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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 10, 2016 19:38:02 GMT -5
I'm a member of the NW Film Center but will not be able to go to all of these. Which ones would you recommend? Taking your question a little more seriously, I am going to assume you haven't seen very many of these movies. So which of these films would be best to see on a big screen if you've never seen them before! If you can only see one, I'd go with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I made a Top Ten list fairly recently and Baby Jane was #6. It's not one that I watch over and over again because it's a bit long - over two hours - but I've seen it five or six times over the years. I would love to see it on a big screen! If Portland was a little closer, I'd drive up just to see it. The Women - I love this one as well. It's not just Joan Crawford, it's Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, Marjorie Main, Mary Boland and I don't know who-all. It's one of the movies that makes 1939 the Greatest Year in American Cinema. If you love a perfect script the way I do, this is a very good bet. (The only trouble is that Joan is part of an ensemble cast, so she has a relatively small part. She's pretty good in it, but she takes a back seat to Shearer and Russell. For Bette Davis, I'd go for either The Letter or Jezebel. She won her second Oscar for Jezebel! And it's a fascinating movie about the Old South. Baby Jane is a favorite because it's totally my kind of movie in just about every way, but Jezebel is my second favorite Bette Davis movie because she just so damn good! And The Letter, well, if you go, you'll know in the first two minutes why people love this movie! For Joan Crawford, I think Mildred Pierce is the one to see. A great great movie! It's the one that catapulted Joan from superstar status to icon. I also would love to see Grand Hotel on a big screen, but it's another ensemble piece with Joan elbowing past Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and GRETA GARBO for screen time. I should also mention All About Eve. I was assuming you'd seen it, but if you haven't, feel free to disregard my other recommendations and put it at the top!
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 10, 2016 21:18:55 GMT -5
I watched Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) last night. Jose Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why!
The source material is a great play! I saw the version with Gerard Depardieu when it first came out (about 1990, I think) and I was really impressed with the play, Depardieu and the whole production.
Overall, I might pick the Depardieu version over the 1950 version, but really, you can't beat the performance by Ferrer.
I would really love to see it on stage some time!
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2016 5:40:25 GMT -5
I watched Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) last night. Jose Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why! The source material is a great play! I saw the version with Gerard Depardieu when it first came out (about 1990, I think) and I was really impressed with the play, Depardieu and the whole production. Overall, I might pick the Depardieu version over the 1950 version, but really, you can't beat the performance by Ferrer. I would really love to see it on stage some time! Hoosier X ... I have seen this Movie on Stage in Portland Oregon during the 2014-15 season. It was very good performance. Portland Stage Information
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 11, 2016 9:54:29 GMT -5
I watched Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) last night. Jose Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why! The source material is a great play! I saw the version with Gerard Depardieu when it first came out (about 1990, I think) and I was really impressed with the play, Depardieu and the whole production. Overall, I might pick the Depardieu version over the 1950 version, but really, you can't beat the performance by Ferrer. I would really love to see it on stage some time! Hoosier X ... I have seen this Movie on Stage in Portland Oregon during the 2014-15 season. It was very good performance. Portland Stage InformationLucky! I can't complain. I saw As You Like It last year at Shakespeare in the Park in San Pedro. For my birthday, the whole family went and saw How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the local high school. Fun! They were really good. And in April, I went and saw The Addams Family: The Musical at the other high school in town. It's a mixed bag. Grand-mama, Wednesday, Fester and Lurch were all great! And there's a ghostly chorus of dead Addams ancestors that was really good! Very amusing.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 11, 2016 10:38:20 GMT -5
Ack ack! Ack Ack! Ack ack ack ack! Ack ack ack ack ack ack! Last night I watched Mars Attacks! (1996) with my nephew. My brother tells me that Nick has seen this quite a few times because my brother likes it a lot and watched it quite a bit when Nick was 4 or 5. (He's 13 now.) But my nephew said he couldn't remember it at all. But as we were watching it, he remembered what happens to everybody. He kept saying things like, "She gets her head put on the dog, doesn't she?" and "Oh, yeah! The dove sets the aliens off!" and "The old lady's music is what kills the aliens" usually just minutes before they happened. We were both amazed that Jack Black is in this movie. (My nephew loves Jack Black.) And Nick was amazed that the president's daughter is Padme from the Star Wars prequels. I love this movie. I saw it when it first came out and I've seen it quite a few times since then. (But no for a while.) On my IMDB Favorite Movies Year-By-Year list, I have it tied with Fargo as best movie of 1996. It was only about 10 p.m. when we finished Mars Attacks!, so I watched Bunny O'Hare (1971). It has a reputation as a bad movie. And it's pretty much deserved. Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine dress up as hippies and rob banks. And nobody in the banks notice that they are two people in their sixties dressed up as hippies. So the police are harassing the hippies to find the bank robbers. I enjoy a bad movie as much as the next guy. But I didn't enjoy this the way I enjoy something like Manos the Hands of Fate or Monster-A-Go-Go. I liked Bunny O'Hare for the performances. In addition to Davis and Borgnine, this movie also features Joan Delaney, Jack Cassidy, John Astin (Gomez Addams) and Jay Robinson (Dr. Shrinker). Everybody is doing their best with some weak material, and it almost works despite being so silly. I found it quite charming and I had no problem watching the whole thing without getting tired despite the late hour. I can only recommend this for people with very specific tastes in films. Bette Davis fans and bad-movie fans should be in Movie Heaven watching this bizarre artifact of the early 1970s.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 11, 2016 16:52:59 GMT -5
I took my nephew to see Warcraft (2016).
It's not good.
I left the first time to go to the bathroom.
I left the second time to text my friend about how bad it was.
I ended up liking a few moments in the last 30 minutes. There's a scene with a golem that I liked. But getting to that point was a chore at times. I felt like I had been in the theater for half the day.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2016 18:28:31 GMT -5
Hoosier,
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying ... Would make an excellent stage adaption! Glad you and your family enjoyed it so much!
Mars Attacks! ... This movie came out 10 years ago and I was stunned by an all star cast with some memorable characters thrown in for good measures and it's one of my favorites and I was very impressed by the flow of this movie and direction it's leads you. I just wished that they made a sequel; but it's wouldn't be a right thing to do.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2016 23:22:30 GMT -5
It Happened to the World Fair (1963)As a Native Washingtonian, I wanted to watch this movie and waited all week to see this movie starring Elvis Presley, Joan O'Brien, and Vicky Tiu who played Sue-Lin and by the way this is her only movie role that she did in her lifetime and she was adorable in this charming musical. Vicky Tiu with ElvisJoan O'Brien with ElvisGary Lockwood played Danny Burke and he and Elvis had a plane named (they lost the plane over $1200 debt) Bessie and I'm not going to dwell on the story of the child being abandoned by her Uncle Walter Ling being played by Kam Tong who had an accident in this film. But, the real star of the movie is the Seattle World's Fair and it's was an excellent job of getting all the main things the Coliseum, The Space Needle, The Rides, Monorail, and other attractions as well. It was fun seeing it all together in this movie. In a uncredited role Kurt Russell was the boy that kicked Elvis in the shin in order to see the attractive nurse being played by Joan O'Brien. Kurt Russell with ElvisIt was a delightful movie and I haven't seen it since the 80's and I enjoyed it very much. And, all you Batman TV Fans ... I wanted to add this ... Yvonne Craig was in this movie she played a young (by the name of Dorothy Johnson) lady who Elvis was romancing at the beginning of the movie and she Elvis was together about 10 minutes or so and that's all she had and spent half the time on the screen kissing and that's pretty much not much of role for Yvonne Craig of which I was a little disappointed of. Yvonne Craig with Elvis
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 12, 2016 14:40:25 GMT -5
Every once in a while, my brother likes to watch a foreign film, so last night we watched Volver (2006) with Penelope Cruz and directed by Pedro Almodovar. He used to watch a lot of Almodovar, but I don't think he's seen any of Almodovar's movies since the 1990s. I saw Volver just a few years ago, and I love it! I've been wanting to see it again for a while. I don't even want to begin to describe the plot. It has so many twists and turns and goes off in such unexpected directions that being surprised is an awful lot of the fun. I think it's probably Penelope Cruz's best movie. And Carmen Maura (who played Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) is also great. I usually prefer Almodovar's earlier movies, but Volver and The Skin I Live In (from 2011) are as good as anything he made way back when (except Women on the Verge, which is a one-of-a-kind classic that I've seen a bunch of times).
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 12, 2016 14:54:29 GMT -5
It was a little after 10 p.m. when we finished with Volver, so I turned on the TV to watch Svengoolie. He was showing Pillow of Death (1945), the final "Inner Sanctum" movie released by Universal. I'm a sucker for Universal horror movies, especially the ones I've never seen. Lon Chaney Jr. appeared in all the "Inner Sanctum" movies. In Pillow of Death, he's joined by J. Edward Bromberg and Brenda Joyce, who played Jane in the Tarzan movies after Maureen O'Sullivan quit. Pillow of Death is pretty silly. Very very silly. And not really very well-constructed as a murder mystery. So many people are murdered that I was wondering if the murderer would turn out to be the only one left. I was eagerly awaiting the scene where Lonely Lon is standing over the smothered body of the last victim and explaining it to the audience in his anguished, hammy way. "Those blackouts! The mud on the carpet! All those extra pillows on the divan! Why ... I WAS THE KILLER ALL ALONG!" I desperately want to see a movie with Richard Dix, Lon Chaney Jr. and Victor Mature, and then watch to see if there's any scenery left by the end.
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Post by DE Sinclair on Jun 13, 2016 11:42:10 GMT -5
Ack ack! Ack Ack! Ack ack ack ack! Ack ack ack ack ack ack! Last night I watched Mars Attacks! (1996) with my nephew. My brother tells me that Nick has seen this quite a few times because my brother likes it a lot and watched it quite a bit when Nick was 4 or 5. (He's 13 now.) But my nephew said he couldn't remember it at all. But as we were watching it, he remembered what happens to everybody. He kept saying things like, "She gets her head put on the dog, doesn't she?" and "Oh, yeah! The dove sets the aliens off!" and "The old lady's music is what kills the aliens" usually just minutes before they happened. We were both amazed that Jack Black is in this movie. (My nephew loves Jack Black.) And Nick was amazed that the president's daughter is Padme from the Star Wars prequels. I love this movie. I saw it when it first came out and I've seen it quite a few times since then. (But no for a while.) On my IMDB Favorite Movies Year-By-Year list, I have it tied with Fargo as best movie of 1996. It was only about 10 p.m. when we finished Mars Attacks!, so I watched Bunny O'Hare (1971). It has a reputation as a bad movie. And it's pretty much deserved. Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine dress up as hippies and rob banks. And nobody in the banks notice that they are two people in their sixties dressed up as hippies. So the police are harassing the hippies to find the bank robbers. I enjoy a bad movie as much as the next guy. But I didn't enjoy this the way I enjoy something like Manos the Hands of Fate or Monster-A-Go-Go. I liked Bunny O'Hare for the performances. In addition to Davis and Borgnine, this movie also features Joan Delaney, Jack Cassidy, John Astin (Gomez Addams) and Jay Robinson (Dr. Shrinker). Everybody is doing their best with some weak material, and it almost works despite being so silly. I found it quite charming and I had no problem watching the whole thing without getting tired despite the late hour. I can only recommend this for people with very specific tastes in films. Bette Davis fans and bad-movie fans should be in Movie Heaven watching this bizarre artifact of the early 1970s. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree about Mars Attacks. Don't get me wrong, I've liked monster movies, alien attack movies, etc, including some really goofy and bad ones. And Mars Attacks includes a lot of really good actors. My problem with this movie is that it has always struck me as something I can only describe as mean-spirited. It doesn't come across to me as funny, none of the characters are likeable, and it seems like the movie makers are just delighting in torturing them. I know it's based off the trading card set back in the sixties, and maybe these things are scenes that were on the cards and they were just checking them off the list, but I didn't care for it.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 13, 2016 13:09:39 GMT -5
Today on YouTube Theatre: Girl Shy (1924) with Harold Lloyd. YouTube has a very nice print of Girl Shy. And it's really good movie. Safety Last is not just Lloyd's best movie, it's also one of the top classics of World Cinema. If I made a list of my Top Five Silent Films, Safety Last would be Number Four or Five. It's hard to compete with that. Girl Shy tries really hard, and it is very funny and fast-moving in its own right. It's my second favorite Lloyd film. Part of the reason for that is Jobyna Ralston. She's the best actress of the leading ladies in the classic comedies of the silent era. I love Edna Purviance and Mildred Davis, but Jobyna was something special. And she adds so much to Girl Shy! When Harold is stuttering so bad that he can't even get out a single syllable, Jobyna is simultaneously nodding encouragement and also clenching her fingers with frustration. She is always so much more engaged with the material than many of the other leading ladies in the silent comedies. Whereas the films of Buster Keaton are filled with clueless but pretty virgins evocative of D.W. Griffith's movies, Jobyna Ralston is a modern woman, a flapper almost, and a lot more involved in the movie. Basically, Harold is a tailor's assistant who is very shy with woman. He has written a book about his (imaginary) love affairs and he travels to the city to give it to a publisher. On the train trip, he rescues Jobyna's dog and he somehow works up the courage to flirt a little. And so it goes from there. The rousing finale is Harold trying to get to Los Angeles when Jobyna is about to marry a terrible person who is already married. (Harold and Jobyna parted ways when Harold acted indifferent when his book wasn't accepted by the publisher and he nobly dumped her because he couldn't support her.) So Harold steals several cars, a motorcycle, a horse AND A STREETCAR in order to stop the wedding. Geez Louise! It's an amazing, action-packed, hilarious sequence! I really love this movie. I've seen it before, but for some reason, it really came alive for me this time. I've always liked it but I hadn't really noticed before just how good it is. Maybe if I see it a few more times, I'll rank it as high as Safety Last.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 13, 2016 19:34:38 GMT -5
You Tube have Girl Shy and I just can't believe it and I will be definitely be watching in a day or two. Thanks for the heads up Hoosier and that's one of my favorite Harold Lloyd film that came out in 1924.
Jobyna Ralston is a Knockout!
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 13, 2016 23:39:07 GMT -5
You Tube have Girl Shy and I just can't believe it and I will be definitely be watching in a day or two. Thanks for the heads up Hoosier and that's one of my favorite Harold Lloyd film that came out in 1924. Jobyna Ralston is a Knockout! YouTube also has Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother, which is another one he did with Jobyna. It's another really good one!
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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2016 2:11:11 GMT -5
You Tube have Girl Shy and I just can't believe it and I will be definitely be watching in a day or two. Thanks for the heads up Hoosier and that's one of my favorite Harold Lloyd film that came out in 1924. Jobyna Ralston is a Knockout! YouTube also has Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother, which is another one he did with Jobyna. It's another really good one! I just got those movies bookmarked and ready to watch on Friday and just can't wait to watch them!
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