FredCDobbs

> For me what nostalgia I feel is almost camp. I have > to acknowledge that the Soviets presented a serious > threat, although missiles in the hands of the USSR > was probably safer for the world than all the nuclear > material that ended up missing after they fell. I think "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was a parable on the Cold War too. The American and Russian Communists were said to be mindless zombies who all thought alike and had no emtoions, like the pod people in the movie. And who does the hero call for help? The local police? No. The military? No. He calls the FBI.

> It occurred to me it must've taken a lot of courage > for the first astronauts to venture into space -- > especially after seeing all the horrors that awaited > them via movies!!! Yep, I would fly in one of those early space ships. Or in the modern ones either.

Yeah, the science lessons were good in some films, such as "Destination Moon".

> Speaking of "The Blob," found myself sneaking over > from the Twilight Zone marathon on SciFi to TCM's > "space travel" offerings... Blob... on... sofa... > Yeah, me too.

> I see the religious allegory in DtESS, but I'm a > preacher's kid and an English Lit major, so I tend to > see it everywhere. This is the kind of allegory > that's both beautiful and inspiring. > > That said, "Red Planet Mars" was almost painful to > watch, both because of the cultural stereotypes and > the cold war drumbeating (read the imdb comments on > the movie -- there are people still fighting over > it). I found "The 27th Day" nearly as bad -- the idea > that the solution to all of our problems is a bomb > that kills only the "bad people" was just disturbing. I never thought I?d look back on that era with a feeling of nostalgia, but I do when I see these old films. It all seems a lot better now since the Russians didn?t blow us up as we thought they might do.

> The irony is that now I LOVE to watch almost ANY > movie or show set in NEW YORK.Go figure! I do too. In fact I spent about 4 months living in New York in 1966, but I found that in order for me to live full-time in New York, I would need to have one of the higher paid jobs in the city.

Woo Wooo.... Gidget is next! This is a very socially significant film. Cliff Robertson turns out to be a very honorable guy. Films like this contributed to the great increase in the population of California in the '60s and '70s. Back when I was a kid in school in the Deep South, things in our location seemed too simple and boring. Many of us saw the teen films of the big cities like Chicago and New York, and we saw the teen films of California. Some of us liked the California teen movies better, so we wound up in California after we got out into the world. Some of the others went to New York. Blah. I loved California while I was there. I mean, wouldn't you like to head for California back in the days when the teens were having so much fun and there were no hoodlums among them?

Brad...come back! Come back, Brad! Brad! Please come back, Brad!

> > Lol, now we've got "The Blob". This was a big hit > > back in the '50s. > > I haven't seen this in years. What a treat! What a > great camp classic! What a lot of fun! Don't you wish > all bad movies could be this enjoyable? :-) Lol, yeah. When I was in high school, I loved those movies where some of the teenagers appeared to be smarter than all of the adults. We never noticed that the boy teenagers all looked like they were in their 30s. Oh boy! Now some beach party movies!!

Lol, now we've got "The Blob". This was a big hit back in the '50s. The theme song used to be played on the rock and roll stations. I used to be like the teenage boy in the parked car, now I look like the old man who comes out of the house with the lantern. LOL.

Speaking of religion in Sci-Fi movies, let me ask you and everyone else something.... study ?The Day the Earth Stood Still? and see if you think it might have religious overtones. The super-guy arrives from the heavens, he brings a message of peace and good will, but he also brings a message of the doom of the earth if we humans don?t straight out and live right. To show humans his super-human power, he performs a ?miracle?. The military is highly suspicious of him, so they track him down and kill him. But, he rises from the dead and gives one last message to earth people, then he ascends back into heaven again, promising the earth people that they?ll hear from him again, especially if they don?t straighten out. And then there is the girl who speaks up for him, but she doesn?t have a romance with him. She realizes his importance to the whole world.

Hi. It was an interesting movie, huh? I saw it one other time, on TCM several years ago. I was a kid when it was first released. I used to go see all the space-related films, but sometimes I lived in small towns that had only one theater, so I didn't get to see all of them. I think Andrea King was the crook's girlfriend in "Ride the Pink Horse." I haven't seen "The Next Voice You Hear" since it was first released. I'd sure like to see it again. There was a lot of serious and profound thinking going on back at that time, because of what we were learning about the Nazis and the Commies, and because of the invention of the A-bomb. Certainly Hitler would have blown up the whole earth if he had had a chance there at the end of the war. Now we've got similar problems with other crazy guys around the world.

I think he sounds a little like George Montgomery or Robert Taylor.

Hey, we're going to the moon and we're going in Technicolor, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The Man From Planet X is on now! I love this film. It's rather simple, but I like the spaceman. He seemes to be a nice guy. This is one of the first spaceman movies of the '50s.

I can't remember the details of the film. I saw it on TCM years ago. I thought it was very interesting. It is one of the few sci-fi space films that bring in the issue of religion. The Bible is filled with strange flying things and men dressed in strange bright gleaming suits and angels coming down from heaven and giving messages to earth people.

and in the early am Monday. Red Plant Mars has religious overtones (Jesus might live on Mars) Man from Planet X - Very early "man-from-outer-space" movie, very good!

> I am going to be relaxing tonight. lol, last night, > while watching The Saint or The Falcon, I went to the > kitchen to get some potato chips, and not watching > where I was going on the way back, I tripped on a > speaker wire and fell against some things. lol, I > wasn't like the old lady who said, "I've fallen and I > can't get up", rather, I was "Let me stay on the > floor for the next several minutes. I'm in too much > pain to get up." But I'm generally okay, I know how it feels. But it's not your fault. I'm sure that gravity has gotten stronger on earth since I was in high school 47 years ago. Everything was easy to lift back then. I could jump 6 feet high back then. But with this new modern gravity, everything is heavy and I can't jump at all.

Oh. OK.

Uhh, why do some people dislike CineSage? I don't find any problems with his posts.

> I was waiting for Fred to answer, but this got > "buried" in newer stuff. That wasn't a zoom (as > such), which is done with the camera in place and the > lens elements adjusted to (apparently) "move" closer > or further. It's called a "tracking shot" (or maybe > a crane shot), since the camera itself moves toward > or away from the subject. I don't remember the last scene in "Young and Innocent". But you are right about tracking shots. That's when the camer is on a dolly (a small four-wheel truck or platform). The dolly is pushed toward or away from a subject. A zoom lens shot can imitate a trucking shot, somewhat, but the perspective changes. I think with a dolly shot, objects at different distances from the camera appear to get further apart. With a zoom lens shot, they can seem to move closer together. Of course some dollys are big, they can even be a big truck that is heavy enough to carry a boom or a crane on the back flatbed, so that the shot can "truck" (move forward or backward) and the camera can raise up and down, as in the opening shot of "Touch of Evil", the scene where the bomb is planted and later blows up the car as the car drives into Mexico. That was done with a big dolly (possibly a big truck) with a crane arm on it, with the camera operator probably sitting next to the camera and aiming it all during that complex motion. The zoom in on the close up of Stewart in Wonderful Life, in the bar prayer scene, started out as a dolly shot from wide to medium close. Then the zoom in closer to his face was apparently done one frame at a time in an optical printer, by moving the printer's camera a little closer to the each film frame and by refocusing the lens.

> After Mr Gower, Warner's biggest role is as the > avuncular lama, Chang, in Capra's LOST > HORIZON. I think he is best remembered as Chang. Also, he played Chen Tsu in "The Adventures of Marco Polo"

Oh boy, here are some audio excerpts from a George Lewis Jazz recording from the 1960s. I have this record. I used to hear this guy and his band live at Preservation Hall in 1963-64. An old friend of mine introduced me to Lewis. A white British version of ?Down by the Riverside? was in the movie tonight. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jazz-Funeral-Orleans-George-Lewis/dp/B0000058RC/sr=1-28/qid=1167454057/ref=sr_1_28/202-6769774-4763849?ie=UTF8&s=music

I remember in '63-'65, every now and then, one of the bands would travel to England to play a series of concerts and they made a lot of money doing that. Also, every now and then, some young British guys would come over and hire a band for a day -- for about $500 -- they would rent an old dance hall (plenty of them in the black neighborhoods) and they would record a couple of hours of the bands, and then go back to England and release new record albums of their music. This was the last of the real 1920s jazz bands.

Dang, I didn't record it. I didn't know they would have all that jazz stuff in it. I used to go to Preservation Hall back in the early '60s. I think it was started around 1960s by a young guy and his wife from the North. He went around New Orleans rounding up as many old Jazz guys he would find. Many of them no longer played in bands, since the music had gone out of style with the Big Band era of the 1940s. Many of the old guys were either retired or worked as janitors. The young guy got them all back together and they were still as good as they had been in the 1920s and '30s. when I lived there, I didn't fully realize what a rare era in history I was living in, because within the next 15 to 20 years all of the old-timers would be gone. Preservation Hall was a small room in an old building in the French Quarter. It would only seat about 100 people at a time, but it was a very popular place. I even photographed a few old Jazz funerals in '63 and '64, with a sound camera and with some of the old guys playing in the bands. I've still got some of that old film. I need to find it and try to sell it to the History Channel or some music museum.