What Are You Watching Now?

[TopBilled]

Watching ACCIDENT (1967) on the Criterion Channel. I've been wanting to see this film for years, and it somehow eluded me...till now!

[Peebs]

On 4/2/2022 at 10:22 PM, TopBilled said:

Watching ACCIDENT (1967) on the Criterion Channel. I've been wanting to see this film for years, and it somehow eluded me...till now!

What did you think of it?  I watched it a few years ago and remember it having a good cast: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker and a young Michael.York.  I also remember it as being very Harold Pinter-y.  Looking at imdb, it seems like people either loved it or hated it.

[Peebs]

Jimmy Saville: A British Horror Story (2022). A two part documentary about the (strangely) popular DJ turned TV host and philanthropist, Jimmy Saville.  I heard of him before the scandal broke and then read a little bit about the allegations after his death.

The first episode details his career.  As an American, I found it fascinating how popular this odd character was.  He hosted Top of the Pops and a show called Jim'll Fix It, granting wishes to kids. He also raised millions of dollars for charity even volunteering at a hospital for spinal injuries.  Prince Charles sought Seville out for advice, he was friends with Margaret Thatcher.  He was eventually knighted. 

The second episode shows that there were rumors about his personal life.  He never married.  He claimed to have had numerous flings but no one ever met a girlfriend or boyfriend.  He spent a strange amount time visiting a reformatory for teen girls.  No one could ever pin down any truth behind the rumors.  In his later years, reporters would gently broach the subject.  He'd joke about it or just dismiss it as the price of being famous.  Less than a year after his death, hundreds of victims came out with their similar stories of abuse.  It's a disturbing story of how fame and power blinded people to his monstrous behavior for decades.

[TopBilled]

3 hours ago, Peebs said:

What did you think of it?  I watched it a few years ago and remember it having a good cast: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker and a young Michael.York.  I also remember it as being very Harold Pinter-y.  Looking at imdb, it seems like people either loved it or hated it.

Yes, the reviews on there are rather intense. LOL

I enjoyed it, and I usually dislike nonlinear films. I thought the performances were uniformly excellent. Joseph Losey is an excellent director, and it's interesting to see how he guides Dirk Bogarde alongside Stanley Baker...since prior to ACCIDENT, he had directed them both multiple times but never together.

In a way I feel that this story resembles VICTIM, since in both pictures, Dirk is a married man with secrets to hide. 

Jlewis has not seen ACCIDENT yet, and I suggested he watch it. I think we're going to review it on the Essentials thread in August, since our theme that month will be "Follow Ups" and we can follow up on what we wrote about VICTIM.

[Technicolor33]

Angels in the outfield on good ‘ol TCM

[TopBilled]

Yesterday's episode of Emmerdale. One of the best in a long time.

[LuckyDan]

Lots of familiar faces in this episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour story, "The Monkey's Paw - A Retelling" including a young Stuart Margolin and Lee Majors. Original air date April 19, 1965.

[LuckyDan]

I Love to Singa

 

[TopBilled]

Joan Crawford

[LuckyDan]

If I had known forty years ago there was so much skin on T.J. Hooker, I would have tuned in. 

I switched over to the Decades marathon a few hours ago and every time I look up at the screen there's a h@@chie mama shakin it. 

[TopBilled]

1 hour ago, LuckyDan said:

If I had known forty years ago there was so much skin on T.J. Hooker, I would have tuned in. 

I switched over to the Decades marathon a few hours ago and every time I look up at the screen there's a h@@chie mama shaken it. 

Thank the folks at Aaron Spelling Productions. Another Aaron Spelling crime show from the 80s that has a lot of scantily clad women is Matt Houston.

[cinemaman]

I   watched  an  very good  episode   of  Hotel.  Its  from  season  one  episode  number  ten  The  Offer.  This  episode has  an  excellent  cast  Lorenzo  Lamas,  Diane  Kay ,  Liberace,  Margaret  O'Brien ,  Donald  O'Connor ,  Craig  Stevens  and  Eleanor  Parker. What  made  this  episode  special ,  you  had  Anne  Baxter  and  Eleanor  Parker  fighting  over the  services  of   James  Brolin..  Donald  O'Connor  and  Margaret  O'Brien  played  Liberace  fans. They  got  Liberace  to  play  As  Times  Goes  By  ,  as  Liberace  gave  them an  special performance.  Lorenzo  Lamas  and  Diane  Kay   play  an  romantic couple  for  the  younger  set.

[TopBilled]

On 5/1/2022 at 9:27 PM, cinemaman said:

I   watched  an  very good  episode   of  Hotel.  Its  from  season  one  episode  number  ten  The  Offer.  This  episode has  an  excellent  cast  Lorenzo  Lamas,  Diane  Kay ,  Liberace,  Margaret  O'Brien ,  Donald  O'Connor ,  Craig  Stevens  and  Eleanor  Parker. What  made  this  episode  special ,  you  had  Anne  Baxter  and  Eleanor  Parker  fighting  over the  services  of   James  Brolin..  Donald  O'Connor  and  Margaret  O'Brien  played  Liberace  fans. They  got  Liberace  to  play  As  Times  Goes  By  ,  as  Liberace  gave  them an  special performance.  Lorenzo  Lamas  and  Diane  Kay   play  an  romantic couple  for  the  younger  set.

Sounds like a great one. There is one where Ginger Rogers guest stars that I have been anxious to see.

[LuckyDan]

Janice Rule and the tragic Terry Burnham in the TZ entry "Nightmare as a Child," which first aired April 29, 1960.

[TopBilled]

This one from 1954:

[LuckyDan]

The Honeymooners, "Better Living Through Television" more popularly known as The Chef of the Future. First aired November 12, 1955.

 

[Peebs]

Enough Said (2013) Starring Julia Louis Dreyfuss and James Gandolfini.   With Catherine Keener, Toni Collette, and Ben Falcone.

I saw this in the theater when it came out but watched it again recently and still really enjoyed it.   Louis Dreyfuss is a divorced mom struggling with the idea of an empty nest when her daughter graduates HS.  She meets Albert (James Gandolfini) who is also divorced with a daughter about to leave for college.  The two have a nice chemistry and the film addresses some of the issues of dating in middle age.   There is a complication when Louis Dreyfuss discovers that her new friend Keener turns out to be Gandolfini's ex-wife.  She keeps this revelation to herself.  As JLD starts listening to Keener complain about her ex-husband it begins to poison her romance with Gandolfini. It sounds a little sit-com-ish but as JLD explains it she was trying to protect herself from getting hurt but ultimately, she sabotaged her romance with someone she really liked.  She missed how shallow Keener is.  

It's a pity that Gandolfini didn't have more roles like this where he plays a normal guy not some off-shoot of Tony Soprano.  He died in 2013 and the film is dedicated to him.  

[TopBilled]

Watching this one:

[TopBilled]

Looking at THE PAINTED HILLS (1951).

[shutoo]

The Ghost Walks  (1934).:   A car gets stuck on a dark stormy night, and 3 men have to take refuge in a sooky old house...hey, that's an original idea 😎.  Yes, it's the same old start, but this one turned out to have some nice twists.  The passengers in the car are a playwright (John Miljan), a big time producer (Richard Carle) and his somewhat whiny, but clever assistant (Johnny Arthur).  The group in the house are an odd bunch...all dressed up and full of tales of murder in the house.  I won't be giving anything away to tell you that all these people are actors, and they are acting out the play for their buddy Miljan , who set the whole thing up.  They get away with the charade until one turns up dead, and another goes missing.  ..now, that's not in the play!   Even after they confess to the producer that it was all an act, he and his assistant continue to sit back and watch like it is...and that's pretty funny--Carle and Arthur get some clever dialogue and steal the scenes in fact.  There's even the report of 'the escapee from a mental hospital' thrown in for good measure, and though the 'killer' is kind of easy to guess, there's another little twist at the end.  Considering this is a pure B film from Invincible Pictures, it's actually kind of entertaining.

[LuckyDan]

Alfred Hitchcock Presents "The Night the World Ended" first aired April 28, 1957. 

No mistaking this face.  Harry Shearer played a street kid. He would have been 13. 

[TopBilled]

Watching an Audie Murphy western on Starz Encore.

[Peebs]

Top Gun:  Maverick (2022) I went with a friend who wanted to see it.  The theater was packed. The movie was originally scheduled to come out in 2019 but was delayed shooting the complex action scenes and then later delayed because of the pandemic. This is a movie that was made for the big screen and not to be streamed at home.  A brief message from Cruise ran before the movie thanking the audience for coming back to the theaters.

The sequel opens with Kenny Loggins singing the familiar Highway to the Danger Zone.  There is a lot of action up in the air.  It was refreshing and frankly, impressive to see the actors in actual planes rather than the CGI blandness of Marvel-type movies.  The plot is a McGuffin for the action sequences:  There's a top-secret mission and Maverick is called back in to train an elite group of young pilots.  (I was grateful that the young actors remained supporting players.)  One of the pilots (Miles Teller) is the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards from the original TG) who blames Maverick for his dad's death.  Jennifer Connelly is Cruise's the age-appropriate love interest.  The ailing Val Kilmer makes a touching cameo reprising his role as Iceman.  The movie incorporates Kilmer's failing health in the story line.  I read later that Kilmer's brief spoken dialog was created through AI.  

I wasn't a fan of the original, remembering it as being pretty cheesy.    I was pleasantly surprised by Maverick. I still think Tom Cruise is probably a nut, but I appreciate his effort to make an old school, big screen popcorn movie.   It was a good excuse to go back to the movie theater but I'll never watch it again.  

[TopBilled]

4 hours ago, Peebs said:

Top Gun:  Maverick (2022) I went with a friend who wanted to see it.  The theater was packed. The movie was originally scheduled to come out in 2019 but was delayed shooting the complex action scenes and then later delayed because of the pandemic. This is a movie that was made for the big screen and not to be streamed at home.  A brief message from Cruise ran before the movie thanking the audience for coming back to the theaters.

The sequel opens with Kenny Loggins singing the familiar Highway to the Danger Zone.  There is a lot of action up in the air.  It was refreshing and frankly, impressive to see the actors in actual planes rather than the CGI blandness of Marvel-type movies.  The plot is a McGuffin for the action sequences:  There's a top-secret mission and Maverick is called back in to train an elite group of young pilots.  (I was grateful that the young actors remained supporting players.)  One of the pilots (Miles Teller) is the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards from the original TG) who blames Maverick for his dad's death.  Jennifer Connelly is Cruise's the age-appropriate love interest.  The ailing Val Kilmer makes a touching cameo reprising his role as Iceman.  The movie incorporates Kilmer's failing health in the story line.  I read later that Kilmer's brief spoken dialog was created through AI.  

I wasn't a fan of the original, remembering it as being pretty cheesy.    I was pleasantly surprised by Maverick. I still think Tom Cruise is probably a nut, but I appreciate his effort to make an old school, big screen popcorn movie.   It was a good excuse to go back to the movie theater but I'll never watch it again.  

Great write-up. The film is getting a lot of favorable press and will probably be the year's biggest moneymaker. 

Though the younger ones are support, I wouldn't be surprised if this is meant as the beginning of a series of sequels. Where the younger characters are developed into leads and Cruise will eventually become support in subsequent pictures.

[Peebs]

 

20 minutes ago, TopBilled said:

Great write-up. The film is getting a lot of favorable press and will probably be the year's biggest moneymaker. 

Though the younger ones are support, I wouldn't be surprised if this is meant as the beginning of a series of sequels. Where the younger characters are developed into leads and Cruise will eventually become support in subsequent pictures.

Thanks, TB!  Interesting, I hadn't thought about this as the launching pad for a movie series with the younger pilots.  Maybe you're right with the movie doing so well.  It didn't feel like that though,  more like a one time movie event but you never know.  There was also a preview for another long delayed Cruise movie,  the next Mission Impossible.   It's coming out next summer. It looks like a fun popcorn movie, too especially compared to some of the other previews before Maverick:  The CGI heavy umpteenth Thor sequel and the Brad Pitt action borefest Bullet Train.  Pitt, who is only a year younger than Cruise,  is trying so hard to look young and relevant that it ages him, at least from those clips.

I wonder how long Cruise will continue to work on these intense, stunt heavy movies.  Will he eventually go back to smaller roles?