TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Oh, okay.  That had two Ts.  I thought it was maybe some IMF concept involving age.

[Admiral Yi]

Check out the big brain on Syt. 

[Eddie Teach]

Yi's so old his rule won't let him date twenty-somethings.

[Admiral Yi]

32.  My limit now is 32.

[Ideologue]

That's about when they cross the Shatner line.

[Ed Anger]

32.  My limit now is 32.

Wuss.

[Admiral Yi]

That's about when they cross the Shatner line.

I don't get it.

[crazy canuck]

I don't get it.

Then you should amend your rule

[Ideologue]

That's about when they cross the Shatner line.

I don't get it.

Turns out the real final frontier is the treadmill and no one's interested in exploring it.

[Savonarola]

Sumurun (1920)

Released as "One Arabian Night" in the United States; this Ernst Lubitsch film features lavish sets and a large cast.  There are two main stories; in one the favorite concubine of the Sheik has fallen in love with a cloth merchant and the harem's attempts to aid and abet her affair while outwitting the eunuchs.  The second story is that a hunchback clown (Lubitsch) loves a dance girl (German silent cinema star Pola Negri) but she's eager to be sold into the harem of the Sheik (fulfilling every German woman's secret fantasy.)

The film alternates in mood throughout from erotic, to comic, to pathetic, to romantic, to tragic, to slapstick.  It doesn't work.  The actors, for the most part, seem distant and stilted (with the exception of Negri and the Sheik (Paul Wegener.)  The lovers are forgettable, and Lubitsch is unable to make his clown sympathetic in the way that Lon Chaney could in similar roles.

[Ideologue]

Bummer.  That's on Netflix and I was thinking about watching it at some point when I found the time.

[Savonarola]

Bummer.  That's on Netflix and I was thinking about watching it at some point when I found the time.

I wouldn't recommend it; but that doesn't mean you won't like it. 

Is "The Oyster Princess" (Die Austernprinzessin) on Netflix?  Of the Lubitsch silent films that I've seen (which haven't been that many) that one is my favorite.

[Ideologue]

Nope, although I Don't Want To Be a Man is.  That's a cover that gets your attention, in a "how the fuck was this made?" sort of way, until you realize one of them is a chick in drag.

Apropos of nothing, what's that pre-code movie about people having sex that's famous?  You know the one I mean.  It's 1931ish.

[Ideologue]

I consulted a list of pre-Code films, and, duh, it was Tarzan and His Mate.

Tarzan rides a rhinoceros in one scene - a first for film. The rhino, Mary, was imported from the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany. Weismuller did the scene himself, sustaining only minor scrapes to sensitive places from Mary's rough hide.

Way off, though.  It was 1934.

[Ideologue]

Holy cow.  Did you know that Saul Bass, America's favorite title sequence designer, had a directing credit?

It's a little film you might've heard of called Phase IV.  For those not in the know, it's a movie about a solar flare (or something) that grants super-intelligence to every species of ant, who put aside their long-standing differences and set out to conquer the world.  95% of the budget, about fifty bucks, appears to have been devoted to its microcosmic photography of ants, and it was featured in the little-seen KTMA season of MST3K.  However, while it's both a little dull and a lot weird--the ending, which I won't spoil, takes the picture from "the writer came up with an interesting conceit" to "we need to stage an intervention"--it may actually be the best movie ever featured on MST3K, and really contends for that title only with the Gamera and Godzilla films, Moon Zero Two, a proper sci-fi film of some merit, and Danger! Diabolik, the Italian supervillain flick that closed the series out.

I only mention it because it's such a bizarre intersection of high and low cinema, and the next time you're having a conversation about the title sequence for Psycho, you can say it was created by Saul Bass, director of the preeminent antsploitation film of the 1970s.