....as all things must....

[selenak]

Since I still haven't watched Sound of Music, my first exposure to Christopher Plummer was him playing General Chang in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, and I was less than enthralled (not due to Plummer, due to all the Shakespeare quoting the script insisted on), which was my reaction to The Undiscovered Country in general. Otoh, then I saw him in the tv version of The Thorn Birds, where he plays a supporting role, and was immediately charmed. This held true in most later encounters as well, including the last one, Knives Out; in The Last Station, he and Helen Mirren were stunning together as that real life Albee-esque couple, the Tolstois. By all accounts, he had a long, good life, but I'm still sad to see him go.

On to more positive things: festivids is always a treat. Here are some of my favourites from this year:

Ghosts (aka the delightfully silly sitcom I mentioned in my last post): Life of Riley. How life with the ghosts works out for Alison and Mike.


Lost in Space (TV 2018): Sun goes down: a Robinson family portrait that reminds me how much like this show.

Watchmen (TV 2019): Doubt and Nothing is safe both focus on Angela and Will Reeves, and the forces that shape them, the decisions they make; brilliant character vids that also capture the layers and greatness of the series.

Comments

[cahn]

Christopher Plummer via Sound of Music was definitely a major major part of my childhood. Though watching it again as an adult (when inflicting it on my kids as a USian rite of passage) I realized a) Plummer's Captain Von Trapp is really kind of a very charismatic but rather obnoxiously arrogant jerk (a few years ago I saw a different interpretation than Plummer's which I really liked) ...but b) he might have been formative for my apparently keystone trope of charismatic guys who have some emotional vulnerability but can totally be obnoxious jerks, ahem :P

(I followed your link to the sporking and was highly entertained -- I'd read Maria von Trapp's memoirs (though not having a head for chronology, had entirely missed that the dates were off) and knew the Reagan story, but not the sheer depth of how bad the... everything Austrian... was!)

I had no idea he was in Undiscovered Country until this post! (Teenage!me's opinion: did not like ST:VI, because needed more Saavik. Also, Saavik would never. Teenage!me did not pause to consider that the movie wouldn't have had a plot then, or perhaps just decided that the movie should have had another plot entirely. With Saavik.)

[selenak]

As you can see, I agree with teen and adult you about Saavik, though younger me had additional reasons for disliking ST: VI - the gags were unfunny (aside from the shapeshifter Kirk had had sex with turning into him mid fight and saying this must be what good old James T. always dreamed of - , the Klingons had by then (ca. fifth season of TNG) being developed far beyond simple stereotypes, so the movie wanting to do a "Klingons are people, too" lesson for the crew to learn felt redundant, plus it did it badly (given that all Klingons other than Chancellor Gorkon, who gets killed and Azetbur, who hardly gets any lines, act according to stereotype), and the intended Chernobyl parallel felt sledgehammery. And don't get me started on the "Uhura, communications expert, does not know Klingon so she has to look up phrases in old dusty books on a Federation starship" scene which upset Nichelle Nichols while filming it. (Star Trek Beyond isn't a good movie, but I do suspect the scene where Uhura speaks fluent Klingon was an intentional making up for that.)

Ha, yes, according to all I've osmosed about Plummer's Captain, he sounds like he would be my type as well. Still, I've seen one Trapp movie (the 1956 German one), and hence did and still don't feel the urgent need to watch the very... USian take on it. Since turnabout is only fair, have a a scene from Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika, the 1958 sequel, in which the kids' singing after a period of poverty conquers the US.

ETA: Just checked wiki, and it does say the success of the two German films led to the musical, so really, we're all to blame/credit. Says Wiki: The Sound of Music story is based on Maria von Trapp's memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, published in 1949 to help promote her family's singing group following the death of her husband Georg in 1947.Hollywood producers expressed interest in purchasing the title only, but Maria refused, wanting her entire story to be told. In 1956, German producer Wolfgang Liebeneiner purchased the film rights for $9,000 (equivalent to $85,000 in 2019), hired George Hurdalek and Herbert Reinecker to write the screenplay, and Franz Grothe to supervise the soundtrack, which consisted of traditional Austrian folk songs. The Trapp Family was released in West Germany on October 9, 1956 and became a major success. Two years later, Liebeneiner directed a sequel, The Trapp Family in America, and the two pictures became the most successful films in West Germany during the post-war years. Their popularity extended throughout Europe and South America.

In 1956, Paramount Pictures purchased the United States film rights, intending to produce an English-language version with Audrey Hepburn as Maria. The studio eventually dropped its option, but one of its directors, Vincent J. Donehue, proposed the story as a stage musical for Mary Martin.[8] Producers Richard Halliday and Leland Heyward secured the rights and hired playwrights Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for State of the Union. They approached Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to compose one song for the musical, but the composers felt the two styles—traditional Austrian folk songs and their composition—would not work together. They offered to write a complete new score for the entire production if the producers were willing to wait while they completed work on Flower Drum Song. The producers quickly responded that they would wait as long as necessary. The Sound of Music stage musical opened on November 16, 1959 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City and ran on Broadway for 1,443 performances, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In June 1960, Twentieth Century Fox purchased the film adaptation rights to the stage musical for $1.25 million (equivalent to $10,800,000 in 2019) against ten percent of the gross.

[cahn]

Okay, wow, those movie--Trapp-kids are actually impressive singers (that was really cool!) and honestly I would have been really eager to hear them too if I'd lived there. (While I think that the singing displayed in the US version is better than the sporking thought they were, I had never quite bought that they were able to win competitions and such just by being not horribly out of tune.) I can see why you wouldn't need to watch the US version (which is better thought of as unrelated to the source material in any case, perhaps "loosely inspired by" would be a better description :P ) It's rather a period piece anyway... unless one were a big Rodgers& Hammerstein or Julie Andrews fan in general, it's not like I would be recommending it to random US person either. The value in it is mostly in the shared cultural experience from everyone who grew up in the US in that time period :)

though younger me had additional reasons for disliking ST: VI

*nods* I was too young to understand some of those things (or the Shakespeare out of context), and while it's possible that others of them may have bothered me while watching, I was definitely not at an age where I could articulate why they might have bothered me.