From: bc@campbell.Gwinnett.COM (campbell)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: Twenty I Liked
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 93 23:18:29 EST
Organization: Suncrest, Fairlawns, & Mulberry Frisbee Club

Well, after reading all these lists of the 10 (or 12 or 16) best
(or most enduring or favorite or whatever), I thought I'd throw
out a few more favorites for public consumption.  Maybe there are
some here that some of you haven't seen before that you might want to
take a risk on.
Plenty of room for agreement/disagreement.
Have fun.


AIRPLANE (1980)
   I knew I was in for a very strange one when one of the characters
   looked directly into the camera after getting the brush-off from
   his girlfriend and said "What a pisser!"
   "The WHITE zone is for..."

AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
   I never knew quite what to expect next...like the way Toad
   finally got his bottle of booze.  All kinds of things happened
   to the main characters causing Toad (Jerry?) to make the 
   supreme understatement near the end..."Geez, what a night!"

BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1954)
   I posted something about this one before.  This is NOT a Western!
   A one-armed Spencer Tracy goes into a beatup town in Arizona after
   WW II and the local citizens are very curious as to why he's there.
   It drives them nuts!  Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine
   are menacing bad guys.  Anne Francis and Walter Brennan (who, I
   presume, was BORN an old man and stayed that way for 60 years) also
   star.  Yeah, it WAS a bad day!

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY (1973)
   A movie with a baseball theme that was about much more than that.
   Robert DeNiro plays a dimwitted second-string catcher on a fictional
   professional team.  Michael Moriarty is the star picther who is
   his only friend.  This is not particularly a comedy but it
   has quite a few amusing scenes like the recurring attempt by the
   manager (Vincent Gardenia) to figure out why they were in the
   place they were during the offseason.  He finds out.  I think this
   is Danny Aiello's first screen appearance.

A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983)
   I used to think this was a TV movie because it pops up on every
   station at Christmas.  This one depicts the craziness of growing
   up, in general.  It centers around young Ralphie and his desire
   for a Red Rider BB-gun for Christmas even though everyone - his
   mother, his teachers - tell him "You'll put your eye out."
   And you just can't get lamps like that anymore, can you?

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)
   I came.  I saw.  I made things stop.  I split.  Neat.
   There is some phrase that goes with this movie but I forget
   what it is now.   (NAnu NAnu?  No, I guess not).

DIRTY DOZEN (1967)
   So how much would it cost NOW to get that cast together?  Ok, some
   of them are dead, I guess, but it was a powerhouse cast.  Just
   recently I realized that three of the main characters of one of
   my other favorite movies (Bad Day at Black Rock) appeared together
   13(!) years later in this movie in vastly different "rankings"
   than before.  (Marvin/Borgnine/Ryan). I wonder how often 3 actors have
   gone such a long time before appearing together again.
   "What the hell's going on in there?"  "A gentelman from the South
   asked about the dining arrangements.  He and his colleages are now
   discussing the placecard settings."  (Close enough, anyway).

DUCK SOUP (19??)
   Marx Brothers, of course.  A great parody of war (and government
   in general) if, in fact, that's what it was supposed to be.
   "Hail, hail, Fredonia!"

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
   A science fiction movie way ahead of its time starring
   Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen.  (How old IS this
   guy?)  Smaller roles for Richard Anderson and, yes, Earl Holloman.
   Robby the Robot - who got Lost in Space about 10 years later -
   makes his screen debut.

GROOVE TUBE (1973)
    Although this comedy is somewhat dated, a little uneven and a bit
    short (61 minutes) it still has some of the funniest stuff I have
    ever seen.  It is a full-fledged TV parody, that begins with KoKo
    the Clown (who makes all the "big" people leave the room before
    lighting up and reading requested "adult" passages) to the Kramps
    Kitchen which shows you how to make a nice semi-edible Forth-of-July
    Heritage Loaf.  Towards the end of the film (during the evening
    news) you get a unique Public Service announcement about VD that
    you will NOT see on television and a hilarious human interest
    piece on "urban decay."  Then you get to see what happens when
    the lone anchor man has two minutes left at the end of the news.
    A pre-Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase pops up in a couple skits.
    Richard Belzer is in a lot of it, too.

THE HUSTLER (1961)
    Paul Newman plays a little pool.  He plays very well.  Then he
    doesn't because he, uh, can't.  Then he picks up George C. Scott
    (who is not a four-star general just yet) as a manager(?) and
    he plays again.  He play the Fat Man himself, played powerfully
    by Jackie Gleason.  Newman's character was revived (sort of) in
    The Color of Money about 25 years later.

JOE VS. THE VOLCANO (1990)
    Ok, ok.  Just wanted to see if anyone is still paying attention.
    Actually, this really IS one of my alltime favorites.  Most of the
    movigoers I know have one movie (at least) that they liked a lot
    that everyone else thought really sucked.  This is mine.
    Maybe it was because in 1990 I had a job that I looked forward
    to going to about as much as Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) did.  And
    bosses who repeated things just to hear themselves.  This is
    one of the quirkiest movies I have seen.  People come out of
    nowhere and say the most preposterous things with a straight face.
    (brain cloud?).  I don't expect to change anyone's opinion by
    putting it on my list.  You can still think it sucks if you want...
    "I'm not ARguing that with you.  I'm not ARguing that with you."

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS [the original] (1960)
    One of many Roger Corman B movies.
    Mr. Mushnik has a flower shop.  Seymour Krelboin (?) is his inept
    helper who cultivates a talking plant and needs blood
    to survive.  One of the regular patrons buys flowers and eats
    them.  He carries a salt shaker.  The cops talk exactly
    like they were on Dragnet.  This is a hilarious black comedy if
    there ever was one.
    This is a public domain film that I bought for $5.  A young Jack
    Nicholson is in one scene (as a masochistic dental patient).
    This is a now-legendary cult film that was shot in about 2 days
    because the set was being torn down.  The budget was microscopic.
    Nobody else of any future fame appeared in it.  (Beware of
    flashy remakes).

MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)
    A first-class John Ford Western with Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne,
    and Lee Marvin (as Liberty).  Stewart is a young tenderfoot
    lawyer in the Wild West who gets a lesson or two along the way.
    Wayne is typical Wayne;  a good guy and a bad guy.  Lee Marvin,
    however, is a REAL bad guy who carries a whip and terrorizes
    (nearly) everybody.  His two sidekicks - who barely have any
    speaking parts - are Lee Van Cleef and Strother "failure to
    communicate" Martin.
    Wayne uses the term "Pilgrim" on Stewart in this movie which,
    I guess, is where it got famous as a John Wayne catchphrase.
    Anybody know about this?

MONTY PYTHON: HOLY GRAIL / LIFE OF BRIAN
    The Holy Grail is the more well-known of the two but I always
    liked Life of Brian just as much.  Did anyone ever count just
    how many roles they played in these movies?  I still laugh when
    I think about Brian's attempt to disperse the crowd from outside
    his home, telling them they are all individuals.  Naturally, they
    repeated - in unison - "Yes, we're ALL individuals!"  I also
    liked the Latin lesson he got when he didn't get the graffiti right.
    I remember watching the Holy Grail in the theater years ago when
    I heard a woman turn to her husband halfway through the movie
    and ask "Which one of them is Monty Python?"
    Well, I guess it's not for everybody.  That's why they make so
    many movies in the first place. :-)

PSYCHO (1960)
    I don't know too many people who haven't seen this one.  This
    movie probably caused an increase in the sales of clear shower
    curtains for years afterwards.  I always like the way the
    emphasis shifted drastically from what was going on in the first
    10-15 minutes of the film.  The initial crime became insignificant.
    "My Mother is not herself today."

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
    A roller-coaster ride to the highest degree.  In and out of trouble
    every few minutes.  Lotsa neat bad guys.  I thought it was funny
    about an hour into the movie when someone asked him something like
    "How are you going to get there?" he said "I don't know.  I'm
    making this up as I go along!"

REAR WINDOW (1954)
    Another one of Hitchcock's best.
    The ultimate voyeurism movie.  Jimmy Stewart is a photographer
    stuck in his apartment with a broken leg and Grace Kelly is
    his girlfriend.  He thinks he sees something in the apartment
    building across the way but it could just be his imagination.
    Alfred himself can be seen briefly winding a clock in the
    apartment of a musician played by someone named Ross Bagdasarian.
    Is this the same guy who later changed his name to David
    Seville and invented the Chipmunks?  Hmmmm.

SLEEPER (1973)
    Woody Allen goes in to have ulcer surgery and winds up being revived
    200 years later.  Disguised as a domestic robot for much of the film,
    he has to adapt to new things...like how to tame a huge runaway
    blob of pudding in the kitchen by beating it with a broom.  Later,
    he is running away from the authorities.  He runs into a cave where
    he spots a 1973(?) Volkswagen which, of course, starts up immediately.
    Did anyone ever count how many zeros were on the McDonalds sign
    as to the number of hamburgers sold?

WOODSTOCK (1970)
    A great documentary that perfectly captures the times.  If it looks
    badly dated now, all the better.  People really DID talk, act, and
    look like that then.  Many great performances.  Richie Havens got
    it going and Jimi Hendrix closed it out.  In between they had a
    hell of a lot of good fun.
    Best conversation was in front of one of the portable toilets
    as a guy comes walking out:  "You making a movie about this?"
    "Yeah."  "What's it going to be called?"  "Port-O-San."

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1973)
    The scene with Frankenstein (Peter Boyle) and the blind man
    (Gene Hackman) is still one of my favorites as is the "Puttin'
    on the Ritz" performance.  (Can that guy sing or what?)
    Directed by Mel Brooks (who was not in this one) it also starred
    Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Terri Garr, Cloris Leachman,
    Marty Feldman (as I-gor).  You'll have to watch this one for
    yourself to see why Madeline hits those high notes.
    "Put the candle...back!"

 |__________________________|______________________________________|
 | Bob Campbell             |                                      |
 | bc@campbell.Gwinnett.COM | "Think not of the hours wasted...    |
 | ...!emory!gwinnett!bc    |  but of all yet to be tasted."       |
 |__________________________|______________________________________|