66 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
conventional wisdom among collectibles retailers is that children's items begin to dramatically escalate in price about twenty-five or thirty years after the item was made .
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that's when the kids of that time have jobs , disposable income and a desire to re-visit the awe and wonderment of childhood that has disappeared from their lives .
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check out the prices of toys from the late sixties and you'll find that yogi bear lunch boxes are demanding big bucks .
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there's a heavy nostalgia nowadays for the late sixties and early seventies and nowhere is it more apparent than on the big screen .
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boomers are now mostly in their forties and fifties and have lived in the work-a-day world for a long time .
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they'd like to re-capture some of that fun they remember from days of yore .
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hollywood seems more than eager to churn out product to help them .
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directors are zealous to put their stamp on icons from that time .
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and for the most part they're messing it up .
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" mission impossible " , " lost in space " , " godzilla " , " zorro " .
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none of these successfully capture the originals .
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none of these are even good films .
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you can now add " the avengers " to the list .
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the british television series began in 1961 .
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super secret agent john steed ( then-patrick macnee ) and his third partner , emma peel ( then-diana rigg ) are the pair that the american audience fell for .
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surrealistic and witty , the series fit the mood of the times .
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the leather-clad rigg probably didn't hurt the ratings either .
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after all it's not a coincidence that you can't pronounce her character's name without " appeal " .
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now we're in the nineties .
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steed ( now-ralph fiennes ) and peel ( now-uma thurman ) are battling evil genius sir august de wynter ( sean connery ) who is screwing with england's weather .
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that's about as much of a plot as we have .
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there's some footage about a lot of other things that either don't make sense or make even less sense .
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we get betrayal for some unknown reason .
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evil clones appear and vanish and have no connection to the film .
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remarkably ineffective giant flying robot wasps with machine guns in their belly come from nowhere for no good reason .
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there's a high tech hot air balloon , but i have no idea why anyone's in it .
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the spy agency is run by a man called " mother " who is in a wheelchair and a woman named " father " who is blind . . . at
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least in some scenes .
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there's probably a reason for all of this , but we'll never know it .
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macnee makes an appearance of sorts .
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he is the voice for an invisible man whose character goes nowhere in a scene that does nothing .
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a group of villains sits around a table , all clad in huge pastel-colored teddy bear outfits .
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at first it's humorous to watch the teddies waddle around , but then it becomes goofy .
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the movie is a medley of clutter , confusion and wrong decisions around every corner .
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it feels like major portions of the film are missing .
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the storyline jumps rather than flows .
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reportedly the film was re-cut several times .
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this is one of those times where the whole is less than the sum of the parts especially since some of the parts appear to be missing .
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there's one good point where peel is running from one room to another in a house designed by escher .
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other than that , the effects are second-rate .
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the weather threat is old hat as are the scenes of huge tornadoes .
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thurman almost makes an adequate emma peel but it doesn't work .
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she looks good , dresses in all the right fetish outfits but there's no spark .
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fiennes fares even less well .
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macnee's steed was a witty man of the world with a sense of humor .
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fiennes' agent comes across as a dour kid in grown-up clothes who has never been out of his home town .
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even connery , one of the greatest living actors , doesn't have much of a presence outside of a few fiery scenes .
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the action scenes are difficult to follow .
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director jeremiah chechik ( responsible for the atrocious remake of " diabolique " ) somehow manages to put the camera exactly where it shouldn't be .
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things happen , people move around , but even if , with the utmost effort , you were able to care about any of it , the scenes are bewildering .
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the primary allure of the original was the interaction between the two leads .
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witty banter and an underplayed sexual tension were a winning combination .
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admittedly there are a few humorous sexual puns in the film , but there's no chemistry and the repartee is anything but clever .
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one of emma peel's first lines of dialog is " rules are made to be broken . "
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it doesn't get any better .
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advance word alone should have been enough to scare off anyone .
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the release date was changed several times .
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connery refuses to promote the film .
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there was no screening for critics which may have been a good choice for warner brothers .
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at least this way , they get something of an audience for the first weekend before the news gets out .
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admittedly i haven't seen an episode of the television series for a couple of decades .
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my guess is that it would be severely dated now .
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no matter how antiquated it might be , there's no doubt that it holds up better than this film is at first viewing .
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there's no reason to waste any part of the last few days of summer inside watching this movie .
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no reason at all .
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