Selma Blair, not Linda.
I mixed up my Blairs. Thanks for the correction.
I saw this movie a LOT as a kid. I think WWOR in Secaucus, NJ must have owned a copy, because it seemed to be on their Supernatural Theater an awful lot. An interesting premise, done on a shoestring budget by director Herk Harvey. The film has been released on DVD with a Diector’s ut, and also on RiffTrax.
I didn’t rea;ize until I re-watched the film several years ago, after having lived in Salt Lake City, that much of the film was shot there. The Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution – ZCMI, the one-time SLC Big Downtown department store, features in several scenes. As does the second Saltair Pavilion on the edge of the Great Salt Lake (It’s where the Dance Hall of the Dead scenes take place). On the other hand, several other scenes appear to have been shot in other states.
If you think the RiffTrax treatment is blasphemy, pick up a copy of Zacherley’s Horrible Horror – the straight-to-video film includes outtakes from Carnival of Souls.
I watched Plane over the past two days. An appropriately unimaginative title for a movie that never really rises to clever title status. The actors try, but the plot is obvious and some of the scenes are just ridiculous. A pilot that knows how to fix landing gear? Really? He’s also apparently a master of antique telephone repairs. The end of the movie leaves us with an unresolved character arc for some reason, which is a cardinal sin.
September 5 (Amazon Prime) Already reviewed above (#2164, 2166..) but I’ll add a few more notes of my own.
Highly recommended. Interesting insight into the crude technology behind putting TV news on the air in 1972. Also insight into how ill-prepared the world was to deal with the situation.
Security was so lax that an ABC staffer could get into the Olympic Village with a fake id; and ABC news could monitor police communications with a short-wave radio. Munich police had no playbook; they were making it up as they went (poorly). Even using the word “terrorist” was new – the first bulletin called them “commando guerrillas”.
Because of the filmmaker’s decision to restrict the action completely to what happens inside the ABC control room, the climax is a bit frustrating. We have no idea how the fuck-up at the airport happened, or how and why the German authorities actually announced (briefly) that all hostages had been freed.
I found this aspect far more interesting than the hostage story which has already been dramatized multiple times.
I’ve watched a couple of heavy movies lately.
Manchester by the Sea. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Scott Hasn’t Seen, the premise being Scott Aukerman watches a movie he hasn’t seen and then discusses it with Sprague the Whisperer (Shaun Diston) and a guest. I started listening to the Manchester by the Sea episode but I hadn’t seen it a few years, so I fired it up. Still very depressing but with amazing performances. I still don’t quite get the end. Like, nothing happens … it just ends.
And Brokeback Mountain showed up on Prime and I hadn’t seen that in some years either. I love this movie. It is amazingly gorgeous. Ang Lee can produce some amazing images on the big screen. And every performance is top notch - Heath Ledger’s the most noteworthy. I’ve said it before, but Jack Twist’s death is the one fictional death that hit me the hardest. It comes so out of left field.
Friendship
Mildly recommended.
Tim Robinson stars in this as a, get this, awkward man who has a hard time making and maintaining friendships because he blurts things out and is kind of weird. He’s not autistic or anything like that; he’s just awkward the way Tim Robinson can be in his sketch comedy.
He befriends his neighbor, played by Paul Rudd. He can’t fit in.
It’s a comedy, but I actually felt really bad for the character. I’m not sure it worked as a whole.
Good, not great. I think the comedy just doesn’t quite hit enough. I laughed a bit and one gag late in the movie was absolutely hilarious(when the protagonist takes drugs).
The rest was OK.
Most of what wasn’t shot in SLC was filmed in and around Lawrence KS. That organ factory? There used to be one in town.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Had not seen this one before, and for some reason, the idea that it’s about damn time insinuated itself into my brain. Pretty much what I expected after all the stuff I’d heard about it over the years. Amusing, dumb in a good way. Be excellent to each other.
Watched several MST3K movies over the weekend.
Also watched the first half of Gone With the Wind for the first time in ages. I didn’t get to see it for the first time until I was in college – this was the film that they said “would never be on TV” (well, until 1976), there was no home video at the time, and I don’t recall ever seeing the film re-released (although it evidently was in 1967), unlike the other epics I caught in re-release at the theater (West Side Story, Dr. Zhivago, Lawrenvce of Arabia).
I’m still impressed at the quality of the filmmaking – the special effects shots are gorgeous, the “panorama” scenes memorable, the Max Steiner music impressive (Steiner wrote the score for King Kong, among others). The story was appropriately down-to-earth, pointing out the unlikelihood of a Southern victory from the start. I’d read the book in high school, and Mitchell appeared to have done her homework about the history of the war.
The blemish in all this is, of course, the depiction of slavery and the black characters. It’s not that I doubt that you had overprotective “mammies” like Hattie McDaniel or annoying and mercurial ones like Butterfly McQueen, but the sentimental blanket of glaze the film pulls over the issue of slavery and the obsequiousness of all the black characters is unbelievable and troubling to a modern audience. Viewed in one light, all of this makes sense – this is the World as Viewed by Scarlett O’Hara – this indulgent view of black slavery is exactly the way she saw things. The problem is that apparently too many people didn’t realize that this is the story as told by an unreliable narrator. I wonder how true that was of Mitchell herself – there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in her treatment of Scarlett.
Whatever - it’s tough to watch Everett Brown as Big Sam, proud and unquestioning of his position as foreman, and eager to help out the Confederates at the Siege of Atlanta, or Oscar Polk as the butler Pork, chasing down “the last chicken in Atlanta” for Ashley’s dinner. You just keep telling yourself It wasn’t really like this, and that lots of household servants escaped to the Yankee lines, or absconded with the family silverware.
The first sequel is quite a bit funnier. Do love that original one, though.
I tried to watch FUBAR, but it was awful right from the get-go.
MGM re-released Gone With the Wind in 1967 with great fanfare, and made an attempt to modernize it by releasing it in 70mm, which was much wider than the original ratio. (It originally was in the 4x3 Academy ratio, the standard in 1939.) How did they do it? They simply cropped the top and bottom of each frame. They also gave it some kind of fake stereophonic sound.
I’d never seen it before then, so I didn’t realize how awful it was until I saw it later in its original ratio.
It’s a great film in every way, but I can’t watch it now for many of the reasons you mentioned. I don’t think art from a different age should be judged by the standards of today, yet there’s just too much about it that’s cringeworthy.
If you mean s1, I wanted to like it and did stick with it the whole way through, but came out unsatisfied and I have no urge at all to watch the new s2.
According to the Wikipedia article on the film, they first did this in the 1950s, when widescreen was the New Thing that was going to save movies from television.
I can watch Gone With the Wind, despite the cringeworthiness, but it takes a lot more effort to get me through Birth of a Nation
The third film is basically there for fan service and closure, but it’s fine and it has its moments. And the two lead actresses turn in excellent [sic] performances.
(On a sidenote, William Sadler had a recent guest appearance on “The Rookie” and I immediately went “Hey, it’s Death!”. )
Regarding Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are scheduled to appear on Broadway this autumn in Waiting for Godot.
In “Metroscope!” I’ll bet that was awful! In my collection of movie posters I have a one-sheet from the 1961 reissue and there’s no mention of any widescreen modifications so they must have put it out in the original ratio that time. Or they just used the prints from 1954 to save money. MGM was on the skids around then.