Probably the success of Roger Rabbit made it seem like a safe bet.

They actually stuck a 75ft tall cartoon Kim Basinger on The Hollywood sign, for real, to promote it at the time. Didn’t work.

That advert is kind of fun.

After Who framed Roger Rabbit? They were thinking $$$.

It's Ralph Bakshi innit, Fritz the Cat dude. He was doing bosomy ladies before Roger was a twinkle in Thumper's eye.

It's a terrible movie.

regmcfly wrote:

It's Ralph Bakshi innit, Fritz the Cat dude. He was doing bosomy ladies before Roger was a twinkle in Thumper's eye. It's a terrible movie.

Yeah, I remember seeing Fritz The Cat as part of a late night double feature back in the day. Oooft! What turkey that was. You would think the studio would maybe have looked at that and heard alarm bells ringing when they hired him to do Cool World. It's almost like it was some sort of Producers-esque tax write-off.

I have 3 DVDs in hiding at home. Didn't want my daughters to stumble across them. They can come out of hiding now of course since my daughters have probably seen a lot worse by now.....but they had been half forgotten about.

I'm off work this week - we have to burn leave up - so doing some admin - and came across them while digging through my PC backup discs and assorted papers. Have been consolidating my written down passwords too onto a single sheet of paper kept under lock and key. (it may surprise some but a non electronic single copy of this is the best solution and certainly should be a backup to a password management solution).

Anyhoo.....
BFI releases of Salo and The Devils.
The "Imperial" Edition of Caligula

Hadn't watched The Devils in an age and it reminded me of my incomplete copy of The Devils of Loudon on Kindle.

Chucked it on and watched it with the commentary track (Ken Russell, editor Michael Bradsell and uber fan Mark Kermode). I had forgot just how damn good this film is and it's such a shame British cinema has faded under the unsubtle glare of Hollywood's blaze. This simply could not be made in Hollywood.

If you haven't watched this I'd try and get hold of it. I doubt any streaming service will touch it as this copy of it has never even been screened in the US. It's more or less the original version screened in Britain and subsequently butchered for US sensibilities. I doubt it will ever be shown there outside an arthouse or private screening.

Oliver Reid and Vanessa Redgrave lead but it's backed up by a great cast including a marvellous turn from Dudley Sutton - and the sets are stunning. The final shot is one of the greatest I have ever seen in cinema in all its horrific beauty.

Bonkers it is but it's historical fact that a lot of what went on in this film happened. People did pay to see the possessed nuns, the king of France was camp as Christmas and dressed protestants up as crows and shot them. It's all here and it's bloody marvellous.

The 2nd disc has a documentary which mainly covers the horse trading with the censors and includes some of the cut scenes - the highlight of which is a nun on a swing in the middle of the mass exorcism scene. Worth the price of acquisition alone.

g.man wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

It's Ralph Bakshi innit, Fritz the Cat dude. He was doing bosomy ladies before Roger was a twinkle in Thumper's eye. It's a terrible movie.

Yeah, I remember seeing Fritz The Cat as part of a late night double feature back in the day. Oooft! What turkey that was. You would think the studio would maybe have looked at that and heard alarm bells ringing when they hired him to do Cool World. It's almost like it was some sort of Producers-esque tax write-off.

Like an upsettingly large number of things in my pop culture lexicon, I learned of Fritz first through the Simpsons parody of it.

poprock wrote:

Well that was a surprise. A Star is Born. Is this Bradley Cooper’s first film as a director? If so it’s a bloody great start. Emotional throughout the honesty of some of it surprised me. I don’t know what it was but the film I got wasn’t what I expected at all. The argument scene in particular is spot on, based on my experience. When you argue with your partner you invariably put the knife in and they both targeted each other’s insecurities perfectly. Great performances all around. Didn’t Ga Ga win the Oscar? Did Cooper get anything? He should have. He was excellent.

It’s a fucking brilliant movie. Betters the original, by far. It got a lot of Oscar nominations but no wins.

Didn't they win for best song at least?

It's the main issue I have with digital being the only way. Agendas and censorship becomes an enormous problem, particularly when they can be applied retrospectively.

Think I've seen bits of The Devils before, it's one I should watch in full as I reckon I'll like it.

I have that BFI Salo (if it's the white card-type box for it), it's a great film but one I tend to watch maybe once every 5-10 years. It's undoubtedly more clever than I, and I seem to take more from it with each viewing. As an aside, in terms of depravity, it's far, far tamer than its source material. Far tamer.

I've seen Caligula once off telly but tbh I'd want to track down the version with the hardcore scenes in if I'm going to watch again, I'm a completionist.

The writings are perverse and scandalous, iirc one of 'the fuckers' (the hired studs) is called 'arse cleaver' or something. One of the four nobels, the judge I think, also recounts how he buggered a young girl saying he'd spare her father's life (who was innocent), then revealed him being executed as he climaxes in her arse. Now, I'm hard to shock but it was pretty tough going. It gets rambly at end as the Marquis is just short handing how the rest on the story goes.

Tempy wrote:

Hmm, what do you mean by "agendas" here? .

I understand what you mean - the recent BLM thing. It's a valid question. 

I'm not thinking of anything specifically. Could be many things. An agenda of paying for content at the point of consumption is one obvious one. I appreciate that with physical media you don't really own that content ; only a licence to view it through that medium - but I have lot more control over how and when I view it - not being subservient to the whims of a marketer. I don't need a bloody wifi connection to watch it either.

Lucas and his constant tinkering is another. 

Imagine a world in which all b&w content is colourised. Or content made in 4:3 is stretched to 14:9. I don't think that's likely at all - but I'm more worried about something in the the same vein on down the line. The race to the bottom means corners cut.

With respect to documentaries I would certainly consider digital only access to any thing that is in the area of delivering critique to be possibly problematic. That could be affected by pressure groups. But feature films can be part of that too.

As far as I can see the BLM thing has only resulted in the framing of content to provide the context - indeed it has improved matters. That has been a responsible reaction. You could say it should have been done a long time ago but quite often we need an incident to jolt us into action.

To say the censoring of archived content is rare is all well and good. Digitisation changes all of that. How will be know what has been censored if we end up relying on memory and can only access the archive electronically which is a transient thing?

If you pay enough for your Office 365 licence you can lock all of your documents such that they cannot be opened without authenticating yourself. So your documents are suddenly a transient thing - only that which exists at the point of authentication. Not a huge leap to see everything being like that.

I don't like the way the internet is going. That's what is at the root of my concerns really. Control of indexes is one problem. Another is the masking effect of apps as conduits to information.

If something only ever existed electronically then it's hard to say what it was like when it was created. Sure stuff like blockchain can help with that - but nothing is infallible. Block chain isn't immutable. It's just currently impractical to compromise it.

Imagine a point in the future where something may not be economically viable to store? What happens then?

Your point of availability is a variant on that. If not enough are deemed interested then tough.

Paranoia and age probably. I just don't like it. I don't like the smell of it.

jdanielp wrote:

Didn't they win for best song at least?

You’re right, yeah. Of course it did.

Retrospective censorship would be possible of course and that would be problematic for me too - in this instance it would smack of revisionist thinking.  Re BLM - pretending there were no films with racism in them (the dog's name in The Dam Busters for example) wouldn't be helpful to tackling the issue.

I presume that film would need a context setting screen first. It probably could be redubbed and it wouldn't change any aspect of the film - but it would gloss over the fact that it was considered a name for a dog either at the time portrayed or the time the film was made.  That one could be dealt with in several ways. Dubbing it and letting the viewer know it was dubbed might be better?

Going over old ground I suppose - thought I read about that dog's grave in the paper recently.