I turned on HBO Max for a double feature on Friday. 1st up was Mad Max Rury Road, awesome as usual, fast-paced kinetic energy, you all know the drill.
2nd was a bizarre John Cusack and Julia Roberts movie called America’s Sweethearts with which totally sucked, was completely banal, came out in 2001, and I have 0 memory of it, yet it still made a cool $138 million dollars at the Box office.
Hollywood went through this weird thing where they tried to make rather ordinary looking guys into sexually charged leading men. Remember, Bill Murray was supposed to be the hot guy in Ghostbusters. I mean what the h*** were they thinking? Billy Crystal (also in this movie, as is Stanley Tucci) is someone that Meg Ryan wants to boink? Seriously?
Anyway, Cusack is better looking than those two, but as a partner for both Catherine Zeta Jones and Julia Roberts? Not buying.
I find all three of those men sexy. Sexier than most of the ones I’m supposed to find sexy. Any of the super hero actors, for example. Big boring beefcakes.
Re-watched Galaxy Quest since I wanted something stupid and fun. It still delivers.
Great cast. (Note that Rainn Wilson is one of the more prominent Thermians but appears way down in the credits.) I miss Rickman.
Too bad the “joke” about Tony Shaloub playing an Asian isn’t more obvious. “Kwan isn’t even my real name.” And they cut out the reason why he has the munchies all the time.
I didn’t even realize this was a joke. So was he supposed to be high? I know Tony Shaloub played it like he was high, but was there cut content indicating this?
A few moments here or there, but no recommendation from me. Too dull for most of it. A woman goes to what is supposed to be a solitary retreat to recover from a health problem. A lot of people end up being there, she learns witches were previously burned there, she does some stuff supernaturally related to the witches. It was less interesting than my description even makes it sound.
If you want to see a good version of The Lost World, look up the silent version from 1925. That film had the blessing of Doyle himself. The original film was lost ages ago when they planned to do a remake in the 1930s, but didn’t. All that remained was a butchered version only about 60% of the full length. In the past twenty years there have been two restorations that bring the film back to about 95% of its total length, created by scrounging for the missing bits in film archives all over the world. One is the Eastman House version (which, oddly enough, appears as an “extra” on the DVD of the 1960 version). The other was marketed separately. Critics seem to prefer the Eastman House version, but I very definitely prefer the other.
As part of my 3-D film festival, I watched The Bubble. This is a 1966 science fiction film by Arch Oboler, who was much better known for doing the radio show Lights Out! As with a lot of Oboloer’s work, this is a Twilight Zone-esque piece about a couple and a pilot who fly through a storm and land on the road in a weird town where everyone acts like automatons. The baby is delivered with no complications, but no one will tell them where they are, and they all repetitively go through the same motions and mostly say the same things. The doctor is the least mechanical, but even he barely unbends. To top it all off, they find when they try to drive out of town that the town is enclosed in an invisible solid unbreakable dome.
I have absolutely no doubt that this inspired the setup for Stephen King’s Under the Dome. King knew about Oboler (he’s mentioned in Danse Macabre), and he’s known for swiping situations from other works and then running in his own direction with it.
This film was re-released around 1976, when there was a mini-revival of 3D films (that’s when I saw House of Wax), under the revamped title The Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. I thought I saw it at that time, but most of this film wasn’t familiar. Maybe I just caught the end before House of Wax started. In any event, the original film was in color, and you used polarized glasses to watch it. The DVD I have is black and white with anaglyphic (red and blue) glasses. They didn’t have to do that – Some color films work pretty well in anaglyphic (like the version of Inferno I recently watched).
Arch Oboler is one of the giants. His stuff is well worth listening to, or watching (He did the 1951 movie Five, one of the first post-apocalyptic films). He’s the guy responsible for the infamous radio play about the chicken heart that took over the world.
I watched the original Star War and Rogue One with the kids. They’ve seen the former before, but they were too young when the latter came out. The original is well appreciated, although it’s definitely a movie of a different time. Much slower pacing then current films, but the story is engaging enough.
Rogue One holds up as well. Of course, the whole thing of developing characters, only to kill them, is rather tough. Kids figured it out.
We’ve been pulling out some old stuff in the Amazon Prime library when we have nothing else to watch. It’s been interesting.
First, we watched “The Angry Red Planet,” made in 1959. Somehow, I never saw this when I was a kid. The story’s not bad, and the actors are all pretty good, given the awful dialog they’re forced to recite. It almost plays like a parody of bad sci-fi movies. This one really deserves the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, if it hasn’t received it already.
The “Poe-inspired” movies Roger Corman cranked out for A-I-P are always a treat, so we watched 1961’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Richard Matheson, no slouch in the world of sci-fi/fantasy, penned the screenplay. However, except for Vincent Price, the acting is perfectly awful. And it’s pretty boring until the last 20 minutes or so, when Price’s character flips his lid and starts torturing people. (Nobody played batshit crazy better than Vincent Price.) It’s still fun to watch, though some of Corman’s other “Poe” movies are better, most notably “Masque of the Red Death.” I still can’t believe they showed those movies to kids my age at Saturday afternoon matinees back in the day.
We’d seen 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead” a couple of times before, but I never can remember what happens in it, so we watched it again. It’s great fun if you’re inclined to liking zombie comedies. And it seems like anyone and everyone who was a steadily working British actor/actress at the time was in it, if just a small part with no lines. (“Hey, there’s that woman from Downton Abbey, and there’s Bilbo Baggins!”) Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for it.
Angry Red Planet deserves some attention for several reasons:
1.) It was coproduced by the son-in-law of the leader of The Three Stooges, Norman Maurer. Maurer hooked up with the stooges when he was the comic book artist who drew them in the early 1950s. He married Moe’s daughter, and ended up directing some of their later flicks. He also produced this non-Stooge film. (Maurer had a clear interest in science fiction.)
2.) It was filmed in Cinemagic, which seems to be a heavily solarized image printed on orange film stock. This results in really high contrast in places and actual reversed contrast (white for black) in others, giving the whole thing an eerie appearance. They only used this for the scenes set on Mars, but it gives you a very different “feel” for the Mars scenes. They also animated a lot of theseThey refused to show these scenes during the “coming attractions” trailers – you had to see the movie.
Here’s a sample:
The problem they have at the end – where part of the Giant Space Amoeba is eating the arm of the Handsome Young Hero – is actually solved in an intelligent and scientific way. They place a sample tissue near the arm , then apply small voltage shocks to the amoeba to make the arm a hostile environment. The Amoeba migrates over to the slab of bacon, or whatever they put there as bait.
Bonus points – the person who came up with the solution is the female member of the team. take THAT, Sigourney Weaver!
Yes, the brainy-but-beautiful woman scientist is played credibly by Naura Hayden, and having her solve the creeping amoeba puzzle was quite ahead of its time. Until we get to that point, however, she’s treated and spoken to in ways that are so sexist it makes your skin crawl. And just about everyone gives off the impression that they’d like to get into her…space suit. Not un-typical for the time, though.
As I said, the actors are all pretty good. Jack Kruschen (the guy-from-Brooklyn character) was nominated for an Academy Award the next year for “The Apartment,” and old steady Les Tremayne played the scientist-with-a-goatee-and-a-pipe with great credibility. Gerald Mohr was the weakest of the group, but OK. They were all much better actors than the script they were given.
The CineMagic effects were actually pretty imaginative and helped disguise their clunkiness. I kept thinking that this could actually make a pretty good movie today, with better dialog and special effects. Maybe someone already has and I’ve missed it.
Didn’t know there was a Stooges connection there, an interesting tidbit.
Speaking of Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, I watched Hound of the Baskervilles on Turner Classic the other day. This is the version with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
Hated it. Found the acting hammy, bad story, random nonsense mostly. Sherlock Holmes was an annoying wanker.
I Love Melvin (1953) with Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor.
Debbie Reynolds performs a musical number in a football costume. No, not dressed as a football player - she’s the FOOTBALL and even gets kicked through the goal posts.
Donald O’Connor does a tap dance on roller skates.
