King Rat
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Posts posted by King Rat
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3 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I don't wanna hype it up too much for you- but I like BOMBSHELL a lot, it is a brilliant early example of meta-storytelling, honestly it would make a pretty good double feature with ADAPTATION (2004?) It is a story within a story, a cinema verite about the fakest place on earth: HOLLYWOOD CA. 1933.
I'm also a fan of Bombshell. Lee Tracy is lots of fun as the fast-talking agent.
3 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:MERYL remains on probation with me since getting eaten by the chicken in DON'T LOOK UP.
But.
Her work in A CRY IN THE DARK is ONE HELL of a piece of acting.
Yes, I think A Cry in the Dark is one of Meryl's best. It can be a hard film to watch, with a miscarriage of justice and Meryl playing such an unsympathetic character, the polar opposite of Susan Hayward's sanitized "innocent" in I Want To Live! Sam Neill's scene on the witness stand is great, too.
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Casablanca was originally planned to star Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan.
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On 1/25/2022 at 12:49 AM, Bogie56 said:
Irene Handl, who for a while seemed to be in every British film made, as Mrs. Kite in I'm All Right Jack (1959).
Terry-Thomas as Major Hitchcock in I'm All Right Jack (1959).
Irene Handl is also hilarious as David Warner's Marx-spouting mother in Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment.
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Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland were going to star in Carousel.
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13 hours ago, Bogie56 said:
Tuesday, January 25
Kay Francis SOTM
6:15 a.m. Storm at Daybreak (1933). Kicking off WWI.
Bogie, were they right on the "fringe" of WWI? You gotta love Kay's costumes!
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Many actresses wanted the role of Fannie Brice in the original stage version of Funny Girl. The song "People" was specifically written for Anne Bancroft.
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4 hours ago, cinemaman said:
Alfred Hitchcock wanted to cast Vera Miles in the movie Vertigo. Vera was having an baby at the time and could not do Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock made an deal with Columbia head Harry Cohn , Kim Novak for Vertigo if James Stewart would star in Bell Book and Candle.
I think there's still one indication that Vertigo was intended for Vera Miles. Judy, the woman who looks so much like the dead Madeleine, says she is from Kansas. So was Vera Miles, who had represented Kansas in the Miss America pageant.
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From last night's Noir Alley, Over-Exposed: Isobel Elsom as the society lady Mrs. Payton Grange and Donald Randolph as the queenly owner of Cafe Coco.
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8 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
it's kind of like watching the contents of a spiral binder from a 1980s middle school get the FANTASIA treatment
Great description of Heavy Metal. I saw it on its first run in NY when I was visiting someone who did not become the love of my life (thank you, oh spirits of the universe!). The two movies we saw, at his choice, during my visit were Heavy Metal and the Bo Derek Tarzan and the Ape Man. Definitely not a marriage made in heaven! He had seen Miles O'Keefe, Bo's Tarzan, in a New York gay bar and said that Miles had a high-pitched voice about an octave higher than you would expect from his manly frame.
What happened as we were walking to see Heavy Metal was a better story--in retrospect--than the actual movie. A car full of teenagers slowed down, and one of them threw a chocolate milkshake all over me. Hair, shirt, pants. The shirt was ruined. If you haven't had a good laugh since the beginning of the pandemic, I'll admit that at the time I had (brace yourself) a curly perm just like Tony Geary as Luke on General Hospital. No doubt the milkshake was my cosmic punishment for the bad hairstyle.
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1 hour ago, nakano said:
Untamed 1955 20th Century Fox . Directed by Henry King. Tyrone Power Susan Hayward Richard Egan Agnes Moorehead. Story set around 1890 ,over several years, in South Africa during or just before the Boers War.I say before because Power is a Dutch rebel leading. a guerilla against England.Nice cinematography filmed at different places in South Africa,Hayward had to stay in the USA because of her first divorce battle was going on,she did not want to lose a possible custody of her twins. Power is not present all the time, reappearing each time after several months or years,I guess he had to do another film or something. The story is good somewhat reminds me of Out of Africa 30 years before not only the location but the relationship of the two leads. Good battle scenes against the Zulus,Could have inspired Stanley Baker for the sixties movie,Zulu.Last film after 18 years for Power at Fox,he became a free agent. 111 minutes 7/10
Untamed can also be seen as another variation of Gone With the Wind, like Reap the Wild Wind. Susan Hayward, in her days as Edythe Marriner, actually read for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. Tyrone Power plays the Rhett Butler figure to Susan Hayward's Scarlett in Untamed, which begins in Ireland, ancestral home of the O'Haras. Untamed isn't bad, though I got the impression that a lot of story had been condensed, especially in the last third of the movie.
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28 minutes ago, nakano said:
The Lost Moment 1947 Produced by Walter Wanger dist by Universal .Directed by Martin Gabel . Robert Cummings Susan Hayward Agnes Moorehead. Great gothic type mystery drama about a publisher going to Venice to try to obtain the lost letters of an ancient poet,Moorehead is the sole surviving relative-she is a 105 years old, you will not recognize her under a ton of make-up, Hayward is excellent in her almost surnatural role,as for Cummings i personnally never liked him as a leading man but he is ok.89 minutes 7/10
This sounds like a version or imitation of Henry James' novella The Aspern Papers. I have never heard of this film. Did you see it online?
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A shamefully neglected film is Almost You (1984). I would never seen it if the daughter of a friend hadn't mentioned that it was her favorite film from that year. Brooke Adams has been in an accident and needs physical therapy. Her husband, Griffin Dunne, begins to fall for the physical therapist (Karen Young). In an era of open marriage (or not), what is he to do? The film maneuvers between comedy and drama, and we're not sure where this is going (in a good way). There's a job interview scene that will be especially funny to anyone who has ever interviewed candidates for a job. Dana Delany also has a small but important part in the film.
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2 hours ago, chaya bat woof woof said:2 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR is without a doubt a very disturbing movie, but Diane Keaton's excellent performance always helps me to keep on watching despite some uncomfortable imagery in here.
Interestingly, this came out the same year as Keaton's oscar-winning turn in ANNIE HALL, I think her award was as much for this film as it was for Woody's movie.
Rex Reed wrote "If Diane Keaton doesn't win the Oscar for Looking for Mr. Goodbar, there is no God." She did win the Oscar, but for another film, so I'm not sure what that tells us about the existence of God! Quite a few Oscar winners have been helped by another performance the same year.
By the way, we all seem to be on the same page about Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
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2 hours ago, Bogie56 said:
Hardy with Nicole Courcel in Sundays and Cybele (1962). There is a fantastic dvd extra interview of Hardy talking about this film on youtube. Check it out - just do a search. You will not be disappointed. I've watched it several times! He is great conversationalist. It is really a great story of how he came to be in this film. He talks about juggling Hatari with this film. Hatari lead to his buying a place in Africa. There is also one with Ms. Courcel.
Very sad news. Thank you, Jakeem for posting this thread.
Sundays and Cybele used to be hard to obtain. I'll have to look for it again. And jakeem and Bogie, thanks for mentioning The One That Got Away, a film I've never heard of. Hardy Kruger was wonderful in The Flight of the Phoenix, and seeing that again would be a great way to remember him.
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A much too neglected film from 1980 is Serial, starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld. Fortunately it is now on DVD; for a long time it wasn't. I remember laughing myself silly at this satire on the self-absorbed denizens of Marin County. Casting Martin Mull as the straight man among all the loonies seemed like odd casting at the time, but it worked. Tuesday Weld is the wife who falls for every fad going, and brother, there were a lot of fads going. And where else does Christopher Lee get to play a gay biker?
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1 hour ago, King Rat said:
Understood. Can't think of the guy without remembering the Ricky Gervais comment from the Golden Globes. Haven't seen the Meryl version of Into the Woods, only the PBS filming that CinemaInternational mentioned. That was good, though I had seen an amateur production which had stronger actors in a few roles, especially the Baker.
59 minutes ago, LornaHansonForbes said:WHAT DID GERVAIS SAY?
I honestly think there are entire chat rooms and communities on the Internet dedicated to speculating aloud as to just why James Corden has been forced on us as a People, Speculation ranges from a deal with the devil to agreeing to betray us to the robot overlords who run the matrix.
The Ricky Gervais comment about James Corden went something like this: "This year James Corden was a big *****. He was also in the Cats movie."
Before the She-Devil movie, there was a British mini-series called Confessions of a She-Devil (the title of the novel), starring Patricia Hodge and Annette Badland. It was much better and worth seeking out. As you can see from the clips, Meryl has to do a fair amount of acting to get the accent which Patricia Hodge could take for granted.
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4 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I can't with JAMES CORDEN.
Understood. Can't think of the guy without remembering the Ricky Gervais comment from the Golden Globes. Haven't seen the Meryl version of Into the Woods, only the PBS filming that CinemaInternational mentioned. That was good, though I had seen an amateur production which had stronger actors in a few roles, especially the Baker.
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25 minutes ago, CinemaInternational said:
10 Rillington Place would have been very controversial in 1971 for both the serial killing and the abortion angle as well. I know Richard Attenborough only took the role of the killer to protest capital punishment for the death of the man John Hurt played. I also know that the film has some weird sort of cult following. I saw it about 5 or 6 years ago because some man on a Oscar-oriented messageboard I was part of would never stop talking about it as a masterpiece; very unusual because the film was released 17 years before he was born and he was obsessed with keeping up with practically every new release, not so much classics, and I really don't think its a film that gets revived or televised a lot.
PS As another resident Meryl fan, I have to cosign the disdain for The Hours. It stranded a truly brilliant cast (I usually like Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Miranda Richardson as well) on a dreary, self-important dirge of a story with the pacing of an arthritic snail on sleeping pills. Phillip Glass' moody score was virtually the only interesting thing about it. I think you can chalk up that failure mostly due to an overpraised book propped up by a Pulitzer prize and an ambitious publishing company [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, one of the Pulitzer 's two favorite publishing companies; The other is Knopf, which has an extremely high quality air but more mainstream reading appeal as well. Knopf is my favorite publishing company for contemporary {1920s onward} fiction. ], Weinstein, Scott Rudin, and an overly gullible Academy.
Second postscript, I grew up in a library from the time I was four weeks old. If I go on about books or publishing companies that most wouldn't notice, that's why. Books are in the blood. Just like the movies.
As much as I hate to disagree with both Lorna and CinIntl, I like The Hours and feel a deep personal connection to it. Not so much the Nicole Kidman with a fake nose winning the Oscar part (you know I mean Nicole winning the Oscar, not the fake nose winning the Oscar, or did it?), but I have almost never been moved by a child performance (I could stop right there) as I was by Jack Rovello as Julianne Moore's abandoned son. I love that this super-arty film had better twists than any thriller of the day: a character assumed to be dead returns; one character turns out to be the older version of another character; one character takes an unexpected exit from the film. All of these twists work for me, and they make the film. In a film with so many great actresses, Jack Rovello and Ed Harris give the standout performances. I also love Julianne Moore in this film, Allison Janney adds a human touch of comedy amongst the Great Ladies of the Theatah, and Toni Collette in a small part is, as always, memorable and real. This is not to slight Meryl, great as always.
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1 hour ago, speedracer5 said:
I also watched No Way Out on the Criterion Channel. I watched it in tribute to Poitier and it was his first film. I was shocked at how blatant the racism was in this film and how mean and nasty Richard Widmark's character was. There was no beating around the bush in terms of addressing racism in this film. Widmark's character did not screw around and was one of the nastiest characters I've ever seen in a film. There's no way that this film would be made today. I think this movie would make a great double feature with Odds Against Tomorrow if that was the type of double feature that someone would want to put together.
You could pair them with a "Liberals Playing Racists" theme, and add Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.
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Mr. Lucky has one of his best performances, and Laraine Day and Charles Bickford are great, too. I'm very fond of this one.
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2 hours ago, midwestan said:
You're right about "Two Weeks In Another Town" being over-the-top with its campy performances by the principals. Still, it's one of those guilty pleasures that I enjoy watching whenever it shows up on TCM's schedule. There are so many scenes where you wonder which actor or actress scored the highest decibel reading while shouting their lines! That climactic scene toward the end where the maniacal Kirk Douglas is speeding down the winding, twisting road with Cyd Charisse screaming at the top of her lungs had me thinking....had this film been made 30 years earlier, Charisse might have given Faye Wray a run for her money as the 'queen of scream'!
She probably felt she had to scream to keep up with Claire Trevor.
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16 hours ago, Dargo said:
And MissW, you might also remember Kiley as the teacher who the delinquent students rough up and break his record collection in the film Blackboard Jungle...
Richard Kiley is even better known as a Broadway leading man, star of Kismet and Man of La Mancha. To some, his voice will be familiar from cast albums. He introduced "Stranger in Paradise" and "The Impossible Dream."
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2 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
TUBI TV continues to be where it's at, I came across THE STUNT MAN (1980)- which I have been curious about for some time.
[note: this is not an easy film to describe or review]
**EDIT: IT OCCURRED TO ME: THIS FILM IS LIKE WATCHING AN ACTION FILM WRITTEN BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV (with a REWRITE from VONNEGUT perhaps)
It stars STEVE RAILSBECK as a man on the run, wanted for murder, who winds up being (more or less) kidnapped and forced into work as a stunt man on a troubled WWI picture that is being shot- for some reason never explained but amusing nonetheless- AT THE HOTEL CORONADO (in San Diego I think?) by a MACHIAVELLIAN MEGALOMANIACAL DIRECTOR played to b!tchy, deranged, grandiose perfection by PETER O'TOOLE, doing A wicked DAVID LEAN, but DAVID LEAN as one of the many personalities of his psychotic character in THE RULING CLASS.
It's a wild film that blurs reality and challenges the viewer- it's META to THE CORE, but interestingly so, and even though it's 20 minutes too long and there's one scene in the third act between RAILSBACK and BARBARA HERSHEY, as the film's subservient, duplicitous leading lady that TRIED MY PATIENCE...
But, not even knowing that much about film, you cannot help but be DAZZLED by the direction, which is showy because it can be, but not so showy as to interfere with the story. there are some shots and stunts in this movie that are years ahead of their time- amazing they were done before computers, and stunning for it.
the film got OSCAR NOMINATIONS for BEST DIRECTOR for RICHARD RUSH (which he really deserved) and BEST ACTOR for O'TOOLE, it's a shame that his part verges on being supporting, but in terms of performance, he's a LEAD all the way.
it's a rare example of a film that was nominated for BEST DIRECTOR but not BEST PICTURE and that's kinda how it shoulda been.
good luck getting the theme song out of your head:
I got to see The Stunt Man at one of the TCM Film Festivals with Richard Rush present. The film had been restored and looked great on the big screen. Though my memory is hazy, I believe it had been years since Rush had seen it on the big screen. The audience was very enthusiastic. For whatever reasons, Rush never had the sustained directing career in the movies that his talent deserved. I'm with 100% about Best Director nomination being deserved, omission of Best Picture nom OK, and that Peter O'Toole, in a supporting role, feels like a leading man.
The Paul Brodeur novel is no more linear or coherent than the film. I had seen the film on television and realized, after seeing it on the big screen, just how many nude scenes had been cut for TV. No wonder it was so difficult to follow. Yes, it was filmed at the Hotel Coronado in San Diego, where Some Like It Hot was filmed, and where L. Frank Baum stayed when he was writing some of the later Oz books.
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Beth, thanks for booping this thread back to the first page. Since devil possession has been a recent theme on Days of Our Lives, which I watch only occasionally, I was delighted to learn that 1) the devil has left Marlena--or was scared out by Jackee, I missed this--and has instead possessed Marlena's grandson Johnny who 2) because the devil made him do it, dumped his new sweet black wife, Chanel, who 3) was consoled in bed by her girlfriend (in both senses) Alli who 4) felt guilty and wanted to confess to her boyfriend Trip. It ain't yer grandma's soap opera!
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I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
Sam Neill cute? You betcha!! And not many actors as manly and good-looking as he would risk playing a not very bright weakling as he does in A Cry in the Dark.