CineSage
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Posts posted by CineSage
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Yes, and if you'll look just a little bit more closely, you'll notice that all the titles your college station shows have fallen into the public domain. All they need do is buy cheap VHS or CD copies made from inferior prints and run them to their hearts' content, without having to pay rentals or royalties to anyone.
Hardly something to be mentioned in the same breath as TCM.
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You need look no further than Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to know who the greatest star child of all time is!
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FredC, you sound like all those teenagers who whine about the unwatchability of black-and-white films. No one wants to watch still photos -- if the actual motion picture footage exists -- but in the absence of it, there's no other way to know what the original filmmakers intended. You should be grateful that the studio employed a unit still photograher(s) to record the basic outline of each camera set-up, and that the still prints were preserved.
If all this is simply too taxing for your brain, there's always MTV...
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The problem is the monthly themes. A couple of films exploring that theme per day or night is fine, but when it runs film after film after film, for hours on end, that gets old fast, even when one likes the theme. When one doesn't, it makes TCM the channel of last resort.
A broader mix of films is always welcome.
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The subject bar says it all: I want to stop getting notifications in my e-mail whenever someone contributes another posting to any thred.
There's a control panel, but the only choices are "immediately," "once a day," and "once a week." There's no way to select never.
This stuff's clogging up my e-mail's "In" box. I want to be left alone! Please, tell me how to do this!
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If I have to listen to one more rendition of Waltzing Matilda, I'd rather have that radioactive cloud come right now to take me away.
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Of course, it does (the line is, in toto, The point, William Potter, is in not [/u]minding[/u] that it hurts.
Lawrence is, in simplest terms, a masochist, and it drives him to do much of what he does in the film. A corruption of the Calvinist ideal that tells adherents that things of value are only achieved through pain.
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Little-known? Hardly (and your politics are showing). What is little-known is that Fast and Trumbo, whatever their politics, detested each other. It's also not widely known that Fast had to publish the first few printings of his novel, Spartacus, himself (I have two copies, one autographed by the author), because publishers of the day were too skittish about its content.
What's truly frightening is that the forces in control of this country today have so much in common with Crassus, that they and their ilk would see a novel about an actual historical figure challenging a repressive system built on slavery and human misery would ever be considered "subversive."
The allegedly subversive content was, of course, the "radical" notion that slaves -- being wealth -- didn't belong to masters who were "entitled' to make an honest buck. Too close to the modern situation in the US where underpaid factory and service workers toil in often dangerous conditions (see recent stories about the two W. Virginia coal mine disasters) while the owners stop counting their profits only long enough to conspire to keep their employees from unionizing.
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What's fascinating is that, decades later, Groucho would say that he, his brothers, Paramount, and director Leo McCarey had no idea that they were making an anti-war film.
And that's just about the silliest thing I ever hoid!
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That's William Hurt, and Kathleen Turner. And BODY HEAT's not a remake, only a painfully pale copy of DOUBLE INDEMNITY.
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BODY HEAT's a pale copy of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, made with cloyingly self-conscious reverence for the work of vastly more talented filmmakers.
The biggest problem with BODY HEAT is that it lacks a character analagous to DOUBLE INDEMNITY's Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), who serves as the story's moral center, the one against whom all the other characters are measured. Moreover, the cat-and-mouse relationship between Keyes and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), in which Neff thinks he's so much more clever than his across-the-desk co-worker -- and, when it's too late, finds it's just the opposite -- adds a subtext and dramatic core to the film that makes BODY HEAT seem like the soulless, hollow film it is.
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It was issued on Region 1 DVD by Universal about four years ago, but has since gone out of print. The transfer's merely adequate, and there is a trailer.
Talk of this makes it all the more critical that Universal issue a Billy Wilder box set, with all the films he and Charles Brackett (although Brackett refused to work on DOUBLE INDEMITY; Wilder collaborated with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay) made at Paramount prior to 1949 (at which point the films still belong to Paramount), especially my favorite, FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, a neglected minor masterpiece.
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Do you mean phony specs for surgical instruments? I leave that to the FDA.
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One of my favorite films. I collect anything and everything on it. Not that it's perfect; it has a hard time deciding whether it wants to be a swashbuckler, or a historical epic (they're not the same thing), bit it's also unusual in that it preserves Sir Walter Scott's message about the evils of anti-Semitism (probably due to the influence of MGM studio head Dore Schary, one of Hollywood's better-known liberals).
You're quite right about Robert Taylor; a more wooden actor never drew breath (he did have great hair, though). As for Sanders, he gives the only fully-textured performance in the film (remember that he'd won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar two years earlier for ALL ABOUT EVE; MGM was lucky to sign him for this kind of picture). Though the villain, it's him -- and Rebecca -- that you feel for. To be fair to R. Taylor, though, the character of Ivanhoe, is the least interesting one in the novel, with the possible exception of Rowena. If only Stewart Granger had been cast at Sir W o I, and not Taylor!
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It disappears the moment you look away from the screen. The engineers found a way to turn every TV in the world into an interactive monitor (see "1984, N.S.A. spy records), that can detect where your eyes are pointed at any given moment. As such, it appears only when someone can see it.
Of course, wearing a tin-foil hat renders it invisible permanently.
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Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhardt?
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Kiss me!
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The part about writing on the star was mere hyperbole, but the mispronunciations on Osborne's part are real. While his mistakes aren't as egregious as were those by that ignorant nitwit, Bob Dorian, on AMC several years ago, he still needs to sit down and do his homework, the sort he presumably does when he writes his column for The Hollywood Reporter. Of course the material he reads is compiled, and probably written, by others, but that doesn't absolve Osborne, or relieve him of the responsibility of vetting its accuracy before it passes his lips.
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THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE SLEPT HERE, starring Jack Benny (or was that THE HONKING HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT?)
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Is this a movie with Old Italians?
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THE THIRTY-FOOT BRIDE OF CANDY ROCK.
Well, whadda I get?
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Hey, fella, just buy a DVD player with a zoom feature (a lot of inexpensive models have them these days); then you can blow up a letterboxed film to your heart's content, so you can see right up the actors' noses.
The rest of us like letterbox just fine (though it does helf to have a 16x9 hi-def set (if only the electronics manufacturers had settled on a more felicitous 2:20 screen-size ratio, though).
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It's about time. I hope that Universal's had the good sense to go back to the prints of SIGN OF THE CROSS and THE CRUSADES restored by UCLA several years ago (and that were shown on AMC and TCM). They also might've chosen THE BUCCANEER (1938) as the fourth film, instead of UNION PACIFIC, though they both belong, more properly, in a collection of DeMille's Americana film,s and not the European historical epics (interestingly, DeMille tended to show his Fascist colors in the latter; while flag-waving, the Americana films were less judgmental, though they did whitewash and make apologies for Manifest Destiny and genocide agianst indiginous populations, but that was par for all Hollywood movies of the period).
Now, if only Universal will give us a box set of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett Paramount films, including DOUBLE INDEMNITY (long out of print on DVD, and in need of re-mastering, even if it were still available), A FOREIGN AFFAIR, THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR and, most emphatically, FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, a long-neglected masterpiece, and one of my all-time favorite films.
Dietrich! Scarlett Empress!
in Information, Please!
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von Sternberg's film is one of the great triumphs of style over content, and absolutely irresistible. Too bad the Breen Code had just come in, and Sternberg couldn't go into more detail about Catherine the Great and her horse! I'm lucky to have found the DVD, mispriced, for $14.99.
The film's also a very interesting contrast to MGM's Marie Antoinette, made a couple of years later. They tell similar stories, and MGM's is bigger and more sumptuous, of course, but a bland, crashing bore compared with The Scarlet Empress. Sternberg's films of this period are also interesting when compared with Cecil B. DeMille, who was making his own sex-saturated epics elsewhere on the Paramount lot at the same time. The public obviously preferred DeMille's more prosaic approach, since he became the most powerful director in Hollywood for the next 25 years, while Sternberg's career petered out in the late 1930s.
PS: It's spelled Criterion.