Peter Bogdanovich, threshing machine

What's Up Doc was the best screwball comedy of the seventies. (CLose run thing with Foul Play but...)

Nah, he'd been holding up that "will pose as a Welles expert for larges houses and scads of money" long before that, and to great effect. I hate this guy almost as much as I hate John Landis.

he actually is kind of an expert, and he speaks well, so it makes sense that he should appear on so many documentaries and commentary tracks. unfortunately there's usually an even more interesting expert that's been passed over for old pete.

+ eddie izzard is in it and how can one not like eddie izzard, eddie izzard is a fucking genius.

Or fucking David Thomson!

argh! otm. my dislike for him continues to grow.

actually everyone does, come to think of it.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/

Blogdanovich!

Man will never give up his Ascots, will he.

They shall pry them from his cold, dead dewlaps.

The guru has started another blog.

I'm seeing him introduce Citizen Kane in a couple of weeks--just for the thrill of hearing him namedrop "Orson" every other sentence.

i wonder what orson welles' blog would've been called. Roseblog?

Enjoyed him on the Dick Cavett show circa 1971 surrounded by Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, and Frank Capra. And yes, he was wearing his snappy Cary Grant garden party leisure wear.

I have a certain nostalgic fondness for the original 1972 Elaine May-Neil Simon comedy, THE HEARTBREAK KID (available on DVD), which goes beyond the darkly hilarious film itself, because at the time of its making and release I was living with one of the stars, Cybill Shepherd. This warm feeling only increased with the publication of Cybill’s memoirs (Cybill Disobedience), in which there are numerous revelations—-to me, too—-about her various doings during our nine-year relationship (and, of course, before and after).

This fuckin' guy.

This kills me--Bogdanovich in a nutshell:

"As the Duke was walking me back to my car, he took a shortcut, leading me through the sizeable garage..."

I should say that I think The Last Picture Show is a fine film, although I have difficulty connecting it to Bogdanovich (other than as an assemblage of stuff borrowed from his favorite directors...think Stanley Kauffmann said the same thing way back when).

Casting him as a thinly veiled Hugh Hefner on Law and Order was kind of amazing.

That episode made me laugh so much.

it's weird seeing tokyo rosemary on ILX

It used to be on YouTube, I linked it up thread (link now dead).

RIght. That's what I figured, thanks.

Still thinking about Saint Jack. Ben Gazarra is such a weirdo, I think. Maybe I am biased now based on seeing him once at a Cassavettes screening.

This is on YouTube, Colleen Camp promoting the film on the radio in Cincinnati, and everything goes horribly wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgNjnSzM3Eg

^ Haha, well done

I found Saint Jack quite good. Just the backdrop of it alone is interesting, and then Gazzara and Denholm Elliott made an entertainingly odd couple.

One of these days I'm gonna get around to At Long Last Love

I watched a Netflix-red-envelope DVD copy about a decade ago.

The past is a foreign country iirc

haven't seen Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, Saint Jack, or They All Laughed

but his 3 films in consecutive years from 1971 to 1973 - The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc?, and Paper Moon - are all-time great

Eileen Brennan and Cloris Leachman from Picture Show are both good in Daisy Miller.

I was going to add that the kid's kind of annoying, but first I looked him up, and you know who it is?--James McMurtry, who I've never heard but recognized the name right away.

^^Larry's son, and future Alt-Country kingpin. Wrote one of the best W-era protest songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szclr2caFG8

Always felt part of why guy directors (Tarantino, Wes Anderson etc.) love They All Laughed is that conceptually it's kind of a platonic ideal of a film a dude would love to make: a passion project with all your buddies on board, the most of the leading ladies have been involved with you romantically, and everybody's on great terms treating NYC as a playground for grown-ups.

Makes sense.

https://www.criterion.com/films/29965-targets

I've seen it twice and found it a little overrated, although in meeting Corman's (?) conditions--get Karloff in there--pretty resourceful. Thought that weird animated thing from a few years ago Tower, was a better treatment of Charles Whitman.

Unfortunately obscure YT of the day: not streaming, not available in the U.S. since the excellent DVD (still not hard to get), here is Peter Bogdanovich's personal favorite of all his films, THEY ALL LAUGHED, w/ John Ritter, Audrey Hepburn & Ben Gazzara. https://t.co/r29M4upwY9 pic.twitter.com/HHMLWwVib1

— James Kenney (@jfkenney) June 12, 2023

love that movie, think of it a lot

https://www.criterion.com/films/27533-the-last-picture-show

Bundled with two cuts of Texasville

Kino Lorber is putting out a Blu of Daisy Miller in May.

i guess tcm aired they all laughed last night for the first time

by way of twitter discussion about that i read about 'one day since yesterday', free on tubi -- good doc focusing on they all laughed & 100% confirms

I'd honestly rather watch movies about They All Laughed than the picture itself

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, January 20, 2022 8:14 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is there a good threadreader workaround for nonusers for this Twitter thread by the guy who got it on TCM?

i promised Peter in a phone call around Christmas time in 2021, before he passed away heartrendingly and unexpectedly a few weeks later, that i'd help him clear the rights on They All Laughed, (his once Lost Masterpiece) so it could show on cable and streaming, something that pic.twitter.com/00rBBiurN9

— bill teck (@billteck) September 15, 2024

I saw it as a Netflix Red Envelope release in early '19 as I mentioned above, so it was available, however briefly.

Would you class it as a Lost Masterpiece?

FWIW, it gets screened in 35mm around NYC once in a while - I caught one at BAM a long time ago and Bogdanovich did the Q&A. If you love Bogdanovich, you should absolutely see it, it's almost a nakedly personal film to the point where the Q&A kind of felt like TMI. (IIRC, he kept saying soberly how he was "in love" with like every woman in the cast - not in a frivolous or joking way, it was a little cringey for me.)

It's interesting, and I think it has its merits, but I can't agree with its boosters that it's a great film, much less his masterpiece. Targets and The Last Picture Show paired with Texasville are still my favorite works from Bogdanovich.

It's a goofy film, often not in a good way.

I saw it as a Netflix Red Envelope release in early '19 as I mentioned above, so it was available, however briefly.

Warner Bros. put it out on DVD with a commentary and a conversation featurette featuring PB & Wes Anderson back in the mid-'00s. Copies are still findable. I too rented it from Netflix maybe 10 years ago and had an ordeal just trying to watch the DVD: The first copy was scratched to shit and started skipping a couple minutes into the picture; the second arrived cracked; and finally the third one played ok.

I'm not liking this era where "Lost Film"=Not Available On Blu/Streaming.

Yeah

It's on MAX.

Reminds me that it was pretty the only thing on HBO during some visit home so I watched it over and over until I got into.

Probably posted the same upthread already

https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/peter-bogdanovich-they-all-laughed-streaming-1235049834/

The color version of Nickelodeon is back up on Prime.

how have people endured Paper Moon for half a century

mostly by ignoring it I think

Elaborate plz, Mr. Soto.

I tried once 20 years ago, turned it off. I tried this afternoon, turned it off.

Oh come on, Tatum O'Neal's performance alone!

Saw it on the big screen recently with a buncha zoomers dressed to the nines in 70's garb, unexpected but delightful.

Shouldn't they have worn 30s garb?

Wouldn't go as far as switching it off but I didn't really get it

Shouldn't they have worn 30s garb?

Who am I to tell the youth what to do?

The main thing to get is this uncomfortable truth: while children smoking is a bad thing in real life, on the silver screen it looks even cooler than adults doing it.

I've been meaning to rewatch it. I saw it maybe seven or eight years ago in a packed Sunday morning screening with a lot of kids, and I remember it playing like gangbusters.

psichiatra di psichiatri

Tatum is a large part of the problem. I'm recoiling from the film's effort to make me adore her cunning.

saw the one-day rerelease of Paper Moon today. I’d tried once on TV and made it five minutes: the big screen and a (small, polite, multiplex matinee) audience made it click. It’s best when being a comedy, and could easily trim to a sub-90-minute sharper, sillier version. But the languorous scenes often feel like the point of writer Bogdanovich’s interest (let’s feel like an older style of storytelling, even if that was a minority at the actual time), and provides a showcase for probably-other-writer Platt’s production design.

I’ve never been convinced by O’Neal père in my brief, glancing encounters. But the mix of contrasts and comparisons between him and Tatum in this make his character rich and believable despite his limitations as an actor, and give her an authenticity roughed up by her precociousness. And her scenes with PJ Johnson as Imogene show that Tatum’s distinctiveness isn’t just nepo enthusiasm or an existing rapport with her father — they very convincingly have a relationship of equals (plus/despite the age difference) on a range of levels distinct from the adults’ all-lies-to-each-other mode

Heh, Paul Nelson liked They All Laughed so much that he owned three VHS copies of it.

Also I recently finally saw Paper Moon and What's Up, Doc? properly on a big screen at MoMI and enjoyed them both.

Nickelodeon BluRay: https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=38069