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Have watched the 50th Anniversary show and enjoyed it. The number of guests, cameos etc. was astounding and really hit home the density and scope of the basic phenomenon of SNL. Steve Martin's monologue was witty excellent and John Mulaney restated his claim to be this generation's Steve Martin by joining him and being equally attractively droll: "Over the course of 50 years, 894 people have hosted ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and it amazes me that only two of them have committed murder.” (Mulaney also seemed to be the guiding light behind the bog musicals sketch half way through the show - a man of man talents it seems, like Martin.)
Of course, there'll be lots of people disappointed by various cast absences - no Chase, Ackroyd, Hader (who was in some of the previews with Wiig and Armisen so what went on there?), Carvey, Frankel, and so on - but otherwise the huge number of participants was a flat-out winner.
Enjoyed seeing Nicholson, De Niro, Streep, Stone, Drew Barrymore, Miles Treller, Aubrey Plaza (in passing and looking understadably a bit sad) and in Audience Q&A segment Hamm, Cher, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and many more who didn't speak up like Seinfeld. Quite the party to see, and even more so to participate in I'm sure.
Revelations: didn't know that Wiig had a Broadway-quality voice. A gal of many talents; loved all the clip bits about Physical Comedy and Commercail Parodies etc.. Paul Simon and Paul McCartney's voices both seemed shot (whereas they've been ptretty good until fairly recenty). Those guys may have to hang it up or maybe a week's partying in NYC killed them?
<blockquote>so MANY movies are off to streaming so quickly -- even as they are still playing for a week or two in theaters -- that the movie going experience is GONE</blockquote>Yes, and perhaps the lack of commonality of experience is making movie preferences more niche than before and making consensus more fragile/shallower than ever before.
I found a lot of the 2010s list pretty bewildering. PTA's Phantom Thread (2017) at #8 for example. Does anyone *really* like that (admittedly handsomely mounted) film-school exercise of a film more than, say, Dunkirk or Grand Budapest Hotel or The Lobster or The Favorite or Melancholia or True Grit, none of which made the list's Top-25 (and only half of which made the wider Top 75)? And I personally would rate Fury Road well below any of the film's I just mentioned. I'd gripe similarly about other top-tenners, Boyhood, Tree of Life, Roma, Moonlight.... they're all just 'arguables' for me not truly, inarguably acclaim-worthy. But maybe there is no consensus to be had now, at least not so soon.
@Doghouse. Thinking some more about these issues... there really are so many cases now of differing (sometimes well-motivated, some not) versions of films and tv that it's a little head-spinning. One family of cases that I've been exercised by is the changes in aspect ratio that has afflicted a lot of tv. That is, most pre-2000 tv stuff was 4:3 but almost all of that stuff is now screened in 16:9, e.g., Seinfeld, The Simpsons, are famous cases. One '70s documentary series to which I was very attached, The World at War was presented correctly on dvd in its original 4:3 but on blu-ray it's cropped down to 16:9 (where it's also now very very blue!). So much of the footage in TWAW is historic that it feels borderline criminal to crop it (I don;t know hat to make of the coloring). Anyhow, the Bluray set has hours and hours of additional footage which, if you're a fan, you have to have but you have to hang on your dvds to keep the full images of the original eps, which I've done. At least films mostly get presented in their original/proper aspect ratios these days.
<blockquote>So, to all video engineers and still-living directors: indulge all your that-could-have-been-better impulses, and tweak and "improve" and "enhance" all you like as long as the films have been preserved in as close as possible to the forms in which they were originally seen.</blockquote>Yes, this seems like the best settlement. Ultimately, though, the plasticity you mention is just stressful. Communications about movies, i.e., among fans, become fraught I find, and in general having ultimately to familiarize yourself with multiple versions of so many movies is exhausting. Consider the examples of Aliens and Amadeus both from the mid-1980s. I prefer the theatrical cuts of both of these, which are available but definitely underseen these days compared to the longer director's cuts. And things like Apocalypse Now and The Good the Bad and The Ugly are even worse because there are 4-5 different versions in each case with wildly different lengths, color palettes. etc. (And, e.g., Kilgore's 'I love the smell of Napalm' scene now comes in multiple different versions with increasingly surreal dialogue. The upshot is that I don't even know whether I think it's a good scene any more - the longer versions feel utterly absurd and push Apoc. Now into Catch-22 territory, and make it a different movie.) I tend to hew to the theatrical release versions in each case but there's *no doubt* that the loose constellations of materials each film now represents across the wider film community undermines my commitment to my own preferences. I wanna give up!
<blockquote>The one chink in the unstoppable killer's armour! 😄</blockquote>Haw haw. That's dream-logic for ya. It's normally pretty unsatisfying when this sort of dream-logic occurs in an actual movie. The original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) <spoiler>ends with Freddie being kinda wished away</spoiler> - a dream-logic chink in his armour for sure! That was a damp squib of an ending for me at the time (which the film kinda makes a joke about with an even more ludicrously unreal/dreamy final shot). And the recent mega-successful Stephen King's It adaptations flicked backwards and forwards between whether Pennywise is a real threat or only a dream threat that's easily dismissed. Didn''t work at all for me. Still, a lot of David Lynch is horror-adjacent via a dreamy dodge: something terrible is happening but we see it only indirectly through a dream-logic realm where, e.g., unexplainable chinks in armour can happen but any security may just be a dream. So it can work well...
@megan. It sounds as though in your dream you fused Marion's and Vera's stories (although Norman/mother looking directly into the camera after killing is a further twist; you dream is quite creative!). I'm not sure that I've ever had a dream like that about Psycho or any other film, but I can say that I've found myself confabulating scenes in movies that aren't there, e.g., I *seem* to remember seeing in Hitchcock's NbNW that Cary Grant has liquor forced down his throat but when you review the film we in fact never see that. And, a very famous case of mass confabulation, I like lots of people seem to remember a scene from Moonraker (1979) where the villain Jaws and a small cute blond girl grin at each other revealing that both have clunky braces on their teeth, but in fact no such scene exists. The gag as described is so obvious that lots of human minds evidently auto-completed it into existence! And doubtless there are lots of other cases of this sort of thing. The human mind whether awake or asleep *is* pretty active and creative, constantly filling in backgrounds seamlessly for us as our eyes which have very small focal areas saccade around 3-5 times a second without our noticing and everything gets magically stitched together in real time for us as something like an unbroken panorama. When we sleep and dream our eyes saccade around like mad things (the famous REM - rapid eye movement) so it's a dead certainty that the same generative mechanisms that construct our sense of a persisting reality when we're awake *are* at work fabricating dream realities out of our memories, wishes, etc..
(cont'd) Fourth, Lorne Michaels just looks like an idiot - having three hours worth of material still ready to go an hour before show time, so you're not even close to being locked is just too bizarre...... I did like Jon Batiste's Billy Preston and Rachel Sennett's Rosie Shuster. Overall of the three show/film biopics events you mention I think The Order about the making of Godfather with its Al Ruddy perspective is easilty my fave best and the most satisfying and engaging.
Thanks for your voluminous reporting on Saturday Night (2024) ecarle. I just got around to seeing it and thought it just OK. Nothing really happens in it is one problem. Another is that we don't get a lot of the payoffs the movie teases us with, e.g., We don't see either Carlin's monologue or Billy Crystal's cut-down sketch, e.g. 2. we don't see any of the Muppet stuff (why were they waiting for pages from the show's writers anyway - weren't they their won separate thing?) and some of the payoffs we *do* get are either pointless - will or won't Rosie Shuster use her married name in the credits or not? Who cares? (movie says she won't but fact says she did for the first ep. - what gives?) - or confounding - we spend most of the movie seeing Belushi freak out about having to play a bee, but then we see him appearing on Weekend update doing a meteorologist "in like a lion" riff *and* the surreal 'wolverines' cold open sketch. That makes Belushi look like he's a whiny baby with absolutely nothing to complain about. A third problem is that while we can allow for compression of incidents from across the first few seasons of the show, there's just a problem with treating the first SNL ep. as anything super-significant when it's an on-going evolving show that gathered steam over years of a cast etc. working together. Who's to say that the Paul Simon ep. the following week isn't the one that clinched the show's future and status.
For those who don't have access to Peacock (like me), 13 minutes of Nosferatu-Behind The Scenes material is on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl1UKp5K_A0
Hearing Lilly-Rose Deep talk in her natural 21C American accent is a bit of shock after her ultra-committed early-19C English performance as Ellen. She probably should have been Oscar-nommed ahead of Cynthia Erivo for Wicked at least (but I guess Demi Moore for The Substance grabbed almost all the pro-horror votes since I never heard even a whisper of support for the Strange Darling lead actress either).
Marianne 1.0, Come and Stay With me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu2C1tuLCFw
Marianne 2.0, Broken English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHrsv0NVa6k
The very best of the Stones (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers) is perennially cool. So is the best of Marianne F..
<blockquote> "Mother" and her Old Crone off-stage voice are a bit...corny?...these days. But not in THOSE days..</blockquote>N1922 has quite a bit of silent-era, reads-as-overbroad acting to contend with as well as some *very* unconvincing day-for-night, not to mention some some sped up (and sometimes negativized) action that's supposed to read as 'eerie' but instead reads as yacketty-sax comic nowadays, and, from a modern perspective, there are a lot of unnecessary basic logic lapses about, e.g.1, the extent to which Hutter is being kept a prisoner in the Count's castle or not; e.g. 2 Hutter picks up a crucial book in The Count's castle that's a how-to-manual of how to kill The Count!; and there are lots of shots, e.g., The Count carrying his own coffin through the streets of Wisborg (in horribly false day-for-night) that are dubious in basic conception and provoke laughter. And so on. For these sorts of reasons, I have no objection to remaking and updating and improving N1922 and until recently I've recommended people check out N1979 first. But now N2024 (which amps up the sexual aspects of the story and simultaneously makes the Count more realistic yet also more ethereal and omnipresent) is the preferred entry point I think.
Note that one thing that N1922 introduced that wasn't in Stoker's novel (hence isn't in the Hollywood Dracula films up to and including Coppola's) is that the Count introduces plague to the city. That was vivid to people in 1922 after the great flu epidemics of 1918-1920, and N2024 feels similarly timely after the covid disaster of 2020-2022.
(cont'd)Remakes that aren't horror or horror-adjacent probably have a slightly easier time being remade successfully (there's less evolution in what makes something moving than in what makes something scary)...the imdb score trajectory over the four versions of A Star Is Born goes 7.3-7.5-6.1-7.6 although I'd personally rate the most recent version a fair bit lower. Most consistent has been the four versions of Little Women starting with Cukor's with K. Hepburn in 1933: 7.2-7.2-7.3-7.8. People love that premise and those settings! and I guess the same is true of Nosferatu.
<blockquote>But more RECENT prints of North by Northwest seem to have washed that "blueness" out of the print and replaced it with...BROWN?</blockquote>
It's fascinating but also slightly mortifying to have the details of the evolution of NbNW's color palette right in front of you. Behold two dvds compared with the Warners blu-ray:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare5/northbynorthwest.htm
The Blu-ray has a lot more green in the images which makes the crop-duster road setting seem earthier/more desolate and gloomy whereas the dvd images are redder and bluer and brighter and correspond to my first memories of NbNW.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film10/blu-ray_review_150/north_by_northwest_4K_UHD.htm
The 4K-Blu-ray is bright again like the Dvds but yellower rather than red so the basic look is now Brown for the first time!
@Melton. Cameron's AI-driven tinkering looks completely horrible from what I've seen of it on youtube. Cameron has then taken great umbrage against those online reviewers, telling them to 'get a life'. Amazing!
<blockquote>some horrible slasher called Maniac.</blockquote>It's a very tough slasher for sure with a couple of the nastiest and most memorable kill scenes of all time (the one in the car and the one in the public bathroom). It's funny how in the Spielberg video Spinnel looks like an ordinary-size guy whereas Maniac makes him seem huge and terrifying. I do believe that Maniac must have cost Spinnell quite a lot of future employment because you absolutely cannot forget him in that role. I was in a bit of a state of shock watching it, so I have trouble remembering the ending, but ultimately Spinnell's character is a pitiful figure who see himself as his mother's victim and her as ultimately killing him whereas it's his own suicide at the end. I remember thinking that Maniac (1980) felt to me as though it should have been the logical end of the road for Psycho-style mother-centric-explanatory slashers.
Relatedly, Jerry Schatzberg, director of Scarecrow recently did a great Criterion closet segment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHzWP5Pj2wM
and Barry Sonenfeld recently did one that was even better:
https://youtu.be/Td2060BoCAk?si=ytn-I4V7I4OuRb7P
These guys both radiate charm and intelligence. It's a reminder that being a good, fun hang is part of the story of success for a lot of people in commercial film.
<blockquote>I never saw that happen</blockquote>There are a couple of copies of it on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mgrxvTdl-Q
There was a big doc. about Faye Dunaway released recently, Faye, that had some strange omissions. It didn't discuss the Musketeer movies at all (although it included a few seconds from them in montages), it also didn't mention or show any images from either Little Big Man or Eyes of Laura Mars. These were hits or important movies or both! Weird. The doc. was done in close cooperation with Dunaway so I guess that they got filed under 'Stuff D. didn't wanna talk about'. The doc also doesn''t press her or get into specifics with her about her 'bad on set' reputation, super-pro Bette Davis calling her the worst in her 50 years in the biz, and so on. A sheepish 'I was a bit bipolar back then' is sort of allowed to pull the curtain over everything.
<blockquote>Spielberg was watching the nominations announced and evidently blurted out "Fellini got my slot!") Ha.</blockquote>This is awful in two respects. First, the camera crew (from 60 minutes?) was there with Spielberg as the nominations were announced precisely because they and Spielberg both fully expected him to be nominated. Second, although Fellini's movie Amarcord is very good indeed, it was also a 1973 movie, and had in fact, after being officially released in the US on Sept 19, 1974, already been nominated for and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for 1974! It is therefore ultra-weird that it was separately eligible to be nom'd for screenplay and directing Oscars in 1975. It's almost like the cinema gods decided to invent an arcane exceptional case specifically to block Spielberg from early elite peer-group success.
Help!
The Night Before
Ticket to Ride
You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
I Need You
Another Girl
You're Going to Lose That Girl
--------
That's a brilliant batch of songs - 5/7 are standards now and the best of them are kind of purest alpha-dog Lennon starting to feel less sure of himself, confronting the new, more complicated world he's in with complicated, interesting girls who are driving him mad, and so on. It's perfect.
BTW someone on youtube has assembled a playlist corresponding to the original US version of Help!.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa61V_ErwsrFLdTj_tGGapPKsMDz2Q97D&si=jZ5AoxtCiuQ2u7uS
I've really enjoying all the - very John Barry-ish, Bond-y!; shows how big Bond was at the time- orchestral inserts. The non-US version of Help! feels likes a normal Beatles Album whereas US-Help! is fully committed to the whole fun-movie-side-project idea and in that sense is more expressive of the lark the movie started out as.