Josh's HomePage : Version 5.0 launched! Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my HomePage's launch on the Internet, way way back in those dark days of America Online and Bill Clinton impeachment hearings. Now it's 2012 and it's time for the site to reflect that, so here is Version 5.0, six and a half years after good ole 4.0 first smiled upon us!
This a complete redesign, with a new foundation and new fittings, its contents reorganized and its purpose rejustified, the whole thing slimmed down and spruced up. During versions 3.0 and 4.0 the site became more of a node linking to the various sub-sites and less about being a personal home on the Internet. This redesign brings the site back to me for personal and professional use and allows greater room for expansion along those lines.
Join us this Sunday, April 1 for Shatner Day (observed)! It is a very belated celebration for William Shatner's birthday, which actually falls on Thursday but, like, who has movie days on a Thursday anyhow? No, it must be on Sunday because that is the day that works.
Feel free to show up for who knows what! Don't hesitate to bring movies of your liking with you, 'cause we're all for variety and the mighty Shatner cares not for preordained schedules. We'll be starting at 3:00 PM.
(Click for larger)
DISCLAIMER: Just because we're celebrating Shatner doesn't mean we're going to watch Star Trek. Don't worry.
ABOUT SHATNER DAY
Shatner Day is usually the first major movie day after the new year. Traditionally the first two and a half months are given over to half-hearted events without much planning, inviting, or effort. In 2009, for example, there was nothing at all between January 10 and Shatner Day on March 21. This is a day that marks the beginning of spring and, with it, the new movie day season that usually extends up to around JoshFest, when things peter out again.
This afternoon I watched the 2006 documentary about early silent film star Theda Bara (1885-1955), The Woman with the Hungry Eyes (it is download link #1 underneath the little projector icon on Dr. Macro's gallery page). The documentary was very enjoyable, and a peek into a film icon who has practically no surviving body of work.
Historian Robert S. Brichard made the observation in the documentary, "Theda Bara is unique among film stars in that her image comes down to us almost entirely from still pictures. She made something like forty films and only a handful of them survive, but the images of Cleopatra and Salomé with the skimpy costumes and the exotic poses are what people remember. They don't know the actress, they don't know her films, but they know the image that she projected onscreen, or at least in the still pictures."
Between 1914 and 1926 she stared in forty-four films, with all but four or so having been lost over the intervening decades (and only one on home video), the majority being destroyed all at once in a film library fire on the Fox lot in July 1937, including her two biggest features, Cleopatra (1917) and Salomé (1918). Her career was elaborately crafted from the start, with a new back story of having been born in Egypt rather than Ohio, and her name Theodora Goodman changed by William Fox Films to Theda Bara -- literally "Arab death" -- to befit her new onscreen persona as the first vamp, a dark, predatory sexual being feeding on mens' vitality. She was inevitably typecast in the part.
At the forty-three minute spot something caught my ears. "Theda's name started to appear in the titles and lyrics of popular songs," the narrator informs us. "Photoplay magazine offered the recipe for the 'Theda Bara sandwich,' a spicy affair described as 'the sandwich that bites a little and says "more."'" Wait, what?
You can't just drop a fact like that and let it go! A little Googling for "Theda Bara sandwich" got me the issue of Photoplay in question: February 1916. Google Books has a handful of archived PDFs from the early years of this magazine, including one that has all issues between December 1915-May 1916. In that collected PDF, the February '16 issue begins on page 356 and the article on movie star sandwiches is pages 484-5. Here's a copy of the article for perusal:
This issue featured actress Marguerite Courtot on the cover. Once a star of some acclaim, she's basically unknown today (here is a better scan of the cover).
The article, "Sandwiches a la Movie" is quirky and unique, and I love the idea behind it. It's written by Lillian Blackstone and provides recipes for seven sandwiches corresponding to the attitudes of seven well-known actresses at the time. Today only three of them are remembered at all: Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Theda Bara. The other four -- Beverly Bayne, Edna Payne, Alice Joyce, and Violet Mersereau -- have all faded into film obscurity, but that doesn't mean that their sandwiches should.
Overall, some of these sound delicious. The Alice Joyce sandwich, with only mayonnaise and onions, turns me away, but the other six aren't bad, even if four of them rely so much on mayonnaise.
The Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish sandwiches aren't all that different. They're both essentially hard boiled egg yolks with mayonnaise and lettuce on white bread. The difference is that on Gish's sandwich the yolks are sliced and added intact while Pickford's mashes the yolks and mixes them with the mayo. So essentially Pickford's is a deviled egg sandwich, which could actually be tasty. It's interesting that Hollywood's pure and innocent angel would be given a deviled egg concoction, though it lacks paprika. Is that what makes it "deviled?" I don't know.
As to the Theda Bara sandwich, it's minced ham, pimento peppers, sweet pickles, and mayonnaise on white toast. I'd say that's "spicy and peppery" to befit the tempestuous Bara, "the kind that bites a little and says 'more.'" It also sounds pretty good.
Do you think I could substitute the ham with chicken from the Beverly Bayne sandwich? I've never cared much for ham.
Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dedicates an evening to themselves, spending four long hours wining and dining the Hollywood system, elevating celebrity personalities to the ranks of godhood and doing its very best to enforce the ideology that those very personalities are the heart and gears that make it all possible. Of course, the end result is more and more celebrity-driven piles of rubbish like We Bought a Zoo and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never being churned out each year to record profits.
Still, the occasional quality work does get through and the Academy will occasionally recognize it for the honors it deserves. Not always, but the Best Picture winner each year is usually one of the better outputs. Sometimes the Best Picture winner is a truly extraordinary work of art to be esteemed by posterity, as in the cases of Gone With the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1943), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Amadeus (1984). Most are generally decent while only an exceptional few are just downright bad: Cimarron (1931), Cavalcade (1933), and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) are certainly the worst.
This year's 84th Academy Awards are set to happen on Sunday, February 26. We will spend the next two Saturdays -- February 18 and February 25 -- watching nothing but those films that have managed to claim the illustrious Oscar for Best Picture.
We will have 56 of the past 83 winners on hand. The vast majority of them are pretty good and considered classics to some degree or another, so there's relatively little concern about being saddled with a pile of cinematic stinkers. But that's all we're doing. There will not be an Oscar party on the 26th because that's just absolutely awful.
Programming Note for Upcoming Events:
The Criterion Collection Movie Day that we held back in October was considered a successful effort and, with Criterion finding plenty of reasons to have massive sales throughout the year, Charles and I decided that another one is in order. In fact, we decided that maybe it could be a biannual affair, occurring every six months. The second Criterion Collection Movie Day is currently scheduled for Saturday, March 31.
On February 4 we finally held our first movie day in 2012. Dan, Katie, and Charles showed up and the day went well. We managed two movies, an anime episode, and a short walk outside because the weather was nice. We even got to watch one of my favorite movies, so that's an automatic win for me.
Here's what we watched!
Getbackers 1x01: "The Initials are G & B" (2002)
Tired of all the Azumanga Daioh we watch around here, Daniel brought an anime series of his own: Getbackers. I like the basic premise of the series, where two guys named Ginji and Ban (the "G & B" in this pilot episode's title) operate a business dedicated to retrieving lost items through whatever means necessary, no matter how scrupulous or potentially illegal those means may be. This could potentially be interesting, with the duo seeking out a new item every week, getting into different scrapes and binds each time.
Unfortunately, and this is where I had problems with the show, the two leads both have magic superpowers that give them a huge advantage over the mere mortals that they encounter. These powers, which include electrical discharges and psychic trickery, are enough to allow Ginji and Ban to overpower a room full of twenty or so Yazuka without too much work and stop the villainous rogue police officer by simply psychically convincing his brain that he's been beat. It's almost too simple. When the main characters are granted such deus ex machina powers that any threat can be easily overcome with little effort on the part of the screenwriter, then all tension is lost. The big fight at the end of this episode didn't have me convinced that our superpowered duo were in any real danger or that they wouldn't be capable of successfully completing their mission without breaking too much of a sweat.
Granted, this is only the pilot and I have a habit of hating pilot episodes. Maybe the series eventually finds better footing and balances the fantasy elements better because, honestly, it's just the fantasy portions that bother me. If it had simply been about two guys getting back lost things, encumbered with the same weaknesses as me or you, then that could be a great series. But letting them have near-unbeatable magic powers ruins the concept.
My rating:
The Thin Man (1934)
Nearly twenty years ago the little trivia quiz in the newspaper's entertainment section ran a question that was something along the lines of "detective series staring William Powell." I didn't have a clue what that could be and, turning to the answers, found out it was something called "The Thin Man." I'd never heard of it and brushed it off thinking, "now who would even know that?" That must have been a day that I did well on the quiz and felt spurned by this oddball.
I have absolutely no idea why I still remember that. It should have been an ephemeral moment, quickly forgotten as soon as I moved on. Years and years later when my interests began drifting more and more to movie appreciation and later still, when I discovered Turner Classic Movies, I kept coming across that one title: "The Thin Man." IMDB told me it was a detective movie that had a bunch of sequels but it wasn't until I finally saw it that I understood why it was so frequently name dropped. It was a dang good film.
The Thin Man is indeed a whodunit detective story, with a murder mystery at its center and a whole lineup of colorful suspects with questionable alibis and intentions. What makes The Thin Man unique, however, is that it really isn't about the caper. It's not about who's actually guilty and how the murder transpired. The film drops hints along the way, and they're there if you look hard enough, but the viewer isn't encouraged to strain for them. The whole mystery is wrapped up almost matter-of-factly during a dinner scene at the end but that's only because of the need to tie up loose ends.
What makes The Thin Man special are the three individuals at its center: retired detective Nick Charles (William Powell), his enabling wife Nora (Myrna Loy), and their wirehaired terrier Asta (Skippy), who accompanies them everywhere and is a bundle of energy possibly more clever than his masters. Nick and Nora, retired and living happily on her father's inheritance, keep their relationship sexy and fun, teasing playfully, mocking lovingly, and drinking endlessly.
Nick and Nora meander through the film always a little tipsy with a glass in one hand while reaching for another. Never drunk, never sober, always somewhere in between, and rarely where Nick would prefer. It's never anything that affects their ability to function and they rarely overdo it (Nora's ice pack at one point notwithstanding). It's a running gag, character development, and social lubrication all in one. If anything, the drinks help keep Nick and Nora a little more aloof and more willing to hassle, flirt, and do anything but keep us thinking about the ongoing murder investigation.
This is something that's lost in the five sequels that followed. They became more focused on the logistics of the crime and solving the mystery than breaking it up by spending some home time with Nick and Nora. This is what made the original so delightful. Even though throughout the series Nick earnestly insists he's retired and is continuously forced to take the cases, the first film paces itself closer to Nick's desires. Plenty of screen time is spent simply lounging with the Charles, enjoying one another's company with Nick doing his best to ignore the case and Nora doing her best to keep Nick interested in it, their solitude interrupted only when those involved come knocking on their door.
The Thin Man is immensely entertaining, if for Nick and Nora alone. The whodunit is interesting but even the movie knows that the real heart lies with the Charles and their little dog. Nick rightfully treats that whole mystery thing as nothing more than a huge bother. "It's putting me way behind in my drinking."
My rating:
Eastern Promises (2007)
I tend to take David Cronenberg films one at a time, approaching each with a little caution, never quite sure what to expect. That isn't a condemnation against the man or his work, since I've never seen a movie of his that I didn't like. Cronenberg is an excellent filmmaker with a list of pretty decent titles to his credit. Some of his works can be a little ... off kilter, though, to say the least. Videodrome (1983), for example, is a mind-tripping, disgusting, upsetting, whack-to-the-head with a golf club. Gross? Yes. Violent? Yes. Still a good watch? Yes yes. The same can also be said for The Fly (1986), one of my favorite horror flicks. Such is the style of David Cronenberg.
Charles brought this from Netflix, so we didn't have a DVD case to get an appreciation of the film, only the short description on the DVD sleeve. The concern was that this would be one of those times when Cronenberg just threw everything at the viewer and that's not the sort of thing that Katie likes in a film. She wasn'u entirely happy about when we watched The Fly in 2010. Fortunately, this one wound up not being exceptionally violent and had a compelling story to tell.
That story dealt with a branch of the Russian mafia working in London and an English nurse's (Naomi Watts) unintentional run-in with them while investigating the death of a Russian girl. In a way it reminded me of a similar film about immigrants in London, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), which similarly dealt with the seedy underbelly of the immigrant experience. Where Dirty Pretty Things tackled the black-market organ trafficking racket, Eastern Promises focuses more on organized crime and sex trafficking. The premise of both is pretty similar: it's tough out there and people might do awful things to get by, especially when they're strangers in an unwelcoming land. Wherever those conditions present themselves, there will always be a shady market to sweep in and take advantage.
All told, I enjoyed Eastern Promises more than I expected to. The cast was great, with Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl all giving terrific performances. It's just another tally mark on the "Why do I always hesitate with David Cronenberg?" board. Then I remember Videodrome and sob silently.
Another resolution for the new year that I know I'll never keep is to try my bestest to be better at doing write-ups of our movie day viewings. I say this every year and last year I even slimmed down the layout of the write-ups because the previous format took too much effort. Still, I know that my best intentions today will not hold true for the next eleven and a half months. That it's taken me over two weeks to write this one attests to that.
There are two main reasons for me to want to write these things. The first is simply that I don't write enough anymore and I'm getting downright rusty. I had a brain freeze on this single paragraph and had to rewrite from scratch, and even then I'm not sure the wording is entirely sound. It feels wobbly. Ever increasing difficulty in finding the right words is also key to why my writing even dwindled in the first place.
It's also my nature (and academic training) to approach every movie from a historical angle and I'm occasionally prone to getting overwhelmed on some of these write-ups, which can either get a bit lengthy or suffer from difficulties in framing and context (which then lead to undue lengthiness as I try to make sense of it). For example, I've effortlessly typedseveralpages about Metropolis (1927) in the past but fell apart last October trying to slot The Howling (1981) into a historical perspective. Let it be known: I'm not a movie critic, nor do I pretend to be or wish I were. I don't really want to do "reviews," per se. But my background is history, so I try to play by those rules. Personally, I'd rather write about a movie made in 1912 than any from 2012.
The second reason to write these is because some of these movies are also on my personal GREAT BIG LIST that I've been plugging away at since 2010. Gradually writing about them here gives me a sort of head start so that I don't have to face a completely blank slate when the time comes to write about them there. Who knows, maybe I'll have a version of my list -- which selects one movie to represent each year since 1900 -- in a form I'm comfortable enough with posting before 2013 rolls around. Since I just replaced four titles during the past week alone, who knows when I'll ever be satisfied with it.
Well ... unless the draconian SOPA passes, then I can just forget it. This whole post will be in violation of that law and I'll very likely have my website shut down because of it.
With that out of the way, here's the stuff we watched on the last day of 2011.
Little Nemo (1911) & The Flying House (1921)
As I've said adnauseum, our theme for New Year's Eve was a focus on the past century of film, linking 1911 to 2011. There was no reason why we couldn't have gone further, to 1901 (though much more than that and films lack narratives), but I figured that a good one-hundred years was a nice, clean number. There are a number of options for 1911 movies, but I only had two on hand: L'Inferno, an Italian epic based on Dante's depiction of the underworld, and Winsor McCay's much shorter effort of pioneering animation, Little Nemo. In preparing the schedule I felt the McCay short was a better choice to start us out.
By the time he began experimenting with animated films, Winsor McCay (1869-1934) had already long established himself as one of the bastions of the illustrated comic strip, turning out elaborately detailed, multiple-panel strips for weekly publications. His newspaper strips included Little Sammy Sneeze (1904-1906), Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913), and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914, 1924-1927). His eccentric style often poked fun at adults (Sammy Sneeze's room-shattering sneezes always upended the adults' tidy world, Little Nemo's dream world was run by kids, and the rarebit fiends were adults who made bad dining decisions) and included a large share of fantasy elements (Little Nemo and Rarebit Fiend were both set within dream worlds), with a healthy helping of good humor, colorful characters, and offbeat situations.
When it came to animated films, however, McCay certainly was not the first. He had been preceded by J. Stuart Blackton who had created An Enchanted Drawing in 1900, though his "animation" was achieved through camera tricks and a bit of the showman's slight of hand. Several years later, in 1908, Émile Cohl made Fantasmagorie which, though crude, is widely considered to be the first truly animated film. Incidentally, it was Blackton who would go on to found the Vitagraph Studios, hiring McCay to try his hand at animation.
Winsor McCay bets his friends that he can create an animation.
Little Nemo (1911)'s actual title is Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N. Y. Herald, and His Moving Comics, though that lengthy and not terribly concise name has largely been ignored in favor of the actual star of the short: Little Nemo, the young prince of Slumberland, based on McCay's long-running comic strip in the New York Herald. Besides, isn't Little Nemo a much catcher title?
The premise is straightforward: during a series of live-action sequences that open the 12-minute film, McCay places a bet with his "friends" (played by fellow comic artist George McManus [of Bringing Up Father] and film comedian John Bunny) that he can complete an an animation 4,000 frames long in one month. In reality McCay worked on his film over the course of six months, during the free time he had in between working on his syndicated comics and other more pressing commissions. McCay, being very proud of his art and the whole animation process, walks the audience through the comical behind-the-scenes created on a Vitagraph set. Eventually he premiers his creation for his friends and wins the bet.
The highlight of Little Nemo is the final two minutes, where his famous newspaper comic characters come to life. Much of it is Nemo playing with the laws of cartoon physics, stretching and compressing his comic comrades Imp and Flip. Nemo then draws the Princess and the two ride off in a dragon throne. Meanwhile, Flip and Imp's car explodes, launching them upwards only to land on poor Dr. Pill. It's not tremendously complex but it's a start. Little Nemo is not only of extremely important historical value but it is also just downright entertaining, even given how repetitive McCay is about demonstrating the animation process. We have come a long way in the past one-hundred years, and that's saying nothing of this film's massive leap in quality over Cohl's work from just three years prior.
Nemo (center) messes with Imp (left) and Flip (right). The depiction of Imp is something we can take comfort is no longer considered acceptable.
We balanced Little Nemo, which was McCay's first animation, with The Flying House, one of his last. Made ten years later in 1921 as the third of his three shorts based on the Dream of a Rarebit Fiend series, The Flying House is my personal favorite. Between 1911 and 1921 McCay made ten animated shorts before moving on. I'm not sure which of the three Dream of a Rarebit Fiend cartoons that are dated 1921 was the last one that he completed, but of the three I feel The Flying House comes closest to the spirit of his newspaper comic.
The Rarebit Fiend comics and films rely heavily on "dream reality," a deliberately fuzzy interpretation of life with little sense of actual time or place. The main character in The Flying House, a housewife, has to keep going upstairs and downstairs and back upstairs again for no other reason than because dreams frequently force a person to constantly run back and forth. Her husband Bernie attaches a propeller to the house in order to fly it away from thieving mortgage collectors, allowing dream logic to not only justify this as a sensible course of action but also to allow the converted house to work so effectively as a flying machine. McCay was deliberately conscious about ensuring that the dream worlds worked on a very different psychological level than the real, waking world that book-ends the story.
Absolutely still timely after ninety years.
Of course, the real star is the never seen rarebit, always consumed before the action begins. It's a long running crack at the national dish of Wales, which is basically toast soaked in a sauce made of cheese, beer, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. Winsor McCay must not have been a fan given that he made it the great, universal disruptor of lucidity for his characters' night terrors.
In any event, I love The Flying House for its sheer silliness and because I adore the charm of its unironic use of the term "flying machine" to describe the house-turned-aeroplane.
Don't worry, the Up joke has already been made.
Programming note: I considered the inclusion of these two Winsor McCay shorts as a sort of "trial run," to gauge enjoyability and acceptance. A few weeks ago I promised Mayfield that we'd include the whole anthology of McCay shorts in a movie day this summer and I am now satisfied that watching all of them would be just dandy for everyone.
Reflective note: Felicity brought the 1989 animated movie Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland to the February 6, 2010 movie day. It's a modern movie that uses McCay's classic characters and designs. It was pretty okay, though not necessarily with the same characterizations of the original comic. Still, as a fan of Winsor McCay, it was nice to see that he hasn't been completely forgotten.
Project note:Little Nemo is on my big list project, so I felt justified in devoting a fair amount of verbiage to it. I'll try to keep the others briefer since they're not on the list.
My rating: (Little Nemo) My rating: (The Flying House)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
I had put together a pretty decent list of potential movie titles available in both Charles' collection and my own. We narrowed the choices down to a small group of possibilities, which we narrowed down further by process of elimination, eventually settling on Blake Edwards' 1961 classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. Doesn't it seem strange to think that Breakfast at Tiffany's is fifty years old?
Breakfast at Tiffany's is, of course, the credit most equated with Audrey Hepburn. Her depiction of Holly Golightly has become a cultural staple, imagery of that role reaching far beyond the film. Such is the extent of the role's inspiration that its popularity as a Halloween costume needn't even derive from being a fan of the film. I once asked an extraordinarily well-done Holly what she thought of the movie only to learn she'd never seen it. Boy, did I feel awkward.
But why doesn't anyone ever go as Holly in the final scene?
I mean, all you need is a cat and a trench coat. So easy! So chic!
Though I must admit that while I do greatly enjoy this movie, and Audrey Hepburn is simply splendid in it, this has never been one of my favorites of her career. I love Audrey Hepburn but I do prefer My Fair Lady (1964), Sabrina (1954), and Roman Holiday (1953) out of her filmography before landing on Breakfast. Still, this became a career defining role for her (or is it career reaffirming by virtue of posterity?). Is it overrated? Sure, yes, absolutely. Does that hamper its enjoyability? Not a bit.
I can't help but think of the tagline one year later for Stanley Kubrick's tale of pedophilia and taboo based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel: "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" The answer, of course, is simple: "By cutting out everything even potentially objectionable." In Truman Capote novel, Holly was openly bisexual, swore like a sailor, was much more open about her escort career, and was even more flighty and self-indulgent. Clearly none of that would fly for a major Hollywood film in 1961 and so Holly had to be ... oh, dare I say it ... domesticated.
BOOK SPOILERS: The biggest change is that, in the end, Holly has to find the true love and happiness that she had always been lacking, save the cat, and live happily ever after in order to avoid upsetting the target audiences of 1961. The novel, on the other hand, is told almost entirely through flashback by the nameless writer after learning from Mr. Yunioshi that the long missing Holly had last been spotted in Africa. The story ends with Holly never again showing up and the writer noting that he think he saw the cat resting in someone's window. Not quite as cheery as the movie but let's be honest here. At this point even Lolitacan't work with all of the saucy stuff put back in, so Breakfast at Tiffany's simply has to stand on its own two very well planted feet and be loved and accepted, out-of-character finale and all. It accomplishes this with ease.
Though Mr. Yunioshi in the novel was a lot more competent. And not Mickey Rooney. God this is embarrassing.
Still, Hepburn manages to humanize Holly Golightly in a way that Capote didn't (or deliberately wouldn't). Capote imagined her as more of a physical presence of nothing: a spectre who burns through people and places, investing nothing while simultaneously being nothing and everything. (As Holly's in-story agent O. J. Berman puts it, "She's a phony. But she's a real phony.") Capote was reportedly peeved when Hepburn was cast in the movie since he wanted Marilyn Monroe, as ever an image of his personal Holly as anyone. The new happy ending and Hepburn's delightful spin on the vapid Holly, I think, makes watching a movie about this character even tolerable.
In May of 2009 we did an Audrey Hepburn movie day on the occasion of what would have been her eightieth birthday. Sadly, it was a little bit of a bust because the day wasn't working out schedule-wise for others. Maybe it'd be worth considering another go at that sometime?
This was also a movie day rerun. We had previously watched Breakfast at Tiffany's on September 14, 2008. I think it was about time to watch it again.
My rating:
The Maltese Falcon (1931)
It's the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon! Wait, what?
There's no Humphrey Bogart, no "stuff that dreams are made of," no demanding that Joel Cairo like being slapped. The 1941 version of this movie is so freaking fantastic and yet ... we didn't watch it. We went with the lesser known earlier take on the Dashiell Hammett crime story.
The Maltese Falcon had been published as a crime novel in 1930 and the rights were immediately purchased by Warner Bros. and turned out as this pre-Code ditty. It's nothing particularly special. This is one of those movies that no one intends to be a hit. Just a low-budget adaptation of a popular novel with no expectation to win awards, just to sell some tickets and, hopefully, recoup its cheap production costs and rake in a little extra. Indeed, when the award ceremonies finally rolled around, The Maltese Falcon was nominated for ... absolutely nothing. Poor sucker didn't stand a chance.
That's not to say this isn't a decent and watchable detective caper, because it is, and I tried my best to avoid making connections to the better-known version made ten years later. This one works on its own because the base story is just that good. It doesn't rely on Bogie's demanding presence to be told (though it helps), and Charles, Dan, and I all agreed that Ricardo Cortez did a fine job as Sam Spade, approaching the role with a more laid back air. This is a Spade who isn't a hard-boiled, no-nonsense gumshoe, tired of every two-timin' dame tryin' to land him in a cedar box. Cortez is a significantly sassier Spade, more prone to mocking and joking to irritate his way out of an unpleasant situation. I'm not going to say that it doesn't work for the character and Cortez's performance did remind me a bit more of offbeat William Powell as Nick Charles in The Thin Man (1934), also adapted from a Hammett novel, than Bogart ever did.
A sassier Sam Spade. No wonder he made so many enemies.
As noted, this is a pre-Code film, meaning that the Hollywood censoring system hadn't yet been established to begin their puritanical cleansing, ensuring that only decent and acceptable content made it onto celluloid. This means that when Spade refers to falcon enthusiast Caspar Gutman's henchman, Wilmer, as a "gunsel," it means that he's using the term literally. "Gunsel" is Yiddish for "little goose," or "passive partner." It's suggesting a homosexual relationship between Gutman and Wilmer, which was Hammett's intention. In the 1931 version, Spade hammers the point home by referring to Wilmer as Gutman's "boyfriend," leaving little doubt. In 1934 the Hayes Department instituted the Hollywood Code that forbade anything except boring, happy, consensual, heterosexual monogamy, and the term "gunsel" was slyly redefined to mean "hired gunman" by the time Bogart's Spade referred to Wilmer as such in 1941. The filmmakers, obviously, still intended it by its actual meaning.
Dwight Frye as Wilmer, the gunsel. Literally, this time.
Recognize him?
Dwight Frye as Renfield, vampire's manservant in Dracula (1931). Like a gunsel.
It was that very same Hollywood Code that turned around and censored this film to such a degree that Warner Bros. filmed a new version in 1936 based loosely on the Hammett novel, called Satan Met a Lady, this time as a comedy starring Warren William and Bette Davis searching for a jewel-filled ram's horn. Four more years later Warner returned to the original story and produced the now-beloved version with Bogart and Mary Astor, seeking out "the stuff that dreams are made of." It was a hit, being nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but failed to win any. To be fair, Citizen Kane was also nominated for nine awards that year and only managed to pick up the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The Hollywood Code, meanwhile, collapsed during the rise of New Hollywood in the mid 1960s, when filmmakers began challenging the system and weakening the influence of the Hayes Department. The Code finally gave way, in 1968, to the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) film rating system, which allowed a great deal more flexibility in establishing standards for films to meet.
My rating:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
I've long suggested that the more money James Cameron has -- and his budgets only increase with each film he makes -- there is an inverse trend in the quality of his storytelling. His best works, with the tightest stories, were at the beginning of his career, when he had smaller budgets and, as a result, fewer special effects to tell the story with. As time passed, Cameron's budgets grew tenfold and the writing began to suffer when pretty effects began to supplant actual writing and character development.
One need only peruse his filmography to see the startling increase of budget: The Terminator (1984) - $6.5 million; Aliens (1986) - $18.5 million; The Abyss (1989) - $70 million; Terminator 2 (1991) - $102 million; True Lies (1994) - $100 million; Titanic (1997) - $200 million; Avatar (2009) - $237 million. For all the money spent on some of these films, his cheapest and simplest efforts -- namely The Terminator and Aliens -- remain the best written and most developed of his filmography, using effects strategically and only where needed, and using good storytelling to fill in the rest. Because of this, I rate James Cameron on similar ground as George Lucas. As long as they haven't any money they can turn out great things, but once the pocketbook becomes bottomless, green screens begin to substitute for well-written scripts.
Mind you, I am excepting his directorial debut, Piranha II: The Spawning (1981), in which he was reassigned from special effects to director by the studio at the last minute when the initial director proved unsatisfactory. In that instance, Cameron hadn't been free to develop the movie on his own and was more or less coerced into churning out some kind of finished product. I don't think it's fair to count that one.
The truck scene in the first Terminator, the film's biggest effect. They blew up a model semi because blowing up a real truck was too expensive.
The first truck scene in Terminator 2, a lesser effect in the film. Two real trucks were catastrophically destroyed during key action sequences.
I know there's a lot of arguing back and forth about which Terminator film is the best. For the reasons already stated, I feel that the first one is by far the superior of the first two in the series (the only two directed by Cameron). For some reason this has led some to believe that I hate Terminator 2 as a consequence, which is simply not true. I do like T2 quite a lot and fully believe it's an excellent movie. It's simply a weaker film than the first.
One argument I've heard for Terminator 2's greatness regards how much more impressive it looks overall, even going so far as to mock the first film's not-always-impressive effects, limited scope, and longer dialogue scenes. This is a poor argument, given that the first film's meager $6.5 million budget prevented it from having much in the way of special effects, and for a sci-fi/horror flick it's fairly lacking in that department. Instead it relies on having a very good story and well-developed characters to make up for its effects shortfalls. As a result, it makes for an excellent horror film with a sci-fi twist. Terminator 2, on the other hand, has no problem with proclaiming itself a sci-fi/action movie, sporting a budget 15.6 times larger and with all of the explosions and mind-blowing special effects that that genre engenders. The problem is that it is all to the film's distracting detriment.
After all, T2's biggest explosion was what I selected to ring in the new year.
Surely I can't always be so down on Terminator 2, right? I mean, I did deliberately decide to feature the movie for our big midnight moment. Despite its faults, there is still very much to like about it. For starters, The Terminator ended with enough loose ends left hanging that a sequel was entirely possible. Where Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlough) find themselves at the start of T2 is entirely believable and a sensible continuation of where we left off and where T2 ends fits perfectly in line with where it should be expected. The destruction of Cyberdyne Systems, the company that would eventually develop the terminators in the original timeline, was pretty much the only requirement of the sequel, and everything that fits around that moment is mostly played out fairly well. As I said, Terminator 2 is only hampered down by Cameron's growing reliance on special effects to fill in parts of the story.
It's also not the happiest movie ever made, but I won't hold that against it.
When all is said and done, Terminator 2 isn't quite as great as the original, but it's still a pretty darn good movie in its own right. It does a lot right and a few things wrong, either with the story striving to find more and more ways to show off the effects budget or a small handful of scenes that slow down the pace, such as Sarah's weapons storage in Mexico, which seems tacked on between two sequences very important to the plot. At the end of the day I still give it an enthusiastic thumbs up.
Even has a tearjerker ending.
For the record, since I did this for the previous movies here, Terminator 2 is also a movie day rerun. It was part of the Terminator marthon on May 23, 2009.
My rating:
That's that! I finally finished this write-up! I also finally wrote the last entry about New Year's! Time to pass out.
INTRODUCTION Last year I dedicated four days to writing a series of four articles about the previous four years' worth of New Years insignia. In Part I, I gave the reasons for writing these behind-the-scenes styled essays and I don't necessarily feel that entirely needs repeating. What it boils down to is that a lot of work goes into creating these insignia for events that require a fair amount of planning, and I have no shame in milking as much use out of them for as long as I can. That, and I really just enjoy writing these articles that discuss the thought process, show off preliminary designs and early missteps, and allow me to post high-resolution copies of individual elements from the completed design. I have fun making the patches and I have fun discussing them afterward. I only hope that you enjoy reading about them.
Reexamining the New Year's Eve Insignia Part V - 2012: Terminating the New Years
(First) Little Nemo's actual title isn't very descriptive and is largely ignored (Second) The Flying House's title, part of McCay's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend series (Third) Breakfast at Tiffany's pleasant title screen, with Audrey suffering a pastry (Fourth) The Maltese Falcon's title card, emphasizing Dashiell Hammett's book
(Left) Terminator 2's aggressive titles, slamming shut and on fire (Right) The midnight moment: Cyberdyne Systems goes BOOOOM!
The rest of the night went better than I could have hoped. The movies were all excellent and well enjoyed, Terminator 2 was started at 10:16:45 PM, and the Cyberdyne explosion lined up exactly with the stroke of midnight, and 2012 rang in with a lot of promise and potential. Good times!
And that's that! I hope that everybody had a terrific 2011 and may 2012 be even better.
Happy 2012 Last night's rushed together will-it-or-won't-it-happen New Year's marathon went just swimmingly, with the explosion of Cyberdyne in Terminator 2 lining up exactly on the dot with midnight. Last year's timing wound up way off and all the pre-planning in the world doesn't do much good if midnight comes and the movie doesn't sync up as intended. This year was on-the-second perfect. I was very pleased.
I'll have more to say later because there's graphics and more typing than I want to do right now. In the meanwhile, here's a set of five collages for each year's respective midnight moment:
They all link to full-sized versions.
Regarding last night, I want to do a write-up on the actual event and the movies we watched, with photos and descriptions. There will also be an article about designing the Terminating the New Years insignia, like the ones I wrote last January.
Resolution: come up with more stuff to write in this journal. I was extremely bad at that last year.
I should also try to draw more. Most of the hand drawn artwork that I turned out in 2011 wound up being rough concept sketches for event insignia that I later realized in Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely happy with everything that I did digitally, but the pen and paper method was sorely lacking.
Millions will watch Dick Clark drop a ball on New York
Instead, we'll be watching Miles Dyson save the future
For the pasttwo New Years, we've focused on highlighting the works of late actors, delving into their filmographies and celebrating the careers that they left behind. This year we're taking that concept one step further by exploring cinematic history dating back from the last moments of 2011.
Our movie selections will span a period of one-hundred years, dating back to a Winsor McCay animated short from 1911 and touching off on films dated by equidistant decades from there. In other words, if the film's anniversary is a multiple of ten from 2011, it's a potential candidate.
To ring in the New Year I've chosen a classic from twenty years ago, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day from 1991. There were several reasons for picking this one. First, it's a great movie (though I personally prefer the first Terminator). Second, it's one I think we've all seen and thereby doesn't require our rapt attention as midnight nears. Third, I'm allowing that T2 plays into that whole "2012 apocalypse" meme that people clamor about so much. Fourth, the time travel theme relates to our decades of film. Fifth, as far as midnight moments go, this year's will be pretty big.
Here's the base schedule if you're interested in showing up:
NEW YEARS 2012 MOVIE SCHEDULE Friday, December 31, 2011 - Saturday, January 1, 2012
Time:
Event:
Length:
4:30:00 – 4:42:28 PM
Little Nemo
0h 12m 33s
4:42:28 – 4:55:01 PM
The Flying House
0h 12m 28s
4:55:01 – 5:00:00 PM
Open time
0h 04m 59s
5:00:00 – 6:54:42 PM
Breakfast at Tiffany's
1h 54m 42s
6:54:42 – 7:20:00 PM
Open time
0h 25m 18s
7:20:00 – 8:38:25 PM
The Maltese Falcon
1h 18m 25s
8:38:25 – 10:01:16 PM
Open time
1h 22m 51s
10:16:45 – 12:33:12 AM
Terminator 2
2h 16m 27s
Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1911) 12 min.
The Flying House (Winsor McCay, 1921) 12 min.
Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961) 114 min.
Maltese Falcon (Roy Del Ruth, 1931) 78 min.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) 136 min.
The one thing I have to stress is that this won't be a booze-pounding, raucous affair. It will be a drier, quieter, robopocalypse-ier New Years than the other parties out there.
Angela Melzak was excited about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 6x07 "Rascals," one which I feel just the opposite about. This was going to be a short and cheeky reply to her Facebook but instead grew to the point where I felt weird about posting such a long diatribe. Rather than have it go to waste I'll just toss it here instead, fleshing things out a little more now that I'm not self-conscious about space. I'll even add pictures.
* * * * *
The Premise: Captain Picard, Ensign Ro, Guinan, and Keiko O'Brien are turned into kids by a transporter accident shortly before three rogue Ferengi manage to take over the Enterprise. The kids save the day.
This episode hurts me severely, but here's ten things I have learned just now about "Rascals," after reading Trekcore's behind the scenes page.
1) This episode was originally conceived for Season Five but didn't make it into the final schedule. They had been wanting to tell this exact story for the better part of a year.
They saved this one, it was that important.
2) Leonard Nimoy's son could have gone to law school but chose to direct this episode instead.
Good choice, Adam Nimoy.
3) Writer and executive producer Jeri Taylor's rationale for using the Ferengi: "Would you believe four little kids could retake [the ship] from the Cardassians?" The writers knew very well that of any of the established alien species, whether Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans, or the happy-go-lucky Bolians, that each of them would shoot-to-kill when attempting to hijack a Federation ship.
These guys would leave no survivors.
This boarding party? They will mess you up.
These two alone might not succeed but there'd be a lot of casualties.
The same with this guy.
4) Knowing this, they deliberately picked the most mentally-challenged species Star Trek has ever produced, simply because that's the only way the story could proceed. The antagonists had to be certified idiots so they selected the only aliens they felt could be bested by four twelve-year-olds, neverminding the fact that such a trio would never have managed to hijack a starship in the first place, if they didn't choke on their own spit first.
The faces of fear.
5) There are over a thousand people on a Galaxy class starship, meaning that a boarding party of three individuals is really no threat at all. It also doesn't matter that the Ferengi somehow managed to get their hands on a pair of Klingon ships. Riker! You have the strategic advantage! They're probably too stupid to use the Bird-of-Preys properly. Riker should be arrested for criminal negligence in letting this go down.
Turn in your pips, Will. Your career is finished after this.
Riker, tell the 990 other people on the ship about this!
They clearly have the resources to handle these situations.
Stock footage of Klingons being effective doesn't mean Ferengi are.
6) And really, there's no reason why the "crew becomes kids" story and the "aliens hijack the ship" story had to be the same episode. They neutered both ideas by merging them. Both stories should have been separate episodes. Well ... the second should have been, anyhow. And I don't mean when the empty-save-Picard Enterprise was nearly hijacked eleven episodes later in "Starship Mine."
Star Trek: Voyager, despite its faults, actually handled the "aliens hijack the ship" story fairly effectively in the second season cliffhanger, "Basics." In a slight twist, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did "aliens hijack the station" with the season five finale, "Call to Arms." Years later, Star Trek: Enterprise botched this theme by once again using the Ferengi in the ridiculous first season episode, "Acquisition." Kirk's Enterprise in the Original Series was susceptible to being hijacked, as in "Space Seed," "And the Children Shall Lead," "The Way to Eden," and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
He doesn't understand this.
7) In any event, it doesn't matter that Picard, Ro, Guinan, and Keiko turned into kids since they still maintained the full knowledge of their decades of experience. It doesn't appreciably hamper their abilities other than being unable to reach the top shelf, but neither can the Bynars, the Evora, or any number of height-deprived Federation members.
Picard knows full well that he's normally bald.
You never saw Balok complaining, Keiko.
8) This is the kind of story I would expect from Star Trek: Voyager, not The Next Generation. Voyager, the series that turned two characters into salamanders after crossing the "Warp 10 threshold." Yet Voyager never turned anyone into a kid. I think.
Granted, the second season Voyager episode "Innocence" included a species that aged backwards, Benjamin Button style, but that's a slightly different case than what we had in "Rascals."
God dang it, Voyager.
9) Jeri Taylor thought Ro could be left as a kid, suggesting that "where else but on Star Trek could you do something like that?" Then they didn't do it because "it seemed too drastic for us, and we were sort of squelched on that." So ... I guess that Star Trek isn't where you could do something like that after all, because Star Trek never does things like that. As much as I love Star Trek, it's a series that never cripples characters or otherwise changes them in a drastic way that would affect their future appearances on the show. Everything is always fixed by the next episode. Select episodes of Deep Space Nine and Riker's beard notwithstanding.
Star Trek has never had the guts to stick with something like this.
But man, does he love being William Riker.
10) Isis Jones repeated her childhood vision of Whoopi Goldberg in the 1992 film Sister Act.
In October 2007 Mr. Charles Meyer sent me a telegram proposing a post-thanksgiving movie day. His message is as follows:
I BELIEVE THAT THE NATIVE AMERICANS, AS A TRIBUTE TO THE BOUNTIFUL HARVEST, OFTEN OFFERED UP SACRIFICES TO THEIR DINOSAUR OVERLORDS THAT WERE GENETICALLY MODIFIED AND PLACED IN SOME SORT OF PARK AND SUBJECTED TO THE MAD RAVINGS OF A CHAOS THEORIST -STOP-
I BELIEVE IT WOULD BE IN GOOD TASTE TO BASE OUR WATCHINGS ON THEIR TRADITIONS -STOP-
So yea, it has been decreed (and yea it is good) that, beginning in 2007, during the weekend after that of Thanksgiving a complete Jurassic Park marathon will be held. This year it will be on Saturday, November 26 and will start at 5:00 PM.
Depending on remaining time and interest after the JP movies we may, in proper Turkey Day fashion, wrap up the evening with terribly bad movies. This may be the most appropriate course of action.
Through the end of the year As winter fast approaches, it's time for me to list the schedule for the rest of 2011. Here are the dates of the annual events that are guaranteed to happen every year. Every Saturday that isn't part of this list is a penciled-in random movie day.
Saturday, October 22: Pre-Halloween Horror Film Day (Details) Saturday, November 26: Jurassic Park Six-Foot Turkey Day (Details) Saturday, December 17: Holiday Movie Day (Details) Saturday, December 31: New Year's Eve (Details)
There will be no movie day on Saturday, October 8. Saturday, October 29 will likely be filled by Halloween parties and Saturday, December 24 is Christmas Eve. That leaves six unscheduled Saturdays free up to the end of the year: 10/15, 11/5, 11/12, 11/19, 12/3, and 12/10.
EDIT-----Updated Sunday, January 1, 2012 This post has been used as the "official calendar," so I'm going to keep it up to date until the New Year. These are the proposed upcoming events, unique to the 2011 schedule:
Saturday, November 12: Nigel Tufnel Day +1 (Details) Saturday, November 19: No movie day Saturday, December 3: No movie day Saturday, December 10: No movie day
Criterion Collection Movie Day Last month, on September 8, The Criterion Collection held an impromptu 50% off sale on all DVDs and Blu-Rays to commemorate reaching 75,000 fans on Facebook. For 75,000 seconds, their entire inventory was basically two-for-one. Of course we took advantage. Charles, Dan, and I snagged some fine new titles for ourselves.
A Criterion Collection Movie Day was proposed in the wake of the sale, to watch not only the new discs that we bought but our existing films as well. So that's what this is: only movies that have the Criterion branding and distribution.
The Criterion Collection is, in their words, "dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film." The point being that the titles they put out, though often times obscure or esoteric, more often than not tend to be excellent and essential films that rarely ever disappoint. Criterion aims for quality in presentation and charge every cent for it.
This is the plan for tomorrow, Saturday, October 1 starting at 3:00 PM.
If you have any Criterion releases to bring, bring them all. Don't worry about whether or not we've ever watched them before.
Includes all titles from the Criterion Collection, plus all Eclipse, Essential Art House, and Janus Films releases.
The 30 Day Movie Challenge Archive It's been a little over two months since I wrapped up the 30 Day Movie Challenge, a month-long effort on Facebook to post a movie each day to correspond with a pre-assigned list of criteria. In other words, if one day specified "favorite horror movie," then I had to post my favorite (or most recommended) horror movie.
Easy enough, though the challenge lay not only in coming up with thirty films to meet every category, with no repeats, but to also maintain the motivation to do this every day for a month. I personally had my doubts, figuring that I'd lose steam and start forgetting after about a week. Much to my surprise I completed the whole thing between June 1 and June 30.
Because I put a lot of effort into brainstorming a list of movies in advance, as well as writing short (less than 240 characters, per the old Facebook restrictions) explanations of my rationale, I'm saving all of the entries here, lest they become inexorably buried on Facebook to never be seen again. In archiving these entries here on LiveJournal I went and added a word here and a word there in order to better flesh out some sentences shortened by character limits.
Paul's apartment Just a little something something from the morning of March 30. Paul posted a photo of his apartment on Facebook with the comment, "cheap surround sound solution."
The shape of the wires gave me an idea.
The eyes and nose were drawn in Illustrator while everything else was done in Photoshop.
The June 4 movie day May has passed and, once again, I totally flaked out when it came to doing movie day write-ups. As always, there is the master list for all of the titles that we watched. Last night was our first movie day in June. This is what we did.
At 4:00 Felicity and her new bee-eff, a different Josh (though I still claim seniority to the name), arrived and set off the customary bickering and hawing over what to watch. This lasted until I sprung a surprise on Felicity: the DVD of Captain Blood, which had been brought up a week prior and swiftly purchased for this weekend. Paul arrived about fifteen minutes in, which necessitated the need for a quick recap which was okay, since very little had happened by that point.
Captain Blood (1935)
Last week we watched the marvelous Technicolor classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1935), during which Felicity fell to pieces and began fawning over Errol Flynn. Perusing the Flynn trailer gallery in the disc's special features, we watched the preview for his first U.S. picture, Captain Blood, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. That night, after everyone left, I found myself ordering that movie from Amazon.
All in all, Captain Blood was well-made and enjoyable enough, even if I thought its narrative flow felt a bit like chapters in a book where we begin with the protagonist in one situation, then move on to another, and then another, finally arriving at the climax in a generally stair-step fashion. The only fault with this is that during each "chapter" it might not be entirely clear where the film is intending to go next. This causes the narrative to imply that the movie's actual story is related more directly to the immediate events on screen rather than the bigger picture that our characters are working toward. In spite of that, I felt Captain Blood was a good and fun adventure romp made all the more delightful by its leads, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, both of whom were unknowns with no real experience playing leading roles at the time.
My rating:
At this point we entered an aimless interim period characterized by fussing over what to watch next and attempts to contact Laura (who, as I found out later, was at the one point of her day were she was unavailable, right when we were trying to get ahold of her). Felicity and other Josh took this moment to head out, because they are boring people who don't know from fun. Paul and I voted amongst the two of us to grab some grub at Taco Bell, passing Laura, who was driving to my house just as we were leaving. So, out of the kindness of our hearts, we swung back to get her and then our Taco Bell adventure was free to begin.
Paul tried the Doritos taco, which is basically a taco in a shell made out of Doritos. He gave it a thumbs-up of approval but I remain hesitant. Doritos are fine and all, but I cannot imagine a situation where I would need them to encase a taco.
Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943)
Our tummies full, we returned for another movie. But first, some cartoons from World War II, stemmed from a brief discussion about how awful and racist some Loony Tunes and (especially) Popeye shorts got. We watched a pair on YouTube through Paul's phone and I tossed in Yankee Doodle Daffy, which came as an extra on the Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) DVD. No stereotyped Asians here. It was instead a comical musical review of popular songs of the day as Daffy Duck tormented Porky Pig. Not the best that Looney Tunes had to offer but enjoyable enough.
My rating:
Alien (1979)
Eleven months ago we organized an Alien & Predator Marathon, something we held on July 24 and July 31, 2010. Our results were adequate: we watched the first three Alien and both Predator films. We ran out of time and didn't get to Alien Resurrection (1997) or either Alien vs. Predator (2004 & 2007), meaning that we skipped the bad ones, which seemed to be just fine with everyone. Still, there were some goals that we hadn't reached.
The first was that the inspiration to have another Alien & Predator Marathon (we'd had them previously in 2004 and 2006) had stemmed from a conversation with Paul, who said he hadn't seen any of 'em yet. Unfortunately, Paul became unavailable on the day we did the Alien films, so he wound up missing them, though he did make it a week later for the two Predators.
Second, our attendance otherwise was a bit low, coming at a time when it seemed like everyone was having scheduling issues. Even then, those who made it had all seen the movies before so, with the exception of Paul on the 31st, there was nobody seeing them for the first time, leaving only us fan-core nerds to view them again. Which really wasn't an actual problem because we're all the sort of people who watch them fairly regularly anyhow.
That said, it came to our attention yesterday that Laura also hadn't seen any of the series. So here's me with Paul and Laura, the two who had missed out last year. Paul had seen Alien in the meanwhile but could go to watch it again. We put in the first film and I was pleased that they both walked away with positive impressions. Plus, Alien introduces Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, a strong female character. I've been trying to provide more of these for Laura ever since her disapproval last year of Fay Wray in King Kong (1933).
In hindsight, maybe the Alien and Predator franchises have grown too large for full-blown marathons (since two films, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) and Predators (2010) have been added since our last completed marathon in '06). Perhaps it's a better idea to break up watching them a little bit. I'll be keeping these movies on a back burner for Paul and Laura, even the bad ones because they're still nonetheless parts of the series. In any event, next up is Aliens (1986). I think they will enjoy it.
My rating:
One last thing, and this is total geekery right here. It involves a coffee grinder and a bunch of pictures that I'll stick behind a cut.
First movie day in May So we were actually been having fairly regularly movie days throughout the month of April that I wasn't writing about. Well no, that's not entirely true. I really spent most of April with the LiveJournal queue open and a partially written series of movie writeups taking shape within it. Unfortunately for progress, I was never able to marshal up the inspiration to get anywhere with them and, as each Saturday passed, I fell another week behind and got swamped by a steadily-growing entry that I began to get lost in. I've saved a copy to work on when I'm more in the mind for it, because we did manage to watch some good stuff. Anybody who is impatient can check the 2011 master list for the titles.
Now we're starting over in the merry merry month of May and I'm determined to set off on the right foot from day one eight. So here's how today went.
We didn't begin until 6:00 and started out with Katie and Dan, fussing over what to watch. We eventually decided on Fargo (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996).
Fargo (1996)
Fargo is one of my favorite movies and it's the only one that I wrap a tradition around. Every year on Christmas Eve, after I've finished my cleaning, wrapped gifts, taken a late shower, and finalized every conceivable item on my x-mas to-do list, I settle down and watch Fargo. I don't know how this began outside of in 2004 I decided to watch a movie, picked this one, remembered it a year later, and watched it again. So the past seven Christmas Eves have ended with me snuggled up to the Coen brothers' delightful tale of desperation and murder just before bed.
I used to accompany this movie with the Marx Brothers classic, Duck Soup (dir. Leo McCarey, 1933), but began to drop that one due to the nights running a bit later than I desired. In 2007 Shawn and Avasa were in town and set back my work a bit, meaning that once I was finally completely wrapped up with everything, I wasn't even starting Fargo until nearly three in the morning. Tradition dictated that I suck it up and go with less sleep that night.
So that's why I've never brought Fargo to movie days. Not because I think I can only watch it in the wee morning hours of December 25 but because I always watch it in the wee morning hours of December 25. In other words, because I've always just watched it in the fairly recent past. Today when Katie asked about it though, I was more than happy to view it again. I've no qualms about watching it at any time during the rest of the year.
Dan had seen it but Katie had not. I was a little despondent when Katie said, about twenty-five minutes in, that she didn't think she was going to like the movie based on the violence and negative personalities. To be fair, the first half hour maybe doesn't give the best impression of what's to come. After all, Francis McDormand doesn't even make her entrance until thirty-four minutes in as the eternally-likable police chief, Marge Gunderson. Once McDormand announced that she thought she was gonna barf, I was pleased to see Katie's feelings change.
Too bad for Paul though, as he walked in a half-hour in and hadn't seen the movie either. We paused and Katie did a far better job recapping the story thus far than I would have (as I am terrible at trying to tell stories because I tend to stammer and backtrack and just make a mess). We got Paul up to speed on what he missed, all of which served as perhaps a lengthy prologue to the McDormand portion of the film.
In the end, everyone enjoyed the movie, to my everlasting joy. Now it's just another seven and a half months or so until I watch it again. That's right, you now have only 231 days 'till Christmas!
My rating:
* * * * *
Dan and Katie left after Fargo ended and we never heard from Charles. Paul stuck around for a bit and we chit-chatted about space shuttles, subway systems, and spiders before finally calling it a night.
So May dawns. We might have only watched one movie tonight but next week could potentially be more productive. Only time will tell.
The death of bin Laden with Michael Moore We're all well aware of what happened Sunday, when the president announced that Osama bin Laden had finally been captured and taken out. The world rejoiced and I got into arguments with people who were disappointed that I wasn't celebrating as loudly as I could. "I can find nothing to celebrate," I wrote on Facebook. "I can derive no pleasure from war and slaughter. No effort of my happiness will ever be derived from humans killing humans, no matter how 'right' it may be."
Then I sat down to write out, in full right here on LiveJournal, my opinions on the matter. That yes, I was happy that bin Laden was through, and that it is a good thing overall, but that I had concerns over how important of a target he really was, whether our nine years in Afghanistan were spent solely on finding him, what I thought it said about us celebrating and singing in the streets, and why I think releasing the photos would only satiate the most ghoulish part of our country. Mostly, that the reaction to his death shook me into thinking, "is this what we are as a society?" It was that, most of all, that didn't seem right.
The lengthy write-up wound up being abandoned after several paragraphs because I felt it was starting to ramble. Also because I was starting to make myself sick in the stomach from investing so much energy into arguing a matter of standards. So that journal post is not on its way and I've moved on with matters.
That is, until just this afternoon, when Michael Moore wrote a stream of thoughts on his Twitter account that I thought summed up my feelings well. Here is what Moore wrote.
It's not that OBL "deserved" a trial. WE deserved it. WE need to return to what we say we are: a nation of laws made by free people.
The #1 comment I've heard since being on CNN last night: "Trials are a waste of time." #2: "A trial for OBL might create more terrorism."
I understand the sentiment because we all want OBL gone. But these statements are an admission that our great American Experiment is dead.
The terrorists win when we are willing to scrap our system of justice and do it their way: "Just kill 'em!"
The terrorists win when we have turned into a nation of wusses who are afraid to hold a trial because "they might hurt us!"
The terrorists win when we elevate them to nation status and call it a "war" and call them "the enemy."
They are a crime syndicate using religion as a guise. They seek power through fear. Like the mob. They're not an army--they're criminals.
And like the worst, most despicable criminals, they should b hunted down & brought 2 justice. We r NOT them. We r civilized. We hold trials.
And, I'm sorry: Ground Zero is a graveyard of heroes and victims. It is not a place to hold a party, spray champaign, & shout "USA! USA!"
RobertE.Lee & JeffersonDavis led a war that cost 600K lives. I didn't see them get double-tapped. In fact, whole states have holidays 4 them
I'm just saying, I want my America back. I dunno, maybe it never was. We are a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves.
I guess I & lots of others thought we could do better, b better, b that shining light 4 others. Now we just let generals & bankers roam free.
On Monday night I wrote this in a private message to a friend:
"Which brings me to the proper recourse. Do I think that it was absolutely the best course of action to shoot him in the head during a raid? No. I do not. In my perfect puppy dog and lollipop world, he would be in custody, to be tried for his crimes and to be interrogated for information. Granted, I completely understand that, given the circumstances of his capture, taking him alive was a far from likely possibility."
In other words, precisely what Moore tweeted today. "We are NOT them. We are civilized. We hold trials."
I worry that we have lost this most crucial element.
At 5:82 PM EDT (4:18 AM local time) last night, Soyuz TMA-21 lifted off from Pad 1 ("Gagarin's Start") at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying three more crewmembers to the International Space Station. When the spacecraft docks tomorrow it will bring Expedition 27 up to its full compliment of six.
Commanding the Soyuz is Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyayev (Samo-kuty-ayev), who is making his first trip to Earth orbit. The same holds true for cosmonaut Andrei Borisenko, sitting to Samokutyayev's left during launch. The third crewmember is American astronaut Ron Garan, making a second jaunt to space after STS-124Discovery in May 2008.
They will be joining fellow station crewmembers Dmitri Kondratiyev, Cady Coleman, and Paolo Nespoli, who had launched in December. Kondratyiev, Coleman, and Nespoli are due to remain aboard until May 19, when Samokutyayev, Borisenko, and Garan will transfer to Expedition 28 with Borisenko assuming command of the ISS.
This launch comes just a day and a week before the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Vostok 1, which carried Yuri Gagarin as the first human to achieve Earth orbit on April 12, 1961. Russia is rightly proud of Gagarin's achievement, endowing upon him an almost beatific cult status. His office has been preserved at Star City and is visited by crews who sign a guestbook on his desk. Each Soyuz crew lays flowers at his grave along the Kremlin wall in the weeks before their flight. On the day of launch, the crews go through a number of traditions derived directly from Gagarin's actions fifty years ago including presenting themselves to the Roskosmos administrator to declare themselves ready to launch and taking a moment to pee on the tires of the crew bus on the way to the launch site.
In honor of Gagarin's first flight, every April 12 is celebrated around the world as Yuri's Night. This year Gagarin's anniversary is being showcased right in the forefront by Roskosmos and the station crews. In addition to bearing an image of Gagarin on this flight's mission patch, the Soyuz-R rocket TMA-21 launched upon also featured Gagarin's face on its fuselage along with his proclamation, "Поехали!" ("Poehali!") -- "Let's Go!" TMA-21 is even flying under the callsign "Gagarin," and the upcoming Expedition 28 patch makes reference to both Gagarin and his American counterpart, Alan Shephard, who launched 24 days later on May 5. As far as the spaceflight community is concerned, this anniversary is a big deal.
Moving on, there's also the launch video:
Continuing a tradition set by Soyuz TMA-14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 01M, and 20, the mission patch for Soyuz TMA-21 shares links with artwork painted by children. This time the rocket drawing on the patch was derived from artwork created by Marciel Santos Kayle from French Guinea, in South America. This is the location of the new Soyuz launch site, operated by ESA, that will begin operations this autumn. The patch was realized by Erik van der Hoorn of Spacepatches.nl, combining Kayle's rocket and a caricature of Gagarin, with the silhouette of Vostok 1 forming the design's overall base.
done!
hungry
excited
okay
relieved
lethargic
analytical
awake
giddy
amused
tired
blank
