Electricity was out in my neighborhood all evening. That happens, and the D.W.P. does a good job of correcting these problems and getting the juice flowing through the lines again. But here's the part I find a bit annoying...
You phone up to make sure someone has reported the outage or to see if they have an estimated restoration time...and you wait on hold for a human being to come on the line. While you wait, you have to listen to the same recorded announcement over and over...
...and it keeps telling you that they're experiencing a high caller volume and you'd be better off checking the Department of Water and Power website, instead. Which is tough for some of us to do when the power's out.
On the web, you can find a bunch of reports on this year's Comic-Con International but you won't find any better than Peter Sanderson's. He's serializing his accounts over at Quick Stop Entertainment. Here's a link to Part One, which you should read but you can skip if you're short on time since it doesn't mention me. Here's a link to Part Two, which does so you have to read it. I'll be linking to future parts as they appear, especially if they mention me.
Image Entertainment is announcing a new DVD that will present the entirety of the three episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show on which Elvis Presley made his legendary appearances.
Well, not exactly.
I'm not sure if this will be mentioned on the DVD or not but there were a couple of non-Elvis segments on those episodes where there were legal clearance problems. They're not historically significant so they're being replaced on these DVDs with segments from other Sullivan programs. If you watch carefully, you may note Ed's wardrobe changing suddenly as he introduces them. The Will Jordan monologue on the January 6, 1957 episode is one of them. Will wasn't on that program but his spot has been edited in to replace one that couldn't be included.
These should be great DVDs for two reasons. One is that they're including all the other material for those of us who don't care all that much about Elvis. There's a spot with Carl "The Amazing" Ballantine. There's one with Señor Wences. There's Carol Burnett and Charles Laughton and a great musical number from the Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella. For those who don't care about such performances, the DVD producers are including a menu option to play only the Elvis songs. I wouldn't mind another option that said, "Play everything except Elvis."
The other selling point is that I've seen a preview of the video quality and it's incredible. The photo above left is not from the DVD. The video on the DVD has been processed by a new restoration process called Live Feed that makes it look like...well, like a live feed. It looks like Elvis is performing today, there's a black-and-white video camera on him and you're next door, watching him on a monitor. I'll try to post something about this amazing technique in the next week or two. It's salvaging old kinescopes and making them highly watchable today. After you see it, you'll want to join me in encouraging more companies to employ it. The video quality on some recent releases is disgraceful or, at least, not as fine as it could have been.
You can see the full listing of what's on these peachy DVDs over on this page at TV Shows on DVD, which is your one-stop source on the Internet for info on what old treasures of the cathode tube are coming out on DVD. It's a great place to find out that while you already bought all seven seasons of The West Wing individually, your completist tendencies will force you to also purchase the special "gift set" for yourself, even though it contains the same seven seasons, because it also has extra material available nowhere else. (I need to write more about that scam...)
The "Photo of the Day" over on the Stars and Stripes website is especially cool today. Take a look...and thank Joel O'Brien, who called it to my attention.
The other day, I told you that Turner Classic Movies was running Pretty Maids All in a Row this morning. I'm watching it now and I realize I forgot to tell you something about it. I forgot to tell you what a truly crummy film it is.
In my defense, let me assure you I'd forgotten. It was not atypical of many movies that came out around 1970 that couldn't seem to figure out the morality of sleeping around...whether it was a good thing or a bad thing or even, beyond the release of horniness, what it might mean to someone's life. It's almost like movies were afraid to have a point of view on their own sex scenes. They were there because that's what ticket buyers were buying tickets to see and that was more than enough.
There are some other odd things about the movie. I know Rock Hudson wasn't dubbed in this film but for some reason, he sounds like he was. It's also a bit distracting, in light of later revelations and his death, to see Mr. Hudson play an unabashed heterosexual hedonist. And isn't it odd to see Telly Savalas rehearsing to play Kojak? Even though the character had the silly name of Sam Surcher, it's Kojak. I think this is the first time Savalas played that kind of part and it wouldn't surprise me if he got the role of Theo Kojak in that TV-movie because someone saw him in this film.
But really, the "who's killing the co-eds?" plot is so lame with no surprise and no logical throughline. When the film came out, I was baffled as to whether Hudson's character was really as one-dimensional as it seemed or whether I was missing something. My curiosity led me to buy and read the book by Francis Pollini from which the movie was based. I thought it might give me a clue but it didn't. The paperback had a great James Bama cover but no more insight. As I recall — it's been 35 years since I read it — the book had a much stronger racial angle, keying off a young black student who was suspected of the killings. In adapting that work, Gene Roddenberry eliminated that character, thereby creating a murder mystery with no suspects and no clues...and not much of a point.
Still, it was nice to see my old high school...and even nicer to see Angie Dickinson. But I apologize if you went out of your way to watch this one because of me.
The Boomerang Channel is about to begin rerunning Garfield and Friends, a cartoon show I wrote years ago. I think it might play better if they had the show translated into Finnish. See if you don't agree.
August 14, 2006
