X-MAS IS FOR "FUNNY"...right, kids?

As I was contemplating a boxed set of Cassavetes Films.....an ordinarily supercilious acquaintance, locked into festive X'mas mode, 'recommended' that I abandon what he considers my 'high-mindedness' and consider some much lighter cinematic....dare I even use this word in this context......fare.....just the fake Duchenne smile on his 'recommended' entertainment 'boxed set' is enough to make me vomit up my breakfast and look for a Criterion Edition Box of Kathryn Bigelow/Nagisa Ôshima collaboratives, all singing...all dancing....'light' entertainment.....But, since this would/did NEVER happen, I'll 'go' for the compromise of 'Terry Gilliam's Greatest Hits'! o.k. everybody happy with that? I'm still grieving the cancellation of Hannibal and tossing a metal-toed combat boot at a screenful of NBA combat sports that edged it from Primetime to yesterday's news......."Mondo" is what most folks really, really like.....more 'guilty pleasures'......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d68kyNY0jI

Ronald SInclair's horseshoe Stickpin or The Font of Unimportance

Among the many 'things' that I've gotten from obscure auctions.......During an auction that I was attending with a friend who was bidding on some campy props from Elizabeth Taylor's CLEOPATRA,  I had only a few bucks in my wallet....and settled for Ronny's stickpin and an old photo of Ronald Coleman.....as I dug the stickpin from an old shoebox, I wondered "what happened to Ronald Sinclair, one of the many 'child actors' of the 30's, now largely forgotten?"  He, incidentally, became an actor in 1950's  THE SHE CREATURE as well as a few Roger Corman "B" movies.......Roger Corman's THE TRIP.....and  Mario Bava's  DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE........

Ken Burns Series about Country Music

Excited to view another Ken Burns Series on Public Television, I returned from the 'nothing much happening' Scott Show last night, unpacked all the show paraphernalia and went supine with an antique chicken feather pillow under my aching feet and a memory foam collar around my neck, clicked 'now playing', and voila....there was 'some Ken' for me.......'Growing up' in Alabama, I was...and it seems odd to me now....not exposed to Country Music....my parents were still 'hooked' on Big Band music and dumbed down classics, played by....you got it....big bands! A couple of trips to 'The Record Store' when I was 10 or 11....where one could 'pre-listen' to a 78....and later, a 45, before shelling out quarters or bucks to purchase it.....Arnold Hornbuckle, the Store's proprietor and arbiter of popular tastes, indulged a privileged few, myself included, with samples of all kinds of music....Classical European for the more educated German scientists...and there were enough of these to warrant a 16" bin of recordings........The usual 'pop-slop' for teenagers, "on to" the latest musical fads.....lots of Big Band music for the older folks, with money to spend, and what I now call "Mouseketeer Music".....Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalonish fare.......Always a 'shopper', I always perused the 'Bargain Bin' of recordings that languished, unheard and unpurchased....that didn't seem to 'fit' a popular category, or were made by glimmer-in-the-jar, not even 1-hit wonders......Arnold sold me a stack of recordings.....for a buck.....and I rushed home, to my room, to play them on my red/yellow/orange swing-out arm, enameled tin, electronic-less 'record player'......How about Hylo Brown & The Timberliners....or a warped, skipping recording of Red Foley's "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" or Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys, 'moaning the blues'? None of this 'did much' for me, who...still in 6th grade'....was more interested in Burl Ives' "Big Rock Candy Mountain", and whose musical tastes gravitated....with exposure....more toward the music of Stravinsky, Orff, Cage and Schoenberg.....1955 did introduce 'country music' into the mix.....coincidental with the Sesquicentennial Celebration that had enveloped Huntsville Culture then......However, "That" was more about "Grab your partner, dosey doe, swing them ’round and don’t let go!" than about the sentiments of 'country folk'.......and I preferred Patsy Cline to Mother Mabel Carter, then.... and African Tribal Music to Bluegrass strumming and foot-stomping......Well, that's another 'stuck jar lid' on some old pickles, isn't it?...and the contents, a bit saltier and sweeter than I remembered......Gene Autry, anyone?

Camera, Obscura......

A sleazy night's movie-going, initiating the 'tone' for a gloomy early morning, subsidized by the last of the civet bean coffee and last drops of Kalona Supernatural heavy cream, now abandoned, even by Whole Foods....triple-feature at the All Night Picture Show: Jean-Jacque Beneix's seldom seen "Art" film, Moon In The Gutter....that motivated me to get that Richard Avedon Photograph of Nastassia, wrapped in a giant python: decadently sad The Happy Prince....biopic of Oscar Wilde's last days, in Paris, begging for money to buy 'escorts', absinthe, cigarettes and liquor; and the 1993 Nicolas Roeg interpretation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that I had the good sense to pause, then delete, as the morning sun failed to glimmer through the eastern window, passing behind a thick, dark cloud....I must, somewhere around here, have that old copy of A Wonderful Life......Yes...put away that DVD of Querelle, Reed! Else this become a rainy Fassbinder morning, before the birds awaken to Dawn.......The golden sun is a fine thing, but I am a child of the moon, after all.....but have the good sense to prefer a silken divan with goose down pillows to a hard, wet rock in the Matchless Mine, Horace!

Summer and Smoke.....over a half century later..... another perspective........

watching Summer and Smoke @ 3 am.......The exemplary acting of Lawrence Harvey made Tennessee William's stagey old-school dramaturgy and the proscenium-bowing righteous acting of all its other actors seem like high school drama department stuff........I recalled another Harvey film, done around the same time......the remake of Of Human Bondage....where Harvey is better 'matched' by Kim Novak...their 'real life' dislike of one another adding some dynamics, maybe..... in some of the film's similar scenes.......Two films in which Harvey plays a young doctor who eventually rejects his female suitor after she 'comes on to him' after he had, earlier, made some 'moves' on them......It's time for remakes of both films, retaining the innuendos that were only inferential during the repressive 1950's and early 1960's, before the floodgates of 'un-expurgation' and "R" & "M" separated adults from 'children'..... That transitional phase between curtain and footlight acting and post-1950 'Methodism' which, thankfully, led to modern Naturalism.......I've already imagined a remake of Summer and Smoke...with Cate Blanchett and Lawrence Harvey.....just digitally remove Geraldine Page..which would not even be a consideration, had Margaret Leighton landed the role.... although Page's performance....at the time....was considered 'Golden Globe Worthy'!!.., John McIntire, whose talents were better served in formula Westerns; Pamela Tiffin, playing her 'kitten with a whip' schtick.....leave Rita Moreno who, even then, is always...and still is.....'on point', although she had to suffer through the racist posturing, still prevalent at that time....(and, later, "bitched" about this)....Ahem!.... And, incidentally, suffering through having to watch Edith Head's horrid costume designs in Summer and Smoke led me to ponder "how on earth did she get the Breakfast At Tiffanys gig!!"? Oh, that was really Hubert de Givenchy, wasn't it? Harvey's attire, was, as always....impeccable.......

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You did better than 99% of users on this list

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You beat the avg. score of 4 (!)......... ] Is Everything a 'CONTEST"? My "Taking" a TEST, at a friend's 'request', about the types of films viewers prefer to watch, only confirmed my judgement of Popular Tastes in Film....... Dragon Ball Super: Broly did stuff the registers with $93M.......while Alfonso Cuarón's ROMA barely filled the coin drawer with a penny more than a million bucks.....pocket change in the commercial film world.....Little has changed since Annette and Fabian were kicking sand and singing pop slop; but now, Annette would be in a cape, with CGI super powers and Fabian would be....well....in a cape, with CGI super powers.....

TY HARDIN....Bronco in hotpants

'Cinema History' research for this afternoon: I was always a big fan of Glynis Johns......and reading about her led to several associations with Ty Hardin, a popular 1950's and 60's T.V. star.....Remembering 'Hardin' (aka 'Hardon'), who seemed to always appear, shirtless and in the emerging, fashion-trending "Hot Pants"...or in cowboy hat with cartridge belt....and, of course, 'shirtless'.......I wondered 'what happened to Ty Hardin.....born as Orison Whipple Hungerford, Jr.    What a Life! at least 6 wives, one of them a former Miss Universe, Marlene Schmidand, 10 children with them.....After his 'hot cowboy stud' roles that lasted into his thirties, he later owned a chain of laundromats, in Spain.....was jailed for drug trafficking. (found with 25 kilos of hashish in his car).......then, became a born-again Christian minister......Who next.....to research...? How about Estelle Winwood? 

This morning, I watched....and it was a struggle to not press the 'delete' button, every 3 or 4 minutes..... "It's All About Love"...Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, Douglas Henshaw, Margo Martindale, Mark Strong and Sean Penn's "worst film"....... as well as Thomas Vinterberg's.....I think that this film should be utilized as an example of 'everything wrong,..that a director can 'do'....in a single film production'.........At least, it had an 'ice skating' scene.......reminiscent of the 'shooting of high fashion models' in the far better film, Sally Potter's "RAGE", done a few years later......and the music, by Zbigniew Preisner, was no Dreaming of Joseph Lees, either.......Yet, this mutating sci-fi-ish rambling fostered some far better dismally depressing dystopian flicks..... Sorry, Oksana Baiul, but Thomas must have had You in Mind!

OSCAR PREDICTIONS FROM PAID PROMOS...

2018 may have been the first year that produced films that I've not seen, yet....none of them!.....Yet, I venture to cast my opinions into my Blog....  Money talks, and Netflix has shelled out over $20,000,000 to 'advance and promote' its chances to garner the Man With The Golden Veneer Trophy......So....will that be for Buster Scruggs?.....more, more likely, the more humorous...and mainstream....costume period piece, The Favourite?:  And, to be considered...before it is largely forgotten, like its predecessors...all three of them.....as Americans' popular movie tastes change like skirt/hair/fingernail lengths and belt/hips/shoulder widths....to accommodate the latest big screen fads and fashionabilitys....in response to massive advertising campaigns,  Yorgos Lanthimos  and Alfonso Cuarón?   One thing, for sure, the list of 'next year potentials' hinges on the diving platforms of last year's goods, before they hit the sales tables and racks of Showtime, HBO and the bargain basements of afternoon TNT showings and the narcissistic inundations of humor and glamor on early morning and late night shows......Anyway, and 'back on 'nubulata' track'.....with a reference to 'tracking' shots.....which may, incidentally, finally fetch up a statuette for Glenn Close.....and it's about Time, isn't it, for that!........all those intimate, sensitive closeups will focus the attentions of 'voters'......like any other Political Scenario.....Time for 'Black', perhaps....with two 'Black''s in the titles, even?  I'm certain that Spike's 'gotta have it', after all........Roma seems to be the my choice, although I've not seen any other than artsy B/W clips with totally unknown actors.....which I like so much more than Parades Of Stars in concealment or enhancement makeups.......Will this 'year' be the Year of European-looking movies?......'Social Statement' flicks?........'WOMEN!".....'BLACK" + "WOMEN"..... Gay Glitter Rock-n-rolling?   Has Richard Grant finally been on screen enough in Hellraiser Reruns?......  I'm for Bale, who will do 'anything' to do it his way......and his way is 'many ways'.....right, Mr. DeNiro?  Will the "EURO-but 'we love MEXICO'"  stamp ..up the prestige of "OSCARS" with a toss-up between the films that have been seen the least.....

 

Ready, Player One? You're Free of Real Concerns!

"I watched Wade Watts and his High Five both defeat plausibility and engender complicit deniability, as comics-reading/virtual gaming fantacizers, incapsulated in CGI-actuated-retro-nostalgia, fill their goggles and headsets with Alter-World displacements of the exigencies of Dulldrum and its replacements of excitement, super-powers and the considerable unthinking rewards of Deus Ex Machina,,,,,,,,,The escapist fare looked great!.... It IS all about the surfactants, isn't it.......with the catalyst of unquestioning adolescence, buying this all up...then rushing out to Circuit City for the latest escape mechanism.... Now....clean up all this crap and do your trig homework or move out and get a job wrangling your plastic trash into the garbage pickup truck.....and McDonald's needs drive-through window order takers, you know!...."

Sincerely, your parents, King Kong and Godzilla, recently wed.. to legitimize our many offspring...[recently, in a lake of molten discarded electronic circuit boards and batteries, as The Iron Giant melts like The Terminator, and the enormous gorilla with lifelike fur dissolves in evanescent, liquid Imagination.....]