This might be the strangest of all coincidences. I was just watching a Gene Kelly video when I clicked over here.
Tumblr tends to lend itself to very narrow specialization.
So many high-waisted trousers. And in _Anchors Aweigh_ they even have that joy-inducing little notch in the back waistband.
As my mother used to say about women's dresses with a low neckline and a v-shaped waistline, "What it don't show, it points to."
The nipple-oriented arrows are a bit much.
Actually, I think I only heard her say it once, inspired by this outfit. Cracked me up, though.
No, that was not a great outfit. Everything about Deanna Troi was terrible.
I didn't know about these movies growing up. My introduction to them was The Men Who Made the Movies, the episode on Vincente Minnelli, on PBS about 1971. Revelatory. I remember Minnelli in his interviews was quite explicit about Kelly's sexualized style. Reinforced by Kelly's own anthology project, That's Entertainment in the mid-seventies. After that, I watched these on tv whenever I could find them.
As I say, revelatory, in the presentation of masculine sexuality in my parent's generation. Kelly was born in 1915, and his career didn't really get going until after the war. He's about 40 in these clips.
He's a very fit man for sure, and he and such contemporaries as Burt Lancaster had a real physicality that is very different from the weight-trained look of contemporary actors. I greatly prefer it but I would, wouldn't I?
There's a great exchange in An American in Paris where an exasperated Leslie Caron asks, "What can I do for you?" and Kelly replies, "You know what you can do for me, go out with me!" A level of brashness to aspire to.
Spike has adjudged Tasha Yar "one of the cool chicks".
I have. And, unlike Troi, she didn't manage to crash both the Enterprise D and the Enterprise E. Obviously, chicks can't drive spaceships either, am I right?
Though, to be fair, you could blame Tasha for the fate of the Enterprise C.
spike is correct. dianna troi sucks, and in one episode when picard gets demoted and a normal officer takes over he's like, 'get the fuck off the bridge and put an actual uniform on.' you're supposed to think he's a martinet, but in fact my family was all, 'fucking FINALLY!' deanna troi's awfulness is only surpassed by a) deanna troi's mom and this latter's insistence on being naked at her wedding ceremony b) us being supposed to care about ryker and deanna's romance backstory in general, and in particular that one time when ryker got beamed up to the ship but wrong, so two rykers were created, and one was stuck on this base alone and all sad about deanna troi the whole time, but then something something something deanna troi something.
aw dag my post got eated. I was saying that spike is right and deanna troi sucks. one time picard got demoted and an actual military leader was put in charge, and he said 'get off the fucking bridge and put a real uniform on,' and your supposed to think he's a martinet, but my family was like, 'fucking finally!'
Its true, the only character worse than Deanna Troi was Lwaxana Troi.
I don't remember nearly that much about the show.
Famous architects dressed as their buildings at the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects annual ball, New York, 1931
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I've seen most episodes multiple times, 20 years ago. I can't imagine doing that with a show today.... between Tivo and Netflix and Hulu, watching reruns in syndication is no longer a part of my life.
Same here -- the 1991-92 school year, ST: TNG was on when I ate dinner, and I probably watched an episode four nights a week while I ate.
ST:TNG had no appeal for me, but was so universally watched among people I came in contact with as to be alienating. People wanted to analyze, share, speculate. It wasn't just something a lot of people watched. For a while, it seemed really important, and I can remember thinking "this is never going to end, is it?"
But it did. It became period quickly, and somehow more dated than the original for many people. Now most people who mention it—many of the same people—only mention it to mock it, or treat it as a quaint cliche.
28.last: Hmm, because the original seems incredibly dated to me. Particularly in the cheesiness of the sets.
A new Star Wars trailer available for needing and you renerdprobates are discussing Star Trek of yore. Jesus tap-dancing Roddenberry.
Why would anyone care about anything related to Star Wars?
The dirty secret of the awful prequels is that the originals weren't good either.
28.last is the opposite of my experience. I know lots of people who love TNG.
34 is correct. I know people who still regularly watch old episodes of TNG.
Overall I think it hasn't quite held up quite as well as the original, or it won't continue to hold up as well anyway. The thing about the original series is that it was a mixture of pulpy adventure and hard moral questions, and TNG is a mixture of hard moral questions and people hanging out together (but in a 90s, serialized sort of way where the relationships didn't really change or evolve much). In both cases the hard moral questions end up getting a bit embarrassing as time goes on, both because, well, television wasn't seen as a place for really serious high minded stuff at either point and because the way we think about things evolves over time. So most of the 'serious moral question' episodes of the original series range from "no seriously this was a historically important point to be make at the time" to "holy crap someone make racist grandma shut up". And this is happening to TNG as well, only more slowly and without the goofy adventure bits to keep things as fun.
33 is correct. Go back and watch them, they're terrible! That's overstated, of course, because they did one thing exceedingly well: make a compelling visual outer-space universe; and another thing just well enough: transliterate mythology into that universe. But the really obvious flaws in the subsequent movies are in the originals too; they were just harder to see because we were more swept up in them.
Also there were other people digging through all the stuff Lucas did and cutting out the more ridiculous/awful bits. If George Lucas hadn't had endless studio interference Star Wars would have probably had half an hour where Luke and Biggs chatted to each other at Tosche station or something.
I wasn't so much endorsing the view that the original Star Trek held up better, although I'm sympathetic to it, as I was tracking the evolution which has caused earnest Trekkies to have ceased being the bane of my existence.
Drove down to Hyde Park today, and inevitably discussed the projected George Lucas museum for the museum campus near the Field, Shedd and Adler. My wife and I agreed that we had thought of the original Star Wars movie as a deliberately campy escape, and to this day it's the only one I've ever seen. The development of the cult was something we never had anything to do with and still don't. We don't mind the museum idea which will be an attraction for sure, but wish it could be somewhere else besides right there.
NMM to Bo Pelini's career at Nebraska. But he's still getting paid for 51 more months if that turns you on.
40.last: thank goodness, I wouldn't want to think that they'd do something that wasn't in the best interests of the students and the state.
You can't go seven years without a conference championship and almost lose to Iowa without consequences.
Good thing I didn't almost lose to Iowa.
Pelini could have said that last year.
I love and will watch TNG to no end. Do not like the original, beyond the films. Like DS9 and Enterprise, too.
Star Wars I have never enjoyed much. I will probably watch the remake though, just for fun.
Star Wars has aged poorly, but Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are still pretty good.
The original trilogy is pretty goofy, but the prequels aren't even that -- they are genuinely ineptly made movies. I just recently happened to catch a scene in Revenge of the Sith where Anakin is rushing to confront the Emperor or something, and the actor just jogs a little bit, and then walks the last few steps. The best I can figure is that there wasn't enough green screen for him to actually run, and Lucas just said fuck it.
I liked Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back more than Return of the Jedi. Because Ewoks.
the projected George Lucas museum for the museum campus near the Field, Shedd and Adler
Lolwut
In hindsight, Return of the Jedi should have been a strong clue as to how the new Star Wars movies turned out. They gave the reins back to Lucas and it turned out that he really didn't have much of an idea what made Star Wars good, so he just made the same movie over again with a few tweaks.
This is basically an entire history or political science course in how whole countries full of smart people end up making terrible, terrible decisions and causing catastrophes. (Note that he immediately starts talking about how Phantom Menace will really be just the same as the other ones.)
This reminded me of the fabulously awful macramé dance sequence in Les Girls. Wonderful.
The original Star Wars trilogy was great. Empire was one of the best movies of all time. That part of the franchise is head and shoulders above Star Trek, with its annoying earnestness and not enough shit blowing up. But the rest of Star Wars is bollocks, and, after the terribleness of the three prequels, excuse me for not being particularly interested in whatever new crap Disney is churning out under the Star Wars name.
I think I'm the only one who barely knows the plot of the original trilogy (they're siblings, a hand is cut off, ewoks live in treehouses) because I find them so boring that I've never paid attention to any of them, all the way through.
There's an episode of one of the later Star Trek tv shows where the ship is traveling through some empty space where nothing is happening and the episode turns out to be about the crew struggling not to go insane from boredom. I thought that was probably the most accurate depiction of what the experience of space exploration would really be like.
I always thought ability to appreciate Star Wars maxed out at age... 8? Maybe 9? My sister remembers me pretending to be Han Solo, agonizingly lowering myself into the cryogenic pod by sinking down through the monkey bars on the playground until my arm strength abruptly gave out and I shot down into a dead hang. For that age group well-made, well-plotted films are the exception rather than the norm, right? The only thing that matters is that there's enough plot to act out with peers, or serve as a seed crystal for bad fan fiction-- sure, it's shit, but it just has to lend itself well to make-believe. (The fact that this is a major part of many adult lives is something I don't talk or think about LA LA LA seriously though, Carrie Fisher is always kind of a pleasant surprise, no?)
I really liked the original trilogy when I watched it when I was a kid. I was maybe 12 or 13 the last time I saw them for many years. When I watched them again in my 20s, following the start of prequels, I didn't think any of them were particularly great.
What is the "this" in the parenthetical in 54?
53 -- I know I've linked Country Joe McDonald's song Space Patrol before.
http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=Country+Joe+McDonald+Space+Patrol
Of course it works better if you have the record, so it's followed by UFO and then Get It Together.
http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=Country+Joe+McDonald+Get+It+Together
What is the "this" in the parenthetical in 54?
It's obviously Star Wars, no? I mean, obviously it's not obvious to you, but put yourself in someone else's shoes and read it again.
My boys ages 8 and 6 seem to have a limitless--literally, limitless--capacity to watch, reenact, talk about, read about, pretend play based on, and otherwise obsess themselves with all things Star Wars. I have seen all six of the movies probably twenty times each, at least. They are bad movies in some sense, but that's beside the point. Lucas wasn't trying to win an Oscar (other than maybe for special effects).
I have only one eight year old boy. He has a vast but limited capacity.
I haven't watched any of the original Star Wars movies in ages, but I remember thinking that Star Wars held up fairly well due primarily to Alec Guinness who has so much more charisma and control over his performance than anyone else in the movie it's remarkable.
thinking of the dedication I had as a young mother is somewhat troubling. before my oldest could read AT ALL, I narrated at least one, and usually two, studio ghibli movies to her EVERY DAY. yes. I did. I could recite the full screenplay to "my neighbor totoro" and "porco rosso" and "laputa and "kiki's delivery service" if you got me on sodium pentothol and played the soundtrack with japanese. the result is that my children will not tolerate dubs ever of anything ever. they also say, well, walt disney was great and everything, and obvi if he hadn't inspired tezuka where would we be, but studio ghibli is so by far the best animated film studio that it's not even close. in this they are entirely correct. fuck disney and ruining every book I ever cared about. did miyazaki ruin "howl's moving castle," I ask you? he did not. did disney ruin "the little mermaid?" well, is each step she takes on land like stepping on razor blades? does she dissolve into sea-foam at the end? I di'int think so.
star wars is a great movie, empire is a great movie, both are cheesy but in perfect doses. the prequels are so, so, so bad. teenaged anakin skywalker is like ten times the whiny bitch luke ever was. also, the jedi knights control the empire and they can't pony up to buy anakin's mom out of slavery? they just fucking leave her there? did they lose all the money they were given and have to win it back on that fucking race? fuck that.
to be clear, she couldn't read because she wasn't two yet. or had just turned two. and since she's dyslexic she didn't learn to read till she was 6. and subtitles about laputa from illegal subs are hella fast and confusing anyway.
Miyazaki kind of a little bit did ruin Howl's Moving Castle. But only a little bit.
Disney has distribution and merchandising for Ghibli in the US and Europe and that's where the money is so suck it Japan, you may have built some awesome Acura NSXs in the 90s and and STIs now but you still can't distribute movies for shit so we basically own Totoro like a cuddly indentured servant. The first two Star Wars have residual 70sishness that make them awesome. George Lucas is a jackass and should never have been allowed to work outside studio approval, that shithead, There's a reasonable chance that the newest three wont suck. God fucking fn this piece of shit blog and myself and all of you loveable assholes, I want to get out of here but why not stsy, let's keep partying like we're all the chatty inane invited hookers on a fucking explosive-laden megayacht that's sailing into harbor, BOOM!
You can't put hookers and STIs together like that in one comment. Welcome back, weak-willed one.
56: this = make-believe as social activity.
63: Girl X (?) was dyslexic? When could you tell? I don't think my concerns about my daughter are 100% irrational, but 3.25 is still a little early for anything unambiguous.
Not sure why make-believe as a social activity is something one would want to prevent oneself from thinking about, precisely, but w/e.
65: just like in a legally distributed copy of the 18-hour-long "transformers age of extinction:" BAYHEM!
64: really? how so?
67: well, I learned to read when I was four, and when I was seven, having read it so many times, I decided to time myself, and read the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe in 30 minutes. so when four came and went and I wasn't seeing awesome lettering skillz despite her truly, unusually excellent drawing skillz, I was a little unhappy. husband x said, "I didn't learn to read until I got sent to first grade at seven, fuck it she's fine." pre-school teachers continued to send home reports of letter reversals. she's also a lefty (like husband x) so maybe this wasn't so unusual? but she suffered from no chinese character reversals?
then at one point when we were practicing together and she got tired (aged five by now, but I was already pretty concerned about it) she complained that the problem was partly that the words and letters "jumped around on the page." this sounded like everyone's experience of dyslexia ever, but also like peeps being tired, and seriously, said husband x, since when did kids not need to go to school to learn to read? she did learn to read, but with difficulty. she was incredibly good at memorizing things, and so could often appear to read books she had been read before, being only occasionally betrayed by having turned two pages over at once.
and when she was in first grade (and six) I took her to a specialist, who said, 'I'm going to play these games with you.' 'they're tests,' she said reasonably. 'no, they're not tests.' 'yes they are.' me: 'they're not the kind of tests you can get a bad grade on, they're the kind of test you could do in an experiment to see if a certain thing were metal, like, see if it could get picked up by a magnet.' her: 'OK.' afterwards, her: 'just because I'm probably dyslexic doesn't mean I'm stupid. those said 'test a,' and 'test b' at the top. I think people who are dyslexic can read upside down better than other people.' me: 'ummm, me too.' the doctor explained that it seemed like she was dyslexic, but that amounted to her having an unusual way of looking at things, and was the reason why she was so good at art, and that he had eye exercises she could do that would make reading much easier. she said, 'won't that take away me being good at art? if it does that, I don't want to do the exercises.' him, 'oh, of course not.' her, after we left the office, 'I don't trust this doctor. if he lied to me about the tests, why should I believe him about anything else?' headdesk. I even told him in private, hey, don't lie to children! he laughed at me.
we did the exercises but she was very unmotivated, and we gave them up fast. then she just got good enough at reading that she is merely a very good student rather than the amazing student she would obviously be if they allowed her to dictate everything. the real problem area is math, where reversals and failure to note negation and powers and things like that fuck her up bad. her teacher always says, she understands the algebraic operations perfectly but has trouble applying them. I have been unable to convince him about how this is happening.
There's an episode of one of the later Star Trek tv shows where the ship is traveling through some empty space where nothing is happening and the episode turns out to be about the crew struggling not to go insane from boredom.
FANTASTIC.
RIKER: We could hang ourselves.
PICARD: Well, you'd have to hang yourself first.
RIKER: Why?
PICARD: You're heavier than I am. If I hung myself first and then you tried and the branch broke, I'd be left here on my own.
RIKER: Perhaps the Romulans were here yesterday and we missed them.
PICARD: If they were here yesterday and we weren't here then they certainly aren't going to come back again.
RIKER: They said we should meet them on Thursday.
PICARD: This is Thursday.
RIKER: I thought this was Wednesday.
did miyazaki ruin "howl's moving castle," I ask you?
Earthsea
62: Let's fight. The Little Mermaid is better than Howl's Moving Castle.
I'm afraid to show Spirited Away to my daughter, because if she doesn't like it I'll be crushed. To unify the subthreads: My wife showed Star Wars to my daughter, and she found it so boring that she turned it off half way through.
72: that was miyazaki fils.
73: ...ehhh...naw, it ain't though. howl flouncing around about how life isn't worth living if he can't be blond? look, though, I just pretty much hate disney. they slaughtered a lot of books I loved as a child, and when very young I associated their sunday wonderful world of disney show with a kind of apex of boredom/disappointment. and I don't like amusement parks. how old is your daughter? she's bound to love it if she's at least 8 and you've raised her properly, but you have to keep in mind that the social embarrassment/trauma of the parents getting turned into pigs is supremely painful. my older flipped out and had to be talked off the ledge for the rest of the movie.
The chances that I've raised my children properly is pretty low.
but studio ghibli is so by far the best animated film studio that it's not even close
Umm, okay film, but don't we say that tv has surpassed film? And Miyazaki fils has been purgatoried to a tv series after earthsea. Anyway, I think Madhouse and Production I G have surpassed ghibli in overall quality product. Historically I would put Studio Pierrot and Nippon Animation at least par with ghibli for children's material. Disney is American Evil.
so suck it Japan...but you still can't distribute movies for shit ...Glen Tipton
ToS is back? But this is true, at least for the int'l market. Much better with TV, Oshin in India and Brazil.
74: true, although I remember reading an interview with LeGuin in which she talked about meeting père and coming away with the impression that he was going to do it, followed by sadness and disappointment at the decision to give it to his kid and the eventual result. If it was the way she tells it, it's arguable that it's Dad's fault for the poor and nepotistic decision. OTOH I'm just being contrary and broadly agree with you. Also budweiser is a good beer.
I haven't found where I read this - there are vague mentions of it elsewhere - but apparently one of the reasons the first several seasons of Next Generation are so boring is that Roddenberry had an idea he enforced that everyone on the ship was so enlightened and professional that there would be no significant conflict between them.
79: even better, Picard (or rather Patrick Stewart) was in "Godot" with Ian McKellen in London last year.
71 That's where Q always comes in and says how much he finds Picard so amusing/boring.
Speaking of Studio Ghibli, they're doing this great "see it big - animation" series at the Museum of the Moving Image and I was able to catch Princess Mononoke there the other week, thankfully in Japanese with subtitles as I found Clare Danes horribly miscast in the English language release. Next week they're showing both Pom Poko and My Neighbor Totoro.
53. I thought that was probably the most accurate depiction of what the experience of space exploration would really be like.
I think you misspelled "the middle part of 2001: A Space Odyssey."
This was a very successful thread derailment. A pair of comments about my mother being catty about Deanna Troi, and the thread never made it back to Gene Kelly's remarkable ass.
There was a young girl from Madras,
Who had a remarkable ass.
Not rounded and pink
As you probably think,
It was gray, had long ears, and ate grass.
What I'm really curious about is what your mother thought about your catsuit.
Oh, she was all for it. Once I hit adulthood, she was more worried that I was never successfully going to get laid (unkemptness, wounded-bobcat-like personality) than trying to protect my virtue.
I think. This is all interpreting very subtle tells. My family doesn't talk about sex.
I laughed at 71. Should be a holodeck play that becomes too real. (Also seconding 82: Needs more Q.)
My family doesn't talk about sex.
I guess you don't need to if the clothing has arrows pointing in the needed direction and if you can somehow make consent explicit through actions.
I was very disturbed when I found my parents' collection of mime porn.
Of all the porn where somebody's face is painted, mime porn is the least disturbing.
Al and lur, if you're curious about further eye testing you might want to try an optometrist who offers a binocular vision test. Coordination problems in kids' eyes are not uncommon, they present as dyslexia (or can) and they are not hard to fix. My son went through six months of home exercises for 20-40 minutes a day after school -- it sounds like a lot but the results were dramatic. He wasn't reading at all, now he reads easily. The exercises were exhausting, but well organized, like playing video games while wearing 3D glasses. He could measure his test scores every session, and even though he had to lie down and rest after a session, he was determined because he could see his eyes were getting stronger. We're watching him in case there are other processing problems lurking, but so far it seems to have been just a binocular vision problem. The program we used was visiontherapysolutions dot net, through the optometrist. Good luck.
I've done vision therapy, and it did help. My understanding was that it helps a lot more if you start as a kid.
Yes, the magic word for which my little guy is going to the ophthalmologist tomorrow morning is "stereopsis," which I think is the same thing. I'm 90% sure he was just being stubborn and difficult when he failed the low-tech test at his well-child visit with the pediatrician, but if there's actually an issue we were also told that they're easy to fix in little kids, but harder later.
70.first -- Howl's Moving Castle: The Motion Picture Experience is fine as a Miyazaki movie, which we need more of, but loses many of the things that make the book great: the focus on Sophie as a principal, particularly crotchety-old-Sophie, but also her sense of fear of the world and dutiful resigned-ness (indeed, the Sophie of the movie has no magic at all); the collapse of her sisters into a single character (which makes sense for the movie but is a shame regardless) and the removal of Sophie's relationship with her stepmother; the switch of heartless-Howl* from being someone who is bangin' pretty young things left and right with the help of his guitar, fashion sense, and awesome Welshitude to someone who is a Miyazakian warmonger; the romance between Howl/Howell and Sophie, which feels more genuinely earned in the book because they've been going at it like Hildy Johnson and Walters Burns for a hundred pages.
Also, in the movie, Sophie never once enchants or even lectures a hat.
* He eats the hearts of young girls, you know. Tee hee.
ok, that's fair. and it was wrong to turn earthsea over to miyazaki fils (though princess kaguya looks amazing? but that's not him, just the backup studio as a whole maybe?) seeing the movies on the big screen subbed is AWESOME, and princess mononoke particularly is great there, so, cool.
84 overlooks 50. Sadly the macramé dance sequence doesn't seem to be posted anywhere.
71 is great, but I'm pretty sure the episode was on Voyager, not TNG.
