I came on here to add Arming Scenes to the list — I think the first one I specifically flagged in my movie-going years is Ripley strapping the pulse rifle and flamethrower together in Aliens, and as Tropeofmonkeys notes, the A Team was built around them, but the lineage is obviously ancient, as you describe.

“Boy’s imaginary friend turns out to be the ghost of an assassinated anti-war activist... But neither he nor his parents speak Greek.”

Thanks for the tip. I’ll make a point of trying it out.

Thanks for the confirmation that this keep-reloading-to-see-comments problem isn’t just with me and my script blockers, though I think they’re probably part of it. My participation is definitely down given how laborious casual commentary has become, and Bob’s Burgers was pretty much my only regular stop anymore, so...

The Morro Castle would be the appropriate flaming ship metaphor, but you’d have to be extra geeky to “get” it, so you’d take your chances, even here.

As Vago alluded, recognition is partly conscious and party unconscious, and there’s a convergence of cues involved. I know a face-blind guy, and he compensates by a variety of tricks — Like he can remember voices, and can keep track of people’s clothing once he’s identified them on a given occasion.

I think the fierce dispute over this probably reflects a basic perceptual difference in our population. Some people are apparently completly “face blind” — unable to visually recognize people even from day to day and reliant on other cues — and many more are more mildly impaired. I, for one, find it fairly mystifying…

Yeees!

This was KYW in Philly’s “Saturday Night Dead” running at 1:00AM, hosted by a buxom Elvira knockoff called “Stella”. In addition to staples of such programs, like the aforementioned Corman Poe movies and Hammer films, I remember them running somewhat more unusual selections like this, and the more recently released,…

It’d be kind of disappointing to find that he’d subsequently turned around and proclaimed that “The Music” had been reborn when disco took off.

I saw this ages ago on a late-night TV “fright night”-type feature (probably the closest real-life parallel I can think of to SCTV’s Count Floyd presenting Whispers of the Wolf). I was pretty young at the time, and found the William Wilson adaption boring, and “Toby Dammit” frustratingly incoherent. I did kind of…

He does indeed, and I recommend it highly to those who have some knowledge of the subject through the many authors you allude to. And it’s fascinating in its own way to think that the guy’s greatest con may have been helping create his own myth.

Discussions of the Columbian Exposition eventually turn to The Devil in the White City, and thence to H.H. Holmes. Have you by any chance read Adam Seltzer’s recent... revisionist take on the subject?

Or at least one of those ‘60s Victorian/Edwardian farces — like The Great Race, or Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

World’s fairs back then were pretty sprawling events, though. There was room to have the carnival/“hoochy-koochy” attractions without necessarily stigmatizing the cultural and technological exhibits.

Moore (already 55) lackadaisically amble through the narrative without the slightest concern that any woman would find him anything but deadly sexy

I’m fully with you on Octopussy. It’s easily one of the more plausible villain schemes of all the Moore-era films (though I think For Your Eyes Only was the most self-consciously scaled back). And I think it more-or-less introduced the trope of having multiple cooperating villains instead of one big überbaddie, which…

And dealing with the German traffic cops, and the basic problem of having to persuade anyone to listen to him while dressed as a clown. Pretty much all the action in Octopussy, besides maybe the afterthought raid on Khan’s palace, is really first rate.

A weirdo with gun-crushing mechanical hands and an underground lair with giant aquarium walls and built around an unshielded nuclear reactor, one might add. Lotte Lenya and iron-man Robert Shaw are John le Carré characters by comparison.

I’m not sure the sensibilities of From Russia with Love were all that drastically different. If it’s gadgety, the gadgets are at least plausible ones. And the stakes largely revolve around an attempt to assassinate Bond himself, rather than anything particularly grandiose. I’d argue it was Goldfinger that really built…