Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

UPPER BERTHS

Do trains still have sleeper cars? If so, do they still have upper and lower berths? Perhaps the bigger questions is: do people still sleep on trains other than falling asleep in their uncomfortable seat, jammed next to somebody with a service dog. (This happened to me on a long

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WAR IS HELL; SO IS SHOW-BIZ

It’s astonishing that World War 2 was somehow fought without the use of computers, cell phones and the internet. In fact, only the lowly Fax (‘Fascimile’) machine provided any true up-to-date technology. Somehow vast projects were organized and immaculately executed in record time–planes were designed as trainers to teach squads

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‘ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS’; A HOWARD HAWKS SKY-OPERA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24XNg4DQTr8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98TETzMWjTg It’s hard to pick a favorite Howard Hawks films given the diverse amount of genres he worked in and always at such a high level. “To Have and Have Not’, ‘Bringing Up Baby’, ‘Rio Bravo’, ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘Red River’–Jesus, what an absurd list of genres to have conquered.

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HOWARD HAWKS–SPEED DEMON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2itmdeH0nQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEn3tjbYO8M Howard Hawks was what used to be known as a ‘man’s man’. He was a sportsman (another defunct term) who raced cars and motorcycles, flew planes, hunted, fished, rode horses, the whole shmeer. His love of flying was well documented in several movies–‘The Dawn Patrol’, ‘Air Force’ and the

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WHAT THE FUTURE SOUNDED LIKE ON TV IN THE 60s

Our week of weird audio comes to an appropriate close with a deeply strange collection of sci-fi special effects sounds that were used for shows like ‘Lost In Space’, ‘The Twilight Zone’, ‘Land Of The Lost’, ‘Outer Limits’,. ‘The Twilight Zone’…you get the idea. The big question I have here

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MY FAVORITE LP?

Decca records may have passed on signing ‘The Beatles’, but they more than made up for that goof by producing the above record which may be my favorite long-playing record ever (next to that Monty Python record on which one side contains two completely different sets of material and you

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SOUNDS EFFECTS–1960s EDITION

When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s our ginormous Magnavox console living room stereo was the center of my after school universe. In addition to my ever-growing collection of jazz LPs, a great deal of my time was spent listening to comedy records my parents had bought

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STOOGES IN THE SKY

I can see by the gently declining number of hits on my blog that my obsession with vintage aviation isn’t necessarily shared by my readers. In that case I’ll wrap the subject up (until I unwrap it of course) with one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts ‘Dizzy Pilots’ (1942).

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ENTER THE LAUGH TRACK

The above video provides a neat little (five minutes) history of the laugh track. I agree with all of the points made by the, er, maker and I’d like to write more than these two sentences, but I can’t. You see, I actually did write more but then my word

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SINKING OF THE ‘TITANIC’: IT REALLY KILLS YA’

Yesterday we looked at a scene from an episode of “Friends’ sans laugh track. It revealed itself to be something entirely different than intended–an innocuous sit-com scene with a few laughs instead turned into a Bergman-esque study of faces, mute interactions, intense but silent emotions etc. Today we’ll see what

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