EricJ

Lyrae, in the plot point you should be expecting by now, falls into the role of playing Jeannie to Tryon's Major Nelson, but...Dany Saval is no Barbara Eden. No matter how badly the movie needs her to be. It's funny once, with a five-ring circus of five actresses (including an early uncredited Sally Field?) all competitively hamming up 60's-sitcom stereotypes of "Beatnik types" for the aforementioned bad definition--Unfortunately, each instance goes on forever, and they do the gag three times, with three lineups. IN A ROW. Chimps aside, this was why "Disney comedy" became such a dirty word by the end of the 60's.

It's a Warner film (one of their "core" promoted 70's titles for obvious reasons), and considered one of the great rockumentaries of the 70's, so that's a no brainer. If it was good enough for Charlton Heston, it's good enough for TCM:

Yep--That's the first thing to check, once that Prime banner disappears from the corner. (I was only curious about the, wink-wink, "Final Chapter" IV, but I knew they'd be back. Just like that copy of "Fiddler on the Roof" that keeps "disappearing" and reappearing with a different thumbnail before I can get around to finishing it.)

Having lived through a lot of bad minor motion pictures for most of summer '79--and an even worse Christmas, with Star Trek 1 and The Black Hole--I read that and thought "1979? The whole 70's, and you picked THAT one??" And since there wasn't any BoxOfficeMojo listing to run down the year's hits, I had to look up the Oscar roster on IMDb: Apocalypse Now, Kramer vs. Kramer, Alien, China Syndrome, Being There, The Black Stallion, All That Jazz...Okay. I concede a point. It's still no 1981, though.

Written by someone who thought Fight Club was one of the Greatest. Films. Ever, and spends most of the book defining its '99 place in the annals of film history, next to American Beauty. (And he slips in some "ironic" defenses of Phantom Menace.) Yyyyyeah--Moving on. 😓 It's strange to realize, we now have an entire generation of Millennials--growing misty-eyed at the very mention of "Shawshank Redemption" and "Lion King"--who now genuinely look at the 90's the way our generation looked at the 80's. Of which 1982 could easily rank as one of the Greatest Movie Years Ever, narrowly beating out 1981 and even 1984: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1982

It does go a long way in explaining Roy Orbison's The Fastest Guitar Alive (1967), though.

It would be nice to have the Farrah Flip (even if it has to be "Sunburn" or "Somebody Killed Her Husband"), but otherwise, the 70's were defined when Carrie Fisher pulled off her hiding-hoodie: And then, three years later, white girls tried wearing cornrows:

...Yes, but would it be cool?

Looking through my parents' scrapbooks as a kid, I'd found a ticket for this--It was one of the three "Theatrofilms" (along with "The TAMI Show"), but I was under the impression it was shown as more of a Fathom-style video event than a theatrical film? (I'd heard the Burton-Cronyn version on an LP, and yes, Hume Cronyn is one of the great defining Poloniuses...Even over Ian Holm in the Mel Gibson version.)

And Fox, back before Fox tried to beef up its own movie channel-- Backstory had some good mini-doc episodes on Cleopatra, The Seven Year Itch, and The Omen, back when those were regularly rotating on old-school AMC, and think the Cleopatra one ended up on the disk?

Warner's terror of getting back on the horse after one or two badly sold/mismarketed vintage boxsets crippled what was once a thriving collector restoration-set market, and banished it all to "Mad King Ludwig's dungeon" when the studio went on its doomed seven-year quest to sell us Flixster downloads singlehandedly. While the individual titles from Warner's Fred Astaire, Busby Berkeley, Val Lewton and B-Movie boxes eventually found homes in the Archive, the collector bonus material didn't, and third-party labels like Shout Factory have taken up the hard work of taking some of the Lewton titles to Blu. So, yeah: If you see a vintage Fox or Warner collector-boxset being sold on clearance, BUY IT. Preserving the more film-tolerant 00's is what permanent disk was made for.

It's....okay. It was a lot FUNNIER back in the 80's, when the idea that a president once had funny movies (or reality-TV shows) was rollicking political satire in itself, and every political cartoon showed Pres. Ronnie with a chimp--But young B-actor Reagan had a personable charm, he's game enough, and you could do worse for B-comedy. For the first four years, everywhere you went on local stations, it was either Bonzo, or "The Killers", until the FCC had to step in and classify it as "presidential" viewing requiring equal time, and that shut up most of the 80's snickering. If it's worth watching for anything, it's for Walter Slezak filling in a role clearly written for S.Z. Sakall.

Strange that Robin Williams gets his face on the cultural-movie cover of 1987, with so many other great films, most of them TopBilled's honorable-mentions. I keep defending Good Morning Vietnam, though, not just because Williams kept snarkily dissing the movie because of his "Aladdin" tiff with Disney (I'm still not sure why he turned down a proposed 1968-set "Good Morning, Chicago" sequel), but it's easily his second-funniest movie ever, just behind Aladdin and ahead of Popeye, if that's what we have to choose from--Like most late-80's/early-90's $1.98 Disney bulk McMovies (of which "Three Men & and a Baby" was one of the better ones), it's not a strong story, but it's a great historical-comic experiment in "What if Robin Williams had been cutting loose in 1967"? Eh...Everyone knows the "great" movie years of the 80's were '82 (ET, Blade Runner) and '84 (Amadeus, Ghostbusters). '81 had its Great moments, but they were mostly about getting the 80's started. (And are there STILL third-generation Japanese-anime fanboys passing down the father-to-son tradition of assaulting poor innocent newbies with "Oh man, you have to see Grave of the Fireflies, it's so cool and serious!"? We thought we'd finally eradicated them, through education, outreach, and availability to more resources.)

Think it was also the Addams Family mansion, in the ultra-cheap 70's-reunion "Halloween with" TV special. There was also one rich LA estate that seemingly EVERY single rich nasty "Columbo" suspect lived in (think they kept renting it out to new tenants after the last one was arrested 😃 ) but can't recall whether that was Stately Wayne Manor. Or whether the Cheap Addams Mansion was that one.

Also, for some reason, even before the Disney deal, we've had the various "Studio Orphans" (left adrift into semi-PD status by studio's 10's apathy in releasing their older 70's-90's disk catalogs) surface on the Usual Streaming Suspects: We've had the MGM/UA/Orion Orphans, we've got the Columbia and Paramount Orphans at the moment, and now even unwanted bits of Warner are starting to wander the streams, but....no Fox or Universal. By strange coincidence, these also happen to be the two studios that tried to release their own studio-exclusive movie channels, leaving aside Disney. So, yeah, not sure what's going to happen with the Fox titles, but at least those aren't wandering about at the moment.

In his vaudeville days, he was being sold as just a generic Variety Star, and it doesn't quite fit--Without his signature self-deprecating humor that he later built for radio, he wasn't very likable. Even in the early 40's, Charley's Aunt (1941) and The Horn Blows at Midnight (1942) seem like they could have been for any generic variety star, and George Washington Slept Here (1942) and Broadway Melody of 1936 were crafted more for an actor who could play crabby and comically-unsympathetic.

It's definitely not a "rock 'n roll movie", it's a 50's Tom Ewell/Jayne Mansfield comedy that tried to get some of the Music The Young People Were Into, and lucked out big time: Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Platters, Gene Vincent, and not to mention Julie London singing "Cry Me a River". It's not "The TAMI Show", but it'll do for a start.

Back in '87-'88, we tied it in with Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun", and thought they were starting a "genre" of disjointed/episodic wartime-childhood films. Until I watched Radio Days again, factored it in with Woody's 80's Fellini/Bergman-cribbing phase, and by the time we got the big Fellini-esque New Year's Eve farewell party-fantasy in the final shot ("Beware, evildoers..."), I realized: "(head thump) D'ohh!...'AMARCORD'!! 😮 No wonder Woody wanted to do it!" (Right down to the Crazy Family/Relatives and Peeping on the Sexy Teacher, although Josh Mostel never climbs a tree and shouts for a woman.)

The critics were in love with the idea of the WWII-boyhood "neato war" as seen through our young character's eyes (when most wartime-childhood stories are about Eviction-Summer in the countryside) but unfortunately, that's all it is: All reminiscences, no PLOT. And precious less point, by the end of the movie. It's a collection of nice colorfully evocative moments from the trailer and critic-blurbs, but I kept waiting for something to tie it together into a, y'know, movie.

I prefer Gummy Vites--Tastes just like candy! ...But, it's getting late, and I gotta hit the sack for my greatrest.

And of course, Cab Calloway came back to do "Jumpin' Jive" again on Sesame Street, in the 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAMCCvvFd2E

And--to show how much their names escaped history--who were the comics who did the "Conversation" routine? ("Say, aren't you still going with--?" "Nah, she started seeing--" "Not him, isn't he the one who--?") Apparently, that was a well-known comedy routine in the day, sort of the Black "Who's On First?" Mantan Moreland even redid the routine with another comic in one of Republic's Charlie Chan B-movies.

So, we're pretty much defining Lasse by one film, and not those dozens and dozens of sellouts he did every time Miramax wanted to sneak in another feel-good Oscar-bait? I didn't know Lasse Holstrom even had a "directorial style" anymore.

There...Now the hyperdefensive pro-stoner tantrums are getting back to normal again! Wondered what'd happened to it. (For comparison: Suppose I wanted to defend "Avengers: Endgame" against haters by digging up a Frederick Wertham PTA film from 1954 warning parents about the dangers of comic books causing juvenile delinquency...Yeah. That wouldn't look any less desperate either.)

Sorry, I just remember the late-70's days when GC was one of the only one or two big 'plex chains in the country, wanted to cash in the new "Midnight movie!" craze that was just starting to get public attention with Eraserhead, Dawn of the Dead, Richard Pryor: Live and the Rocky Horror cult in the downtown city theaters, and tried sponsoring their own "culty" midnight movies at the shopping-mall plexes. Until we started noticing their "midnight movie fests!" were the exact same four cheapo-PD movies over and over again: Night of the Living Dead, A Boy & His Dog, Reefer Madness, and a "Stooge festival" which was likely to contain Malice at the Palace and Disorder in the Court. (There was also briefly a midnight Little Rascals festival, "uncensored, with all the racism intact!", but that didn't last as long as the Uncensored Stooges.) Midnight movies are an exclusive right of local independent theaters: I remember never being able to go to one for all my high school years (no train home from the big city), until I found a first apartment literally around the corner from the local college-arthouse before it closed, and could walk home from October screenings of "Haxan" and "Horror Express" (also PD). And it proved, like your parents always said, if you need drugs to have a good time with your friends, that says a lot about your parties.