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Showing results for tags 'Jerry Paris'.
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You have two choices when watching "The Wild One": 1) Watch it through the eyes of older people who lived through The Great Depression and World War II, and were genuinely afraid of seeing society unravel and go to hell in a handbasket, or 2) roll your eyes, and scream aloud, about fifty times, "My *God* this is dated!" "The Wild One" is so dated that it comes across as a parody of itself. The acting is so overwrought, and the dialogue is so corny that it comes across as being about as rebellious as "Rock Around the Clock." One of the leaders of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club is Jerry Paris, who played the dentist in "The Dick Van Dyke Show" - I'm sorry, but seeing Rob Petrie's next-door neighbor Jerry Helper in a black leather jacket is just not that frightening. Clocking in at just under an hour and twenty minutes, "The Wild One" seems interminable. You have to acknowledge its influence as the first-ever biker flick, and for Marlon Brando influencing both Elvis Presley and James Dean (and hence, the rebellious 1960s). This film is, at once: terrible, important, influential, dated, forward-looking, inane, and ridiculous. Marlon Brando's stunt-double was *so obvious* that it was, at times, laughable, as he didn't look anything like Brando, and the transitions between Brando and his stunt-double were very poorly done, and not edited well at all. If you want to watch a movie for a good time, take a pass on "The Wild One"; if you want to be a good film scholar and watch a historically important movie, then go for it. That's about the best I can do for you - I felt like I was watching an episode of "Route 66," and not a particularly good one, either. --- But there is this legendary quote: Kathie Bleeker: "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?" Johnny Strabler: "Whaddya got?" --- The Hollister Riot, the staged picture of which - in Life Magazine - influenced the whole biker genre. -
Season 3, Episode 12. "The Sound Of The Trumpets Of Conscience Falls Deafly On A Brain That Holds Its Ears ... Or Something Like That!" - Dec 11, 1963: Have you ever had one of "those moments" where a character appears on a TV show, and you *know* you've seen the character before, and try as you might, you just cannot figure out where? (Of course you have: That was a rhetorical question - we all have). Well, it just happened when Lieutenant Yarnell came walking into the front office of the police station in this Dick Van Dyke show. Thank *goodness* for internet search engines - it only took about a minute before I had my "Aha! Moment." Meet Lieutenant Yarnell. --- ETA - Interesting, I just found out I'm related to Dick Van Dyke (we're both descendants of John Alden). May be a somewhat distant relationship.
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I'm breaking recent protocol by posting about "Marty," the Academy Award-winning film from 1955, because I haven't seen it recently; I'm pretty sure all the other movies I've posted about, I saw right before or during my initial post. But I've seen Marty twice, and have seen it within the past couple of years, and I think it's a splendid film - it watches like it could have been adapted from a play, but it wasn't. "Marty" is the shortest film ever to win the Best Picture award, with a runtime of only 90 minutes. Ernest Borgnine gives a magnificent performance (before Marty, he was known as a "tough guy" in films), and the scene at the dinner table with his mom is one of the saddest things I've ever watched in a movie (I also want to alert you that this scene is in the trailer). This movie isn't hard to find, and it's not boring *at all*, despite having no action, or guns, or profanity - it's a human drama of the most poignant type, that just about all of us can relate to. Try and find it if you can, and in the meantime, here's the original trailer - if you watch it, you'll have an idea what the film is about, but it won't ruin it for you; nevertheless, I'm going to announce a slight SPOILER ALERT:
