Sunday morning, my sweetie-wife and I went out and saw the first showing of Iron Man 2. I think this may have been the first time my sweetie-wife has gone with me to see a Superhero flick.
A few weeks ago she started expressing an interest in Iron Man 2 and I pulled out the blu-ray of Iron Man to catch her up on the franchise.
Iron Man 2 is a worth sequel to the first film. It’s based on the premise What Happens If Iron Man existed? Continue reading
So last night I returned to my trek through the Bond Franchise. Since I am watching the film in release order the next movie was You Only Live Twice.
This is a Bond movie I have never seen in it’s entirety. Oh, I’ve seen lots of bits here and there, but I had never had the chance to sit down and watch it straight through from the start.
The problem in doing a franchise like Bond is that the producers, writers, and directors have to keep topping themselves. Each film needs to be bigger and with higher stakes than the last or you risk having you audience go ho-hum over what was supposed to be thrilling experience.
Of course the problem with getting bigger and bigger in your stunts, action, and your dangers is that you run the terrible risk of sailing right over the top and landing in farce-land. (A fine place to be if you intend to go, but a lousy accidental destination.)
As you can likely tell from the picture i selected to illustrate my post, I think You Only Live Twice splashed-down in farce-land with a side trip to Mockalvania. Continue reading
So this week’s movie was a bit of a gamble for me as it was something I had never seen and further more was something I had heard little about.
I started the Sunday Night Movie habit as a way of utilizing my movie collection. I had realized one day that I rarely watched so many movies in my collection and when I did I tended to watch the same ones over and over. I started Sunday Night Movie as a regular event to enjoy those movies that I love but so rarely watched.
This is not one of those movies.
I Sell The Dead is a story about two men in the resurrection business in what I presume is the 17th or 18th century. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is partner and former apprentice to Willie Grimes in the resurrection business. That is they steal corpses and sell them to doctors. Their lives take a dramatic turn down a path of bump in the night events when they discover that digging up some corpses leads to a much more active product than the pair is accustomed to finding. They have a number of serious threats in their wretched lives, There Dr. Quint (Angus Scrimm, Best know as the Tall Man in Phantasm.) who is extorting their services without compensation by threats of the law. Then there’s the House Of Murphy a rival gang of resurrectionists with a tendency for murder and mayhem, and of course there’s the very active undead who are always ungrateful for being dug up or unboxed.
This movie is supposed to be a comedy and as such one is expected to give it more leeway that a traditional horror film or dramatic feature for suspension of disbelief, however this film had too many flaws for me to do that. There are endless anachronisms, historical errors, and a general failure to understand just what it was that resurrection men did. (They did not sell bodies to doctors for their general practice, they sold them to schools and teaching doctors for study, instruction, and research.) In the end this movie was simply too much of a mess with too little plot and too much gag to work as a film.
I recommend pass if someone offers a viewing to you.
So I was looking for a soundtrack that I thought was out of print and it cause me to ponder the ethics of downloading it.
I fully support buying material to support the artists. I buy my books, I buy my DVDs and Blu-rays, and I buy my music, but there are times when what I want is not in print. I cannot buy a copy that will support the artist. (Buying a used copy generates no royalties for the copyright holder.)
So in that situation is it ethical to download a copy? Certainly on the legal front it is illegal, but I’m asking a question of ethics.
I think so. I will support the legal methods of reimbursing the artists and such whenever I can, but if the copyright holders do not make it possible for me to pay them for the product I then I really do not feel bad about finding a copy on my own.
My story had a happy ending for the copyright owners. Not only was the soundtrack to The Wicker Man (1973) in print it was available from iTunes!
So if you follow political columnist at all then you should already be familiar with Michelle Malkin. Ms. Malkin is a very conservative opinion writer. She’s known for fiery opinions defended aggressively with a penchant for name-calling. Ms. Malkin’s frequent posting are aggressive, and in-your-face which has earned her plenty of die-hard supporters and an equal number of die hard critics.
I am in neither camp. I do not care for name calling and I feel whenever you you do so in an argument you do nothing but weaken your case. I find her blog to be depressing. There is very little joy in her posts and nearly every post is about something that has offended, enraged, or irritated her. That’s fine if that is what she wants. It’s her blog and she can put up anything she likes, but it make for a repetitive and angry tone. I seriously can not think of a post that was truly just happy or joyous.
I frequent her site because it is a very good reflection of where conservative thought and feelings are for a number of subjects.
For a woman who like to call people to the left or her Socialists and Communists I have been surprised lately with her love affair for Communism. Thought I am sure it is one born out of ignorance.
Recently she’s been posting that Conservatives need to have an “I am Spartacus” moment of resistance to the health care reform, base on the stunning scene from the movie “Spartacus“.
Here’s the scene:
Spartacus is one of my favorite films and I will be so happy in a few months when I have it on DVD, but the film is a communist allegory.
The film was based on the novel Spartacus written by Howard Fast, who was a communist. I don’t mean that in the current Republican way of anyone left of me is a communist, Mr. Fast was a member of the American Communist Party. He was so hot politically no publisher would touch the novel Spartacus and he was forced to self-publish it. On the audio commentary to the Laserdisc of Spartacus Mr. Fast made it clear that the story was a communist allegory about the rich and the workers.
The film screenplay was adapted by Dalton Trumbo, another Communist. Trumbo spent 11 years in prison for contempt of congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Spartacus was the first film he was credited with writing after the blacklist. (Thoigh he had written many just denied credit.) He was proud of having killed films in Hollywood that were deemed anti-communist.
I have no doubt that if either man was still alive today they would happy tell Ms. Malkin that in their view she and her fellow conservatives are more aligned with Marcus Licinius Crassus than with the workers uprising symbolized by the slave revolt in Spartacus. (To be clear I am not a communists and I ignore the communist allegory of Spartacus, but then I am not trying to lift the film for my own political ends either.)
I am deeply amused by the irony that a communist hater is aligning herself with communist writers and with what they saw as communist characters.
Last night I was in the mood for something darker and yet fantastic, so I settled on the original film, The Wicker Man, made in 1973. (Let’s make this clear NOT the remake staring Nicholas Cage.)
This is a film I first heard about when I watched the Academy of Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror’s televised award broadcast in 1979. To give you an idea of their commitment to horror they are the ones who unleashed William Shatner’s — interpretation — of Rocket Man upon this world. Anywho, that year they award the Best Horror film award for 1978 to The Wicker Man. (I guess horror is such a thin field you gotta let a film five years old compete.) So a few months later I got a chance to see this movie in HBO and it blew my little mind. Continue reading
So on Saturday the Fedex man brought me my newest addition to my growing DVD and Blu-Rau collection; Dracula The Legacy Collection.
For those not in the know, from the 30’s through the 50’s Universal was know for its horror films. In 1931 they produced and released Frankenstein and set the tropes that would be used in retelling that story for the rest of the century. Several years ago they began releasing their classic horror films in Legacy boxed sets. Each set containing the Classic film from Universal in that franchise. The Dracula: Legacy collection has five films in all, I had only seen two of those so when I got the chance to buy the Legacy Collection for just $12 I jumped at it.
Dracula’s Daughter (1936) picks up exactly where Dracula left off. Two police constables come down to the cellar of Carfax abbey and find Renfeld dead at the foot of the stairs, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan reprising his role) kindly points them towards the body of Dracula and confesses to staking the man. Naturally the police are skeptical about the whole hie was a vampire defense and arrest Van Helsing.
The plot continues with Van Helsing and his friend Dr Garth struggling to find some way to save Van Helsing from the gallows while remaining true to the truth. Their job is made easier when Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) appears on the scene and starts munching on necks. in this story however we have an unwilling vampire, the Countess wants to be free of her curse and believes that Dr garth has the secret to freeing her. However the Countess’s human servant — the best vampires have one — Sandor (Irving Pichel) is convinced that there is no release.
This turned out to be a better movie than I had expected. the story had a few twists and I really enjoyed the fact that you could splice it together with Dracula’s and there would not be a moments’s continuity gaff.
In the evening — I had watched Dracula’s Daughter in the afternoon — I watched the next in the series Son Of Dracula (1943).
This film I had more interest, but lower expectations for. Unlike Hammer Studios, Universal was not seeking a way to raise the Count for each film and in this one another lost relative of the famous vampire turns up. This time the charming and suave eurotrash vampire is played by Lon Chaney jr. This is some of the worst casting ever. Please just go ahead and put Arnold Schwarzenegger in a musical if you want to equal this terrible casting. Lon Chaney jr had no ability at voices or accents and it not credible an in fashion as a Hungarian prince.
Surprisingly, I kind of like this movie and wish it had not been hampered by inadequate direction and moronic casting.
A european count, Alucard (Lon Chaney jr), has come to live in a Bayou town at the invitation of a plantation owner’s daughter, Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton.) People are suspicious as Katherine is not acting like herself. Upon the mysterious death of the plantation owner, Katherine inherits the land and bring in Alucard as her husband. Cheesing off her fiancée, Frank Stanley (Robert Page) to the point iof murder. Slowly the counts true name is learned — cause spelling your name backwards just won’t fool Americans a young and vital race — and it falls upon men of learning to battle the demon spawn again.
What made this film particularly interesting is I think it might have been the first time in film we saw a character who wanted to become a vampire. That here might be the genesis of the rock and roll vampire. It’s good to live forever and party all night even if you have to die to achieve it.
For whatever reason I am utterly exhausted tonight. (Could be why I am going in for a sleep study in a little over a week.)
Anyway I did watch a Sunday Night Movie and I will write it up tomorrow.
See you kiddies on the other side of the terminator.
So last night I was in the mood for something fantastic. By that I do not mean something of such tremendous quality that decades later people ares till amazed with the filmmaking, but rather in the mood for a film that dealt with a fantastic premise.
Thanks to my new nifty database program, I was able to sort the movies by time, I was looking for something under one hours fifty minutes, and then I just scanned the titles until I saw something that struck my fancy.
So The Sword And The Sorcerer is a fantasy film that came out in 1982 about the same time that Conan: The Barbarian was released into theaters. While Conan was a big budget film, 20 million dollars, which grossed nearly 40 million dollars domestically, The Sword And The Sorcerer was a much more modest production. Reportedly The Sword and The Sorcerer was made for the price of a single set on Conan: The Barbarian, and yet it still gross 39 million dollars domestically as well. Clearly the better return on investment went with the little film that could. Continue reading
So I have spent a few hours this morning databasing my DVD/Blu-ray collection. I have according to the database 222 movies in my collection, but this number is not completely accurate. The database software counts boxed sets as a single entry, so for example my boxed set of the Star Wars movies is one entry, but it has three movies.
Given that my feature film count is closed to 290 from boxed sets. (The el cheapo 50 ‘classic’ horror films bosted that count by 49 alone.)
The database software is Movie Collector and I love it. After the jump is a screen capture of what it looks like. The software cost me $30 so it is not pricey. You can enter films by title, barcode number (typing it in by hand) or by scanning the barcode on the box of the DVD/Blu-ray. I bought a cheap barcode scanner off Ebay ($8) and it took me just a couple of hours to enter all the films. Continue reading