My favorite extravagance in this movie is that they crashed a REAL DC-10 into a mountain! I had an article on it at the time from Cinematographer Magazine that described how they did it with a multi-camera set-up, and of course they had ONE TAKE to get it right.
I can't believe they did that! The sad part is that it STILL looks like a model, not a real plane!
Good God.
It's still an exciting scene, and the whole first part of the movie, before they get to Shangri-La is very good "as is."
I was watching it with a friend of mine who is very picky about films, and he said, "This is great! I don't know why it bombed!"
And my answer was, "Wait until they start singing." As soon as they get to Shangri-La, those Bacharach songs (as wonderful as they are) just don't fit! And that's what's so delightfully wrong (and right!) about this movie. It's two different films in two different genres, struggling to survive simultaneously in the same movie.
And in that tug-of-war, nobody wins! Yay!
"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
blocked: logan2, Diamonds3, Hamilton22