Mario, have you seen THE LAST WARNING? I've got it here to watch and I heard it had a lot of influence on THE OLD DARK HOUSE. As for that film, it's really hit or miss with me on each viewing. One some viewings I really love it but on others it annoys the hell out of me for some reason.
Mike,
Since I don't own it in any way, I haven't watched THE LAST WARNING (1929) yet; still, as far as I know, it's set in a theater so it isn't really an "old dark house"-type film but, I guess, there should be similarities, yes.
As for THE OLD DARK HOUSE, I failed to mention that BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) occupies my No. 1 spot as well (which is a bit of a cheat perhaps) but the fact is that the more I watch HOUSE, the shorter the gap between these two superlative movies grows in my mind!
My wife has an illogical aversion to B&W except for a select few comedies like Some Like It Hot and The Philadelphia Story. She also doesn't like to "read" movies or go for most indie stuff.
She either does her own thing or she comes in the room and knits or reads. (can be somewhat annoying depending on the movie since this requires the light to be on, spoiling my carefully calibrated images
Usually she knits even if that night's viewing happens to be a newer movie she wants to watch since she falls asleep about 90% of the time if she tries to just watch without doing anything else.
As for the theater, I go by myself more often than not. Though that's a function of having kids too and this year I've gone far, far less than in past years.
I give on just about everything else but am an admitted selfish jerk on the movie list. The ratio of "my" movies to "her" movies that get watched is probably 40:1 or more.
DOH! I totally dropped the film festival ball. I had it in my head that I had a ticket for a screening tonight and didn't realize until a day too late that my ticket was for Monday night. So much for seeing Requiem a German film based on the same story as SteveGon's 8,002,485th favorite film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Ah well, I am seeing The Host tomorrow at midnight. A South Korean monster movie that sounds right up SteveGon's alley.
Yes, Captain Hammer's here, hair blowing in the breeze. The day needs my saving expertise! - Captain Hammer, Corporate Tool
2002 Sight & Sound Challenge: 314 Last Watched: An Autumn Afternoon
Last 10 Films Watched: Mon Oncle Antoine - B / Late Autumn - A-
Paranoid Park - B / An Autumn Afternoon - A
Forgetting Sarah Marshall - B / Run, Fatboy, Run - B
Get Smart - C- / Rendition - B-
Springtime in a Small Town - B+ / Evan Almighty - C
My wife and son like movies. A lot. Except compared to me. Then they're just pikers.
I spend a lot of my time watching movies that my wife doesn't like, that are inappropriate for my son, or tv on dvd, by myself. My wife tries to watch a couple of hours each night, and we then watch a movie she likes (our tastes, while not identical, overlap a lot, she likes about 50% of my dvd collection enough to want to watch them with me). We watch films with my son when we can (mostly on weekends). After school, after he does his homework, he and I usually watch for an hour (my introducing him non-films: Looney Tunes, Brady Bunch, Flinstones, etc.).
This sounds like a lot, and it is I guess, but we still spend far more time, working, reading, playing, sleeping, eating, etc., than we do watching tv.
"Movies should be like amusement parks. People should go to them to have fun." - Billy Wilder
While this film is a lot better than you'd expect from a film starring the Rock, that doesn't exactly make it a great film by a long shot. It's short, which frankly works to it's advantage. If they'd tried to fill this in to a 2 hour movie, then the movie would be a lot worse IMO.
"Movies should be like amusement parks. People should go to them to have fun." - Billy Wilder
Rather forgettable but I guess historically interesting short, which features Louise Brooks just after being kicked out of Hollywood. This was also directed by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle who was working under a fake name. A cigar chomping idiot (Jack Shutta) takes a trip to San Fran but ends up in Hollywood where he gets work trying to resurrect the career of a fallen star (Louise Brooks). This short features only two laughs but it remains mildly entertaining due to Brooks in her first talky. Paramount ruined her career by saying she couldn't do talkies due to a bad voice but she sounded fine here. She certainly brought a lot more energy than this film deserved.
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Fairly raw German silent from director G.W. Pabst. A young woman (Louise Brooks) is raped and is eventually thrown out of her house when she has a baby. From here on the girl goes to a reform school, becomes a whore but will she find redemption? I was somewhat letdown by the film since I felt it did have a few flaws. I thought the men characters were really one sided and the second half of the film drags somewhat but there are certainly more positives than negatives. Brooks is terrific in the lead role and does a great job at showing off the virginal younger girl and the eventual sluttish, if mature, older woman. There's a scene where she's working and her father notices her. Within the same scene we see Brooks "slut" slide melt away into that virginal girl we saw at the end of the film in some of the best acting I've seen. The mood and atmosphere is very strong at the start of the film and the morality ending actually works quite nicely.
11/16/06
International House (1933)
An all-star cast is the highlight of this comedy about a wacky group of characters who go to a Chinese hotel to bid on a new invention (the television). With a cast that includes W.C. Fields, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Stewart Erwin, George Burns, Gracie Allen and Bela Lugosi, there's really something here for everyone. The film is certainly uneven but that's not really a problem since the movie is just set up to gets laughs at any way possible. I'm really not that big of a fan of Fields but I enjoyed his performance here. Burns and Allen certainly steal the show but I felt Lugosi gave one of his best performances here as well.
Tarzan Triumphs (1943)
War propaganda 101 as Nazi's take over a lost city but Tarzan shows up to kick their ass. This probably should have been called Triumph of Tarzan's Will but the politically incorrect humor works just fine for this film. The story is pretty stupid and the German bashing stuff might not go over well today but the film remains a lot of fun due in large part to the animals. Cheetah and the various other monkeys really steal the show here as they're giving a lot of fun things including the one scene where Cheetah steals a bunch of food from three monkeys. Weissmuller is in great form again and Frances Gifford is entertaining as well. There's plenty of nice humor (if politically incorrect) and the action is great. This first RKO Tarzan ranks right up there with the best from MGM, although it does get a little long winded at the end.
Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943)
Jane, who once again sends Tarzan a letter saying she isn't coming home, also asks her boyfriend to get a secret formula that can cure troops fighting in the war. Tarzan, Boy and Cheetah set out to do this but end up fighting Arabs. I found it incredibly difficult to stay awake while watching this film and it took several viewings to be able to do so. I thought the first forty-minutes of this thing were deadly dull and lacked any nice comedy or action. The female lead also wasn't very interesting, which hurt matters. The film eventually picks up at the end when Tarzan must enter a mysterious jungle full of living vines, prehistoric creatures and a huge spider. If only the entire film had taken place here. This is the first Tarzan I've actually been disappointed in to the point where I probably won't watch it again.
Maltese Falcon, The (1931)
First version of the famous story has a mysterious woman (Bebe Daniels) hiring Detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) to investigate the disappearance of her sister but that's just a backdrop for the missing black bird. While it's very difficult not to compare this film to the John Huston one, I think this works somewhat decent on its own. The biggest problem I had with the film were the two leads. Daniels was quite annoying and I never really bought into her in the lead. Cortez didn't quite work out either as I felt he was just too playboy and not enough detective. The supporting cast is very good throughout, although they don't quite reach the excellence of the Huston version. Thelma Todd, Dwight Frye and Dudley Diggs are all watchable. The added pre-code sexuality and the homosexual talk is one benefit over the Huston version.
Satan Met a Lady (1936)
A WTF variation on The Maltese Falcon has Warren William getting involved in a case of a missing trumpet. There's really no point in comparing this one to the original or the Huston film since many plot points have been changed. The "WTF" notion comes from all the humor that the film tries to get. This seems to have tried being a comedy a lot more than any type of mystery. William is wasted in the role and he's never able to get. Thank God for remakes.
What a completely over-rated and waste of time piece of crap. Nothing in either the directing or the writing suggests to me that Eli Roth is the Next Best Thing nor do I like being strung along for 45 minutes before the first shots of blood and gore pop up in a...*gasp* horror movie. The guys of the Saw flicks know how to weave the gore with exposition. Clearly, Roth does not. I'll definately be passing on the second installment. Complete bore.
11/16/06: LITTLE RURAL RIDING HOOD (Tex Avery, 1949) ***
Included as an extra on Warner’s DVD of BATTLEGROUND (1949), this delightful MGM cartoon from the legendary Tex Avery is very typical of his irreverent output; actually, it’s the last of a trio of shorts with virtually the same plot (the others being RED HOT RIDING HOOD [1943] and SWING SHIFT CINDERELLA [1945]). Despite the title, this deliberately unappealing character is not really the ‘star’: in fact, at the invitation of his slick cousin, the wolf goes to the city where he meets a sultry chanteuse – but he goes into the usual hilariously exaggerated reaction soon after, thus forcing the cousin to take him back home, where Little Red Riding Hood is waiting… This was voted the 23rd greatest cartoon ever in a 1994 poll!
Some of these side-splitting classics have cropped us as DVD bonus features (for instance, AIN’T WE GOT FUN [1937] on Warners’ edition of THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA [1937], WHO KILLED WHO? [1943] on PRESENTING LILY MARS [1943], SLAP HAPPY LION [1947] amidst “The Thin Man Collection”[!], the sublimely surreal BAD LUCK BLACKIE [1949] on KITTY FOYLE [1940], THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW [1949] on MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE [1948], etc.) but, for the life of me, I can’t understand what’s holding Warners from releasing them properly i.e. in the form of a veritable (and most deserving) “Tex Avery Collection” Box Set…
A “Peter Smith Specialty” one-reel short which, as can be gathered from the title, provides a number of situations with which the everyman hero has to deal with; in itself, harmless and occasionally amusing but certainly nothing special [sic]. Again, these titles (and other similar shorts of their vintage) are finding their way slowly to DVD in the form of bonus features; they offer mild entertainment which is usually capped by a moral of some sort, but are perhaps more valuable today as time-capsules.
11/16/06: THE REAR GUNNER (Ray Enright, 1943) **1/2
The title says it all about this tolerable but awfully propagandist WWII instructional short (included as an extra on Warners’ DVD of OBJECTIVE, BURMA! [1945]); it follows a group of raw recruits from training through their first combat mission (obviously compiled from stock footage). However, the credits provide a relative boost to the proceedings: apart from journeyman director Enright, the film stars Burgess Meredith as a rather simple-minded and over-age hero, as well as featuring turns from the likes of Ronald Reagan, Tom Neal and Dane Clark.
11/16/06: THE TANKS ARE COMING (B. Reeves Eason, 1941) **
This is another flag-waving short found on the OBJECTIVE, BURMA! (1945) DVD; again, the title couldn’t be more direct (though this one is kind of interesting because it actually predates America’s entry into WWII!). Though filmed in Technicolor, it shows little more than the basic training which we already saw in THE REAR GUNNER (1943); even worse, it features the cornball and resistible comic antics of George Tobias! For what it’s worth, there’s a scene in which Tobias’ beloved taxi-cab (which he hid in a cabin in the woods against the orders of his superiors) is crushed by his own tank during maneuvers.
I've only watched this one once via a 24 fps version (running for a mere 74 minutes) and with no accompanying score to boot so it can hardly be considered an ideal viewing experience; I would have already upgraded for the Kino DVD where it not for the fact that a R2 edition from Eureka Video under their esteemed "Masters of Cinema" label is forthcoming next year.
As for PANDORA'S BOX (1928), I hope you get to it soon Mike as I consider it among the greatest Silent films ever and that's based on one sole VHS viewing several years ago! I've been meaning to revisit it ever since but, thanks to Criterion's 2-Discer, I guess I won't have to! It's a shame that it's being released next Tuesday which meant that I couldn't grab it during Deep Discount DVD's current "20% off" promotion. The next one can't come soon enough for me...
Re: INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933)
This was indeed a pleasure to watch: in fact, the entire W.C. Fields Box Set comes heartily recommended from the undersigned. The film itself was different enough from Fields' typical vehicles to make it noteworthy and that sterling cast certainly helped. Hopefully, another similar set is in the works from Universal...
By the way, if you liked this one, you might want to try another all-star comedy of the period - Leo McCarey's SIX OF A KIND (1934), again with Burns and Allen among others, which is even cited by film critic David Shipman as possibly the funniest film ever! - which is available on DVD as part of a George Burns triple-feature DVD.
Re: TARZAN TRIUMPHS (1943)
I only caught this one by accident some years back on Italian TV; I had programmed the VCR to record something else but this got shown instead. Since I had it anyway, I thought I should watch it and I'm glad I did. Little did I know, however, that in a few years' time I'd actually be the owner of a bunch of Johnny Weissmuller Tarzans! I haven't gotten hold of this new set yet but, since I have the first one, I guess this should eventually make it into my collection too someday...
Re: THE MALTESE FALCON (1931)/SATAN MET A LADY (1936)
Now these two I did get in the Deep Discount DVD sale. I've been wishing to watch the respectable 1931 version for eons and, even if it probably won't be superior to the untouchable Bogie version, I'm dying to finally see it for myself.
The Bogart version is arguably the finest remake ever, one of the best directorial debuts and also one of the signature noirs, not to mention a cherished childhood favorite, so to have it as a SE DVD is just grand. Of course, the original single disc edition was one of my earliest DVD acquisitions so maybe I should give it away to Joe Karlosi since he won't be getting the new Bogie set...
