Well, he did tell Ponyboy Curtis to stay gold in The Outsiders, so there’s that.
Robocop the original. I think it holds up fairly well, given that it’s a pre-cellphone dystopian future story.
I love that the ED-209 is almost entirely comic relief, and was grateful that there were no reconnecting with the family scenes. Brutal and violent, but a fun watch.
Agreed. When I finally saw the remake, I hated it. Better CGI does not necessarily a better film make. That movie had no soul.
Alien 1-4
Somewhat recommended.
I am pausing my Alien viewings before I watch the latest two from Ridley Scott. I had seen Alien 1 and Aliens, but my memory of them was not great. I’d never seen Alien 3 or the fourth one. Here are my, probably contradictory to many, thoughts.
Alien - Honestly kind of dull for the first hour. what a final section, though. Well done, probably a bit over long by 20 minutes, though.
Aliens - Better than the first one, but still kind of overlong and dry in parts. Yes, the final 30-40 minutes are terrific, though.
Alien 3 - Yeah, so I get the hate over killing everyone from Aliens except Ripley, but I was able to get past that and watch the movie. What an odd film. I appreciate some of its choices, like setting it in a prison/monastery of sorts. I think Charles Dance is great in this movie; I had no idea he was even in it. A good, but not great movie. Not as atrocious as some people claim.
Alien Resurrection - A perfect example of an unnecessary and by-the-numbers sequel. I mean, it has a bit of new stuff to offer, but it was kind of generic. Alien 3 should have been the last one, clearly. This was just classic cash grab. Good for Weaver for taking the big paycheck, though. I would. Nothing much to see in this movie.
I’d recommend seeing the first three and at that point, you probably should just watch the fourth one so you get why they stopped.
I’ll move on to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant soon. I know it is a mixed bag of reviews on these, but I have very little baggage with this series, so I’m hopeful.
I think you’re judging The Great Race too harshly. I saw it many times with my dad and brother in the 1960s, and I remember it fondly.
Like Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (which other people have claimed was not funny), it was never intended to be a yuckfest. Instead, it was a rollicking action-adventure flick with comedic overtones. It was also a parody of old melodramas with a mustachioed villain and a hero dressed in white, meaning that the stars were expected to ham it up. (And they did so beautifully, IMHO.)
Yes, the film is very long, but the '60s was a period of movies that required an intermission to get through. In other words, they were intended to provide a good evening out for the whole family, something which I appreciated greatly and always looked forward to.
Like most good movies, you’re losing a great deal of the experience if you’re not seeing it on the big screen. There’s an old cinema in Toronto that I go to sometimes just to see classic movies projected the way they were supposed to be, rather than watching them on TV. The photography in The Great Race is gorgeous when you see it on the big screen, just like that of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and other movies of the period.
There may be segments that are less engrossing than others, but together they draw you into the story. In other words, they work as part of the whole. It doesn’t hurt that three of the male leads (Curtis, Lemmon, and Falk) were brilliant comic actors, and Natalie Wood was a beautiful leading lady.
I wish The Great Race would be re-released for a limited run, so I could see it on the big screen again in the time I have left.
The Great Race, **Mad…Mad World **, Cat Balou, and other excesses in camp, as well as Jerry Lewis’ physical comedies of the era suffer from misplaced nostalgia. Unlike the fast-paced silent comedies they pay homage to, they let the gags hang there with an “okay you should be laughing now” pause that’s just painful. Mel Brooks and the Zuckerbergs knew not to do that.
Plus, Blake Edwards was a nasty man to our Eve when she tried to interview him about his father J. Gordon Edwards.
In the world of college athletics, anytime the University of Utah Utes are being discussed, somebody is sure to include a gif of Fred Gwynne saying “Yout’s?”
Aww. Ruined my, ‘Well, Ralph was always a bit of an outsider.’ sly reference.
I’ve never seen The Ousiders.
His resume is actually reasonably broad. I first saw him on Eight as Enough and I remember me and my step-brothers being fascinated with the assembled guitar talent in Crossroads when it came out. It’s just that the Karate Kid films swamp everything else out as he never really established himself as a leading man after that series, falling back into smaller character roles.
I have to disagree with you there. If a movie that self-describes as a Slapstick Comedy isn’t a “yuckfest”, then it’s a dismal failure.
I grew up watching hose 1960s movies on The Big Screen, so I have experienced what you’re speaking about.
(If you ever get a chance to see Around the World in 80 days – which it is painfully evident this movie was trying to emulate – in the original Todd-AO, do so. Watching it on a narrow-vision small TV set ain’t at all the same, as you suggest)
Nevertheless, I don’t think seeing this in a theater would’ve helped. I’ll agree that the scenery is gorgeous, but I’m not looking flor a travelogue.
Slithy Tove wrote:
I have to agree here. I didn’t care at all for It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Worldf, either (the only reason I know the right number of "Mad"s is by remembering the theme music), and Cat Ballou has always perplexed me. Both movies are clearly trying – and failing – top be funny, even though they are trying as hard as they can.
I like a lot of Stanley Kramer’s “message” films. But who told him to be funny?
Prometheus
Recommended.
I think I liked this movie the most of the Alien series so far, but even this movie got a bit bogged down in the middle. Great movie, though. You don’t need to see any of the Alien movies to watch this one; it’s about 99% unrelated.
Ridley Scott is so wildly inconsistent for me, one of the most inconsistent directors out there. This one was a good movie from him, though.
I’m sure people were both thrilled and disappointed by it, though. I mean…it was kind of alien movie, though, right?
Next up is Alien: Covenant.
It has a handful of very dumb scenes, but also some very good ones. For some reason, out of all the things that might have disturbed me in that movie, the one that really did was the fight near the end between the Engineer and the massive face-hugger, which was compellingly horrifying.
Yeah, the effeminate gay man stereotype is dated and a bit cringy.
Indeed it is.
Totally with you on that, Cal. I saw it once when I was about 12 years old, and I may have thought it was OK at the time, but in the almost 60 years since, I’ve tried watching it again, more than once, and just find it boring. I know people who simply adore that film and find it hilarious but in my book, “frantic” does not equal “funny.”
Stanley Kramer was a great producer/director of serious films, but he had no flair for comedy. “Mad Mad World” was sandwiched between “Judgement at Nuremberg” and “Ship of Fools,” two period pieces involving the rise and aftermath of Naziism in Germany.
I’ve often wondered if he made “Mad Mad World” on a bet. “Hey Stanley! Bet you can’t make a comedy!” “Oh yeah? I’ll show you…!”
Worth remembering that these were aimed at an early-mid-1960’s (so before I was born) adult audience and humor doesn’t always work consistently across generations. We were having this same discussion in the Eric Idle thread recently in relation to his shrinking residuals. Millenials and Zoomers don’t necessarily find Monty Python, if they are even aware of its existence, as the height of comedy.
My favorite HS teacher, who passed away last year at the age of 97, was a big fan of It’s a Mad, etc.. I remember him particularly singling out the scene where two guys take a swing at each other and accidentally painfully ram their fists together and Terry-Thomas’ annoyed speculation that the American obsession with “bosoms” was a result of being improperly weaned, as being the absolute height of humor. My response to those two scenes when I later watched the film was rather more…muted. As opposed to hysterical laughter 
.
De gustibus and all, but I don’t doubt it might be in part a generational divide. I remember watching an old Richard Pryor special with a somewhat younger friend who was seeing it for the first time and they were utterly unmoved by stuff I once found hilarious (but don’t as much now myself).
Recognizing that tastes change, I still have to point out that a great many movies continue to be funny even across the great generational divide, and I still laugh at movies from the same era as IaMMMMW and TGR. I still find A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a hoot.
I love the older Marx Brothers movies, and **Arsenic and Old Lace. Buster Keaton’s The General is still a quintessentially funny movie – even though its hero is a Confederate in the Civil War. When she was young, my daughter loved it, despite it being not only a black and white movie, but silent, to boot.
Some films “deteriorate” because we lose the cultural touchstones – we don’t have the background to know what’s funny. Or attitudes changes, or social mores an expectations do. (One of the weirder things is the way , in Neil Simon’s first play Come Blow Your Horn and the film made from it, the hero’s girlfriend gets herself drunk and threatens to go to bed with him, and this is regarded as a bad thing.)
That can’t explain my “meh” reaction to The Great Race and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I don’t think the crowds at the time might have thought them funny because of some novelty about them.
My apologies, by the way, for coming across too strong in my evaluation of these movies. Re-reading my comments, they seem rather harsh. But I don’t find them funny, even though I find other films from the same era funny, abnd I don’t think it’ds because of any change in me.
I’ve watched The Great Race probably a dozen times, although not in the past decade or so, and always enjoyed its intentional campiness. It’s long but its cast has great comic chops.
OTOH, I’ve never been a fan of IAMMMMW. It’s always seemed forced and contrived to me, despite having some of the greatest comedians of its time: Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, and Jonathan Winters, ferchrissakes! And although it’s about as long as TGR, it drags, and the big comic climax at the end, with the ladder truck, is just too hokey and fake.
What’s particularly a shame is that IAMMMMW was filmed in 70mm and 6-channel audio, so its image and sound quality are far superior to the quality of its content. Sadly, TGR, for all its scenic locations, was shot on 35mm.