EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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9 hours ago, DougieB said:
I confess, I was having trouble thinking of any, until your avatar's Boob shot from Yellow Submarine (1968).
Searching Amazon, a recent package of low-rent "Mondo" movies included a BFI restoration of Primitive London (1965)--Which promised its exploitation goers "shocking" sights of strip clubs, but only offered a documentary on the changing trends and attitudes of Swingin' proto-Beatles mid-60's London, including a segment on the Mods vs. Rockers rivalry, for those establishment folk who didn't know what our young people were up to.
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On 3/15/2019 at 9:50 PM, LawrenceA said:
The Children (1980) - 4/10
Silly horror tale about a group of school children that are transformed into mindless zombies thanks to a leak at a nuclear power plant. The children, who all have black fingernails, burn people alive with their touch. The local sheriff (Gil Rogers) and the father (Martin Shakar) of one of the kids team up to try and stop them. Also featuring Gale Garnett, Tracy Griswold, Joy Glaccum, Clara Evans, Michelle La Mothe, Peter Maloney, and Shannon Bolin.
Thanks to many Friday nights staying up with cable, I still have USA Network's Commander USA intro to the movie running through my head:
"Gale Garnett--Sure, you know her, she sang 'We'll Sing in the Sunshine'! She's singin' a different tune in today's movie, though!"
QuoteThis low-budget travesty features very shoddy production values and special effects. This is the kind of late-70s/early 80s horror flick that would never get made today, what with multiple scenes of kids being shot (they just get back up again), and the "heroes" hacking children up with swords and axes. Fun for the whole family!
It's the low budgets of drive-in 70's-80's movies like these that used to creep the fertilizer out of me a kid/teen--Basically because our own nightmares are filmed on shoddy sound, faded color, amateur cinematography, non-existent editing, and a lack of background extras. And when it's something as strange as the they-don't-stay-down climax, they could have just hooked a camera to my head after a few bad burritos. 😮
6 hours ago, LawrenceA said:The Narcotics Story (1958) - 8/10*
The information about pot-smoking is relentlessly hilarious, including such great observations that "marijuana smokers often become violent, and the infliction of bodily injury and wounds brings laughter"!
(Well, they were correct about YouTube: "Duuude, you so totally did not break that brick wall with your face!...")
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7 hours ago, Sgt_Markoff said:
Sorry. I was running over the brim in my posts of last night. But I just can't fathom how the Oscars even survives. I despise today's film industry pretty much from top to bottom. I usually don't dwell on this subject at any real length but last night I saw trailers for 'Captain Marvel'. Nearly made me vomit. It's embarrassing to know this is my country doing this, my nation's film industry which churns out this codswallop. Awards? For today's Hollywood? It's outrageous. Eh well I'll button up my lip about it. I apologize.
Are you...EXPECTING Captain Marvel to be nominated, or just venting at Things That Bug You? (Even as someone who likes Marvel movies, your spew wasn't far off, btw--The patient, ahem, mature moviegoer learns to take movies on a case-by-case basis. And yeah, I know what I said earlier, but we're dealing with the two opposite sides of the same coin.)
Me, I say this every year--Usually in defense of the five-nomination rule (the one we got rid of after all those tantrums over Dark Knight and Wall-E not being nominated for Picture), and for getting rid of the Preferential Voting rule (the one that accidentally causes the second-place runner-up to get more votes, which, if you're wondering, is most likely HOW Green Book got the award):
In our local theater growing up--an old downtown theater that looked like an old local furniture store or Italian restaurant on the outside, and a cozy-nook three-screen theater on the inside--there was a long (to me, anyway) corridor going off to the other two screens built as a new wing onto the antique-palace main theater in later generations. To decorate the corridor, they had framed collages of the Oscar-winner posters by decade, '29-'39, '40-49, etc...I might look at the 60's collage, with Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Cowboy next to Sound of Music and Oliver, and think "Okay, two of those, I've heard of", and wonder about the other two. As a result, every year I get excited about what movie DESERVES to be on that Hall-of-Fame wall: I remember winning my betting pool against an entire film-class of students who were convinced The Killing Fields would be "powerful" enough to crush Amadeus, and when friends chortled "Ho ho, the Academy hates fantasy!...An elf movie against Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn??", my belief in the Oscars gave me the last laugh. And yes, I do know why Chicago won for '02.
So, yeah, I'm PO'ed about Green Book too, but only because Black Panther, while not a great film, deserved to be on that wall--That was the film you'd want someone to be film-curious about twenty or thirty years later, while the critic-fueled Indie-attack of "Moonlight" and "Birdman" were....................................not.
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18 hours ago, Sgt_Markoff said:
- Noah Beery Jr
- Harry Carey Jr
- Victor Mclaglen
- Nigel Bruce
And William Demarest, in any Preston Sturges comedy.
Even when Sturges was forced to go "serious" in The Great Moment (1944), Demarest still runs away with the picture.
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6 hours ago, Sgt_Markoff said:
What's to predict? Their foul, fetid, despicable, reeking, pustulence? For cripe's sakes, Oscar-mania is truly the last vestige of the wastrel. Gets my goat. It's like the kind of person who says, "I listen to everything". What? I mean, does anyone watch the Grammys seeking recommendations for quality listening? Does anyone turn to the Emmys for advice on quality intellectual life via their TV?
Even as someone who LIKES the Oscars--or at least the respectable five-nomination kind we used to have before 2005--you get to the age where you think, "How young was I to still try predicting Oscars?...High school?"
Think it's usually around the adolescent age, when A) emotions of anticipation for something you want are higher than normal, before the hormones cool down, and B ) anything you like is looked down on as too "unimportant" by authority, and you need the social validation of having a group agree with its importance. It is literally not enough just to say "I'm looking forward to (...) in November."
It's okay to predict Oscars once the nominations have been released (as in, NOT from the Golden Globes lists), but if one is still caught up in predicting "What movies coming out in 2019 are sure Oscar favorites?", we're dealing with a very literal and figurative "Grow up."
(I remember a whole generation of pre-release gun-jumpers learned their lesson the year they banded together behind "Kevin Costner's going to make history again with another Picture-Director-Actor sweep for 'The Postman'!"...Okay, I see a few older folks cringing at the back.
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[anonymous praise of Arthur Hunnicutt, including later work on TZ episodes]
I feel as if the "The Hunt" TZ episode had originally been meant on paper to be an over-the-top shaggy-dog Beverly Hillbillies tall-tale, for one of their lighthearted "funny" episodes--
But Hunnicutt plays his role SO un-ironically Appalachian-grizzled, it turns the entire atmosphere of the episode 100% straight, into another one of Earl Hamner's colorful down-home pre-Waltons back-country stories.
One of the few times Arthur got to be top banana in a story, and I'd always spotted him in his second-banana roles ever since.
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On 3/12/2019 at 8:38 AM, DougieB said:
Otherwise, I'd have to say Professor Marvel. He had the shrewd manipulativeness of the Wizard, as when he takes the picture of Auntie Em out of her basket and pretends to be conjuring her, but he was sweet and thoughtful and really wanted to help her too.
"Can't I go with you and see all the crowned heads of Europe?"
"What, do you know any?...Oh, you mean the, er, (points to sign)."I've also started watching Uncle Henry's few scenes at the beginning, and how he could be a minor farm character, but still hide enough Midwest savvy to heckle Miss Gulch:
"Oh...She bit her DOG, eh? (gate-slap!)"
(For Dorothy, he must have been the "good cop" to Aunt Em's farmwife-efficiency.)
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5 hours ago, Det Jim McLeod said:
Uncle Buck (1989) 3/10
Candy was a comedy genius but director John Hughes does not allow him to let loose and do what he does best. The supporting cast doesn't help except for Macaulay Culkin who has a funny "Dragnet" spoof with Candy but he doesn't have much else to do with him.
Hughes, who tended to make his movies in bunches, liked the Dragnet scene (which was pretty much all critics and audiences liked from it too), went ahead and wrote an entire movie just for Culkin next, and you...probably might be more familiar with that one.
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So...no Monty Clift movies, then?
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On 1/6/2019 at 1:04 AM, Sgt_Markoff said:
Hmmm. Let's see if I can recall some others I have heretofore tried to dismiss from my memory.
- Doctor DoLittle. Would have probably been an acceptable flick without the music.
- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Ditto. Fun film but unappealing music.
I'll let the others slide (and only a heart of stone would not cringe at seeing Rex Harrison as the doctor "whimsically" sing a love song to a seal in drag), but as for CB2, I must take exception that there are no bad Sherman Brothers musicals. I've tried to find one, and there AREN'T...Even "Huckleberry Finn" has its Sherman moments. I can even remember tunes from "Snoopy Come Home", whether I want to or not.
But especially when you take the three that were arranged by Irwin Kostal (Mary Poppins, Chitty, Charlotte's Web), who could hitch up a full studio orchestra and turn even the flimsiest Sherman song into pure magic. Qv. the title tune from "Charlotte's", or the Entr'acte from Chitty. 👍
I will admit, however, that "Slipper & the Rose" tests the theory, and I have not, as yet, been able to track down The Magic of Lassie (1978).
On 7/12/2018 at 7:42 PM, Looney said:I am by no means someone who is into musicals or who really knows much about them. I will say that I disagree with anyone who says The Wiz (1978) and The Pirate Movie (1982) are the worst. The former is wonderfully entertaining and bizarre. The latter is so wonderfully bad it is good.
As others have mentioned I might have to say it is The Apple (1980). This movie is bizarre and it is bad, but it is rarely entertaining in those regards.
The Wiz tried hard, and could have turned Diana Ross and Michael Jackson into gold, but had Sidney "Wrongway" Peachfuzz at the helm, just because producers thought "Well, he knows NYC!". And The Pirate Movie is not just bad, it's Australian bad...That's a whole different dimension, even leaving aside any comparison to the better "real" Linda Ronstadt/Kevin Kline movie it stole.
And similarly, The Apple is not just "foreign"-bad (as in "And boy, was it foreign..."), it was Menahem Golan's idea of "What a musical is"...That should speak volumes right there. Now, I just have to track down a copy of Golan's Mack the Knife (1989) version of "Threepenny Opera".
So I just thought: what does everyone think of Stanley Donen's *The Little Prince* ??
I have to confess, I always adored Saint-Exup?ry's charming book, but have mixed feelings (and somewhat fuzzy memories) of the musical. The one song I can remember offhand is "A Snake in the Grass". The rest I can't even remember, and I'm not sure I would want to watch again.
Eleven years after the question no longer needed to be answered:
Weird, depressing (I keep hearing Wally & Andre's discussion on "Some sentimental SS officer in love with St. Exupery's story"), sappily embarrassing for Gene Wilder, and would have been my choice, if not for Richard Kiley letting loose his Full LaMancha on the title tune...And grab the Kleenex when he does. 😥Not a great moment for Lerner &....D'OHH!! How could I forget Paint Your Wagon (1969)? How could ANYONE??
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Quote
[anonymously submitted quote about Project Blue Book extraneous-fabrications]
I'd been digging up reruns of the old Jack Webb-produced 70's Blue-Book "Project UFO" series, fresh off the Close-Encounters 70's UFO craze, on YouTube--And while I remembered it from my childhood as one of those "cool sci-fi shows" of the decade (aw, man, if they ever cancel "Powers of Matthew Starr"!), looking at it again, I was struck with how much Webb and the ex-Blue Book producer/consultant had designed the show to rationally debunk UFO sightings, with at least one explainable sighting explained in each episode...And, like Dragnet's Joe Friday giving his sad "Whadda we do with 'em? 😓 " head-shake every time some disgruntled citizen said "Why don't you police do your jobs for us taxpayers??", star William Jordan, doing his dead-on Webb imitation, would do the Sad Friday Head-Shake every time some average jerk-citizen in the episodes would say "It's all a big government coverup! When are you Air Force guys going to tell the people the REAL truth about what's in Area 51??"
That caused some problems for NBC, which had been hoping for a Neato Spaceship show for the kiddies--So, in the second season, Jordan's character was replaced, and while the fictional Blue Book investigators would still bust one sighting per episode and leave another one Unexplained, the ratio of "Unexplained" sightings began to rise in the second season, and even the Explained ones would have an ambiguously backpedaling "...Or WAS IT???" last shot deliberately tacked on by the network just before the closing-credits freeze.
Think that comes under the heading of "When facts become legend..."
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13 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I saw THE GOLDEN CHILD in the theater in 1986(?)
I still remember how deeply confused everyone was by it, And I have never touched oatmeal again
That’s one of the odd things I miss about going to movies in theaters, when a group of people see something and you get to share that communal sense of disappointment and “what the **** did I just watch?” With a bunch of complete strangers
TGC confused the living heck out of everyone when it came out, since it was originally pitched as just another generic Paramount fantasy-gimmick action-cop comedy for Mel Gibson--Until Paramount thought the script needed a punch-up, so they brought in Eddie Murphy, fresh off of ad-libbing his way through the equally generic "Beverly Hills Cop" (which had originally been written for Sly Stallone), and let him motormouth-destroy this generic action-comedy for more box-office money.
Which is what confused everyone in the audience: All the other actors on screen are taking the script gimmick absolutely at face value, while Murphy just "huuhh-huuhh" Murphy-chuckles at the ridiculousness of its all, proudly refuses to play along, and sets out to write his own script to the movie instead, like some live onscreen MST3K heckling of it by its own actor:
(If, like the actors, you're taking the whole story seriously...you're just not in on the joke.
)
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13 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
from time to time, i toy around with the notion of writing a spec script that concerns a LAST ACTION HERO type scenario where a peculiar, misanthropic, middle-aged intellectual who avoids modern culture entirely finds himself "magically transported" into some sort of HARRY POTTER/STAR WARS/ AVENGERS type scenario and the whole world must watch with bated breath as he apathetically has to navigate through the baroque scenarios and plots that he knows squat about in order to preserve a world that he doesn't give two squats about BUT THAT MEANS SO MUCH TO EVERYONE ELSE.
(might be interesting, maybe call it THE CHOSEN ONE)
For some reason, that last bit reminds me of Eddie Murphy in The Golden Child (1986) ("If I'm the Chosen One, we in a lotta trouble..."), and think they beat you to it.
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14 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
Wow...glad you clarified you "liked it" because it sounds utterly ridiculous. Why would anyone parody several very different shows? (sounds horrible!) \
3 hours ago, kingrat said:I'd like to see the full production of Ruthless! the Musical. The song I've heard from it is hilarious, as the mother-turned-reluctant-star wishes she could go back to the more fulfilling life of ironing clothes, etc.
Why are they (kitschily) parodying old-movie iconic 50's potboilers about Mildred-Pierce/Mama Rose moms and Bad-Seed kids? Keep in mind it's an off-Broadway musical...'Nuff said. Just hint that they might be spoofing You-Know-Who Dearest, and watch the Lorna Hanson Forbeses come running. 😓
(And if it's showing on BroadwayTV, and never got a movie, it's probably an obscure one that only had a few weeks. I've never heard of the Harry-Potter-spoof OBM "Puffers: the Musical" either.)
On the subject of obscure musicals on streaming (and Amazon and/or double-paywalls at that), I remember seeing my first NYC Broadway musical as a kid in the early mid-70's, and for some reason, wanted to see Stephen Schwartz's The Magic Show, even though Doug Henning had already left the production by that point. Was meh-okay--in addition to being the show that put me off of 60's/70's hippie Stephen Schwartz musicals--so I don't know whether I quite have the courage to watch an ancient Showtime concert production that Amazon Prime recently dug up from late-70's cable pre-history. Just making the point that the musicals that never got to movies are usually the ones still floating around on cable video, unless they have corporate tie-ins like "Newsies" and "Shrek".
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1 hour ago, DVDPhreak said:
Filmstruck had a lot of technical difficulties in its early going that might have led to fewer subscribers and ultimately its demise. This new service will need to be a better starter than Filmstruck was.
Filmstruck (even, ahem, without a PS4 console app, or any streaming-stick app that did work) was at the height of its popularity when it was canned, and not because of a lack of subscribers--In fact, Filmstruck was just on the verge of being raised as the new symbolic "Anti-Netflix" banner, with those same viewers who'd flocked to streaming to thumb their nose at cable now cult-flocking to the movie service to be Film-School Educated on the Classics, and thumb their symbolic noses at Netflix and Amazon dropping their movie catalogues for "Original content".
It was canned because Warner was trying to circle its streaming wagons, drop any services that didn't have a W in the name, and had ideas about keeping their Archive titles safely in-house and moving them to their own streaming service. Pretty much reducing Filmstruck to what it had been BEFORE the mania, ie. a snooty upscale-poseur place to watch foreign Criterion films.
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3 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Captain Marvel (2019) - 6/10
Meh.
I have to repeat the same Ebert-esque "My fingers took control of the keyboard" North moment I had when rebutting another "Look how much box office women made!" gush on another thread, the same day after coming back from the movie: 😓
QuoteBrie Larson plays Rockette Raccoon, THE most relentlessly obnoxious and unsympathetic hero/ine ever to front a Marvel movie since Tony Stark got liquored up in his armor from "Iron Man 2"...
Her character would be more interesting if she had a variety of powers--In this movie, however, she only seems to have ONE: Blast something to smithereens with her glowing fists, and then smirk a "Don't mess with me" look or "I'm smarter than you" wisecrack to the nearest male character...Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Hug the brave-supportive-black-woman or wise-old-grandma for wisdom, flash back on how some male character betrayed or underestimated her, put a 90's 'I'm a drunk hellraisin' bad-grrl!' song on the soundtrack, and, for a note of variety...repeat steps 1-3.
At our theater, they showed Warner's "Shazam!" trailer before the movie--about the hero who thinks his new powers are neat, but still acts like a 12-yo--which may have been a little too ironic considering Larson's interpretation of her Captain Marvel.
When this movie was in production, there was speculation that Marvel was going to use the "Evil alien Skrull shapeshifters" canon, a long tradition in the print comics, to jumpstart a new multi-movie story arc just in time for the Avengers to have their big finale next month. (Although no alien-impostor revelation in the movie has the same punch to the audience's gut that Garry Shandling had whispering two words in "Captain America: Winter Soldier.")
But, since Marvel wanted this to be their "women's movie", and show how rebelliously independent, caring and soulful our hero was about "ending wars", we see good, kindly Skrull shapeshifters reunited with their loving refugee families, because intergalactic sharing is caring...Um, okay, looks like we can scratch the "New infiltration story arc" idea, guess, and just go with the finale.
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4 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Oh, and for fictional characters - the author of the character gets to decide if an actor has the right genome.
Not always a good idea, if we're talking about JK Rowling and Harry Potter decisions. ("Sure, of course Hermione can be black!...That's why she's so sensitive about prejudice!")
QuoteOf course I'm cracking wise (but some activist may think otherwise): to me the only 'requirement' is that an actor comes off as authentic.
And I'll trade the entire cast of "Crazy Rich Asians" for five minutes of Joel Grey in "Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins".
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54 minutes ago, Sgt_Markoff said:
Ha! Yea it was all pretty rich. Cleverly 'innocent' humor even when Brooks' romantic schemes had her tongue hanging out; or when she was trading icy barbs with catty rival Miss Enwright. I think I've said it before, but even though its he-man Jeff Chandler's voice (the bumbling target of their passion) it always conjured a mental picture of George Brent in my mind.
Ms. Brooks: "I hope I'm not interrupting, Mr. Boynton... 😍 "
Boynton: "Not at all, in fact, I'm glad you're here."
Ms. Brooks: "You are? 😍 😍"
Boynton: "Yes, usually when someone comes in the lab, it's too distracting, but whenever you're here, I can concentrate on my work."
Ms. Brooks: "Gee, thanks. 😓 Must be my perfume--That's what I get for wearing a perfume called '(shrug)...Ehh!'"
As for TV, the greatest. But can it peel a apple.
Wouldn't describe Ralph as "Narcissistic", but any list of great TV Blowhards must include Ralph's equivalent:
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2 hours ago, Princess of Tap said:
On television I knew Gale Gordon as simply the worst principal anyone could ever have in a school on the TV show"Our Miss Brooks".
Mr Conklin was a boss that you could only survive if you were assertive, creative, and extremely sarcastic. He was invented for Eve Arden.
Gordon also played Principal Conklin on the radio version, and even offscreen, his pompous sense of timing--usually when Conklin had a delayed-reaction lag for processing bad news--was note-perfect:
In one radio episode, Arden's Miss Brooks has to smuggle the biologist's pet frog out of the lab, is caught in the office as Conklin returns, and tries to hide it in the filing cabinet ("Let's see, does Bullfrog go under B or F?") And when Conklin returns and tries to look up a file:
"Let's see: One letter from Boys Town...My old Beaver Patrol badge...A communication from the Board...(ribbit!) One frog...An invitation to the Elks barbecue...Another notice of a Board meeting...A letter fro--ONE FROG?????"
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18 hours ago, GGGGerald said:
Now this... is a trailer !
Starring Morgan Fairchild...who we see NAKED!
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Name one movie Robin Williams made for Warner.
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3 hours ago, Feego said:
An American in Paris
The Graduate
Bus Stop (Marilyn stalked by Jethro!)
Don't Bother to Knock (Richard Widmark stalked by Marilyn!)
The World of Henry Orient (Peter Sellers, just...stalked.)
And, of course, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) - I have no idea why people say it's "too long" or "slow", unless they were expecting the wrong Western.
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6 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
Second worst. I think stingy caped "Casual Friday" chino dressed superhero Puma Man (1980) is the number one worst-
The very foreign 70's Superman/Star Wars knockoff Supersonic Man (1979) (from, if we're going to quote MST3K-isms, the director of "Pod People") is ten times the fever-dream that Puma Man, or even Shaq in Steel (1997), was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2MPHY5TFuY
(But yeah, Exo-Man was pretty close, as post-"Hulk" 70's TV pilots go.)
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2 hours ago, TomJH said:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - William Shakespeare
Oyyy...#7 on my list of "Most painfully misquoted Shakespeare lines." (Just above "To thine own self be true", two ranks under "First thing we do is kill off all the lawyers", and do not put a comma in "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" within ten miles of my presence. 😓 )
FTR, in the story, I'll assume you're using the correct context that Hamlet was giving his buddy a dig about his lack of worldly experience, and saying "More things than in YOUR philosophy..."
36 minutes ago, Dargo said:Can't think of Belafonte's "Day-O" song anymore without also flashing back to this scene in the movie anyway.
I had the same experience myself, only with "Jump in the Line".
(And with Warner now digging up every one of their 80's classics trying to find the "next" pop franchise to fill in a lack of Harry Potter, be prepared to get Beetlejuice nostalgia up to the eyeballs, over the next '19-'20....Like Willy Wonka and A Christmas Story, enjoy it now while you still CAN.)
Nickaloaden Kids Choice Awards 2019
in General Discussions
Posted
The same is true for any questions regarding Disney, TVLand, or Sesame Street.
And frankly, just in the last few years, the network HAS become "Nickeloaden".