EricJ

Hated Dark Knight, and suffered through the ridiculously over-wishful Justice League, but have to admit: Christian Bale is the better Bruce Wayne, but Ben Affleck is the better Batman. Thanks to the Bale/Affleck movies, the comics have now made the scary-gravelly voice-modulator built into Bat's suit canon, to now explain why nobody says "Hey, doesn't he sound sorta like Bruce Wayne?" (And Adam West is okay if you're with the whole "Support your police!" 60's anti-Establishment spoof, but that's if.)

Yes, but Flintstones was intentionally based on Honeymooners--Just like Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera intentionally based "The Jetsons" on Blondie (even casting Penny Singleton), and "Top Cat" on Sgt. Bilko (with Arnold Stang doing a killer Phil Silvers). Unless you can come up with a better explanation for the joke where Fred loses another Scrabble game to Arnold the wisecracking 10-yo. newsboy: Fred: "He kept coming up with these big words, like 'Esoteric', and 'Polopponies'!" Wilma: "That's 'Polo ponies'!"

Think I remember that--Seemed like perfect voice casting.

My image of Bronson in the 70's was always from the action movies and loopy Michael Winner "Death Wish" movies, so he always came off as too granite and antisocial to like, but putting him in as Kurosawa's "good" wood-chopping samurai gunfighter raised my respect for him. Second time I was ever impressed with Bronson was as a retired, death's-door Wild Bill Hickok at the end of the West, joining with mountain man Jack Warden and a future Crazy Horse to fight The White Buffalo (1977) - A very overlooked movie (Dino DeLaurentiis was still in laughingstock mode after "King Kong" and "Orca") that's just now resurfacing on the Streaming Orphans.

...THANK you! I'd seen that on Twitter (I hadn't gotten the newsletter for a while, and didn't know they were doing the cartoon riddles the rest of the year), and was struggling with whose face that was...Too white to be Obama? And yes, Ernst Lubitsch pretty well cements it as a Criterion release. Once they have a director, they never let him go.

Juzo Itami's Tampopo (1986) for those who can't read kanji, and yes. The perfect movie for turning your love of packet noodle-ramen into a love of Japanese-restaurant ramen. IIRC, one of our first cultural hints that Japan had an actual functioning (and silly) sense of humor, just a few years before Lum, Ranma and Totoro would hit our college campuses. (And of course you know, Joe, that the only REAL reason I'm responding to your post is my secret unexpressed romantic passion for you, which my frustrated male-ego repression can only express in creepy obsessed acts of net-stalking...Oh, just grab me, you big sweet wonderful fool, and kiss me like there's no tomorrow! 😍 )

It's not a great movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot more FUN to watch than that, ahem...other retooled bit of Joan-Crawford-wannabe hysteria that had a flying saucer jammed out of nowhere into its third script-doctoring. And Provine with big backscreens and little props is one significant reason why. Even before Abbott & Costello broke up after "Dance With Me, Henry", Lou was trying to fashion himself as more and more of a "family-man" comic with an interest in children's charity and trying to gear himself as a kid-friendly star. This wouldn't be his first attempt to crack into a "kiddy-matinee" market (that would be the A&C "Jack & the Beanstalk"), but it shows he wouldn't have floundered as a solo act if he'd had more of the chance.

...No, fat jokes, not fa(r)t jokes. Please read more carefully. 😓 Ralph: "That does it, Norton, you and me are through as pals! I don't want nothin' to do with you anymore--From now on, when you see me coming down the street...get to the other side!" Ed: "When you come down the street...there AIN'T no other side!"

Or when Wilma packed Fred's lunchbox for work, a three-foot Dagwood stack of sandwiches, sardines and drumsticks: Fred says, "Have you forgotten anything?", and Wilma replies "Like what, the living-room sofa?" They go through their daily ritual of closing the lunchbox--"Okay, 3-2-1: (squash!)(slam!)"--Fred gets his fingers caught in the slam, and Wilma says "Impossible, you couldn't get anything else in there." Rodney Dangerfield, OTOH, managed to make a profitable business out of fat jokes in Back to School (1986)

Especially when there's so much more opportunity to hate Captain Marvel AFTER they see it-- It would get repetitive if they only had one or two reasons before seeing it. 😈 Timothy Q. Mouse in a cage with a wheel? Oh, Disney and Burton, you did NOT know when to stop when you were ahead, did you? 😠

(Errata: "The Magic Voyage of Sinbad", which was actually the Russian fairytale of Sadko, hence the jokes about why "Sinbad" dresses like Peter the Great.)

...That's not how David Bowie's song goes!

Yep--And "Branded". (Which Cohen intended to be a "Blacklist" metaphor, back when TV wouldn't touch it, and Chuck Connors was reportedly furious when he found out.) Good interview with Cohen from last August's Village Voice, which captures his style: https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/08/02/im-only-interested-in-making-movies-my-way-an-interview-with-larry-cohen/

Despite marketing that was boneheadedly sabotaged by the studios, if we have to remember Cohen for one film, some remember "It's Alive", some remember "Q", but true Cohen fans remember The Stuff (1985), one of the cleverest horror spoofs this side of John Sayles, and perfect for the 80's. Probably the definitive example of Cohen's confessed ability to take something "harmless" and make savvy B-horror out of it. Cohen also wrote a few B-movie scripts he didn't direct, and James Woods and Brian Dennehy in Best Seller (1987) is a tidy little cop-thriller from James Woods' Sleazy Golden Age.

And I'd seen the original BBC Joss Ackland version of Shadowlands, and while Attenborough's 1993 Anthony Hopkins version was pleasant and all, it left me thinking, "Why did they make this??" Generally, in the 70's, there was a lot of "Old-movie parody/homage", some of it caused by the new mania for "That's Entertainment", and some by our troubled Nixon-era 70's picking on happy innocent TV icons for the crime of being clueless and mainstream, one of which icons was late-nite movies with local used-car ads. Even in late-60's/early-70's movies, when revival theaters were still around, movies and TV shows depicted revival-theater audiences as either a place for the bums to hang out during the day, except for one or two naive mousy dreamers who couldn't handle the modern world, and just sat watching Fred & Ginger all afternoon. (Qv. Woody Allen's character in "Play It Again, Sam".) At that time, if you said "Old movies", people literally thought there were only seven of them ever made: The Maltese Falcon, Stagecoach, Frankenstein, Angels With Dirty Faces, King Kong, Dawn Patrol, and Swing Time, only in color, with Busby Berkeley bathing-beauties doing leg patterns like in 42nd St...Oh, and something with the Keystone Kops throwing a pie fight.

Oh What a Lovely War (1969) - 👍👎 (mixed) Now that the weather's turning warmer, I can start going next door to our local library--whose DVD section inherited an entire 30-year downtown-storefront rental shop --and start browsing old movies there again. Managed to find this one, from the '69-'75 days when movies weren't allowed to make bitter satirical antiwar statements against Vietnam, and had to metaphorically pick on all the other bungled wars of the past instead, with WWI being a very, very, VERY frequent target. (Unless you happened to pick on Korea or WWII, but those were different movies.) The concept here, taken from a London stage musical at the time, was to musically satirize England's role in WWI through real vintage music-hall and soldier songs, with the abstract framing device of cutting between real battle scenes, and the stage's concept of depicting WWI as a flag-waving Brighton beach-pier Sunday outing for the middle and upper-class folk: Normally, "Absurdist/symbolist musical satire" would be the kind of thing you would sensibly(?) give to Ken Russell--But, since nobody mentions sex or religion, and spends their time in uniforms talking about king-and-country, they had to give it to Lord Richard Attenborough instead...Who, when he's not directing bitter satires of king-and-country, is one of the most frustratingly pedestrian directors in the business, who directs like he's flipping pages through the script, without any sense that there's some ultimate goal to the story: I was one of the few people in '82 who thought "Gandhi" was ridiculously heavy-handed, Robert Downey Jr. still thinks it was his own fault the frustratingly pointless "Chaplin" didn't get an Oscar, and I have less idea why Attenborough was picked for "A Chorus Line: the Movie" than for why it was made. When the movie works, it's a good historical Cliff-Notes for the events of WWI (we never got to study it in college as much, so I had no idea of the battles going in, or what happened after Archduke Ferdinand), but it's a long 2-1/2 hours, and both Attenborough and the play have enough time to make their points very early and very often: The usual targets--the upper class thought the War was more triumph for Britannia, the generals were out-of-touch lunatics, the soldiers knew they were on death-row--all seemed to be handled better and with more acidic satire (and just as much revisionist preachiness) in BBC's "Blackadder Goes Forth" Britcom, and I found old Rowan Atkinson lines from the show springing to mind in between just a historical songbook of little-known tunes.

Assuming you're talking about "Movie Movie" (1978), it was a product of what I refer to as "the Carol Burnett Show 70's", when audiences liked to trivialize "Old late-night movies" for their naive cuteness, but hadn't actually seen enough of them to make specific jokes about them. Which, of course, all changed in our culture once the VCR arrived, followed by cable. (For ex., the WWI-trailer parody: I don't think I've ever actually SEEN another WWI-flyboy movie besides the obvious Errol Flynn and "Dawn Patrol", and yet 70's jokes were convinced "old 30's movies" were flooded to the gills with them.) It's pretty obvious in the choices of old-movie targets (they had Technicolor musicals in 1933??), but all audiences had to laugh at at the time was the mangled-metaphor script, which was cute, but didn't compete with the Mel Brooks parodies that were still fresh in our mind at the time. Oh, well, here ya go--And it's on "free" Prime, too: https://www.amazon.com/Movie-George-C-Scott/dp/B07FK5DL1F/

Although I haven't seen it yet, Larry Cohen--and his career that spans from "Hell Up in Harlem" to "Q: the Winged Serpent"--has finally been honored with his own cult-retrospective documentary, King Cohen (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPblr7nKaYw And even if it was only for "The Stuff" (1985), it would be thoroughly deserved. 👍

Some do-- Bubbles happen when people overreact that something NEW and NEATO! they absolutely don't understand, but that Those Young Kids Are Into, will officially become "the Future" that will sooner or later replace every industry it touches, and even if you don't understand what you're buying, some expert in the field has been all over CNBC explaining why it's Too Big To Fail. The folks who dove into "Self-driving cars!" last year, "Bitcoin!" the year before, and "Alibaba!" the year before that are now looking at "New applications for AI!"...Whatever those are. And BION, eight years after Comcast/NBC/Universal decided to become a "media giant", and everyone first started cancelling their [censored] [censored]in' cable-bundle subscriptions that Comcast could wrap up tightly in a [censored] [censored] and [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored][censored] 😈, those same gullible investors are now wondering whether "Hey...This company says they're starting a new streaming service! This could be a hot area for startups!" 😓 Which brings us back to Disney and Fox, and why everyone went nutso over Filmstruck, just to thumb their nose at Netflix and Amazon: The more that real movies disappear off the third-party ex-00's startup services, because the studios became too guarded of their movie libraries, starved the third-parties out and forced them to fend for themselves with foreign "Originals", the more that streaming is going to become a Game of Studios, with Warner and Universal competing against the mighty Disney/Fox for their libraries' share of the streaming-scape...For movie fans, Winter Is Coming.

Thank you for being literally the FIRST person I've heard in the last year to comment on the Disney/Fox deal without mentioning: the X-Men Homer Simpson Deadpool Avatar Doctor Doom Star Wars Episode IV Alien/s When those are the first movies that spring to mind, our movie culture is in deep trouble. 😓 Me, I remember back in the late 70's, when Fox had their own weekly syndicated TV knockoff of MGM's "That's Entertainment", consisting of famous nostalgic Fox clips--That was always my image of the Fox studio, back when...well, why remember, when we have YouTube?: (Keep in mind, this was fall of '77, when any mention of Star Wars on TV was "Oh no, they didn't! 😮" As we can see, however, it was also back when Fox still considered Burt & Liza in "Lucky Lady" one of their "big" films.)

Conversely, have any movie fans really watched this movie, as opposed to getting a little, ahem-cough, too wrapped up in "Liz"'s pop-culture Hollywood iconography, and wishing they could wear that Isis dress? 😓 (Remember, Michael Jackson was a Liz Taylor fan, too...) It's LONG. Taylor does a good performance, but this is probably the both the one symbolic good and bad icon for What Happened to the 50's-60's Roadshow Epic. It could be an hour shorter, but the more money the studio put in, the more they thought they had to deliver, until the opening hype was practically assaulting the audience with its Importance. Most Roadshow-Epics play better on disk, where you can take a half or hour at a time like a mini-series, with bathroom and seat breaks, than they did for those poor audiences, in the days before reclining seats and cup-holders. Ah, the days of AMC and Backstory--Fox was using AMC to promote their big prestige DVD releases (ah, the days when studios got excited about their big classic movies premiering on DVD...), and, similar to their Marilyn/Something restoration-doc, used Backstory documentaries to make their own DVD Bonus Featuretttes. And darn good ones, too. The budget problems were first remembered for Liz Taylor, who didn't want to do the project, asking for (Dr. Evil finger-bite) one mil-lion dollars in salary to scare them off, and getting it--Like Heaven's Gate, that started the press hype starting the "Over-indulgence" stories, playing up the Dick & Liz gossip, and the audience thought they got two stars' Mediterranean vacation wastefully throwing money at the screen. It's too good to be compared to HG, but it does have the same problem of the producers going "all-in" to protect their bet the bigger the production got and the more attention spent on set detail, and telling themselves more and more that the appeal of its Stars and its Importance would come to the rescue at the box office.

And still a great tune for any house band daring enough on the guitar to jam on-- No matter.....WHAT instrument takes the solo: 😮

I'm open on Channel D, however, and so was MST3K (in arguably one of their better episodes):

Haven't been around for quite a few years now-- Wasn't an "awards" anyway, it was just a variety-show excuse to round up the last surviving rerun-icon actors in comedy sketches by Bruce "Star Wars Holiday Special" Villanch, and...what's the ol' fat fruit up to now, anyway? Is it true, DID he officially retire after that James Franco/Anne Hathaway Oscar disaster?