Search Results for: Today's Double Feature

This time around, we have two of my favorite movies. If you've never seen It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World before, I suggest you not watch it here, especially alone, especially on a small screen. Wait until some theater near you is running it on a big screen with a big audience because it really needs both. But if you've already seen it that way and just want to refresh your memory, here it is…

And here are Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie from 1966. I had this movie up once before and a lot of you wrote to say you enjoyed it…

We start off Today's Double Feature with the Mel Brooks movie that no one I know ever saw or even heard of. It's Dracula: Dead and Loving It from 1995…

And then we have Top Secret! from the folks who brought you Airplane! This is from 1984 and I thought it deserved more attention than it received…

Today's Double Feature stars a man who at one point in his career could have been voted "Least Likely Actor In Hollywood To Ever Become The Number One Star Of Comedies." Here's Leslie Nielsen as Lieutenant Frank Drebin in two of his highly successful comedies…

First, we have The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear from 1991…

Then we have Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult from 1994 And don't call me Shirley…

Here's one of Woody Allen's best early films, Bananas from 1971…

And here's one of the Marx Brothers' poorer later films, A Night in Casablanca from 1946…

Hey, let's watch two musical remakes! Here's the musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors from 1986…

And this is the musical remake of the movie of Annie. They made a movie of Annie in 1982 and this is a remake of that movie from 2014…

What do we have for you today? Why, it's The Flintstones from 1994. Back when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, someone was always talking about taking the cartoon show and doing a live-action version of it. I always thought and often said "It would never work" and eventually, they spent a lot of money to make this and prove me right…

Amazingly, it did well enough to warrant a sequel so here we have The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas from 2000. What some people won't do to prove me right…

Here's one of Woody Allen's best movies, Hannah and Her Sisters from 1986…

And here's an even better Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall from 1977…

We have two more feature films for you today…

This is American Graffiti from 1973…

And here's (arguably) the best movie Jerry Lewis was ever in, The King of Comedy from 1983…

An awful lot of full movies are being uploaded, apparently quite legally, to YouTube.  So for a while here, I'm going to link you to two of them each day. Let's start with a little Mel Brooks Film Festival, shall we?

Here's Spaceballs from 1987…

…and Life Stinks from 1991…

Here's another one of those videos that takes old black-and-white silent film of some city and someone colorizes it and adds a fake soundtrack. This one's of New York and the caption says it's from the 1940s.

Trying to figure out just when in the forties, I note a movie marquee that seems to be showing the Tom Tyler movie Valley of Hunted Men (1942) and another marquee that seems to be showing the Rita Hayworth film The Loves of Carmen (1948). A possible conclusion would be that we're seeing film from '48 and the Tyler film has been re-released as the bottom half of a double feature. Another possible conclusion is that what we have here is a combination of footage from different years. Take your pick…

Here's a Legal Eagle Double Feature for you: Two videos by Devin Stone, the YouTube attorney who talks a bit too fast but seems to know his stuff. In the first, he evaluates the many past and present lawyers who've represented Donald J. Trump in his many recent investigations, indictments and lawsuits. Some of these folks will probably write books and I wonder how many of them are going to say that the reason they lost was that the client insisted on doing things his way despite sound advice to the contrary…

And here's Counselor Stone talking about a legal issue regarding online videos in which someone shows someone else's video so they can "react" to it and when that does and does not qualify as "Fair Use." Stone used to do such videos. He and a lawyer friend would show some law-oriented movie and comment on how much what was in the movie resembled actual courtroom procedures and how much the legal content resembled the actual laws…

Here's an oddity. In 1929, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made a short called Double Whoopee. It was one of their last silent films and it is most notable for a brief scene with a then-largely-unknown Jean Harlow. She played a woman who gets much of her dress ripped off…a star-making part if ever there was one back then. A lot of people think this is one of several shorts that Stan and Ollie made when transitioning to sound — films issued in both sound and silent versions because many theaters in this country were not yet equipped to play "talkies."

The confusion is because there was a sound version of Double Whoopee. It just wasn't made in 1929 and doesn't feature the voices of the on-screen actors. In the late sixties as a pilot film for a projected series, a group of Laurel and Hardy fans dubbed the film with voices, music and sound effects. The main voices were done by Chuck McCann. They only did one film this way and I'm not at all sure how I feel about it…

More Barbershop. This is Zero8, the same group we featured yesterday…though this configuration has about half as many members as yesterday's. This is their "Acceptance Song" from the SNOBS Nordic Chorus Championships in Nyköping in April of 2013. I gather that when a group wins something over a certain level, they come on stage and perform another tune as a kind of "thank you" or victory lap.

Zero8 is based in Sweden and it is (they are?) very popular. On their website, it says…

Zero8 — A choir formed in 2007, directed by Rasmus Krigström, the Lead singer of Ringmasters, the 2012 World Champion Barbershop quartet, has since then consisted of 20-50 of Stockholm's best choir singers and shaped world-class Barbershoppers in double digits. Having merits such as placing Top 5 in the International Barbershop Chorus Competition, winning the Rimini International Choral Competition, having produced several full-length A Capella CD's and being on Swedish National Television multiple times, Zero8 proudly stands out as one of Sweden's best and most versatile male Choir. Concerts are hosted at least twice every year, and gigs are accepted on demand. Zero8 can, upon request, deliver world class quartet performances as well as the full experience of the whole powerful choir.

Yesterday's video was at a competition in Las Vegas in 2014. I'm curious as to why their membership doubled and about the finances that get fifty singers plus any family members and entourage to Las Vegas. Maybe someone can enlighten me. In the meantime, here they are…

I'm going to write a longer post about this one of these days but I've been thinking lately that some of us need to realize something: That in politics nowadays, consistency of thought and principle is nowhere near as important as winning. Not even close.  Republicans were outraged that Obamacare was passed without enough transparency or time but are fine with their alternative being passed with way less of each. It doesn't matter. We no longer fault our politicians for saying or doing today the opposite of what they said last Tuesday.

Remember "I'd rather be right than president?"  There is no honor today in making that choice.  If you lost, you're a loser.

I mean, it might make us uncomfy down deep to see our side fudging or even reversing itself on principles.  Not winning, however, makes us less comfy so we look the other way, double-talk our way past the flip-flops and refuse to admit the bullshit factor of at least one of our two contradictory firm positions. Democrats do less of that than Republicans but that may just be because Democrats aren't winning.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pointing out when someone is saying or doing exactly what they said was horrible when said/done by the opposition. We just should maybe stop expecting it to matter so much. Now, this…

• Ezra Klein writes about how one of Trump's big problems is that he doesn't listen to his staff, doesn't operate on the premise that you hire people who just might know more than you about something. That is why he keeps contradicting what his own spokespeople say. Klein writes about Al Franken and Franken's new book, which I'm now in the process of reading. What impresses me about the book so far is that the book is not "I'm great so here's why you should always support me," which is the message of most books by active politicians. Franken really writes about his own experiences and what he's done right and wrong. Often, what's he's done wrong is that he hasn't grasped that his new job (U.S. Senator) is a lot different from his old jobs in show business. It's a lesson Trump could stand to — but will probably never — learn.
• Matt Taibbi believes Megyn Kelly vivisected Alex Jones in that much-publicized interview. I caught some of it and thought, "Yeah, people who know the guy is full of crap will grin that she made that obvious. People who like what he says will ignore any cracks in his credibility." A real vivisection would change some minds among his followers…though I think those folks are more likely to reassign their genders than their faith in a guy like him. I do however agree with other things Taibbi has to say here.
• As Eric Levitz notes, hardcore Trump supporters think this whole Special Counsel Russia Thing is a "witch hunt." When does anyone who doesn't like where an investigation is going not dismiss it as a "witch hunt?" I actually know one Trump voter whose support for Donald J. is waning, not because he thinks the administration colluded with Russia but because Trump's reactions to the charges have made the guy look incompetent and insane. My acquaintance who is falling out of love with Trump says, "He doesn't look like an adult who can rationally deal with things."  Makes you wonder why.
• Jonathan Chait makes an interesting point: The Republicans are now not attempting to pass the idealized dream of Health Care that Conservatives have always wanted. That clearly will never fly with the voters. What the G.O.P. is trying to pass is a castrated version of Obamacare that will allow Big Tax Cuts For The Rich now and will hide some of the downsides for the poor and middle class until after the next election or two.

Make sure you see the segment John Oliver did about coal on his program last Sunday night. The only thing I don't like about Oliver — and I'll put up with it, of course — is certain interjections of irrelevant, distracting jokes into some of his pieces. This one was so on-target and informative, I wish he hadn't made some of those pit stops along the way to go for laughs.

I know some of you think I'm writing too much about the election and about Trump but my blog is about whatever's on my mind and what's there now is the Electoral College.

Right now, every major pollster has Hillary Clinton with what would seem to be an insurmountable lead in the following states: New York, California, Vermont, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, Hawaii, Virginia, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Oregon, Maine, Delaware, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, plus the District of Columbia. In most, she's up around ten points.

Those states total 258 electoral votes…so she's twelve shy of the 270 it takes to win.

Now, you hear a lot about Ohio (18 electoral votes) and Florida (29) and even North Carolina (15) and how Trump needs those states to have even a chance of winning. He does…but the point is that Hillary doesn't. She can get the twelve votes by winning Minnesota (10) and any one other state or just by winning Georgia (16). She can get it by winning Iowa (6) and Nevada (6). She can get it by winning Arizona (11) and any one other state. There are many routes.

At the moment, she's either ahead or neck-and-neck in all of these plus a few others. She probably already has Minnesota but there haven't been many polls there so you can't really award her the state…yet. The latest Monmouth Poll — that's one of the better pollsters — has her up nine in Florida…so there's more than double your twelve votes right there.

Trump is solid in seventeen states that will give him 139 so he's 131 short of the 270. There are thirteen "toss-up" states where neither is far enough ahead to claim a near-lock and those have 141 electoral votes. So Trump would need to win almost all of them or maybe flip a few states where Hillary has a solid lead.

As Nate Silver notes, Trump seems to be about to ratchet up the nastiness and accusations. That's the approach that got him where he is today — on the verge of being on the wrong end of a landslide. Still, my thinking is that Trump has no other choice.

If he suddenly starts acting statesmanlike and polite, it's not going to change the minds of anyone who already decided he was unfit. They remember…and in case they forget, there's loads of video around for the Hillary people to replay. Undecideds won't believe there's a new Trump…and of course, there's the very real question of whether he is actually capable of performing any other act. All he'd do probably is disappoint his base and cause less of them to turn out on Election Day.

Seems to me Trump's only hope is to sell hard the "Crooked Hillary" theme and hope something emerges that has a lot more substance than any of the allegations hurled so far. Even then, I think a lot of people would opt for Crooked Hillary over Crazy Donald.