Bad Movie Descriptions of the Golden Era

Since most of my TCM-watching is DVR vs. live, I don't even bother with the intros most of the time, I just zap though.

And I do agree that their between-features pieces are interesting. I love that Leonard Maltin shows up for the Disney films. I love that they showed Private Snafu cartoons, which I'd read about for decades and never seen. I saw my first Miyazaki films there. The National Archive Treasures. Rediscovered lost silent films with new scores. Great foreign classics (I'm still seeing wonderful Kurosawa and Bergman films for the first time!) And sometimes, obscure films I've been on the lookout for since the sixties. TCM is an invaluable resource.

But I'm sorry, Ben is trading on the family name. He's literally never said anything I didn't already know. (Okay, I'm a film scholar and very well-read... But he doesn't have a fraction of the keen insight that Robert Osborne brought in spades.)

I get the sense I'm in a deprived era for TCM, because of the mediocre to terrible hosts (Ben Mankiewicz, Alec Baldwin). Sick and tired of hearing about their damn Marx Brothers wine ("It's zany and goofy, just like them!") and the TCM tours. Win a meeting with Ben Mankiewicz? Nah!

Fading Fast said:

To your question one post before, until you said it, I hadn't thought about it, but you are correct, I haven't seen Tiffany Vazquez doing intros in some time.

Click to expand...

Haven't watched it on the weekends in a while, but realized one day she wasn't there. It was a short, but sweet ride. Oh well.

Is Alec Baldwin back? To be honest, I'd watch it more, if they'd go back to showing more comedies. Reality is dark enough, I don't want to see so much dark drama that seems to be on TCM most of the times I flip past.

This is the description for tonight's episode of Masterpiece from the PBS website.
Things haven't improved much.

"Tormented by demons, Claude goes to dry out in the country, where a terrible secret is unearthed. Paul attempts to bury the past by forcing his mentor to retire. Nina takes control of her life."

I may have seen this one on FL before, but it's worth repeating:
"TV Guide" - "The Wizard of Oz" - "Unhappy teen-age girl leaves home and travels to a strange country, where she kills the first person she encounters. Teams up with three odd drifters - one heartless, one brainless, and one cowardly, only to kill again."

^^^

http://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-description/

"An old one-line movie blurb has gone viral this week thanks to mentions all over the world wide web. In 1998, for a Wizard of Oz listing on TCM, writer Rick Polito wrote,


“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”


This morning, Polito told JimRomensko.com, “That line is going to follow me to the grave. It was just on Leno, it was a clue in a crossword puzzle, it showed up in Playboy, and people use it as their email sigs.”

It’s easy to see why the terrifying silly line caught on. It got us at PopWatch thinking about how we could cryptically describe some other popular movies in one sentence:

"A Christmas Carol" (various years): Old rich guy has to be scared into having empathy.

I do remember sneaking downstairs to watch the old movies that came on long after I was supposed to be asleep. The descriptions Lizzie mentions were so mysterious to me that I decided they were being deliberately obscure in order to keep children from watching the films. (Yes, that is how my mind worked then & still works.) That's probably how my obsession with the 1930s and 1940s started.