Reviews

B.R.A.T.S. of the Lost Nebula, by the Jim Henson Company, looked like it could have been a great show, if only had it gone beyond its first three episodes, the only ones aired in the US. From what I saw, it was like a cross between Farscape and The Dark Crystal. A fresh new fantasy show for kids and geeks alike. Likeable characters, good puppetry and miniatures. It could have had a catchier title. This series, all thirteen episodes of it, could draw in new fans if it came back on streaming and blueray. It is as enjoyable as all the other Henson productions.

"As cast members of the motion picture Cats, nobody more than us understands the importance of ... " spoke James Corden, then joined by Rebel Wilson to intone in unison "GOOD VISUAL EFFECTS!" In the Oscars show, right before they presented the award for Best Visual Effects. While made up in character as Bustopher Jones and Jennyanydots, and indeed seeming an example of two other Oscar categories, (Not-So-Good) Makeup and Costumes.

An article in Esquire states that Cats' box-office failure is being blamed on its visual effects, and that the Visual Effects Society is not happy about it. One VFX artist tweeted "I assume these two were really classy and thanked me for working 80 hour weeks right up until I was laid off and the studio closed, right?" (Haven't we been there ourselves? We, the moviegoers who work for our living, and come to the theaters with any spare dollars we'd have if we're lucky?)

Corden and Wilson did not make a serious statement, they were just being funny. Poking a little fun at someone else's expense, maybe. However, the wrong thing to do is to put the blame on the VFX artists. That wrong thing has been done by many critics and many moviegoers. Many, but not all.

Seriously, Cats does have visual effects that are actually good. Every bit as good as those of 1917, Endgame, Skywalker, The Irishman and The Lion King. Cats' underperformance is not due to its VFX. The best visual effects in the world will not compensate for a story told badly. Just how badly told is Cats' story, in comparison to Endgame and Skywalker, is still in debate among moviegoers.

Cats is not really as bad, or as weird, uncomfortable or "traumatic" as people call it. Cats' biggest issue is this: people don't like it. Not all people, just a lot of them. They don't like the VFX. They don't like the way the story is told, or the story itself, any way it could be told. The people have no reason to not like any of it, no reason except their own individual opinions.

The VFX artists and companies, as well as the movie crews in all departments (makeup, costumes, production design and cinematography among them) all do as well as they can. They work hard and long for their pay and the sake of their art. They have control over the look and quality of their movies. But there is one factor that they have no control over: whether any viewer will like it or not. The best artists in the world cannot make an individual like it.

The free world, our free will and freedom of choice, not even "The Dream Factory" has much control over it all. Cats has been called a scary-looking movie, but every viewer is able to decide for themselves to accept it or reject it. This ability of ours, one that we usually don't think about much. Try to imagine some kind of movie that could take away from you that very ability. Would such a thing be any less unbearable that a movie like Cats?

In a short and simple review, Cats is not what all the nay-sayers are making it out to be. 8 stars for the recut version, a noticable improvement over the original that would have 7 stars. Cats is strange and different, but it fits the strange-and-different trend in recent movies. Cats has more than the usual amount of strange and different, but not as much as the harsher critics claim. Not bothering with the film's quality or details, I'll just leave well enough alone.

Except for one minor detail hardly worth mentioning. One crucial flaw. The single worst thing about this movie as well as all other Hollywood fare. It's budget. To be more precise, the budgetary ways and means of Hollywood.

Given it cost $100,000,000 to make Cats, it cost another hundred million to distribute and advertise. The average cinema ticket, however much it costs, has to have at least 50% going to the cinema that shows Cats, with no more than 25% going to Universal Pictures. Cats could make a profit if it grosses more than $400,000,000. It has grossed around a tenth of that, but this is only its 10th day of its first run. Cats might break even in 3-6 months, considering it can profit from home video release.

Compare this business to the Rise of Skywalker: its budget of $275,000,000 requires a gross of $1.1 billion before profit shows up. Is it anywhere near that yet? Can Disney deny a loss of their own in the hundreds of millions?

The Hollywood money system, if not broken, is built to break movies. In a previous decade, a movie's cost of distribution and marketing would amount to no more than 25% of its production cost. This was when movies came on reels of 35mm film. Digital technology is the current medium of the movies, so should it not cost less to distribute and exhibit? The cinemas need not take as much percentage of their tickets, and they would still make more than enough of their own profit to pay their workers well and maintain their venues well.

In a more sensible world, no movie would have to gross four times it budget (if not five or six!) to begin to make money for its studio, since the profiteers who want their money up front would settle for sensibly smaller amounts. Why would Universal or Disney demand so much money to distribute digital video files to cinemas? Who would Universal and Disney have to pay so much money to for the digital services? Why would not a major studio consider a distribution and marketing cost as part of a movie's production budget? Or pay for such out of their own bank accounts, since the major studios are capable of doing so with ease?

This miserly money-grubbing stinginess at multiple levels is what tilts the playing field against the good people who do honest work to make the movies as good as they are, and more good people's honest work to keep the movie venues as good as they are.

What are audiences expecting, an equivalent of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)? Or, of Avengers: Endgame? Comparisons are not to be bothered with here. The Rise of Skywalker is its own kind of conclusion sequel. It does not quite hit the mark perfectly, but it hits close enough.

The Rise is certainly worth seeing in the best cinemas available. The enhancements of IMAX and 3-D definitely add to the experience in a good way. Nothing in the Rise actually relies on any enhancement. It all works well with or without. The ordinary flat screen in standard definition is the perfect way to watch it, since it matches the medium in which were shown most often the previous eight chapters of the Star Wars saga.

Where ever you see it, how ever you watch it, and whatever you're paying for your ticket, the Rise is worth every cent. The viewer will not be completely disappointed.

One local TV station in the US had a Friday-evening one-hour movie show for a few years in the 1970s. Each hour was a movie cut down to 50 minutes shown with the standard 10 minutes of commercials, and each movie was on a 16mm film print owned by a local collector and film buff. These movies were usually not available anywhere else, not even cable. That show was "The Funny People" and it specialized in classic Hollywood comedy.

The Funny People is where I got to see some classics, like International House, Hollywood Party, She Done Him Wrong, and many not-so-classics, like Behind the 8-Ball starring the Ritz Brothers.

I haven't seen it since, but if I remember right, isn't International House the one with a subplot involving an automobile being driven up and down the stairs of a fire escape? It had to involve visual effects using miniatures and stop-motion animation. It must have fit in well with the far-fetched story, manic style, flying machine and all.

I never saw this in its complete form, but I did get to see it in a one-hour time slot with commercials. In the 70s, a local TV station had a Friday 7-o'clock time filler titled "The Funny People", which would be a movie from the 30s or 40s, from a private collector's treasure trove of vintage film prints. That collector sometimes appeared as an announcer before and after the film. For a few years this was the Portland area's only opportunity to see certain films and stars of old times. It was not syndicated or shown anywhere else in the US.

The first time we watched the Funny People was half of a compilation of 1920s silent shorts of Laurel & Hardy, with a funny narrator and new music and sound effects added. There were at least two such compilation features, each one shown in two parts, and rerun some months later. I had wished similar films of other silent comics would be aired, but none ever were.

The remaining entirety of the Funny People were feature film comedies and musicals, classics and B-flicks from the major and minor studios of Hollywood, featuring stars remembered and forgotten. All with sound, none in color, none in their entirety, none with their opening credits, every one cut down to 50 minutes with the standard 10 minutes allotted for advertisements. Most ended simply with "The End". If any had closing credits, those were cut.

This time-economy was one thing I did not like about it. Many old films were made short, ranging from around 75 minutes down to maybe 55, so not too much was omitted, other than a throwaway song or dance number. But some of these old movies were longer. For instance, The Marx brothers at the Circus, that one is almost 2 hours long, but the Funny People did not present it in two parts. Just one part containing less than half its length, A beginning, an ending, and some of its middle. The edit must have included all the scenes centered around the Marx Brothers themselves, and excluded whatever was considered extraneous.

Another example is Hollywood Party, which had long been available only without its color cartoon segment and Mickey Mouse appearance. Its short length is 68 minutes at the most, but may be only 60 minutes or even less. The Funny People edit likely had all of Jimmy Durante's scenes and all scenes pertinent to the plot, and it must have had most of the guest roles and cameos included. What ever went missing must have been forgettable.

I saw Hollywood Party twice at least. This movie attempted to cram 30 stars into less than 30 minutes not taken up by the central plot. Jimmy Durante plays himself having a fictional and sudden rise to movie superstardom, being cast in "Schnarzan" and other movie parodies. Schnarzan is a blockbuster, giving MGM an excuse to throw a gala party and invite many other Hollywood stars -- including Laurel and Hardy.

This is a mixed bag and it is barely strung together on a yarn. A showbiz satire doubling as a Is it meant to me an all-star spectacular, like MGM's earlier Hollywood Revue in 1929? Or just another vehicle for Durante? Or both, like Paramount's 1933 International House, a film similar to Hollywood Party in scope and in running time, being a gathering of half as many guest stars as well as a vehicle for W.C. Fields.

By coincidence, I also got to see International House in an hour edit on the Funny People. On a related note, the Disney cartoon segment which has been omitted from Hollywood Party, may or may not have appeared in black-and-white on another channel, in the syndicated reruns of the original Mickey Mouse Club, Disney's variety show which occasionally presented a 1930s cartoon. Disney had a different cartoon which featured caricatures of various Hollywood stars, and it could be mistaken for the cartoon that used to be part of Hollywood Party.

Those who gave this episode low ratings did so for some good reasons. I felt like they did when I watched it, so I don't blame them. The scriptwriting is the weakest part of a production that is mostly highly well-done.

Then I try to put myself in the shoes of D and D. Imagine the constraints of time and budget, and the looming deadline. D&D are not GRRM, that's for sure, but they did not have the luxury of writing with the same freedom and leisure as GRRM. The writing was simply a job for D&D, yet they did the best they could given the circumstances, which was good enough and quite a bit more.

What if they did write a better script? The season finale would have still been anticlimactic, understated, conservatively orderly, maturely thoughtful, a winding-down and a decompression, with a less-is-more approach. This episode does not set a high bar to obligate to surpass, as by a hopeful future continuation of the epic of Westeros.

I don't think the writers of other shows could have done much better. None of the other shows have a finale much better. However, none of the other shows are comparable to this one. Game of Thrones is it's own kind of show.

This was indeed not what I had "signed up for", as I pretty much knew from the very beginning. Yet, the ultimate episode of Thrones, along with the penultimate, "The Bells", makes a rock-solid conclusion to a fine series. Thrones is one of the first great epic fantasy shows on TV. It took a premium cable movie channel and the TV-MA rating to have such an epic done "right", which is hard to define. The series finale gives a feeling of relief, not as in a relief from a bad production, but a rest from the tension, roughness and unpredictability of a plot which was held taught for 8 years.

Basically a long novel adapted for TV, it segued into an original novel for TV. I had expected the show to be strictly adapted from the five published Novels of Ice and Fire, to end on a cliffhanger to be continued eventually just as the fifth book did, and total at seven seasons. The result might have been just a little better. Instead, the series strayed in a different direction from season 4, slightly at first, increasingly with time. This meant original plot material, and straight from the author G. R. R. Martin himself. This route was done well, though it made the series somewhat not the same as the books, yet both versions of the epic are great. A graphic novel series of adaptations are in progress, and that might stray in its own way to make a third version of the epic. Of all three, the surest thing is they may not turn out the way readers and viewers wish they would.

I shall draw comparison to the movie Citizen Kane, the tragedy plays of William Shakespeare, and the classic novel War and Peace, not to be hasty to put the Game of Thrones and the Song of Ice and Fire on a pedestal so lofty as the famous works, but to be critical of its style and flaws which are comparable to those same works. Even Hamlet is flawed, being excessively long and meandering, and ending in a way I simply don't like. "The Iron Throne" final episode is anticlimactic, and introspective, in a way like Citizen Kane but without the "Rosebud", so one good thing is that it did not leave me with an unsolved riddle that nags one to wonder what does it mean.

The TV series is over, but the Song is not finished. I still look forward to the eventual sixth and seventh books, that return to the original route of the epic arc, and I am sure they will not fail to surprise, thrill, disappoint and disillusion the readers.

At least a dozen hour-long episodes survive, all in color but without sponsor messages and plugs. KOPB in Portland, OR, gave it a weeknight run for a while. I watched 2 or 3 for its historic significance, though I had no interest in the country genre or any decades-old music. Surprisingly, the show looked and sounded so pristine it seemed to have been originally made using a 35mm film camera, yet it played like a live broadcast. It did not look like a kinescope, nor like a colorized film, but rather like a broadcast-quality videotape of a new print made fresh from a well-kept original negative.

The radio show of Louisiana Hayride went on for eleven years, enough to justify a TV series -- for who knows how may seasons? It was either live and caught on film, or filmed for a broadcast print, and either all color, all black and white, or in color for a season or more. The state of Louisiana likely had no color TV stations, if not one or two. Very likely the TV show has more surviving episodes in black and white than in color. Have other local TV stations around the US made and preserved shows as well as this one?

If the Louisiana Hayride that appeared as far north as Oregon was just a kinescope that was colorized, then it had the best quality of its kind. Fans would be happy to have this show available to watch, again or for the first time.