FILMS #2

I suppose the dumb movies of the past were relaxed because they weren’t trying to do anything much, apart from getting Doris Day married off, or maneuvering as many confrontations between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis as possible.

Penelope Gilliatt . The New Yorker (July 13, 1968)

**

    Not everybody who speaks about language need be a linguist. For example, in August of l934, this motion picture producer and director stood befor 500 summer session students at Columbia University and declared that consonants were disappearing from our speech in favor of vowel sounds.

      He said: “Where ever you go, you hear such phrases as ‘oh yeah, gotta go hoe.’ This tendency to drop the consonants, as shown by the lost ‘m’ in the foregoing, applies not only to young people but to adults as well.”

     Who was this Academy-Award winning director?

MOVIES

One always more or less believes to have ‘dreamed’ it when one recalls Claudette Colbert bathing in a pool filled with asses’ milk at the beginning of DeMille’s ‘Sign of the Cross.”

Salvador Dali

Movies are so unforgiving because any moment when the story is not developing, you’re dead.

William Goldman

In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine –that’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it s our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Nicholas Carr      The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

**

Film doesn’t work as a bunch of still frames, It happens in the gap between frames, and in our imagination of how we’re moving forward in time, moving somewhere in space, or seeing from someone else’s point of view. It’s not in the shots; its in the space between, and it’s all in your head.

Stan Douglas, quoted in The Guardian (May 9, 2014)

**

Two or three years ago, I had the impression that everything had already been done, that there was nothing left to do that hadn’t been done before. In short, I was a pessimist. Since Pierrot (Pierre Le Fou) I no longer have this feeling at all. Yes. one has to film everything, to talk about everything. Everything remains to be done.

Jean-Luc Godard

**

FILM SCHOOL

When I attended school,
Francis the Talking Mule
Was not highly thought of.
No wonder my dissertation received an F.
**

ON TYPE CASTING

Asked Buster Crabbe,
“Why can’t I play the life of Christian Grabbe
Instead of Flash
Gordon? At least Grabbe enjoyed pleasures of the flesh.”

**

                    MARLON BRANDO
   Brando, Marlon –
   Never played Harle-
   Quin.
   He preferred characters involved with sin.
**
COACH JAKE , a documentary  by Ian Phillips about the nation's high school soccer coach with the most games won, can be seen for free
on Amazon.com

**

CASTING NEWS:

The Life of Eli Whitney -- starring Joseph Cotton
TAXI -with Cab Calloway
HURRICANE -- starring Gale Storm
**

**
FILM REVIEW FROM A GUEST REVIEWER
Finally saw Ford versus Ferrari. Evidently the producers thought car races are so interesting that they can carry formulaic writing and lifeless acting. They can’t. Because car races don’t go anywhere.  The square peg in a round hole formula has produced some good pictures like The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit but these writers used it right off the shelf without dusting it off. Christian Bale had the handicap of being able to act only  from the nose down because of his goggles so he could just suck in his cheeks and grimace like the Joker. Henry Ford II was the Penguin, I guess, and the kid was Robin. Matt Damon seemed disengaged from the film, which I guess was a sound decision. Still, kinda strange not to give the biggest star a love interest. A closet gay?  Blowing up Bale off stage must have been the only way they could figure to kill this turkey.  And I hate Australian accents. Now I feel better. For that to have been an Award nominee says something.

S. Kin Flic
**

3 QUESTIONS FROM 505 MOVIE QUESTIONS
YOUR FRIENDS CAN'T ANSWER

1.In Hong Kong, the title of the 1955 film directed 
by Stanley Kramer, and starring Robert Mitchum
and Frank Sinatra, was The
Heart of a Lady as Pure as a Full Moon Over The Place 
Of Medical Salvation. In the United States, the film
was known by what shorter title?

2. Because his parents were strict Calvinists, this
   writer/director did not see his first movie until
  he was seventeen years old. The first movie he
  saw was Walt Disney's Living Desert. Since then,
  he went to write Taxi Driver, Blue Collar, and 
 Rolling Thunder. He directed Blue Collar (1979]
and American Gigolo (1980), Who is he?

3. The Cincinnati Reds baseball team once 
autographed a second base bag and sent it
to cowboy star Roy Rogers. Why?

ANSWER TO CONSONANT LOSS:

   Cecil B. De Mille

ANSWERS TO 3 MOVIE QUESTIONS

1.Not As a Stranger

2. Paul Schrader. He also wrote the film script

for Raging Bull.

3. The Cincinnati Reds sent the autographed base

to Roy Rogers because the boyhood house of the

future “King of the Cowboys”stood on the location

of second base in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium.