The Passion of the Christ (Prime). Ugh. The things you do for love. Inna wanted to see this (again). I saw it in the theater back in 2003 and never expected to have to go through that again. But this time, I knew when to close my eyes.
The White Diamond is such a great documentary and if you have not seen it, you should. It’s free on Youtube. Here it is in full. No, despite what it looks like, it isn’t just about a blimp-like machine.
I’m mentioning it because I wrote the main guy the doc. is about and asked a couple of follow-up questions. He kindly wrote me back today. I’ll share what I asked and what he said:
1.Did you continue to make aircrafts and fly them? What kind of big successes have you had in the 20 years since?
Not much worth mentioning (yet) unfortunately. TWD was never flown again. One reason is that helium gas prices have risen and I did not manage to secure funding. I guess remotely operated drones would now be more effective (and safer) for canopy exploration.
2.Did anyone ever capture or release footage of what is behind those Guyana falls? I would love to see what it looks like back there.
I heard that there was a period of dryness when the falls were much reduced - revealing more or most of the cliff back wall but I have not read of a complete survey.
Regal theaters are showing a re-release of classic comedies each day this month.
Yesterday was “The Muppet Movie” 1979! Only $8.
Haven’t seen it on big screen since I was eight!
Too classic.
This Wednesday is Airplane!
Charade 1963 Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy
Charade is known as the best Alfred Hitchcock film, which he didn’t direct.
The mix of drama and comedy is classic Hitchcock. Audrey Hepburn plays a recent widow hounded by 4 ex-soldiers that think she possesses 250k they want back.
Cary Grant is the mysterious character that keeps changing names. Is he another dangerous character or an ally to Hepburn?
George Kennedy is nearly unrecognizable with his hair spiked up and his menacing character. I’ve never seen Kennedy play such a violent personality.
This movie kept me guessing until the end.
I highly recommend. Score, 10 out of 10
I’ll agree. I’ve written about Charade on this Board many times before, Stanley Donen directed, but most of the credit really goes to screenwriter Peter Stone, who came up with the twisty plot and some very clever plot devices. It’s hard to believe that he wrote the “book” for both the stage and screen versions of the musical 1776, which is so very different in tone and style.
If you like Charade, you might want to have a look at its darker brother, Mirage, also written by Stone but directed by Edward Dmytryk (and which feels a LOT more like a Hitchcock film than Charade does), and with two of the stars from Charade, George Kennedy and Walter Matthau. Gregory Peck is the lead in this one, rather than Cary Grant, and it’s more his type of film – dark humor and paranoia. Definitely worth a look.
Stone also reportedly did a re-write (under a pseudonym) on another thriller that starred Peck, Arabesque. This one was directed by Donen, and Henry Mancini again did the score. But I don’t find it as satisfying as the first two.
Thanks for the tip. I’ve added Mirage to my watch list.
Don’t sell yourself short. Good outdoorsmen don’t need to be great outdoorsmen. I recon you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to attempt the things he did. No credit for following a trail into the woods, squatting for 3 months at the first human relic you find, and then ending up dead in a sleeping bag full of your own shit because you were too stupid to have an exit plan.
Well, that is certain. I also feel like I’d have read the whole plant book.
I watched two movies that were what I call “easy movies”. Rental Family with Brendan Fraser and Solo Mio with Kevin James. No explosions, sex, violence, twists, etc. Just sweet and touching. I enjoyed them both.
Boy, do I disagree here! I watched Charade for about the fifth time–it was a favorite of mine when it came out, and then a favorite film to watch with my kids when they were little, but on the fifth go-around, the plot seemed kinda dumb –Matthau pulls off an elaborate murderous scam by sneaking into an unoccupied Embassy office when the entire staff is at lunch?–and the Grant-Hepburn dialogue seemed too cutesy by half. Thanks for the warning about Mirage, tho–I’ll be sure to avoid.
Several old-time movies suffer from the same fate–awful, stiff predictable dialogue. I just watched The Ox-Bow Incident for the first time on TMC and found the central moral issue–should we lynch him or should we not?–to be belabored amid tons of lousy hackneyed discussion.
So, Three Days of the Condor but in reverse?
We do, indeed.
I watched Trading Places (1983) for the first time in over 30 years. It is classic comedy film that stars Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd and was directed by John Landis.
I found it to be funny but I was definitely surprised by the amount of casual racism (frequent use of Negro and the N word to refer to Murphy’s character) and Eddie accusing multiple people of being gay using the F word slur. While this film did help launch her career, Jamie Lee Curtis was definitely included primarily as eye candy.
Fun to watch for the nostalgia but I wouldn’t show it to anyone under 35.
Plus Dan Aykroyd in blackface! And yet it’s one of my favorite films.
I just watched this again with my boy! It holds up, I would say, and looks nicer than I remember.
Huh. I don’t remember the blackface moment. What was the context for that? Comedy, I presume.
It really does matter what the purpose is. Zach Braff did Blackface in a Scrubs episode, but the point was that Turk(who is actually Black) tricked him into doing it when they went to a Black Fraternity party and then Zach Braff got beat up.
If you remember the sequence on Amtrak during which they swapped the briecases, Aykroyd was, as I recall, in a jeans jacket wearing dreadlocks and with his face darkened.
It was blackface in very much the wrong way. It’s portrayals like this that are exactly why it’s so offensive to do blackface.
I re-watched A Few Good Men (1992) last night with my parents but I just about drove them crazy. We searched on their smart TeeVee for the movie and blindly clicked the first option, which turned out to be on AMC streaming. We watched for about five minutes and when Wes Craven’s characters says, “I’m going to hang your boy from a … yardarm,” I immediately announced, “I can’t watch this.”
“Why not?”
“‘Fucking yardarm!’ Where’s the ‘fucking?’ It’s edited. I can’t watch edited R-rated movies.”
Oh, the eye-rolls. But then we found it on Tubi so all was well. Interestingly, I hadn’t seen it a long time so I didn’t even notice that the attack on Santiago at the beginning of the edited movie was cut right down to him being woken up and getting gagged, then a cut directly to the next scene. In the real movie, that scene is much longer and you actually see the poor guy coughing up blood.
From Russia with Love 1963 Shawn Connery, Robert Shaw, Pedro Armendáriz
One of my favorite Bond movies. Interesting plot. Bond is sent to assist in the defection of a beautiful Soviet consulate clerk. He doesn’t know SPECTRE wants revenge.
I can’t believe how much Robert Shaw changed after only 12 years in Jaws 1975.
I guess cigarettes and booze ages a guy quickly.
