EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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38 minutes ago, TikiSoo said:
I certainly lit spliff in the mid 70's for midnight showings of 3 Stooges Marathons in my college years. Seems kind of like a rite of passage, with the movie changing for different generations, Rocky Horror, for example.
If you have to light up to get a fun showing out of Rocky Horror, you're just not in on the joke--As the guy said in "Fame", this (audience) IS the show, and if you don't like it, go see it in Jersey.
(One could easily say that about the Stooges as well. But if you were seeing midnight Stooge-fests in the 70's, I'm guessing it was the same Public Domain Five, with four of them Shemp shorts...Would I be right in guessing a big General Cinemas theater?)
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22 hours ago, JeanneCrain said:
I’ve watched “The Trial” (1962) sober and stoned…and stoned was much more enjoyable…laughing right along with Josef’s final scene. 💋
In other words, everything looks different and more entertaining when you're brain-damaged...Well, it would certainly be hard to argue that point.
But, let's break down the basic classic Hyper-Defensive arguments here:
1) We've got the never-fail Stoner's Whataboutism ("What about all that drinking Ray Milland did in Lost Weekend, that was legal!"):
QuoteMovies and marijuana are merely devices for our entertainment, perhaps like sporting events and gambling one has a different perception taking in a movie stoned or watching a game holding wager upon its outcome...Americans have long been accommodated with wagering when attending horse races…why not football games, tennis-matches, etc.? (The wave of the future?)
2) "It's POPULAR, isn't it? It's been around since the 20's!"
QuoteAmericans have a long history of being stoned when attending concerts, just like those performing them
3) "It'll be okay, once everybody starts turning it into a billion-dollar business!"
Quoteimagine marijuana sales at theatres, enhanced viewer participation along with concession sales? (The wave of the future?)
4) And the classic High-school-virgin Abstract-Philosophical "What is 'right' and what is 'wrong'?...Isn't it all relative?" attempt to move the fault off of themselves.
QuoteHow does sobriety ever find meaning in abstract art or the cinematography of an Orson Welles?
The “it’s always a happy ending mandate” of Hollywood has been out of touch with the sobriety of reality …therefore, what kind of perception should Hollywood’s audience possess?
5)...(wait, what, no kitschy 1936 piano-playing clip from Reefer Madness to straw-man all "unreasonable" arguments against it? C'mon, you're breaking tradition, here!
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Let's face brass-facts: You were giggling like an aging high-schooler, at a movie you chose not to understand, for reasons that an underachieving high-schooler wouldn't. That's not often a smart idea in our complex world, where most of us have graduated by now and been through college...Except, of course, for the ones who weren't.
There's enough NATURAL stupidity and passive-uncuriosity causing problems in the world already, do we need to create more of it through artificial means? Do smart people need to be made stupid because they think too much?
16 hours ago, Ray Faiola said:has anyone ever seen a film (probably an early one) in which someone refers to a "muggle" or "muggles"? An early name for a joint.
(Reportedly, that's why JK Rowling's
fivetwo Fantastic Beasts movies decided to refer to American non-wizards as "NoMags", rather than the more familiar British title. Although they claimed the M-word was also a racial slur in some parts of the States.)-
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7 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:
MERCURY RISING (1998) *Score: 3/10*
Starring: Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Miko Hughes.
Willis stars as an FBI agent who starts investigating a double murder, and ends up on the run with the victims' young autistic son.
I remember when we cringed a year later seeing the trailers to "The Sixth Sense", thinking "Bruce Willis and a creepy-silent kid, again?"
One of the reasons for Sixth's box office smash in '99 was our collective astonishment that it wasn't the Mercury Rising II we were afraid it was going to be going in.
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6 hours ago, Hibi said:
Za Za Zotz!! i didnt realize William Castle did this one. Been many years since I've seen it.
To paraphrase the MST3K-ism, as much as William Castle was the 50's, he just wasn't the 60's:
Castle seemed to retire to comedies in the 60's after his horror-film days, with the Tom Poston The Old Dark House (1963) and the Sid Caesar The Spirit Is Willing (1967), which both played themselves to cutesy "macabre" 60's-sitcom gags. But Zotz still had one of Castle's more amusing cameos:
And yes, it is nice to see Margaret Dumont was still around doing comedy in her 80's (yes, she did "get" the Marx Bros. jokes, and you can see her crack up numerous times in "Animal Crackers").
After being curious for years, I finally tracked down Castle's last film, Shanks (1974), with Marcel Marceau, on Amazon Video a few weeks ago, and discovered that, yes, even that was another one of his near-retirement comedies. And not even a decent theater gimmick.
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5 hours ago, jakeem said:
No so fast. "Stir Crazy" -- which starred Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor -- was a major hit. The "buddy" film grossed more than $100 million at the domestic box-office in 1980, making it the first picture by a black director to earn that much money. It went on to become the year's third-highest grossing film -- behind "The Empire Strikes Back" and "9 to 5."
Critically however...it's pretty awful. Apart from the "We bad, we bad" scene--and no, I don't know why that in particular became such a cultural phenomenon in 1980, unless it was mainstream audiences who were taking notice of Richard Pryor for the first time since "Silver Streak"--it's punishingly unfunny, and the main "prison rodeo" plot (the original title of the movie) seems to go on forever.
However, to its credit, if it hadn't been for Stir's box-office, Columbia would never have made Pryor an A-list star and given '82's "Live on the Sunset Strip" its major-release due.
Poitier eventually went back to acting in the 90's, with "Hunt to Kill" and "Sneakers", followed by more TV-movies, but those expecting a new voice in black directors after the 70's Bill Cosby comedies were in for a disappointment.
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4 hours ago, jakeem said:
In the 1970s, Poitier was ready to direct. His first film behind the camera was "Buck and the Preacher" (1972), which co-starred his longtime friends Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee. The Western was downright subversive as the black protagonists teamed with Native Americans to foil bloodthirsty white bigots.
Unfortunately, Poitier's later directorial efforts after the 70's--"Stir Crazy" (1980), "Hanky Panky" (1982), "Fast Forward" (1985) and "Ghost Dad" (1990)--never quite lived up to the promise of Poitier as a groundbreaking social image-shattering director.
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2 hours ago, JeanneCrain said:
Recent airing of “The Trial” (1962) was a hoot – oblivious to the plot/story, hypnotized by the cinematography and couldn’t stop laughing at Josef K and all the surrounding lunacy.
Now, if you try watching it sober, you can appreciate Orson Welles's dreamlike David Lynch imitation, trying to recreate a nighttime REM style in the idea that Kafka's allegories could only take place "in a dream". And then the B/W opening with the agent bursting into Tony Perkins' bedroom, and never quite answering his questions, can freak you out.
Marijuana encourages passivity, and the idea of giggling at something without having to think too hard about it...And thinking about it is EXACTLY what classic film challenges you to do. Come to think about it, that's exactly what adulthood asks you to do. Without it, there's the passive-bystander aspect of "Huhuh, sucks to be Josef K, dood..."--the same way a child lets the dumb grownups take care of all the "boring stuff" that he doesn't have to--and the general approach to interaction with our complex world that that encourages.
Under the right altered circumstances, the Weather Channel could be a giggling hoot, but that's no fault or credit to the show itself.
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31 minutes ago, Sepiatone said:
One black guy I worked with was disgusted that many other black folks never did realize(in his opinion, and I do somewhat agree) that the "Living Color" show title and character "HOMEY THE CLOWN" were "send-ups" of what HE called, "Self perpetuated negative stereotypes." And claiming the term "homey" DID, to him too, sound more like the name you'd give a CIRCUS CLOWN and NOT what you'd seriously address your brother man with.
At its best, In Living Color, Homey included (Homey basically being a "clown" of ghetto-thug self-loathing), was a biting satire on black self-images--One sketch had a prisoner behind bars spouting four and five-syllable verbal-mast*rbations of Lewis Farrakhan prison-converted black-Muslim paranoia ("The delineation of the perpetuation of the subjugation of the black man...") and we see it's a PSA: "Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste."
The show could have been in the spirit of the old observation about Jewish humor--that a minority can make jokes at its own expense, even if the outside can't for fear of "racism"--but in the end, it's Booty humor that gets the louder and "easier" laughs. Sort of why SNL was funnier before Kenan Thompson became the lead performer, or why the Daily Show was funnier with Jon Stewart than Trevor Noah.
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8 hours ago, hamradio said:
Will miss him. RIP Got his movie with Don Knotts.
An early 80's generation can't recall a single line from either of the Apple Dumpling Gang movies, but can discuss the habits of Wookelars at length. Don't say Conway never found immortality in feature films.
10 hours ago, David Guercio said:Oh. I forgot to ask. Will TCM be paying tribute to him too?
(Er, yes, we did wonder what took you so long...) 😓
8 hours ago, speedracer5 said:Someone has already posted the hilarious video of his elephant story. Vicki Lawrence's comment at the end is what completely pushes this scene over the top. RIP Tim Conway.
And I already jumped the gun and posted his German-interrogator sketch with Lyle Waggoner over on the TCM Memorials thread...Didn't realize there'd be a GD thread. (The whole sketch ran about ten minutes, but it's the three minutes of Tim with his Hitler hand-puppet that became TV history.)
In all the YouTube clips of Tim Conway's Emmy speeches, I'm trying to find the one where he shows how much support he had for the award by reading a letter from his hometown to the Emmy audience: "Best of luck on your award, Tim, from your friends at Gary's Miniature Golf....Hey! Fun for the whole family! Bring the kids to Gary's Miniature Golf! Family night every Tuesday, kids under 12 admitted half price! Coming soon, look for our Mark Twain hole, with a rotating paddlewheel, and music of the old South!" And so on, for three minutes.
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6 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I also agree with Nora's opinion that many of the SJW people online are like sheep. They've *heard* that Song of the South glorifies slavery... they've *heard* that [insert film title] features [insert controversial subject], but very few people actually take the time and make the effort to see these things for themselves. They want to appear "woke" and act as activists... online.
It was pretty much that way in the early 60's, when the 50's-TV "Amos & Andy" had to be expunged from broadcast, because nobody who was too young to remember the radio show knew why the characters were talking that way, and just assumed they were stereotypically "forced to" by evil white producers. Anyone who still uses the term today as a symbol for all imagined "outdated black depictions" has likely never seen the show in the last fifty years either.
And let's not even get STARTED on the facepalming social-soapbox attempt to use the TV Jack Benny's Rochester calling Mr. Benny "Boss" as a coverall symbol of every attempt to ever cast a black actor in the role of a subordinate domestic. Anyone accusing Jack Benny of a "racist" depiction of Eddie Anderson has never seen or heard very much of Jack Benny's material, or of Benny's experiences during his WWII tours.
14 minutes ago, Sepiatone said:I'd say that most of the negative stereotypes many white bigots still believe actually exist among African-Americans are those I've seen oddly perpetuated by Black film makers and television shows. MARTIN LAWRENCE'S show was particularly guilty of this.
I remember one comedy talk show during the 90's having a round-table discussion with the producers and stars of UPN Network (remember that?
), by the time the network had become almost entirely dopey urban-black sitcoms, asking "Why 'Homeboys from Outer Space'?...Is this forwarding the cause of diverse television??"
In their defense, the comics and producers naturally leapt to old-fashioned Whatabout-ism, responding "Well, what about those Jim Carrey comedies?...You're saying white people don't make dopey comedy too?" (Ignoring the rather obvious fact of on whose show Jim Carrey had first risen to stardom as Token Dorky White Comic.)
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17 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) - 4/10
I thought it was painfully tedious, but I'm not the audience for this.
I am. It happens to be my childhood favorite movie of all time, thank you. 😡
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Quote
“Harvey never saw what I was going to do until he was actually doing the sketch,” he said. “As a matter of fact in the dentist sketch you can actually see Harvey wet his pants from laughing.”
And not just Harvey, either--
Some say the funniest moment on the Carol Burnett Show was Carol coming out in her Gone with the Wind "curtain" dress...But they're wrong. The funniest moment on the Carol Burnett Show was German interrogator Conway ruthlessly (and improvisationally) breaking up Lyle Waggoner:
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23 hours ago, Sepiatone said:
First of all, I'd like to know what the **** was that BIRTH OF A NATION "glorified". (something tells me Otto got carried away.)
BIRTH OF A NATION's biggest "crime" is the over the top presentation of things NOT based on ANY facts, and being presented as some kind of historical representation.
Er, technically, Birth's biggest crime is that it's not an overstatement to say that it was literally Griffith's recruitment film for the K-K-K. The local Kl*n at the time even treated it as such, and sponsored a big opening expecting membership to soar. (When Woodrow Wilson made his famous endorsement of it, he wasn't exactly disagreeing, something we historically recognize about Wilson today.)
When we get our hero and his White Riders charging to the rescue to "Ride of the Valkyries" to save our virtuous white heroine from nasty race-mixed congressmen, I've seen Trump ads that were more subtle.
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On 5/12/2019 at 12:49 AM, Princess of Tap said:
But all truly great singers are also great actors and actresses.
With the exception of Neil Diamond,
Elton John,
Michael Jackson,
and Billy Joel in that Disney movie:
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12 hours ago, Princess of Tap said:
I would have to give this movie credit for taking the stupid Crown from Kevin Spacey's " Beyond the Sea ". That was another film about a great singer who's music was destroyed by an actor pretending to be a great singer.
Unlike Spacey's Bobby Darin, however, I doubt Zelwegger is about to go on a one-woman live Judy stage tour, so that's still in favor of Spacey keeping the crown.
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16 hours ago, lhowe said:
I would like someone to explain this odd issue people in the 20's and 30's had with their necks. A comeback phrase might be "Oh go wash your own neck!" I've asked all sorts of people what was the deal with people's necks in the 30's? At this point I know no one is going to give me an answer, so I just save it for those special moments when whoever I'm with is pondering something else unanswerable. No one knows!
Don't give up hope!
"Neck" was basically the clean radio/movie term you could substitute for other humorous colloquial body parts you couldn't mention....Eg. "A horse's neck", "If this goes wrong, it's gonna be my neck!" -
On 5/8/2019 at 2:55 PM, DVDPhreak said:
If we protest, it should be about something tangible and consequential -- such as the apparent impossibility of hoping Disney would release "Song of the South" on home video. Yes, it has outdated and insensitive views, but we still need to see it for film history. We can assume Disney has done next to no restoration for the film. So this film is actually in some REAL danger of being erased from the face of the Earth, and film history. Now, this is something that we could lodge a LEGITIMATE protest against -- not some inconsequential naming practice in some local college.
At this point, the only thing STOPPING SotS on DVD--apart from Disney still in Warner "Digital-vs-Physical" mode from the 10's, vainly trying to pretend "disks are dying" to get their DRM service started--is Bob Iger. Who still thinks Remus was a "slave", and now dismisses the "fanboys" nagging him about it at every stockholder meeting. (The last time it was "buried", in '96, Sidney Poitier was still on the Disney board, and Maya Angelou was palling around with the Clintons.)
Cutting the Crows out of Dumbo (just the remake for now, BUT...) and the Siamese cats out of the upcoming direct-to-streaming Lady/Tramp remake (yes 😓) isn't a helpful current sign--But up to now, back during the big "Disney Archive" push in the 00's for classic rarities on disk, there was widespread studio support for just getting it out there like a passed kidney stone, and Iger's announced retirement became a fan "deathwatch" to get over the one main obstacle, before he kept pushing the dates back. At this point, the fan mentality seems to be "Sure, give him a $100M, give him a hundred billion, just get rid of him!!"
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3 hours ago, SunAndMoon said:
What say you, my fellow forum-goers? Did I watch the only decent Elvis movie?
Since it wasn't Viva Las Vegas (1964), with red-hot firecracker Ann-Margret, and arguably Elvis's best movie song, no.
2 hours ago, Sepiatone said:It largely is a matter of personal opinion. I never thought his acting was as bad as some try to make it out to be, his problem was mostly being quickly typecast and given "throw away" roles in which he seemed to be a similar character in many of his flicks. Ex G.I., Race car driver, mechanic, crop duster pilot, etc. that can also sing and get all the good looking girls in whatever town he's in to hang on him like tinsel.
And although it was claimed he longed for more "serious" roles in more serious movies, it's said the Colonel made sure most of his movies were vehicles for new songs to be showcased and too, generate revenue from soundtrack recording sales. There's only a few in which he's NOT a singer or that even have ANY of him singing in them. WILD IN THE COUNTRY('61) is the only one I can think of,...
And Elvis was reportedly originally up for Kris Kristofferson's role in the '77 "A Star is Born", but both management and the studio thought Elvis & Barbara Streisand would be a battlefield--There is only ONE star in an Elvis pic, they argued, and you don't put him in supporting roles.
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3 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
Never heard of that movie but -wow- is fighting supposed to be funny? It suppose it is when there's Three Stooges sound effects.
Clint Eastwood's immortal auteur tribute to Hal Needham.
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Like the scene from Alien Nation (1988), where cop James Caan discovers that crotch-kicks don't work on aliens, and alien partner Mandy Patinkin advises him, "I believe the effect you were trying to achieve would be here, under the armpit."
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8 hours ago, TheCid said:
A major reason why Airport is so good is because it is based on a really good book by Arthur Hailey. After seeing the movie, I started reading his books and he wrote several goods ones to include Hotel which was also made into a good movie.
Although Hailey's book was more about "Behind the scenes crisis-expose'!" at an airport--like he did for "Hotel"--with a plane disaster attached.
What we think of as "the 70's Disaster Movie" didn't really start until "The Poseidon Adventure" two years later, which also had a good Paul Gallico book behind it. Ah, the days when bestsellers could Soon Become Major Motion Pictures.
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4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Ark II - Season 1, Episode 1 (1976) - "The Flies" - 3/10
In this first episode that I watched, they encounter a group of thieving children who work for an older man named Fagon (Jonathan Harris hamming it up to nth degree). It was all very silly, and didn't make a lot of sense. It seems squarely aimed at children, but I wonder if even they were bored with it.
Speaking as one who watched it on Saturday morning (during Filmation's Shazam/Isis spate of live-action Saturday-morning series, in the days before He-Man)...yes.
From here, you can go on to Jonathan Harris hamming it up in "Space Academy", but I don't promise any improvement.
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Fear Strikes Out (1957) - 👎
With the weather turning warmer, May is the usual season for me to try and get motivated by digging out good sports movies (still have "The Natural" and "Eight Men Out" that have spent the entire winter on my New Unwatched Blu-ray pile). Hadn't recognized this baseball title at the library, so took a look--More in the then new "Athlete hospitalization-comeback" genre, with Anthony Perkins in the role of Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall's autobiography, whose dad had obsessively groomed him for the big leagues since childhood, leaving him with crippling anxiety issues, leading to a breakdown on the field, and a long recovery.
Unfortunately, as psychology was still a "shocking" topic for 50's films, it's all played at a melodramatic level, on top of the "it wasn't my fault!" self-defense of survivor autobiographies: Karl Malden, as the domineering dad, basically gives a one-note performance for ninety minutes, as he's called upon to do nothing but play a sort of male version of Mama Rose, all but singing "Have a goldstone, Mr. Eggroll" to the big-league baseball scouts. Perkins, of course, plays his usual traumatized, stammering screen character, three years before Norman Bates (not that there's anything, y'know...s-strange about that, I mean, lots of people have nervous moments now and then, it's sort of...natural, don't you think?), but through the miracle of creative editing, we don't see much of his skill on the baseball field--He's usually just finishing up practice or coming back off the field, so we don't get to see whether Perkins could make the turn on the double play. As a result, we don't really get the sense of what made Piersall a big prospect with 50's sports fans, and until the end of the movie, where he finally fits the uniform, poor twitchy, vulnerable Tony looks like he'd be freaked out by a pop fly.
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5 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Source: internet
...Can you be more specific?
)
Actor-comedian Tim Conway (1933-2019)
in General Discussions
Posted
I remember seeing it at our local shopping-mall matinee as a kid, back when Conway and Knotts were trying to get away from 70's-Disney and do their own indie B-comedies, most of which fell out of major release and ended up on the ethereal wilds of 80's-afternoon-HBO..."The Prize Fighter" has its amusing moments, but never hit the pure percentage of hits that "The Private Eyes" did.
Not sure if it's on the current disks, but saw it on DVD with Tim Conway commentary (yes, he claims he still gets kids asking about Wookelars), where he told the story of the low-budget production having to carpool out to the Biltmore estate--It was the hottest day in August, and Don Knotts was showing the strain of having to film scenes in his Sherlock trenchcoat. Finally, Knotts stormed off the set, claiming he was going to go back to the hotel room, and...Conway did a hilariously dead-on Barney Fife imitation as he described Knotts coming back to the set five minutes later saying, "Say, Tim, you, uh...(sniff!)...wouldn't happen to have the KEYS, wouldja?"