I had the "Elaine at The English Patient " experience with Pirates of the Caribbean . People had low expectations of the film, based as it was on a Disney theme park ride, but because it was better than that, suddenly it became a phenomenon. When I saw it, I was expecting a really enterta...

I'd never heard of Stopette until I started watching WML reruns on the Game Show Network years ago. They would show the entire original show with period commercials (and then add their own modern ones too), so a 30 minute episode ran 40 minutes. It is currently shown on: Buzzr. It retains the origi...

What's My Line (1950-1967) was sponsored by: 'Stopette' (Poof! There goes perspiration!) These commercials were usually a talking head but there was one which had a lady in a unitard doing an interpretive dance. It is ... interesting. Stopette is referenced in Sabrina , of all things. As I understa...

Old Friends, Cameron Mackintosh's love letter to Stephen Sondheim, will be coming to America. It began life as a one-off event in London with an all-star cast, to benefit the Stephen Sondheim Foundation. It was later mounted with a mostly different cast for a run in the West End, which is where I s...

THE THING ABOUT MODERN COMMERCIALS that gets me is THAT THEY ARE soooooooooooooo PUNISHINGLY DREADFUL- and there is NO NEED FOR THEM TO BE. I was recently looking at commercials from the 70s 80s and 90s ON YOUTUBE and was taken aback by how INNOCUOUS AND INNOFFENSIVE AND TO-THE-POINT THEY ARE. No s...

It's been on Sundance, AMC and BBC America lately (with ads), along with on-demand copies on MGM+ and YouTube Movies. I DVR'ed it off Showtime when they had a free week offer some time ago, and my DVR still picks up copies from various networks. The ad networks have about 45 mines of ads, based on t...

I'm one of the few Americans who never saw any of the trial, so my filter is just based on what the media & others have said afterwards. I was living in London almost the entire time. I returned to the US just a day before the trial ended. You never heard anything about it on TV or radio in the ...

I don't watch any network shows, but the news shows (network and cable) are also awful. Many long commercial breaks. It seems there are more commercials than actual news stories. Often they'll come back from a commercial break, tell one news story and go on break again! I'm constantly switching sta...

Most network shows now have about 9 minutes of breaks per half hour - ads, promotions for other shows, PSAs. That's nearly a third of the time slot wiped out. Older shows had about 5 minutes of breaks per half hour - even less in the 1950s. The FCC doesn't regulate this, except for children's progra...

Okay, sorry, but I now have one more comment to make about David Janssen. Well okay, not particularly about him, but an observation about the TV series he will forever be most associated with. I noticed that these bikers were mostly riding Triumphs and Hondas (c'mon, everybody knows that outlaw bik...

Bronxgirl48 wrote: ↑April 10th, 2024, 4:15 pm Dargo, you know me so well, lol! Actually Troy is more like a brother figure for me. But it's also because of his fish lips. Let's face it, they're blubbery, and I am a thin-lipped guy kind of girl.

You and Hot Lips Houlihan, apparently...

It was still fairly light up until the last minute or so. And then it got dark very quickly. And 3 minutes later when the totality was over, it got light again just as quickly. Within 10 minutes, the light looked like it would on a cloudy day. Although the clouds broke up a bit, there was a big puff...

Here's the schedule for the Frank Borzage films at MOMA. Of course it's nice that TCM is showing a few of his films, but there's no substitution for seeing them on the big screen (if you're in the neighbourhood). Man's Castle: April 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Bad Girl: April 18, 22 Moonrise: Ap...

Aww, guys. leave Shelley alone . . . I see you and I hear you. Shelley Winters achieved a lot in her life, and throughout it she had to endure a lot of really tacky and obnoxious jokes about her appearance that were completely uncalled for. In fact, I’ll even say that when she first hit the scene i...

Masha wrote: ↑April 8th, 2024, 12:48 am What was easy was understanding why people long thought they were evil omens.

Some still think so, and they have access to Twitter/X, and use it a lot.