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SF31 reviews, part 1
Just for the heck of it, and coz I'm a fan of instant gratification, I'm gonna release my SF31 reviewlets in chunks, rather than waiting until I've written then all up. (Also coz I'm a slow writer and I feel self-conscious about spending too much time on this all at once.)
King Kong: The 1933 version. I actually hadn't seen it before.
Audience moment: the movie producer, "discovering" Fay Wray's character wandering the streets of New York, and without so much as an introduction he physically takes hold of her and hustles her into a taxi. Next scene, they're chatting amiably in a cafe. This sequence was so bizarre that everyone laughed; it's hard to imagine a time when that didn't look ludicrously sketchy. ("So that's how you do it", said I.)
Also enthusiastic applause from the whole house whenever Kong kicked some dino's ass. (And a silly/disgusted laugh/sigh whenever he delivered the coup de grace and the stop-motion grape jelly came bubbling out -- this is a rather gory film, for its day.) But this sort of thing would happen repeatedly through all the films... I note it here simply beause the first time it happened it truly reminded me where I was, and I was happy.
Personal smartypants moment: The whole movie has a typically over-the-top orchestral soundtrack, but during the big fight on Skull Island between Kong and the T-Rex, the music cuts out entirely, and its absence is striking, leaving you with only the grunts and roars of the unbelievable combat on the screen. I was reminded of nothing so much as the Balin's Tomb battle in Fellowship of the Ring where the soundtrack similarly vanishes, which always struck me as a subtle and unsettling effects. And since we know how Mr. Jackson feels about King Kong, I couldn't help but see a way in which the earlier film directly informed the latter. I did squirm in my seat, so smarty did my pants become.
The Batman: a 1943 film serial -- that is, a lurid action-hero story split into a dozen cliffhangery parts, meant to be shown in weekly installments before a theater's feature presentations. It was as much fun as you'd expect from a 1943 Batman flick, especially considering that the character hadn't even existed in the comics for 10 years, at this point.
For one thing, it's hard for a modern smirky audience not to see it as brazenly homoerotic from the get-go. Literally the first scene is Mr. Man looking sad and pouty at his Bat-Desk while the narrator drones on about how awesomely dark and frightening he is, when Robin bursts into frame and drapes an arm around him. They look into each others' eyes, grinning, and then dash off-camera together. Oh, the reaction to that. More than one person yelled out "Brokeback Batman!" Haw haw whatever guys.
It's also a fascinating and frank snapshot of a tiny facet of wartime America. (Actual wartime, not ah'm-a-war-president-time.) One character asks Bruce Wayne (here depicted as a spoiled and lazy playboy) why he isn't off fighting, which is actually a very good question. He shrugs and says "Eh, still 4-F." We laugh, but: holy crap. Sobering.
It was the narrator, though, who won the big Audience Reaction Moment. The boss villain, see, was an evil Japanese mastermind (played by funny-talking white guy) hidden within Gotham City, hoping to help overthrow the government from within for the glory of Emperor Hirohito. OK... pretty ugly, but par for the course given the time and subject matter. But his introduction was just jaw-dropping. The camera pans over an empty street filled with storefronts featuring Japanese signage, and the narrator explains that this is Gotham's "Little Tokyo". Once it was bustling, but (and I quote) "a wise government has rounded up all those shifty-eyed Japs," and nobody heard what he said after that, such was the sound of an entire movie audience falling over.
To me this was interesting beyond the visceral OMGness of it. See, like everyone else Gen-X and younger (maybe even Boomer and younger), I learned of the Nisei internment in school as a quietly shameful piece of modern U.S. history, an oft-overlooked but still unforgotten blot on American heroism during the war. But I don't know if I had ever encountered an example of how the (non-Japanese) Americans of the day viewed it, and here it was, punching you in the gut. It was really something else.
Steamboy: Anime film from the Akira guy, originally released in the U.S. last year. Big ol' steampunk adventure story, and was well-received. It's visually wonderful, has pretty good voice acting (including performances from Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina), and the story's OK, but rather shallow. Nobody knows subtle in this movie, unfortunately; as a friend suggested after the marathon, each side has all conflict-resolution skills of a 4-four-year-old. Therefore, the last third or so of the movie is mostly a series of big explosions.
It was kind of funny that this followed the Batman serial. When the opening credits displayed the director's (very Japanese) name, some wag in the audience loudly muttered "Shifty-eyed..." and was shouted down.
Anyway, I'd still recommend this movie in general coz it has some cool stuff in it.
Fire Maidens from Outer Space: The title makes it sound like a weak spoof of 1950's B-movies, doesn't it? But no, this was an actual piece of source material. It is exactly what it sounds like, and as such we missed the first half in order to go have dinner. (It's not that I don't like watching pure aged cheese, but when I have to choose between (a) not eating a real dinner, (b) missing some of a so-bad-its-good movie, and (c) missing some of a just-plain-good movie, there's really no choice involved.)
So, yeah, the story had something to do with manly astronauts visiting a planet inhabited only by giggling young women in short togas, some old guy, and a scary monster (actually just some poorly-lit lanky dude wearing a black leotard) who says RRRRRRR a lot and you can bet that the audience loved helping with that. Some stuff happens, and there is a lot of strange dancing.
One of the ladies actually looked like she actually knew how to dance, but kept breaking her routine to do this backwards-bendy-gyraty thing that I guess was supposed to be sexy, but ended up simply unfortunate. I imagined a scenario for this woman outside of the movie, a classically trained dancer who comes to Hollywood in search of a career and finds roles only in skanky B-movies, directed by dirty old men who keep telling her that he needs to shake those hips a little more obviously for the camera. I hope she went on to better things.
King Kong: The 1933 version. I actually hadn't seen it before.
Audience moment: the movie producer, "discovering" Fay Wray's character wandering the streets of New York, and without so much as an introduction he physically takes hold of her and hustles her into a taxi. Next scene, they're chatting amiably in a cafe. This sequence was so bizarre that everyone laughed; it's hard to imagine a time when that didn't look ludicrously sketchy. ("So that's how you do it", said I.)
Also enthusiastic applause from the whole house whenever Kong kicked some dino's ass. (And a silly/disgusted laugh/sigh whenever he delivered the coup de grace and the stop-motion grape jelly came bubbling out -- this is a rather gory film, for its day.) But this sort of thing would happen repeatedly through all the films... I note it here simply beause the first time it happened it truly reminded me where I was, and I was happy.
Personal smartypants moment: The whole movie has a typically over-the-top orchestral soundtrack, but during the big fight on Skull Island between Kong and the T-Rex, the music cuts out entirely, and its absence is striking, leaving you with only the grunts and roars of the unbelievable combat on the screen. I was reminded of nothing so much as the Balin's Tomb battle in Fellowship of the Ring where the soundtrack similarly vanishes, which always struck me as a subtle and unsettling effects. And since we know how Mr. Jackson feels about King Kong, I couldn't help but see a way in which the earlier film directly informed the latter. I did squirm in my seat, so smarty did my pants become.
The Batman: a 1943 film serial -- that is, a lurid action-hero story split into a dozen cliffhangery parts, meant to be shown in weekly installments before a theater's feature presentations. It was as much fun as you'd expect from a 1943 Batman flick, especially considering that the character hadn't even existed in the comics for 10 years, at this point.
For one thing, it's hard for a modern smirky audience not to see it as brazenly homoerotic from the get-go. Literally the first scene is Mr. Man looking sad and pouty at his Bat-Desk while the narrator drones on about how awesomely dark and frightening he is, when Robin bursts into frame and drapes an arm around him. They look into each others' eyes, grinning, and then dash off-camera together. Oh, the reaction to that. More than one person yelled out "Brokeback Batman!" Haw haw whatever guys.
It's also a fascinating and frank snapshot of a tiny facet of wartime America. (Actual wartime, not ah'm-a-war-president-time.) One character asks Bruce Wayne (here depicted as a spoiled and lazy playboy) why he isn't off fighting, which is actually a very good question. He shrugs and says "Eh, still 4-F." We laugh, but: holy crap. Sobering.
It was the narrator, though, who won the big Audience Reaction Moment. The boss villain, see, was an evil Japanese mastermind (played by funny-talking white guy) hidden within Gotham City, hoping to help overthrow the government from within for the glory of Emperor Hirohito. OK... pretty ugly, but par for the course given the time and subject matter. But his introduction was just jaw-dropping. The camera pans over an empty street filled with storefronts featuring Japanese signage, and the narrator explains that this is Gotham's "Little Tokyo". Once it was bustling, but (and I quote) "a wise government has rounded up all those shifty-eyed Japs," and nobody heard what he said after that, such was the sound of an entire movie audience falling over.
To me this was interesting beyond the visceral OMGness of it. See, like everyone else Gen-X and younger (maybe even Boomer and younger), I learned of the Nisei internment in school as a quietly shameful piece of modern U.S. history, an oft-overlooked but still unforgotten blot on American heroism during the war. But I don't know if I had ever encountered an example of how the (non-Japanese) Americans of the day viewed it, and here it was, punching you in the gut. It was really something else.
Steamboy: Anime film from the Akira guy, originally released in the U.S. last year. Big ol' steampunk adventure story, and was well-received. It's visually wonderful, has pretty good voice acting (including performances from Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina), and the story's OK, but rather shallow. Nobody knows subtle in this movie, unfortunately; as a friend suggested after the marathon, each side has all conflict-resolution skills of a 4-four-year-old. Therefore, the last third or so of the movie is mostly a series of big explosions.
It was kind of funny that this followed the Batman serial. When the opening credits displayed the director's (very Japanese) name, some wag in the audience loudly muttered "Shifty-eyed..." and was shouted down.
Anyway, I'd still recommend this movie in general coz it has some cool stuff in it.
Fire Maidens from Outer Space: The title makes it sound like a weak spoof of 1950's B-movies, doesn't it? But no, this was an actual piece of source material. It is exactly what it sounds like, and as such we missed the first half in order to go have dinner. (It's not that I don't like watching pure aged cheese, but when I have to choose between (a) not eating a real dinner, (b) missing some of a so-bad-its-good movie, and (c) missing some of a just-plain-good movie, there's really no choice involved.)
So, yeah, the story had something to do with manly astronauts visiting a planet inhabited only by giggling young women in short togas, some old guy, and a scary monster (actually just some poorly-lit lanky dude wearing a black leotard) who says RRRRRRR a lot and you can bet that the audience loved helping with that. Some stuff happens, and there is a lot of strange dancing.
One of the ladies actually looked like she actually knew how to dance, but kept breaking her routine to do this backwards-bendy-gyraty thing that I guess was supposed to be sexy, but ended up simply unfortunate. I imagined a scenario for this woman outside of the movie, a classically trained dancer who comes to Hollywood in search of a career and finds roles only in skanky B-movies, directed by dirty old men who keep telling her that he needs to shake those hips a little more obviously for the camera. I hope she went on to better things.
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Actually, it wasn't the way the music disappeared. I think that can be very effective. A recent (to me) example that I really liked was in High Noon, where the music disappears several minutes before noon and stays disappeared long enough to start driving me crazy.
The thing I didn't like about Balin's Tomb was the way the music came back in with a bang when the troll starts going after Frodo. It's almost like the music is hitting you over the head and saying "this is the really dramatic part." Other examples of precisely the same thing are the pod race in Phantom Menace and the asteroid scene in Attack of the Clones. No subtlety at all.
It's because of comments like this...
That I can't take your recomendations on voice acting quality seriously. It wasn't terrible but there were no performances that I would call good, and several that the actors should be embarrassed by, IMHO.
Re: It's because of comments like this...
Actually I thought Molina did a splendid job, Stewart was mostly OK if a bit too yelly, and whoever did the little girl was whiny and annoying but it befit the shallow character, no?
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