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Aylmer's Replies
I saw this movie in the theater as a kid and distinctly remember there being a (very brief) hell sequence, where Charlie enters a cave with a bunch of burning lava beneath him and he freaks out and runs away, clinging onto something and then he gets transported out (as though it was just some nightmare or a vision). I remember it being just one shot long and it was definitely there because it was the most surprising, hence memorable thing about the film (along with that line "you can never come back!"). Did they remove that from the film or am I totally remembering it wrong?
I think the movie's title was intended to be ironic or a belief among the characters that turns out not to be entirely true. Also see AMERICAN TALE's "There are No Cats in America" song.
Considering he's almost 80 years old he kinda has to branch out into something different as nobody is going to be buying a full geriatric tough guy. It's kinda pushing it as it is and it's a miracle that he's been able to do it this late into his career. It's crazy to think that he's the same age now that Charles Bronson was when he filmed his final role.
From my 10 years living in Hollywood, I realized just what mental giants celebrities can be and that they have a strong finger on the pulse of economics and what middle America is going through at any given time. Anyone who makes a living off of pretending to be someone else and reading memorized lines must be a hard worker and really smart, right?
Once actors craft a "Macho" image of being dominant and successful, they practically never backpedal and take a role where they look like a desperate wimp in any way, even if they play a villain.
Like, could you imagine George Clooney taking on a role as a dork who can't get laid to save his life?
That's sort of what makes Sly and Tom Cruise outliers. Cruise took that role in TROPIC THUNDER where he's a dorky balding TV exec. Stallong did a similar move in COPLAND as a wimpy sheriff who looks the other way, but he did undergo an arc where he finds his strength at the end. I haven't seen RHINESTONE or STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT but I think he was a little more "everyman" in those movies with a little more of his shy, sensitive side out that we saw in the first ROCKY movie. Whether or not you consider that macho is up to you. I think it depends on where his character lands at the end of the movie and I haven't really seen him end up as a cowardly follower at any point. Even his villainous role in DEATH RACE 2000 was played for ultimate machismo.
Considering that this was the first movie I remember seeing in the movie theater and I was maybe 3-4 years old at the time, I don't remember anything about the hype other than the huge toy push running up to the film (and sticking around for years afterward). It seems Star Wars has sort of backed off of toy hype in recent years but then again I'm not as focused on the toy market as much at the age of 44 as I was at 4.
I do remember the THE PHANTOM MENACE had rabid fandom and anticipation, even just for the trailers of the film. This was an entirely new phenomenon to me as I'd never heard of anyone seeing a movie just to see a TRAILER for another film. There was even a fake trailer someone edited together with shots from various scifi movies like DUNE and even that got a bunch of hype for a day before everyone realized it was fake. The result was certainly more mixed. I hated MENACE and fell asleep in the packed theater watching it during the Tatooine scenes while a bunch of my friends and cousins were obsessed with the film, as though they wanted to like it so much that they successfully rewired their brain to do so. Thankfully over the decades more people have come to my line of thinking over it.
JEDI was highly regarded when it came out but I think was segued into Ewok-Star Wars for the 80's. There were two movies and a TV show focused on Ewoks so that's what Star Wars was after JEDI. It sort of turned into a somewhat obscure cult franchise during the 90's so it took the 1997 re-issues of the films to re-ignite the fandom, and it seems to have definitely worked as the hype for MENACE was so extreme compared to JEDI.
Keep in mind too I am sure a few pizza restaurants had a "baked in" fee for delivery as well, which may have added $3-4 to the tab.
The movie was kinda given an "average" appraisal when it came out. Nobody seemed to love it or hate it really that much. Then with Red Letter Media skewered it back around 2009 or so, that led to a system-wide re-evaluation of the film. I agree with pretty much everything they said. I hate all the TNG movies because they took a somewhat slow, cerebral TV show and tried to turn it into a series of action-movies.
This movie did indeed drop the ball on coming up with a smart way to get Picard and Shatner together, and then it didn't have them do much together either that made any sense. Soren was a pretty weak villain too.
As weak as Star Trek V was, I'd rate this as even worse, because at least V had a few good scenes sprinkled in there, like when McCoy has to face his pain, etc.
He's an extremely friendly and personable guy in real life. I worked with him a few times years ago and we'd meet for coffee semi-regularly in Hollywood. He always had a ton of stories about working on various genre films through the years and was always good-natured and humble about it. I tried to sprinkle most of them around the imdb, such as Shatner standing on his tippy-toes whenever Forest was near him.
I originally set up his facebook "fan page" and handed it over to his wife so she could manage it when it started getting private messages intended for him. Sadly the page completely evaporated automatically then once she passed away, so I'm not even sure how to broadcast Forest's willingness to sign autographs to fans anymore. He always signed anything mailed to him for free as long as people had return-addressed stamped envelopes inside.
I was friends with a kinda lower level celebrity once who was on "Grey's Anatomy" and even he had a bunch of properties in the US and abroad. Once you get to a certain wealth level, it's kinda insane NOT to own property which makes it easy to "leave the US" because you already have your toe in the water somewhere else without breaking a sweat.
But in this increasingly digitized "work from home" era that we live in, why need to live in a specific place for work in entertainment? High level celebrities (and Gere barely qualifies anymore) get flown to wherever the shoot is and put up in a nice hotel, or if it's on greenscreen, then the shoot often comes to them (like Christopher Lee in his last few movies). Practically nothing gets filmed physically in Hollywood anymore so it doesn't make sense for celebrities to live there (or any specific place) especially when Cali is so ruthlessly expensive. I lived in Hollywood for a couple years and it's actually kinda a dump anyway, though I did see Tom Bergeron and Francis Fisher walking their dogs in my neighborhood on numerous occasions.
Granted, I'm sure Gere is making it all about politics, but the economics I think factor in a lot more heavily.
I'm rehashing this thread because I think it needs to be finally settled. If that prisoner guy isn't a young Aaron Eckhart at the start of his acting career, then WHO IS HE???
I don't think there is anything definite but I'm 99% sure that Michael Caine does indeed cameo in the film. What's bizarre is that imdb has his appearance listed in the film's TRIVIA section but does not have him listed in the cast. I've tried adding him (fruitlessly), but seriously, which way is it? Either he needs to be added to the cast or removed from the trivia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYC47DYLq2I
Timecode 5:28
https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/oy1nzl/during_the_zulu_war_sequence_in_monty_pythons_the/?rdt=33623
When I was a kid, I found the cartoon version absolutely absorbing and spellbinding. Today I still think it has some of the best animation of the era and even compares favorably to all other Rankin/Bass animated films (including The Last Unicorn - which is classier maybe but a lot less fun and kinda runs out of steam toward the end). The cartoon is a master class in good efficient storytelling. They trim all the right fat and even find a way to incorporate the poetry and the songs into the presentation.
Jackson was more interested in making some big sweeping fantasy saga and shoe-horning The Hobbit into the the LOTR universe. The tones don't match at all and the 3 Hobbit films were deadeningly boring to anyone familiar with the story. All the added characters were terrible too, like the antagonist guy in Part 3 who seemed to soak up more screentime than anyone else.
Well the problem is that whether these Climate people are right or wrong, all their solutions are moot unless you somehow could convince China and India to stop polluting and get the entire developing world to stop developing. Allow your kids to live in poverty, allow people to starve to death, and the planet will theoretically start cooling down by some unspecified amount at some vague time in the future. Sounds like a great plan that everyone can easily be persuaded to get behind.
I had just moved away from Alaska at the time in 2008 and remember being baffled by the announcement that Sarah Palin, of all people, was named as his VP pick. She was not seen as anything more than a pretty face even among most Alaskans at the time. It did represent however the only memorable thing about his campaign, outside of Jon Stewart tearing him to shreds about saying the economy was strong.
Funny that we had a complete inversion of that whole formula with Biden in 2024 saying the economy was strong while his moronic VP tried to similarly gaslight us but also claim that she'll be even better than the last administration.
Mark Felton covers it pretty well here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaNnbHl30ic
The short of it is that the Germans tried to retake Nijmegen several times but took heavy casualties and got nowhere. Meanwhile the allies sort of bypassed the area by putting all their energy toward the south, first crossing at Remagen.
I have the Blu-Ray as well as the old DVD from 2000 or so. The DVD's sound has a lot of issues which I didn't notice on the Blu-Ray. For one, during the battle sequences (especially the German assault across the bridge) there are a lot of these annoying "Beep" sounds that keep popping in over and over. I can't tell if it's overmodulation or some kind of added "ricochet" sound that they threw in to make it more realistic. Unfortunately they all sound exactly the same and artificial, almost as though they were digitally created.
The Blu-ray has a little richer sound mix, and if the beeps are still there, they're at least a lot better hidden in the mix. I wonder what the story was there.
I wonder if getting defeated in the popular vote will finally make fun-hating Leftist Karens cease to assume that everyone is automatically on their side. Notice that they always resort to ad-hominem attacks and profanity when describing people they don't like. It's almost like we've normalized mental illness, but at least the country luckily had a rare bout of lucidity last week.
At the very least, they will quiet down about abolishing the electoral college.
One hole in the plot I always considered was the Terminator's power source. If it's running on some kind of nuclear fission reaction, you would think all he'd need to do is get close to Sarah Conner and he could just detonate himself, IMPOSTOR-style.