And I’ve always liked Michael Lonsdale as Drax — kind of a reprise of Charles Gray’s deadpan Blofeld from Diamonds Are Forever, but wonderfully droll in his own way.

It is kind of the gold standard of silly Star Wars ripoffs. And Caroline Munro really gives it her all, in spite of being dubbed, as always.

There’s not a lot to recommend Moonraker, but I though Michael Lonsdale was a wonderfully deadpan villain.

I believe the old Starfleet Battles boardgame, or perhaps the FASA role-playing game, established that all Klingon spaceships, including tugboats and utility craft, were armed with at least one phaser, because it would be horribly dishonorable to command an unarmed vessel.

That’s been a common progression in my life, but I may not be representative.

But definitely nominate Raising Arizona.

Indeed. So you could probably make an extra few bucks with a 3-D IMAX version.

Thing is, one could have filmed a stage performance of this, gussied up the special effects a bit, and seeded the cast with a couple recognizable song-and-dance-capable actors for maybe a third of the budget of this, tops, and made a respectable profit. Once the thing started tail-spinning, though...

Vivist privilege!

Or humping their legs, at least...

Not to mention the sort of “high drama” individuals the show likely selects for.

Whatever the ongoing controversies about domestic abuse (under-reporting of female perpetrators, and such), I find it remarkable how prevalent the trope of “violence is just an inarticulate expression of passionate love” was, right up through the ‘60s, and how abruptly that evaporated going into the ‘70s. While I’m…

I believe Sting is on-record as far as that having been the intent, but I like that it retains some ambiguity — that it can be seen both as something broader about unrequited or “from-afar” love, as well as something outright manipulative and creepy.

Awfully judgemental talk from somebody who’s never been trapped in a lifeboat for months with a tasty-looking cabin boy...

I don’t know about a crush, but he’s definitely in that zone with Ernest Borgnine and Roddy McDowell of ubiquitous character actors who felt like childhood friends to me.

Sometimes you want to go, where every zombie knows your naaame...

Back when we saw the Spielberg movie, a friend of mine played us a recording of the Welles radio play, which was indeed pretty great. I was most taken by the episode with the Artilleryman -- which most other versions have heavily altered or omitted from the original H.G. Wells version. It has a little twist that…

Walter Hill said when he wrote the script, he made a list of all the things he loved to see when he was young going to the movies, and he tried to do all those things in the story

Actually, I’m not sure it’s true about the “life expectancy”. When you see life expectancy data, it’s heavily skewed by infant and child mortality, so to see “how old ‘40' was”, you really need to look at life expectancy at about age 15, rather than overall.

My school in the mid-’70s predated tanbark. It was mostly blacktop, though I recall the swings being erected over dirt, and the monkey bars in an extended sandbox area.