Category Archives: Movies & TV

Being king means never sleeping through the night again

Well this isn’t too bad. Kings is a modern retelling of the David story, with Ian McShane as Saul, Chris Egan as David, and a tank as Goliath. It does a more or less 1-to-1 mapping from Biblical Israel to alternate universe America, which is smart: When your source material is one of the greatest stories in ancient literature, there’s no reason to change it.

There’s a comic book series, Testament, which did the same thing with the book of Genesis. I didn’t like it. The mapping was odd, the appeal of the original legends was lost by trying too hard to be clever. Kings, so far, does not. Michael Green maps Bronze Age to Internet Age in a way that is both creative and mostly faithful to the story.

I’m not sure about Jonathan, (“Jack”). He’s gay, which the original story hinted at, (one of many delightfully inconvenient passages in the Bible), but also shifty, possibly treasonous, and unlikely to hook up with David. It’s an odd departure from the source. There’s also an evil corporate presence I don’t remember from Sunday School. But – I’m beginning to sound like a nitpicking Watchmen-fan.

The tone of the show is well done: Contemporary, with a sideways step towards the mythical. It’s the only example of Biblical SF on television I can recall, and I want to see where it’s heading. (Even if I know how it ends. Probably. Unless this is all a ruse leading up to a shocking departure later on.)

30’s movies marathon – part .. oh who’s counting?

Jezebel (1938, USA) – A 1850’s New Orleans woman tries to win love through manipulation and audacity, which doesn’t work out too well. Told against a background of Southern elegance and happy, comical slaves. Fantastic, racist period piece, with Bette Davis switching comfortably between brave, pathetic and cruel. Watched it all. IMDB reviewers call it a prelude to Gone With the Wind, which is nonsense – this is far better.

You Can’t Take it With You (1938, USA) – A group of free spirits explore Maslow’s fifth layer in their commune, which is threatened by .. (queue Psycho-music) .. tycoons. Nice, well-intended, and naive, in a way that’s a little less interesting now that we’re all like this. Watched: 30 minutes.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938, USA) – The beloved classic, reimagined as Dennis the Menace. Watched: 10 minutes.

Ask a Policeman (1938, UK) – Loud jokes that beat you over the head with how funny they are. Watched: 8 minutes.

The Texans (1938, USA) – Evil cardboard yankees force confederate veterans to pay taxes and work for a living in reconstruction-era Texas. It’s a travesty! It’s up to a band of brave, doomed rebels to save the South, by relaunching the Civil War with Mexican and French soldiers on their side. Yes, they’re the good guys. Watched: 14 minutes.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938, USA) – Gangster tries to go legit when prohibition ends, but Society Won’t Let Him, (they hate his crappy beer). Watched: 8 minutes.

30’s movies marathon – part 23

Topper (1937, USA) – Manny-man man’s man Cary Grant plays an irresponsible playboy who kills himself and his wife in a drunk driving accident. They then return as ghosts to teach a respectable banker to be an irresponsible drunk driver too, (or at least help him stand up to his shrewish wife). Loved it. Watched it all.

The Good Earth (1937, USA) – I don’t know which is more stupid: A movie set in China where all the main characters are white, or this, where the characters are Chinese, but they’re all played by white actors. Watched: 14 minutes. IMDB reviewers beg us to consider the casting in the context of its era, and not condemn it out of “political correctness”. I wonder if they excuse all 30’s racism equally?

Conquest (1937, USA) – Polish countess Greta Garbo is pressured into offering herself to Napoleon in the hope of securing freedom for her people, but all she gets in return is rape and dishonor. She falls in love with him anyway, but again (and again, and again) she is betrayed by his ego and ambition – just like Europe. Excellent. Watched it all.

Range Defenders (1937, USA) – Oh God, it’s a horrible, ultracheap Western. Noooooo…! When did they begin making good ones?! Watched: 5 minutes.

A very innocent time

I wonder what impression a viewing marathon of 1946 films would leave on the mind of someone who never knew that year. How true a picture would it give of the time? When I look back, as I frequently do, at movies of the thirties and forties, and compare them with the reality I knew then, as schoolboy, soldier and young newspaperman, I can say that they reflect very fairly our backgrounds, our values and some of our ideals.

I insert the word “some” as one who has never been politically committed, except for brief periods after every political meeting I ever reported: if it was a Labour meeting I came out somewhere to the right of P.C. Wren; if Conservative, my feelings would have made Lenin look like a hesitant moderate. But I concede that those with strong political views might not think that old movies gave a true picture, inasmuch as they had no time for extremism, either way.

What does come off them, very strongly, is a remarkable innocence. No doubt the Hays Office and the British Board of Film Censors had something to do with it, but not all that much. It was, as I look back and remember, a very innocent time – even with the Depression and Hitler and the atom bomb, it was still innocent. Perhaps that was why they happened.

- George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World

30’s movies marathon – part 22

Young and Innocent (1937, UK) – A British movie that doesn’t suck! In fact it’s good. Hitchcock does his innocent suspect thing, with black humor and many inspired scenes, such as a jazz drummer in blackface trying desperately not to reveal his villainous twitch. Watched it all.

A Damsel in Distress (1937, USA) – Merging Fred Astaire with P.G. Wodehouse sounds like a good idea, but .. nah. Watched: 15 minutes.

Salama fi khair (1937, Egypt) – En Egyptian farce! It’s actually funny, at times. A lazy office worker gets stuck with a large sum of money, and becomes afraid of thieves. Watched: 31 minutes.

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, USA) – A man happens to look exactly like the crown prince, and happens to meet him just in time to fill in for the prince at his coronation after he’s poisoned. This will no doubt cause 1h and 40m of intrigue and confusion, but this sort of aristocratic adventure doesn’t interest me. Watched: 15 minutes.

La Habanera (1937, Germany) – A Swedish woman visits Puerto Rico with her humorless aunt, where she is swept off her feet by the natives and their exotic customs (bull-fighting etc.) Watched: 14 minutes. IMDB reviewers say the romance doesn’t last, and she ends up safely in the arms of a fellow Aryan.

The audience will laugh them off the screen

At first glance, Hollywood and pirates would seem to be made for each other, but in fact they are not. Apart from the technical difficulty that sailing ships are nightmare machines which refuse to stay still, and even large models have their problems, there is the plain fact that pirates – the real pirates of history – the Blackbeards and Morgans and Kidds and Calico Jacks – are too bizarre, too larger-than-life, too unreal even for the cinema. That they were real is irrelevant; their truth is too strange for fiction, and pantomime and Peter Pan have turned the grim reality into a comic figure which usually defies attempts to fashion it for conventional drama, or even melodrama.

Madmen who run about with blazing fireworks in their whiskers, eccentrics who hold religious services and prohibit swearing on their unholy cruises, red-headed hussies who put to sea disguised as men and fight duels to the death – they may do for send-up, but try to present them as they truly were, and the audience will laugh them off the screen.

- George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World

30’s movies marathon – part 21

Dead End (1937, USA) – Excellent drama about street kids in a poor New York neigbourhood. Smart and unsentimental, with great performances by the kids, and a fine supporting job by Humphrey Bogart as a bitter gangster. Watched it all.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, USA) – You know, I find it hard to believe that Snow White and the queen are the two most beautiful women in the kingdom. It’s .. unlikely, and not borne out by the visual evidence. The movie looks great for its time, but the story is stupid, full of cute animals and cute songs – in other words a typical braindead FX movie. (Besides, I think this is how it really happened.) Watched: 27 minutes.

Love From a Stranger (1937, UK) – Another terrible British movie. Watched: 6 minutes.

Souls at Sea (1937, USA) – Gary Cooper isn’t the right actor to play a slave trader, even one with a conscience. Watched: 19 minutes.

Stella Dallas (1937, USA) – Character drama that feels too much like a novel. Watched: 17 minutes.

The Last Gangster (1937, USA) – Is that a promise? Good enough, but I’ve seen it all before. Watched: 15 minutes.

Lost Horizon (1937, USA) – Silly but well-made oriental adventure with something of a Spielberg flair. Watched: 37 minutes.

Movie colorization

I just noticed that three of the DVD’s I’ve bought because of my 30’s movies marathon, She, Things to Come and My Man Godfrey, contain both a black & white and a colorized version of the movie. In other words, movie colorization is back.

What a great idea. I know – colorization has a bad reputation. But it’s undeserved. These movies look great. There’s nothing wrong with the quality. That is, Things to Come both looks and sounds bad, but so does the black & white version.

I don’t see any good reasons not to colorize old movies, now that the technology is good enough. The last stand of the purists is that “they weren’t meant to be in color”, which is a stupid thing to say. Of course they were meant to be in color. They just didn’t have the money. Color technology existed in the 30’s, but it was expensive. Few directors would have said no if they’d had the option.

There are movies that would look worse in color. Black & white is a tool, and some directors knew how to use it. But most black & white movies are just .. colorless. To oppose all colorization is to give blind obedience to accident, (this movie got the budget, that movie didn’t).

One critic of colorization is George Lucas, (yes, George Lucas, the man who changed Star Wars!), who is afraid that old comedies may be less funny in color. If so, the problem is hardly the color, is it?

The Bechdel test

The Bechdel test was formulated in 1985 in a cartoon by Alison Bechdel, where a character says that she only watches movies that meets three basic requirements:

1) It has to have at least two women in it, who
2) talk to each other, about
3) something other than a man.

The joke is of course that there aren’t many. If you live by the Bechdel test, you don’t see movies very often.

The Bechdel test is simple and obviously sensible. It’s not about watching movies with a stop watch to ensure equal time between the sexes. It’s not about someone’s subjective idea of what is or isn’t offensive. It’s about a basic measure of intelligence.

“You mean you’ve made a movie where the women don’t talk to each other? Or they do, but all they can think of talking about is the male lead? Which planet does this take place on?!”

And it’s not like we can put all the blame on the film industry. Yes, they make movies that only rarely treat women as actual people. But the audience doesn’t notice, or care. The fact that there’s even a name for this test is proof that it’s needed.

Please notice it.