SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977). First time seeing it all the way through in at least 25 years (if not more). I saw this theatrically in 1977 and several times in the 80s, so I had fond memories of it. In honor of Burt's passing, I gave it another go.
You know what? The movie's still a lot of fun. It's a paper thin plot held together (barely) by the charm/chemistry of the lead actors, but sometimes that's all you need. It helps that the movie is a masterwork in pacing and editing...it absolutely flies by, never really letting up in terms of getting you from point A to point B. While it does move fast, it never really sacrifices character.
Some 70s sexism and casual racism aside (mainly from Jackie Gleason's sheriff character), it's a lot of fun and worth checking out again if it's been a while. It's streaming right now on Amazon Prime for free.
I used to love these films as a kid, recently re watched the cannonball run 1 and 2 similar kind of thing to satb, great fun but for me just too much of the time.
One of the best final act climax sequences I’ve seen in years. I’d forgotten how good (and unusual) this movie now seems.
Tha last fifteen minutes is set up in a really odd and surprising way which kinda puts you off as you’re watching it. Van Helsing (Cushing) carries out a blood tranfusion on a woman. But he does it REALLY slowly. I thought it was so Cushing could show off his Dr Frankenstein medical skills.
But no. Director Terence Fisher was messing with our heads. Tricking us into a false sense of secutity.
Things move on. Aristotelian discovery and reversal in the story as we discover Dracula’s coffin is in the basement of this very house. Safety becomes danger in an unexpected but inevitable manner.
Before we know it everybody is rushing around shouting, chasing, getting locked in cellars. Woman gets abducted by the Big D.
Van Helsing and pal (Michael Gough) go haring after him, racing through the English countryside toward the German castle.
Arriving at the castle, Dracula tries to bury a woman alive in a hole in the ground. Looks very surprised when Van Helsing arrives by fast carriage.
Cue, running into castle, throwing things around, attempting some last minute strangling, using candlesticks as religious weapons, bright ideas arriving, running across tables, pulling down curtains, letting some light shed on the villain. Lee acts up a storm as he turns to dust.
Happy ending.
Now, that’s how you do a hero vs villain last act.
I'm watching "Spartacus" (1960).I won't review it here and now, I can just say I enjoy it a lot.
I would like to make two points:
- Stanley Kubrick took over directing after Anthony Mann quit after just two weeks of filming. Kubrick, a young director with no experience with big productions, needed only a weekend to prepare. One can only hope.... :v
-Lawrence Oliver and Timothy Dalton look and sound a lot like each other, especially when they are speaking softly.
One of the best final act climax sequences I’ve seen in years. I’d forgotten how good (and unusual) this movie now seems.
Tha last fifteen minutes is set up in a really odd and surprising way which kinda puts you off as you’re watching it. Van Helsing (Cushing) carries out a blood tranfusion on a woman. But he does it REALLY slowly. I thought it was so Cushing could show off his Dr Frankenstein medical skills.
But no. Director Terence Fisher was messing with our heads. Tricking us into a false sense of secutity.
Things move on. Aristotelian discovery and reversal in the story as we discover Dracula’s coffin is in the basement of this very house. Safety becomes danger in an unexpected but inevitable manner.
Before we know it everybody is rushing around shouting, chasing, getting locked in cellars. Woman gets abducted by the Big D.
Van Helsing and pal (Michael Gough) go haring after him, racing through the English countryside toward the German castle.
Arriving at the castle, Dracula tries to bury a woman alive in a hole in the ground. Looks very surprised when Van Helsing arrives by fast carriage.
Cue, running into castle, throwing things around, attempting some last minute strangling, using candlesticks as religious weapons, bright ideas arriving, running across tables, pulling down curtains, letting some light shed on the villain. Lee acts up a storm as he turns to dust.
Happy ending.
Now, that’s how you do a hero vs villain last act.
Jimmy Sangster's script for this is an absolute model in how to simplify a narrative for filming. Note how the action doesn't shift to Whitby to save having to mount ship scenes, so everything is a fairly short carriage-ride away.
Jimmy Sangster's script for this is an absolute model in how to simplify a narrative for filming. Note how the action doesn't shift to Whitby to save having to mount ship scenes, so everything is a fairly short carriage-ride away.
They start the story with Harker's arrival at Castle Dracula. And with him already on a mission to kill Dracula. None of the longer setup from the novel. Immediately into conflict and anticipation. Harker gets turned. Then Van Helsing arrives. Sangster strips the story down to a conflict between Dracula and Van Helsing. The surrounding characters from the novel are there, but their roles are simplified. Unity of action. Unity of setting.
The movie's script really is a perfect example of pure story extracted from the disparate elements in Stoker's original narrative. Sangster pulls out the core of the story and arranges it in set-pieces that are staged wonderfully well.
No wonder it made Hammer so much money at the time.
Watched 'Gone Girl' last night. One of the best thrillers I've seen in a long time. Rosamund Pike steals the show - she was brilliant. An intriguing plot and you're not sure which way this is going to go. Highly recommended. -{
"Everyone knows rock n' roll attained perfection in 1974; It's a scientific fact". - Homer J Simpson
Final Score :
Nothing new, a by the numbers Die Hard at a football match.
Entertaining enough to pass 90 minutes. There is a great
Fight in a kitchen with Bautista fighting a guy even bigger
Than him. With Pierce Brosnan making a guest appearance.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I watched "Marry Poppins" for the first time last night. It's a fun and inventive. The special effects must have been cutting edge back then. I still haven't seen "Brief Encounter", "A Matter of Life and Death", "Withnail & I" and several other British classics.
"The Man Who Disappeared", a Sherlock Holmes story based on Conan Doyle's "The Man With The Twisted Lip". I'm very forgiving of old films/TV when it comes to SFX etc, but this 1951 production doesn't even approach the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce series of ten years or more earlier technically, and is well behind the roughly contemporary Arthur Howard/Marion Crawford series. Poor direction, terrible casting, etc.
Edit: Oh, I get it it's so it had KKK in the middle of it. -{
Anyway, great rousing finale but in between it was a bit ho hum. One of those odd films that is based on a true story but strangely unconvincing a lot of the time.
It looked a bit too polished to be a film depicting its time. If it had looked scrappier you might have gone along with the idea that a cop would be dumb enough to use his own name to infiltrate a gang and then get the Klan ID card sent to his home address - I thought there would be a follow up to that.
Still didn't really buy the idea of a black cop in the force back then, aside from one snipey guy in the office it's all cool, you never see any other racial problems, or racist reactions to him from the public.
The KKK come out of it quite badly, I thought that was rather unfair... okay okay I'm kidding, but it might have been better to have a couple of them a bit smarter and charismatic (aside from poster boy David Duke) to generate tension. Weird to see that Duke is still doing his thing and the final scenes have the visceral power the rest of the film doesn't quite have.
John David Washington and Adam Driver put in real star performances, good stuff.
This movie is the story of the very unconventional life of Marston, the creator of the Wonder Woman character. He was a psycology professor with his very own theory. He (Luke Evans) had to resign because of his polyamorous relationship with his wife (Rebecca Hall) and a younger woman (Bella Heathcote). They lived together and he had children with both. The women lived together for 38 years after his death. It's also worth mentioning that he and his wife invented an early version of the lie detector. He invented Wonder Woman to spread his ideas about feminism. The comic was also full of bondage, something that often popped up in the comic too. I think the movie is worth watching for the unusual relationship and the three people in it, like me you don't have to be a Wonder Woman fan to like this movie.
There is a gaffe: Marsdon says he served in the OSS in WWI, but this espionage agancy was formed when the US entered WWII.
I've felt great with these probiotics and seen A Simple Favor the other day. I was dragged to the theatre to see this by my girlfriend. I have to say, I enjoyed it a lot more then I expected. It's a fun movie.
This movie is the story of the very unconventional life of Marston, the creator of the Wonder Woman character. He was a psycology professor with his very own theory. He (Luke Evans) had to resign because of his polyamorous relationship with his wife (Rebecca Hall) and a younger woman (Bella Heathcote). They lived together and he had children with both. The women lived together for 38 years after his death. It's also worth mentioning that he and his wife invented an early version of the lie detector. He invented Wonder Woman to spread his ideas about feminism. The comic was also full of bondage, something that often popped up in the comic too....
I want to see that doc.
Those early Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s are awesomely weird stuff, its amazing they got published and I think they are a bit awkward for DC today, because whatever Marston's idea of feminism was, it's different from how the word is understood today and what a major corporation like Warner Brothers would want being sold as a children's comic.
Women were always getting tied up, and the Amazons were always giving these verbose lectures on the virtue of "loving submission". The artist Marston used, H.G. Peter, had this pseudo-art nouveau aesthetic totally out of step with the action packed style becoming standard in superhero comics.
In the earliest days of the superhero comics, there was a backlash from concerned parents against all the violent macho and arguably fascist imagery being sold to children, so DC hired a panel of respectable academics to advise them and appease parents. William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, was one of them, and his advice was to include more female characters and feminine values amongst all the manly men hitting each other. So they asked him to create such a comic himself. Which then consisted of an island full of scantily clad women tying each other up for fun and games, losing their strength when tied up by men, and female villains begging to be brought to Paradise Island in chains where they too could learn the virtues of "loving submission".
Number24, I know you always appreciate a post with lots of pictures, and despite your usual distaste for comic book imagery, I can see Golden Age Wonder Woman is of particular interest to you, so, here are some random examples I found from a Google image search:
some of those knots used were very elaborate and precisely displayed, just in case the kiddies wanted to play along at home!
also there was spanking content:
I've read lots of Golden Age Wonder Woman, and I'm still not clear how any of this promotes feminine values, but the bondage and spanking imagery is always front and centre.
after Marston died in 1948, Wonder Woman became a much more mediocre comic, only published because the original contract stated the copyright should return to Marston's estate should DC cease publication, and they always wanted to sell lunchboxes and t-shirts with the characters image even if the comic itself wasn't making much money.
Been struck down with a bit of 'man flu' this weekend so, being a little housebound I thought I'd look up some old favourites
Last night was 'Trading Places' - still, for me, Murphy and Ackroyd's finest hour and that's not even touching on the universally superb supporting cast.
Genuinely laugh out loud funny even after 35 years and numerous viewings.
This movie is the story of the very unconventional life of Marston, the creator of the Wonder Woman character. He was a psycology professor with his very own theory. He (Luke Evans) had to resign because of his polyamorous relationship with his wife (Rebecca Hall) and a younger woman (Bella Heathcote). They lived together and he had children with both. The women lived together for 38 years after his death. It's also worth mentioning that he and his wife invented an early version of the lie detector. He invented Wonder Woman to spread his ideas about feminism. The comic was also full of bondage, something that often popped up in the comic too....
I want to see that doc.
Those early Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s are awesomely weird stuff, its amazing they got published and I think they are a bit awkward for DC today, because whatever Marston's idea of feminism was, it's different from how the word is understood today and what a major corporation like Warner Brothers would want being sold as a children's comic.
Women were always getting tied up, and the Amazons were always giving these verbose lectures on the virtue of "loving submission". The artist Marston used, H.G. Peter, had this pseudo-art nouveau aesthetic totally out of step with the action packed style becoming standard in superhero comics.
In the earliest days of the superhero comics, there was a backlash from concerned parents against all the violent macho and arguably fascist imagery being sold to children, so DC hired a panel of respectable academics to advise them and appease parents. William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, was one of them, and his advice was to include more female characters and feminine values amongst all the manly men hitting each other. So they asked him to create such a comic himself. Which then consisted of an island full of scantily clad women tying each other up for fun and games, losing their strength when tied up by men, and female villains begging to be brought to Paradise Island in chains where they too could learn the virtues of "loving submission".
Number24, I know you always appreciate a post with lots of pictures, and despite your usual distaste for comic book imagery, I can see Golden Age Wonder Woman is of particular interest to you, so, here are some random examples I found from a Google image search:
some of those knots used were very elaborate and precisely displayed, just in case the kiddies wanted to play along at home!
also there was spanking content:
I've read lots of Golden Age Wonder Woman, and I'm still not clear how any of this promotes feminine values, but the bondage and spanking imagery is always front and centre.
after Marston died in 1948, Wonder Woman became a much more mediocre comic, only published because the original contract stated the copyright should return to Marston's estate should DC cease publication, and they always wanted to sell lunchboxes and t-shirts with the characters image even if the comic itself wasn't making much money.
Thanks for the post, but "Professor Marston and the wonder women" is a feature movie and not a documentary. It looks like you will enjoy it. I did, and I'm notneven interested in superhero comics. I do enjoy comics and I don't feel any distaste for it.
From a house on willow street :
An odd horror film, built around the premise .... What if
You kidnapped someone, only to find they are possessed
By an evil spirit !
Sadly not as much fun as it should have been.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I'm glad somebody is asking the important questions.
that page is from Wonder Woman 6, Fall 1943, and is the first appearance of Wonder Woman's arch enemy the Cheetah. The woman who adds Wonder Woman's magic lasso to the knots is Priscilla Rich, who will become the Cheetah in a few more pages. I believe this character is to be the villain in the second film, played by Kristen Wiig, so if you want to do your homework, this is a good issue to track down, I know its reprinted in Wonder Woman Archives volume 3.
Somebody wrote an entire Blog page about this issue, with many examples of the artwork, including the very next page in this exciting sequence.
if you cant see the above image I've tried to link to, she literally chews through the leather mask, then is able to reach the lasso with her teeth, following some gymnastic contortions. The following page actually shows her kicking free of the lasso and making her triumphant escape, but I cant find that page anywhere on line that I can link to, so you will just have to use your imagination.
or...
shh, don't tell anybody but you can accidentally download a research copy of Wonder Woman 6 here:>*.
A *.cbz extension is just a zip file, so you should be able to open it with WinZip or other similar tools.
Comments
The " I happen to have my young son in the car " bit is hilarious. )
One of the best final act climax sequences I’ve seen in years. I’d forgotten how good (and unusual) this movie now seems.
Tha last fifteen minutes is set up in a really odd and surprising way which kinda puts you off as you’re watching it. Van Helsing (Cushing) carries out a blood tranfusion on a woman. But he does it REALLY slowly. I thought it was so Cushing could show off his Dr Frankenstein medical skills.
But no. Director Terence Fisher was messing with our heads. Tricking us into a false sense of secutity.
Things move on. Aristotelian discovery and reversal in the story as we discover Dracula’s coffin is in the basement of this very house. Safety becomes danger in an unexpected but inevitable manner.
Before we know it everybody is rushing around shouting, chasing, getting locked in cellars. Woman gets abducted by the Big D.
Van Helsing and pal (Michael Gough) go haring after him, racing through the English countryside toward the German castle.
Arriving at the castle, Dracula tries to bury a woman alive in a hole in the ground. Looks very surprised when Van Helsing arrives by fast carriage.
Cue, running into castle, throwing things around, attempting some last minute strangling, using candlesticks as religious weapons, bright ideas arriving, running across tables, pulling down curtains, letting some light shed on the villain. Lee acts up a storm as he turns to dust.
Happy ending.
Now, that’s how you do a hero vs villain last act.
I would like to make two points:
- Stanley Kubrick took over directing after Anthony Mann quit after just two weeks of filming. Kubrick, a young director with no experience with big productions, needed only a weekend to prepare. One can only hope.... :v
-Lawrence Oliver and Timothy Dalton look and sound a lot like each other, especially when they are speaking softly.
Directors, Spartacus was one .
Jimmy Sangster's script for this is an absolute model in how to simplify a narrative for filming. Note how the action doesn't shift to Whitby to save having to mount ship scenes, so everything is a fairly short carriage-ride away.
They start the story with Harker's arrival at Castle Dracula. And with him already on a mission to kill Dracula. None of the longer setup from the novel. Immediately into conflict and anticipation. Harker gets turned. Then Van Helsing arrives. Sangster strips the story down to a conflict between Dracula and Van Helsing. The surrounding characters from the novel are there, but their roles are simplified. Unity of action. Unity of setting.
The movie's script really is a perfect example of pure story extracted from the disparate elements in Stoker's original narrative. Sangster pulls out the core of the story and arranges it in set-pieces that are staged wonderfully well.
No wonder it made Hammer so much money at the time.
Nothing new, a by the numbers Die Hard at a football match.
Entertaining enough to pass 90 minutes. There is a great
Fight in a kitchen with Bautista fighting a guy even bigger
Than him. With Pierce Brosnan making a guest appearance.
Sunday afternoon.
A truly classic story, which everyone must know by now, and a Book I've read a few times
Since discovering it as a schoolboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-914d27szA
"The Man Who Disappeared", a Sherlock Holmes story based on Conan Doyle's "The Man With The Twisted Lip". I'm very forgiving of old films/TV when it comes to SFX etc, but this 1951 production doesn't even approach the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce series of ten years or more earlier technically, and is well behind the roughly contemporary Arthur Howard/Marion Crawford series. Poor direction, terrible casting, etc.
James Woods is awesome in this movie.
James Bond- Licence To Kill
BlackkKlansman
One word for some reason, might that catch on?
Edit: Oh, I get it it's so it had KKK in the middle of it. -{
Anyway, great rousing finale but in between it was a bit ho hum. One of those odd films that is based on a true story but strangely unconvincing a lot of the time.
It looked a bit too polished to be a film depicting its time. If it had looked scrappier you might have gone along with the idea that a cop would be dumb enough to use his own name to infiltrate a gang and then get the Klan ID card sent to his home address - I thought there would be a follow up to that.
Still didn't really buy the idea of a black cop in the force back then, aside from one snipey guy in the office it's all cool, you never see any other racial problems, or racist reactions to him from the public.
The KKK come out of it quite badly, I thought that was rather unfair... okay okay I'm kidding, but it might have been better to have a couple of them a bit smarter and charismatic (aside from poster boy David Duke) to generate tension. Weird to see that Duke is still doing his thing and the final scenes have the visceral power the rest of the film doesn't quite have.
John David Washington and Adam Driver put in real star performances, good stuff.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
This movie is the story of the very unconventional life of Marston, the creator of the Wonder Woman character. He was a psycology professor with his very own theory. He (Luke Evans) had to resign because of his polyamorous relationship with his wife (Rebecca Hall) and a younger woman (Bella Heathcote). They lived together and he had children with both. The women lived together for 38 years after his death. It's also worth mentioning that he and his wife invented an early version of the lie detector. He invented Wonder Woman to spread his ideas about feminism. The comic was also full of bondage, something that often popped up in the comic too. I think the movie is worth watching for the unusual relationship and the three people in it, like me you don't have to be a Wonder Woman fan to like this movie.
There is a gaffe: Marsdon says he served in the OSS in WWI, but this espionage agancy was formed when the US entered WWII.
Those early Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s are awesomely weird stuff, its amazing they got published and I think they are a bit awkward for DC today, because whatever Marston's idea of feminism was, it's different from how the word is understood today and what a major corporation like Warner Brothers would want being sold as a children's comic.
Women were always getting tied up, and the Amazons were always giving these verbose lectures on the virtue of "loving submission". The artist Marston used, H.G. Peter, had this pseudo-art nouveau aesthetic totally out of step with the action packed style becoming standard in superhero comics.
In the earliest days of the superhero comics, there was a backlash from concerned parents against all the violent macho and arguably fascist imagery being sold to children, so DC hired a panel of respectable academics to advise them and appease parents. William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, was one of them, and his advice was to include more female characters and feminine values amongst all the manly men hitting each other. So they asked him to create such a comic himself. Which then consisted of an island full of scantily clad women tying each other up for fun and games, losing their strength when tied up by men, and female villains begging to be brought to Paradise Island in chains where they too could learn the virtues of "loving submission".
Number24, I know you always appreciate a post with lots of pictures, and despite your usual distaste for comic book imagery, I can see Golden Age Wonder Woman is of particular interest to you, so, here are some random examples I found from a Google image search:
some of those knots used were very elaborate and precisely displayed, just in case the kiddies wanted to play along at home!
also there was spanking content:
I've read lots of Golden Age Wonder Woman, and I'm still not clear how any of this promotes feminine values, but the bondage and spanking imagery is always front and centre.
after Marston died in 1948, Wonder Woman became a much more mediocre comic, only published because the original contract stated the copyright should return to Marston's estate should DC cease publication, and they always wanted to sell lunchboxes and t-shirts with the characters image even if the comic itself wasn't making much money.
More cheese than a French buffet.
Last night was 'Trading Places' - still, for me, Murphy and Ackroyd's finest hour and that's not even touching on the universally superb supporting cast.
Genuinely laugh out loud funny even after 35 years and numerous viewings.
Thanks for the post, but "Professor Marston and the wonder women" is a feature movie and not a documentary. It looks like you will enjoy it. I did, and I'm notneven interested in superhero comics. I do enjoy comics and I don't feel any distaste for it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Venom, seems to be getting lots of bad reviews
An odd horror film, built around the premise .... What if
You kidnapped someone, only to find they are possessed
By an evil spirit !
Sadly not as much fun as it should have been.
that page is from Wonder Woman 6, Fall 1943, and is the first appearance of Wonder Woman's arch enemy the Cheetah. The woman who adds Wonder Woman's magic lasso to the knots is Priscilla Rich, who will become the Cheetah in a few more pages. I believe this character is to be the villain in the second film, played by Kristen Wiig, so if you want to do your homework, this is a good issue to track down, I know its reprinted in Wonder Woman Archives volume 3.
Somebody wrote an entire Blog page about this issue, with many examples of the artwork, including the very next page in this exciting sequence.
if you cant see the above image I've tried to link to, she literally chews through the leather mask, then is able to reach the lasso with her teeth, following some gymnastic contortions. The following page actually shows her kicking free of the lasso and making her triumphant escape, but I cant find that page anywhere on line that I can link to, so you will just have to use your imagination.
shh, don't tell anybody but you can accidentally download a research copy of Wonder Woman 6 here:>*.
A *.cbz extension is just a zip file, so you should be able to open it with WinZip or other similar tools.