Category Archives: Movies & TV

30’s movies marathon – part 5

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, USA) – Song, dance, witticisms and a flimsy plot about show business. Hey, this formula might have future! (Multiple female leads who talk about other things than men: Not so much of a future.) Watched it all.

Shanghai Express (1932, USA) – Marlene Dietrich is all decadent on the Beijing-Shanghai train, which carries its all-white passengers through some tedious little civil war or whatever. Ah, the golden age of cinema. Watched: 19 minutes.

Freaks (1932, USA) – Good idea: Cast a movie with misshapen humans, pretend you’re doing it to educate the world about their plight. Bad idea: Make it really really boring. (This has been another Good idea / Bad idea). Watched: 14 minutes.

Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933, Germany) – Leni Riefenstahl’s clumsy precursor to Triumf des Willes. Makes marching in a Nazi rally look not at all fun. Watched: 30 minutes. IMDB reviewers say you shouldn’t downrate a film just because it’s Evil.

Bureau of Missing Persons (1933, USA) – Violent cop learns manners from the kind, public spirited folks at the Bureau of Missing Persons. Could be the pilot of a modern family-friendly cop show. Watched: 19 minutes.

20 000 Years in Sing Sing (1933, USA) – Prototype of the uplifting prison drama. With Spencer Tracy as the tough guy who isn’t so bad after all. All he needs is a bit of Loving Discipline from the wise and fatherly prison warden. Written by the warden of Sing Sing. Watched it all.

30’s movies marathon – part 4

The Most Dangerous Game (1932, USA) – A hunter of big game runs his yacht across a reef of Dramatic Irony, and becomes himself the hunted on a mad Cossack’s island. Contrived and badly acted, but gets points for making the quintessential Star Trek episode 30 years ahead of time.

The Island of Lost Souls (1932, USA). Good Island of Dr. Moreau, starring .. The Panther Woman?? Yes that’s what the credits say. Anyway the manimals rebel and chant “Law no more!”, thus making some point or other.

La Chienne (1931, France) – Introduced by a puppet, who mocks the conventions of filmmaking. Watched: 18 minutes. IMDB reviewers say that with this movie, French cinema enters the pathway to genius..

The Public Enemy (1931, USA) – Gangster childhood! Starring James Cagney, as an unconvincing teenager. Remember, kids, selling beer isn’t cool.

Le Bonheur (1934, France) – Surreal allegory about happiness. Impressive, whatever. Watched: 10 minutes.

White Zombie (1932, USA) – Ooh .. I had forgotten that zombies came from voodoo! But I prefer the kind that eats brrrraaaiiiinnnsss. This movie is terrrriiiiibbbllleeeee. Okay, I’ll stop now. Watched: 10 minutesssss.

The Big Trail (1930, USA) – Westerns got better over the years. Watched: 6 minutes.

Taxi (1932, USA) – Cab drivers can be gangstahs too! Yes, but I’m tired of gangster movies. Even if this one’s got a yiddish-speaking James Cagney. Watched: 9 minutes.

Flight Commander (1930, USA) – Won the Oscar for best writing, which is a mystery I don’t care to explore. Watched: 11 minutes.

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on

Joe Straczynski is one of the best scriptwriters in television. There’s been a golden age of television this decade, but Straczynski was years ahead of it, with the ca 100 episodes he wrote for Babylon 5 in the 1990’s. Nobody since has come close. Babylon 5 was a freak accident, where Straczynski was given the kind of creative control that is normally reserved for authors. The music, the actors, – the writing. Near perfect. An accident.

Now Straczynski has written his first movie, Changeling, which by Mysterious Means I’ve managed to see. (Angeline Jolie and Clint Eastwood are also involved somehow, but who cares?) I’m not fully pleased. Changeling is too subdued, especially at first. The story is realistic – a boy is kidnapped, the police screws up and sends the mother the wrong kid back, and when she complains they commit her to a psychiatric institution for being a nuisance. Realistic, oh yes. But it isn’t played in a believable way. Jeffrey Donovan plays the cop like his con roles in Burn Notice, light-weight. They should have filmed and cast this more like Carnivale.

Later it gets better, even quite good, and there are several Straczynski moments, (fans will know what I mean). And people in Hollywood seem to have liked it, and have given Straczynski more major movies to write. Good for him. I can’t evaluate this just as a movie. This is my hero’s big chance. He will never surpass Babylon 5, but maybe he’ll get the recognition he deserves.

30’s movies marathon – part 3

Paul Muni as ScarfaceMurders in the Rue Morgue (1932, USA) – This is really bad, but gets WTF-points for turning Poe’s crime story into a damsel & man-in-monster-suit movie. Takes place in Paris, 1845, where people are so well-read that they’re already discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution. Watched: 30 minutes.

Scarface (1932, USA) – Say hello to my little .. oh, never mind the pun. This is actually really good, apart from the comic relief and some attempts at being respectable. Paul Muni is a crazier and better Tony than Al Pacino. Notice the glee in his eyes as he gets his first machinegun.

Hell’s Angels (1930, USA) – Bits and pieces of everything stitched together. Some parts are shot as a silent movie, others in a sort of “color”. It’s the Frankenstein monster of movies: slow, dull, and with a sickly green hue (*ba-dum-bum ching*). Academy Award nomination for strangest German acting in a movie. Watched: 30 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the stuntman-killing action scenes. Not worth it.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932, USA) – I am an important made-for-Oscar social drama. Watched: 9 minutes.

The Beast of the City (1932, USA) – The Shield: The Previous Generation. Watched it all.

Limite (1931, Brazil) – It’s not that I hate art films on principle. I just think they attract bad filmmakers. Watched: 10 minutes.

30’s movies marathon – part 2

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932, USA) – It is good that the world has a group of clumsy British archeologists to protect us from hundreds of millions of obedient and ruthless Chinamen. Watched: 18 minutes. IMDB reviewers call it “politically incorrect”, by which they mean racist.

Mata Hari (1931, USA) – Greta Garbo is a tease, for which she is shot by the French government. Good and weepy, and not true to history.

The Blood of a Poet (1933, France) – French surrealism again. Okay, I get it, it’s clever. But – why?! Watched: 10 minutes.

Smart Money (1931, USA) – Small-town gambler learns swindling and street smarts in the big city, (inoffensively named “The Big City”). Charming.

The Mummy (1932, USA) – A reawakened mummy bores archeologists to death. Watched: 14 minutes.

The Old Dark House (1932, USA) – It was a dark and stormy night, in every conceivable way. Makes up for being bad by being peculiar, which is the definition of cult. Watched all of it, and so should you.

Morocco (1930, USA) – Marlene Dietrich’s too sexy for this crappy movie. Watched: 30 minutes.

Blacker than the blackest black times infinity

Metalocalypse is a cartoon tribute to metal, and should be played at high volume.

Dethklok is the world’s most brutal band. They live the metal dream in Mordhaus, a mountain fortress built like a viking ship:


Dethklok does everything every metal band ever sang about, times infinity. They’re that brutal. Their anti-piracy scheme is to visit your house at night, kill your family, and take you away to Mordhaus to be tortured. Dethklok’s concerts frequently lead to the death or mutilation of their fans, but that’s okay, because the fans don’t mind:

Dethklok gets away with this because they’re immensely rich and powerful. And because a secret society of leaders believe they’ll play a role in a prophecy. Satan is also involved somehow.

Befitting the world’s greatest metal band, Dethklok has two Scandinavian members, Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth. (Yes, Skwisgaar and Toki are common Scandinavian names.) Some of the show’s Scandinavian metal references are mean:


I do not approve. Well actually I do. That’s hilarious. So is Burzum’s, the diner, and Finntroll’s, the supermarket.

Dethklok is good for a fake cartoon band, and have released a real-life album called The Dethalbum. Series creator Brendon Small sings the lead vocals. They actually go on tours. This is This is Spinal Tap for metal fans.

30’s movie marathon – part 1 (“I bid you .. welcome” edition)

My new movie marathon is movies made in the 1930’s. Where on earth do I get them all?! Have I found some kind of buccaneers den of movies? It’s a mystery! But however it happens, I always buy the good ones. I don’t rip off artists, even when they’ve been dead (undead undead undead) for half a century.

Dracula (1931, USA) – Creaky, (meaning bad), but every overacted word out of Bela’s mouth is gold. Mad Renfield’s good too.

The Bat Whispers (1930, USA) – It’s a remake of The Bat! NOOO[dramatic fade-out]ooooo[almost gone now]ooo… Watched: 5 minutes.

The Black Camel (1931, USA) – Bela Lugosi (again?) is a psychic charlatan who gets involved with a murder investigation in Hawaii. This sounds more exciting than it is. Oh, Bela. Watched: 17 minutes.

Platinum Blonde (1931, USA) – Romantic comedy with the quips of a Groucho Marx and the satire of a P. G. Wodehouse, only much less so. Watched: 30 minutes.

Chandu the Magician (1932, USA) – Boy, those mysterious Indians sure are mysterious! Watched: 8 minutes.

Enthusiasm (1931, Soviet Union) – Confused documentary about the Soviet Union’s struggle against religion, coal shortages and good filmmaking. Workers in the Ukraine fulfill their five-year plan in four years, and then they all live happily ever after.

The Golden Age (1930, France) – Scorpions .. sick islanders attacked by battle bishops .. what? Looks good, sounds bad. Making talkies is hard, especially without a narrative. Watched: 20 minutes.

Silent movie marathon – Part 4

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927, Germany) – Oh .. my .. God. People, machines, buildings. Yes!

The Lost World (1925, USA) – Stop motion dinosaurs and a man in a monkey suit. Not bad, but typical. However groundbreaking, special effects really do work better with sound, color and CGI. Watched: 15 minutes, then fast forwarded to the dinosaurs.

The Unknown (1927, USA) – Circus artist Joan Crawford is sick of men groping her, and develops a phobia about hands. She finds comfort with a man who pretends to have no arms, but is secretly a thief and a strangler. Deliciously macabre symbolism. Sometimes a cigar really is a penis.

Anthology of Surreal Cinema, Vol 1: Entr’acte (1924, France), La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928, France), Ballet Mecanique (1924, France), Anemic Cinema (1926, France) – Huh. Funny! Brain massage. Watched all of it, but the nice thing about surrealism is that you can take a bathroom break without missing anything.

La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928, France) – Not bad, but I like Roger Corman’s Poe movies better. Watched: 10 minutes.

The Battleship Potemkin (1925, Soviet Union) – Fine film. Made in that very very short period when Bolshevik doctrine held that the state shouldn’t massacre citizens for no good reason.

That’s all the silent movies for now. I have learned that I hate silent comedies, and that all silent movies should be set to Shostakovich.

The end of the world, as we know it

The world just ended again. Twice. First with the new mini-series Dead Set, where the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are participants in Big Brother, unaware throughout the first episode that zombies are eating their audience. Nice spin.

Second with Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic RPG. I’m an impatient gamer. If a game doesn’t constantly reward me with points, happy sounds and shiny colors, I lose interest, and go back to something more exciting, like reading a book. But for now I’m having fun exploring the nuclear wasteland of the D.C. area. Based on the game engine from Oblivion, Fallout 3‘s lush and detailed graphics cover the full range of colors from brown to gray. Broken buildings and roads litter the landscape. Mutants and hopeless people roam about, waiting for you to save, exploit and/or eat them.

I always play the hero in these type of games, even when they give you a choice. “Why, of course I’ll save your village from the mutant army without asking anything in return, even though I’m sick, starving, and short on ammo. Don’t mention it!” I don’t want to explore my inner sociopath. I just don’t. Well, maybe I should try it just once. Just for a little while. To see what it’s like. Surely that won’t make me a .. BAD PERSON?!!

Silent movie marathon – part 3


The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Germany) – Arabian Nights-based fairy tale. Animated with silhouettes, which looks amazing. Look! Watched it all.

The Bat (1926, USA) – Jewel thief dressed as a bat (if a bat looked like a mouse) baffles the police. Reminds me of a kid telling a story with action figures. Watched: 10 minutes.

Ménilmontant (1926, France) – Drama from the bleak and menacing school of film-making. Life in Paris really, really sucks. Watched it all, not because I liked it, but because it’s compelling and doesn’t feel old.

The Blue Bird (1918, USA) – Probably a morality tale. There’s a bird of happiness which only some people can see, and then there’s a rich family and a poor family and one that is normal. They all live on the same street, just waiting to bump into each other for valuable life lesson purposes. Watched: 11 minutes. (Having checked IMDB, I see there’s also a fairy involved.)

Oktyabr (1928, Soviet Union) – Mm .. Soviet propaganda, where hysterical mobs of rich ladies beat up workers in the streets. Fairly truthful account, in the sense that, yes, the October revolution took place in October. (Well, it was actually November). The version I saw was with sound effects, which is silly, but it was set to music by Shostakovich, whose ‘1917’ symphony is my favourite of the few positive outcomes of communism. Watched it all, but it lacks focus.