Something about the E.T. special edition

What they should have done is made Elliott stop pedaling.

I'm not sure how many times I've seen E.T. I had a friend who wanted me to see it, so we went. Then I was hanging around with him and his girlfriend wanted to see it again so I went with them again. Later, he bought a VHS copy of it so I had to sit through it a couple more times. 

I made the mistake of telling my sister that I didn't care for the movie. It turned out that watching E.T. was the most deeply moving experience of her life, so she spent a couple of hours ragging on me. She thought that I must have found the movie so profoundly emotional that I was trying to conceal my true feelings.  I know she was sincere because, later, my brother was in town and she insisted we all watch E.T. But before she put it on, I saw panic in her eyes. Would the movie be TOO emotional? Would watching it together become socially awkward?

Yeah, I know I wrote about this before at some point. But I came across this on Cracked.com:

https://www.cracked.com/article_32919_how-spielbergs-et-special-edition-pissed-off-the-screenwriter.html

 

The Way West (1967)

It was a big covered wagon movie with Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark. Sally Field's first movie, with Paul Wexler in an uncredited role as a barber. I never met him but Wexler used to own the little house right across the street from me.

Part of the movie was filmed near here. I had never heard if it. Seems to have been forgotten because it wasn't very good. The violent deaths of at least two children (one played by Stefan Arngrim from TV's Land of the Giants) didn't do it any favors. 

But now it's showing up on streaming video.

North by Northwest

I don't have anything interesting or coherent to say about it. Just that Cary Grant was in pretty good shape. He was fifty-five years old and has a scene where he runs at full speed. This is Tom Cruise's thing---he runs in every movie. He compared himself to an Olympic athlete, but Cary Grant did the same thing without making a big deal out of it.

I recently mentioned Ralph Reed who played a 14-year-old in High Noon. There he was again in North by Northwest as the bellhop who says he's not allowed to send a telegram for Cary Grant. "I'm not permitted to do that, sir," he says. It's hard to believe his bosses told him, "And another thing---NO TELEGRAMS!"

That bellhop caused Cary Grant's whole ordeal. How many people died because of his sloth?

It was Martin Landau's first movie. He decided to play his character as gay. He thought he was subtle enough that most people wouldn't notice, but he was warned that people might think he was gay in real life. Could this be why he was in so many things with his wife, Barbara Bain? I doubt it. But he appeared with her in Mission Impossible, Space 1999, and The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, as if to say, "See? I'm not gay!"

Landau's career really blossomed once they divorced. Poor Barbara Bain was like Sonny Bono watching Cher's career take off.

The Goldbergs sans Jeff Garlin

From Showbiz411 about how The Goldbergs has been faring since Jeff Garlin's dismissal:

For weeks, “The Goldbergs” have been pretending Murray is still around. They use stand ins, make oblique references, but Garlin’s face is long gone.

Last night, fans were howling on social media that Murray’s daughter got married and there was no sign of him. His whole family was present. At one point, the narrator referred to “my parents” and there was a shot of a stand in pretending to be Murray from behind, dancing with his wife.

That doesn't sound so bad. But would a replacement need to be plausible or not obvious? Like the new Darrin on Bewitched, someone who sort of looks like the old Darrin and shares his opinions and general outlook but is a toned-down, blander version of the original.

It's like when you watch the pilot for The Waltons. Patricia Neal played the mother and Edgar Bergin played Grandpa. It takes a minute or two but you get used to it.

They should try it. If it doesn't work, they can go back to what they're doing.

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales (1972)

There used to be an art theater in town. At some point, they decided to supplement their art film revenue by showing porno films late at night. But when they started doing this, they showed only non-pornographic X-rated foreign films. Pasolini's Canterbury Tales was one of them.

I don't know what they thought it was, but my older brother and some of his friends were going to go to it. He asked me if I wanted to go. I said, well, okay. I was eighteen but I didn't drive and had no proof of age, so I didn't go. Proof of age wouldn't have been an issue. Even when they started showing actual pornography they didn't care.

I saw The Canterbury Tales a few years later on videotape and those guys had to have been disappointed. Shot without sound, dubbed in Italian and subtitled in English. I really didn't like it the first time I saw it. But I clicked on it on The Criterion Channel and it was much better than I remembered. 

Had things that were peculiar to Pasolini, like actors smiling at odd times. Like if you lie to someone in his movies, they smile to show that they fell for it. 

Things probably not going well

Anonymous keeps shutting down the RT website. The hacktivists want everyone to watch only CNN. What rebels!

The EU is shutting down all Russian media. Which is stupid because RT's reporting doesn't show things going well for Russia. 

In Ukraine, meanwhile, the mayors of two towns have ordered that looters be shot on sight, and they consider stores raising prices to be "looting". It's hard to picture local cops murdering shop owners. 

Ukraine has lifted age restrictions on military recruits. They took anyone 18 to 60 already which seemed pretty wide-open. They're opening prisons, handing assault rifles to inmates. It's only been five days. Are they that already that desperate?

I thought Russia would fire some missiles at Ukrainian bases and leave it at that, like the United States does all the time. People thought Russia would need twice as many troops. Ukraine is enormous with a population of 44 million. I don't know why they need to arm criminals or the elderly. 

Bear in mind, the U.S. hasn't won a war at least since World War Two (in which the Soviets did most of the fighting). It's been argued that the Invasion of Grenada is the only war the U.S. has won since the Spanish-American War. Israel hasn't won a war since 1973. It's possible to do pretty well without winning.

If Putin is voted out, who will take his place? The Communists had the second biggest party after Putin's Russia United.

Bob Newhart on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1963

Alfred Hitchcock Presents was great as a half  hour show. Having it drag on for an hour wasn't an improvement, like the one season they made The Twilight Zone an hour show. 

Bob Newhart's wife doesn't seem that bad, but everyone agrees that she's terrible and that he's a saint for staying with her. They're upper-middle-class and she inherited their money from her mother so he'd take a hit financially if he left her. She tells him she won't give him a divorce, so Newhart tries to convince her that he's plotting to murder her. He leave boxes of poison open in the kitchen where he fixes her coffee, he keeps appearing suddenly with a knife or a straight razor and he digs what looks like a grave in the garden.

Should I give away the ending? He makes it look like she tried to murder him and she ends up in prison.

It was an earlier time and TV characters had to be punished for their crimes. So, in the end, Bob Newhart's comeuppance is that he has to give up his stripper girlfriend and start dating a less attractive woman. She knew what he had done but hadn't come forward while his wife was on trial.

It wasn't funny. Hitchcock's introduction was especially unamusing. Now I understand why Orson Welles hated that crap.

Bob Newhart's second acting credit. He took an odd path to stardom. His record, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, came first. The record was a huge hit and it was only then that he started performing stand-up.