What old media are you watching? - Since new media isn't worth watching

This is the best movie about Napoleon ever made.
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POOOOOOOOOOORE JUD IS DEAD

A CANDLE LIIIIIIIGHTS HIS HEEEEEEAD
ヾ(´〇`)ノ
 
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My Name Is Earl
Redneck loser has an epiphany, goes on a lifelong mission of redemption with his retard brother. Cultural satire, bawdy.

Plebs
Ordinary lads living in ancient Rome, most of the jokes revolve around the juxtaposition of classical Roman and modern British culture. Bawdy.

Patlabor on Television
Quasi-competent unit of the Tokyo police in the distant future year of AD1999. Low-budget animated slice-of-life/light comedy, rock solid heart touching, real robots, wholesome. Big thanks to the kiwi farmer who DMed me the link, you rock.

Star Trek - The Next Generation
It's Star Trek but the captain is bald, Mr Spock is a faggy robot and the ship has wall-to-wall carpet. Classic sci-fi, wholesome.
 
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I'm a huge superhero fan, and I'm surprised it took me this long to finally check Darkman out.

Liam Neeson absolutely knocks it out of the park as the titular character. I was a little iffy at first seeing his performance as a mild-mannered scientist, but once he gets burnt and deformed, he becomes a lot more compelling. Unlike a lot of 90's comic stories, Darkman's edgy and violent behavior isn't just something cool. It's depicted as a sign that Peyton's sanity is eroding. It's explained that the procedure that saved his life heightened his emotional responses, so he can be cold and heartless before he cackles like a maniac as he kills his enemies. I especially love the ending where Julie, Peyton's love interest, tries to reach out and see the man inside, while Peyton is the one who comes to the conclusion that he can't live a normal life anymore. It's just a gut-wrenching way to conclude the arc. Definitely going to check out the two sequels later on.
 
Watched "A man for all seasons" on YouTube. Released in 1966, involves Cromwell, the king, and some guy named Thomas More. Its about a marriage and politics behind it, ending in betrayal.
Paul Scofield was one of those actors who should be mentioned in the same breath as Gielgud, Olivier and Lancaster. He was a fucking hammer in every scene he ever appeared on screen for.


The real More was probably far less noble than the movie portrays him, especially if you happened to be a Protestant, but watching Scofield deliver speeches is still a thrill.
 
Ive been watching hogan's heroes through plutotv
If you like that, you must try Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, the inspiration for Hogan's Heroes. Bill Holden's Sefton is a bit of a scumbag, but he's an honest scumbag, and one of the best defenses of capitalism ever done on-screen by Hollywood. It's patriotic, but in a very astringent way; deeply cynical—not "hypocritical," but "facing humanity head on, without blinkers." No one in this movie carries the Idiot Ball.

Billy Wilder is a hipster favorite. I saw Sunset Boulevard, but wasn't that knocked out by it (aside from the awesome ending).

Michael J. Fox was a really good comedic actor.
Try Greedy (1994), Fox, Kirk Douglas, Nancy Travis, Olivia d'Abo, Phil Hartman, Ed Begley Jr. Only saw it once, but it was pretty good. If you like that, I also recommend Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, his more comedic homage to Evil Dead II. And if you like those, I can also recommend Heavenly Creatures (young Kate Winslet), gross-out Muppet-parody Meet the Feebles ("Trevor..." "Yes, boss?" "I want that fudge-packer eliminated."), and demonic gore-fest Dead Alive ("I KICK ASS for the LORD!")

Speaking of demons, Demon Knight (1995) is a blast. Billy Zane is severely under-utilized by Hollywood.

Was catching a couple of eps of Millennium recently, including the Darin Morgan helmed-episode "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me". Henriksen has what amounts to a cameo appearance in this episode, but it's no less important for that...
That was an amazing ep. An ex-gf of mine was into X-Files and Millennium, so I watched a bunch, too. Generally, I preferred the Halloween episodes of X-Files, such as "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." Basically, those eps really enjoyed blowing up the show's own premises.

She had to explain to me where the dancing baby came from, because I never watched Ally McBeal.

Now Stonewall… Stonewall was a man. God, what forearms.
I have two of the three hours (on YT) that Ken Burns shot of Shelby Foote. I listen to them repeatedly, so superior to Burns' heartfelt, yet plebeian, take on the Civil War (not to mention the pandering of some Democrat politico-rando, and a black history prof whose purse-lipped, spoiled-mayonnaise attitude is just execrable). I have, of course, read Foote's Civil War: A Narrative. But I also recommend Fletcher Pratt's CW history Ordeal By Fire, not as exhaustive, but it covers more than the battlefields.

There's no "story." Rather, the film is a bunch of vaguely connected vignettes following the history of Excalibur and the reign of King Arthur.
There's tons of story. Boorman just has the good taste to stick to wizardry, mêlée, armor, honor, and sex. It's the Good Bits™ version of the Matter of Britain. Nicol Williamson's Merlin is the best kind of cinematic wizard, hidden purposes, often distracted, shows plenty of power but hints at so much more in reserve.

I don’t know if it’s authentic to the original Welsh legends or whatever, but both Excalibur and Camelot kind of have the same thesis, which is that Arthur is promoted like four levels past his actual competence.
Arthur (in Excalibur) is simply the standard tale of statecraft, where your acts to gain the throne lose it in the end, only compressed into a single lifetime, plus change. Much of what bites Arthur in the ass is the result of Uther's oath-breaking.

Jackie Gleason was also a great villain who played off Reynolds perfectly. Really nailed the corrupt sheriff role.
Someday, the South will raise a statue to Burt Reynolds, who single-handedly brushed the Jim Crow grime off the South and made it nice and welcoming. Consider what a Southern sheriff was before Smokey and the Bandit. Buford T. Justice isn't corrupt, just very single-minded with Terminator levels of determination. Gleason's madly incongruous extra-dainty moves as BTJ come strongly to mind when I saw the Obamas' pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
 
Try Greedy (1994), Fox, Kirk Douglas, Nancy Travis, Olivia d'Abo, Phil Hartman, Ed Begley Jr. Only saw it once, but it was pretty good. If you like that, I also recommend Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, his more comedic homage to Evil Dead II. And if you like those, I can also recommend Heavenly Creatures (young Kate Winslet), gross-out Muppet-parody Meet the Feebles ("Trevor..." "Yes, boss?" "I want that fudge-packer eliminated."), and demonic gore-fest Dead Alive ("I KICK ASS for the LORD!")
I've seen Greedy and The Frighteners. I love both. Frighteners is also fun to watch because Jeffrey Combs.
 
Someday, the South will raise a statue to Burt Reynolds, who single-handedly brushed the Jim Crow grime off the South and made it nice and welcoming. Consider what a Southern sheriff was before Smokey and the Bandit. Buford T. Justice isn't corrupt, just very single-minded with Terminator levels of determination. Gleason's madly incongruous extra-dainty moves as BTJ come strongly to mind when I saw the Obamas' pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Ehhhhh, I will slightly disagree. You're mostly right, but that southern sheriff trope predates Gleason's Smokey and the Bandit character by a good seven years and is actually a reference to the original.

It actually started with a line of very popular Dodge Challenger commercials featuring the Dodge Safety Sheriff "JW Higgins", who would keep pulling over Challengers he mistakes as illegal racing cars, usually ending with him being humiliated in some way. They ran from around 1970 to 1972 or so. He even did PSAs with Gov. Ronald Reagan.


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The character was so popular that 1973's Bond film "Live or Let Die" intentionally copied the character, redubbed him "JW Pepper" and despite him being intended as someone the audience would root against, turned out so popular they wrote him into "The Man with the Golden Gun" the following year.

(Why they didn't just hire Joe Higgins to do a cameo, I have no idea. Maybe Dodge refused since the films had a deal with Chevrolet.)


"Smokey and the Bandit" was four years later, and "Buford T. Justice" was building on the Higgins and Pepper characters. Justice and Pepper are essentially just feature-length versions of the Dodge ads.
 
Someday, the South will raise a statue to Burt Reynolds, who single-handedly brushed the Jim Crow grime off the South and made it nice and welcoming.
Unfortunately, Reynolds' legacy will forever be tainted by the destruction he caused in his quest to defeat the Teleporting Fat Guy.
 
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960)

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David Niven is a theater critic. He discovers that destroying plays for a living is easier than working. His wife Doris Day is at home raising four kids while he very occasionally looks up from sniffing his own farts. Niven keeps popping in like sorry darling I must return to Manhattan and ruin someone’s career again, it is my calling. Eventually he realizes (wait for it) that maybe ignoring your wife and four feral children to become the Simon Cowell of Broadway is a mistake.

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This movie is based on a book of essays by a humorist. The result is basically two movies happening at the same time. One plot is David Niven being a professional hater. He writes one savage review and suddenly New York elites are inviting him to soirees and calling him a genius. Cool now I will now become even more of a judgmental asshole. Which is probably the most realistic part.

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In doing so, he pisses off Janis Paige, who’s like a Broadway sexpot. Her revenge scheme is to wiggle her ass at him. Literally, there's a scene where she shakes her ass at a party because he called her fat.



It doesn't matter anyway because a totally separate movie is going on where Doris Day moves the family out of Manhattan to some upstate town called Hooten.

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Jack Weston shows up as a cab driver begging Niven to read his script. Which also goes nowhere. Nothing goes anywhere.

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And then there’s ANOTHER subplot where Janis Paige's director finds a terrible old script Niven wrote in college and decides to weaponize it. Niven somehow blames his wife for this, because why not.

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And it all ends with the predictable “everyone hugs and the movie just ends." It’s basically a bunch of sitcom sketches stapled together.

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Of course, anyone familiar with Niven’s filmography knows where his character will end up. He plays uptight, upper-class guys who need to be reminded to be human. Jack Weston is reliably the best part of any movie he's in. Doris Day's teeth seem to be undergoing their own character arc: she removed her veneers so her teeth seem smaller than they used to be.

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Her kids are just ambient chaos gremlins. She keeps one of her kids padlocked in his crib all the time 'cause he's literally a biohazard if released. I like her energy but she doesn't seem very proactive in this story.

Rating: 3 stars.
 
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