Movies

Panique (1947) An unpleasant, but perfectly innocent and relatively harmless, man becomes the target of intentionally malicious gossip and mob violence. A resounding condemnation of then-recent historical events, and overall a well-presented story. Michel Simon is always both repellent and attractive in all his roles and is perfect for this one. 8/10

Paycheck (2003) A nice little twenty-minute short story by P. K. Dick is padded out to a numbing action movie with car chases, explosions, people constantly crashing through windows while running and shooting, as well as lots of running and shooting, shooting while running, running while being shot at, and shooting at people who are running. You get beeping letters and whirling wireframe computer models before the credits are over!! That is a warning right there. Luckily someone would pop in every twenty minutes or so to explain the concept to us dumb schmucks who find anything other than running and shooting real tough to figure out - at one point using an apple in the explanation - I am beginning to take note of the "apple explanation" as a hallmark of quality filmmaking. Ben Affleck is the guy trying to understand the message he left for himself from the future, and he looks really good running. Rarely has anyone had such talent for the role of shallow hunk. The disparity between concept and presentation in this movie is amazing -I am sure Dick never could have imagined so many people crashing through windows in one of his stories. Kind of a chore to sit through all that crap. 2/10

Movies

Sometimes educating yourself can be hard work with little reward. Alien Vs. Predator is where the predators from Predator fight the aliens from Alien. Which is to say dickfaces versus pussyfaces. First thing on the screen - BEEPING GREEN LETTERS! Not old school bippety boop beeping, but a kind of half windchime, half dot-matrix printer kind of noise as they pop onscreen one by one, but it still counts. It also appears that, however advanced the alien race, their whirling wireframe computer models and red numerical time-bomb countdowns closely resemble our own. I have said that I enjoy a really atrocious insult to my intelligence, but this was nothing but a rude gesture. Every scene and every bit of dialog is a cliche set-piece: here is where we do this bit of business, here is where we establish this person's character. It's a mouse skeleton of concept wrapped in a whale's blubber of cliche drivel, driven by a soundtrack that drives a hammer of trite derivation into your skull every few seconds. Then for some stupid reason I thought I would go from the "THE END????" finale of this piece of lame-assed crap to its sequel which I knew would probably suck even more, but I couldn't have imagined how much it actually did suck. The half-alien half-predator created so idiotically at the end of the other movie becomes a sewer monster in the middle of a suburban soap opera in Gunnison Colorado. Not the redneck mountain town I remember, but some kind of upscale multi-ethnic suburban soap opera fantasy that was so lame and stupid it wasn't worth wading through a full twenty minutes of the pukey filler to see if anything interesting ever happened to equal the constant garbage-can pounding that was supposed to make it seem like something scary or exciting might one day occur. Alien versus predator, YOU SUCK. 1/10

Movies

I completely forgot that I also watched La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemon (2003) yesterday - a Spanish spy farce in which two goofy "super-agents" must recover a stolen secret weapon from a nearby dictator. It's as deliberately cartoonish and absurd as possible, with people being hit by speeding cars and leaving a pair of smoking shoes behind, or smashed down by a blow on the head and waddling off one foot high. A less developed audience might find this one continuous howl from start to finish, and hurt themselves screaming with laughter, but I found myself admiring the effects yet never laughing once through the whole movie. Then it passed from my mind like a dissipating mist. I have to write this quickly before I forget about it again. ?/10

Movies

Celebrated Thanksgiving by staying home alone, eating a small lentil and brown rice burrito with spinach in it, and some cake, and watched these movies:

The Creeping Flesh (1973) Peter Cushing and Cristopher Lee are fraternal competitors for the big science prize - both want to cure insanity, but Cushing's technique involves making a serum from the blood of an ancient New Guinean devil skeleton which regenerates its flesh when dampened. Doesn't work out as well as he had hoped. DEVIL SKELETON, I said. Fairly good Victorian Pseudo-Science movie, not a real rip-snorter though and you have to wait quite a while for the devil skeleton to get rained on enough for it to amble about, but it does have the craziest POV shot I have ever seen. 6/10

How the world looks to a partially regenerated devil skeleton.

Puzzlehead (2005) Small, quiet, intelligent SF story exploring what it means to be human. Man builds his android replica and programs it by scanning his own brain - the creation must learn to overcome the weaknesses and failings of its creator. No huge surprises, just a thoughtful, well-made character study. 9/10

Love on the Run (1936) Joan Crawford is the rich girl who hates reporters, Clark Gable is a reporter. Pretty much like a jillion other movies where the girl finds out the guy wasn't being honest and never wants to see him again. Lots of "follow that cab" kind of stuff, competition with fellow-reporter Franchot Tone (who overacts horrifically), and there is a spy subplot tossed in. Some sequences are irrelevant to the story and are dragged on way too long, and at one point Gable suddenly has a black eye for no apparent reason. Kind of a mess, though Crawford seems very human, fresh and almost innocent at certain points. Best part of the movie is Donald Meek's role as an eccentric night watchman at the palace of Fontainebleu. Won't kill or thrill. 4/10

The day before Thanksgiving I watched Fangs of the Cobra (1977), a Chinese lite contemporary romance adventure from Shaw Brothers studio, not the usual costume martial arts for which they are best known. Young man returns from studying abroad to take over management of the large family farm, and falls for the daughter of a tenant farmer. The unique twist is that her pet, best friend, confidante and protector is a cobra - but he hates snakes because his mother was bitten by one when he was a child, and died. The scheming cousin who wants to marry his money ends up naked quite a lot more than I expected, though without sufficient attributes for me to find it anything but surprising. Eventually the hero cobra protects the infant son from being bitten by the evil mongoose and pretty much saves the day all around. Unique and surprising while still being quite mediocre. 5/10

Movies

Mary and Max (2009) This was on Donna's list of movies she wanted to see, but she couldn't remember why it was on there. Australian stop-motion animation, well executed, of the variety that is called "edgy" because it is occasionally tasteless and repulsive, and attempts to balance it out by being maudlin. "Adult" without being mature. Not what either of us really care for. 3/10

Movies

Cat Girl (1957) Multigenerational curse of unknown origin causes mental bond between woman and leopard. Not quite a transformation film - she thinks she turns into a cat and there is a vague blurry sort of a transformation scene at one point, but mostly it is gloom, atmosphere and stiff British dialogue. Not very exciting or interesting. 4/10

Konga (1961) Michael Gough, one of the great overactors of the cinema, is the mad scientist whose plant serum transforms a tiny chimp into a gigantic gorilla suit. Takes a very long time for the gorilla suit to become gigantic so for the most part it is a conventional gorilla suit movie, with the requisite stranglings, and lab apparatus being swept off tables. When the gorilla suit finally becomes gigantic it bumbles feebly about, or stands immobile, roaring at the hundreds of rounds of gunfire zipping past it because something that large is so difficult to hit. The moral of it all is that those who use science to justify their sociopathy are destroyed by their own creation, but I heard that before. It's all pretty flat, leaving lots of time to admire the way the lighting on the sets doesn't appear to come from any of the visible light fixtures. 3/10

Kongo (1932) There is also a chimp in this movie but everything else is different. Walter Huston is a scar-faced wheelchair-bound white witch doctor who controls his lackeys with drugs and violence, and the natives with simple stage magic, while nursing a grudge against the man who stole his wife and broke his spine. The natives are props and plot devices, the whites uniformly filthy and degraded, though bearing a tiny spark of humanity. Lupe Velez is oiled up and lustful, always on the brink of losing her top. A truly perverse production of a lurid and deranged melodrama. 8/10

Movies

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Space aliens want to save the earth by exterminating humanity, but change their minds when they see people hugging. Wasn't as bad as I expected. Personal note to soundtrack composer Tyler Bates: You have used your quota of thundering drums for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. Try to come up with something else. 5/10

Movies

The Earth Dies Screaming (1965) A very small end of the world movie, with half a dozen baffled survivors in a British village facing enigmatic alien robots and blank-eyed remote-controlled corpses. It's full of slow-moving threats from which people are unable to escape, since they hide by running into a room and leaving the door open. This is one of a number of similar British films at that time, such as Night of the Big Heat, based on the novel by John Lymington, who made a career of writing novels about a small group of people trapped in a village by a mysterious force. Doesn't live up to its title. 4/10

Wonder Bar (1934) One evening's events in a high-class nightclub in Paris. I had read that this film contains some of Busby Berkeley's most spectacular work but I didn't know why it wasn't readily available. Now I know. It must have been incredibly expensive to produce, with huge numbers of dancers, costumes, forty-foot moving pillars and other props, and some scenes are shot in a closed room walled with gigantic mirrors, creating a vast space filled with moving forms. Al Jolson stars, and he gives an amazing performance of songs, offhand gags and vaudeville routines. Dolores Del Rio is resplendent in a backless lame' gown and metallic satin jacket with mink sleeves. Every dress is completely nuts - even the dowagers were wearing eye-popping attire. Dick Powell sings, Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert drink and try to evade their wives. The plot is mere filler between insanely elaborate spectacles. What killed the film for television is not the gay joke or the sadistic gaucho dance, but the astounding production number in which Jolson rides to blackface heaven on a mule. I don't think any other movie contains so many blacked up white folks as this, not to mention the relentless depiction of the most painfully obvious stereotypes. Blackface heaven contains Lincoln worship, porkchop trees, an automatic chicken roasting machine, and of course free watermelons in the blackface heaven version of Harlem. Even his dog and mule end up with tinfoil wings in blackface heaven. I think everyone ought to see this, just so they can see what kind of bizarre and deranged stuff was once considered perfectly normal and acceptable entertainment. This is the sort of screwed up thing I pick for Family Movie Night. 10/10 for being one of the damnedest things I ever did see.

THIS IS BAD. DON'T DO THIS:

Marse Linkum is patron saint of Blackface Heaven

Blackfaces love watermelon.

Movies

Danger: Diabolik (1968) John Phillip Law is fantastically attractive as the masked super-criminal Diabolik. Directed by Mario Bava, based on a comic strip, this is the perfect venue for Bava's wild talents. Diabolik's subterranean lair is a vast hallucination, and the Night Club Scene is the most bizarre and amazing I have ever seen. The theft of a twenty-ton giant ingot of solid gold was fantastic in every sense of the word. The super-criminal, such as Diabolik, Fantomas, Mabuse, Lupin or The Black Lizard, as a character and genre has been shamefully neglected in these decadent times, while idiotic allegiance to primitive ideas of law and justice are spoon-fed to the masses as virtues to prevent their rising up against their evil masters. The world awaits its deliverer. Until then, this fantasy will have to do. 8/10

Adaptation (2002) This is the kind of movie Donna chooses, and I end up watching them just because I like to learn about things. I would never have picked it myself, but ended up enjoying it quite a bit. This movie shows how helpful it can be to listen to your stupid half - one of the best things I ever learned. I don't understand how Nicholas Cage can be such a good actor and still end up in so many brain-dead action spectaculars. Chris Cooper gets the toothless redneck genius thing down with deadly precision. Pretty good stuff if you like quality. 8/10 for completely different reasons from the above.

Movies

White Noise (2005) The EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) movie. Michael Keaton is the bereaved yuppie everyman seeking contact with his late wife by watching hours of blank videotapes. There is quite a lot of that very sad music of a lonely piano and soft violins. They manage to make a pretty good scare story out of a guy turning himself into an obsessive crank watching static on five screens at once, and it's well produced and directed but overall forgettable. 5/10

Gigantes Planetarios (1965) From the perpetrators of El Planeta de las mujeres invasoras, using some of the same actors, props, sets and locations, as well as some sets and costumes from what must have been a Jesus movie. Also involves earthpeople going to another planet to depose a dictator, but not as good because it isn't a planet of scantily clad women. Made me sleepy. 3/10

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) Considering that I hate zombie movies it is rather surprising that I like the Resident Evil movies. What I don't like is just taking the NOTLD format of a bunch of people trapped somewhere shooting zombies in the head, and trying to "up the annie" on it with more and bigger everything. Resident Evil adds a layer of sci fi concept to it, as well as the natural charm of Milla Jovovich kicking raw-meat zombie dogs to pieces. She looked like they were doing a lot of digital smoothing on her face in this one though, as she had a pretty unreal look at times. While the second movie was pretty weak, this had quite a few moments of imaginative grotesqueness, like the protagonist encountering a trench full of the hundreds of rotting corpses of her clones. Good for when you don't want to have to think much and just watch stuff. 6/10

Movies

Disney High School Musical China (2010) I liked High School Musical a lot because it is a pure, non-ironic reversion to the basics of the artform. I liked this even more because it takes that and puts it into a different culture, reflecting a different set of mores and ideals. It is blindingly colorful, intensely choreographed, with a harder rocking beat and less (or at least different) melodramatic formula. I was soothed into a state of vegetable delight. I suppose there is no way to see it legally in the U.S. and it seems to be actively suppressed online. As a lover of the artform, I found this to be the best modern musical I have seen since the original. 10/10

Match Factory Girl (1990) Finnish film, directed by Kaurismaaki, in which a young woman's every attempt to find a little happiness in life is mercilessly crushed. Not as much of a downer as it sounds though, as Kaurismaaki's films, however bleak and sparse, always leave a strange feeling of calm satisfaction. His aesthetics and ideals seem to match mine precisely - I never say "I didn't like that part," or "I wouldn't have done it that way," and he obviously loves machines and industrial spaces as I do. There is no filler, and every shot is a beautiful composition, no matter what is happening. His influence on the modern Quirky Independent Film is obvious, just as obvious as the fact that they are trying to do what he does and not succeeding. The characters sit silent and immobile in a state of perpetual discomfort with life, but they are thinking and feeling beings with human souls, not goofy cartoon characters being weird for weirdness' sake. Probably only about a hundred words are spoken in this too-short, hour-long film and it makes me long for that imaginary Finland, where people aren't always yapping at you or each other or themselves. This was Donna's viewing choice for the evening. 10/10

Mark of the Vampire (1935) A deliberate cartoonish mockery of a vampire movie, with Barrymore as the vampire expert, Atwill as the angry policeman, Donald Meek as the local doctor, and you know who as The Count. An incoherent script makes it seem as if production was halted before they were through shooting everything and they just stuck together what they had. There are a few effective, but almost laughably stereotypical, scenes and sequences, but it's not sure if it wants to be a satire or not. Leila Bennett does the same comedy-relief maid she did in Doctor X, though she is not given as much to do here, and Carroll Borland carves in stone the Vampire Woman cliches for all time to come. If you are really into vampires, see it. As a movie it kind of stinks. 4/10

Movies

Mechte Navstrechu [A Dream Come True] (1965) A Soviet SF film from Odessa Studios. An alien spacecraft on the way to Earth crashes on Mars, prompting a complicated series of rescue attempts. Numerous colorful, elaborate and often surrealistic sets and models depict the alien planet and spacecraft as well as landings and walks upon the surface of the Moon, Mars and Phobos. Not much of a plot, and a cop-out ending, but really wonderful to see, as demonstrated below. 8/10

Event Horizon (1997) Another rescue mission, this time to an experimental FTL drive ship orbiting Neptune. I had given up on SF films around this time so I missed this one, and I don't know if I am sorry or not. The parallels between this and Disney's The Black Hole are numerous and obvious, not just in concept but in visual design and in the vast absurdity of execution. This is so excessive, even the sound design stands out as simply going too far. The only thing it didn't have was a comedy relief robot, or a comedy relief anything for that matter. Nevertheless it is delightfully ridiculous from the very first beeping letters that pop onto the screen. Beeping letters are always the sign of things to come, not necessarily good things, from a skewed conception of how a movie ought to be done. Sadly, they were not beeping green letters, the acme of the form. Anyhow, the long-lost spaceship eventually transforms into an Old Dark House from which None Shall Escape, and the SF movie becomes a grisly supernatural horror story. Why would anyone design a faster than light drive to look like a mechanical device for summoning demons? Because THAT'S WHAT IT IS! Why would anyone design a spaceship to look like a Haunted Mansion, with gothic wall panels, arched colonnades and coffin-shaped doorways? Because THAT'S WHAT IT IS. Though it becomes outright ghoulish at the end, with actual cascading rivers of blood, it is primarily an excessively, absurdly over-the-top gadgetporn space opera that had me laughing with glee. Except for the horrifically mutilated corpses, which I hate. Stupidly great in certain ways. 8/10

Movies

Donna and I both enjoyed Scott Prendergast's short film The Delicious so much when we saw it a while back, we thought we would try his feature film Kabluey (2007) for Family Movie Night. Luckily I had a backup ready because after a seeming eternity of SCREAMING HORRIBLE CHILDREN scenes we just couldn't take any more and will never get to see whether it is really any good or not. The backup was Caveman (1981), which I wasn't able to easily obtain when we were going through caveman movies a couple of years ago. The animated dinosaurs are the real stars of this not entirely funny comedy, but at least nobody was SHRIEKING continuously in it. 5/10

Addendum: Donna says she is going to try to watch the rest of Kabluey, after reading more about it online. I have wished her luck.

I got back to work after that and watched Beast of the City (1932), a hard-edged prohibition drama. Walter Huston is the police chief dedicated to cleaning up his gangster-infested town. A clear backlash against the gangster movies of the day, and it doesn't pull any punches. The Hollywood Ending was not mandatory at that time and it gets pretty rough at the end. Includes Jean Harlow as a scheming gun moll and Mickey Rooney, a tiny speck of a kid. 7/10

Movies

I'm accumulating an uncomfortable backlog of things I need to get watched so I am really buckling down and getting the work done. Recently I have seen Murders in the Zoo (1933) and Doctor X (1932), both starring icily villainous Lionel Atwill, neither of which were worthy of note except for the latter's failure to make full use of its primitive Technicolor. Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) I watched because of the sort of praise Ebert has given it, and found that although there are quite a few naked women in it, and it stars the charismatic William Smith, it didn't get much of a rise out of me. Yesterday I stuck my nose to the grindstone and got four movies watched, starting at 6 pm and ending at 1 am.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (2010) Directed by Bresson, from the comics by Tardi. Globe-trotting adventuress rides pterodactyl through the Paris skies to snatch from the guillotine the only man who can revive the ancient Egyptian mummy who might cure her sister, catatonic with a hatpin through her skull. The re-creation of early 20th century Paris was splendid, and it is a fairly entertaining lite adventure movie that passes the time painlessly. What it cannot capture from the comics is Tardi's heavy line and simple yet dense composition which adds a different kind of intensity from any live action rendition. 6/10

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) Lushly produced Yellow Peril spectacular - one of the most completely ridiculous things I have ever seen. It must have seemed amazing at the time to see every bit of orientalia they had in the warehouse dragged out and jammed higgledy-piggledy into every scene regardless of race or national origin, along with Turbaned Nubians, atrocious sparking and clattering pseudotechnology, and Karloff and Myrna Loy faking deranged Asianity, bellowing such catchphrases as "Kill the White Men and STEAL THEIR WOMEN!." Most dreadful of all is the final scene in which we are shown what a "Good Chinaman" is - a smirking dimwitted ignoramus in a white jacket. Stupidly and horribly amusing. 6/10

The Girl on the Boat (1962) Starring Norman Wisdom, this is one of the far-too-rare films of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. As such it maintains a certain level of urbanity and wit. Wisdom's more working-class mugging lowers the tone a bit at times but on the whole it is mild and pleasant without being outright hilarious. A really good Wodehouse movie has yet to be made, though the BBC's various treatments have been uniformly charming. 6/10

The Devil-Doll (1936) The hit of the evening, yet another gem I have managed to miss for decades. Lionel Barrymore makes use of a mad scientist's invention to get revenge on the men who destroyed his life. Rafaela Ottiano as the scientist's wife and heir to his madness is outstandingly bizarre as she carries on the dream of one day reducing all living creatures on earth to ONE SIXTH THEIR SIZE. With no will of their own, miniature humans are controlled by Barrymore, by remote mental influence, to carry out his vengeance. The effects, inserting small humans and animals into the scene, are extremely well done considering the technical constraints of the day. Also notable is Barrymore's convincing disguise through most of the film as an old woman. Bizarre in conception and execution, it's exactly why I plow through all that other crap - for a transcendent experience like this. 10/10

We can make the WHOLE WORLD small!!!

Movies

Petlya Oriona [Orion's Loop] (1980) Soviet science fiction of the Metaphysical school. A shipful of cosmonauts and their android replicas investigate an apparently deadly ring of energy approaching earth and encounter difficulty in communicating with an advanced non-human race. Co-written by cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov. Kind of interesting at times but not very exciting. This was the first film I have ever seen from the Odessa Film Studio. 5/10

Movies

Byleth, el demone dell'incesto (1972) Costume psychodrama of a 19th century noble seemingly possessed by a murderous and incestuous spirit. Really just a skin flick and an excuse to indulge the passion of that era and nation, of depicting a mysterious figure in black stabbing naked women to death. Even that is muddled and vaguely executed, like everything else in the film. Apparently seeing an actor and actress supposed to be brother and sister making out was intended to be startling. 5/10

Movies

Woman Chases Man (1937) Miriam Hopkins is the poor girl, Joel McCrea is the rich boy in this screwball comedy. Lots of fast talking, scheming, and absurdly complicated situations. Gets to be a lot of shouting and fighting at the end which I find wearisome, but overall it was pretty cute despite its lack of a negligee scene. 7/10

Movies

I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay (2006) Eccentric and imaginative Korean romantic comedic fantasy. A young woman believes she is a cyborg and wears her grandmother's false teeth when she talks to other machines, and she finds understanding and love in the mental hospital. That is just the skeleton on which a very entertaining and well-executed film is built. Bright, colorful, inventive and fun, with fantastic and realistic elements seamlessly blended. 8/10

Addendum: Re-watched it with Donna, and it was well-received. Not as light as it first appears, and unconventional in every way.

Movies

Hiroku Kaibyoden [The Haunted Castle] (1969) Another version of the story filmed in 1958 as Mansion of the Ghost Cat. This version is from a classier studio and is a straight-ahead costume spook story of samurai days. The beloved pet of an unjustly slain vassal becomes a vengeful demon to punish the murderous lord of the castle. While it builds quite a bit of tension by keeping almost all of the action in claustrophobic night-dark hallways, with characters floating in isolated spheres of dim light, it really doesn't compare to the earlier version for imagination and sensation. Has its moments but you definitely want to go with the earlier one. 5/10

Echappement Libre [Backfire] (1964) Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and a Triumph Spitfire convertible made of gold wandering around the mediterranean. Sort of a heist movie so you can figure how it's going to end up. Never really makes a whole lot of sense, builds chemistry between the characters, or becomes very interesting. Passes the time painlessly, and is not challenging. 5/10

Movies

Horror Island (1941) Factory-made back lot b-picture, specifically designed not to outshine the film at the top of the bill. Doughy all-purpose good guy Dick Foran, exotic foreigner Leo Carillo and a mixed bag of characters (including Iris Adrian) in a haunted castle looking for pirate treasure. Groping hands, secret panels, cobwebs and screams in the night. Harmless. 5/10