After a week that saw a “comedienne” post a picture of her holding the severed head of Donald Trump then play the victim card after near universal backlash, and another terrorist attack in London, host @chadsmart has reached his breaking point with the level of hate in the world. Instead of going with the initial reaction of being “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,” Chad implores listeners to “be excellent to one another” and tells a story about how seeing New Kids On the Block at the Hollywood Bowl helped erase negative feelings and spread positivity.
It’s a classic. The Ten Commandments came out in 1956. I saw it decades later. It is still probably a top-twenty film for me.
The Cecil B. DeMille production had a budget of $13 million (adjusted to $116,619,639.62 in 2016) and took in $122.7 million ($1,100,709,983.17 adjusted) in its initial box office release.
Three hours and forty minutes. That’s the runtime. It beats Avatar by an hour. And let me say that it’s worth every minute.
That’s not coming from Greg the Catholic. That’s coming from Greg the Movie Fan. I will spend time looking at IMDb.com while watching a movie and look at the Trivia section to learn the ins and outs of the production. This movie was the work of thousands of people, extras, etc.
The sets were massive. And this was before green screens and CGI.
Thanks, Google!
The exceptions I know of are the Parting of the Red Sea and Raising the Obelisk of Seti’s Jubilee.
You can see in the beginning of this clip the variation of foreground and background image quality. Charlton Heston and Vincent Price (and later Yul Brynner and Cedric Hardwicke) are there in front of the camera, while the background of the laboring crews is clearly added in post-production.
The reason I’m writing about this today is today is Passion (Palm) Sunday, and tomorrow is the first day of Passover. I always thought that this was the night of the yearly telecast of The Ten Commandments, but in my research, I learned that they always played it on Easter. Since 1973, this film has been on ABC each year (with the exception of 1999). So before it was even a twenty-year-old movie, it was getting the same annual timeslot. That’s good exposure.
I try to watch this movie each year. I really love it. As far as biblical epics go, this is the golden standard. Maybe that was all a part of the plan – get this movie in front of the viewing public regularly. Get them to love it. Get the ratings each year and the advertising dollars.
I don’t know. All I know is that sometime between now and next week, I’m going to watch this movie and thoroughly enjoy it.
“Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.”
Those are the first words in the 1998 movie Rounders. Now unless you play cards or really love young Matt Damon, my guess is you probably haven’t seen it. It’s actually a who’s who of late 90’s actors. Damon, Edward Norton, John Malkovich, John Turturro, Famke Janssen, and more.
Rounders is about a bright college guy who has earned a good amount of money by playing cards. See, he’s a gambler. And he knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. But when his friend (Norton’s Worm) is in deep with loan sharks, Mike McDermott comes out of retirement to go after the big payday that he hopes will save his buddy.
You get one of the all-time great lines from Malkovich, who is a Russian poker great and likely criminal known as Teddy KGB. Spoiler alert, at the end, Damon’s character wins, and they have only one choice.
It’s hilarious because it’s not a good Russian accent. But it will forever live in Hollywood lore.
That you don’t see in this clip is that the card on the river is the same card in 2006’s Casino Royale, the ace of spades. Now I admit that I watched some Bond movies before Daniel Craig took on the lead role, but Casino Royale was the first Bond movie I ever owned, and is probably my favorite. I think I can credit the Texas Hold ‘Em tie-in for that.
I love playing Texas Hold ‘Em. I don’t say that to mean you’ll see me on the World Series of Poker or anything. I mean, I’m not good. But I enjoy it. I enjoy the camaraderie of sitting at the table, usually with friends, and having laughs over some cards and usually beer.
I remember the first time I played Hold ‘Em. I was in Colorado Springs visiting my friends Joe and Danielle. We were hanging out at the bar they frequented with people they’d known for some time. We sat down and started a game, and in said game, I eventually was dealt pocket rockets. Talk about poker face – I’m sure I was damn-near sweating trying to contain my excitement. Turns out that of the five cards dealt on the table, the other two aces were up. BAM! Four of a kind. It was amazing.
A couple years later, the Jaycees organization of which I was a member had a little poker tournament. I eliminated my friends Dan and Kevin in a short amount of time by being, let me see if I remember it correctly…”a river-catching m@!#&% f@!#&%.”
I went to a casino once for a friend’s bachelor party and decided I was going to go sit in with the regulars in the Texas Hold ‘Em room. What I didn’t know until I got there was that it was a $60 buy-in and they weren’t as nice as the guys I played cards with regularly. I ended up losing all my money, but I won one hand, and did so with a full house.
The bulk of my card playing came from the guys in The Cellar on Friday nights. We’d get two games in each week, at $5 a game. Kick in a quarter each game for the straight flush fund (a couple guys would cash in big on that), and $5 all-you-can-drink from the keg, and you had a good, cheap night of entertainment with a good bunch of guys. I even managed to win a few times there.
So now I want to watch Rounders. But mostly, I want to play some cards. I’ll start with the boy. When he’s old enough, I’ll teach him War. That was a fun game. A lot better than that Go Fish nonsense.
On the first episode of Positive Cynicism, host Chad Smart finds out hosting a podcast is not as easy as it sounds (literally). After struggling with organizing thoughts, Chad weighs in on the current political climate of America and has several words for anyone opposed to the Trump Presidency.
The episode ends with a look at the recent Oscar nominations and if anyone outside of Hollywood actually saw any of the movies nominated. Share you nominations for Best Picture on Twitter, @chadsmart.
This was a thought I had over the extended Thanksgiving weekend.
Two “classic” sci-fi movies that have yet to be touched by modern day Hollywood. The Last Starfighter and Flight of the Navigator. I use quotes around the word classic because I think they are only “classic” in the sense that they were made in the mid-1980s. In fact, until I mentioned them, did you even remember their names?
Let me ask another question – were you even aware of their existence?
How about some movie poster art? You know…to jog the memory…
A quick synopsis of both movies for the uninitiated (taken from memory, not from IMDb – so you know it’s shaky at best):
The Last Starfighter is about a trailer park maintenance man (Alex) who spends his evenings ignoring his girlfriend in hopes of achieving high score on an arcade game – Starfighter. When he finally achieves the highest of the high scores, he is visited by an alien that looks like The Music Man (He’s a what? He’s a what? He’s an a-li-en). Centauri recruits Alex to join the intergalactic war raging between the Starfighters and the bad guys (I looked this one up – it’s the Ko-Dan Armada). The base is destroyed, leaving Alex and an alien named Grig, who serves as navigator and mentor. Hence, Alex is THE LAST STARFIGHTER.
Meanwhile, while Alex is in space, fake robot Alex is on Earth in his place. But fake robot Alex is a poor man’s Alex. He almost ruins things with Maggie the girlfriend. However, fake robot Alex does take a bullet, an assassination attempt.
Long story short – Alex succeeds in fending off the Armada, returning home safely to a confused Maggie and family. They leave to return to the Starfighter Corps (why not) and the galaxy is saved.
Flight of the Navigator starts in 1978. I don’t remember every detail, but here we go nonetheless. David is playing with his little brother. David falls down a hillside and hits his head. Here’s where it gets fuzzy. I almost think that David wakes up in 1986, and while the world around him has aged and progressed, he is still a kid. And his younger brother is, essentially, now older than he is. He is taken to some government (NASA, I believe) facility, because there was some connection to a spaceship.
Like I said, some parts are fuzzy.
David gets some help from future Hollywood A-lister (in her best performance ever) Sarah Jessica Parker and escapes captivity in the spaceship version of Evil T-1000.
He and the ship (we’ll call it Mack, because that’s its name – and also voiced by Pee Wee Herman) escape authorities and travel back in time to when he fell down the hill and disappeared. Either that, or David wakes up only to realize he had the weirdest #*$@%& dream of all time.
Here’s where I’m at with these two movies. Flight of the Navigator is a Disney movie, and therefore COULD be remade. Let’s just all admit that we’re marks for what Disney is doing and move on. The animated stuff is solid (both standalone Disney Animation and the coop with Pixar). And maybe you were unaware that Disney owns Marvel and Star Wars. T+So they have that going for them. Disney is doing well. They don’t need to try to resurrect largely-forgotten titles from thirty years ago.
That’s why I say that The Last Starfighter should be remade. It has a decent story (I didn’t really do it justice). Plus, and I think this is the biggest reason – those special effects.
I mean, there’s charming and then there’s painful. Give a modern director, and more importantly a modern visual effects team, an opportunity to tell the tale with the cutting edge technology they have at their fingertips.
Hollywood has remade a slew of movies that didn’t need to be remade (looking at you, glaringly, Red Dawn). Let them have some fun with a flick that deserves a remake.
#REMAKESTARFIGHTER
If you want to submit a topic for my next #ToughCallTuesday, just leave it in the comments or email nerdsunitedpodcast@gmail.com.
And remember that the Comics for Beginners II episode is being recorded in January. Submit your questions (same as above) and win a prize! Seriously. It’s that simple!
Positive Cynicism EP 12: Be Excellent to Each Other [ 36.93 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (831)![Fresh Content Day 40: The Ten Commandments [Movie]](https://jitterymonkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the-ten-commandments.jpg)
