#Leonard Maltin Game

[unicornery]

1989. Leonard Maltin gives this movie 2 and a half stars.

He says: "Pleasant but completely unremarkable" and "Followed by two sequels." He also calls the female lead "Bitchy".

How many names do you think you can get this in?

Negative three names

can anyone go negative four?

[cantsayidont]

Haterating and hollerating in the 1970s:

SKIN GAME (1971): Tasteless, offensive, completely unfunny comedy, set in 1857, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett as con artist partners Quincy and Jason, whose preferred scam is having Quincy sell Jason as a slave and then immediately help him escape so they can split the proceeds of the "sale." When Jason is enslaved "for real," Quincy has to come up with a scam to get him out, with the help of a persistent con woman (Susan Clark) who's decided she's his new partner. Inexplicably well-regarded by critics — Leonard Maltin gives it three and a half stars out of four — it's indefensibly dreadful, serving mostly to illustrate how bad BLAZING SADDLES might have been without the involvement of Richard Pryor; SKIN GAME screenwriter Peter Stone's idea of a comic setpiece is having a cartoonish caricature of real-life abolitionist John Brown break up a slave auction just before Quincy can collect his biggest-ever profit from selling Jason. Appalling. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nix. VERDICT: The pits, and Garner's normally charming laconic patter only makes it worse.

VANISHING POINT (1971): Existentialist road movie about a delivery driver named Kowalski (Barry Newman) — eventually revealed as a disillusioned Medal of Honor recipient and ex-cop, expelled from the San Diego police force for stopping another cop from raping someone — who becomes a fugitive after accepting a bet that he can deliver a souped-up Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Franscisco in less than 48 hours. Pursued by police across four states, Kowalski finds himself an outlaw celebrity thanks to a blind DJ called Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who christens him "the last American hero." More of a mood piece than an action movie, with Newman effective as the doomstruck Kowalski, who already has at least one foot in the grave. (The UK cut includes a crucial penultimate scene with Charlotte Rampling as a rather sinister hitchhiker, dropped from the original U.S. release.) Not entirely satisfying on its own terms, but its pretensions set it apart from the usual drive-in fare, and it boasts some evocative visuals and an interesting, mostly diegetic gospel soundtrack. It's also far less abrasive than the thematically similar RUNAWAY TRAIN (1986). CONTAINS LESBIANS? No, and the movie's worst scene has Kowalski nearly carjacked by a pair of grotesquely stereotyped gay men whose car has broken down on the highway. VERDICT: Worth a look, but stick with the longer UK "extended" version.

WILLIE DYNAMITE (1974): Dreadful blaxploitation movie about a slick New York pimp called Willie Dynamite (Roscoe Orman), who finds a gay rival pimp (Roger Robinson) trying to cut him out of the action just as one of his girls (Joyce Walker) is tempted to leave the life at the urging of social worker Cora (Diana Sands), who wants to bring Willie down with the help of her assistant DA boyfriend (Thalmus Rasulala) and a bitter cop (Albert Hall). Silly and over the top for a while, the movie then makes a lurching shift to clunky morality-play melodrama, leading up to a laughably contrived uplifting finale. Awful songs with heavy-handed lyrics by director Gilbert Moses don't help; Curtis Mayfield he was not. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: Only for blaxploitation completists.

[adultswim2021]

Aqua Teen Hunger Force #80: "Shake Like Me" | April 5, 2009 - 11:45PM | S07E02

A momentous episode. Folks, it’s the “lost” episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Hell, it's loster than "Boston" at this point. It’s the one you can’t stream online or buy digitally or whatever. Hell, it’s even missing from the recent DVD box set. Can we get an Adult Swim Treasures DVD box with an intro from Leonard Maltin? Will it ever be okay to laugh again???

Okay, this is how this write-up is going to go. First I’m going to dryly describe all the racist stuff in the episode. Then I’m going to apologetically tell you that I thought the episode was funny. Then I’m going to pay lip-service to people who might legitimately have problems with the episode. Then nobody is actually going to read this, and I’m gonna go on to watch Duckman or whatever show aired after this. I think it was Duckman. I don’t know, there’s some weird guy on YouTube who makes his own Adult Swim blocks but he includes shit like Duckman and Dr. Katz and I'm starting to believe it's all real. I don’t hate it, but I’d prefer to see Duckman sandwiched between Weird Science and USA Up All Night, with nothing but phone sex ads and promos for Silk Stockings.

A construction crew is dumping green toxic ooze into a neighboring house (the Ruth Powers side, not the Ned Flanders side). Shake tries to stop them by yelling at them a lot, when one of the operators, a black man, gets pissed off and bites Shake. So, he was bitten by a radioactive black man. Eventually signs of Shake’s blackness start coming out; he turns from white to brown, sprouts an afro, sports a bejeweled grill, and now possesses an immaculate vertical leap. Frylock, scientifically testing the authenticity of his blackness, tries to make Shake go in Carl’s pool. But alas, Shake can no longer swim. I’ve heard of MASTER Shake, but CHOCOLATE Shake???  

I have never heard of a “chocolate shake”. Anyway, Frylock tries to give Shake his whiteness back, but it just won’t take. Boxy Brown eventually intervenes (is this the first time characters other than Meatwad interact with him?). Boxy, of course, is the original racist character of the show. He encourages Shake to embrace his blackness, but while they are on the basketball court it simply begins to wear off. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. I mean, if that’s the kind of fun you like having. 

Honestly, this episode made me laugh a lot. The joke about him swimming, especially. Also, the part where Frylock gives him a wristwatch after his supposed white conversion in which they straighten his hair and cover him in white house paint. Frylock gifts the wristwatch and says something like “here, time management is going to be real important to you now”. Really funny! I'm not even racist! That's what's so insane about this! 

REFERENCE: There’s a scene where Frylock takes Shake to a hockey game in order to whiten him up. There is a hockey guy in the background just bleeding from his neck. That seems to be a reference to Clint Malarchuk, who in 1989 took a skate to the neck and it caused massive blood loss on the ice. He survived! If you just wanna see photos of a hockey goalie hunched over a nasty amount of blood on an ice rink, I recommend googling his name and looking at the image results. 

In retrospect, the squirmiest part of the episode is Carey Means participation. I would like to think they cleared these jokes with him beforehand, and I’m sure if I googled around one could definitively answer this. A better version of this blog would be one where I actually take it upon myself to do just that. A better version of this blog would be one where I am also being paid handsomely to do stuff like that. Oh well. But: the main sticking point with me is the idea that Frylock is specifically written to not exactly be black. 

There’s an argument to be made that Shake isn’t actually white; they are food products and aren’t afflicted with race. It sorta gets to the problem of whiteness being seen as a “default”. If Shake is white, then that should mean Frylock is black, and Meatwad is retarded. The only reason I don’t think I’m stretching too much for this, is the fact that Frylock defends himself to Boxy Brown that he’s not being “racist” against him. To me, this is the only actual profound misstep of the episode. It’s the thing that cements the fact that they fucked up Frylock’s characterization. It sorta made me feel the same way when I saw an old episode of South Park where Trey Parker voices a black character saying stuff like “actually I’m opposed to hate crime legislation”. 

This one is funny as fuck. That's kinda the only thing that matters to me. But I get why they would rather sweep it under the rug. I also get why I sought out an old iTunes release of the episode and keep it on my computer. I get why I won’t get rid of my DVD copy of it.

EPHEMERA CORNER

[panatmansam]

ATTACHMENT TO IMMORTALITY

Added Bonus: My Walt Disney Rant

The Buddha teaches us about many different types of attachment. Specifically, he names the attachment to being and to non-being. Now, I asked myself, what does this mean? Attachment to non-being could mean attachment to the idea of death, of the cessation of rebirth, or something else. Attachment to being could mean attachment to life, to the concept of rebirth, of eternal existence in celestial realms or just the vague hope that we will not be forgotten when, of course, we all will in time.

The idea, "I will be forgotten" is one of those attachments that has no bearing in assuring our survival. If you are dead, no such thing will concern you. This thought is for NOW and how it made you feel. It is ego and nothing more. It can be left behind with no danger or risk because it is useless. Some use "what will my legacy be" to stir them on to achievement. Walt Disney American artistic innovator, creative genius, and futurist was one such man. He also was a ruthless strikebreaker, and union buster. commie baiter, a shill for corporate America, and worse but he did build some cool theme parks. Generals always play the "what will my legacy be" game (don't get me started on Patton and his reincarnation beliefs). So has every tinhorn dictator that ever ruled as a friend of the Capitalist West in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

I only mentioned Disney and went off on my rant because I watched an interview from the nineties with Ray Bradbury about his lifelong friendship with Disney. Leonard Maltin asked him the question "is immortality possible"? To which Bradbury said yes but then made it clear that he meant immortal in our contributions to human culture. He said Walt would be immortal. Then Bradbury who was quite elderly at this point got far away and wistful and start tallying up his own contributions his books, movies, friendships but mostly his kids and said "I am immortal" he paused and then corrected himself with a sigh "but I will only be remembered for maybe forty more years" (traditionally two generations). In this moment, I saw, in his old man's face, a new revelation about the truth of what it means to be an individual human stuck in time with the foreknowledge of mortality.

[back-and-totheleft]

The World is Yours

On December 9, 1983, Brian De Palma’s Scarface— which reimagined a 1932 Howard Hawks gangster film as a blood-and-neon opera about the rise and fall of Cuban-born Miami cocaine kingpin Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino— opened to decent but unspectacular box office and decidedly mixed reviews. Leonard Maltin hated it. Roger Ebert loved it. According to People magazine’s 1983 report on the New York and L.A. premieres, Cher was a fan– “It was a great example of how the American dream can go to s—,” she told the magazine– but Kurt Vonnegut tapped out after about 30 minutes, around the time one of Tony’s associates gets carved up with a chainsaw.

De Palma’s film has been lodged like a bullet fragment in pop culture’s brainpan ever since. It made Michelle Pfeiffer a star; it inspired real-life drug lords and provided generations of rappers with a mythic framework for grandiose criminality both real and imagined, even though Tony Montana ends up face down in his own fountain; it sold (this is a rough, anecdotal estimate) approximately ten billion dorm posters. It’s a movie inseparable from its cultural and aesthetic context but someone is always trying to reboot or remake it, or retell it as a story about The Penguin; so far an actual Scarface 2 has not materialized, although actors Robert Loggia and Steven Bauer came back to voice their Scarface characters in Scarface: The World Is Yours, a 2006 video game for Playstation 2, Xbox and Windows platforms, in which players could unlock “Rage Mode” and mow down their enemies as an invulnerable Tony Montana.

Film critic Glenn Kenny’s new book The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface charts the movie’s path from development to cultural ubiquity; like Kenny’s superb Goodfellas history Made Men from a few years back, it’s simultaneously brisk and exhaustive, built in this case around interviews with seemingly every living person involved with the production, except Pacino himself, who’s presumably saved his Scarface memories for his own forthcoming memoir. Pacino still emerges as an indelible and mercurial character, as do the many other players responsible for putting Scarface onscreen.

One of those is the no-less-mercurial producer Martin Bregman. Bregman starts out as a theatrical agent whose early clients include up-and-comers like Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen; he discovers Pacino onstage in a 1968 production of Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx and becomes his manager. In the late ‘70s Bregman also works with a screenwriter named Oliver Stone, who’s written a script called Platoon about his experience in Vietnam; Stone and Bregman end up developing an adaptation of fellow vet Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July as a vehicle for Pacino. When that project collapses, so does Bregman’s relationship with Pacino, and they don’t speak for years, until Pacino walks out of a screening of the original 1932 Hawks film and calls Bregman on the phone, saying “Look at Scarface– I think there may be a character there for me to play.”

The following excerpt from Kenny’s book picks up there, as Stone signs on to Scarface and begins researching the cocaine business—a world Stone is already intimately familiar with as a customer. —ALEX PAPPADEMAS

Oliver Stone had to travel a long way before becoming “Oliver Stone,” the prolific, outspoken, provocative Hollywood agitator. The man whose cultural gravitational pull is such that a friend of mine called his book on the man The Oliver Stone Experience was a scion of Wall Street affluence, a soldier in Vietnam, a student at NYU’s film school who worked under Martin Scorsese, and, by the time producer Marty Bregman brought him on the Scarface project, the director of two films.

Horror films, as a matter of fact. The first, Seizure, produced in Canada in 1974, starred Jonathan Frid, then known as the sex-symbol vampire Barnabas Collins on the supernatural network soap opera Dark Shadows, as a writer tormented by figures out of his nightmares come to life. The second, 1981’s The Hand, was a gloss on The Beast with Five Fingers in which Michael Caine’s pathologically jealous writer loses his hand in an auto accident, and believes that hand is still around, with a life of his own, killing anyone who ticks him off. Neither made much impact on release, but both are fascinating artifacts, not least due to the pathologies they treat, pathologies that reflected Stone’s own conflicts at the time. When I interviewed him in 2022, one of the first things I asked was if, upon meeting Brian De Palma, he sensed an affinity with this director who’d also worked in horror. Not quite, as it turns out.

“Well, Brian had been a very successful horror director. I had not. And that was screwed into my psyche by Bregman, and you can believe that. The Hand, according to him, was ‘a disaster,’ blah, blah, blah. But you can look at The Hand, it’s certainly a psychologically interesting film. But it had not done business. And I was dead in the water, as a director. And Bregman used that, of course. I wanted to direct, badly. I had written and directed and I wanted to continue doing that. But I knew that this was not going to be my film, because I didn’t have the experience to do something this size.

“To the contrary, I learned a lot on the film. I was down on my luck, and I had just done The Hand, and it had been ridiculed. And I was on cocaine. I was doing cocaine, and I was really an addict, without knowing it.”

In a sense, Stone reunited with Bregman because he had to. Stone, Pacino, and Bregman had all fallen out with each other over the collapse of Born on the Fourth of July. As far as Stone was concerned, between that and Bregman’s inability to get Platoon made after teasing him with the possibility, he might as well never work under his aegis again. But in the wake of the failure of The Hand, he was in a state. “I never wanted to work with Marty again, after that. It was just so difficult. It’s what they call ‘masochism,’ to work for Marty. You have to really suffer. I’m sure you can tell that. Ask any other writer, they know what’s in store for them if they go with Marty: endless re-writes. So, I had to go through that process. It’s a process. And out of that process, I said I didn’t want to be with him again. “And then, my bookie called me up after I had hit bottom again—how many times have I hit bottom? Marty called me and wanted me to do it. I didn’t want to do a Mafia story. No interest. Thank you. And then, he called me back a few weeks later. He said: ‘Lumet has another idea, and here it is—about the cocaine trade.’ That was interesting, and that made it different.” On Scarface, Pacino and Bregman were definitely running the show, from where Stone sat. “Once Al said, ‘I’m excited by it,’ then Marty would go to work and he would do his number— which was get the screenplay together for Al,” Stone said. “Because Marty, at that time, was an independent producer. He had tremendous success from Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. And Marty also had another client, Alan Alda, who was really making a bundle of success—real big money—for Marty. So, that was his financial base. He put together Scarface, really literally, with his own blood. And he was Scarface, in a sense, in the making of that film; he was ruthless in getting it done.” Not that it represented a particularly tough sell on Bregman’s part, at least initially.

“Of course, gangster films are easier to make, in the system. So, he had the cooperation—on that film—of [executive] Ned Tanen and the whole Universal group that had financed Alan Alda. So, they went with him, but it soured quickly because Scarface was a hell of a hard number to pull off—many difficulties and way over budget. I think twice the distance. Six months, as I remember. It was scheduled for three months. That’s outrageous. In those days, too. It’s always been outrageous to go that far over budget, and there was a lot of pissed-off people, including Tanen.

“So, one of the things Marty did was just keep Universal at bay. He was constantly promising them anything—‘God will come and solve these problems’—keeping them at bay, keeping them away from Al. He always used to say Al was a monster and would blow up if you ever confronted him. And he kept that as a weapon, to defend the enterprise. But he had difficulties inside the enterprise because, frankly, it was in a very difficult shape. The thing was, there was not a lot of communications. And the assistant director had to be fired after a certain point, Jerry Ziesmer. That’s the ‘usual sacrificial victim,’ right away.

“The pressure on me was enormous because I didn’t want to cut the film, because I thought it worked as a whole, and I did get pressure, but I don’t remember exactly giving in to it. I think we kind of struggled our way through it. We just doubled the budget, and we doubled the time, and Universal kept betting on Bregman, I think because of Alan Alda’s success and his past success with Pacino. But they were kind of pissed off. I don’t remember it being a very happy film that opened. “After the film was over, I had a huge fight with Bregman over the cut, and I never talked to him again, for years. I saw him in the ’90s before he died, and we made up. But Marty was a tough character. He was a handsome gangster-type who grew up in the Lower East Side, and loyalty was the most important thing. And if you crossed him, if he felt like you’d been disloyal, he treated you like a gangster. He’d want to kill you. So, the situation was very difficult because he wanted to control the film. He was a control freak.”

Bregman did not look over Stone’s shoulder much while Stone researched and wrote the screenplay, first in collaboration with Lumet. “Sidney was Al’s favorite director,” Stone recalled. “The moment he told Marty he wanted to do Scarface, they went to Sidney. Sidney liked the idea, he liked Al very much, Sidney had been involved with me on Platoon. He’d wanted to make it for ten minutes or something like that, and then he passed. Because he was an older man and he didn’t want to go to that degree of exertion. He was very interested in politics, Sidney. He certainly wanted to keep Scarface in its political atmosphere of that time. With the Mariel boatlift, with the relations between Cuba and the US, and the other side of the equation: the coke war.

“That’s what interested Sidney. Sidney wanted to probe the relationship of the CIA and the DEA to what really was going on in the drug trade and if the United States was involved. And of course, it’s a dirty story. It’s hard to prove. But you know what? It led, ultimately, to the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the Iran/Contra scandal. It led, ultimately, to the Contra hearings and the accusations—which are accurate—of the CIA turning the other eye to the smuggling in Los Angeles. It was a dirty story. In Sidney’s conception the film would explore this, but Bregman did not want to go there.” In order to write, Stone had to get off the cocaine he’d been using to lift his spirits after the failure of The Hand. This would prove tricky, as his initial research on the cocaine trade would put him in rather close proximity to, well, the cocaine trade.

“I did all the research for Scarface on cocaine, in and out of the country. It was quite interesting because I understood that world better than if I had not done it. Al, on the contrary, had never done anything like that. He’d never even done cocaine. So, he didn’t know. Marty took me down to Miami, and he introduced me to a dozen people who were very helpful. And then, I expanded my contacts from there, outward.

“I talked to several police departments, and I tried to get as close to the gangsters as I could; but that wasn’t so easy. I talked to defense lawyers, of course, who were very important to contact. I went to Bimini to actually confront what was the trade, the nightly trade, going into Miami on cigarette boats. And also, prior to that, I’d been to South America, in Peru. I’d been there on another thing that I had been working on, years before, with a very knowledgeable journalist. This was not the El Salvador guy on whom I based my film Salvador; this is another thing completely. I had been in that world, and I’d been ingesting the material. So, I knew a lot in the sense of the feeling of it and the fear of being in that world.” It was from that fear that Stone conceived the film’s notorious chainsaw scene.

“When I was in Bimini, I was found out. I was with my ex-wife and we were pretending to be Hollywood screenwriters, which we were; I was. But they thought, because I knew a lot of people from Miami and I mentioned a name at this late night—we were coked down in the hotel room with three gangsters. Mid-level people, not high-level. They were the ‘shippers.’ They were the people who were doing the work of shipping it on cigarette boats into Miami. There was a hotel in Bimini, it was very famous. These shippers were all staying there and there was a lot of boats every night, shipping out all night. You’d hear the cigarette boats going. It was a trade. And this was the grunt work, the shipping via cigarette boat. But I could tell the scale of it.

“The characters that we grew came from that period. They were people who were killed with chainsaws. And some of these crimes were gruesome. They’d scrawl on the wall of the person they killed, they’d scrawl in blood ‘Chivato’—or something like that—like ‘Traitor.’ Or cut people’s eyeballs out. All kinds of gruesome shit. So sitting in a hotel room and feeling ‘found out’ by a group of them was something I tried to get into the film. “This was a multibillion-dollar business. Talking to the prosecutors in South Florida—there were three or four different divisions trying to handle it. There was this bureaucratic overlap. It was Fort Lauderdale. It was Miami. It was the US Attorney’s Office. There was Miami Beach. There was Miami. It was a mess. And the cops were all over the place. Different police departments had different rates of success. We talked to all of them. And we got a varied picture of it. “So, this was serious; and, as you know, it’s the period when Escobar started to get really big, going into the ’90s. And it was a great business to be in because you could get away with it so much. It started to change about the time we were making the movie there. And Miami was very paranoid about us being there. In fact, we lasted—and I don’t know exactly—I’d say close to two weeks we lasted, in Miami, before they threw us out. Because they didn’t want to be associated with that stuff.”

Having gotten uncomfortably close to “that stuff,” Stone decamped to Paris to write. He presumed cocaine would be more difficult to get a hold of in the City of Lights than it had been in these other climes. “It was a hard thing to get off of, yeah. But I knew I had to make a break because it wasn’t working for me and my writing was being hurt. So, I moved to Paris deliberately, after the research was over. I cut off everybody I knew. Getting out of the country to a country where there was not much of it, there—in France, in the winter—it was perfect. And of course, I did have family there, so it was a re-entry to an old world that I knew. And I got off it, and I came back to the States, and I was clean. I was able to do it—that is to say I could socialize on it, but I didn’t need it anymore.

“The thing is: cocaine doesn’t work. That’s clear. And I made it very clear to myself. But I have to say: in the movie, it’s all relative. Tony is basically saying, through the movie: ‘They should legalize this stuff. That’s the only way to beat it. They’re not going to cut it down by outlawing it.’ Like everything else, when the United States goes to war on something—war on drugs—it becomes like a ‘Vietnam.’ It’s a mess. We don’t know how to regulate anything.

“Tony Montana is the ultimate, ultimate free-market proponent. Sort of the Milton Friedman of cocaine economics. And he saw the picture correctly. He saw the hypocrisy. That’s what he hated, the hypocrisy. And then, of course, after so much cocaine usage, he becomes tinted with paranoia and he ends up turning on his friends. But for a while there, it was some great business. If he’d just kept his marbles, he would have been able to go all the way and probably retire as a millionaire and get into hedge funds or something. And by the way, there is a link because when I did my film Wall Street, I was going up to New York, down to Miami, there was a lot of traffic in cocaine coming to New York from there, at that point, about ’85. A lot of people were using cocaine—young people—and they’re making big money. So, there was a lot of that similarity exploding in Wall Street, the environment.” Back home from Paris, things did not proceed as planned. “Sidney reacted badly to my first draft, which was pretty close to the final draft—it was violent and vulgar, all those things—and it was too much for Sidney. He would have gone somewhere else. But Marty cut him off quickly. It was ruthless. He just said: ‘Goodbye. It’s not going to work.’ So, right away, he went to Brian because I think he was thinking of Brian, in the back of his head, because Brian had already been involved. On some level.” De Palma was amenable to Stone’s approach.

“There are two styles to screenwriting. One is to be like [Stone’s one-time mentor and Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter] Robert Bolt, where you put everything on paper. The other style is more American, where you put it on paper but it’s impressionistic and you direct it, and it becomes—you work on it in the direction. And I’m of both styles. Putting it all on paper is extremely difficult because there’s so many variations on the theme. So, I’ve been both ways. I worked with people like that and I worked with people who are a little looser. Brian’s a little looser. He’s not a stickler in the ways Marty or Al were.” He could take what was impressionistic in Stone’s script and run with it.

Stone stayed close to the production, starting with the casting process. He clashed with Bregman over the conception of Elvira, which Stone saw as an ideal role for Glenn Close. “I could never have directed a film with Marty,” Stone recalled with some amusement.

“De Palma was much ‘looser’ than I was at the time, in the sense that he had a little more experience, and he could put up with Marty’s control freak nature. Marty would be in every casting session. He didn’t even have casting sessions with actresses without Brian being there. I saw those. He’d line up fifteen, twenty blondes in the hallway—because he really felt responsible for the Elvira character. He really wanted her to be his ‘dream blonde,’ I guess. And I think he found it in Michelle Pfeiffer. I had a fight with him—I realize, now, how stupid it was—but I was defending Elvira as Glenn Close’s role. And Marty didn’t think she was right, visually. And my point was that Close was a very good actress. Michelle was not as experienced and had to struggle to make things work, and sometimes, I had to change the nature of the role, to make it fit Michelle. But ultimately she was the right choice.”

Once shooting started, Bregman let Pacino do his thing. “Brian had no choice because Al was a force. And Al was tough. Al wouldn’t get going—and I said in my book: ‘I don’t think Al will get going for the first seven takes.’ It was just generally the formula, and I couldn’t believe it because you don’t know how much time that wastes. A day has got so many hours and if you can’t get the first five, six, seven takes, you’re really fucked. You’re not getting many setups every day. And I could see this was coming, and it did go that way. But Brian was not a motivator. He was not. Brian was, as you might say, impersonal maybe. “Al was outside time. And I can’t tell you I understood his thinking. I understood his brilliance. I understood the things he was doing. And his screenplay ideas were always very—I always listened to him. I never belittled him like—Marty would belittle him and say: ‘Al was out of his mind. Forget it.’ You have to think about it, though. He’s saying that maybe it doesn’t sound right, but there’s something there. You have to think about that. “There was one time, Al went a little bit crazy when he heard Brian’s comment about ‘The actors are taking over this insane asylum’ or something like that. And he did go nuts on that. I think he disappeared for a few hours into his trailer. Jesus. One thing after another. It was a nightmare. I wouldn’t want that on one of my films. It would never happen that way, but it can get out of hand. So, Brian’s seen a lot. Yeah.”

Nevertheless, Stone sometimes found De Palma’s way of working confounding. “I don’t understand Brian. He’s very obtuse. He doesn’t give his emotions away. He certainly had a sardonic sense of humor. Very sardonic, very cynical, it’s funny. He’s very funny. All I can say is he didn’t seem to enjoy himself, at any time, in the movie. Except when he was shooting up something and having a tremendous time. But he didn’t seem to enjoy the process of people. He didn’t seem to like people as much as I would.

“On weekends, usually the director’s available because the film is an ongoing, seven-day-a-week affair, but he would actually, literally, cut off Bregman and would not answer his phone calls. So, here we are. And Bregman says: I can’t reach the motherfucker.’ And Brian’s rented a big house and he had a staff and they’re telling Bregman he can’t be disturbed, he’s asleep. He’d be asleep all weekend. So, he’s a strange guy. But he had a divorce going on.” Indeed he did, from the actress Nancy Allen. Apparently one source of strain was that De Palma would not cast Allen in the Elvira role.

Briefly putting himself in Bregman’s shoes, Stone reflected, “How could you fire De Palma when you’re in the middle of this mess that’s going on? But Marty’s certainly pulling his hair out: ‘What can I do to speed this guy up? I’ll call him on weekends. We’ll have a meeting.’ And he won’t even talk to you on the weekends. You can understand then Marty’s frustration. So, you get to the set Monday morning. You finally see your fucking director, and you can’t really say ‘You’ve got to speed it up.’ You’ve got to talk to them in certain ways. It’s very hard to motivate two people like Brian, who’s into his own world, and Al, who’s into his own world. So, you have these two obstacles. I wouldn’t want to have been the producer on that movie. I would have probably lost all my hair and ended up three hundred pounds or something, eating doughnuts all the whole time. I would have liked to see Scott Rudin fucking make that picture.” (Rudin was a famously prolific theater and film producer known for his prodigious temper; the accusations against him were such that while he’s still alive, he’s taking an indefinite hiatus from work. Apparently in addition to being a shouter, he was a thrower of objects. Hence Stone’s curiosity. What Would Scott Throw?) De Palma recalls asking Stone to leave the set on more than one occasion. From his perspective today, he’s not unsympathetic to Stone’s situation. The guy wanted to direct, had directed, and was now relegated to the writer’s chair but still hadn’t divested himself of the desire. And time would prove him a director of some distinction. But on the set of Scarface, De Palma had two primary collaborators cum bosses—Pacino and Bregman—and hence was likely to process Stone’s unsolicited suggestions as so much static.

But Stone insists he was not banished from the set as such. “He asked me to leave the set maybe three or four times in the course of the shoot. Like for the day, I’d leave for the day. I’d go back to where I was staying, and I’d work. Then Bregman may want me back and Pacino wanted me back. There was no way I was going to leave that set. I was stuck. Frankly, at the end, I was getting tired. It was just too much. Six months is a long time, and especially out of my life at the time. There were other things I wanted to do.”

Nevertheless, Stone had a passionate attachment to the film and worried over the finished product. In Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Oliver Stone Experience, one of the full-page illustrations is a letter that Stone sent to Bregman during the editing process of Scarface. Dated August 11, 1983, here are two paragraphs:

[…] the film is more important than any single one of us and right now I am convinced there are some major problems, especially in the middle. As a result it just doesn’t work—not on the level you or I expected. In parts it’s downright embarrassing. Unless we fix it now—while we still can—we will be hiding from disaster, not taking it by the horns now. I think still the picture could be good, not great—but good. Right now it’s not even that.

I’ve given my initial impressions to Brian but in the intervening 36 hours I’ve been unable to sleep and have jotted down various other notes I didn’t cover with him so I am sending him a copy of these notes. I am dealing I think only with things that can be fixed, not with things that cannot be changed because they were directed that way. Nor am I going into the many fine things there are in the movie.

Looking back now, Stone allows that he was likely more privy to the shooting and editing processes than a writer arguably ought to have been. In his book he goes into some detail about the differing factions weighing in on how the film ultimately ought to play. He portrays himself as something of a willing pawn of Pacino. He told me, “The reason I saw the cut was only because Al was so alarmed that he brought my attention to it and he wanted me to go. Marty didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want me to see the film, as a lot of people know—it’s the writer! You don’t want the writer to see the bones of the film. Right? Now, I think a writer can bring a lot to the rehearsals and to the film as a whole. Brian had me in the rehearsals, that’s true; but he didn’t have many rehearsals. He was never an actor’s director, that way. He didn’t believe that much in talking things out about characters, or much rehearsal.” But on the set De Palma rolled with Pacino’s requests for numerous takes. “That's a crazy way to work,” Stone insists. “But you don’t tell the actor what to do. The actor doesn’t tell the director what to do. The producer does what he’s supposed to. It’s a strange system, and I guess in the old days it might’ve worked because they all agreed on the idea that they’d have a thirty-day schedule. But this was not agreed to at all. There was no consensus. I saw the ‘rough cut’ and I went back to Al, and I shared my thinking with him and then, of course, all hell broke loose because that’s what Bregman did not want me to talk to Pacino about.

“So, Brian turned on me. Marty and Brian would not talk to me. They were furious because I had let loose the monster, who, of course, was personified in Al. Marty always put the onus on Al. He always made him into the monster, made him worse than he was. Now, Al could be a monster, but he was also very bright. Al had a great sense of drama and a great sense of what was working and what was not working. So, I think it’s wrong to ignore him. I think he’s very important to the process.

“Anyway, it did improve after I saw it. But I didn’t talk to any of them about it again. Even Al didn’t call me, which was hurtful because I had been loyal to Al. I feel divided because a director and a writer are supposed to be combined. And I’d been in a situation where the writer ends up working for the actor and I know exactly what happened in that sense, because the writer and the actor—when they combine—it becomes a number for the director. So, the director has to be in charge of the writing and directing. He has to have that under his control, and in certain respects he has to be his own producer. It’s an impossible situation. Brian was able to put up with it because of the way he works.”

Stone has made his peace with what Scarface is. “When Brian’s making a gangster film, he wants it to be big. He wants it to be like a Sergio Leone kind of gangster film. He wants it stylistic. He wants big scenes, a lot of suits, a lot of clothes, a lot of costumes, jewelry. I get it. I didn’t perhaps get it as much as I did now. And I like the result. I liked the movie. But you realize at the time I was working off a more realistic palette because I’d been there. And Brian didn’t really have that realism in him. Or interest in it. He wasn’t that interested in it. I would take him to certain places in Miami and show him the atmosphere, and that’s what he loved—he loved the clubs, and all of that. But the realism of the business, how deals were made, how money was counted, all of that, he’s not that interested in it.”

Ultimately, he looks at Scarface as Bregman’s film; when wrapping up our conversation, he said, “Scarface became Bregman’s ‘big one.’ It became his ‘big number.’ It was his film. And he became famous for it. He did other successful films. But I don’t think he ever did anything else that matched it, not even Carlito’s Way.”

-Excerpted from The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface by Glenn Kenny © 2024 in GQ.

[countzeroor]

Book Review: Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

If you know anything about me at all, I have a passion for the history of tabletop roleplaying. One of the books that helped stoke my interest was the book Heroic Worlds, which I read when I was in middle school. That book was a high level overview of the roleplaying game books that were on the market at the time – like the tabletop RPG equivalent of all those Leonard Maltin books giving an…

[oldshowbiz]

1987 - Leonard Maltin on the $10,000 Pyramid

[cinephilegame]

#CinephileGameNight schedule. More details at The Film Stage.

[derivativealigner]

Well I haven’t watched sp all the way through for about a decade now, so I thought it was time

Sometimes I wonder how accurate the fandom is when it comes to how we interpret the characters. Like, why is Stan a football star so often in fanfic and why’s Kyle always the smart one? So I thought I’d rewatch the show and make notes along the way to see where the source of all these interpretations is. I also wanted to see if I could get some fun info to analyze, but season 1 is pretty sparse in that regard so there’s not too much of that in this post, but I’ll make a post for all the other seasons too as I watch them

In summary, it’s established in season 1 already that Stan’s a star quarterback and an animal lover, Kyle’s an A+ student, and Kenny is poor and knows a lot about sex and doesn’t have many qualms about doing crazy shit. Cartman is a bit weird since he’s mostly just a naive brat in this season, but he and Kyle have a mildly antagonistic friendship already

I have all my notes under this cut. They include a bunch of small details and other observations. I also listed every Kenny death just because

Ike has freckles

Cartman says “Weak!” and “You guys” and “Seriously” a lot from the start, also “Kickass!” He doesn’t say weak or kickass much in the later seasons iirc

Stan says “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here” three times in this season but they dropped that catchphrase pretty quickly

Bebe got named in episode 2

Stan’s been an animal lover since s01e03 Volcano since he won’t shoot a bunny or anything else. He does shoot Scuzzlebutt at the end though

Cartman’s a pathological liar but in a childish way

Randy got named in s01e03 Volcano (and it only got worse from there)

The mayor went to Princeton

South Park is next to Mt. Evanson

Kenny will literally drink gasoline

Stan’s a star quarterback in 3rd grade

Clyde’s voice is wrong as hell in S01E04 Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride and he has a dog, Rex

Garrison says Kyle is an A+ kid

Shelly seriously abuses Stan, punching him, throwing him, maiming him with a lawnmower

Cartman had a pot-bellied pig called Fluffy

Cartman’s mom smokes crack and has sex with strange men

Dr. Mephesto is probably a Buddhist since he says “Thank Buddha” instead of “Thank God”

Clyde’s voice gets kind of fixed in S01E06

A guy called Mr. McCormick is killed in a protest, launched and splattered against a network building. He doesn’t look like Kenny’s dad though

Zombie Clyde attacks Bebe, rude

Wendy gave her costume contest prize (2 tons of candy) to hungry children in Nairobi

Cartman’s mom is on the cover of Crack Whore magazine. “Back do’ ho… Five on one action!” is the headline

Cartman genuinely cries at Kenny’s grave after the whole zombie thing but gets over it because of candy

Stan knows his mom’s credit card number and has no problem using it to adopt an Ethiopian child (the boys wanted a watch that came with the adoption, they weren’t doing it to be nice)

Cartman calls Stan a vas deference, Stan doesn’t know what that is so Kenny says “Dude, it’s a pipe for your peepee” (according to a transcript). Kenny sure knows male anatomy

Kyle sniffs Kenny after Cartman asks why poor people smell like sour milk and Garrison says “idk eric they just do”

Cartman thinks poor people should die and decrease the surplus population

When the boys get Starvin’ Marvin delivered to them, Cartman says “Hey mom, we found an Ethiopian, can we keep him?” and his mom says “Sure, hun.” She rarely says no to Cartman

Kenny’s dad is an alcoholic who drinks scotch according to Cartman. I mean, Mr. McCormick is seen drinking in multiple episodes and has a hat that says SCOTCH so it’s probably true

Kenny’s family says grace

Craig’s first appearance is S01E09. Also, S01E09 is the first time Kenny doesn’t die (Coincidence? I THINK yeah but it’s still fun)

Clyde got named in S01E10

Clyde and Bebe both spit on Pip’s face, friendship goals <3

Cartman and Kyle have their first fight at Cartman’s birthday party because Kyle didn’t give the right gift. Cartman slaps his face and  screams “I hate you! I want you to die! Die!” while on top of Kyle who’s not really fighting back

Satan throws a fight with Jesus after everyone except Satan bet that Jesus would lose, which leads to Satan winning everyone’s money. Mr. Garrison says “What a mean thing to do!” and Jimbo says “He is a jerk!” and I thought it was quite a laugh so I wrote it down

In S01E11 Tom’s Rhinoplasty Bebe and Wendy are sitting in the swings together and generally appear together throughout the episode, then Bebe gives Wendy a makeover so they’re bffs obviously <3

Craig first appears in the classroom, though not sitting down, in S01E11

Wendy’s not happy about Ms. Ellen taking Stan away from her, she says “Don’t fuck with me! Stay away from my man, bitch, or I’ll whoop your sorry ho ass back to last year!”

Kenny gives Ms. Ellen a scrumptious looking sausage as a valentine’s gift and giggles deviously. Wendy’s gift to Ms. Ellen is a dead animal

Even Kenny doesn’t know what a lesbian is

Wendy’s grandma died in S01E11

Wendy gets Ms. Ellen killed by hiring the Iraqi government (?) to put her in a rocket and shoot it into the sun, then she and Bebe have a pool party (very cool, they wear sunglasses 😎) and watch the rocket hit the sun

Cartman and Pip play a game of kicking each other in the nuts until someone falls. Cartman calls it “Roshambo”

Kenny has a sack of marbles

The boys aren’t fans of Barbra Streisand, but Stan is a fan of the Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway (he’s not a quarterback anymore, he’s an American football executive and the president of football operations for the Denver Broncos of the NFL according to wikipedia.)

Officer Barbrady is a fan of Fiona Apple (who was 20 at the time and had only one album released called Tidal)

Ned knows how to pilot a helicopter

Kyle’s mom is a fan of Streisand unlike literally everyone else, she even gets an autograph from Mecha Streisand

The boys are fans of Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure. Stan says “Robert Smith is the greatest person that ever lived!” and Kyle says “Disintegration is the best album ever!” and Cartman says “Robert Smith kicks ass!” and Kenny’s dead so he doesn’t get to have an opinion

Cartman has tea parties with his toys: Polly Prissypants, Clyde frog, Peter Panda, and a dragon called Rumpertumskin

Kyle wants to make fun of Cartman for the tea party but Stan stops him because he’s concerned that Cartman needs help

Craig is in front of the school counselor’s office in S01E13

A young miss Cartman drinks like a motherfucker at the 12th annual drunken barn dance where Cartman was supposedly conceived

Stan lets Cartman borrow his bike like a good friend

Garrison wanted to have a threesome with Chef and Cartman’s mom. I don’t know why I’m making a note of this but uh… yeah.

Cartman’s mom has had sex with everyone at this bar that Garrison’s drinking at, including principle Victoria, the mayor, Father Maxi, and Jesus (and maybe Kenny’s dad since he’s at the bar but the camera doesn’t pan to him when Garrison says they’ve all slept with Liane). Later Gerald Broflovski is a possible father to Eric, so he fucked her too. Also Mr. Mephesto and his friend Kevin, that little guy, are candidates along with a lot of other people, including the 1989 Denver Broncos (and Mr. Tenorman is included in that later)

Cartman doesn’t make fun of Kyle for being Jewish much at all in this season even though the Christmas episode is all about Kyle not celebrating

Clyde and Token appear very early on and Clyde has always been in the classroom (along with Bebe, Red, Kevin Stoley, Wendy, and Pip and uhh DogPoo too I think). Craig appears later in the season and Tweek’s not in season 1 at all, so Craig’s gang isn’t really a thing yet

And here’s a list of the ways Kenny died in this season. He dies in every episode except episode 9, and he dies twice in episodes 2 and 3. Altogether he dies 14 times

S01E01 Killed after alien shoots him, cows stampede over him, then cop runs him over which finally actually kills him

S01E02 Killed in a play by a falling teepee, then a second time shot by Garrison which sends him in the air and he gets impaled on a flagpole on the way down

S01E03 Killed by a volcano rock that burns him then rolls on him but he’s alive again in the end but gets shot by Ned’s gun that he drops and it accidentally goes off

S01E04 Gets his arms and head torn off in an American football game

S01E05 Stan’s clone punches Kenny into a microwave where he gets cooked alive

S01E06 Death touches Kenny

S01E07 Kenny gets crushed by a Russian space station and turns into a zombie because he gets Worcestershire sauce in his veins, then Kyle chainsaws zombie Kenny in half, then zombie Kenny rises from his grave and is crushed by a statue and a plane

S01E08 Kenny is killed by a bunch of turkeys. His eye gets plucked out. It’s dark blue

S01E10 After Kenny gets turned into a duck-billed platypus, Jimbo and Ned shoot him

S01E11 Ms. Ellen throws a sword through Kenny’s face

S01E12 While Mecha Streisand and a giant robot Leonard Maltin fight, Kenny plays with a tetherball and gets the rope wrapped around his neck and it strangles him

S01E13 Kenny gets stuck on a go kart and it drags him around but stops and he’s still alive! Too bad the go kart stops on train tracks and a train runs him over. Stan’s grandpa sends a video of the event to America’s Stupidest Home Videos and wins $10,000

If you read all that, first of all hello. I’m not new to the fandom even though this is the first thing I’ve posted on this tumblr blog. I’ve been writing a fanfic called Caffetamine though so I’m not a complete non-entity. Anyway, I’ll watch season 2 soon and post my notes on that too probably.

[archive-archives]

SIX BY SONDHEIM (2013) Run Time             86:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 - English Aspect Ratio       1.78:1; 16 X 9 Widescreen Product Color    COLOR Disc Configuration           BD 25

From award-winning director and frequent Sondheim collaborator James Lapine, Six by Sondheim is an intimate and candid look at the life and art of legendary composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who redefined musical theater through such works as Company, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. Told primarily in Sondheim’s own words from dozens of interviews spanning decades, the film is a highly personal profile of a great American artist as revealed through the creation and performance of six of his songs. It features rarely seen archival performance footage and original staged productions – created exclusively for this film – with stars including Audra McDonald, Darren Criss, America Ferrera and more.

HARLEY QUINN: THE COMPLETE FIRST AND SECOND SEASONS (2019,2020) Run Time             594:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 - English Aspect Ratio       1.78:1, 16 X 9 Widescreen Disc Configuration           2 BD 50

Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) has finally broken things off once and for all with the Joker (Alan Tudyk) and attempts to make it on her own as the criminal Queenpin of Gotham City in this half-hour adult animated action-comedy series. With the help of Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) and a ragtag crew of DC castoffs, Harley tries to earn a seat at the biggest table in villainy: the Legion of Doom. Don’t worry – she’s got this. Or does she? In Season 2, Harley has defeated the Joker, and Gotham City is hers for the taking…what’s left of it, that is. Her celebration in the newly created chaos is cut short when Penguin, Bane, Mr. Freeze, The Riddler and Two-Face join forces to restore order in the criminal underworld. Calling themselves the Injustice League, they’re intent on keeping Harley and her crew from taking control as the top villains in Gotham.

NEW 2021 1080p HD master! PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990) Run Time             102:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 - English Aspect Ratio       1.85:1, 16 X 9 Letterbox Product Color    COLOR Disc Configuration           BD 50 Includes Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

By day, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a painfully shy new kid in a small Arizona town. But by night, he’s Hard Harry, the cynical, uncensored DJ of a pirate radio station. Idolized by his high school classmates (who are unaware of his real identity), Harry becomes a hero with his fiercely funny monologues on sex, love, and rock and roll. But when he exposes the corrupt school principal, she calls in the FCC to shut Harry down. An outrageous rebel with a cause, Slater gives a brilliant performance as the reluctant hero who inspires his classmates to find their own voices of rebellion and individuality. A movie with a message, Pump Up the Volume is a raw and witty celebration of free speech that will make you laugh, make you cheer and make you think.

NEW 2020 1080p HD master! A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1935) Run Time             126:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Audioscopiks (MGM short); 2 Classic Cartoons 'Hey, Hey Fever' and 'Honeyland'; Radio adaptation with Ronald Colman; Trailer

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Charles Dickens’ tale of love and tumult during the French Revolution comes to the screen in a sumptuous film version by the producer famed for nurturing sprawling literary works: David O. Selznick (David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, Gone with the Wind). Ronald Colman (The Prisoner of Zenda) stars as Sydney Carton – sardonic, dissolute, a wastrel…and destined to redeem himself in an act of courageous sacrifice. “It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done,” Carton muses at that defining moment. This is far, far better filmmaking too: a Golden Era marvel of uncanny performances top to bottom, eye-filling crowd scenes (the storming of the Bastille, thronged courtrooms, an eerie festival of public execution) and lasting emotional power. Revolution is in the air!

NEW 2021 1080p HD master! BABY DOLL (1956) Run Time             114:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English Aspect Ratio       1.85:1, 16 X 9 Letterbox Product Color    BLACK & WHITE Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: "Baby Doll: See No Evil" vintage featurette; Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

Times are tough for cotton miller Archie (Karl Malden), but at least he has his child bride (Carroll Baker), who’ll soon be his wife in title and truth. The one-year agreement keeping them under the same roof – yet never in the same bed – is about to end. But a game with a sly business rival (Eli Wallach) is about to begin. In Baby Doll, as in A Streetcar Named Desire, director Elia Kazan and writer Tennessee Williams broke new ground in depicting sexual situations – earning condemnation from the then-powerful Legion of Decency. They earned laurels too: four Academy Award® nominations, Golden Globe® Awards for Baker and Kazan, and a British Academy Award for Wallach. Watch this funny, steamy classic that, as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide proclaims, “still sizzles.”

NEW 2021 1080p HD master from nitrate preservation elements! SAN FRANCISCO (1936) Run Time             115:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 Product Color    BLACK & WHITE Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Alternate Ending Sequence; "Clark Gable: Tall, Dark and Handsome" featurette with Liam Neeson; two vintage FitzPatrick Traveltalks: 'Cavalcade of San Francisoco' & 'Night Descends on Treasure Island'; Classic Cartoon 'Bottles"; Theatrical re-issue trailer (HD)

Romantic drama combines with humor, starpower combines with lavish spectacle and the walls come tumbling down! This Academy Award-winning extravaganza’s street-splitting, brick-cascading, fire-raging recreation of the cataclysmic earthquake remains "one of the greatest action sequences in the history of the cinema, rivalling the chariot race in both Ben-Hurs" (Adrian Turner, Time Out Film Guide).

Clark Gable plays rakish Barbary Coast kingpin Blackie Norton. Jeanette MacDonald portrays a singer torn by her love for Blackie and her need to succeed among the operagoing elite. Earning the first of nine career Best Actor Oscar® nominations,* Spencer Tracy is a priest who supplements spiritual advice with a mean right hook. He urges Blackie to change. But if love and religion can't reform Blackie, Mother Nature will.

NEW 2021 1080p HD master from 4K Scan of original Technicolor negatives! SHOW BOAT (1951) Run Time             108:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 STEREO - English, DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Original Mono Theatrical track- - English Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 Product Color    COLOR Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Commentary by Director George Sidney; Till the Clouds Roll By - Show Boat (1946) Sequence; "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill" Ava Gardner Audio-only Outtakes; Lux Radio Theater Broadcast (2/11/1952); Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

From novel (by Edna Ferber) to Broadway smash (by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II) to three film versions (1929, 1936, 1951) to stage revivals. Like Ol’ Man River, Show Boat just keeps rollin’ along. Produced by Arthur Freed and directed by George Sidney, this 1951 version of the saga of riverboat lives and loves has glorious stars (Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Marge and Gower Champion) in Technicolor® radiance, a made-from-scratch 170-foot paddle wheeler, timeless songs and an equally timeless outcry against racial bigotry. “This was music that would outlast Kern’s day and mine,” Ferber said in recalling her first reaction to hearing “Ol’ Man River.” She was right as rain.

NEW 2020 1080p HD master! MY DREAM IS YOURS (1949) Run Time             101:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        MONO - English, DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Vintage Joe McDoakes Comedy Short "So You Want to be An Actor"; The Grass is Always Greener short subject; Classic Cartoon 'A Ham in a Role' ; Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

Talent agent Doug Blake (Jack Carson) is giving 100% to earn his 10%. He walks away from his arrogant singing star (Lee Bowman) and scrambles to discover another who will shine even brighter. He finds effervescent songstress Martha Gibson. Doris Day plays Martha. Think she has a chance? During the shooting of Day’s first film (Romance on the High Seas), director Michael Curtiz was sure the sparkling newcomer had much more than a chance and set the wheels in motion for My Dream Is Yours. Curtiz dots his film with authentic Hollywood locales (including the fabled Schwab’s Pharmacy). And Bugs Bunny himself hops into a dream sequence. Welcome to the Dream Factory. Make it yours.

NEW 2020 1080p HD master from 4K scan of Original Technicolor Negatives! ON MOONLIGHT BAY (1951) Run Time             95:00 Subtitles               English SDH Audio Specs        MONO - English, DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: 'Let's Sing a Song About the Moonlight' vintage short; Classic Cartoon 'A Hound for Trouble'; Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

Not since Judy met the boy next door in St. Louis has there been a heaping of tuneful, romantic Midwestern American life like this! Doris Day and Gordon MacRae team for spoonin’, croonin’ and swoonin’ On Moonlight Bay, based on Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. “Try not to walk like a first baseman,” Mama (Rosemary DeCamp) tells tomboy Marjorie (Day) as she prepares to date college man Bill (MacRae). The advice takes. The lovebirds hear wedding bells ahead, just as soon as Bill gets his sheepskin. But World War I rages “over there.” And Papa (Leon Ames) rages at home after a flap with his prospective son-in-law. Will harmony return to this Hoosier home? Surely Day and MacRae will make musical harmony. And On Moonlight Bay will have you sailing along.

[blazehedgehog]

I think the other anon was trying to articulate a bigger question on the very nature of critic's, their power (influence) and who gave it to them, their opinions and if their opinions should be valued more than the masses and if they are does that matter or not. Obviously that's a philosophical debate too long to get into in an ask, but I'll try anyway. How do you feel about how people engage with critics? Do you have any thoughts about reviewers in general?

I think people engage with critics poorly. I think critics are also pretty terrible at engaging with their audience.

I suppose we could start with a tweet I saw about a week ago from former Kotaku writer Jason Schreier.

Now, this was likely a joke to test out a new Twitter feature where you can change who is allowed to reply to your tweets. Schreier said this and then disabled responses, probably knowing he had intentionally struck a hornets nest and delighting in the chaos of shutting off replies.

But it’s a real conversation that’s been had over the years. Should game reviews have scores? According to some, if a game review has a score attached, nobody will read the text, instead focusing only on the score. Ergo, we should remove scores and force people to read and understand the context and the body of reviews.

On the other hand, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Some people don’t want to read a lengthy, self-indulgent review just to suss out whether or not Red Dead Redemption 2 is worth picking up on launch day. And with some games today being so stuffed with hundreds of hours of content, it can often be legitimately prohibitive to read a long review that gets too deep in to the weeds. This is one of the reasons why I got frustrated with the writing of Tim Rogers, because that dude will write you a book about a video game, and some, maybe even most of it will be meandering, navel-gazing personal anecdotes that ultimately don’t really matter.

Because who are reviews for? For consumers, right? They’re product reviews. You’re making a qualitative assessment. Someone is trying to make an informed purchasing decision and that score will save them 20 minutes reading your review. Because, let’s face it, your review is one of a dozen they’re looking at today, and if they read each and every review, they will have spent hours looking at what could be very repetitive information.

But a lot of game reviews, and this is something even I’m guilty of, feel like they’re not only written by the game press, but written for the game press. They’re more essays than they are assessments. There’s nothing wrong with an essay! We’re sort of in a golden era of video essays right now on Youtube! But you call them what they are, because they aren’t really reviews.

And this has kind of driven a wedge between the games media and the people who consume games media. Now, people aren’t reading reviews to tell them whether or not to buy a product, now they’ve already bought the game and are reading reviews to feel smart about themselves. This game is more than just a game, and this review is more than just a review.

And this even briefly gave rise to a new kind of games media, referred to as “New Games Journalism.” Instead of merely just writing about a game, you write about how you experienced the game. You write about what environment you were in when you played the game, how elements in your life outside of the game reflected on how you viewed the game, things like that. The article in question becomes as much about you as it does about the game, sometimes moreso.

This has created a sense that the games media isn’t working for the consumer, the games media is working for itself. And I don’t think those within games media even realize this is what’s happened -- to them, they’re still just writing articles, and reviews, and whatever, just like they always have. And as I’ve said, this is something even I’m guilty of. Everyone wants to sound smart, and important, and not everything is meant to be smart and important.

I don’t want to make this sounds like it’s all the fault of games media, because it’s clearly not. But we’re in this situation now, a perpetual cycle, where readers will complain about writers, and writers will complain about readers, and both sides go round and around in circles until they fall over dead. Neither side seems to understand the problems with the other, and it’s creating this terrible division where writers look down their nose at readers -- but they’re supposed to be serving those readers. And the readers look at writers with contempt, despite still reading what they’ve written.

And it’s something that may be too big for me to unpack. I’ve talked about this subject before, and I always get to this point right here, and I never know where to go next because the big picture becomes too big for me to see it all, and I’d rather not take more shots in the dark than necessary. That’s kind of what gets people in to this sort of mess to begin with.

Like, even when it comes to you -- you write about a critic’s “power” and “influence” when as a critic, I don’t ever think about those kinds of things. I’m not up here wielding phenomenal cosmic power. The example of Anton Ego, from Pixar’s Ratatouille, probably makes up less than 1% of all critics. Heck, he may not even exist at all. The era of the “one true critic” has come to a close thanks to sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Guys like Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert don’t exist anymore. There are a hundred critics now, all reduced down to a single sentence and a headshot, all contributing to The Score.

You can naturally tie this back in to Jim Sterling dragging down the MetaScore for Sonic Colors, but if one review was enough to sway The Score like that then it wasn’t exactly a triple-platinum release, now was it?

I just.... I dunno, man. Don’t take reviews so seriously. That goes for everyone.

[thefilmstage]

We’ve announced the next few weeks of Cinephile Game Night lineups! It’s our twice-weekly series raising money for film-related relief funds, streaming on our Twitter account.

Night 13 – Saturday, May 9 at 9pm ET

Special Guests: Leonard Maltin (film critic) and Jessie Maltin (Maltin On Movies podcast) Featured Fund: Save Larry Edmunds Bookshop

Night 14 – Wednesday, May 13 at 9pm ET

Blank Check podcast vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: Griffin Newman (Blank Check), David Sims (Blank Check), David Lowery (director, The Green Knight, A Ghost Story), Alex Ross Perry (director, Her Smell, Listen Up Philip), and Emily Yoshida (Night Call podcast)

Night 15 – Saturday May 16 at 5pm ET

Little White Lies x Ghibliotheque vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: Iana Murray (Little White Lies), Hannah Woodhead (Little White Lies), Kambole Campbell (Little White Lies), Steph Watts (Ghibliotheque podcast), Jake Cunningham (Ghibliotheque podcast)

Night 16 – Wednesday May 20 at 9pm ET

Collider vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: Adam Chitwood (Collider), Matt Goldberg (Collider), Perri Nemiroff (Collider), Haleigh Foutch (Collider), Vinnie Mancuso (Collider), Allie Gemmill (Collider)

Night 17 – Saturday May 23 at 9pm ET

Fighting In The War Room podcast vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: David Ehrlich (FITWR, IndieWire), Katey Rich (FITWR, Vanity Fair), Matt Patches (FITWR, Polygon), Da7e Gonzales (FITWR, The Storm podcast)

Night 18 – Wednesday May 27 at 9pm ET

Special Guests: Ed Douglas (Coming Soon, Weekend Warrior), Eric Walkuski (JoBlo, Arrow in the Head), Christopher Bumbray (JoBlo), Rebecca Pahle (Box Office Magazine, Pajiba)

Night 19 – Saturday May 30 at 5pm ET

SlashFilm vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: Chris Evangelista (SlashFilm), Hoai Tran Bui (SlashFilm), Bradford Oman (SlashFilm), Jacob Hall (SlashFilm) Featured Fund: TBA

Night 20 – Wednesday June 3 at 9pm ET

The Big Picture podcast vs. The Film Stage Special Guests: Sean Fennessey (The Big Picture podcast, The Ringer), Amanda Dobbins (The Big Picture, The Ringer), Chris Ryan (The Watch podcast, The Ringer)

See more details here.

[cantsayidont]

Hateration holleration in the cinema:

THE BAT WHISPERS (1930): Creaky early talkie thriller, based on a Mary Roberts Rinehart/Avery Hopwood stage play, about a group of people terrorized by a mysterious masked criminal called The Bat. (Bob Kane later claimed that this was one of the inspirations for Batman.) There's a great opening shot and some cool model work in the first 10 minutes (like a sequence where The Bat descends by rope into his special car, which can generate a smokescreen to deter pursuers), but once it gets into the actual play, it becomes too static, and it's burdened with hammy acting and a truly painful level of mugging comic relief from the supporting players (with Maude Eburne the worst offender as the cowardly, superstitious maid). Star Chester Morris appears briefly out of character at the end to urge the audience not to reveal The Bat's true identity. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: Promises FANTÔMAS or LES VAMPIRES, mostly delivers Scooby-Doo. Batman fans interested in the character's antecedents should check out the first 10 minutes, but you won't miss much if you stop there.

ONE WAY PASSAGE (1932): Charming pre-Code melodrama about the doomed shipboard romance between a dying rich girl (Kay Francis) and a suave escaped convict (William Powell), who's being escorted back to San Francisco to be hanged for murder. Despite its obvious contrivances, the compact script and brisk direction keep things from becoming maudlin or grim, and Powell and Francis have wonderful chemistry (the best of their many pairings at Warner Bros.), with good support from Warren Hymer as the thick-headed but not entirely unsympathetic cop, Frank McHugh as a drunken scam artist, and Aline MacMahon as a bogus countess. A surprisingly warm little story about people doing the best they can in the face of unsympathetic fate. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: Touching, funnier than you'd think (though McHugh lays it on a little too thick), and even life-affirming.

THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960): Overlong, overwrought, somewhat undercooked Akira Kurosawa corporate crime drama, a loose modern-dress variation on HAMLET, about a junior executive (Toshiro Mifune) who borrows someone else's name and identity to infiltrate a big corporation whose ruthless skulduggery is responsible for his father's suicide, even going so far as to marry the boss's disabled daughter (Kyoko Kagawa) to ingratiate himself with his foe (Masayuki Mori). It starts off well, with a punchy style Leonard Maltin aptly compares to a '40s Warner Bros movie, but Kurosawa lets the supporting cast go overboard while failing to provide Mifune with enough fireworks to sustain the film through its rather ponderous 150-minute running time, and the gloomy ending offers no real dramatic payoff. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: Highly regarded by Kurosawa fans and film nerds, but casual viewers may wonder what all the fuss is about.

CROSSPLOT (1969): Labored action comedy starring Roger Moore as womanizing ad executive Gary Fenn, whose new discovery is a gorgeous Hungarian model named Marla Kogash (Claudie Lange), who's tied up in a convoluted assassination plot. Moore is game, but the script and direction are too clunky to ever whip up the requisite degree of froth, and the plot's awkward equivocation about student protests doesn't sit well. Martha Hyer is fun as Marla's flirtatious English aunt Jo, and fans of THE PRISONER will immediately recognize costar Alexis Kanner from "Living in Harmony" and "Fall-Out." (Moore's future Bond movie costar Bernard Lee also pops up in a small role.) CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: Never as funny or as fun as it wants to be, and your attention will start to wander by the midpoint.

THE HOT ROCK (1972): Droll, lightweight caper film, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel, about a gang of thieves (Robert Redford, George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Paul Sand) attempting to steal a rare diamond on behalf of a UN delegate from a fictional African country (Moses Gunn), only to have one brilliant plan after another go badly awry. Director Peter Yates wisely keeps things light even as the plot gets sillier, although he sometimes lets the energy level wane too much, and the ending feels a bit anticlimactic. Gunn steals the show as the gang's increasingly exasperated financier. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It really only has two female characters, and their roles are very small. VERDICT: Never laugh-out-loud funny, but a pleasantly relaxed amusement.

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1995): Near-miss film adaptation of the first of Walter Mosley's popular Easy Rawlins detective novels, about a newly unemployed Black veteran in 1948 Los Angeles (Denzel Washington) who's hired to track down a mystery woman (Jennifer Beals) some people will kill to find. Adapted and directed by Carl Franklin, it has great atmosphere, a charismatic lead, and superb support by Don Cheadle as Easy's casually murderous friend Mouse. Unfortunately, the story lacks an emotional hook, and Beals' flat performance leaves a blank space at its heart; the mise-en-scène is ultimately more compelling than the plot. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not in any substantive way. VERDICT: A movie good enough that you'll come away frustrated that it falls so short of greatness.

[makeitquietly]

“Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations” Comes To Blu-ray And DVD June 16

“It's no exaggeration to say that the films haven't looked this good since they were first released in the 1930s.” - Leonard Maltin.

The comedy films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have been beloved around the world since they were first released between 1927 and 1940. So beloved that many of the available copies are blurred dupes printed from worn-out negatives. Now, the best of their short comedies and two of their finest features have been fully restored. They look and sound as spectacular as when they were first released… Here are a few videos that prove it:

[Not posting the videos. Not sure why they chose ones that don’t have Stan in them. Not not posting because of that. Just wondering.]

Blu-ray & DVD Special Features:

NEW! 2K and 4K transfers from the finest original 35mm materials in the world.

WORLD PREMIERES! Laurel and Hardy’s legendary 1927 silent “pie fight” film THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY makes its video debut after being “lost” for 90 years! The only reel of L&H bloopers and out-takes, THAT’S THAT!

Classic short comedies BERTH MARKS, BRATS, HOG WILD, COME CLEAN, ONE GOOD TURN, HELPMATES, THE MUSIC BOX (the legendary Academy Award-winning “piano moving” short), THE CHIMP, COUNTY HOSPITAL, SCRAM!, THEIR FIRST MISTAKE, TOWED IN A HOLE, TWICE TWO, ME AND MY PAL, THE MIDNIGHT PATROL, and BUSY BODIES in addition to the feature films SONS OF THE DESERT and WAY OUT WEST (which includes the team’s famous soft shoe dance routine).

EIGHT HOURS of EXCLUSIVE extras – 2,500 rare photos and studio documents, audio and film interviews with L&H co-workers, original music tracks and trailers plus a full restoration of their one surviving color film, THE TREE IN A TEST TUBE.

Commentaries by L&H historians Randy Skretvedt and Richard W. Bann

Restorations provided by Jeff Joseph/SabuCat in conjunction with UCLA Film & Television Archive and Library of Congress.

Since I’m in a foul mood anyway, and since it doesn’t say anywhere if these go to watch in Europe too, or perhaps it does say and I’m too stupid to understand (what does NTSC mean?), here's some whining. Not to be taken too seriously. At least not the matters of taste. 

I don’t know who wrote the press release but it’s hardly confidence-inducing that they think Laurel and Hardy stopped making movies after 1940. The after 1940 ones have been available on Blu-ray for years and even Atoll K now is.

No silent films included?! And do I really have to believe that there is a person who thinks those 16 are the best of the sound shorts? Please. I mean, sure there may be people who adore Come Clean and One Good Turn but... okay, no, I don’t believe anybody’s top 16 list has those two on it. Maybe the first reel of OGT and maybe the ice cream buying from CC but never the whole movies. Where are Laughing Gravy, Beau Hunks, Our Wife, Them Thar Hills? How about Night Owls and Another Fine Mess? All funnier that the “legendary” Music Box. I wonder what made it so revered? Is it the Oscar Award Certificate?

One silent film included after all. Apparently The Battle of the Century has now been lost for 90 years. Well, I’ve got it on DVD already. It’s just the complete version of the pie fight that was lost or “lost” until five years ago and took them long enough to get it released. My guess is that the people responsible aren’t the same ones who worked ever so fast and smoothly and put the results for everybody to see when new footage for Stan’s Detained was found. Anyway, the boxing match is funnier than the pie fight and nobody’s saying anything about the part with Eugene Pallette been found either, so what’s the big deal?

Already planning a drinking game for the commentaries: take a sip when “childlike innocents” or a version thereof is mentioned and when Stan and Ollie are supposedly victims of a cruel world never themselves wanting/causing any harm etc. A sip of something nausea reducing.

I feel better now. 😛😛😛

[readordiebyemilyt]

Here’s a sampling of my favorite experiments/cheesy movie riffing for Halloween! 

Being From Another Planet: This movie features a mummy (with a twist!), Ben Murphy, and the classic library chase scene. Also, the bots have Joel patronize their haunted house.

Bride of the Monster: Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson, and all the Ed Wood octopus-related deaths your heart can stand! Plus a discussion of terrifying (sea and other) foods.

Manos, The Hands of Fate: Accept no substitutes! And if Torgo’s a monster, what other exaggerated physical attributes might convey monstrous status?

The Creeping Terror: The alien monster movie equivalent of a hot bath...which is to say that I find it very (weirdly?) soothing, but it’s pretty dull unless you have something else to do. Maybe draw some cartoons while watching this movie. 

Laserblast: Turtle aliens, Roddy McDowall, and the Leonard Maltin movie review game. (Also, if you’re interested, laserblasting.)

The Giant Spider Invasion: PACKERS!!!!!!! And Tom Servo’s immortal tagline: “If you see only 10,000 movies this year, make sure this isn’t one of them.”

Cinematic Titanic: I can’t decide between Blood of the Vampires or Rattlers, so maybe check out Cinematic Titanic this Halloween if you haven’t already. (I saw a live show way back in 2013, and it was great.)

Rifftrax Live House On Haunted Hill: Their only Halloween live show, this is an incredibly fun movie made even better with fun (super weird) shorts, Paul F. Thompkins, and the absolutely bonkers conclusion to this film, which involves a vat of acid and a skeleton marionette. 

Reptilicus: The triumphant return, and a new classic song. Oh, and a giant lizard, I guess.

[popculturebrain]

The Creators Of ‘Game Of Thrones’ And ‘Lost’ Are Having A Series Finale Feud

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin was recently a guest on Leonard Maltin’s Maltin on Movies podcast, where he called the internet “toxic” (no argument here!) following the negative reaction to the Game of Thrones series finale.