movies, we'd be just like Romeo & Juliet: I'd be in the orchestra, and she'd be in the balcony." (They don't age well, but still funny.)

And Marconi's famous quote, to a female detractor: "I, madam, I made radio! So I dared--Am I mad? Am I??"

It is bad enough that I have an eternal grudge against the Oscars' new neurotic Golden-Globes fixation singlehandedly killing the Best Picture front-runner momentum for Pixar's Inside Out (2015) dead in its tracks. But that it should also take Michael Giacchino's score with it? Somebody in the HfPA DIES. ☠️😡 (But who are we to interfere with Nip's busy discussion with himself about Goldsmith and Paramount shtootzes?...See, the rest of us got confused from the header, and thought the thread would be about MORE than one movie. 😄 )

Sean Connery couldn't wait to get out of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", but you can see him already packing his bags and barricading the door in Finding Forrester (2000)

TBF, the book was huge at the time, one of Gore Vidal's biggest (remember the 1968 Gore Vidal vs. Wm. F Buckley political debates, where Buckley's answer to every question was "I'm supposed to take that from the author of 'Myra Breckinridge'??"?), and a lot of studio money was thrown at filming it. The book was a satire of "Old Hollywood" (as we got a lot of in the late 60's/early 70's, which also explains the presence of Mae West and old L&H stock clips), and studios expected it to be "controversial", they just didn't expect Sarne to destroy it into a moronic drive-in softcore. (And, of course, once everyone found out 80-yo. Mae was still alive and still filthy, that got Sextette (1978) filmed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as6Iv5R1G0M )

More specifically, Gettysburg and G&G were Ted Turner's little backyard-toys at playing with movies--Confederate Civil War epics, of COURSE--so if anybody would be showing them, you'd think it would be TCM. (And then, of course, Ted went out and bought Rob Reiner's Castle Rock Films company to make it for him, and bought New Line to distribute it for him...Good thing Ted didn't try running for president.)

Think it was the last 60's revival of Fantasia, since I remember when the old Geneva, NY Smith Opera House used to be a movie theater... Or 2001 (and sleeping through it, as I slept through all Kubrick until after college), at the other big local ex-palace movie theater before it burned down.

I assumed, since he'd be named after the old-radio farmer who lived on (Fred) Allen's Alley. (Sorry, just drives me up the wall when "edgy" stars name themselves after cute pop-culture references--Just like director Spike Jonze naming himself after cowbell-ringing 40's bandleaders, or late rapper Nipsey Hussle trying to invoke 70's Match Game stars.)

How exactly do you pronounce that? ("Howdy, bub.") It ISN'T bad, actually: I remember IJW'ing this one when it popped up on the backwaters of Amazon Prime a while back, and having an actual James Bond-vet directer makes it a better 007-knockoff than some of the cheap intentional British and Italian 007 knockoffs we had at the time. The 80-Days star cameo'ing was pretty much of a UN charity benefit (the stars were "hired" for a dollar each), but have to admit, Yul Brynner is cool in anything, and Marcello Mastroianni has a better five minutes here than he had in entire Fellini films. 😁

After years in limbo, Bugsy's now joined the Paramount Orphans, and has been playing just about everywhere on streaming (Criterion, Amazon, PlutoTV). The disk may not be far behind. I've thought of watching that recent Paul Williams documentary, to find out why he dropped out of music so early and we didn't get more Williams-songs musicals after the 70's--his style is so recognizable, you expect Kermit the Frog to join in with "So You Wanna Be a Boxer" or "Give It a Try"--but I'm afraid it might be too depressing.

If only Peter Sellers had ended with Being There instead of The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu... Or Vincent Price had ended with Edward Scissorhands instead of The Thief & the Cobbler... 😥 (BTW: Just post the list now, and let the discussion fall where it may.) And darn, from the title, thought it was going to be about penultimate films in a series, and why nobody believed me when I complained that "Avengers: Infinity War" was basically just the Marvel remake of "Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1".

And expecting the strategic use of the "United in our persecution" complex any time anyone questions their ethical or social double-standards as anything even 1% less than noble or perfect, or "Society's outdated expectations", every time we point out that self-indulgence, combativeness or cynical negativity aren't generally considered admirable traits in our half of the human condition. It's only the guys who've been through the divorces that have the rage and turn it into personal "She took everything!" tantrums; the rest of us just sit on the sidelines and take observational notes. (Not "Going our own way", it's just the only road on our GPS.) Off the subject, what about movie moments of robots going their own way? "You'll be malfunctioning in a day, you nearsighted scrap pile."

That's okay, you do the dialogue, I'll do the screaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RRwSI5I9EU (Even that "....George! 😥 " bit at the end.) Hearing that iconic "twannng!" become a Motown-guitar "...plunk!"? I think that says it all.

And then followed with that National Film Board of Canada Animation fest from a while back.

Hang in there through the 70's, "Tron"'s a-coming...Just the heartbreak-hill of "Return From Witch Mountain" and "Herbie Goes Bananas" to get through, and the "farewell" of "Midnight Madness", and then the 70's get easier. (Even "The Cat From Outer Space" has its pleasant moments, "Treasure of Matecumbe" is an overlooked gem, and old-school Robert Stevenson could make "Island at the Top of the World" and "Bedknobs & Broomsticks" better-remembered than they deserved to be and "Herbie Rides Again" and "One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing" downright adorable. 😁 If you see Vincent McEveety's name on a comedy, however, which you'll see a lot in the 60's-70's, Be Very Afraid.) Not to mention, Rita Moreno got a Tony for the stage role. (And gee, thought "A look back at the pre-Stonewall era of NY bathhouses" would be treated more historically during the cultural appreciation of Pride Month... 😛 )

Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) - 👎 My eye for late-70's thrillers saw this on the rare-Blu-ray shelf at the library, so my urge to go completist picked this up: Usually, when I find a rare movie, I like to check its listing out first with Amazon Prime (a good place to find rare vintage trailers) or Vudu (which lists the RottenTomatoes critic-blurbs), but for some reason--possibly its German-American ownership--it was nowhere to be found on any of the streaming services. In fact, trying to look up whether any TCM'er had already reviewed it, I found one post from '05 asking "Why does nobody ever show it??" Okay, now I HAD to watch this on Blu. 😎 It's a fairly standard late-70's all-star cast Pentagon thriller--If it says Richard Widmark on the cast, you know he's going to play a top general, and even more ridiculously than in "The Swarm". Here, Burt Lancaster--playing the mad-dove equivalent of his mad-hawk general from "Seven Days in May"--hijacks a nuclear missile silo, demanding the President (Charles Durning, uncannily resembling the present-day Bill Clinton) as hostage, and threatens to launch if the government doesn't release the secret memo of why we went to Vietnam. (Apparently, the original book was written back before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Burt could have waited and saved the trouble.) The whole "Ironic patriotism" is laid on a little too thickly, as if the German filmmakers were trying a little too hard to make an American Picture, but the real problem is director Robert Aldrich: The ex-Baby Jane director didn't quite survive the 70's ("The Longest Yard", "The Choirboys"), the Aldrich touch was never elegant or subtle, and the opening "heist" scenes of hijacking the silo are spoiled by turning Lancaster's partners-in-crime into foul-mouthed cliche' thugs. Also, for almost half the film, Aldrich tries to borrow Brian dePalma's trick of split-screening parallel plots and phone conversations, but doesn't seem to understand how dePalma used them for "suspense"--Here, he just lets things play out like we're watching the movie on dual security cameras, or a film-school editing assignment of "How would you intercut these two scenes to make it more exiting?"

In fact, Walt's last public film appearance (apart from the Epcot film) was a filmed introduction to the premiere, telling studio insiders to keep an eye on the career of that Kurt Russell kid, he's going places...

Even if he'll only be remembered for "Nitty's in the car", it's enough. One of THE memorable villains of Big 80's movies. 👍

(So...guess there's no hope on the Fantasy Island question, then? Or how Exorcist II, Sgt. Pepper, and the original Jem & the Holograms ended up in the sale?) Okay, so, like most LGBT "icons", it's just wishful thinking, then--"Gee, I WISH she was just like us, and then we'd have a really character in mainstream pop-culture!"--like Spongebob and Queen Elsa? Especially if it emphasizes obvious cliche'd mainstream stereotypes, which is the only way they believe straights can "identify" them in public in the first place? 😛 (Oh, and I remember explaining the whole Peppermint Patty & Marcie thing in the "Peanuts" strip a while back...I did do that, right?)

For some reason, I thought Serling's "twist" solution was from the original Airport. Thanks for the title ID, wondered where that did come from.