EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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1 hour ago, hamradio said:
Shame remakes are made just to get the young generations interested in it (if possible)
The 1976 film (which is great) isn't good enough.
I always wanted to see the '76 original in Sensurround. 😞
The days when movies stayed in one theater, and you could have a gimmick playing for the whole run. (As it was, only got to see the "Battlestar Galactica" reissue in Sensurround, and the theater didn't know how it worked and pumped up the bass so you could hear it in every scene it was used...And that had to be the last one.)
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10 minutes ago, GGGGerald said:
Why is it that that particular engagement has spawned so many films ? There have been many wars since then. Why do you think this is the one people are still interested in ?
It's like Pearl Harbor, only we won.
(Ie. the decisive battle where we started gaining ground in the Pacific.)
As for "Why another Pearl/Midway movie?", think it's Roland Emmerich's career determination that we should forever keep confusing him with Michael Bay...Okay, quick, which one directed "Armageddon", and which one directed the 90's "Godzilla"?
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3 hours ago, jameselliot said:
'd love to see Lynch do a Batman film, no corporate restraints.
I'd love to see Lynch go the Peter Jackson route, and do a great big-budget epic book on a full studio megabudget:
Maybe if they gave him Frank Herbert's "Du--....oh, wait. 😞-
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6 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
That's just an "effect", not a movie.
That "effect" has been used everywhere, including hundreds of commercials. Would anyone site the movie where a shakey camera was first used "influential" because other movies/commercials use it?
I know The Formula (1980) got a Cinematography Oscar nomination for being one of the first major movies to showcase the Steadicam. (Which had already been used six months earlier in "Xanadu".) I don't think anyone would call it "One of the most influential movies of the 80's", though.
And "Bullet-time" was already being used in half the commercials being made at the time, now that computers able to synch multi-camera perspectives were able to go "around" a still object from round 3-D perspective caught at the same moment, but somebody came up with an idea to use it as part of a movie's dramatic story--Which gave it more impact than the Chevy commercials it was being used for.
(And I know Woody Allen was going on an inexplicable experimental craze for "Handheld cinema-verite'" camerawork in Husbands and Wives (1992) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but I guess that's not in the same category as Shaky-Jake Bourne. Pretty sure it was Steven Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan (1998) though, that gave us "Staggering speed-ambiguous missing-frame action sequences", in his attempt to capture the look of newsreel film.)
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5 hours ago, Hibi said:
LOL. I enjoyed that Who's the Daddy triangle. The humorous plots of the show I did like.
Well, then you'll enjoy this musical interlude:
13 hours ago, EricJ said:Basically, the whole S2 after Laura Palmer, I'm not sure if it was the new directors (wannabe director Diane Keaton, fresh off her artsy documentary, took a "quirky" turn at one episode)
And one of said quirky touches in Keaton's episode was that we see Harry's sheriff office has a picture on the wall of...Harry Truman! Yuk-yuk, nudge-nudge, wink-wink?
Although I'll give S2 points for trying to raise the season-finale stakes with Agent Cooper in Love, as he's smitten by the new diner waitress, in his own odd way--He starts saying, "It's like the joke about the penguin--" before being interrupted, and Truman stares in shock: "Coop...You were telling a joke! 😮 "
("Two penguins sitting on an iceberg--One of them says 'You look like you're wearing a tuxedo.' The other one says...'Maybe I AM.'") -
6 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
because those storylines are seen by many fans as when the show really jumped the shark.
And this irritatingly smug guy.
And who could forget Mr. Tojimura?
Basically, the whole S2 after Laura Palmer, I'm not sure if it was the new directors (wannabe director Diane Keaton, fresh off her artsy documentary, took a "quirky" turn at one episode), or Lynch himself going through a bored transitional phase, but it was if he was trying to prove something by turning these wacky small-town folks into bad 60's-sitcom tropes, to degrees that even the Coen Bros. would never dare sink.
And the whole point of Lynch's "Influential, mind-bending, rule-breaking" Oscar, is that we'll never know what. Just that whatever it was got "On the Air" cancelled after six episodes.
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5 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
You mean you really didn't like the Superwoman Nadine and Mike sexcapades and the James neo-noir murder plotlines?
I assume you mean the "Weekend at Leo's" one...Do I look unhappy with them??
(And then, there were those terrible years of the Civil War...)
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34 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
Season 3 came so many year later in 2017, after an absence of 26 years. Most of the episodes received TV-MA ratings (R equivalents) for language and violence, and some episodes had nudity. Some called it the equivalent of an 18 hour film, and some groups actually called it a film instead of a TV series. It had a massive cast (although some like Piper Laurie and Joan Chen were only shown in flashback clips from the 90s)
Lynch had been promising to tie up the second-season killed-cliffhanger finale since the early 90's, first with a movie, but then "Fire Walk With Me" ended up having other ideas, and that killed the momentum.
Eventually, he got S3 (which, thankfully, did follow up on S2's cliffhanger) made for Showtime cable, since, ironically, Peaks' idea of a "soap-opera serial season arc", that was supposed to parody Peyton Place, was now a more....common genre on HBO/Showtime in the 10's.
(That's who "invented" it, and don't ever forget it.)
Oh, I was counting that as season one. To me, the first "season" was a miniseries.
I, OTOH, would prefer to think that Season 2 never existed. Sadly, it did, but I can dream. 😓
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17 hours ago, David Guercio said:
Hey. Great idea. He was so funny. Wasn’t he?
...Wait, you're not even SURE??
And I don't recall Tim's work, but Taxi star Jeff Conaway was one of the T-Birds in "Grease", and had a small role in "Pete's Dragon".
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4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
My dislike for One, Two, Three had nothing to do with "un-PC humor". I don't recall what exactly was supposed to be "un-PC" about any of it, unless being funny is "PC", in which case, yeah it was "un-PC" in spades. I thought it was just manic loudness and obnoxious desperation, which is basically the same complaint I have with It's a Mad...World.
One, Two, Three was basically falling in line with wartime lampoons like the Stooges' "You Nazty Spy", the WB "Russian Rhapsody" cartoon, or "To Be or Not to Be"--Namely, that the best weapon against a wartime enemy is a good old Yankee lowbrow pie in the face, because dictators don't know how to be gleefully immature, and free Americans do. As it happened, it was 1960, the war on the time was Cold, and our Hitler to lampoon was Nikita Kruschev...And Wilder gave Russia everything it didn't have coming to it. 😀 (One famous episode of South Park asked "Where was our Yankee-lowbrow lampoon of Osama Bin Laden, during the Iraq War?" Watch the Saddam Hussein jokes in "Hot Shots: Part Deux", and the question will be answered.)
IAM4W, OTOH, just thought that destruction would be funny if you put enough celebrities in it, or conversely, that a star-studded Cinerama epic could also do comedy if you destroyed enough BIG things in it. Which is like saying a pound of spinach would be tastier if you just put more ketchup on it.
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5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
I can't speak for kingrat, but personally I tend not to share the same comedy tastes with most people. Some Like It Hot is considered an all-time comedy great. To me it's like a bad sitcom. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is reportedly thought to be hilarious by a majority of viewers, yet I thought it was excruciatingly dumb and obnoxious. The same goes for The Three Stooges, Red Skelton, most Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, etc.
Some Like It Hot is good if you can imagine showing it to today's audience and imagining the reaction you'd get--Like in the similarly all-out One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder knew that un-PC humor is funnier if you consciously dive in and wallow in it, and you'll suffer for it if you only timidly dip a toe. "Kiss Me Stupid", OTOH, shows that if you float somewhere in the middle, all you'll get is Stupid.
I will concur that IaM4W is excruciatingly bad (during the never-ending highway chases, I kept flashing back on Roger Ebert's famous comment about the Cannonball Run movies), but would rebut the others with enforced film-school showings of "You Nazty Spy", The Court Jester, The Nutty Professor (imagine that Jerry isn't "imitating Dean Martin", but had a grudge against Frank Sinatra...), and anything with Red in live concert. I doubt they'll change your mind--as I'm guessing yours is the type that doesn't change easily--but at least it'll cut down on using them interchangeably in the same sentence. 😀
2 hours ago, speedracer5 said:I thought the Munsters was funny, though yes I agree it was sort of dumb. I didn't like The Addams Family. I just didn't find that show funny. The funniest thing about the Munsters was how they thought of themselves as your average everyday family.
I grew up on the Munsters, but just now--this week--finished getting through a newly-purchased boxset of The Addams Family, and what was I thinking all those years?
The key to finding the Addamses funny is the question we always wondered as kids: WAS John Astin deliberately trying to play Gomez as Groucho Marx? (Ie., making wisecracks with his cigar, reacting to things with comically formal exuberance, and then leaping on Morticia Margaret-Dumont-style every time she spoke French?) If you go into the show on the premise of thinking "Yes", it's one of the most ingeniously funny sitcoms of the 60's--Producer Nat Perrin worked with the Marxes in his early days, writing gags for "Duck Soup" and "The Big Store", and he captures the same rebellious note of comic anarchy, it's actually more in the spirit of watching "a Marx Brothers TV series" than You Bet Your Life was with Groucho.
Lisa "Wednesday" Loring, on the commentary, said she used to handle the Addams/Munsters debate at fan conventions by saying not only that the Addams was a Marx comedy, but the Munsters was a Three Stooges comedy: In their comedies, the Stooges thought they were responsible go-getting entrepreneurs, would set out to get jobs as plumbers or housepainters, and because they were knuckleheads, make a mess of it...The Marxes, OTOH, would invade some fortress of respectability, like the opera or cruise ships, bring their own brand of logic, and respectable society would be powerless to stop them. On their shows, the Munsters tried to be average everyday members of suburbia, and didn't know why everyone ran away at the sight of them--But on the Addams' show, someone would try to take advantage of the Addams' fortune or influence, and once inside the mansion, soon wished he hadn't, and would run out the door with our heroes happily unscathed, and unaware than anything had ever posed a threat to them.
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4 hours ago, Det Jim McLeod said:
What are your favorite classic star sitcom guest roles?
The "Honeymooners" episode where Ralph Kramden tried to start a tenant protest against the building's "stingy" landlord--Good luck:
(Also, not a sitcom, but Danny Kaye's variety show once had a huge, opulent opening production number, where we see a royal Egyptian procession of slaves, dancers, guards and litter-bearers, and as the bearers bring the royal carriage into a closeup, they pull back the curtains and we see Cleopatra kissing Caesar, played by...Jack Benny: "Now, wouldn't this have been a perfect opening for Danny Kaye?" The procession moves on, as we see Danny is the poor litter-bearer struggling on the back end.)
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10 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
Too bad for you.....😥
(Well, I didn't give up, I just had two weeks on the DVD boxset from the library, and I don't binge--I may try again with the second half, but PLEASE tell me Edward Cooper-Hands comes to his senses in the next few episodes after the insurance company? Give us back our twitchy FBI agent, let him throw rocks at another bottle, something!!)
5 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:Also, I think Truman was just aware that a woman had been killed and when he turns over the body he looks genuinely surprised that Laura had been murdered. I would have probably ruled him out. Truman is my favorite character (alongside Cooper) and is very upstanding. It is such a shame that he and Josie didn't get a good ending in Season 2 like how Ed and Norma got one in season 3. That's one of my gripes with season 2.
Still, if Pete called him up distraught and said simply "She's dead, Harry...", wouldn't anyone else in town think Pete was talking about his "dear" wife Catherine? I wasn't sure whether Truman looked "surprised" to find out it was Laura, and if he wasn't, that would make him the only one in town (except maybe for Ben) who WAS expecting Laura to come to a bad end...Which would mean he knew something the rest of the town didn't.
Oh, well--The whole theory revolved around how willing Truman appears to be to convince Cooper that Leo & Jacques did it, and when Leo has to testify at the inquest, the camera lingers on an unexpectedly satisfied look on Truman's face...
5 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:he is also screenwriter for the ABSOLUTE CLASSIC ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES. A rare case of a throwaway TV sequel being turned into something not only superior to the first, but a deserving cult film in its own right.
It wandered off the subject a bit, and didn't live up to the first movie--The first Addams captured the series in its own right (Raul Julia isn't John Astin, but uniquely Gomez), but "Values", with the whole Wednesday-at-camp subplot, seemed to want to turn the family into "Free-spirited avengers against PC tyranny". Which is as bad as some of the folks (ahembroadwaytimburtonbryansinger) who think the Family was a "Free-spirited gay-pride allegory"....Nnnnnno.
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1 hour ago, slaytonf said:
Did you get them all?
If you can't, there's always https://www.filmsite.org/100yearsatmovies.html
(Maybe it's that I used to watch it late at night, but I still melt at the twinkly Citizen Kane music. )
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1 hour ago, speedracer5 said:
Another great year for film is 1984: Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Footloose, Romancing the Stone, Amadeus, This is Spinal Tap, Sixteen Candles, The NeverEnding Story, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Flamingo Kid, and my personal favorite: The Karate Kid. The Karate Kid came out on the exact same day that I was born!
I mentioned that, but it seemed to get lost in the discussion. (Well, not "Karate Kid", and definitely not Temple of Doom, but the rest of it.)
And throw The Natural, Splash, The Terminator, Revenge of the Nerds, The Last Starfighter, Police Academy, The Gods Must Be Crazy and Top Secret on the pile, while you're at it:
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8 hours ago, Gershwin fan said:
Also like you, I am a big fan of Twin Peaks. I'm one of the few to defend the much maligned second season (I genuinely enjoy the strong Nadine storyline and Andy and Dick fighting to be the father to the receptionist's child). Season 3 is also very good but it is much more "Lynchian" in tone than the first two seasons which I liked but it isn't for everyone.
The first season is classic "Dream" Lynch, not just in the general slow sense of eeriness, but also his Eraserhead-callback in the famous "Agent Cooper's midget" scene. Probably the last good bit of artsy Surreal Lynch.
Unfortunately, all the proto binge-TV fandom to guess Who Killed Laura Palmer took over the image of the show*, and Lynch kept protesting that it was art, "not Murder She Wrote!" And after the murder was wrapped up in Season 2, there was nowhere to go, new directors stepped in with just as unspontaneously "quirky" touches, and Lynch's own boredom with the series started to drift off into inexplicably goofy tributes to "wacky" humor. Which he got out of his system in his next short-lived series, "On the Air", and that's enough said about that.
I'll give Season 3 credit for at least following on the unfinished cliffhanger of S2, and showing us how Agent Cooper came back--Unfortunately, they take one of the great iconic characters of late-80's TV, bring him back with a kind of empty amnesia, let him wander for six or seven episodes in a mindless daze in a different identity, and, "Weekend at Bernie's"-like, accidentally convince people he's a genius. Yes, it's the return of S2's Goofy Lynch, now trying to do his own version of "Edward Scissorhands". 😓
That's as far as I got in S3, so I don't know what happened to his dual role as Cooper's evil doppelgänger, now on a midwest crime spree. (That's the Highway/Roadhouse Lynch, taking over again.)
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* - Back before the S1 season-finale, our group had a betting pool for whodunit--I had an almost perfect...perfect...scenario for how Sherriff Truman could have done it, but then S2 happened. Hint: When Pete first calls in the body at the very beginning, why does Harry seem to know who he's talking about?
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
It's 3 hours long. Lynch had just discovered digital cameras, so he made this independently, with no oversight from corporate types that may have tried to "dilute his vision". I described it at the time as the most David Lynch David Lynch movie. I've never spoken to anyone who liked it, except for me, and I completely understand why everyone else hates it.
Although that description changes:
From Eraserhead -> Dune, "A David Lynch movie" was one that tried to capture (literal) dreamlike imagery, while Wild At Heart onwards (including the relatively sentimental and coherent "The Straight Story") was his "biker" phase, where he became infatuated with desert highways, diners and roadhouse bars. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks S1-2 was his "transitional" phase in between, where he started out with dreams of dancing midgets, and ended with moody bikers, a roadhouse bar in Idaho, and the never-explained Screaming Meemies.
I'm guessing Mulholland Drive was his third "Hollywood" phase, where he deals with actresses and old studios.
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Although I continue to campaign for retiring the use of the phrase "It's a popcorn movie!" after "Battlefield: Earth" strategically stank the phrase up nineteen years ago.
It didn't fool us then, and anybody who still naively uses it today is only fooling themselves.
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19 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction (1964) - 6/10
British SF serial comprised of 2 half-hour episodes. After escaping the Daleks in the previous serial, The Doctor (William Hartnell), his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford), and the two Earth school teachers Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill), are on their way back to our planet and our time when the Doctor's ship, the TARDIS, encounters a malfunction that leaves everyone dazed and confused about their whereabouts. They struggle to figure out what happened before things can devolve into further danger.
The first season, BBC didn't really have a handle on who the Hartnell Doctor was--The original first on-paper concept had the Doctor as a wily duplicitous Dr. Smith-type, who was looking for an earlier age to retire in, Ian and Barbara were our "heroes" who had to stop him from messing up history, and Susan was the resident sympathetic good alien-science expert.
Later redrafts made the Doctor a "good" character, but at the beginning from "An Unearthly Child" and "The Daleks", there's still the dynamic of Ian not trusting the Doctor, and the Doc refusing to answer straight questions about his background--Until the end of the first season, where the two have their big "Well, guess I trust you after all..." moment, and the new show goes ahead as planned.
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3 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
"Good taste is the enemy of creativity" (Pablo Picasso) and I'm sure that worrying about offending someone is likewise.
And someday, "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane" will be recognized for its hidden genius. 😁
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6 hours ago, RoyCronin said:
Geena Davis has established the "Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media", which works to eliminate gender bias and stereotypes in television and film. She was also appointed a special envoy for women and girls in information and communication technologies by the United Nations".
Possibly apocryphal, but back in the 90's, she reportedly tried to get the American rights to "Sailor Moon", as a "role-model empowerment" vehicle for her daughter, with Davis herself playing demonic villainess Queen Beryl:
Of course, that was back when few people knew that the show was Japanese, and rights may have tripped up the project, but ah, Geena as Beryl...The roads not taken. 😪
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On 4/29/2019 at 8:16 AM, Sepiatone said:
Sorry kid.....
Haven't seen an episode of SESAME STREET since MY kids outgrew it by 1980!
Even before that, I think.
I gave up when Jon Stone left the show in the late-80's, Children's Television Workshop folded (or at least circled its wagons into "Sesame Workshop", to start spinoff exports in Kosovo and Palestine), and the whole Street concept started jumping whole oceans of sharks--
I bailed out before we got Ruth Buzzi's dance school around the corner, and that was BEFORE the show split into its new "anthology" format with Grover, Elmo, Abby and...oh, just stay alive until cancellation, Carrol Spinney! It's only got a year or two left on HBO anyway, and I couldn't watch the show without Big Bird! Losing all those Richard Hunt characters in the early 90's was traumatic enough!(Now, y'see, Dave? If you're going to manchild-reminisce in lieu of grownup discussion, at least give it some historical context, so that the adults can bother following it too. Attributed quotes, punctuation and sentence breaks punch up the reading as well.) 😛
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10 hours ago, JeanneCrain said:
Woodstock August 15-18 1969 Yasgur’s Farm New York
32. Sha Na Na👣
Yes, BION, 50's music was just starting to enjoy a renaissance with the Woodstock crowd, near the end of the Psychedelic era, a good four years before "American Graffiti".
It's that fifteen-to-twenty year cultural gap, not to mention that Jerry Lee Lewis still rocks harder than Jimi Hendrix. 😎
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17 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
There was already a thread about all the honorees just a day or two ago! That I guess has already descended into oblivion. That's probably what Lawrence is pointing out in the post above mine.
I posted on that thread to especially express my joy at Lynch's honor, so at the risk of repeating myself, I will do so again.
That's basically because most of us (just me?) didn't readily know what "the Governors Awards" were out of context--"Honorary awards", OTOH, ohh, okay.
Still, it's nice to see Wes Studi honored for his work in Street Fighter (1994) and Mystery Men (1999):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5I94bT23cQ
QuoteAs I said on the other thread, certainly one of the most visionary American directors of the past 40 years.
And then he basically crawled into a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon halfway through "Blue Velvet", and set all of his films in roadhouse bars after that, like the end-credits to every episode of the Twin Peaks reboot...Y'know, I could actually SEE Lynch doing a remake of the Patrick Swayze movie, it might work.
(CaveGirl is gone, right, I can say that without her throwing another bunny-boiling fit? 😆 )
I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
Despite, ahem, another poster's pre-occupation with the movie because we just weren't discussing all the Oscars he heard it was going to get... 😆 (Which traumatic association is one reason I've been dragging my heels about renting the disk, even though it looks good.)
There's another good made-for-BBC biopic, Stan (2006) available on free Amazon Prime, which follows the same/similar history of how they got together, with the framing device of Laurel reminiscing with a bedridden Hardy after his stroke.
https://www.amazon.com/Stan-BBC-Jim-Norton/dp/B00YRMXI7Y/
First thought the movie was going to be a direct Americanized-remake of that, but looks like they went for the "farewell tour" plot instead.
He's a good straight actor, as we saw in "Chicago", but HOW do we keep Reilly away from Will Ferrell without slapping a restraining order? (And after "Holmes & Watson", they might just do it, too.)