Dork Hero: Run Run Shaw

Along with his brother Runme, Run Run Shaw and Shaw Brothers Studio were largely responsible for making Martial Arts movies a thing.  He died in January of this year at the age of 106 (!!!).  He was even knighted by the Queen of England, for crying out loud.  Zounds.

-Matt

A Fistful of Influence! (Matt’s Picks)

    OK, everything Brad said in his post on this same subject.  These aren’t necessarily my favorite films, but these are five of the films that shaped who I am as a movie viewer.  Movies have been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember, becoming all the more so when we got a spankin’ new VCR and color TV in the mid 80s.  These movies represent a few important street signs on the road map of my life in film.

5.  Star Wars:  Growing up in the 80s, Star Wars and the renaissance of genre films that followed in its wake was like a warm blanket I wrapped myself in.  The toys, the bed sheets, the Underoos, sure.  But the movies themselves.  To a lonely kid who spent much of his time inside with a TV, the Star Wars films were trusted friends.  And Star Wars itself was the beginning of it all.  I love all things (almost) science fiction, and I never held with the idea that you were either a Star Wars or a Star Trek person (the 60s Star Trek remains one of my favorite TV shows, and if I did a list like this for TV it would be right near the top).  But Star Wars had a lasting impact, even with all the later tainting of my love that came with the dreaded prequel trilogy and overdose of merchandising.

4.  Fist of Legend:  I’d watched a few Chinese martial arts films before I watched this Jet Li film, mostly Jackie Chan stuff.  But it was while watching this movie that I realized Kung Fu films could be more than just stunts and bad dubbing.  They could also be about stuff.  They could also have compelling characters and solid plots.  They could also tap into genuine emotions.  Fist of Legend has some excellent fights, but it’s a good movie, too.  So, in a way, it was the movie that really introduced me to Kung Fu films.

3.  The Phantom Empire: This Gene Autry serial was a very early viewing for young Matt the Lad.  Not only did it make me fall in love with the idea of the movie serial, but I also became captivated by the mix of genres (here Cowboy Musical and Science Fiction).  Over the years, bits of this film were always floating around in the back of my head, leaking into my fiction and into my choices of movie rentals.

What could I possibly have found to like in this?

2.  Coffy:  When I broke up with my high school girlfriend, I suddenly found myself with more time and more money than sense.  Being me, instead of re-directing those resources into doing something that would improve my life, I descended into a black whole of video rental madness.  For a couple years, I watched more movies than I could possibly count.  I mean, I watched EVERY DANGED THING I could get my hands on.  And while I’d been aware of Shaft, and I knew there were Grindhouse films that had been made in the 70s, I was largely ignorant of them, and knew little of Blaxploitation beyond a few articles in film texts.  But one night, walking through the stacks at the local Front Row Video (yeah, it wasn’t even Movie Gallery, yet), I spotted a very sexy picture of Pam Grier looking out at me from a video box.  I was in love, and my movie lust found yet another new direction to stretch.

1.  Raiders of the Lost Ark:  Almost everything about me, my tastes, and my interests eventually leads back to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the old Bangor Opera House when I was five years old.  I wanted to be Indiana Jones.  I wanted to fight Nazis, travel the globe, find ancient cities, have love affairs with feisty brunettes, and live in Hollywood’s version of the 1930s.  Pulp, history, geography, the desert, the jungle, nature, religion, and so many other life long interests started here, not to mention my eventual love and fascination with the films and the era that inspired it.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Dork Hero: Cheng Pei-Pei

Her Kung Fu is strong.

Must see movies: Come Drink With Me, Brothers Five, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and The Shadow Whip.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (2/16/14-2/22/14)

    This ended up being something of a week of rest for me.  Following last week’s crap-ton of awesome crazy, I started this week with a very busy Sunday, preparing and then running my first major tabletop roleplaying session in a long, long time.  I’m always a ball of nerves when it comes to running games, and this was no exception.  In fact, that morning, I was sporting a raging headache and cloudy thinking that made me worry I was going to have to cancel.  Thankfully, it cleared up by around 2PM and the rest of the day and that evening went pretty well.  The next few days, I didn’t do much but zone out and try to sleep.  Reading, sure.  Though I’ve been having a hard time for a while (a few months, I think) with concentrating, thus I haven’t been reading as much as I should.   However, I did knock out a couple Lovecraft-ish tales.  His ‘revisions’ of Elizabeth Berkeley’s The Crawling Chaos and The Green Meadow.  Both stories remind me of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, as well as some of the more flowery and weird writing of C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and others.  And I read Hazel Heald’s Winged Death (also with revision from Lovecraft), which was OK.  It had some cool ideas, but it felt a little too much like a wannabe Poe story.  It also features some blatant racism, though from a character we know from the start is an evil bastard.  That was about all I could muster until Thursday morning (the start of a 4 day weekend), when I watched my first movie of the week.

     I was also surprised to find out this week that the HBO show True Detective is apparently dropping a lot of references to one of Lovecraft's inspirations, Robert W. Chambers and his King in Yellow.  This is pretty crazy to me, but pretty awesome.  It's especially weird, because one of the plots in the RPG I'm running (which the party hasn't stumbled upon yet), deals with the King.  Don't know if it will play out, and I don't think anyone in the group is watching the show yet, so it shouldn't be an issue.  It makes me want to watch the show even more, though.

Heroes Two:  Though a pretty good story, this film never reaches ‘classic’ level.  Much of the problem is in the fighting, which though copious, isn’t especially well choreographed.  It looks like they needed to do a few more run-throughs before filming.  That said, I do like the ending, and the weird MURDER VISION that kicks in whenever rebels get whacked in that last fight.  A fine, middle of the road, Shaw Bros. kung fu flick.

The Jazz Singer:  Elephant in the room, first.  Yeah, Al Jolson does blackface in this movie, and yeah, that’s really f’ed up.  I knew it would happen, but it was still horrifying when it finally did, and really sours the whole movie.  Now, it’s not done with the contemptuous maliciousness of Birth of a Nation, but that doesn’t make it OK.  It also  comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.  Why is it even in the movie?  The only explanation I’ve got for that is it’s what Jolson was known for, so they worked it into the film.  There’s no plot reason it needs to be there.  And I can imagine someone who isn’t familiar with blackface being very confused by why he suddenly slathers on make-up to sing two songs, nobody seems to notice or comment on it, and there are no contextual clues for why it happens.  OK.  All that aside, I was mostly interested in the film because I knew it was a pioneering effort in the addition of sound to motion picture.  It isn’t a full fledged ‘talkie,’ though.  The musical numbers are synched, and occasionally also have synched dialog accompanying them.  However, the rest of the film is a standard silent film, with title cards.  The story, about a Jewish kid growing up in New York City, who dreams of being a jazz performer, is sweet and somewhat emotional.  Honestly, I was shocked at how openly Jewish the story was, too, as I’m a little more used to heavy Christian dominance in pre-60s films.  And in spite of the skin-crawling that accompanied the blackface scenes, the finale where he has to deal with his career or his parents had a lot of heart.  It is sad that, like Birth of a Nation, this momentous occasion in the history of film has to be tainted with some rather egregious racism, but unlike that Ku Klux Klan love letter, the Jazz Singer may be flawed, but does not feel like it comes from an evil place, only a misguided one.

    Thursday night, Ben and I went over to Cinema Arts to check out a special screening of Knights of Badassdom, a low budget comedy about live action role players.  I’d seen the trailer quite a while back, and according to the woman hosting the screening, it had been held up for a couple years due to some legal issues.  The showing was weird, because the audience was full of LARP people, which I did not expect.  I guess it was like seeing the premier of a comic movie at a comic convention.  I don’t think anyone was in costume, though some of the people look like their normal wardrobe is costume.  Still, other than a few people unable to keep their boisterous nerdiness in check, it was a pretty good crowd.  They laughed a lot more than I did, and I guess there must have been a lot of in-jokes I didn’t get.  As a long time tabletop gamer, I’ve been aware of live action gaming from pretty early on.  It’s a weird combination of D&D (ugh!) and Historic Reenacting.  What I was exposed to most was the Vampire LARP people, who tended to be representative of a lot of things I hated about the 90s, and so soured me on the hobby.  Is that unfair?  Perhaps.  But it’s what happened.

I wish I was born in the 17th Century!

Knights of Badassdom:  LARPing (live action role playing) has always been the fringe of the already fringe hobby of tabletop roleplaying games.  Though on more than one occasion, I’ve been sorely tempted to give it a try, I think my short lived career in Lazer Tag was as close as I’ll get.  This movie embraces the hobby, and manages to laugh with it at least as much as laugh at it.  There are some pretty funny bits, but I found the whole to be uneven, too scattered.  It felt a bit like the scrapped remains of several different scripts that somehow came together, but never quite meshed.  Seemingly destined for cult status, it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to sweep the nation.  I’d recommend it to gamers, particularly LARPers, but otherwise…Well, if it hits NetFlix instant, check it out.  There are some funny gags.  And surprising levels of gore.

Death on the Nile:  There’s something grandly cinematic about this movie.  I think the location shooting and the music have a lot to do with it.  Like the classic Bond film in the overall vibe.  The story?  She's not so good.  Agatha Christie’s work has always had more of a made-for-TV vibe, in my mind.  It works in the small doses of episodic television.  The cast, too, feels made for TV.  Older actors who weren’t getting parts in big films (Bette Davis), up and comers (Olivia Hussey), and those actors who achieved fame for one reason or another but were never especially good (Mia Farrow).  All led by an the usually awesome Peter Ustinov, who seems unusually disengaged in the role of Hercule Poirot.  I liked the film, but didn’t love it.  It certainly played on my nostalgia for films of that era (1978), though it didn’t do an especially good job of transporting me to the era it was set in (1920s?).  The film is very uneven.  There are aspects and scenes I like a lot, however the movie as a whole is just OK.  It’s also one of those 70s PG movies that would shock and appall today.  There are some rather gruesome killings in it, including a nasty shot to the face.  Actually, everybody seems to get shot in the head, except for one, who gets his/her throat cut.

    On Saturday morning, I finally got back into Boardwalk Empire after a prolonged break as I was distracted by shiny things.  I’m now about half way through the second season, and it’s so good.  I don’t even feel the irritation toward Michael Pitt I normally do.  What’s that about?  I’ve got the next disk up close to the top of my queue, so I should be able to get through the season fairly soon.  Thanks to running some Call of Cthulhu, I’m really into the 20s stuff right now, and this is a fine show for that.

Evil Under the Sun:  Ustinov is back and the obnoxious Belgian, Hercule Poirot, in this noticeably lower rent sequel to Death on the Nile.  Oddly, a few members of that film’s cast have returned, but playing different roles.  And this time around, it really feels like a TV episode.  Location shooting or not, it doesn’t look or sound in any way ‘cinematic.’  James Mason only is awake in one of his scenes, though for that scene he’s quite good.  Otherwise he looks bored, sleepy, and confused.  Diana Rigg looks like she thought it was going to be a different film and is now killing time 'til her boat leaves.  Maggie Smith and Peter Ustinov are better used in this movie than the first, but still not given much to work with.  And the whole Agatha Christie, “let’s all go have drinks in the lounge, while I reveal all the clues the viewer wasn’t given, and tell you who did it” thing is especially insufferable.  It’s less uneven than Death on the Nile.  Unfortunately, that’s because it never hits any particular high notes, preferring to languish in mediocrity.

    And that’s it.  Like I said, a week of rest.  I was hoping to force myself to get more reading done, but this fidgety lack of concentration thing is hampering things.  I’m doing some more prep-work for the next game session, which sadly looks like it’s going to be a month away.  Blasted people and their busy schedules.  Stupid retail makes social lives difficult.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (11/17/13-11/23/13)

    I’ve continued to enjoy the heck out of my Criterion viewing, getting in another 5 this week (though Kiss Me Deadly is available from Criterion, I saw it on the big screen, not on disk).  It’s been interesting seeing a bunch of various classic and art films, stuff I’ve heard of but never seen.  And I think I can say that I’ve become something of an Ingmar Bergman fan.  I’m surprised at how grounded and relatable most of his movies are.  When people mentioned his name, I imagined movies like The Magician, which were surreal, vague, and obtuse.  But the movies I’ve seen have been quite earthy, even if the framing and staging has been artificial.  And this week took Brad, Ben, and I out to the AFI Silver for a screening of one of my favorite movies, so that was nice.  But the week started with the awesome Fantastic Fest tour at the Alamo Drafthouse.  Sadly, because of scheduling, neither Brad nor I were able to see any of the earlier screenings, but Sunday we got to see three movies back to back.

Confession of Murder:  Oh, Korean film industry.  You sure put out a lot of vaguely interesting, but ultimately boring films.  I love the cast, and I think they do a great job.  The plot twists aren’t especially interesting, however, or particularly ‘twisty.’  And the pacing is brutally, grindingly slow.  I was shocked to find out it was under two hours, as the last third of the movie seemed to drag and drag and drag.  And there were several places where not only could the movie have ended, but the movie absolutely should have ended (that POV flashback would have been the perfect fade to credits for a very emotionally devastating ending…but it kept going…).  The subplot about the victim’s family trying to do a kidnapping caper bloats the film, adding virtually nothing to the overall piece except excruciating runtime.  The movie would have been stronger (not to mention mercifully shorter) without any of that.  And the CGI action bits looked like crap.  There.  I said it.  The action looked like crap.  And this is an action movie.  So that’s not good.  Overall, it was OK.  But it wasn’t especially good.  And it continues an almost unbroken stream of disappointments from Korea, for this film viewer.  I think The Good, The Bad, The Weird remains the only Korean film I really like (OK, and maybe The Warrior’s Way).

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons:  This martial arts fantasy film is fitfully funny, wildly zany, and surprisingly good.  I’m generally not a fan of comedy films from China, but Stephen Chow does a pretty good job with humor that crosses cultural boundaries.  I wasn’t a huge fan of Shaolin Soccer, but it was solid, and Kung Fu Hustle is fantastic.  This movie takes on the Journey to the West’s early stages in a way I’ve never seen done before (granted, I’ve only seen maybe 5 or 6 variations on the classic tale, and I know there are many more).  I enjoyed the story, the cast of characters, and the very bent sense of humor.  It’s nasty, weird, funny, and freaky.  It’s also got a very fun performance from one of my favorites, Shu Qi.  This may be the most cracked and over the top she’s ever been, and it was great.

Why Don’t You Play in Hell?:  OK, look.  I’m not much of a Japanese film fan.  Certainly not when it comes to the last 30 years or so.  It’s a lot of things, from the pacing, to the repetitiveness, to the frequently squandered intriguing ideas.  And ‘gonzo’ Japanese films hold very little interest.  So, take that in to account when I say, “holy f’in nuts, this movie is one of the craziest, most insanely fun things I’ve seen.”  It’s almost impossible to explain what the movie is like.  You’ve just got to see it.  I’ve watched a trailer that shows some scenes, but it’s not even the tip of the iceberg of how batshit the film actually is.  And the cast takes each bit of madness and runs with it.  They sell it.  The mob bosses?  Awesome.  The filmmakers?  Awesome.  The poor schlub?  Awesome.  It’s hallucinatory.  It’s repulsive.  It’s profane.  And it had me in stitches throughout.  I don’t know what I’m going to call it, but I feel like this and movies like Crank and Crank 2 need to have their own subgenre.  If I could put in writing, Henry Silva’s pre-murder scream from Sharky’s Machine; that’s what I’d call it.

Dallas Buyers Club:  A depressing, but also somewhat uplifting film about a hard partying hick who gets the AIDS and learns some valuable lessons.  It’s well acted, well shot, and doesn’t feel overlong.  It also doesn’t feel the need to go into too much detail, or obsess over the unimportant elements, as many ‘true story’ films do.  It’s probably one of the better films of 2013, though I can’t claim it as one of my favorites.  While a fine film, I don't see myself ever watching it again.

Through a Glass Darkly:  A family getaway brings out some old wounds, as four damaged people come together and try to deal with their various issues.  A writer who has ignored his family, an emotionally immature young man, a woman descending into madness, and her put-upon husband.  Each has secrets and desires to get out, each must face personal demons.  Bergman puts family drama against the stark beauty of a vacation spot, and shoots it all in stark black & white.

Au Hasard Balthazar:  Not at all the movie I was expecting.  Not even the kind of movie I was expecting.  The only thing that could make this more stereotypically French would be for it to smell like piss and constantly insult you.  The characters all suck, everyone’s a scumbag, and there’s a donkey.  A slow girl is the object of lust.  Pointlessly rebellious young people act like turds.  It’s unpleasant, and ultimately detached.  Blah.

Winter Light:  Holy flippin’ crap, this is a danged dark film.  A pastor who has lost his way struggles with his lack of faith, while destroying the lives of those around him.  He’s such a humorless and monstrous human being that it’s hard to sympathize with him at all.  You end up feeling a lot more for the folks around him, who try so hard to reach him.

Kiss Me Deadly:  Thanks to the AFI Silver, I got to see this new favorite on the big screen.  When I first saw this film in 2012, it was a bolt from heaven.  Mike Hammer is a monster.  A dirty, violent, brutal monster.  His vacant grin while he crushes a man’s fingers; his slapping of a fragile old man; whatever he did to Sugar Smallhouse that made Charlie Max loose his nerve.  And yeah, Hammer is the ‘hero.’  He just can’t stop pulling at the threads that will bring about a revelation and an apocalyptic ending.  It’s hard to explain the movie.  You’ve just got to see it.  And when it goes where it goes, get ready to have to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Ministry of Fear:  A man leaves an institution after many years, only to immediately get wrapped up in a strange conspiracy of Nazis and cake.  Or is he mad?  A twisting, turning story of paranoia and ever threatening danger.  Those danged Nazis might be anywhere.  The movie is beautifully shot, stylish in that Lang way, and convoluted and weird.  The rooftop shootout is wild, and the ending is nuts.

Dragonwyck:  “Every now and then, you say ‘golly.’”  A pretty young woman goes to live in a colossal mansion as a sort of governess.  But all is not as it seems, and the house is hardly a home.  Gene Tierney is the plucky woman.  Vincent Price is the rather dastardly, snooty master of the house.  Conflict between classes, between the moneyed families and the salt of the Earth farm folk are just the tip of the Gothic iceberg.  It’s sort of a higher budget precursor to Price’s later work in Poe adaptations for Roger Corman.

Murder, My Sweet:  “It ain’t personal.  We don’t like you.  But it ain’t personal.”  I like the script, but Dick Powell, while likable, doesn’t feel right as a hardboiled detective.  It’s a solid noir, but not an amazing one.  It’s worth checking out, and has some of those great little Noir quips.  But Powell is a bit goofy.

Pandora’s Box:  Everyone wants a bit of Louise Brooks, and generally, she’s willing to share.  And that’s where the problems begin.  Everyone seems to love her, but she just wants to have fun.  This leads to wild parties, marriage, murder, messing about, and all the things a woman gets up to when she’s not barefoot and making babies.  Louise Brooks plays a flapper-monster, but somehow remains charming.  She’s not the kind of aggravating Betty Boop of Clara Bow.  She seems like she’s got more going on behind her eyes, and that she may just be the evil the courts think she is.

    That’s about it this week.  But hey, Fantastic Fest at the Alamo and a trip the AFI mean this was a good week for this Dork.

-Matt

Comic Review: Boxers & Saints

    Set during the late 1800s, Boxers chronicles the rise of a peasant revolution.  Bao is a happy young boy who enjoys the opera and idolizes the masked characters and his father.  But his whole world begins to crumble when his father is beaten and broken by ‘foreign devils.’  When a jovial martial artist arrives in the village, Bao finds a way to embrace his love of the heroes of opera.  What follows is part history, part Shaw Bros. fantasy adventure, as the villagers learn to fight, gather around Bao, and head to the foreign tainted Peking.  Fueled by nationalism, racism, and the pains of oppression, the so called Boxers fight back against the soldiers of the outsiders.

    Saints follows Four-Girl, a child raised under a cloud of family tragedy and ill omen, who tries to find herself in a rapidly changing world.  In an attempt to rebel, and to embrace her ‘cursed’ nature, she joins the foreign devil Christians, taking the name Vibiana.  Her journey is different, but she too ends up in Peking when the rebellion comes to its bloody climax.

    Each volume explores the protagonist’s relationship with various aspects of religion, tradition, and gods.  Bao and his fellow Boxers are inhabited by the spirits of the heroes of opera, while Four-Girl seeks guidance from some horrible raccoon demon, and then from the spirit of Joan of Arc.  Are these possessions and visions real?  Are they the dreams of youth, or delusion?  Are Bao, Four-Girl, and the rest simply mad from the horrors of their times?  It gives you a lot to think about, and I think a lot of interpretive wiggle room.

    As companion volumes, Boxers and Saints make for a good read, each looking at different aspects of the same historic event.  Each complements and juxtaposes the other.  The colorful palette of Boxers and the muted tones of Saints for example.  And the question of religion, of its use, its dangers, etc. seems to be left open.  All this makes for a compelling read with plenty to think about.  And like the best books, it makes me want to read more.  I’ll certainly be reading Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.  But I also picked up a book on the Boxer Rebellion, and another on the Taiping Rebellion.  As much of my knowledge of China’s history and culture comes from martial arts movies and Hong Kong melodramas, I figured now would be a good time to read something more scholarly.  It should also help give me more context for enjoying those films.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/6/13-10/12/13)

    Not a whole heck of a lot going on.  I did read Godzilla: The Half-Century War.  Otherwise, just having my spirit crushed.

Jesse James:  Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda are fine in this perfectly OK film version of the classic American outlaw tale.  Pushed too far by railroad men, two brothers fight back…then keep fighting until they become full fledged bandits.  A nice supporting cast helps, but at the end of the day, it’s only an OK movie.  Not bad, but not amazing.

The Return of Frank James:  Henry Fonda reprises his role as Frank James in this sequel to the previous year’s Jesse James.  It too is fine, but nothing special.  If anything, this revenge movie is far too nice, too much of what TV would become.  And the Clem character?  Holy crap does he suck.  Gene Tierney made her big screen debut as a plucky girl-reporter.  Sadly, she’s not very good.  She’s cute enough, and it’s not like she’s terrible or anything.  Just not memorable.  Sort of like rest of the film.  Director Fritz Lang seems to have brought none of his visual flare along with him.

Dinosaur Valley Girls:  You may not expect it, but this movie is garbage.  Sadly, it’s not all that fun either.  I like dinosaurs.  I like dames.  Dinosaurs and dames have made a great combination many times before.  But cavegirls and fake boobs don’t work.  Also, writing is always a plus.  Good writing even more so.

My Young Auntie:  I’m generally not a fan of Hong Kong comedy (or any non-English language comedy).  I find there tends to be too much cultural specific stuff for me to engage in the humor.  And humor is such a monumentally subjective thing, that is very, very difficult to translate.  So, imagine my shock when I found myself enjoying the heck out of this story of a pretty young woman battling expectations and greedy relatives.  The fighting is top notch Shaw Bros. stuff, too.  I’d recommend watching it with the dubbing, as that adds to the amusement.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:  The first Star Trek film I saw on the big screen is still one of my favorites.  It’s goofy fun, with lots of great lines.  And it’s probably the best film where it comes to giving all the characters moments to shine, especially McCoy and Scotty.  Considering this is one of the most successful films in the series, it’s frustrating that no other movie has imitated it, instead opting for rehashing Wrath of Khan’s formula.  Where are the dilemmas that need solving?  Where is the fun?  No, it’s darkness, war, and the villain that needs to be punched into submission.  Cut it out, Star Trek producers/writers.  It’s time to recapture some of the lighthearted and hopeful spirit of Star Trek IV.

Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric:  One of the best Sylvester McCoy stories, this one has some good bits, and some interesting ideas.  But it’s still only OK.  As I near the end of McCoy’s run, and of the original Doctor Who series in general, I can absolutely see what it was canceled.  From the last season of Colin Baker on, the writing seems to have gone down the toilet.  Occasional bright spots serve to highlight the overall drop in quality.  And unfortunately, a lot of the worst aspects of this era seem to have been held over into the new series, especially the Stephen Moffat era.

Frankenstein The True Story:  This 3 hour, made for TV adaptation of the classic novel is pretty good.  It’s not as ‘faithful’ to the source material as I’d been led to believe, but it’s still probably the best adaptation of the book.  I have yet to see a film that treats the monster right, but this one seems to have done a better job of capturing the irresponsibility of Victor.  The thing about the original Shelley novel that I always liked is it didn’t actually condemn the science, so much as the lack of responsibility on the part of the scientist.  Adam was not evil, but was driven to do evil by circumstances created and exacerbated by his creator, Victor Frankenstein.  He is an immensely powerful child, given no direction or love by his parent.  This movie does not really get into that aspect of things as much as I’d have liked.  Still, it’s pretty good, and it’s worth seeking out.

    I tried a new wine that I ended up really enjoying.  Dearly Beloved: I Thee Red.  It’s mellow and went with the seared chicken and spicy rice I had for dinner.  I’m not much of a wine guy, so I’m trying out some various types to see if I can develop some kind of appreciation of it.

Human Desire:  Director Fritz Lang, stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame reunite a year after making the amazing film The Big Heat to craft another twisted Noir tale of love and betrayal.  Unfortunately, lightening did not strike twice, and this film is nowhere near as tense, brutal, or compelling as The Big Heat.  It’s not bad, but it’s not especially good, either.  Ford is fine, though he seems a bit out of place as a blue-collar rail worker.  Grahame is fine, too, if a bit shrill.

    So, I’ve had access to cable TV for a few months; the first time since moving to Virginia six years ago.  And generally speaking, it sucks total ass.  But TCM is a pretty cool channel, and on Saturday it gave me a chance to see a couple science fiction films I’d never seen, It Came from Outer Space and The World, The Flesh and the Devil.  TCM, the AFI Silver and to a lesser degree the Alamo Drafthouse have all combined create a kind of ambient noise of classic cinema that has me feeling pretty good about movies, even as I suffer through a dreadful year of film.  Plus, I’ve been catching a bunch of other older films through various other means recently.  It’s been quite nice.

It Came from Outer Space:  In tune with a lot of 50s sci-fi films, this has plenty of heavy-handed moralizing.  The acting is fine and the film looks good.  But the story is meh.  The creature is kind of cool, and I like the way seeing it seems to drive people temporarily mad, like something out of Lovecraft.  The ending is pretty cool; and somewhat unusual for its time.

The World, The Flesh and the Devil:  Harry Belafonte is working underground when something really bad happens.  Finally climbing up into the sun again, he finds himself alone in a desolate New York City.  The first half hour or so is carried completely by Belafonte, and there are moments that remind me of the early part of The Omega Man, making me wonder if this served as something of an inspiration (beyond the novel I Am Legend, obviously).  This certainly covers some similar ground, though without any supernatural/plague element.  When he meets a woman, things become more complicated, and suddenly the racial tensions ramp up.  This becomes even more intense when another man, a white man, arrives on the scene.  How much of their pre-nuke baggage will they hold on to, how much can they cast off?  Once the conflict becomes a three-way, it becomes quite odd, building to a rather strange ending that can’t be accused of being typical.  Good use of early morning New York to create a lifeless world.

Thunder Birds:  On the home front, some young men need to learn the ins and outs of flying.  And of course, along the way, catch the eye of a lovely young lady.  Gene Tierney is that lady, and by Odin’s beard, she’s gorgeous.  From her extremely sexy reveal through her search for love.  Goodness.  The movie is an interesting look into the Wartime attitudes about various things, including people from other countries, romance, and stockings.  By no means a great classic, it’s still quite entertaining.

    That’s about it.  I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the wall this week.  It’s been a rough go.

Get it done!

-Matt