Movies

Magadheera (2010) Enjoyed a movie geek night with my friend Jim, brainless spectacle and laconic abortive attempts at conversation. You ought to know by now that every Indian movie is a musical comedy romance - this is also an epic historical action spectacle, allegedly the most expensive film in Indian movie history. Three lives - boy, girl, and angry rival - are bound together until they complete the actions of their previous life 400 years earlier. Bounces back and forth between present and past, and includes something excessive and startling every few minutes. Like being beaten with a pillow full of entertainment for 2 hours and 45 minutes. You don't want any more afterward. I didn't like this as much as Endhiran the Robot, but it had lots of moments. Includes a quicksand pit. 6/10

Look - a jeep about to crash into a helicopter!

Movies

Wild River (1960) High-class big-budget Elia Kazan drama set in 1930s Tennessee. Montgomery Clift is the guy who has to get a stubborn old woman off her island before the dam is finished and she's flooded out, Lee Remick the widowed granddaughter/love interest. A well-presented story that carries you along with it at a steady pace, but it's not really compelling or stirring. My choice for Family Movie Night, and it was satisfactory. 6/10

I Was a Shoplifter (1950) A peppy little Universal Studios B-movie crime drama depicting the pursuit of a criminal gang which blackmails amateur department-store shoplifters into working for them under threat of public exposure. Scott Brady is the young handsome hero, Tony Curtis a minor ethnic hoodlum, with few familiar faces in the rest of the cast. Cracks right along and shows some interesting shoplifting techniques along the way. It's edutainment! 7/10

Movies

It's a good thing I make notes on my desk blotter or I would forget all this holiday indulgence:

Son of Ali Baba (1952) Tony Curtis is browned up for a glamor-boy turn in this cheesy costume potboiler. They couldn't drive an extra half hour to shoot the horse chase scenes in the desert, so this Bagdad is nestled amid rolling hills clad in sagebrush and scrub pine. Colorful filler, more fun than a bible movie. 3/10

Les Belles (1961) "Qian jiao bai mei" is the vernacular title of this Hong Kong romantic musical comedy from Shaw studios, focusing on the lives and loves of members of a modern dance troupe. It is notable mainly for the fact that it is presented in a very western style, with little distinctively Chinese culture intruding beyond a couple of historically themed dance numbers. I have become accustomed to the Hollywood treatment of the latin theme but it is jarring to see a latin dance number done with Chinese tonalities. It's clear they had little experience in staging western style dance numbers, which strive for exoticism but are rather flat and dull. Very brightly illuminated and colorful, with some peppy songs and bizarre dance settings, but rather long at two hours. Of interest mostly as an oddity and for cultural comparison. 5/10

Spiderweb number - in ShawScope. It's wide.

Sunset Murder Case (1938) Burlesque dancer Sally Rand stars in this poverty row B pic, and her bubble dance was the reason I watched it. It's pretty mild until the last moment, when she briefly, and heavily backlit, drops her filmy wrap to show her form. A fan dance number was apparently too revealing, so it's concealed behind palm frond silhouettes inserted over the frame, making me wonder if there might have been a "special" version of the film which lacked them. Otherwise it's another brief gunshots and gangsters story. 4/10

The famous Bubble Dance

Yes Sir, Mister Bones (1951) Hour-long cheapie about a retirement home where old Minstrels lurk, waiting for someone to come along and ask them what a "minstrel show" was. Does a fair job of conveying the spirit of the artform, if not the letter - the music is pretty swingified - with a couple of remarkable turns from Scatman Cruthers, some nostalgic Negro Spirituals, and some grating blackface "comedy." The black performers are uniformly superior, the blackfaces pretty hard to take. It does show the omnibus nature of the minstrel show, providing all varieties of entertainment in one grand spectacle, but a more realistic flavor can be gotten from 1952's Stephen Foster faux biopic I Dream of Jeanie, or Shirley Temple's 1936 film Dimples. Directed by Ron Ormond, and it's not the weirdest thing he did, not by a long shot. 5/10

Side note - Ron Ormond is perhaps least known for this contribution to popular culture - the line "christianity is stupid," from his christian commie-scare film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do, which was put to use by Negativland.

The Hayseeds (1933) An Australian romantic musical comedy, as it proudly proclaims on the title card, and it makes quite a thing out of being Australian too, with monologizing on the Australian national character, and random insertion of wildlife footage. The romantic duet spends as much time showing the Sydney harbor bridge as the young lovers. This is the first film appearance of South African born Cecil Kellaway, who later found quite a bit of work in Hollywood. The quaint, countrified Hayseeds spend some time chasing trollleys in the bustling streets of Sydney, which looks as vast and towering as Chicago. The plot and songs are adequate, and this is an interesting novelty that doesn't tire you overmuch. 5/10

Forbidden (1953) An adequate exotic noir, placing Tony Curtis in a backlot Macau intrigue. Joanne Dru is the adequately angular and immaculate woman with a history. The story is convoluted without being indecipherable, the dialog is full of mild congenial phrases forced through gritted teeth, and it comes to an adequately active climax. The primary song in this universe is You Belong to Me (See the pyramids along the Nile etc.) and I suppose this is the film that made it popular - it's still rotating through my head today. It all looks good and stays interesting, but there is a wee bit too much standing around talking, and jumping into cars and dashing off somewhere for me to say it was great. Pretty good though. 7/10

I also watched quite a bit of Toomorrow (1970) - it seems the masterminds behind The Monkees wanted to do it again, this time with a movie in England. Extraterrestrial observers find that a pop band featuring Olivia Newton John is the only source for the healing vibrations they crave. Aimed at an older audience, with art-school protests and sit-ins a major plot element, it is peculiar without being interesting.

Japanese release. Also very wide.

Movies

The Driver's Seat (1974) One of the most unusual films of Elizabeth Taylor's career. Sort of an art film, kind of a mystery thriller, it's hard to know what to say about this. It's more like an unpleasant dream, with surreal and atmospheric scenes and broken-up time sequence. Taylor is a great actress because, though a natural beauty, she never hesitated to take roles which required her to be ugly and terrible in some way. Here she is a sort of madwoman in search of her death in an alienating and malicious world. Unsettling in concept and execution, it's no wonder this is one of the most misunderstood and underestimated movies of her career. A sort of masterpiece in a way. This was purchased at Target during the short golden age of the dollar DVD, and I had been wanting to show it to Donna for a couple of years but was afraid she would hate it - to my surprise she liked it quite a bit. So do I. I would be very happy to see a nice widescreen print of this some day. 9/10

Movies

Pepe (1960) An American-made Cantinflas movie. Even though they tried to make it a bloated monstrosity by jamming in cameos and performances by everyone they could get their hands on, it still comes out pretty well with his usual blend of comedy and pathos. All the powers of Hollywood could not conquer his natural magnetism and charm. If you can't find a real Cantinflas movie, this one is good enough. 6/10

Movies

El verdugo (The Executioner) 1963 - Spanish comedy in which a newlywed must take over his father-in-law's job as executioner to save their apartment. The means of execution in Spain at the time was the garrote. Might have been more entertaining if it had not been so verbose, and if the amateur subtitler had not been determined to capture every bit of crosschat and radio background, sometimes filling the screen with indecipherable text. Interesting to see the locales and culture, but wearisome. 2/10

Then I made it through half of Who Was That Lady? (1960) starring Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh and Dean Martin. Leigh and Curtis' chemistry is unmistakable, but Dean is the only one truly in his element in this feeble sitcom. Curtis, supposedly a chemistry professor, is caught kissing a student in his lab and turns to his chum Dean, a TV writer, to save his marriage. Which means pretending he is an FBI agent, with ensuing "hilarity." I'd hate to be stuck on a desert island with this thing. 1/10

Movies

Tarkan vs. the Vikings (1971) Turkish movies seem to be popular among badfilm nuts these days so I thought I should see a few. Based on a popular Turkish comic book character, this presents a very imaginative (i.e. absurd) view of Viking life and culture. Primitive in concept and technique, meant to provide cheap thrills only. Good giant octopus though. I saw a short documentary on the Turkish pop film industry of the '60s and '70s and it seems to me that its failure was in catering to the lowest common denominator consistently and exclusively, without attempting to improve the product or the audience. It was doomed to eventual failure because it was content to crank out nothing but cheap crap like this, and lacked a visionary producer or director who strove for something higher. 2/10

10 Rillington Place (1971) could not be more different. A calm, methodical, meticulously accurate depiction of the criminal life of British serial murderer John Christie. Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson and John Hurt star, and locations were filmed on the actual site shortly before it was obliterated from the face of the earth. Extremely well-produced, perhaps its only weakness being the emotional distance it maintains, which left me entirely unmoved even by the terrible situation of Hurt's pathetic character Timothy Evans, hanged for Christie's murder of Evans' wife and child. Maybe director Richard Fleischer was too versatile to make this as strong a film as it might have been. It left me thinking, "Now I know about that," and nothing more. 6/10 for historical accuracy and general viewability.