A Guide to Our Ratings

Rating Explanation
A+ Good Aliens
A- Bad Aliens
A!!! Mechanical aliens with awesome sound effects
B Bitchy women
BS Bitchy women with expensive shoes
BV Bitchy vampires
C Christ on a Stick
CS Christ on a Segway
CSL Christ on an Allegory

D Director describes every scene during DVD commentary
E Eyepatch
F Family-friendly
FM Manson Family-friendly
H Homosexual content
HW Homosexual content masquerading as ancient war
JX Comedy does not feature anyone associated with Judd Apatow
KRX Keanu Reeves keeps his mouth shut
M Plot requires Mensa membership to untangle
O Panders to Oscar voters
P Promises to make you shit your pants, but you can barely manage a skidmark
S Sex scenes
SF Sex scenes with ferrets
SFF Ferret-on-Ferret sex scenes
T Trailer reveals all plot twists
V Brief violence
VV Moderate violence
VVV Shit blowing up all over the fucking place
VVVV Batman

Fake ministry e-mails push Christians toward porn [WorldNetDaily]

An Explanation of Our Ratings [MovieGuide]

84 Comments

Nojo, shouldn’t there be an EE rating for two eyepatches (or a sleep mask) required?

From what I’ve seen, JX is rarely issued these days.
Damn you Seth Rogan!

ARC – Annoying Remake of Classic
Not to be seen by anyone who has seen the original

I enjoy the Day The Earth Stood Still because it is a taut drama without many explosions and big guys carrying big guns who mutter pithy phrases (and I like movies with explosions and violence.) Doesn’t matter if Jennifer Connolly is in it.

ABAD – Awful Book ADaptation

MA – Minge Alert
DOV – Danglers on View
POC – Pissing on Cross
JPOC – Jesus Pissing on Cross
XC – Extreme Hatred of Christians
XBS – Extreme Hatred of Ben Stein
BSPOC – Ben Stein Pissing on Cross
O – Optimism
XO – No Optimism
HPOC – Homosexuals Pissing on Cross
HPBS – Homosexuals Pissing on Ben Stein
BSPHWPOC – Ben Stein Pissing on Homosexuals While Pissing on Cross
C – Crap
DC – Disney Crap
ADC – Awful Disney Crap
GADC – God Awful Disney Crap
PMA – Post-modernism Alert
MWV – Malthusian Worldview
PBP – Contains images of Preznit Bunnypants. Not be suitable for young viewers.
PBPS – Contains images of Preznit Bunnypants having shoes thrown at him. Suitable for all viewers.
AJ – Angelina Jolie
XAJ – No Angelina Jolie
MNS – Makes no Sense
AMSBFAATE – Almost Makes Sense But Falls Apart At The End
CSC – Christ Sucking Cock
XCSC – Christ Not Sucking Cock even though he really wants to
DSCC – Disciples Sucking Christ’s Cock
MMSCC – Michael Medved Sucking Christ’s Cock
RW – Contains images of Rick Warren. Not suitable for homosexual viewers.
S – Sailors
SA – Such As

i give an M for “L.A. confidencial” had to watch it twice.
also kubricks “2001”. still waiting for someone to ‘splain THAT.
cred: i’m a mensa member, but don’t go to meetings. kinda like AA/NA.
hey, that’s an idea. combine them!
“hi, my name is bonnie. i’m an alcoholic, drug addict and genius.”
only time i get aplauded !

@blogenfreude:
Definitely. I thought it was a pretty stupid movie myself. I got angry after the movie till I read the glowing reviews from NRO and others then the laughter began especially when they talked about the glowing manliness of the Spartans (and comparing the Spartans to themselves) while ignorant of Spartan history/facts (or maybe not considering the number of Repubs in same sex sex scandals.)

I never knew so many fascists enjoyed “gladiator” movies.

@blogenfreude:
you stole my next comment!!!!!

i watched an old movie on amc last week with young gladiator tony curtis. the amount of wrastlin’ and rubbing each other and rolling around. i had to keep snapping my jaw shut. definite HW rating, as are many many westerns and ALL gladiator movies. “billy, do you like gladiator movies?” hollywood: jews and gays. gays and jews.
read: the dream makers.

@baked:
SF geek waves arms and jumps up and down frantically while yelling: “Ooooh can I? Pllllleeaze! Ms Baked! Ms Baked!”

-Monolith from a hyper advanced race gave man’s “ape” ancestors intelligence
-We used it to figure out better ways of killing
-Monolith buried under the moon’s surface when we developed enough to get into space, sends signal to let them know we are getting Our space legs
-Discovery goes to see why the signal went to Jupiter
-Crew is told nothing, HAL is told to lie. HAL goes crazy over lie and kills everyone but Dave
-Dave sees Monolith 2 gets sucked into it because it is a Star Gate
-Aliens change Dave into Star Child as their representative who can give man a good smack to the head now and then

Moral of the Story?
Don’t fuck with Flat Black Slabs with the aspect ratio of 1:4:9

@ManchuCandidate: @baked: Hey! One of my fave movies ever. Saw it 9 times when it came out. Was there in the front row for Cinerama. I will never forget that sunrise seen for the first time!!!!!! Genius director and fab script. All story and almost no plot. Very difficult to achieve. While Star Wars (which co-opted optical effects devised by Kubrik and crew) looks dated 2001 still looks fresh and astonishing. Total triumph all round. 9 thumbs up!

It’s about curiosity, people. What’s important is the journey, not the destination.

And P.S. @baked: By ‘Gladiator’ movie with Tony Curtis are we referencing Spartacus? Also directed by Kubrik though not listed on his bio? Yes, it’s supposed to be all homoerotic. He cast Lawrence Olivier as Crassus, for God’s sake, what else could it be?

“I’m Spahticus!”
“Of course you are, darling, now put your pants on and sit down.’

@ManchuCandidate:
great attempt…but
when was it buried in the moon? who told HAL to lie?
what significance is there in a monolith? rather what relationship does a slab have with intelligence?
it’s like first downs, just don’t get it. don’t wanna. (btw, all football games are HW)
i guess i’m just a drug addict and alcoholic.

More from MovieGuide:

MM – May contain scenes with Miriam Margolies trying to act.
MMAA – May contain scenes with Miriam Margolies trying to sound American.
MSAA – Meryl Streep Accent Alert.
EMSAA – Extreme Meryl Streep Accent Alert.
SFB – Smug French Bastards
SLB – Smug Limey Bastards
SLBPA – Smug Limey Bastards Prancing About
CTC – Confusing to Christians (applies to almost everything produced in Hollyweird)
BOPWP – Based On Prize Winning Play (obsolete)
PSS – Patrick Stewart Shouting

@baked: “i guess i’m just a drug addict and alcoholic.” You say that like it’s a bad thing.

@Benedick:
i’m grappling now with my obtuse understanding of 2001, because i respect your opinions, i will ponder on it and rent it.

no it wasn’t spartacus, though thanks for the screen spit.

did you like “eyes wide shut”? kubricks swan song? i thought kubrick was over rated. you are enlightening me, maybe he’s just over my head?

how about peter o’toole in lawrence of arabia? HW! HW!
he tried to hit on me 3 years ago at the beverly hills hotel pool. he looks like cindy mccain now.

@baked: I know an Airplane reference when I see one.

My 80s chick was here this morning, but now I am Ray From Achewood again, oy.

@Prommie:
not much gets past you prommie.
hate to leave this delightful conversation on one of my obsessions-movies, but i must get to some stupid errands 10 minutes ago.
see ya’ll soon. hope we’re still on movies when i get back. xo

@baked: Monoliths are just deus ex machina, unexplainably advanced technology. The aliens created us, using a monolith-all-purpose-intelligent-species-creating-machine. Before they left, they buried a monolith on the moon as an alarm to tell them when we got advanced enough, well, to get to the moon and find it.

The secretive government of course tracked the message sent by the moon monolith to a moon of Saturn, Enceladus, which is a strange moon because its got this huge spot on it and looks like an eyeball.

But the secretive government did not want to tell the astronauts the real purpose of their trip (remember the moon monolith, I believe, killed everyone around itself when it went off).

The HAL thing, kinda an Asimovian subplot, conscious machine freaked out by contradictory orders. IBM minus one letter each, by the way, is HAL.

Nice to see the Pan Am logo again. All the fucking things of my youth dead, can’t get a fucking monkey, the world is swirling round the fucking drain.

Aliens subject Dave to light show to make movie enjoyable to stoned viewers, which symbolizes his transition to the next stage of human development, so advanced as to appear godlike, thus he appears like an infant God being born.

Theme, plot, story, in this its all one: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from God.” Wow, man, are you saying, this entire universe, could be, like, an atom in my fingernail?

@baked: Eyes Wide Shut? No, it’s awful. His obsession with technique finally did him in. Plus Mr. and Mrs Cruise were hopelessly outclassed.

In my opinion he was a wonderful director, at his best quite the equal of Hitchcock with whom he shares a similar POV. He wasn’t always good with actors, however. Lolita, apart from P. Sellers’s destructive perf, is beautiful. And James Mason is magnificent as Humbert Humbert. Barry Lyndon, ditto. Although Ryan O’Neal is not quite up to it.

If you think of the monolith as the McGuffin of the movie you’ll enjoy it more. In itself it means nothing. It’s like the ‘Nazis’ (are they? What the hell are they?) in North By Northwest a similarly abstract narrative that creates an astonishing amount of tension from nothing. What’s important is the attitude of those who see it. Each time it’s found it produces wonderment: what is it? how did it get there? Curiosity leads to simple tools; simple tools lead to complex technology; complex technology leads to… what? A re-birth? We don’t yet know.

And that shot of Gary Whosit running inside the space station!!!!!! Is there anything lonelier? And the silence of space!!!!!! Dismantling Hal!!!! Oh it’s gorgeous. But it really needs to be seen on a big screen. It doesn’t look anything like as good seen small.

@Benedick: Mr. Cruise is so horrific he can suck the goodness out of other actors. I do find him fascinating, however, because it appears the Scientology creeps have actually convinced the poor simpleton that he has super powers and can control people with his mind, you can see him trying to give people the mind control stare sometimes, in public appearances.

He’s the new Mickey Rooney, Mr. Cruise.

Lolita was brilliant, wasn’t it? Humbert is the victim, really.

@Benedick:
@Prommie:

Not even the promise of money could make me watch Eyes Wide Shut again. I’d like to think that Full Metal Jacket was Kubrick’s last movie but alas no matter how many times I try to deny, it isn’t.

@Prommie:
The man had promise. I rather enjoyed his performances in Born On The 4th of July and A Few Good Men. After that? Not so much and he plays variations of Maverick.

I saw Top Gun when I was 15 and I loved it. Now? Just pure crap and I missed the whole gay subtext till it was pointed out to me.

It’s Festivus. I put up a post for the Airing of Grievances.

So where the fuck are you? I take the time to put up a grievance of my own, Manchu does one, but the rest of you? Ungrateful.

I gotta lotta problems with you people!

@Prommie: “Light of my life, fire of my loins… ” etc. My favorite story about that movie is that, when Nabokov, started making ‘suggestions’ Kubrik commissioned him to write the script. Which got N out of the way for several months so K could shoot the script he wanted.

Movie is very good indeed but that novel!!!!!! Be still my heart. Hilarious and heartbreaking! No mean feat.

Tom Cruise isn’t supposed to act. He’s a movie star. It’s a different talent.

Mickey Rooney was, in his day, a huge talent. I saw him in Sugar Babies and he was sublime. I also saw him in stock production of the old Limey farce entitled See How They Run in which he was cast as a young Englishman. Clearly the rest of the cast hated him. The other actors could hardly look at him on the stage. And clearly he barely knew the lines and made most of them up. And by the end he’d popped most of the buttons on his shirt which was drenched in sweat and was not lovely to behold. But. It remains one of the funnies performances I’ve ever seen. Very Shakespearean in its low-comedy POV.

@Benedick: PMA – Post-modernism Alert

But what does it mean to you?

USAS — Mindless Nationalism Alert
MMBE — Michael Moore Being Earnest Advisory
OOOH — Middle-aged Women Advisory
SNAP — Tough African-American Women Advisory
OOOHSNAP — Tough Middle-aged African-American Women Warning
NOOOOO — Cheesy Horror Flick Advisory
FHM — Teenage Boys Highly Encouraged
DUDE — Parental Abidence Strongly Advised

@baked: Hate that film. Hate. It. A friend tried to convince me that I don’t (can’t?) appreciate it because it’s an exploration of the male psyche. Fucking bullshit. And those “New York City” street scenes? I’ve been there only a handful of times, and even I could tell that they were faked, poorly. What a sad way to end an otherwise distinguished career.

Needs to be an “Affleck (I can hear the duck saying his name) and Damon working for scale in a Kevin Smith movie” warning. How about “KEVINSMITH?”

@baked:
@Benedick:
Kubrick was originally a still photographer and it shows in his cinematography- every frame is thought out. He was notoriously hard on actors.
“Boris”, the big name director who wants to make a high budget Hollywood X-rated film in Terry Southern’s hilarious satire “Blue Movie”, is based on SK, and in fact the two of them actually kicked the idea around after “Strangelove”. Eye Wide Shut is probably the belated attempt to do that project. It really isn’t a sex movie, and it isn’t very popular, obviously.
Personally, I’m more forgiving than most about EWS, and I’ve heard that the the casting of the oh-so-wooden Tom Cruise and icy Ms Kidman was absolutely intentional. Still, I don’t think he quite pulled it off.
One of those “a better movie is trying to get out” situations .

@ManchuCandidate: In come circles, Full Metal Jacket is Stanley’s last steamer. The studio claimed he was finished with Eyes, but partisans declared he would have been editing right up until the premiere. Me, I’ve sat out that debate — I’m not a fan of Barry Lyndon, which means I can’t join the Kubrick Kult.

@nojo:
Neither am I a member. Hated Barry Lyndon. Ryan O’Neal???????

FMJ was disjointed due to its three minor plots strung together but it was memorable.

@Prommie: Also:

SMPGFO – Straight Men Playing Gay For Oscar

@fupduk: I don’t know how interested he was in acting. Certainly some of his best films have less than satisfactory perfs at their centre. But. He still made some wonderful movies.

The US of EWS was a complete fantasy. His long exile really showed. Those sets all built in London. I should think that the reason the movie was made was TC saying he wanted to do it. And then giving Kubrick all that time. And of course it had to be bowdlerized for its US release. So I suppose we haven’t seen the film he made.

@Benedick:
Which reminds me of:

BWPROUFO – Beautiful Women Playing Retarded Or Ugly For Oscar

MM – Monkey movie (i.e, Dunston Checks In, 2001)
G4U – Good for You (uplifting sensitive crap)
RFW – Real Fucking Weird (Santa Sangre)
SNM – Shot in New Mexico
ESK – Essential for Smart Kids (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Repo Man, Shaun of the Dead, etc)
JW – Just Wrong – Funny but way inappropriate
CA – Cool Anime

@nojo: “come circles”? Are those like drum circles but, erm, messier?
I thought Barry Lyndon was beautiful — the scenes shot by candlelight were amazing, and yes, I was a film major for two weeks — and loved the music, but the acting was dreadful.
@SanFranLefty: Also, DDLHMPDA: Daniel Day Lewis Handsome Man Playing Disabled Alert.

@Prommie: Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from God.

Very, very close, but for the most esoteric of nuances.

The Monolith is an allegory for Intelligence. Recall that “Man is the only animal who wields tools” was still current in the Sixties — the first Monolith represents a quantum leap from animal intelligence to something abstract, which turns a bone into a weapon.

Each successive Monolith draws Man closer to God — here represented by Jupiter, the Roman version of Zeus. The light show and all that follows represents the incomprehensibility (to us) of an evolutionary step we have yet to achieve, but which given cosmic time is inevitable. Man returns to Earth an Enlightened Being, reborn to a new stage of existence as different from ours as ours is from our ancestral predecessors.

At which point Monkey and Man live in harmony, until Charlton Heston shows up to ruin everything.

It’s all sex and violence. The shuttle docking with the space station is one of the dirtiest fornication scenes ever committed to film.

@Mistress Cynica: Kubrick explored Come Circles in Eyes Wide Shut, explaining to an interviewer he wanted to screw his fans.

@Benedick: A wonderful novel. I read it as Nabokov’s “fuck you” to literary critics.

@nojo: ” The shuttle docking with the space station is one of the dirtiest fornication scenes ever committed to film.” Did you see it on acid? I did.

@Dodgerblue: I thought the lit-crit fuck-you was Pale Fire.

@SanFranLefty:
love that one!
and of course the men playing ugly and retarded for oscar
(leo in gilbert grape, tom in forest gump, philadelphia, ann coulter in everything)

@Dodgerblue: The pot may have helped. That and a 70mm print.

@Benedick:
and gay men playing straight for oscar and i don’t mean rock hudson.
somebody get justin kirk off weeds!!! i love the show, i love him, but when he’s in love scenes with women i GAG.

maybe we’re overthinking 2001. maybe stan was just insane and we’re looking at a naked emporer. maybe i’m an idiot and just don’t get him. i am sensing substance usage is mandatory. i’ll watch it again in a big bake. though as a shutterbug, his cinematography is always gorgeous. that’s always the first thing i notice.
given their brilliance in writing, casting and directing, the coen bros. cinematography is spectacular, and overlooked due to aforementioned. every frame of theirs is perfection.

@Prommie: Theme, plot, story, in this its all one: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from God.”

Actually the quotation from the late great Sir Arthur C. Clarke goes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s a pretty significant difference, especially since Clarke was a self-described atheist. He wasn’t pushy about it and used the words “God” and “Reality” as synonyms.

I recently watched a fascinating documentary about the making of “2001”. Roger Ebert talked about the Hollywood types who couldn’t make heads or tails of the film. He specifically mentioned Rock Hudson walking out of the movie saying “Somebody tell me what the hell this film is about”. Since I had read Clarke’s short story “The Sentinal” before seeing the movie I had a better idea of what was taking place.

Here’s another quotation from Clarke that undermines a major assumption we humans tend to make subconciously, “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” Remember that thought the next time you’re feeling smug about the IQ of Palin’s base and/or fundamentalists of all religions.

@baked: brrrrrrr-BRRRRRR-brrrrrrr-BRRRRRR-shhhhhh-brrrrrrr-BRRRRRR

Sorry. Shining flashback.

While not entirely germaine to this topic, I’ve always thought that episodes of ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ should contain a new warning at the beginning and after each commercial that reads:

TV-PA: This episode may contain instances of actual acting.

The PA standing for Possible Acting, of course.

@nojo:
“At which point Monkey and Man live in harmony, until Charlton Heston shows up to ruin everything.”

HEE HEE

“It’s all sex and violence. The shuttle docking with the space station is one of the dirtiest fornication scenes ever committed to film.”

Next to the refueling of the B-52s in Dr Strangelove. Kubrick loved the fornication metaphors of the technological age.

@nojo: It’s all sex and violence. The shuttle docking with the space station is one of the dirtiest fornication scenes ever committed to film.

Actually the scene as the Pan Am shuttle approaches the space station to the gorgeous strains of “The Blue Danube” is one of the most glorious bits of inspired film making I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. Kubrick turned what could have been simply a routine technical scene into a breathtaking waltz in space. Of course the waltz itself was once considered obscene.

@nojo:
it happens. REDRUM.

speaking of redrum, the first suicide is being reported in new york.
found dead at his desk today with pills and slit wrists. he had given over a million of his personal savings to madoff. indictable? i wish.
so sad, and sad to say i reported here last week what wall street daddy told me, “people will be jumping off the ledge”.

kubrick mangled the shining. stephen king was furious over his treatment of the novel, which was prob his best book.
the movie was eh, but the book is terrific and much much scarier and believable. he couldn’t turn a king novel into something better? or as good?

@Dave H:
Saw “2001” in Nov 1968 on my Senior class trip to D.C.. In Cinerama, although at this point I don’t recall the name of the theater. Maybe an oldster DCite might remember (there couldn’t have been that many 70mm places in Washington). Let’s just say that it was beyond my 17yr-old mind. As a space-and-science nut (I still have a scrapbook of every space-related newspaper item I found from 1961 through 1967), I was intrigued. So when I got home I bought the book, (a paperback which I still have, probably cobbled together quickly after the release) and read that. The movie was way better than the book, although the book explained alot of the weirdnesses. The book ends with the StarChild looking down at Earth, which he has been given as his very own bauble, whereupon he causes complete destruction on the surface, so he can start it (particularly mankind) all over just the way he wants it, and have it work out right this time. Cinerama is the only way to see the film. I’ve watched it in a regular theater, as well as on video and cable, and it was meant to overwhelm, which only the wiiiide screen can do. It looks fussy on smaller screens.
Senior class trips were the best idea ever: Mine consisted of 300+ high school kids on busses with minimum supervision, 200 miles from home, staying four to a room in a mid-level hotel. Smokes, beer, trysts, and very little sleep. Oh, and seeing the sights for several days.

@baked: Speaking of Kubrick’s genius and Giant Prints, I always thought The Shining played better in a theater than on a TV. When Nicholson swings the axe, your head turns back and forth as it sweeps across the screen.

Obligatory Oregon reference: The exterior was Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood.

@Ewalda: I’m going to be shot for this, but I always thought the movie showed how Kubrick transcended Clarke’s source material. (The book version, not the original short story.) The movie works because Kubrick scraped the barnacles off the allegory, instead of relying on literal explanations.

Not that he always knew what he was doing. Early drafts called for the Monolith to include a TV screen with an instructional video.

One thing I did like about the book: All the food was blue. For years I used that as the explanation of McDonald’s: Everything there, from food to furniture, originates from the same goo. It’s just a matter of processing.

@nojo: the Timberline was built by the WPA, right? Features prominently in that book that came out this year on the legacy of the WPA, which I believe even name-checks the Shining.

I hated “Lolita,” both book and movie. There, I’ve said it and have thereby blown any intellectual cred I might have had. I know too many women who were sexually abused as children or teens to find anything artistic about it. It just made me ill. I find the rest of Nabokov unreadable.
::Returns to Grinch cave to resume reading volume 4 of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs::

@Ewalda: The Uptown would be my guess (and I’m not even an oldster!).

@nojo:
Agreed.
Clarke was never more than an adequate writer, he was just a good extrapolator from contemporary sources, and he had a knack for self-promotion.
There were many better SciFi writers, and at least one true visionary (Saint Philip Dick), but Clarke (and that horses ass Asimov) were the ones always on the teevee, blowing their own horns.

@Ewalda: I was a Bradbury Boy, myself — more poetic than Asimov. The moment in Martian Chronicles when the Martian and Human meet on the pass is still chilling.

And to round out Today in Allegory, we have to mention what must have been a very deliberate choice of Zarathustra for the Monolith theme. 2001 reeks of Nietzsche.

@Mistress Cynica: I read about half way through and sort of let it go as a treatise on the ability of the obsessed to lie to themselves. Witnessed plenty of that without needing to read about it.

@FlyingChainSaw: The reaction of the kids to our right is priceless: “Eeeeeewwwww!” In the photo you linked to, that is.

‘Surgeon discovers and removes immense maggot that had eaten Cheney’s heart – and then blows lunch. Film at 11. Tune in and see the chunks fly!’

@nojo: I used to read a lot of sci-fi and, of course, everything by Clarke. Kubrick, as did Hitchcock, spent hours and hours with him working on the script. As you say, he strips all the sci-fi out of it just as he stripped the supernatural out of the King novel. I never saw 2001 while on anything. I’m too puritanical to do that. The Cinerama cinema in NYC was next to the Broadway theatre on 51st st. It was called the Warner’s (came back to me as I typed). And was pulled down years ago. I guess the process cost too much.

@Dodgerblue: I think of it as his Mme. Bovary.

@nojo: Very funny book. I was never so thrilled as I was when I read his plays, and indeed his screenplay for Lolita. They’re not very good. That someone of his brilliance didn’t write good plays was a great comfort. As it was when I read Shaw’s novels.

@Mistress Cynica: I don’t think anyone condemns Humbert Humbert more than his creator. Even though he allows him one day a year out of hell in which to walk in a cool green lane. N loved the joke of the unreliable narrator. I’m a fan. I’ve read everything and am only sorry there isn’t more.

@nojo: I read somewhere that he used that music, indeed all the music, as a mock-up for editing, and that he intended the movie to have an original score. Which was written and not used because the found music worked so much better. That was the first time I’d heard the Barber piece.

If you remember, some time after the movie there was a disco version of Zarathustra. It became the centre-piece for the funniest spectacle I’ve ever witnessed in a theatre and the only time I’ve ever seen a curtain dropped in the middle of a first-night performance to stop the audience from rioting. The Frank Valdoz Tropicado Show Band in their UK debut at the Palladium. Happy times.

@Benedick: If you’re referring to Deodato, I wore out an 8-track of that album.

@Ewalda:
Uptown Theater, cinerama, hallucinogenics….. That was my first (and best)
encounter with 2001…. Was kind of cool at the Drive -In too

I haveto take your word about class trips… my school enacted a moratorium after the previous year’s NYC trip… Never got the details but apparently they moved on past beer, trysts, and weed, to strippers, hookers and bar fights……. Drinking age in NY was 18 then, not that anyone checked….

@Ewalda: Sounds like my middle school trip to Williamsburg. 3 days, all of us 12 years old, wild.

@nojo: I lived and breathed sci fi when I was a lad. 99% of it is trash, space opera, and the high-minded stuff was mostly unreadable, just bad, notable in the way that a dog that talks is notable. But there was a freedom to it, the free reign of imagination, the questioning of everything, the future scenarios.

I liked the apocalyptic stuff, the world ends, few are left, whether a plague, an alien invasion, whatever, I liked the stotries about the survivors of apocalypse most of all. Probably something that led from my very young love for Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson.

The sci fi I most remember is The Forever War, I forget who wrote it, Ringworld, by Niven, Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books, and also his Fafyrd and Grey Mouser fantasy books, there was a short story called “A Bucket of Air” that sticks with me, whoever it was who wrote Schroedinger’s Cat, and his other books dealing with the Illuminati, The Mask of the Illuminati, I remember that one, scariest thing I ever read, I did love the hard science sci fi, Niven, Pournelle, who wrote The Integral Trees?

Here’s a good question for debate, whats the best sci fi movie ever? I actually think 12 Monkeys is near the top.

@Promnight: 2001 and Manhattan are my favorite movies hands down, so I guess that leaves your standard 1977-1982 run: Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars, Close Encounters, and E.T.

Honorable mentions: A Boy and His Dog, Silent Running.

@Promnight: Didn’t Niven and Pournelle write “Lucifer’s Hammer”? one of the few scifi books I liked, unless you count Brave New World.
@nojo: Love Manhattan. NYC, Gershwin, and Allen when he was funny. Doesn’t get any better.

@Benedick: This is very high praise to me. Mme. Bovary is on my Top 5 list, along with Don Quixote, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and something by Philip Roth (I have a few possibilities in mind).

Niven and Pournelle wrote Lucifer’s Hammer. Niven (I think alone) wrote The Integral Trees. If I had to name a favorite author, Niven and Terry Pratchett would tie for the honor.

@Dodgerblue: Me, too. I think the big N did it intentionally. For me the direct line of divine books centered on women goes Karenina, Bovary, Lolita.

I find Ulysses unreadable. I am going to be racist now, I know it and I’m not proud of it, but there we are. Even I have a flaw. I can’t bear the Oirishness of the book. Oirishness in general gives me the willies. I find the Irish at times as tough to figure out as Arabs. That having been uttered, the finale of The Dead makes me jump up and run about the room weeping.

Sci-fi. Anybody read The Dragon in the Sea? I just recently found out it is a famous book. It made a big impression when I was 14. I wonder why it’s never been filmed.

Movies? Close Encounters? The Sound of Music?

@nojo: The Catastrophe in London was a knockoff of that version. But my father was with Deodato and plays on the original.

Oh, and AGWFO – Actor Gaining Weight For Oscar

@Benedick:
sound of music….top of my list too.

when my kittens were sick infants struggling to survive, i would put them on my chest and sing every word in every song from SOM to try and simulate the purring of their dead mama.
they still get excited when i sing “whiskers on kittens”

i love so many movies, but if you put a gun to my head, i have to say
ANNIE HALL.

fun fact: first (only) best picture oscar given to a comedy.
only actor to win best in a comedic role?
kevin kline in ‘a fish called wanda’. lerve that movie, know where the word lerve came from? annie hall. “i love you, i luff you, i LERVE you”

I get the creeps when Woody Allen allows himself to be publicly adored by beautiful and intelligent women. I wonder if he doesn’t have a mirror. He’s so unattractive on so many levels. It makes me think he has no sense of humor.

I’m prepared to find myself in a minority on this one.

@Benedick: You are not completely alone, I think woody is the single most overrated pedophile in the show biz, and I am including Madonna in this comparison, so thats saying something. And the fucking pretentiousness of his supposed intellectuality, jeeze, woody, stop patting yourself on the back just because you read a few books and sorta got it. Read up some on fucking children, and the advisability of not doing so..

@Benedick: @Prommie: I’ve always had a thing for neurotic Jewish men (Southern girls often do — Florence King suggests it’s because they rarely think going to the dump to shoot rats is an appropriate first date), but as he got older and the girls got younger, it was definitely CREEPY. When I watch “Husbands and Wives” I have to wonder that Mia didn’t see it coming.
@baked: I can pretty much recite that entire movie. LERVE.

@Prommie:
oooh, them’s fighten words.
let us separate the flawed man with the artist. he is the most prolific director in history. not every one was a home run, but the consistancy and endurance of his work is astonishing. (one every year! and dozens of treasures!) no director has had that many wonderful films. none. they call directers “great” with 2 or 3 films. he’s incomparable as an artist.
as a man, not so much. and why should we care.
yes, the young love interests became creepy. his last, thank god, was julia roberts in “everybody says i love you” (btw, a delightful story and cole porter musical) he’s replaced himself of late with ed norton and will ferrel, he found a mirror.@Benedick: @Mistress Cynica:somethin ain’t right with mia either, don’t get me started. how could she see anything coming with 27 handicapped children? i don’t think he’s a pedophile. i think it was an honest freaky one time thing. he’s happily married to soon yi a long time now and they have 2 daughters. he never lived with or married mia.

@baked: Well, my Woody Allen collection ends at Stardust Memories. There are moments from later movies that I like, but I felt at the time that he stopped challenging himself after Stardust, and ceased being interesting.

Or maybe I’m just bitter he didn’t stick with Diane Keaton.

I liked Annie Hall because of Annie Hall. Diane Keaton in a hat. Bahzing! I’m there.

Otherwise, I’m not a big fan of Woody.

Re: Woody.
For me, he ended with The Purple Rose of Cairo. I could not watch more than about 20 minutes of that mess. The fact that Woody thinks it is one of his best, and it won lotsa awards, says something about my taste, I guess. I still maintain it was an awful movie.

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