God bless Roy Cohn

[vovat]

bethje and I watched Cry-Baby, allegedly John Waters' second cleanest film, on Monday night. I thought it was pretty funny. My favorite parts were probably when Cry-Baby and Allison were explaining how their parents died, and the bedtime prayers in juvenile hall.

Then, last night, we saw the Family Guy movie. It was essentially an extra-long episode of the show, which isn't a bad thing. Really, I'm not totally sure where the line is drawn between an extended episode and something that feels like a movie, but it does seem like they didn't do anything they couldn't have done in a regular episode, or maybe a few regular episodes. It was even divided into three parts, which suggests that they intended it as something that could be shown as three separate episodes. None of this reflects on the quality of the movie, just its...movie-ness, or something. Overall, it was hilarious, and I liked the glimpse into the future. It's a little weird that they had time-travel devices, but no other futuristic stuff, but they did comment on this. Besides, I think the three Simpsons episodes that offer extended glimpses into the future go somewhat overboard with the sci-fi devices, so it's probably good that Family Guy largely avoided this idea. It did seem like the subplots involving the non-Stewie members of the Griffin family were concluded rather abruptly, but I guess that was pretty much a matter of necessity for the third part, since they couldn't very well keep switching between the present and the future.

I've now finished watching most of the extras on the Wizard of Oz DVD set. About all that was left on the first disc was a feature on the restoration of the film, which I watched, but it didn't really hold my interest. I tend to be lost when people talk about technical stuff. There were also profiles of the main actors, which were interesting, although I couldn't help thinking of a few extra things they should have mentioned. They did refer to Bert Lahr's commercials for Lay's potato chips, but not to Margaret Hamilton's Maxwell House commercials, which seem to be the main non-Wizard thing for which people in my parents' generation remember her. I also recall hearing that one reason Ray Bolger got into acting was his love of Fred Stone, who played the Scarecrow in the 1902 stage play of Wizard. I kind of think they should have mentioned that in his profile, but oh well.

The second disc was made up primarily of documentaries, but also included some deleted scenes and archival footage. I'd already seen the documentary hosted by Angela Lansbury (it was on my VHS copy of Wizard, and I'd also seen it on TV), so I didn't bother watching it today, but I might want to see it again in the future. I didn't watch the stuff in the vault section, either. As for the other material, there were a few things that interested me:

• Coincidentally enough, considering the first thing I wrote about in this post, one of the people interviewed for Memories of Oz was John Waters. He said that Wizard was a cult movie, but everyone was in the cult, so it was the most mainstream cult film of all time.
  
• Bert Lahr's daughter explained how the movie was a product of its time, with Kansas undergoing the Great Depression, and the Wicked Witch of the West as a fascist dictator.
  
• Interestingly, the music for "If I Only Had A Brain" was originally written by Harold Arlen for another project.
  
• Not surprisingly, people mentioned how the Wicked Witch had scared them as children. I don't remember being scared of the Witch, but I think the talking apple trees kind of creeped me out. I don't remember for sure, though. I know there was one year when I refused to watch Wizard on TV, but I can't recall why, and whether it was out of fear or something else. Maybe it was just an early example of my being pointlessly anti-establishment. {g}
  
• Eric Shanower talked about his Oz graphic novels, and his full-length The Giant Garden of Oz, which was a cool touch.
  
• There was a mention of how the Oz books probably wouldn't be in print today if it weren't for someone like Peter Glassman (of Books of Wonder). While I greatly appreciate everything Peter has done to promote the Oz series, this isn't entirely true. As far as I know, the L. Frank Baum books have been in print pretty much since their original publication. Books of Wonder DID bring some of the Ruth Plumly Thompson and all of the John R. Neill Oz books back into print, though.
  
• One of the documentaries had a guy say that Baum's text and W. W. Denslow's illustrations only provided a rough guide for the designs used in the movie. While this is true, the guy implied that it was because of a lack of description in the books, which I don't really think is the case. MGM chose not to use a lot of the details from the text and illustrations of the Oz books, like the dome-shaped houses with two chimneys each, or the national colors of the major countries of Oz. I think the Munchkins' love of the color blue is much more significant in the books than their short stature, which is indeed mentioned in the first book, but usually either ignored or explicitly contradicted in later ones. Yet the popular usage of the word "Munchkin" has everything to do with size, and nothing to do with blue. I can see why they would have chosen not to use the dominant colors anywhere but the Emerald City (where they really couldn't help it), since they wanted to show off the Technicolor, and would have been better able to do that with a wide range of colors. That's the reason why they changed the Silver Shoes to Ruby Slippers, after all.
  
• A lot of the props from the movie, including the tornado, were reused in later MGM pictures. Some of the scenes in which they featured were shown on the DVD.
  
• There were some deleted scenes, and a mention of an early subplot where Dorothy and Hunk (the Kansas equivalent of the Scarecrow) had a romantic relationship (which is why Dorothy said she would miss the Scarecrow most of all). I wish they'd mentioned some of the other weird ideas from early drafts of the script, though.
  

In other news, I heard someone saying something about the possibility of snow in the near future. I really hope it doesn't come to pass. Snow sucks. Well, actually, I guess snow itself is kind of pretty, but DRIVING in it is certainly a pain in the ass.

The other day, the vending machine just stole 75 cents from me. Why is it that technology hasn't progressed to the point where we can make a vending machine that actually functions properly? Or are the malfunctions actually built into it, as a way to cheat people? I suppose only the Secret Vending Machine Cabal will ever know.

Has anyone else not been receiving notification of comments they've received? I know both Beth and I have gotten comments that we didn't know about until actually checking the journal entries themselves. I wonder if this has anything to do with LiveJournal changing servers.

Comments

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed that. They all had their own titles, too, although I can't remember any of them.