And here we go:
2) Second favorite John Frankenheimer movie -"Ronin". Looking over his work, I'm surprised at the amount of hackwork he signed on to direct. I mean, 'Dead-Bang'? 'The Fourth War'? Jeez. (I feel comfortable badmouthing 'Fourth War' as a friend of mine was an extra on that set. 'Will it be a good movie?', I asked. 'Nah.', he replied.)
3) William Bendix or Scott Brady?-Pass.
4) What movie, real or imagined, would you stand in line six hours to see? Have you ever done so in real life?- Criminy, in this day and age, I can't be bothered to see a movie in the third week of its release, let alone stand in line for six hours. Longest I ever stood in line to see a movie was three hours for 'The Empire Strikes Back'.
5) Favorite Mitchell Leisen movie-Pass.
6) Ann Savage or Peggy Cummins?-Pass.
7) First movie you remember seeing as a child -Disney's 'Pinocchio'.
8) What moment in a movie that is not a horror movie made you want to bolt from the theater screaming? -Not me, but I remember as kids we had to take my brother out of the theater during Disney's 'Alice in Wonderland'. The Red Queen scared him shitless. I mean that in the literal sense...
9) Richard Widmark or Robert Mitchum?-Mitchum could portray impending menace or rugged heroism with equal aplomb.
10) Best movie Jesus -The guy who made that cameo at the end of 'Orgasmo' by Trey Parker. Thumbs up!
11) Silliest straight horror film that you’re still fond of - "Brides of Dracula" It's that movie that's playing in the Merovingian's castle in the second Matrix movie, by the way.
12) Emily Blunt or Sally Gray? -Emily Blunt. By default.
13) Favorite cinematic Biblical spectacular-'The Ten Commandments'. I'd have to see Huston's 'The Bible' again, though.
14) Favorite cinematic moment of unintentional humor-The scene in Ken Russell's 'Whore' where Theresa Russell's drunk husband comes home and pukes on her salad. I howled for a full minute. Second favorite? The 'Rewind' scene in Heneke's American remake of 'Funny Games'. I'm a bad person...
15) Michael Fassbender or David Farrar?- Fassbender, natch.
16) Most effective faith-affirming movie-Everyone says this, but it works. 'It's a Wonderful Life'.(Perfect technique: The film starts with the camera shot on the town sign-'You are now entering Bedford Falls'.)
17) Movie that makes the best case for agnosticism -'Saved' It's a rare movie made by secular types that plays fair with the Christian crowd.
18) Favorite song and/or dance sequence from a musical -'Springtime for Hitler' from 'The Producers'. T.V. division: the 'Dem Bones' sequence from 'The Singing Detective'.
19) Third favorite Howard Hawks movie -"The Thing from Another World'
20) Clara Bow or Jean Harlow?- Harlow. Jimmy Stewart did a scene with her, and the fact that she tended to not wear underwear caused him to stammer a little bit more than usual...
21) Movie most recently seen in the theater? On DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming?- 'Drive'. Ehhh, it's been a fallow period for me. Blu-ray? "Harold and Kumar's 3d Xmas thingy uurrrr.' Streaming? 'The Adventures of TinTin'
22) Most unlikely good movie about religion-'The Rapture' Ivan G. Shrive writes:" It’s a cheerfully blasphemous film that states simply “God exists but he’s not worthy of our love.” It made the final push towards atheism for me."
23) Phil Silvers or Red Skelton?- Phil Silvers. Skelton, like most vaudeville performers making the jump to movies/tv always made me uncomfortable. Like he was going to start screaming, 'This is how I feed my family!', if an audience didn't respond to his shtick with anything but rapturous applause...
24) “Favorite” Hollywood scandal-'Fatty Arbuckle and the Evil Champagne Bottle'
25) Best religious movie (non-Christian)- Would 'Rashomon' count?
26) The King of Cinema: King Vidor, King Hu or Henry King? (Thanks, Peter) -I've only seen one movie with any of these 'kings' in it, and that was 'The Fountainhead', so I'll pass, thanks.
27) Name something modern movies need to relearn how to do that American or foreign classics had down pat- Isn't it obvious? Tell a story. By which I mean: Knock it off with the CG, Quit stopping the film every fifteen minutes to make sure we're all caught up on the plot, Movies based on comic books, video games or toys are not movies, they're two hour commercials. Oh, and 3d was a gimmick in the fifties, and it's a gimmick now. Except back in the fifties, theater chains weren't forced to spend millions of dollars to upgrade their projection systems in a last-ditch effort to slow the decline of movie-goers. Gosh, I seem a little bitter. Though if I was in the theater business, I'd be an alcoholic by now...
(You know, while I've got the soap box, let me vent a little more. With the rush to produce movies in digital formats over film stock, the movie industry has several hurdles that it now needs to deal with: 1) Digital formats are changing all the time, and the cost to upgrade projection systems is cutting into theater chain's revenue. 2) Digital formats tend to have problems in their colour corrections, namely the red/yellow spectrums tend to be a little tricky to balance with solid blacks. So you need production people trained to adapt and adjust gamma corrections in digital media. More costs passed onto the theater chains. 3) Archiving digital media can be a bitch. You hear horror stories all the time about CG studios losing hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars of production work because some intern mis-named a file on a terminal, or somebody unplugged a render farm by mistake, or the power went down in the building, or some disgruntled former employee deleted stuff, or...you get the idea. You can see a scenario in the near future where people at Fox just 'lose' the entire master copy of 'The Social Network' for one of the above reasons, and Fincher goes apeshit (understandably) and sues Fox. 4) Not my observation, but there's an article here at Badass Digest by Devin Faraci that illustrates the basic problem with new digital formats. In essence, and I hope I'm not mistaken here, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but unless you're seeing 'The Hobbit' in an Imax format, it's going to look like it's shot on video. Worse still, it may look like how British T.V. shows used to look when they were broadcast over here. (The European video standard is PAL, and the North American standard is NTSC. When you transfer PAL to NTSC, it tends to look washed out and 'flickery', if you know what I mean.) I'm not trying to sound like a Luddite over here, but I suspect these hurdles will be with us for a while to the point that the movie industry may suffer a financial body blow similar to the comic book industry's. End of rant.)
28) Least favorite Federico Fellini movie- For me, it would be 'La Dolce Vita'.
29) The Three Stooges (2012)-yes or no? Goodness, no. Reviving the Three Stooges in this day and age is like trying to start a 'velocipede' club.
30) Mary Wickes or Patsy Kelly?-Pass.Mary Wickes was in 'Rosemary's Baby', but it would be cheating for me to decide based on just that.
31) Best movie-related conspiracy theory- Do we mean conspiracy theories in movies, or conspiracy theories about movies? If it's the former, then 'The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenhimer's version, thanks)' works for me. If it's the latter, it's the weird and baseless belief by the Right that Hollywood is a Liberal Hotbed of Dissent and Determination to Undermine Fundamental American Values. Even though every Summer Blockbuster for the past five years looks like a recruitment ad for the Armed Forces...
32) Your candidate for most misunderstood or misinterpreted movie-of course, 'Starship Troopers'. Runner-up: 'American Psycho'. Third place: 'Inception'.
33) Movie that made you question your own belief system (religious or otherwise)-Terry Gilliam's 'Tideland' was an unpleasant enough experience to make me knock him out of my canon of favorite film directors.
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