Grave Robbers

Last night I watched J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek for the first (and last) time. I have to admit that on one level, I couldn't take my eyes off it: in much the same way that you can't possibly stop looking at a train wreck when it happens right in front of you.

The most basic and obvious reason that I hate this movie is: DeForrest Kelley is dead, Jimmy Doohan is dead, Gene Roddenberry is dead, and here is Leonard Nimoy, playing Spock most likely for the last time, looking like death warmed over.

Meanwhile, here are all these Babies, these new non-entity pukes, all laboring to copy what the Original Cast did so well and so easily. Of all the new cast, the only ones who make no effort whatever to imitate their betters are the actors playing Uhura and Scotty.

For the same reason that I never accepted the impostor Kermit that was installed after Jim Henson's death, I don't accept this impostor crew of the Enterprise, or this alternate history of the Star Trek universe. You can't just keep something alive by pumping hot air into it, just because you're not done making money off it yet. But that's my problem.. What's not my problem is, this movie is just plain bad!

Let's get the good stuff out at the way at the outset, so that I can feel free to knock this piece of tripe from here to eternity. There was one thing and one thing only that I liked about J.J. Abrams's Star Trek:: the production design. They found a way to make the original uniforms work on the big screen, and for the first time since the original series went off the air, Star Trek finally looks the way it ought to.

But that's where it ends.

My biggest gripe is the device that everyone else seems to love: this isn't even our Star Trek anymore, an alternate timeline has been created and the entire original series basically never happened. I've seen this trick used several times before, and it always strikes me as creative arrogance. Abrams doesn't want to be bound by any established rules, so he's just declared that the rules simply don't exist. Like Kirk rewriting the software of the Kobiyashi Maru test, Abrams has declared that the rules are now anything that he wants them to be.

And what he wants is crap. The first twenty minutes of this movie contains some of the most eye-rollinging dumb material ever to come out of Star Trek, and that includes the godawful movie that Shatner directed. Never mind the comic melodrama stuff surrounding Kirk's birth, although that's bad enough. Kirk has always been a cocky piece of work, but never the complete Pain in the Ass and Menace to Society that Abrams has drawn him as here.

Beyond that, I just don't buy Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and all the rest, all at Star Fleet together at the same time. I don't buy Kirk hitting on Uhura all the time, and Uhura throwing herself at Spock on the elevator while they're both still on duty. It's like Star Trek 90210.

I don't buy blowing up Vulcan and killing off Spock's mother just on a whim, just on a plot point.

And I don't buy turning Star Trek into Raiders of the Lost Ark, into an Action Movie. Star Trek is not and never was about car chases, barroom brawls, things exploding everywhere, death drops, shootouts in space or big CGI monsters trying to eat people. Abrams can't seem to hold the camera still even when it's not even a bloody camera, even when it's a CGI shot of the Enterprise! Star Trek is supposed to have a brain -- but you wouldn't know it from this lobotomized, cannibalized monster. All it cost me was my time, and even then I was cheated.

-- Freder.

World Without End

. . . was the title of the vintage SF picture I watched last night. It came to me as part of a two-disk set; I really only wanted Ray Harrihausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but for under ten bucks I got that, Them!, and two other pictures I'd never heard of before.

Made in 1956, this programmer (shot in color and cinemascope for no good reason, as there is no visual excitement to the thing whatever, unless you count a large and patently rubber spider that gets tossed onto the actors at one point) is just about as wonky as they come. It operates under the exact same premise as the much later (and much better) Planet of the Apes: a group of astronauts get thrown into the future and land on an Earth devastated by nuclear war in the year 2508.

Instead of apes, they find a horde of one-eyed brutes living on the surface, and a highly civilized and refined culture living underground, very Buck Rogers if you ask me.

But get this: The men are all weaklings and Olde Fartes in Flash Gordon headpieces, while the women are all 1950's pin-ups in miniskirts and pedal-pushers. And because they're sick of their attenuated, distant menfolk, they're all over the guys from the 20th century!

That's right -- these guys have landed in the middle of the perfect mid-sixties sex fantasy. And because there's a lot of running and punching and fighting and shooting to do on the surface, it's the best of both worlds for Joe Virile.

Although this is not bad enough to fall into the category of "So Bad it's Good," it is bad enough to be worth a chuckle or two, and oddly enough I did not find myself falling asleep on it. Go figure. The only name I recognized was Rod Taylor, and he didn't even get top billing.

At the end of the picture, the guys from the 20th century have made their point about flexing muscles and returning to the surface, and the Olde Fartes from the undercity all take off their Flash Gordon headgear to show that they are ready to become Real Men and help slaughter all those one-eyed brutes.

I'm not convinced that this gesture is going to be good enough to get the women back.

-- Freder.

The Spy

Here it is: the stupid little comedy I shot more than three decades ago, and finally completed this summer with its first and only post production.

Mickey's Gala Premiere

*

. . . is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons ever -- and, really, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. It has no plot whatsoever. A new Mickey Mouse cartoon is having its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all of the Hollywood glitterati -- beautifully caricatured by the Disney artists -- turn up for the event. Garbo and the Marx Brothers are there -- hellfire, even Dracula, Frankenstein and Mister Hyde are there, laughing uproariously at all the inappropriate parts.

But that's neither here nor there.

My boss is the sort of person who will never call any job done so long as she can think of one single different way to do it. This is oftentimes infuriating to me, because I am the sort of person who calls a job done if it looks good and feels "right" and complete -- and it doesn't matter if I can think of a HUNDRED other different ways that it could be done. Everything can always be done differently, but will doing it differently make it better? Sometimes you just have to type the period and move on.

What I'm really typing around here is that my restoration / recut of the family home movies had its Gala Premiere at my father's house yesterday, to strongly positive reviews.

I pushed the job through, staying up until past three-thirty in the morning, because I'm basically seven years old on the inside and could NOT wait another day to get the finished product onto a DVD and watch it on my telly.

You know that you're working with some large honking files when it takes four hours to render them, another hour to export them to the DVD authoring software, and another forty-five minutes for the authoring software to compress them for DVD. At a couple of points I just wandered off and racked out on the porch while I waited.

The computer spit out its first disc a little after two AM, and of course I had to sit down and watch the whole thing, all 72 minutes of it (up from about 45 minutes in its original version).

All of which made going to work the next day a little bit heavy.

Over the next couple days I made ten more copies and packaged them up. Yesterday I hand delivered them to Dad, who, although he didn't know it yet, is my designated distributor to his side of the family.

My father's wife was acting extra weird yesterday. While Dad was updating me on my sister's condition following her heart attack (she's having a rough time of it), his wife interrupted twice to deliver lectures about asian cucumbers. What was that about?

I'd brought pizza makings with me to whip up a quick lunch for the three of us, and when I set the raw crust down on some paper towels to start working on it, she reached right in under my hands and flipped it over onto its top. Pause. I flipped it back. Pause. She flipped it over again. I finally said, "No, that's the bottom," and flipped it back. I mean, who's the pizza chef here anyhow?

All I can think of is that she's not used to having someone else working in her kitchen. I'd brought an eggplant with me to use on her portion. I meant to fry it up before putting it on. Instead, she grabbed it, sliced it -- and threw it into the microwave! Anyone who'd microwave an eggplant hasn't been watching Chef Ramsay as much as I have.

Without even giving me the chance to do it properly, she piled the eggplant so deep on her portion of the pizza (I mean, it was an inch and a half of eggplant stacked up) that all I could think of was "vomit." Sure enough, when it got to the table she took one bite, choked on it and beat a hasty retreat. That's what happens when you interfere with the guy who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how she managed it, but she did come back and choked the whole thing down somehow. She strikes me as the sort of woman who likes to prove a point.

I also learned that she is the sort of woman who, if she sees some job of work that she thinks needs to be done to your house, she will come over to your house while you are away and just do it whether you wanted it done or not. That's another thing that happened this week. I wasn't aware of it until they mentioned it to me yesterday. When I got home, sure enough, there was a metal plate screwed onto the side of my house outside the second floor landing.

You see what I have to put up with?

Moving right along. Dad wanted to watch the movies right then and there, so I had to sit through them again for about the millionth time. I guess my opening scenes were just about as effective as I thought they were, because not more than a few seconds in Dad announced, "I think I'm going to start crying."

Before yesterday, his wife had always refused to watch the home movies on the grounds that they were "his past, not hers" -- fuzzy logic if you ask me. But yesterday she sat down and joined us, and actually paid attention and seemed interested. If it was genuine, and I've no reason to assume otherwise, I call that quite an achievement. After all, I do imagine that there are few things in the entertainment world worse than having to sit through someone else's home movies. If I've succeeded in making them watchable and even enjoyable for people whose past it isn't, then I award myself two thumbs up.

-- Freder.

The Final (?) Cut of Memory

I put in some long hours at the computer over the weekend and am happy to report that my "Version 2.0" of the family home movies is more or less completed! I'll wait a bit before I push the button, in case it needs a tweak here and there, in case I change my mind about some aspect of the piece, but this feels suspiciously like it belongs in the "done" box.

I was so excited to have actually seen a creative project through to fruition! Not even the prospect of Moanday Morning could get me down! This is a milestone -- my first completed project since well before my mother's death. I just wish she could see it.

My father was erratic in his moving-picture-taking habits. He shot a fair amount of my sister as a toddler, but he didn't shoot anything of me at that stage -- so my part of the story lad to be built from scratch out of still images. Likewise, I had film of just three out of the five houses that we lived in while I was growing up, so there was a fair amount of scrambling to unearth stills that I could use to tell the complete story. I was dismayed not to have any pictures of Cliff House in Cape Elizabeth. Then, very late in the game, in one of my grandmother's photo albums, I found three.

In the process, I added a wide range of photos that fleshed out the telling considerably. With music and a neat "pan and scan" process built into iMovie (they call it "Ken Burns"), the still pictures really come alive.

I even found one still photo that had been taken by somebody at the exact same moment that my father had been shooting film from a different angle. You can bet I cut that one in!

The home movies come to an abrupt halt after my sister's wedding, and one of the problems I needed to solve was, how to end the story? I settled on a long fade to black out of the wedding, and then created an epilogue out of pictures from later years.

Titled "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun" (from a song by Dead Can Dance), the epilogue pulls no punches. I show the last pictures of my grandfather and grandmother. I show some of the many beloved cats who have been and gone. Using old pictures and new ones that I took after Mom's death, I show the main rooms of the house dissolving from how they appeared when we first moved in to the state they were in after years of hoarding antiques and collectibles. And I close with a scene that I won't describe, but which really takes the story full-circle, and puts an emphatic period on the end. All set to the tune of Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere," as performed by Tom Waits -- one of Mom's favorite songs.

I knew it was "right" when I burst into tears as I watched the playback.

Following the dedication and a scroll of the music credits (to the Supremes "Reflections"), there's a stretch of empty black screen. I expect most of the family will tune out at that point, if not earlier. But if they stay, my stupid little comedy short that I wrote about a while back will appear as a kind of "easter egg."

I finished that, too. . . and surprise! It's actually kind of cute now. I found the perfect musical accompaniment for it -- Scott Joplin's "Fig Leaf Rag" -- and with its new titles and new look, I can actually watch it without cringing.

Next up -- making the slide show of all the unused photographs. I did it once, last night, and it was easy as can be to get a smashing result -- but exporting the file proved to be another matter. It was looking to take hours . . . and then I realized the program was exporting all the photos in the system, not just the ones I wanted. I aborted the export. When I tried to open the slideshow again, it was gone! Back to the old drawing board!

And the "help" menu!

-- Freder.

National Endowment for the (Low Comic) Arts

I have NO idea why this popped into my head this morning, but I can tell you why I remembered it in the first place, and it's one of those things that, if you haven't heard it already, you'll wish you didn't know. So, be warned before you read on!

I learned it from a book about the early years of Saturday Night Live. (Gad, it's a bit on the depressing side when they start publishing histories of things you were there for!) One of the writers (and no, I can't remember his name) got his start writing "roast" jokes for Milton Berle, so when Uncle Milty came to host Saturday Night Live, they had a chance to sit down and talk about Olde Times.

And the writer said something along the lines of, "Funny, my having to write all those jokes about your penis..."

Uncle Miltie replied, "You mean you haven't seen it? Do you want to see it?"

That's why I can't purge this story from my memory. Milton Berle was everywhere when I was growing up, even on Batman fer crine out loud, and his range of expression is embedded in my mind, and I can just hear his voice and see the expression on his face when he said those words.

The writer then went on to describe Berle taking it out and laying it across the table, and that's where I'll stop.

A couple of years later I was working as a typesetter for Thorndike Press (the best job I ever had and probably ever will have, until the Evil Corporate Bastards at Thomson/Gale laid off the whole production department). Late in the game I had to set a book by Jack Lemmon's son. It was a memoir about their golfing experiences together, pretty dry stuff. The best story in the book was about Harpo Marx and his ongoing battle with a tree on a particular golf course. Harpo seemed to hit it every time. He finally put the tree out of his misery by sneaking onto the course one night and chopping it down!

 But the book also contained a postscript to the Berle story. One day, in a private room at the Hollywood club where all the stars played golf, with Jack Lemmon and his son present, Milton Berle and Forrest Tucker got into an argument. Call it a cockfight. They had it out, so to speak, right then and there, and Berle, in the words of Jack Lemmon's son, "won by a head."

Now I know why Corporal Agarn was afraid of Sergeant O'Rourke.

Anyway. Moving right along. . .

-- Freder.

Out of the Past

While going through the family photos to select shots that needed to be incorporated into the home movies, I found this picture of my Grandpa Claude -- and my mother, when she was a toddler.

I'd never seen it before, and I think it's just smashing. It really shows Grandpa's spirit and personality -- and Mom, well she seems never to have changed in some ways. She loved toys and teddy bears to her dying day.

I can't use this shot in the home movies, because it falls well outside the time period that they cover, but you can bet I'll include it in the slideshow that I'm planning as an "extra feature" for the DVD.

I'm guessing that I scanned another hundred and fifty pictures today, and I've only just begun working on their restoration. It's kind of tedious work, and it's getting more emotional, too, because we're getting up to our earliest days at the farm in Albion.

In those days the house was bright and attractive and open. The plaster was clean and solid; it was a house meant for entertaining and my folks did a lot of that. By the End Days, the house had transformed into a deeply eccentric folly, shot through with cracks -- a funhouse, all right, but one with a distinct Gothic side, a shadow behind all the happy faces that stared out of every available space.

That world isn't covered in the Home Movies either, but somehow I feel that I must give it a nod. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'm going to end the new version of the movies, but I've been working hard all through the recut to give it the shape of a story with a beginning, middle and end. It seems to me that I have to at least indicate the shape of things to come, to at least point at the way it ended. I don't want it to be maudlin, but there needs to be some sense of the damage that time and trouble inflicts on us all.

-- Freder.

The Perfect Giant Gorilla Movie

Last night TCM ran the original Mighty Joe Young. I didn't need to watch it; have seen it many times and own the DVD. But with nine thousand channels on tap there was absolutely nothing else worth playing while my dinner defrosted, so I did take in the first few scenes, right up to the introduction of the grown-up Joe.

I think I like this better than King Kong, because it's got heart (if anything, heartless is the word to describe Kong, with its merciless treatment of man and dinosaur and ape alike) -- and a good deal of flat-out schmaltz. I like schmaltz, if it's not forced or artificial, and the thing about Joe is that it's remarkably genuine. I saw it first sometime before I reached my teens, and while it's not exclusively a kid's movie, that's the perfect age to see it for the first time. Its scary bits and melodramatic bits all prey on a child's innate fears, and at the same time the whole wish-fulfillment thing of having a giant ape for a pet is expertly calculated. Although as a boy gets older, that scrumptious Terry Moore becomes the character you'd rather have by your side.

How do I know when something is just perfect? It's embarrassing to admit this, but it makes me cry. That's why I often weep over things in movies and books that aren't at all sad. I know. It annoys me, too.

But the climactic scene where Joe rescues the little kid from the burning orphanage? It's just perfect. And it gets me every time, from the first time I ever watched it right up to now.

Thankfully, I didn't get that far last night. Don't know if I could have taken it! As it was, even the opening scenes with the little girl falling in love with Joe and bartering for him were getting to me. That little girl is just perfect. "Oh, I'm being very naughty!" But does that stop her?

We couldn't move on to the city and Robert Armstrong soon enough to please me, and watching it this time I experienced a real Coin Drop. If there are any comics fans out there, get this: isn't Robert Armstrong as Max O'Hara the obvious model for Spider-Man's J. Jonah Jameson? I mean, it's exact! The haircut, the 'stache, the moodswings, the fabrications -- it's all here! Stan Lee rather famously never created anything original in his life -- what he did was to cleverly re-combine existing things in new and interesting ways, and lend them a contemporary attitude. When he was casting around for a foil to play off of everyone's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Max O'Hara is surely what must have come to mind!

The other remarkable thing about Joe is that he still holds up remarkably well as a special effect, even in today's CGI-saturated world. We're aware that we're looking at something real, not a digitally generated illustration. By this time, Willis O'Brien had perfected his many tricks and techniques for combining animation with live-action, and he had the added benefit of having the extraordinarily gifted young Ray Harrihausen on his team. O'Brien was a pretty good "actor," too -- he always got great emotion out of his puppets, never more so than here.

My dinner, by the way, was "Frozen Mexican Stuff." It wasn't horrible, but I could have gotten better at Buen Apetito just two minutes drive from my house. Oh, well.

-- Freder.

Robert Wise and Me

When I was in, I think, the eighth or ninth grade, I made a (very) short film. It was supposed to be a comedy, but it was really just a bad joke in more ways than one. It told the story of a Wacky Spy who steals a Top Secret document only to have it blow up in his face.

I was terribly disappointed in the end result. With no means of editing, we shot it in sequence and in one take for each shot. All the fluffs ended up in the "finished" piece. To make matters worse, I was shooting indoors with outdoor film under low lighting conditions, in the hope that this would give the finished film a yellow, faded "silent movie" look, the way it had done with one of the reels of home movies my dad had shot years earlier. Imagine my dismay when the film was developed and gaudy, bright seventies colors flooded the screen.

I didn't even get the title cards framed properly. They were dumb and unfunny enough to start with, but in the "finished" film you couldn't even read them. My venture into comedy film-making was an embarrassment.

I can only suppose that Robert Wise felt a bit that way about his venture into Star Trek movie-making. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was made under appalling conditions, with a script that was never finished and a schedule so tight that the movie went out essentially uncompleted. It never had a proper post production, no time for a sound mix or foley work, so the bridge of the Enterprise was dead silent. Effects shots were still arriving the day before the premiere and they were not what Wise wanted, but he just had to cut them in as-is. The next day he hand-delivered the "finished" film to the premiere. The print was still wet!

So in 2001 he jumped at the chance to do a "Director's Cut" that was far more elaborate than these things usually are. With a rule in place that his crew not do anything that wasn't possible in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was completely rebuilt from the ground up. A new edit restored scenes that got lost in the rush of the original release, and removed dead weight; new effects shots were created, the picture was finally given a proper sound mix. Wise got the chance to complete his unfinished movie.

With the result that it is no longer the worst movie in the series. In fact, it's jumped both The Final Frontier and The Search for Spock to land in the number three position (I'm only counting the films that feature the original cast). Granted, that's not saying much, as both of those other movies are dismal. But Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with all of its story flaws still intact, now at least possesses a professionalism and polish that makes it worth sitting through.

And now I'm getting the same chance that Robert Wise got! Thanks to Apple's iMovie software, my stupid little one-joke "comedy" is getting the post-production that it so desperately needed.

The first thing I did was strip the color out. What an improvement! There's a reason why the great comedies (and even some bad ones like mine) are all in black & white: color distracts and overwhelms. In this case, the black and white also highlights the scratches and age of the film, which I like. And it's now (slightly) less obvious that I shot this in my bedroom and the upstairs hall of our house!

Next the flubs came out. At one point I walk into a wall, and then spoil the take by grinning. At another point I freeze in my tracks and tell the cameraman (my dad) to "Cut." You get the idea. A few frames of film shaved, a cross-dissolve added here, a fade to black there -- goodbye flubs!

Thanks to some stock photography I was able to add establishing shots, exteriors, that will help set the stage and clarify things: a "top secret government facility" (actually the Googleplex) and an "international spy organization headquarters." I'm creating new title cards and insert shots in Photoshop that are at least legible and, I hope, slightly more humorous. Finally, I'll score some silent-movie music from one source or another, and Voila! My stupid old one-joke "comedy" will no longer be quite the embarrassment that it once was.

It's still going to be a stupid little one-joke "comedy," nothing can change that. As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the raw material is what it is. But I'm having a ball and learning new things and who knows? I've always wanted to write a script. With the tech that's out there now, all things seem possible. . .

-- Freder.

Second Bond Syndrome

When Pierce Brosnan took over as James Bond, his debut vehicle, GoldenEye (directed by Martin Campbell), was absolutely smashing. But the follow-up, Tomorrow Never Dies, was just exactly half as good, and they kept getting worse after that.

Yeesh, I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Daniel Craig. I'm on record as thinking Casino Royale (also directed by Martin Campbell -- do you sense a pattern here?) is one of the best of the entire series, right up there with From Russia With Love, so I was scared away from the theatrical release of Quantum of Solace when its reviews skewed so very negative. A friend of mine assured me this weekend that Solace was "even better" than Casino Royale. So when I found it in the five dollar bin at Wallyworld (at  least I didn't overpay for it) I took a risk.

Alas, my friend was wrong and the reviewers were right. Roger Ebert hit it on the nose: Bond is not an action hero!

Following the worst theme song and opening credits sequence ever, the first hour of Quantum is a complete write-off, with one annoying action chase (usually poorly shot, all quick cuts and herky-jerky camera moves) after another. In cars, on foot, in boats, lord knows what all else, for nearly fifty-five minutes things hurtle about and poor Daniel Craig barely gets the chance to speak.

This is not what makes James Bond James Bond. Of course you want a big action set-piece to begin the movie (I would have cut the opening car chase -- a waste of screen time if ever there was one -- entirely and begun with the questioning of Mr. White and the subsequent on-foot chase between Bond and Quantum's mole. There, you see? The movie's better already!), but Bond's main weapon is his personality, and the screenwriters and directors seem to have forgotten that here.

When, finally, things calm down for half a tick and Craig is actually allowed to speak and play the character, Quantum of Solace at last begins to feel like a James Bond movie -- but by then it's more than half over. This isn't so much a James Bond movie as an episode of James Bond tacked on to the first hour of one of those Fast and Furious waste-of-timers.

Daniel Craig may be the best actor to ever take on the role. He brings a genuine gravity and even some heart to Bond that Bond never had before, and most of this movie squanders it.

My advice to the Broccoli family is pretty simple: Don't stint on the director's fees. You have a guy who gets it, who knows how to do it -- Martin Campbell, Use him, please. I'd rather see his name on a Bond picture than on Green Lantern any day.

-- Freder.

El Orfanato

The Orphanage has been on my radar since its 2007 release, but the R rating, which when it comes to modern horror films usually means that the movie is weltering in blood, gore and depravity, scared me away. Only when I'd read some reviews and talked to some people who'd seen it (who assured me that this wasn't the case) did I dare to attempt it -- and then only when it turned up in the $5 movie bin at Wallyworld.

Now I wish that I hadn't waited. This Spanish/Mexican film is as striking and startling as Clouzot's original Diabolique, and even more haunting for being more substantive.

I can't detail the plot, other than to say that, yes, it's set in an old Orphanage, and yes, it is a ghost story. To say more than that would risk revealing details that could ruin the effect. Let's just say that for ninety minutes it is one of the most frightening, suspenseful movies I've ever seen: and then in the last ten minutes as everything starts to come together and the viewer realizes what it's really about, what really happened, it turns so sad, so terribly sad, that I burst into tears.

For ninety minutes, it plays on our fear of the supernatural: only to come down to earth to reveal that Reality can be so much worse.

It accomplishes this without any of the usual modern horror tropes of gore, torture and, with the exception of just one real shock that comes at the exact center of the movie, sudden, graphically explicit death.

This is yet another case of the MPAA acting irresponsibly. This is a much graphically milder movie than say, Jaws, which went out with a PG rating in its original release. If you can take Jaws, you can take The Orphanage. It warrants a PG-13 rating more for its general atmosphere than any specific scene. Instead, the MPAA slapped an R on it, lumping it with depraved torture porn like the Saw and Hostel franchises -- movies that arguably don't even belong in our neighborhood multiplexes, and which, it can certainly be argued, should carry at least a rating of NC-17 or X.

(As an aside, here's a statistic: do you know the demographic that largely drives the torture porn genre? It's women. Go figure.)

Speaking of women, The Orphanage is built on the backs of two remarkable performances from two remarkable women. Belen Rueda gives such a finely-tuned characterization that we, the viewers, become as unstuck and adrift as the woman she plays: it's a thunderstorm of acting, encompassing grief, determination, despair, nightmares of fear, disbelief, belief and loss. She has a great look: a little worn-out, a little tired, a little sad even before the bad things start to happen. She holds the connections to both the past and the present of the orphanage, but she cannot get them to tie up; and although she may or may not become increasingly unstable as the movie rolls along, it is through her eyes that we must watch the events unfold.

The other pivotal role is taken by Geraldine Chaplin -- yes, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie's daughter, a skilled actress in her own right, here speaking Spanish like a native and looking so fragile that it seems like she might waste away at any time. She plays a medium who puts the Rueda character on the path to . . . I don't know if it's success or failure. Call it Destiny. With her hands and her eyes and the brittleness of her demeanor, Chaplin seeks and compels, and in one of the most hair-raiing scenes in the film, seems to make a horrifying connection to the past, and allows us to listen in.

This is an impressive effort from a first-time director, one that relies on suspense, not gross-outs, and which in the end proves itself to be deeply humane -- exactly the opposite of most modern horror films. It's a movie that will stay with you long after the credits roll -- a ghost story that literally haunts.

New Line has bought the rights to re-make it in English, and this just sickens and disgusts me. Our American movie industry is incapable of doing anything original -- instead they buy the rights to other country's original works of art, re-make them, and drain all the goodness and life out of them in the process. I won't support the American version and you shouldn't, either. Instead, truck on down to your local Wallyworld and root about in their five-dollar movie bin. It would cost you more to see something in a theater. Take a flyer on The Orphanage in the original Spanish. It's well worth your time.

-- Freder.

Let's Nap With Cap!

As a tie-in to the current release of Captain America: The First Avenger, Syfy recently ran a marathon of all the previous Captain America movies, barring only Republic's 1944 serial (which never had much to do with Captain America anyhow).

In the comics, Cap actually had three lives, one of which most people prefer to forget. In the 'fifties, he was a Commie-bashing crusading district attorney -- an incarnation deftly explained away by writer Stephen Englehart during a brilliant run in the '70s. The Captain America that concerns us here is the one that links the two halves of the twentieth century: Steve Rogers, the Living Legend of World War Two, and the 'sixties icon lost out of time, struggling to find himself once again.

The two '70s made-for-TV movies starring a nonentity named Reb Brown have little to do with this figure. The producers seemed determined to turn the character into a bland, generic '70s TV action hero, and seemed embarrassed by the costume. These two pilots were bad even in their day, about as close to the bottom of the barrel as comic book movies can get, and their stench has actually ripened with age.

In an era of fast talking and quick cuts, this Captain America plods, plods, plods, populated by a bevy of second-rate TV talent and directed with all the zip of double-strength oatmeal. Christopher Lee guest stars as the villain in the second one, though he's given comparatively little screen time, and let's just say that he doesn't even try to bring his considerable skills to bear on the lame script material. Much of the "action" consists of endless farting shots of Captain America driving around on his motorcycle; and the "character" stuff is strictly out of '70s TV Standard 101. Let's just pretend that this Captain America doesn't exist.

It's all  the more surprising to me, therefore, that the 1990 Captain America, intended for but destined never to make the big screen, is so vilified and demonized by most comics fans. Compared to the TV versions, this is Raiders of the Lost Ark, and although its low budget shows in a variety of ways (more and more so as the picture goes on), I've always rather liked it. It's a straightfaced, honest attempt to present Cap in both of his worlds, the past and the present day, well thought-out and entertaining in an easy way throughout its runtime.

Is it because the Red Skull is changed from a German to an Italian? That never bothered me; his story is much the same. Is it because the picture basically shoots its budget on the 'forties scenes early in the picture and the action is notably less exciting from then on? Is it because the Red Skull's "henchmen" are big-haired wenches on motorbikes? Is it because the padding on Matt Saliger's shoulders is oftentimes pretty obvious? These are all valid criticisms, but they never brought the picture down for me. Why? Because it's a lot like Linus Van Pelt of Peanuts: the mistakes you make don't matter as long as you're sincere.

Salinger (yes, the son of that other Salinger) plays Steve Rogers with honesty and conviction. He makes the uniform work because there's nothing campy about his performance. His sincerity has a remarkably calming effect on the rest of the movie. The picture's biggest scene comes early on, as Cap is strapped to a missile targeted at the White House. This could be the stuff of Camp City, and the actor playing the Red Skull certainly tries to go there, but Salinger pulls him back from the brink.

My only real kick against the movie is that Cap goes on ice right in the middle of his very first adventure, which literally means that he never gets to become The Living Legend of World War Two, and that no one in the present-day story has ever heard of him, barring the two or three people who happen to be involved in the plot.

I think it unjust that the picture never got to see theatrical release. But I'm told that it's available online, for free.

Which brings us to Captain America: The First Avenger, which actually bears a lot of similarities to the Salinger version, although with its much larger budget the challenge of keeping things moving is not a problem. One of the similarities is the sincerity, and it strikes me that no movie about Captain America would ever work, no matter what the budget, if the element of sincerity wasn't there. When the 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers is asked, early in the show, "So, you want to kill Germans?" his reply is exactly right: "I don't want to kill anyone. I hate bullies. No matter where they come from."

Indeed, the first two-thirds of the movie are its best game. There's a lot of care taken to establish character, mood, and motivation. Once the picture moves into its final act, it descends into sound and fury, all very well done, but nothing that we haven't seen before. The resolution of the conflict between Cap and the Red Skull is particularly unsatisfying, as Cap isn't allowed to defeat the Skull; the Skull defeats himself.

Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull marvelously well, by the way; no drapery-chewing here. Although "masked" with human features through the early scenes, once the mask comes off it never goes on again, and were treated to a villain that evokes the work of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee perfectly.

In a bid to lay our doubts about the costume changes to rest, director Joe Johnston launches a terrific musical sequence with Cap in his authentic comic-book duds selling War Bonds on tour. The sequence is canny and great fun, satisfying our desire to see the Golden Age Cap onscreen, while justifying the more practical, muted costume that's introduced later in the film. He even carries his original shield! I was grinning like a kid through the whole thing.

There are quirky, funky retro-modern gadgets and ships throughout the whole picture that lend a nice Republic Serials feel to the action; and in a move that's calculated to leave true Marvelites of a Certain Generation sweeking with glee, Cap gets to lead the original Howling Commandos into action, complete with Dum Dum Dugan in his bowler hat and 'stache, and all the rest of the gang.

Chris Evens does his job, but in the end I like Matt Salinger better as Steve Rogers, even with the padding, and wish that Salinger had had the opportunity to play the part in a movie that's as well-mounted as this one is. Though imperfect, this Captain America gets it largely right, and finally gives us a film version of the character that doesn't come with some degree of embarrassment attached.

-- Freder.

Mixed Media

Does BBC America have the worst programming directors in the history of television?

I mean that rhetorically, of course.

Why do they even call it BBC? Most of the programming is recycled American crap. Star Trek: The Next Generation every damn night! I think once a month they buy the rights to about two movies, and then run them over and over again. For the past month every single Friday night it's been two hours of Top Gear (a show I simply don't "get," and one which BBC America runs incessantly) followed by the original Clash of the Titans. Every single Friday night! How freakin' often can you watch Clash of the Titans? I had a tough time getting through it once. (Hello, Larry? Did you phone in your performance, or what?)

At least Clash and The Next Regurgitation have British people in them. Now, The Crow -- I'm sure the BBC programmers chose that because it represents the essence of the British Empire, yes?

I actually tried to watch The Crow. I thought that I might like it. Alas, it stinks in the way a movie can only when it is made by people who are so bereft of talent or skill that they have to murder their lead actor in order to get PR for the thing.

It is one of the more nonsensical movies I've ever seen. Nothing adds up. The city burns every night, apparently just for effect. Nobody fights the fires. After a few nights of this, there wouldn't be anything left to burn. The reason The Crow paints his face white is because he once playfully spooked his wife with a theatrical mask. Say what? (Plus, it's an ugly theatrical mask that no one in their right mind would own in the first place!)

How is it that the Brandan Lee character comes to rise from the dead, anyhow? People don't un-die just because they're pissed off. I know this is a comic book movie but even comic book movies need to have a certain internal logic. The Fantastic Four got their powers from being bombarded with Cosmic Radiation. Superman gets his from a yellow sun. We know what motivates The Crow (ugliness), but what animates him?

In no time at all he's mopping up the street of those vile Bad Guys that did in him and the missus, and although the ugly tone is consistent, there's no suspense in how it all plays out. I switched it off after the first one. I knew where it was going, and I didn't care. Life's too short. If that's The Moral of The Crow, then at least its producers did something right.

The other night, the Beeb ran Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior. Well, at least that's Australian. They're getting warm.

I hadn't seen The Road Warrior since it's original release, and now I think it's almost the opposite of The Crow. Oh, it's every bit as ugly and mean, and its premise is every bit as stupid, but it's so quirky and well-made that I couldn't take my eyes off it. The ugliness plays out in desert sunshine instead of darkness, and the mean-spiritedness at its core has the weight of a Philosophy. The villains aren't just generic Depraved Killers. They have an inspired lunacy and are almost Grand Opera in their appearance and actions. The final act, and especially the ending, has real bite.

I was dismayed, however, that the Beeb gave it a rating of "TV-14." This was an R picture when it came out, and deservedly so. It is not okay, in my house, for a fourteen-year-old to watch The Road Warrior.

If it wasn't for Doctor Who, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and the endless farting marathons of Top Gear, there wouldn't be anything British on BBC America. And now Doctor Who's gone on hiatus. D'you know what they replaced it with? Battlestar Galactica!

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

-- Freder.

Movie Mogul

Perfect casting: My sister is a vampire and I'm the clown.

Some things are coming together. Among them, the video project I had in mind involving the family Home Movies.

As you may recall, my first attempts to to get the raw files from DVD onto my computer in a working format ended in frustration. But this past week my boss tasked me with getting footage from a DVD into a PowerPoint presentation, and in the process of learning how to do that, the answer to my own problem came along. Last night I had a really productive evening ripping the Home Movie files from DVD and then converting them to QuickTime and importing them into IMovie, Apple's video editing software. Today I slept in late, had a few slices of white pizza for "brunch," then went straight to the computer where I've been working in IMovie all day.

I won't say that it's the most intuitive program to learn, but the help files are OK and I was sometimes able to figure things out for myself. While not a professional video editing tool, it's darn good. It's a breeze to add titles (using any font in your system) and background music and sound effects, and you can incorporate still images as well. I haven't begun to learn all the features; instead I spent a lot of time breaking the master film down into editable scenes, and inserting soft transitions in place of many of the hard cuts. The home movies are already a million times better, and I've only just begun. As an example, instead of the original hard cut from shots made in our back yard to footage of the family vacation on Ludlow's Island in Lake Vermillion, I was able to insert a map of the island, zoom in on our cabin there, and fade in to the action. Tomorrow I may actually go into work just to scan some more family photos for this project. I should just bring a box with me and scan the whole thing. Any photos I don't use in the video can be included separately as a slideshow on the finished DVD.

I'm excited to be learning new things and I love the results I'm getting. Dad will be impressed.

And it especially feels good to have a project again, one with immediate rewards. This project won't last forever, but for as long as it does I've got Direction and Momentum again.

Heck, it even justifies all the time I wasted downloading music. I've got a lot of good stuff to choose from. "Stardust" by Nat King Cole, anyone?

Tonight I get to watch a brand-new (to me) episode of the new Doctor Who. For today, anyway, Life is Good.

-- Freder

Joy and Anger

I was overjoyed tonight that TCM would be running a completely new-to-me movie by one of my favorite vintage stars, Eddie Cantor; but, especially now that the movie is over, I'm incensed at the manner in which it was presented. This could have been a great opportunity to introduce Cantor to a populace that largely doesn't remember him. But not once, not even in passing, were his many talents discussed. Not once was it mentioned that he was one of the greatest performers of his age.

Instead, TCM played the Race card, and shit all over the movie (actually taking scenes out of context and ignoring the whole underlying structure of the picture) as being a demeaning portrayal of Arabs by Hollywood.

Say what? I didn't see any Arabs in this movie.

Yet Robert Osborne kowtowed to his guest, Dr. Jack Shaheen (an Arab man who really should be finding better things to do with his time) and took seriously comments that didn't even deserve to see airtime.

For instance: Shaheen described a scene where Cantor witnesses a crowd of Arabs kneeling to pray. Quoth Shaheen: "And Eddie Cantor rolls his eyes!"

Well, I watched the whole movie and I watched that particular scene closely, and guess what? That's not what happens.

We'll talk about that later.

Y'know what? If you want to rail against racism in the movies, find yourself a movie that's really racist -- like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which some of you may recall I hated on big time when TCM ran it a while back: this is a movie that is absolutely vile, yet TCM treated it with reverence. Why? Because it's D.W. Griffith -- Griffith the God of the Movies, Griffith the bigoted little sod. But show a movie by Eddie Cantor -- who I truly believe was not a bigot -- and because no one remembers him, that makes it okay to shit all over his work.

It's true that Cantor makes it easy for the soft-headed to take offense. In every single one of his movies, Cantor puts on blackface and does a contemporized version of a Minstrel number. His movies need big dance scenes and big, exotic locales, so they went from Mexico to Spain to Egypt and, yes, Arabia: but always in a highly stylized, Holloywoodized context, and often in the context of a dream.

Yes, a dream. Dr. Jack Shaheen kept his tone mellow and a relaxed, a pleasant look on his features, but it was clear that he was getting upset about a movie that does not even purport to represent Arabs in any way.

Here's the plot: Eddie is riding the rails to Hollywood because he's a big movie fan. After an opening song that presents the only real message that any Eddie Cantor movie ever aspired to present ("Laugh Your Cares Away"), he falls out of the train and must take Shank's Mare through the desert. He stumbles upon a movie set (that's right, a movie set) and at first thinks he is in Arabia. But it's just Hollywood, making a live-action version of Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves.

Lucky guy, he snags a bit part in the movie. But just when it's his big chance, he takes an overdoes of a sedative (he was run over by actors on horses in the middle of a scene), and falls into a deep slumber.

You read me right. The whole movie is a dream. A drug-induced dream of an impressionable boy-man who's captivated by a fantasy.

Furthermore, as should be obvious to the plainest idiot, the picture's sense of humor isn't aimed at Arabia -- it's aimed at American politics. Casting it into the context of a foreign land is just a way of providing a launching ground for jokes about the New Deal and the American political system.

At one key point, Eddie convinces the Sultan to resign as Sultan and run for President. A very funny American-style campaign ensues in Arabic drag -- this is just exactly the same sort of thing that Gilligan's Island used to do all the time. Eddie gets out there and stumps hard for the Sultan -- only to find that his songs are so popular that the people want to elect him President instead.

Remember, it's a dream.

Well, the Sultan threatens to have Eddie boiled in oil if he wins the election. So, naturally, Eddie goes out and stumps against himself. But even that backfires. "He's got a sense of humor, let's make him President!"

And here's where the scene comes in that Dr. Jack Shaheen found so awfully offensive. It doesn't go like what he says at all.

Eddie's trying so hard to get people not to vote for him. . . when suddenly (in what I thought was a really lovely and respectful shot) the call to prayer is made. The people fall to their knees and begin to pray. There's nothing disrespectful about the shot.

Suddenly, no one is listening to Eddie. He rolls his eyes. It's not the eye-roll of somebody mocking a people at their prayer. It is the eye-roll of somebody saying to himself, "I can't win!" And it's a beautiful joke, really, because it has two meanings: I can't win because they are going to boil me in oil if I do, and I can't win because the call to prayer was made when I needed to make them hate me.

Anyone who takes offense to this can not be a friend of mine.

Ali Baba Goes to Town is a great example of Eddie Cantor's work; I enjoyed it immensely. I think it's almost as good as Kid Millions, my personal favorite of the Cantor Hoover (that's, I say that's a joke, son!) and one that presented another dream-trip to a foreign land. There's even a cameo from Raymond Scott and his Orchestra, playing one of his signature tunes. I was thoroughly entertained from beginning to end and delighted to check off one more movie on my bucket list.

But TCM had to go and play the race card.

It got worse. The next item on TCM's menu was Popeye Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves -- by any standard one of the greatest cartoons ever made. Dr. Jack Shaheen went to particular lengths to drain every last ounce of joy out of it, calling it "deeply offensive."

I'm going to say this only once:

You cannot change the past to suit the political needs of the present, and you cannot corrupt something from the past that is completely innocent and wholly delightful to make racial hay in the here and now.

Dear Dr. Jack Shaheen: You do not need Eddie Cantor and Popeye to make Arabs (and especially Arab men) distasteful to me. You're doing a real good job all by yourself. Jerk.

-- Freder.

That Persistent, Extremely Large, Dedicated-to-his-work Black Dog

This is one of those mornings where the Prozac doesn't feel like it's working at all, one of those mornings where it's a good thing I'm not the sort of person to keep a loaded gun around the house. There are moments every now and then when if such a thing was within my grasp I would absolutely use it. Fortunately, those moments pass. Mostly, I think of my kitties. It doesn't end the depressive spell to think about snuggling with Honey or the way they all gather 'round and "bump" me when I'm putting on my shoes, but it does bring the thoughts of doing myself harm to a sudden halt.

The only reason I mention it is, I can't be the only one who sometimes feels this way, and some of the others who sometimes do are the sort of people who keep loaded guns around the house. This is the reason why we have tragedies like the one we had recently here in Maine, where a young man killed his wife, his children (nobody knows in what order) and then himself.

Anyone who believes that gun control wouldn't save a significant number of lives every year is living in a dream world. If you don't have access to those sorts of weapons, you can't harm yourself or others. I also believe that people who would turn a gun on themselves or others in the heat of the moment are far less likely to use other methods, because, as I've already typed, the moment passes -- and those other methods are slower and far more intimate. I have actually cut myself on occasion, just enough to know that I could never go deep enough to do the job. I'm not saying that gun control would put an end to all suicides, murders and accidental deaths. Humans are far too venal and inventive for that. If someone really wants to do harm, they will find a way. But we stand a better chance of stopping them if they can't just pick up a gun and start pulling the trigger.

My favorite line in the original X-Men movie comes when Sir Ian McKellan as Magneto says to a large assembled force of police officers, in tones dripping with contempt, "You homo sapiens and your guns!" -- just before using his powers to rip the weapons from their hands and turn them on the cops.

Guns bring no good into the world. But I'm realistic about gun control, because there are too many idiots out there like Charton Heston with his cold dead hands.

If we can't have gun control, I wish that others would be like me and practice self gun control. Don't give money to the gun industry, don't give in to the kind of illogical thinking that having a gun in your house will make you safe. There are better ways to "protect" yourself, including not owning one of the things.

This is also one of those mornings where it feels like a good thing to have started this blog in the first place. Sometimes it helps just to type things out.

-- Freder.

It's Duck Soup

At the height of the Bad Stuff that was going down both publicly and privately surrounding the anniversary of my mother's death, my friend Donna G___________, known to some of you as a frequent commenter here on this blog, made a beautiful gesture and sent me a copy of Roy Blount Jr.'s latest book, Hail, Hail Euphoria!: Presenting The Marx Brothers in DUCK SOUP, The Greatest War Movie Ever Made.

I never saw the box that it arrived in (so Donna, if there was a return address, I never got it). I came in to work one morning, and Stephen, a student worker, had just opened it. There was a general level of mystification, as there always is among the receiving crew when something arrives that has no discernible paper trail. Stephen handed the book to me, and I noticed there was a card, which I opened. "Oh!" I muttered in surprise. "It's from a friend." And then I beat a hasty retreat out of there so that they would not see my tears.

The D__ sisters and I (the initial can stand for their first names or their maiden names, you take your pick) go way back. But it's not what you think, although a part of me wishes that it were. Donna's sister D____ wrote in my senior class yearbook, "I'll let you know. I love you." Should have been a clue, right? But hey, I had Asperger's and didn't know it, it wasn't even a real diagnosis yet; anyway, I didn't have a clue and wouldn't have known where to start. Dating in High School? For me, beyond the pale. The closest I came to having a girlfriend in High School was a girl named Deanna who had sat in front of me in home room for four years without ever saying a word to me or even, to my knowledge, looking at me, suddenly wanted to hold my hand in the hall between classes. I liked her -- but I didn't understand any of it. My efforts to understand included talking to classmates -- and that was the end of that.

When I played the John Travolta part in Grease and it became very much a grafted-on part of my make-up, that was the first time I really started to have any kind of a real social life. The whole company went out together -- to MacDonald's, where we were in full character and were very nearly arrested; to the Hukilau, where, cash-poor, I drank water while the others feasted on Chinese; to the famous Cape Elizabeth Lobster Shack, where, in full Danny Zuko mode, somehow it came about that I had to kiss every girl in the place, and the third D__ sister, D___, was the only one who demurred. I thought she hated me.

The book is neat, and I knew after the first few pages that I had to get my hands on a watchable copy of the movie, which, believe it or leave it, I didn't have. That was OK. I needed to read my books about Asperger's first anyway.

The main title of the book is based on a pun made by Gummo at the Algonquin Round Table, wrapped around the word "euphoria." I'll let you work it out for yourself. It's the last line in Blount's book, so I'd hate to five it away. Clue: although there are five Marx Bothers, only four of them are in Duck Soup.

The book is a self-proclaimed DVD Commentary track, but on paper. It's good fun to read, and full of good information. Like, did you know that the director of Duck Soup, Leo McCarey, a flawed great who worked with the best of them including Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase, so deeply DEEPLY did not want to work with the Marx Brothers that he actually left the studio? Only to find himself, through a circle of events worthy of Duck Soup itself, having to work with them anyway.

Well, I mean, think about it. You're a movie director. Would you want to work with the Marx Brothers?

Quoth McCarey, "They were madmen!"

Blount has done his research, but he still makes one glaring (to me) mistake. Of course Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters must come into the narrative, because Woody's character in that picture is actually saved from suicide by watching this movie (a fact which Blount finds extraordinary, but which I understand completely. Feeling suicidal? Put on Duck Soup and you will know that you have to stay). Anyway. Blount refers to the Woody Allen character in Hannah as "Alvy Singer," and that's just wrong. Alvy Singer is Annie Hall. Sorry Roy.

But that's a nothing, really. That's just me showing off -- Ha ha! I've got something on the expert!! Blount's book is full of Good Stuff, and a delight to read in conjunction with a viewing (or multiple viewings: Duck Soup really is a picture that demands repeated exposure) and I can't do either the book or the movie justice in just one blog post.

On the whole, I find actual DVD commentaries to be distracting and annoying. I can only do one thing at a time: listen to a discussion about a work of art, or experience the work of art itself. This is absolutely perfect, and I wish that more DVD commentaries came in book form.

Duck Soup may not actually be my favorite Marx Bothers movie -- but I'm working backwards through time, so I won't make the call as yet. The thing is, Chico doesn't get to play the piano and Harpo doesn't get to play the harp, and I can't regard a Marx Bothers movie as being complete without at least a glimpse of the soulful Harpo, the spiritual Harpo, the Romantic Harpo -- that side of my favorite of the Brothers that actually made his character complete. Harpo was in no way "on the spectrum" -- all of the Bros. Marx were perhaps more neurotypical than your average neurotypical -- but he played someone who was. . .

Thank you Donna! I have to stop typing now, but I'll have more to say in the time ahead. . .

-- Freder,

David Copperfield, David Copperfield

While I was in the early stages of the move, before DirecTV was installed and I had no television at all, one of the best DVDs that I watched was one that my father had given me of the 1999 version of David Copperfield produced by the BBC. I took it in approximately hour-long bites, and given how I feel about all remakes (and Dickens in particular: The Beeb did a version of Oliver Twist in 1985 that was wretched with a capital Retch, and another one in 2007 that I'll never watch -- Nancy played by a black woman? I don't think so!), it came as a surprise that I liked it so well.

At its exact center is Maggie Smith as Betsy Trotwood. I'll watch Maggie Smith in anything, but her performance here is just delightful. Miss Trotwood is one of Dickens's best female characters, and Ms. Smith really shakes the trees to bring her to life. And she's not the only one. Just look at the cast list over at imdb. But, in particular, Trevor Eve as Murdstone and Zoe Wannamaker as his sister, Sir Ian as Creakle. . . and more. On the whole, I don't think that any version of Copperfield has ever been this well-cast. Plus, the producers didn't mess around with Dickens, instead focusing on what the Beeb used to do better than almost anyone: faithful realizations of classic British dramas that look and sound gorgeous.

At well over two hours, the 1935 MGM version of David Copperfield is an extraordinarily long movie for the period, and even then there's much compression and shortening. It aired on TCM a few days ago, and I hadn't seen it since I was a Young Thing -- and then not from the beginning. On many levels I found it disappointing. I've loved many other of George Cukor's movies, especially including Gaslight, but, I suppose necessarily, this one left me feeling exactly the way the film version of The World According to Garp did. Too much novel crammed into too little film real estate.

When it's good, it's very good. Davey's slow walk and his reunion with Aunt Betsy are terrific. But there's a distinct feeling that we're getting the Classics Illustrated version of the story.

And to a great extent the casting compares unfavorably to the BBC version. Oh, Edna May Oliver as Miss Trotwood was probably the best they could have chosen at the time, and she has great fun with it, but she's no Maggie Smith. And Basil Rathbone gives, I think, one of the worst performances of his career as Murdstone. Good casting, or so one would think: but Rathbone is a scary enough guy when he's being subtle, and there's nothing of subtlety to what he does here. Snarl, rage, chew on the draperies: it's a big performance in a part that's more effectively played quietly.

Jesse Ralph as Peggotty is kind of scary and artificial compared the genuine qualities Pauline Quirke brings to the role in the British version. And in the 1935 version we don't get to see Creakle at all: Young Davey's school years are brushed past with a line of dialogue. This is particularly damaging to the story, as Steerforth isn't introduced until he's all grown up -- and without knowing the details of their school years together, it's frankly hard to understand why David thinks so highly of Steerforth in the first place.

But there are three actors here who, imho, blow away the cast of the BBC version like so many toy soldiers. First, someone named Lennox Pawle as Mr. Dick. He would die just a year after this film was made. There's nothing wrong with what Ian McNiece does in the BBC version, but I can see him acting. By comparison, Pawle has the genuine appearance of good-natured simple-mindedness. You all know what I mean.

Then there's Roland Young as Uriah Heep. I simply can not believe this is the same man who played Topper. It can't be possible! But it is. Nicholas Lyndhurst is good casting in the British version, but there's a trick to playing Uriah Heep that Lyndhurst didn't work out: Heep must be, in equal parts, sickeningly smarmy and unsettling, but also nonthreatening. Too insignificant to be taken seriously. Young actually appears to be sincere in certain of his kind words towards David. You can see why David (and the others surrounding Heep) could be put off-balance by this person. The magnitude of his villainy needs to come with at least a measure of surprise. Lyndhurst doesn't succeed at that. His Heep is slimy all the way, from the get-go.

Last, but certainly not least, is W.C. Fields in the role he was born to play, Wilkins Micawber. Fields was a great fan of Dickens in real life, Micawber was one of his proudest roles. Now, I like Bob Hoskins a lot, and I even liked his Micawber -- but Fields is The Man.

He is good for the role and the role is good for him. It's nice to see Fields playing someone who doesn't hate women and children, someone with a little bit of the hero about him, who is both a protector and someone who needs protection; someone who pays his debts when and how he can, and who for all his lesser qualities is nonetheless fiercely loyal. Nobility looks good on Fields, and so does Micawber's Fancy Dress. It's almost as if Dickens had Fields in mind when he wrote the part.

The pairing of these two Great Men, the one real and the other fictional, is a high-water mark in movie history. If the 1935 David Copperfield had nothing else to recommend it (and it does), W. C. Micawber would be reason enough to call it a classic.

-- Freder.

Chill wills in Mule Drag

I actually have an original copy of this poster hanging in my living room. I figured, if I have a poster for Francis in my living room, I should have at least some Francis on DVD. Anyway, I haven't seen a Francis movie since I was a very little kid, growing up in a time when local stations had lots of time to fill and often filled it with packages of old movies. *Sigh* It was a great time to grow up in.

Francis Joins the WACS is unfortunately a later movie in the series that didn't make it onto Universal's Francis the Talking Mule, Volume One DVD release -- and there hasn't been a volume two. Well, the price was right, and I had a hankering to revisit something from my very distant past, and I figured I'd be doing my part to encourage an eventual release of Volume Two.

It's been sitting here waiting for my attention for a couple of months, and last night I finally cracked open the one that started it all. Although it's popularly known as Francis the Talking Mule, the actual onscreen title is simply Francis, so that's how I'll refer to it from here on.

I don't think I've actually ever seen this one before. I don't remember Francis as having a military connection right from the beginning. But there it is: Donald O'Connor is a hapless Second Lieutenant version of Elwood P. Dowd, but this being wartime there's little room for subtlety. Talking animals always seem to take a fancy to the disingenuous type, the ones who won't be believed when they try to explain what's happening to them (although, alas, never to me. I could use a sensible, Animal Sprit advisor). Francis comes close to the delirious whimsy of Harvey, but falls short the minute it becomes clear that Francis must indeed "come out" to the authorities, and, indeed, the whole U.S. government, if this thing is possibly going to have a happy ending.

I suspect this didn't play as well in the cities as it did in the sticks -- but I have to confess that I enjoyed it completely. How old was O'Connor when he made this? He looks like a baby. But the guy is so naturally talented and funny that he holds down this nutty fruitcake of a movie just as if he was a Seasoned Pro. Such confidence in every movement of his eyes. The only person I can reasonably compare him to is Ray Bolger -- another hoofer who knew how to sell an act.

Without computers to whip up a Wholly Artificial Mule, Universal's effects crew use some very basic techniques to get Chill Wills appear to speak through the long-eared title character -- and y'know what? It's not only perfectly satisfactory, but it registers on my brain as being notably more genuine than a modern bits and bytes version of the character would be. At least you know that you're looking something real.

All the supporting cast is worth watching, especially the delightful Zazu Pitts as a mental-ward nurse who takes a more than possessive attitude towards O'Conner when he keeps being returned into her care. This was back in the day when we had Character Actors -- and what a loss it is to the movie industry that this type of player is no longer cultivated or cherished.

It's not, you know, The Maltese Falcon or High Sierra or even Duck Soup -- but it would be wrong to expect that. This was also back in the day when we had movies that wanted nothing more than to charm and entertain. Now, with access to a hundred gazillian channels, I can safely say that this is another thing Hollywood has forgotten how to do. Francis is the professional product of a machine that confidently knew how to make a perfect cupcake from scratch using real ingredients. When they try to do this now, the result is inevitably a Twinkie.

-- Freder.

Pass the Cheese, Please!

AH-nold hess bin ein bit off a bed BOY, laitly! Yah! Ziss is pROBE-ably vy ze zo-cahlled "AMAIRican Moofie Klessics" (vich hess been running esspezially un-klessic moofies zince ziss pairsson started heffing eggsess to it ziss yair) chose to run ze CONE-an Ze Barh-BEARian moofink pickchair ze naght beffor lest.

Ach! Vhat ein peace of shitzen! I vas most aztonished to remembair zat I did not hate zis moofie vhen it vas fairs releazed. I sink zis vas becows zis vas ein comic book movie vich took idzelf SAIRieously in ein time ven zis vas not ze commonplaize zing. Alzo, zair vas ze teeny leetle beets off Robairt E. Howard zat made it to ze screen, unt ze nize photograffink pictzairs.

Gross gut! Vhat a zilly azz I vas! Ziss mooffie is ein stinking peas off KARbage! Vy vood eenyvun try to make ein zumtink prrrrrr-VOUND outten nize zimple Vantazy Adventure like COH-nan? Vuld heff been a verrrry zimple ting to make ein gut COHnan moofie, but Milius und Shtone had ein HEADS uppen zair ashholes!

Ah! So tonight on TCM, see opportunity for humble Aspie blogger to catch up on Japanese Monster Movies not seen before today, though much read about. It is chance not to be passed up. Imagine sinking feeling descending on humble servant as evening progresses. Early scenes of all movies are well shot and dramatically sound. There is compelling relationship to catastrophic happenings both then and now to small island of good and honorable Japanese people. 

Then, rubber monster suits begin trouncing matchbox cars and cities made of humble popsicle sticks! Unlike honorable mister Kong of Skull Island, monsters have no personality to save them from special effects for which perpetrators must surely have committed hari-kari! Scales on back of Gojirra actually wobble! Rubber wings of Rhodan remind honorable reviewer of something horrible to come from German sex-toy factory!

Much time spent on Wonton -- no, sorry, honorable excuses made here -- wanton destruction, no characters of interest to cling to anywhere! Horrible dubbing with the voice of honorable Paul Frees playing every other character and the voice of honorable Keye Luke (all very recognizable to humble Aspie movie fan) playing two-thirds of remaining characters. Movies start out Most Well, but rapidly descend into such deep mines of boredom that force humble reviewer into depths of sleepishness, from which he is forced to rouse himself, shake off sleep, to crawl to computer and type hopefully offensive lines about movies which never deserved all of the typing which they have received over humble years!

O! For a chance to cleanse the humble palette with the pureness of something genuinely good! But seven AM comes quite early upon the dawn, and time does not exist for humble Aspie reviewer to do anything but mock, snort, and retire to comfort of bed to dream away bad taste in mouth of films most distressingly overrated.

-- Freder.