And from someone who watched Wet Hot American Summer primarily for the Maine location:Translations are quick, as there is a lot of dialogue, and with this, it is difficult to identify which brother is which, as we say about foreigners, "they all look alike".
Jewish children on top of all the other problems detailed in the review? Oh, save us.The movie had absolutely no redeeming value. It barely mentions Maine, and it's a Jewish day camp, on top of things.
I never understood the appeal of Seinfeld. All they did was rip off The Big Bang Theory, but they removed all the interesting plot points and funny jokes, and created a show filled with laugh tracks about nothing interesting.
I'm totally with you on that. Donen and Kelly's On the Town is a lovely film until you see the show and then the choices made in the adaptation become deeply frustrating. How could they discard one of the greatest scores ever written for the stage and replace it with a lot of mediocre ditties ? I suppose the show was just too dark and melancholy for a film made so soon after WWII.Michael Kerpan wrote:I also find the music to the movie version of this musical pretty lousy compared to the music Bernstein had previously written for the same show (almost all of which got dumped in the movie).
) both because of its subject matter but also because of how beautiful the score is (which is not to say that the show isn't also riotously funny in places). It was the best stage show I have ever seen and now I just can't go back to the film.
The film (Citizen Kane) also has several anti-sematic undertones in it, which scared the owners of all the other major studios, who were evidently all Jewish. With Fox, Universal, Warner, Paramount and Disney suddenly pooling their money to buy up every print of the film, this was all the sudden not a laughing matter. Still, the film got made despite all the efforts of others.
Now I personally have never seen Citizen Kane, but I want to more than ever.
Blu-ray.com review wrote:I would wager An American in Paris will only appeal to those who would grab for its case at the mere sight of its throwback cover art.
Talk about high concept!RKO 281 has endless possibilites as a trailblazer behind dozens of potential storytellers. If the story behind this movie is so interesting, imagine if they made a movie like this for all the AFI 100 films! Mostly due to the cast, which consists of such heavyweights as John Malkovich, Roy Scheider and James Cromwell, it’s almost impossible not to have a hit movie. Though this probably doesn’t happen much anymore, the battle over to make a film or not to make a film is always an issue
With The Fountainhead as one of my favorite films, I am a pretty big Ayn Rand fan. I wouldn't consider myself a staunch 'Objectivist' but I have always found her a totally interesting character and certainly enlightening to listen to. Many commentators, in recent years, dismiss her philosophy, but I think one can gain insight without becoming a devout, cult-like follower. She is often misunderstood. As I stated, I already owned this 2004 Image-Entertainment DVD and have watched many interviews with her on YouTube. IMO, she remains one of the more fascinating human beings of the 20th Century. The Strand Blu-ray offers this, almost 2.5 hour, documentary in 1080P with a few supplemental attempts on the second disc DVD. For those curious - this is a worthwhile spin - but her following may be the most appreciative. Not that it means anything , but I, personally, will watch this again gaining more now than from seeing it years ago. I never seem to tire of hearing her talk. She was an amazing gal...
Gotta be Tooze, no? I've never seen anyone else use commas so weirdly. No idea if it's grammatically correct, but it reads so haltingly.Drucker wrote:Sorry I can't resist:
...The Strand Blu-ray offers this, almost 2.5 hour, documentary in 1080P
Necessary?The word 'monster' would be more appropriately used to describe the Euro 'bushes' of the naked actresses, IMO.
Yep. I was amused by his defense/love of Rand.George Drooly wrote:Gotta be Tooze, no? I've never seen anyone else use commas so weirdly. No idea if it's grammatically correct, but it reads so haltingly.Drucker wrote:Sorry I can't resist:
...The Strand Blu-ray offers this, almost 2.5 hour, documentary in 1080P
Ugh, what a creep.sir_luke wrote:While we're on the topic of Tooze, there's this gem from the review for The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein:
Necessary?The word 'monster' would be more appropriately used to describe the Euro 'bushes' of the naked actresses, IMO.
He sounds like he could be a character in one of her books. "Monroe Trout" fits nicely into the company of Ellsworth Monkton Toohey (cribbed from a random page of the copy of The Fountainhead which is the only book in my personal library I have turned backwards so the title can't be read by idle perusers - now that's a healthy way to acknowledge a different system of thought than my own).Gregory wrote:The film was financed by a super-wealthy futures trader and Rand disciple, Monroe Trout, with the cooperation of the Rand estate.
This argument might make sense if the author of the novel had been some trendy young twentysomething trying to make a literary splash in the mid-Sixties, but in fact Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 and was already pushing thirty during the period in which his (partly autobiographical) novel is set. And you'll also find similarly ribald depictions of the behaviour of young Czechs in the first half of the twentieth century in the work of plenty of other novelists - Josef Skvorecky and Jaroslav Hasek both spring to mind.I just watched the film for the first time, which I very much enjoyed, but had thoughts similar to yours, specifically that the portrayal of a sort of rampant, open sexuality was more aligned with the publication date of the novel (1965) than the story's WWII setting. The group scene with the nurses and the German soldiers seemed especially out of place. I thought perhaps the apparent shift in sexual mores was a response to the ongoing war, a sort of "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
The most successful genre at the British box office during WWII was the raunchy costume melodrama popularised by Gainsborough Pictures and frequently ripped off by others. These films are really quite startlingly racy - The Wicked Lady, a blockbuster so massive that it still registered in the BFI's inflation-adjusted top ten a decade ago, even had to be partly reshot for the US because Margaret Lockwood's cleavage was considered too prominent - and that's because Gainsborough realised that the mid-40s British cinema audience was overwhelmingly both female and sex-starved, for reasons that probably don't need spelling out.RossyG wrote:Conservatives always have to have some unsullied golden age to look back on and compare today with. These days it's usually the Second World War or the 1950's. Point out that people also had sex, murdered, and swore back then and they get angry.
