EricJ

Enter the Dragon (1973) Wasn't a Bruce Lee fan up to this point; just continuing my quest to put all those great unseen iconic 70's movies in full context--Cleaning up yet another 70's movie on Netflix I felt I already knew every scene from without having seen, having already seen 1985's ghetto comedy The Last Dragon and being able to quote the Zuckers' scene-specific Airplane-parody in 1977's Kentucky Fried Movie from memory. (This is not a chawade!...We must have total concentwation!) As for the former--a salute to the urban-black grindhouse cult love for the movie, that also inspired Carl Douglas 70's songs about kung-fu fighting--it's easy to see why a black audience identified with the movie as much as the Asian audience did: Enter was the producer's "big" attempt to bring Bruce Lee out of Hong Kong's silly bargain-basement chop-socky, and into the more polished production of an American B-exploitation budget, and the American producers hedged their bets--Lee is here only one of three martial-arts rebels to try to infiltrate a villainous drug lord's secret island army (hired by MI6 operatives and his old dojo master), backed up by standard Blaxploitation hero Jim Kelly, and roguishly obnoxious bet-hustler John Saxon. Whichever ethnicity you identify with, they all get equal time here, and there's as much equal star time devoted to Kelly as the cool, cool hero in the first half of the movie as to Lee, who gets the climactic last third to himself. For those not into the "real" HK films--with their linguistically challenged dubs and their near Super-8 film stock--this is not one of those movies; it's American chow-mein, which makes it a good introduction to the genre. What will also strike first-timers (like me) is that Bruce Lee was more than just a fighter who made goofy faces and sounds with his kicks, but also had a sense of his own star presence. He'd already been in Hollywood since the 60's, and had experience alongside the Green Hornet, so he had enough acting chops to know how to create a character out of his image: The hip, self-assured teen-rebel on foreign ground, always ready to strike a rebellious last laugh against anti-Chinese racism or any showoff philistine who dared question the spiritual devotion of Shaolin training. A year before, Lee had reportedly developed the "Kung Fu" TV series for himself, as young rebellious prejudice-victim Caine, but CBS decided to hedge their bets with Western actor David Carradine instead. Watching Lee's star quality, Enter's a good quintessential introduction that makes you wonder how much better a series we would have gotten, outside of the home product.

Raiders was about an iconic film style, Last Crusade was about a marketable character...The Indy movies never recovered after we were expected to remember his name. No fair!--No posting without telling us where you FOUND it!

I was probably exposed to more classic and obscure movies on the local station, and spent the rest of my formative years trying to find out what it was I watched, when the TV Guide wasn't handy. (Took me thirty years to identify Eddie Cantor in "Kid Millions".) Back in those days, movies were literally filler, for stations that had to kill two hours in the morning, afternoon or late night, and you clicked channels because you'd never know what you'd find--But now, stations are too corporate, too provided with syndicated talk/news, and only have money to spend on building up their news divisions, to even bother with filling time for time's sake. And if they need something at 2am, the friendly local Infomercial will pay them for their time. Used to be the independent UHF stations that needed plenty of miscellaneous filler between baseball games, but thanks to Fox, CW and MyTV, there ARE no more independent UHF stations. That's why it's hard to teach kids to read if you close all the libraries.

Yeah: Turn off THAT cartoon, for a start. Basically, the Millennial treats the "old film" the way the sixth-grader treats the Shakespeare play or the Charles Dickens or Mark Twain novel he's been assigned in English class: Oh, no. It's old. It's one of THOSE things. He's been forced to sit down and analyze why his grownup teacher thinks it's so Important, and it probably won't even have a plot where things happen. And then, if he actually pays attention, things do happen, and he's reading all the way to the end...Because that's why we're still reading Dickens and Twain a hundred years later. If, like the Sarge, you browbeat some stubborn Millennial twenty years younger than you into why he "should" watch movies that are Better For Him than the Marvel ones, he's going to think you're handing him an Important movie that's Good For Him...In a word, he thinks you're going to make him watch "Citizen Kane", and write a 20-page essay on Orson Welles' use of unique editing and camera angles, like any actual moviegoer ever freakin' cared. (Literally: I repeat, get in an old-movie discussion with one, and you WILL eventually hear the K-word thrown back at you. Twenty bucks if you don't.) ...What you have to conquer is not Ignorance, but Fear and Terror of the Unknown.

Well, he did have that brief time in real-estate investment: But things didn't turn out well, and now he's putting his money into new Digital Streaming networks and content. 😛

Probably because they're still wondering whether that constituted an actual song.

No one knows why (well, I do--Show them another snarky wisecracking Comden & Green musical next, like "Band Wagon"), but "Singin' in the Rain" is always THE first movie to show the mythical Someone Who's Never Seen Old Movies Before. That's "The" as in, THE. Not Kane. Not Scarlett. Not Dorothy. Not Travis, Norman, Maria or Atticus. Just Don, Cathy, Cosmo & Lena. Think Singin' may be unique in that it's literally the last thing the old-movie decade-shamer expects: Five minutes into the Hollywood premiere, and Don's "Dignity" story, and the hooked moviegoer--and his bemused reaction of "Wait, this is, like...funny!"--realizes it's not going to be the psychotically smiling diving-bathing-beauty movie he pictured in his arrogant imagination when you said "MGM musical". Muahahahaaa...Why no, it ISN'T, is it? 😈

No, no, Diller meant, "Gosharoonie! Those newfangled 'Netflix' and 'Amazon' folks are the FUTURE!", just because stinky old "Roma" looked like it was the Oscar favorite (And once a starry-eyed new industry starts throwing babies out with bathwater, that's how Mr. Bubble always starts...)

The Karloff/Loy "Mask" was one of William Hearst's attempts at consulting movie projects at Warner, and he reportedly wanted to use a Fu-revives-the-Mongols story to push his anti-Asian "Yellow peril" issues in the press. It's.......pretty evident with Loy, even for Precode. Not that anyone's complaining, mind. 😅 I literally didn't know he was still alive, until he showed up with the other Whatever-Happened-To has-beens in an early 10's season of "Celebrity Apprentice". Where, surprisingly, he played along with the weekly challenges and didn't seem too much of a jerk, not as nice as Pauly Shore, but easily far above the unrepentant offscreen a-holery of Tom Green and Dennis Rodman.

Because of their central indoctrinated philosophy, even the most willing, open-minded Millennial literally thinks B&W films are "broken", because they came from a less technological time. (Or, apparently, that people from an earlier era couldn't see color, rather like dogs.) And why would people watch films that haven't been repaired? But for some reason, when you point out that Young Frankenstein and Psycho were conscious directorial choices--because the director wanted to--all of a sudden, they'll proclaim that those two were the only good B&W movies ever made..."Cool, they were, like, rebels!" Well, it's a START, anyway.

And, that Lin breaks into the exact same motormouth-patter that Dick Van Dyke broke into, at the exact same point in the middle of the equivalent "Jolly Holiday". (It's true that Mavis and Sybil have ways that are winning, and Prudence and Gwendolyn set your hearts spinning...) Although, what's the lesson the kids learn from their excursion? Not "Dads are people too", or "A spoonful of sugar", but "Don't trust the evil bad guy!"

Every time I watch YouTube's React channel showing kids who've never seen old movies, the reaction is always the same: First decade-shaming bravado ("This looks old, like....PRE-80's!"), then bemusement that it isn't what they'd expected, and then something hooks them, and then the need to look like they were the experts on it all along, lest anyone suspect. ("Oh, yeah, well, I totally knew that one, we used to watch that one on disk...") Nnnope--Nopenopenope. I GUARANTEE one of the first words that will come out of their mouths, and it starts with a K...And it drops snowglobes. One of the reasons Millennials are so openly militant about not letting, quote, "Elders" tell them to watch is that the very concept means giving up their "Everything from the 20th century was bad and wrong, and left us stranded in the rubble!". And the first way that manifests itself in movie discussions is the eternal What's So Great About This Citizen Kane Guy, Anyway? protest, even if it wasn't even the movie you recommended. Remember, if your birthyear has a 19, a new more responsible generation must clean up after the shameful legacy of your mistakes and the ignorance of your mindless dogma. My advice, take them to the library: Recently, there's been an inexplicably venomous Millennial-humor counterattack to paint the very concept of "Going to Blockbuster to rent Blu/DVD's" as some embarrassing shame of the 80's and 90's VHS days--qv. the recent Captain Marvel trailer (she crashes into a Blockbuster--It's set in the 90's, get it??)--and just another indignity their parents had to deal with in that humiliating Stone Age before the Internet empowered a new generation with independence. Or, as one hip-snarky Millennial-app commercial put it, apropos of nothing, "Remember back when you had to put on your pants to watch a movie?...Neither do we." (Remember when online streaming services actually had movies you'd heard of? Neither do I.) Then point out that all the movies there are available for free, tell him on the seemingly hush-hush-and-QT that "Nobody knows about this, but I've seen them offering these free classic movies for a while now", and all of a sudden, he'll think HE'S beat the system against all his other friends looking them up on YouTube. Just don't tell him he's doing exactly what his parents did on Friday nights, when they actually found movies they were looking for, and which studios tried to convince him for seven years was "dying out". ...THEN watch those React-channel reactions kick in. (Watch them pretend to be Instant Experts on movies they liked--"This is one of the great American Oscar-winning movies of the 20th century...")

No, I don't, but if you're posting about it, it MUST have been.

And now no longer going to happen: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/all-oscar-categories-to-air-live-after-hollywood-protest-1203141496/ (Well, by "now", I mean "As of two days ago", but...)

But instead, only makes you listen to Creedence Clearwater.

Of all the urban-mistakes that the Young Kids make, none will ever drive me to personal frothing warpath rage as fanboy-teens who don't even understand the basic concept of Angry Hitler Videos ("Huhhuh, he's all red-faced and shouting dirty words 'n stuff!"), and why the first one was ever made. If you don't know why the first one was ever made, call yourself no true home-theater fan: https://movieactivist.blogspot.com/2017/01/january-11-2017-longest-w-day-with.html The second one ever made was a deliberate viral-parody of the first one, of Hillary Clinton on the '08 campaign trail, and no AHYTV afterwards ever found two more perfect targets. Those who've actually seen Downfall (which now seems to be joining the Sony Classics among the streaming Orphans)--and get the joke of the first two videos--will sympathize with Ganz's interview. The original movie's an amazingly sympathetic performance, and almost retires the jersey for any other historical depiction of the Fall of Berlin. The fact that online Hitler fan-giggling has since made us forget Ganz in the Wings of Desire movies is only one more tragedy, but the unfortunate sequel might have also contributed somewhat.

It's already GONE out of most theaters by now. There weren't enough moviegoers excited to see something So Cool. (I will reserve any personal judgments from there...) Even though Merlin's incantation ("Anail nathrach...") was one of the Secret Neato 80's-Culture References in "Ready Player One", for some reason, "Excalibur" seems to be forgotten among both the great Big-80's movies (despite the fact that it's considered to be the official first 80's Summer of Love fantasy, one month before Raiders the Lost Ark), and among King Arthur movies. Remember when Warner's loopy Guy Ritchie action-movie bombed, and everyone said, "Well, we haven't had a King Arthur movie since Sean Connery and Richard Gere!"? (sigh)...For it is the doom of men that they forget. I would have put it on the list too, but under no circumstance will my conscience allow me to refer to the great Big-80's Classics as, quote, "Old" films. Given Boorman's direction, however, I have an overwhelming desire to sit Lil' Davey in a chair and make him watch it...He is over 17 and allowed to see it, right?

Y'mean, do some exist BESIDES Disney? Yyyyyeah, think there're a few.... 😐 Leaving aside all the manglings of Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee" for Will Rogers and Bing Crosby, the '53 "Knights" seem to be the earliest major-studio version worth note. One would call it neither Neat nor Cool.

Unfortunately, John "Bluto" Blutarsky showed up at the dinner, and, well...

Just watch "X-Men 2", and you'll see the whack-job Caligula rise to the surface again-- They always go nutty when they're handed the big-budget sequels and think they have their own private sandbox to play in, and Singer's sandcastles in Marvel's box were a bit.....revealing. (Including the now-infamous line of dialogue that was supposed to make fun of straight people, but has now been adopted by straight people to express their complaints.) In fact, most of the "Nutty" accusations started after that one, or at least they suddenly became a lot publicly trendier. Call yourself no film fan if you don't. It's not the commercial tourism-plugs of the Tonys, it's not the celeb-smooching of the Golden Globes, and it's not a variety special--It's your office's "Employee of the Year" banquet, where everyone sits around the catered tables in the Mariott ballroom until the boss gets up and makes amateur speeches, and then Bob from VP Sales gets an award, except this one is for Hollywood employees. Who make a more interesting product. One director on an Oscar documentary summed it up: "On Monday morning, you'll be back at 7am in Stage 3, spending 12 hours setting up pickup reshoots, and think 'This is what we do for a living'...But for one night, you get to think you're Cecil B. DeMille in Tinseltown, and remember why you're in this crazy business in the first place."

Although Monty Python may have inaccurately pegged that play as a target when they satirized English "working class" theater of the 60's:

Originally, this was supposed to come out in 2009, but Robert Downey Jr. also wanted to play Holmes at another studio, and had more money. I'm wondering if there isn't something to be read into Ferrell's inexplicable preoccupation with "current-movie" parodies of Downey's boxing-Holmes. (For those curious, "I the Jury" and "The Glass Web" haven't been restored for Blu3D, but the previously discussed "Inferno" has. Check earlier post for link. )

IMDb confirms my suspicions that it's a remake of Inferno (1953), considered to be one of the better 3-D B-movies of the 50's.

Well, sort of--He couldn't figure out what the topic was either. Like 99% of the Internet population, he heard "Remake", and his fingers were already typing the W-word. (So...is it..."Re-interpretations of classic stories", or "Frequently filmed source material, in different forms", or "Most frequent remake", or...? If it's "Re-interpretations", can I mention Steve Martin's versions of "Cyrano" and "Silas Marner"?)

Works for me. 👍 (Oh, and it's EqUUs, although Milos Forman did his best to keep Schaffer from ruining the theatrical cut of "Amadeus". Only to see the, quote, "Director's Cut" undo it.)