Movies

It's a Great Feeling (1949) Dreadful Warner Brothers vanity piece - Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan play themselves and show why they are no longer remembered. Doris Day at her peak of freshness is never given a decent song - anything good she gets one verse and chorus and that's it, negating my entire purpose for watching it. It's a back-lot picture, about trying to make a picture on the back lot, so everybody who was between takes gets roped in for a cameo. Filmed in luscious technicolor - beautiful but stupid. 3/10

The high point of the film: Joan Crawford KNITTING???

Movies

Project Moonbase (1958) Co-written by Robert Heinlein, a tale of the year 1970 when Enemies of Freedom are plotting to destroy the US Space Force space station. Their scheme goes awry, and a survey mission intended to photograph the far side of the moon is forced to make the first lunar landing. Makes a good attempt at gender equity considering the time it was written, though even the female top space pilot can be brought in line with the threat of a good spanking. Corrugated fibreglass panels must have seemed the material of tomorrow as they are used for the walls in all the spacecraft. Also a nice effort to depict weightless life in the space station by showing people walking on walls and ceilings using magnetic boots. Overall more of a TV show look to it, due to bright overhead studio lighting, but I'd call it a pretty good try. 7/10

Movies

A Stitch in Time (1963) Norman Wisdom gets into every kind of trouble, mostly medically related, including clinging to the roof of a speeding ambulance while wrapped up like a mummy, and being photographed by the press dressed as a nurse at the wheel of a brand new Hillman Imp. Funny. 7/10

Norman Wisdom frozen in a block of ice.

Movies

Follow a Star (1959) I am having a "Norman Wisdom" phase. In this one, Norman unknowingly becomes a singing sensation when his unscrupulous employer lip-synchs to recordings of Norman's voice - but Norman has a complex about singing in public which requires all sorts of antics before the problems are resolved. I like these movies because they are undemanding, cheerful, occasionally amusing, and overall pleasant. Wisdom has an appealing "good-hearted bumbler" persona, and amid the pratfalls and scampering there are moments of comedic brilliance. 6/10

Flight to Mars (1951) Filmed in dense Cinecolor - lots of deep greenish and reddish-brown tones. First rocket to Mars encounters underground civilization with a fabulous sense of style. Not many women but they all look fantastic in their satin micro-dresses, and the men wear red capes over black tunics with a lightning-bolt insignia on the chest. Great chairs too, and the walls and doorways are all crazy angles. Not super-thrilling but pleasing to the eye. 6/10

Movies I have been unable to finish watching:

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) Dario Argento is a unique cinematic genius, and I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of cutting and bleeding to see where his complex psychodramas end up, but there is way too much raping in this one to suit me.

Krabat (2008) German film about a boy who becomes apprentice to a sorcerer. Takes a long time to develop and too much of that is squalor and humiliation.

The Room (2003) Some people seem to find a Transcendent Badfilm experience in this clumsy vanity flick, made by a guy with money and nothing else. Having made the study of Badfilm a pastime for some 30 years I found it to be merely Poorfilm (a term I have not yet succeeded in popularizing) - tedious and uninteresting.

Uzumaki (2000) Based on the most bizarre and grotesque manga I have ever read, or rather on the first few volumes before it really gets going. This is an amateurish production which seems to take the approach of slavishly reproducing every panel of the manga, presenting it in that dull greenish tone popular among beginning filmmakers these days who mistake style for substance, and using mediocre visual effects as a substitute for drama. A very disappointing experience for me, and an extremely dull and lousy movie.

Movies

Test Pilota Pirxa (1978) Polish/Soviet SF based on a story by Stanislaw Lem. Test Pilot Pirx is sent on a space mission with a robotic crew member and he drives himself crazy trying to figure out which one it is. If it is your goal to see every SF film ever made, include this. It's a bit slow. The future city scenes appear to be Chicago. 6/10

The Bulldog Breed (1960) A Norman Wisdom film. Unsuccessful in both love and suicide, Norman joins the Royal Navy. Because of his absolute incompetence he is put in charge of the ship's dog, and thus accidentally becomes the first man in space. Moderately entertaining at times. 6/10

Be careful what you wish. Now that I am seeing many movies I have wanted to learn about for a long time I am finding that most of them are not very good.

Movies

Fantomas (1964) Fantomas is a super-criminal and master of disguise originally appearing in a silent crime serial, and this is his campy revival. The French have been careful about not letting much of this sort of pop drivel escape to the outside world, but it's heartening to know they have done something other than art films and classy heist flicks. This came to my attention through a Russian release with French and dubbed Russian audio, but I had to work a little to find a copy I could watch with english subtitles. If you like to see cars driving around you're in luck as this has lots of over-extended auto chases, but I found the "careening down mountain roads in a car with no brakes" sequence to be most elaborate and fairly thrilling. There is more dangling from a rope ladder off a helicopter in this film than I have ever seen in one movie before. The one thing I think they really deserve credit for is the thought they put into the disguise bits. Usually when someone is "disguised" as another character in the film and they are simply played by that actor they will put them in a split screen and you know you are just looking at the same actor in two different suits. In this case they deliberately made up the disguised version a bit off, with the ears an odd shape or the eyebrows wrong, and part of the face off-color and slightly shiny like it really was a mask. Good thinking. Pretty lite fare overall, and at times I wondered if it would ever end, but it was good for educational purposes. 5/10

Fantomas and Lackeys in Secret Submarine:

Movies

The First Nudie Musical (1976) They have three weeks to make a movie or they will lose the studio! I am finding that the addition of nudity to a genre film does not improve it. It just makes a bad movie a different kind of bad. Mostly a collection of vignettes and blackouts connected by a tenuous plot and some songs. I actually laughed really hard one time, and I don't think I have seen nude tap dancing before. 5/5

The Core (2003) Huge disaster will wipe out life on earth unless a band of stereotypes performs an insanely dangerous task. Hunky scientist, spunky gal, finicky professor, eccentric inventor, geeky hacker, even what I can only call the "black mammy" - the middle-aged woman of color who nowadays says, "My duty is to look out for the health and safety of this crew!" instead of what they used to say. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that is what I saw. I have to give them credit for making it as nonsensically spectacular as possible as they knock off characters one at a time, allowing for both tragic irony and noble sacrifice. Kinda long at two hours, but they wanted it to be epic and it was. I think this formula really does best at ninety minutes - it makes them keep things tight, less talk and more action. I was impressed when the hunky scientist finished his sales pitch to the top brass with the super-convincing act of roasting an apple with an improvised blowtorch to show what would happen it they didn't send an earth-boring magma train to re-start the spin of the titular core. Yes, a train. That was pretty impressive, having a subterranean train. Anyway if you want to see one of this kind of movie this one is a pretty harmless one that will keep you stupified for two hours, and Stanley Tucci is always a plus. 7/10