Comedy Trailers: Caddyshack (1988)

Posted on April 6, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

I’ve never seen the original  Caddyshack movie in its entirety.  Not because I haven’t wanted to or had the time.  The bits and pieces I have seen have never compelled me to see the whole movie.  Despite an impressive cast, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Chevy Chase, and the Murray brothers Bill and Brian, it’s one of the most overrated comedies of all time.

The first Caddyshack, from 1980, is essentially about a bunch of morons, including some successful snobs.  The sequel, from 1988, is about Jack Kartunian (Jackie Mason), a wealthy man who owns an excellent construction company.  He treats his employees well and is loved by everyone with whom he does business.  He can’t get into a fancy, snobby, waspy, Anglo-Saxon country club, because of his ethnic background. He is Jewish and Armenian and has a working class attitude about life.  He is not someone who’s going to be pushed around or denied things by rich snobs.

He decides that if he can’t get into this snobby country club the old fashioned way by applying and being accepted, he’ll do the next best thing and buy it.  His friend Ty (Chevy Chase), just happens to own Bushwood Country Club.  Naturally, that pisses off the snobby leadership and membership of the club and they go to war with Kartunian to get their club back.

This movie has a lot of funny scenes.  Kartunian buys the snobby Bushwood members in an auction and puts them to work at his construction company building a house.  These people are completely unprepared to work there and make complete assholes of themselves, dressed for playing golf.

I can’t end this post without mentioning that Dyan Cannon is also in the movie. She’s fifty years old, at this point, and still a hot, adorable, and sexy babe.  She plays Jack Kartunian’s new love interest at a time when Jack is not getting along with his daughter who wants to be a member of the old Bushwood Club. This is one of the funniest movies of all time and one of the few examples of ordinary Americans beating the snobs and enjoying enjoy the better life, so to speak.

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Universal Movies: Rear Window (1954)

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Derik Schneider

The New Democrat

Rear Window might be the best not so believable movie I’ve ever seen. . It’s about Jeff (Jimmy Stewart), a photographer  in a wheelchair with a broken leg solving a murder, practically. on his own.  He gets some help from his girlfriend (Amazing Grace Kelly) and his nurse (Thelma Ritter).  It’s not, you know,  the most believable plot ever written.

Jeff has a friend (Wendell Corey) who’s a lieutenant in the NYPD.  The lieutenant is the only person in the movie who has any real life, detective or police experience.  Jeff has a theory about how a supposed murder goes down in the apartment across the courtyard from his.  The lieutenant doesn’t believe Jeff’s theory.

The movie takes place in Greenwich Village in the middle of one of those famous humid heat waves  they get every summer.  Jeff has nothing to do all day but to look out the window, talk to his nurse (Thelma Ritter) when she comes by to check on him, and, of course, hangout with his hot sexy baby-faced girlfriend (Grace Kelly) when she comes by at night.

From his window, Jeff notices some strange things going on in the apartment across the courtyard.  A woman who’s sick and confined to her bed is suddenly missing.  Her husband (Raymond Burr) does strange things at night.  He goes out with a suitcase when it’s raining and comes back shortly thereafter.  Jeff thinks there’s something suspicious in the suitcase, like the body parts of the missing wife. He wants his detective friend to look into it.

All the while, Jeff thinks his girlfriend is too perfect for him, his job being very stable.  He’s always traveling.  He thinks that they would both be better off keeping things as they are.  She wants to marry him and that is not a commitment that Jeff wants to make.  He just wants to recover from the broken leg and go back to work and have his girlfriend available.

This movie stretches credibility but it is very well written and has a great cast, Jimmy Stewart, Wendell Corey, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr and others.  It has a lot of great humor, especially between the lieutenant and Jeff.  The cop sees his friend as an amateur sleuth, at best, and makes fun of him.   He’s doing his best to show that Jeff only has a theory and a weak circumstantial case.  It becomes a great murder mystery.

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Tony Baretta: Myra Breckinridge (1970) Starring Raquel Welch

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Myra Breckinridge may be the best movie that ever flopped at the box office.  It lost more than the 1962 New York Mets who lost something like 120 games that season.  I don’t believe the movie made a dime.  It was too far ahead of its time.  If it were made today with the right cast, it would probably be a huge success.

Raquel Welch plays Myra Breckinridge and really makes the movie worth watching all by herself. Watching her, it is very difficult to look at anyone or anything else.  She is at her hottest, sexiest, cutest and funniest.  She shows the world that she is much more than a hot and sexy babe.  She has great wit and stage presence.

Myra is a former gay man who is now a transgender woman.  She goes to Hollywood to claim what she believes to be her inheritance.  Her uncle,  Buck Loner (John Huston), an over-sexed horny bastard, runs an acting school that he inherited from his parents.  Myra thinks that he owes her half of it.

Buck has no idea that his nephew, his sister Gertrude’s son, is now a women calling herself Myra Breckinridge.  She tells her uncle to pay up or she’s going to a get a lawyer to get what she believes is hers.

To buy time, Buck gives Myra a job on the school faculty.  He tries  to prove that Myra never married his nephew and that he doesn’t owe her anything.  He’s right that she never married his nephew.  She is his nephew and she’s now a woman.  She has a fake marriage license that keeps her in the game  until she can get what she really wants, the five-hundred-thousand dollars that she believes her uncle owes her.

While Myra is trying to get her money, she uses her time at the school to do research on modern young straight men with the goal of dominating them, one day.  This movie is hysterical.  It has all sorts of funny characters including a gay man  who plays the part of the queen perfectly.  There’s also  a very young, baby-faced, Farah Fawcett who’s actually cuter than Raquel, but not as sexy.

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Movie Clips: Airport (1975)

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

To understand Airport 1975 you have to understand the times when the movie was made and the 1970s as a whole.  People were into this type of disaster movie.  Disaster movies were popular in this decade.  There’s a laundry list of them, including Airport 1970 and its three sequels, including Airport 1975, Airport 1977, and Airport 1979.  Earthquake, also with George Kennedy and Charlton Heston, takes place in Los Angeles.

Americans, then as well as today, liked seeing people pushed to their limits with their lives and health at risk and not knowing if they will survive the experience.  In Airport 1975,  the head stewardess has to fly the plane herself, at one point.  This, and a mid-air transfer of a pilot between planes, are excellent examples of people under pressure pulling off extraordinary things when they have to.

The plot of Airport 1975 is fairly simple.  A 747 is flying through pretty awful rainy weather.  There is a small charter plane nearby that, apparently loses contact with the ground controllers.  These two planes do not know they are in the same area headed right at each other without enough warning to avoid collision. The pilot of the small plane has a heart attack and loses control.  His plane hits the 747 with its five-hundred, or so, passengers.

The collision kills the navigator and co-pilot.  The pilot survives but is blinded and barely conscious. There are no other pilots on the plane but, except for a hole in the cockpit, it is in decent shape and doesn’t have to crash if someone can fly it.  The head stewardess (Karen Black)  conveys the situation the situation to the airline’s command center.

She, with instructions, from Al Murdock (Charlton Heston) the company’s chief aviation instructor,  flies the plane,  including pulling the it up so that it doesn’t run into a mountain.  They attempt a mid-air transfer to get an actual pilot in the cockpit into the plane. The first attempt fails with the pilot falling to the ground.   The second attempt succeeds in inserting Murdock into the plane.  He takes over and saves the day, so to speak.

I’m a big fan of Airport 75, even though it is an airplane disaster movie.  It has a very funny cast, Sid Caesar, Jerry Stiller, Conrad Jannis, Normal Fell and others.  It’s a well written movie with funny people making the best of a horrible situation, not knowing if they will ever be able to crack jokes on the ground again, and using humor to avoid going crazy in an extremely stressful situation.

 

 

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Movie Clips: Family Plot (1976)

Posted on April 5, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Lets say you have a movie with William Devane, Bruce Dern, Ed Lauter (the best character actor that no one knows, except for me, just kidding) Karen Black and Barbara Harris.  It’s also important to know that the movie is directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  How could this movie go wrong?  Who could  possibly screw it up, a with a cast like that?  These are just the main famous names in the movie. It’s like the 1978 Pittsburgh Steelers.  How do you not win the Super Bowl with what they had to work with on both sides of the ball and Chuck Knoll as the head coach?

If there ever was a great director that everyone wanted to work with, great actors and actresses alike, it was Alfred Hitchcock.  This gave him the power to put together any type of movie he wanted and to assemble the cast he really wanted for any film that he wanted to make. That’s what power is in Hollywood and Hitch had it.  He was such a great director because he always had a great cast to work with.

Family Plot is about Eddie Shoebridge (William Devane) who wants to escape from his life and takes off without telling anyone where he is going.  He comes from a wealthy, somewhat famous, family and is a bit of a  jewel thief.  He also just happens to run or own a jewelry store, which is perfect for his other job.  His  grandmother wants to find him before she dies and hires two, at best, amateur detectives for the job.  They are wannabe actor George (Bruce Dern), whose day job is cab driver, and his girlfriend (Barbara Harris), who’s a wannabe psychic.

Shoebridge and his wife (Karen Black, R.I.P.) do not want to be discovered and quickly find out from one of their associates (Ed Lauter) that this couple is looking for them.  Shoebridge hires Ed Lauter’s character to kill the couple.  He fails and the couple spend the rest of the movie tracking down the Shoebridges and George’s girlfriend does exactly that before the Shoebridges kidnap her.

For a pair of amateur detectives, George and his girlfriend, who in their other lives aren’t very successful at anything, do a hell of a job catching the Shoebridges, who’ve gone out of their way not to be discovered by anyone from Eddie’s past.  This movie, typical for Hitch, has a lot of great humor, twist and turns of plot, including the kidnapping and the cab driver’s rescue of his girlfriend and the nailing of the Shoebridges.  They finished the job they were hired to do.

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Flanagan: Network (1976)

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Anyone who’s interested in modern network news should watch the movie Network from 1976.  It’s almost forty years old now and except for the modern technology, the new players and the new stories they’d be hard pressed to see any differences between the two eras.  Shows in both address what people will watch and assume that hard news is boring and that most people get the news in which they are interested from their smart phones (today, anyway).   They work long days, come home and are only interested in what some celebrity did at some party, what they wore or some other celebrity gossip.

Network is about a struggling TV network called United Broadcasting System (UBS) and its struggling news division, UBS News. Their lead news anchor, Howard Beale (the great Peter Finch) has a nervous breakdown live on his nightly newscast, perhaps because of his awful ratings (the movie does  not make that clear).  He starts swearing on national network TV back when cable TV was just getting going and not yet a major medium.

The news executives and other network executives conclude that Beale has to be taken off the air completely but give him one last newscast to say goodbye to his audience (the two people remaining outside of UBS) because of his long distinguished career in journalism and with UBS News.  Beale takes this opportunity to continue his rant and tell his audience that the whole world is bullshit and that people should be mad as hell and not stand for it anymore.

Well, to get Network you have to first understand the times. This movie takes place in, I believe 1975, even though it came out in 1976.  America was going through a rough recession combined with high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, high costs of living and everything else that makes life expensive.  Beale, here, is presenting this to his audience and saying that they shouldn’t stand for it anymore.

Fay Dunaway’s character is a program executive at UBS who sees a big opening for herself and a way to profit from Beale and the malaise that the country is suffering.  She gives him his own new show, a nightly rant about everything that sucks in the world.  The show is a hit, at least at first,  This is one of the first instances of network news becoming a money-making business first and public service second.

Network foretold CNN, MSNBC, FNC and all of the so-called reality TV networks 30-35 years before their time.  I’m not aware of a movie before or since that was so prescient.  With its great writing, cast, and humor it is one of the best movies of all time and one of my personal favorites.

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Movie Clips: Heartbreak Ridge (1986) Starring Clint Eastwood

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Heartbreak Ridge is my favorite Clint Eastwood movie and that is saying something because there might be ten of his movies that I love, including Magnum Force, Dirty Harry, The Enforcer, The Gauntlet, Pink Cadillac, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and a few others.  All of these movies have a few things in common: great stories, great writing, great casts and great quick-witted humor, all at times when you might think, “How could someone joke about that?”

Heartbreak Ridge was made in 1986 but takes place in 1983, about the time of the bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon. Its about these lazy recon marines who are in the Marines to chill and have a good time.  They are basically still in boot camp, as far as their level of training goes, and are seen by the officers at their base in North Carolina as screw ups, which is putting it mildly.  Assholes would be more accurate.

Sergeant Tom Highway (Eastwood), a thirty year veteran of the Marine Corps who served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, a distinguished member of the silent generation in this movie and in real life, is brought to this unit to get these assholes in shape and turn them into real marines.  The problem is that Sergeant Highway’s superior officer, Major Powers, (Everett McGill) is an old school, by the book, tight ass who wants things done his way or no way.  Highway is not in the Marines to play by anyone else’s book, so they clash.

Highway has to make these very young men, late twenties at the oldest, into marines with this tight ass major on his back the whole time and do it without losing his job.  He takes his unit into battle in Granada to rescue some Americans.  There are over two hours of this in the full version of the movie along with a lot of great humor from Eastwood and his crew.  Teenage boys, maturity wise, become good U.S. Marines.

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Movie Clips: Video: To Catch a Thief (1955)

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Derik Schneider

The New Democrat

To Catch a Thief is neither the best Alfred Hitchcock movie of all time nor the best Cary Grant movie of all time but I believe it is the best Grace Kelly movie of all time and that includes Rear Window and Dial M For Murder.  It showcases all of her great talents, the hot baby-face, her great sex appeal, her charm, her wit, and her dramatic abilities.  She was the perfect actress for Alfred Hitchcock because he wanted serious movies that were humorous.  Cary Grant was perfect for him as well.

Cary Grant plays John Robey, a retired jewel thief living on the French Riviera. He was so successful as a jewel thief that he doesn’t have to work anymore.  Every time there’s a string of jewel robberies in his new home, law enforcement suspects him, which is exactly what happens in this movie. A new cat burglar strikes Mediterranean France, the legal authorities bring him in for questioning, and he escapes from them.

Robey concludes that the only way to get out of this is to find the real burglar himself.  Thats where Grace Kelly comes in.  Her character, Francy, is the daughter of  a woman who owns a lot of very expensive jewelry and they just happen to be vacationing in the south of France at the time of these new jewel robberies.  Robey needs them to play decoys to get the cat burglar to strike again.  He befriends them, believing they are the next targets.

John Robey’s plan here is to catch the real cat burglar when this person strikes his target so he can get in the clear and move on with his life.  There are a lot of great suspense and action scenes in this movie as well as Cary and Grace taking a lot of humorous verbal shots at each other.  Once she learns that Robey was a cat burglar, she believes he’s still in business and tries to use this to start a romance with him but his goal is to catch the real thief, even if that means using innocent people like this mother-daughter duo.

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Alfred Hitchcock: North by Northwest (1959) Starring Cary Grant & Eva Marie Saint

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

North by Northwest is my favorite movie of all time.  Cary Grant is my favorite actor of all time and Alfred Hitchcock is probably my favorite director of all time.  I have a couple versions of this movie on DVD, saw it on Turner Classic Movies a couple of nights ago and again on  DVD last might.  I decided to write a blog about it today because I’ve been thinking about it a lot. This movie is Cary Grant, perhaps the best comedic actor of all time, at his best.

North by Northwest has all the ingredients of a great Hitchcock movie. A great plot, great writing, great cast,  Hitchcock’s sense of humor, that Cary Grant shares, and James Mason. The very sexy and beautiful Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront, The Russians are Coming) has a big role in the movie. According to my father, she’s smarter, sexier, and more beautiful than Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe.  She reminds him of my mother.

Then, there’s Jessie Royce Landis who plays Roger Thornhill’s (Cary Grant) mother, a great smart ass,  even though she’s only four years older.

The movie is a Cold War thriller about a man, Van Damme (James Mason), who exports American weapons and national security secrets.  Thornhill gets caught up in it, accidentally, and you have a great movie.

Thornhill is a charming playboy New York advertising man who’s just living his life as a very successful businessman.  He’s kidnapped by Van Damme’s henchmen at a New York bar.  They believe he has inside information about Van Damme’s organization.

The Van Damme crew tries to murder Thornhill but he gets away.  He tries to get back in touch with Van Damme and instead connects with Lester Townsend, someone Van Damme had pretended to be.  The Van Damme crew, trying to murder Thornhill, instead murder Townsend.  They believe he also knows something about their organization that they want kept secret.  Thornhill is now not only on the run from Van Damme and company but also fron the NYC PD, the New York State PD, and  the Feds.

Thornhill once again escapes and is now on the run from everyone because of the murder he didn’t commit.  This time, he escapes by train where he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) who just happens to be an undercover Federal agent pretending to work for Philipp Van Damme.  She’s actually working to bring down Van Damme’s and his organization.  She has Thornhill believing she’s on his side and helping him to escape.  She’s actually just using him.

This movie starts in New York, moves to Chicago and then Indiana where the Van Damme crew tries to murder Thornhill and Thornhill is trying to meet the real George Kaplan to find out what this whole thing is about. The problem is that George Kaplan doesn’t exist.  Back to Chicago Thornhill gets arrested again, thinking that he would be safer with the police than on the run. The Feds grab him instead and use him to help bering down Van Damme and company in Rapid City where Philipp Van Damme has a home.

This is one of the best action suspense comedies you’ll ever see.

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AEI: James Pethokoukis: The New Marxism

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest.” This logical form can be applied to other systems as well.

It works fairly well in economics, e.g., “Capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the rest.”  Capitalism has many forms.  In one, Laisssez-Faire economics, government has no role in the economy and all capital is controlled by the private sector with no rules on how to operate. Whatever government exists is funded by trade tariffs.  This form was found seriously wanting and discarded at the end of the 19th century.

The beauty of capitalism, in whatever form, is that individuals are not guaranteed wealth.  They have to earn it.  This incentivizes them to get a good education and be productive in life so that they don’t need public assistance to take care of them.  In a good capitalist economic system, as many people as possible are able to get the skills needed to be productive and successful in life.  Liberals, Conservatives, Progressives and Socialists have been arguing about this at least since the New Deal.

Even Socialists in Europe and in America now acknowledge that capitalism and private enterprise are here to stay.  The Marxists have lost, so the question now is what type of capitalist economic system should we have. I went into this on my blog yesterday but as a Liberal I believe in liberal capitalism or liberal economics.  Some on the far-left would call this “Neo-Liberalism” (because it is not Socialism). But it is is an economic system where, ideally, everyone has an opportunity to attain the  education needed to succeed in life.

In such a system, the role of government is to protect workers and consumers not from themselves but from predators who would hurt them and to help people who fall though the floor of the system.  The  safety net exists to give them temporary financial relief and a hand up.  This is the outline of liberal capitalism.

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