rabidabid

And here is an example of one that shoulda gotten multiple nominations. It got two...two. Screenplay and Sound...

Yet The Towering Inferno got a Best Picture nomination that year among others.

The Towering Inferno...

YF. Shoulda got noms for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Gene Wilder) Best Supporting Actor (Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle) Supporting Actress (Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr), Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Costumes, Score.

I mean this is a movie that gets everything right. No there's not a message. No overarching drama. But lemme say, whille I absolutely loved Manchester By The Sea I doubt I'll be buying the DVD. Yet I can watch Young Frankenstein once a year til I die and laugh out loud every time.

In my humble opinion that's quite an achievement...

Criminals should be forced to watch this cringe worthy endless drivel. Alec Guinness is over-the-top offensive with his half-closed slanty eyes, painted on skin tones, and cartoonish speech patterns. Yes this was a less enlightened time. But really? How can a movie promote understanding between Western and Eastern cultures when it casts an old white man as a Japanese man? It's simply ridiculous.

Rosalind Russell gives her usual feisty performance though she too manages a few icky cultural stereotypes herself. Ray Danton is forgettable as the son-in-law/villain. And what a shame that Alan Mowbray ended his career in this thing. The lessons A Majority of One purports to teach are obvious and one-dimensional at best. Burn the prints and leave this piece of crap back in the dark ages from whence it came. This is one of those movies that reminds us that the good old days may not have been so good.

OK, the story is one thing. Probably shocking when the play was written in the 30's, a little less so in the 60's when this movie was made, it's just ridiculous to watch today.

Lesbians! They're lesbians! They say they're not lesbians, but a little girl says they are so they must be...well...lesbians! The holes in the plot are about a million miles wide.

But it's the acting that gets me. Audrey Hepburn acquits herself, but Shirley MacLaine is histrionic at best and James Garner seems to have no idea what he's doing there. Most of his notes are false. Fay Bainter's character is ridiculous though she makes the most of it. Miriam Hopkins is OK, but winds up taking a thankless role and doing very little with it.

But really, this movie is such an anachronism, and so full of ridiculous relationships and decisions that it's best seen as a comedy.

I like what Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said about it and mind you, this is what he said back in 1961: "IT is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, "The Children's Hour," could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version of it that came to the Astor and the Trans-Lux Fifty-second Street yesterday.

But here it is, fidgeting and fuming, like some dotty old doll in bombazine with her mouth sagging open in shocked amazement at the batedly whispered hint that a couple of female schoolteachers could be attached to each other by an "unnatural" love."

Am watching the pilot after putting it on my DVR. I don't quite get the folks who say it's too soon to show a building being blown up in NYC. Last year United 93 turned 9/11 into a commercial (though harrowing) venture (with a 12 million dollar opening weekend). And the Discovery channel and its cousins have been documenting those events with commercial breaks for at least five years.

Beyond that, it's kinda hoaky and melodramatic, but still thrilling. In some ways it's more believable than Prison Break (and I'm a fan). One would have to be a conservative ideologue not to believe the show's premise. This plot offers a lot of possibilities, and they've handled it better than I expected.