Category: OCF Classic Movie Reviews

Reviews of classic movies by the incomparable critics at OCF

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – Some Observations on the Book

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So, I had so much fun comparing the book and movie for “The Thin Man” that I to read Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” so that I could compare it to its movie too.  And once again I’m reading it from the Library of America edition that I already have.  The book came out in 1939 and the movie in 1946.  The pre-war and post war difference probably is significant.  But we’ll just leave that alone.

And let me state for the record that this review is full of spoilers.

First off, I’ll state for the record that although I’ve always enjoyed the movie immensely, I found the book much more interesting and satisfying as a story.  The biggest difference between the book and movie is the characterization of the Sternwood daughters Vivian and Carmen.  In the movie the role of Vivian is a mostly sympathetic character who becomes the love interest for the Marlowe character.  But in the book, she is almost as reckless as her unbalanced sister Carmen.  And whereas in the movie Carmen is an exhibitionistic spoiled woman-child in the book she is truly psychotic.

And allowing the Sternwood daughters to be pathological individuals they are, simplifies the details of the story that in the movie have to be sanitized in order to fit the Hays Code.  So, we can be told that Geiger’s “book store” lent out pornography to its customers and Carmen was being photographed naked by Geiger at the time when the Sternwood chauffer came in and killed Geiger and stole the exposed film of Carmen.  And so on with other parts of the story that don’t make sense in the movie because the seediness of the plot elements prevented their being openly stated instead of subtly implied.  So, we don’t have an explicit statement that Eddie Mars is not only aware of Geiger’s racket but also uses it to blackmail customers.

But the biggest difference between the two versions of the story is the disappearance of Rusty Regan (called Sean Regan in the film).  At the end of the movie Eddie Mars claims he saw Carmen kill Regan.  But because Mars didn’t even know what Carmen looked like Marlowe seems to reject this version of the facts.  This leads the audience to believe that Mars had Regan killed by Canino out of jealousy over Mars’ wife’s relationship with Regan.  But in the movie Marlowe suspects Carmen of the murder and he tests the theory.  After he had rejected Carmen’s sexual advances one night, the next day he tests her sanity.  He returns her pistol and tells her it’s loaded and she asks for him to teach her how to shoot.  After leading Marlowe to a secluded location, she uses the opportunity and angrily fires all six shots at him.  Of course, he had the gun loaded with blanks and after disarming her she goes into an epileptic fit.  And after bringing Carmen back to the house to receive medical attention Marlowe tells Vivian that he knows that Carmen must have murdered her husband after a similar refusal by Regan to sleep with her.  And Vivian admits to the truth of the killing.

I find this a much more satisfactory ending.  We’ve been shown the Sternwoods as a very sinister and dysfunctional clan and the idea that Vivian is somehow a sympathetic or admirable individual despite all the evidence to the contrary just rings false.  Chandler’s story is a grim tale that lacks the happy ending of the Hollywood movie that pairs Bogart and Bacall as a romantic couple.  But it’s a better ending and in my opinion much more satisfying.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett – Some Observations on the Book

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Someone my age or older if he is familiar with Hammett’s story, “The Thin Man” probably has only seen the 1934 film with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.  And as I’ve reviewed elsewhere, it is a fantastically entertaining movie made up of equal parts comedy and murder mystery.

I have a copy of the Library of America volumes for Dashiell Hammett and for whatever reason this past week I decided to read the short novel that the movie is based on.  And to start with I’ll say I wasn’t disappointed.  It’s a good story and well written to entertain the reader with vivid characterizations and plenty to keep your interest piqued.  But one thing it isn’t is a blueprint for the movie.  So, I thought it would be interesting to just give my impressions on how the book and movie differ and then to say which version was more satisfying.

The first piece of bookkeeping is the suitability for general audiences.  Now the film was pre-code meaning that strict censorship of risqué images, language and themes was not yet being enforced in Hollywood.  But even saying that, the film version of the story would today be rated (at worst) PG-13 due to violent circumstances in the plot.  But in reality, a G rating would not be a terrible stretch.  Several of the characters were criminals and murder and other crimes are the focus of the story but everything was handled in a sanitized portrayal.  The book however leans heavily into the seedier aspects of several of the characters’ lifestyles.  There is allusion to sexual activity and the violence that is portrayed is much more graphic than in the movie version.  And as an example of an unusual bit of reality one character is compared to a lesbian in her “hatred of men.”

And as far as the characterization of some of the more important people in the story, the two grown children of the eponymous “Thin Man,” Dorothy and Gilbert Wynant are described as at the very least highly neurotic and very possibly dangerously disturbed due to the terrible parenting of their mother Mimi.  And this differs significantly from Dorothy’s character in the movie where she is portrayed very sympathetically.  And as one of the main characters Mimi is definitely portrayed as a much worse person in the book than in the film.  In the movie she’s a greedy, manipulative woman but in the book she’s close to a psychopath.  She brutalizes her daughter for almost no reason and she lies pathologically at every turn.  At one point she becomes so angry at Dorothy that she goes into a sort of blind fury as she tries to get at her while Nick restrains her by main force.  She is easily the ugliest character in the book.

As far as the characterization of Nick and Nora Charles, one thing that agreed in both versions is that they both drank hard liquor almost continuously both day and night.  Now in the movie it almost seemed to be a joke.  But in the book, it was just their routine.  I guess allowances would have to be made for the prohibition era mores and customs but to a modern reader it is very noticeable.  As far as their personalities they come off slightly harder edged than Powell and Loy’s remarkably affable screen personae.  Nick especially is quite willing to get tough with both men and women who get in his face.  At one point he has to stop Mimi from assaulting her daughter by lifting her off the ground and pinning her arms while holding her down on a couch while someone throws water in her face to calm her down.  In the final scene he becomes angry at the police Lieutenant Guild for not seeing that Wynant was the murdered man and knocks out MacCaulay as much out of anger as to stop him.  And in general, both Nick and Nora are not as “nice” as their screen versions.

The book characterizes most of Nick’s friends in upper crust New York City as morally compromised while his underworld acquaintances come off as “good fellas” if a little on the rough side.

Evaluating overall the contrast between the book and movie, what we have is a gritty detective story versus a film that is basically a light-hearted comedy as much as it is a murder mystery.  And considering the audiences that each of these stories were aimed at both are highly successful in their entertainment value.  The book was aimed at adults, probably particularly men.  The movie was a family entertainment with some double entendres thrown in for the adults.  But I think the short novel is well worth reading and I only wish he had written more stories for Nick and Nora.  The screen sequels never measured up to the original film but I’m sure Hammett could have provided more gritty adventures for his Nick and Nora.

Champion (1949) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he can only find.  He and his brother Connie arrive on a freight train from the east and believe they have an ownership stake in a small restaurant.  But discover they’ve been conned.  Taking jobs as waiters there, Midge becomes romantically involved with the owner’s daughter Emma but this leads to the couple being forced at gunpoint by her father into a marriage.

This prompts Midge to abandon Emma and he and Connie end up at a boxing gym where a trainer named Tommy Haley agrees to manage Midge.  Midge proves to have considerable skill in the ring but more importantly he has a killer instinct that leads him to brutalize his opponents with maniacal force whenever he gets in the ring.  Eventually Haley arranges for Midge to fight the number one contender for the middle weight crown, Johnny Dunne in New York.  But the gambling interests have only allowed Midge the fight with the understanding that he’ll take a dive to allow Dunne to capture the middle-weight crown from an aging champ.

Midge double crosses Haley and the gamblers and knocks Dunne out in the first round.  The mobsters beat Midge, Haley and Connie badly but now the reality is Midge is the leading contender for the crown.  Dunne’s platinum blonde girlfriend Grace tells Midge that the only way he’ll ever get a shot at the crown is by appeasing the gamblers.  And the only way that will happen is if he dumps Haley and signs up with Grace’s friend Jerome Harris.  And Midge does it without blinking an eye.  Seeing how Midge stabbed Haley in the back and what company he was now keeping, Connie decided to leave New York and go back to his mother’s apartment in Chicago.

Meanwhile Midge is flying high with a victory in the ring against the champ.  He’s dating Grace but sleeping with Jerome Harris’s wife Palmer.  Neither of these women know that he is still married to Emma.  But now all of Midge’s double-crossing comes due.  He has to defend his title against Johnny Dunne and he’s out of shape from living the high life.  So, he hires Haley to train him but has to agree to split 30% with him.  But Haley doesn’t really care whether Midge is up to the fight and after missing his mother’s death bed Connie and Emma despise him.  On the day before the boxing match, she tells Midge she’s divorcing him and marrying Connie.  He answers her statement by dragging her to bed to claim his conjugal rights as husband.

At the boxing arena Connie attacks Midge for what he did to Emma.  But Midge beats him down and heads for the ring.  The match is very even at the start.  Midge manages to knock Dunne to the canvas in the first round but after that the match slowly but surely shifts in Dunne’s favor.  By the twelfth round Midge has one eye closed and looks almost punch drunk.  But when he sees Grace and his other “friends” in the audience smiling at his defeat he becomes enraged and with a manic flurry of punches he beats Dunne to the canvas and wins the fight.  But he is basically dragged back to his dressing room by Haley and his trainers and after a brief ranting speech that seems to come from his angry tortured soul, he drops dead.  The movie ends with reporters asking Connie about his brother and him replying sardonically that Midge was a perfect reflection of the spirit of his sport.

This movie has some good points.  The early scenes of Midge and Connie travelling across country to make a new life for themselves and their loyalty to each other is affecting.  However, the unfolding of Midge’s personality and his general hatred of humanity is a very unpleasant experience.  As he goes from one betrayal to the next, I found him despicable.  And because of this, by the end of the movie, I wasn’t enjoying the story at all.  I was very relieved when he dropped dead and I could turn off the tv.  I can’t recommend this movie to anyone.

Ah, Wilderness! (1935) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Eugene O’Neill, the playwright, was known for his psychologically dark and depressing tragedies that dwelt on alcoholism, drug addiction and family dysfunction.  But he did write one comedy which was sort of an attempt at autobiography (sort of).

And that was “Ah, Wilderness!”  Eventually this play was translated into a motion picture starring Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and even a very young Mickey Rooney.

It’s the story of a family; the Millers, living in a small New England town in 1906.  Barrymore is the family patriarch Nat and his wife Essie is played by the always amusing Spring Byington.  Their youngest son Tommy is played by Micky Rooney.  Beery plays Nat’s drunken and lazy brother Sid who works as a “reporter” on Nat’s town newspaper.  The rest of the children are played by relative unknowns but in general, the acting and direction is quite good.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The event of the movie is the graduation from high school of the next to oldest son Richard.  He’s the class valedictorian and an “intellectual” whose reading of modernist fiction, poetry and political thought gets him into trouble with his parents and his girlfriend’s father.  Swinburne, G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx provide Richard with plenty of quotes to rankle his elders.  But when Muriel McComber’s father Dave finds a Swinburne poem among his daughter’s effects he orders her to break off her romance with Richard and pulls his advertisement from Nat’s newspaper.

To get back at the world Richard goes out with one of his older brother’s friends to a saloon and gets drunk and fraternizes with a chorus girl who sits on his lap and soaks him for drinks and some money.  After he gets thrown out by the bartender for being underaged he show up home drunk and depressed much to his family’s chagrin.  The end of the movie revolves around Nat explaining the facts of life with respect to women and living a decent life to his son.  Of course, Richard and Muriel re-unite and even her father comes around to approving of their romance.

In between Richard’s problems we’re witness to the drunken escapades of Nat’s brother Sid (played by Wallace Beery) and his on-again, off-again courtship of Lily Davis who must be Mrs. Miller’s cousin.  Beery performs a very over-the-top rendition of his drunken oaf character and Lily seems to take solace from chastising Sid for his drinking and career failures.

Alright, so why do I like this movie?  Many of the exterior shots of the small town were filmed in Grafton, MA.  And remarkably the town still looks surprisingly the same after almost a hundred years.  I know the area very well from an earlier phase of my life in New England and find these views of the town incredibly nostalgic.  So that’s one thing the movie has going for it (admittedly a highly specific point with a very small audience of appreciation).  The other virtue the movie possesses is the charm of a small town from the very dawn of the twentieth century.  There’s a simplicity to the activities that still has an attraction to some of us looking back from the awful alienated place we find ourselves in today.  There’s a five-minute scene of the children shooting off fire works on Fourth of July morning that brings me back over sixty years to my childhood.  And the awfulness of the high school graduation talent-show-scene makes me laugh for its similarity to some of the shows I have attended.  There’s just a thick slice of good-natured old Americana that cheers my heart.  So, who is this movie for?  Probably just me, unless what you read here piques your curiosity.

Son of Frankenstein (1939) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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As a kid this was one of my favorite Universal horror movies.  In a way it was the last of the legitimate Frankenstein movies from the series.  Boris Karloff played the Monster for the third and final time.  And they even brought back a couple of the actors from the original Frankenstein movie although as different characters. So, there was a certain amount of continuity with the first two movies.  Basil Rathbone adds his considerable talents to the production as the titular son of the original Dr. Frankenstein.  Lionel Atwill makes his turn as the memorable Inspector Krogh; he of the prosthetic right arm (which the Monster had torn off when Krogh was a child).  And even poor Bela Lugosi is there as Ygor to lend his legitimacy as a part of one of the earlier Universal films (Dracula) that had a lot of “prestige.”  Yes, this movie has everything.  Not only does the younger Dr Frankenstein have a very pretty wife but he also has a curly-haired young son whom the Monster befriends.  After this film the later Frankenstein films became kind of campy to my mind.  So, this is the climax of the original films.

I won’t worry about spoilers because we know that the Monster will come back for endless sequels so let’s just talk about the story.  Dr. Frankenstein and his family have arrived from the United States where he had met his wife.  They find the villagers surly and suspicious because mysterious deaths have continued to occur in the village and the Monster is still blamed for these.

We find out that Ygor has been hiding the Monster below the ruins of the destroyed laboratory but recently the Monster was struck by lightning (!) and hasn’t regained consciousness since.  Ygor wants the doctor to restore the creature.  Ygor was a grave robber who was hanged for his crimes but somehow the hanging didn’t kill him so he went free.  And now he’s befriended the Monster and it does his bidding.  Doctor Frankenstein is intrigued by his father’s creation and we are shown him using “modern” medical equipment like a fluoroscope to examine the Monster.  There’s some gibberish about his rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, cellular structure and we even find out that he has two bullets lodged in his heart which don’t seem to bother him at all.

So, the doctor sets up the generator and zaps the Monster but other than a short bout of consciousness he seems to have failed to rouse the Monster.  But later on, we hear that the doctor’s little boy met a “giant.”  And so, when the murders begin happening again both the doctor and Inspector Krogh are sure the Monster is on the loose again.  After a dart game between Doctor Frankenstein and the Inspector (which was thoroughly lampooned in Mel Brook’s movie; “Young Frankenstein) we have the climax of the movie.  Doctor Frankenstein kills Ygor in self-defense and the Monster kidnaps the little boy and brings him back to the lab.  At this point both the Inspector and the doctor attack the Monster.  Even after the creature tears off Krogh’s prosthetic arm, he manages to fire a number of bullets into the Monster.  And Doctor Frankenstein outdoes him by a swashbuckling rope swing that propels the Monster over the lip of a ledge and into a very convenient, bubbling pool of 800-degree F sulfur-bearing magma.

Alright.  It’s a silly movie.  But it’s a lot fun.  I’ve got a warm spot for this one.  All the hand waving to make the Monster’s existence “scientific” appeals to the ten-year-old kid in me.  They even go so far as to clarify that the “ray” that the original movie said was “beyond the ultraviolet” was actually cosmic rays.  Well, cosmic rays!  What more could you ask?  Highly recommended for ten-year-old boys and other folks who like a good monster movie in black and white.

The Black Cat (1934) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd.  Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen.  Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists.  They are too ridiculous to consider.

Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary.  They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination.  But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.

Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night.  Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel.  Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is.  Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite).  Here he is shown Karen’s embalmed body in a giant bell jar.  And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead.  Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast’s daughter isn’t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.

The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim.  Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice.  Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan’s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall.  Don’t ask me why such a room is part of the story.  The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features.  Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.

But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered.  Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive.  Joan sees this and starts screaming.  Peter finds a gun that Poelzig’s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him.  While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.

O, brother!  Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig’s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches.  And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top.  There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd.  And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff’s face, they show Lugosi’s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him.  This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be.  And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun.  Only for fans of the genre.

Going My Way (1944) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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“Going My Way” is a comedy drama that took a bunch of Oscars and was the biggest box office draw in 1944.  And since it starred Bing Crosby it unsurprisingly had several musical numbers spread through the movie.  It’s the story of Father Chuck O’Malley (Crosby) a Catholic priest sent by the bishop to rescue a New York City parish; St Dominic’s, from the overwhelmed exhaustion of its present elderly pastor; Father Fitzgibbon (played by Barry Fitzgerald).  With a supporting cast that includes such veteran character actors as Gene Lockart, Timothy O’Dowd and William Frawley the film drops any pretense at reality and has Father O’Malley manage to reform a local gang of New York City teenagers and converts them into a church choir.  He manages to raise enough money to pay off the mortgage by selling a song to a music producer.  He saves a runaway teenager from trouble with the police and even manages to reunite Father Fitzgibbon with his ninety-year-old mother by finding a way to pay for her trip from Ireland.

Now clearly this movie has nothing to do with reality.  Having grown up in a New York City Roman Catholic parish I can assure you that no priest of Father O’Malley’s caliber has ever been seen.  But treat the movie as a fantasy from a much more innocent time and enjoy it for its virtues.  Crosby comes across as eminently likeable and the whole movie is a feel-good experience that can be watched around the holiday season to try and believe that there are still good people walking this Earth.

Now the interesting thing is this movie has the distinction of being one of only a very few good movies that had an even better sequel.  The next year (1945) Crosby returned as O’Malley, paired with Ingrid Bergman as a nun in the movie, “The Bells of St Mary’s.”

But with or without the sequel, “Going My Way” is a heartwarming and well-made film that I can highly recommend to anyone who still wants to believe in the possibility of human goodness and hope.  There is comedy, human feeling and a sense of optimism in the face of hardship.  A classic.

They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

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Today I watched the old movie “Gunga Din” for like the trillionth time.  And it has all the same silly things going on every time I see it.  The gags are telegraphed, the sentiment is slapped on with a cement trowel, the improbabilities are piled to the sky.  You name it.

But watching the three leads; Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. go through their paces as Kipling’s three sergeants is a never-ending treat that I can watch several times a year probably until they finally bury me.  It’s a joy to behold.

And the picture works as both a comedy and an adventure story.  And the supporting cast (including an elephant named Annie) provide plenty of support and opportunity for our heroes to search for treasure, destroy British Army discipline, romance the girl or save the day.  And you know, I think I like the fact that even when it was being made, the British Raj was already a sore point for the social justice types but this movie plays up the “white man’s burden” aspect of the story even more than needed to match the historical era.

Sam Jaffe’s Gunga Din really is a minor role right up until the critical juncture in the story where he saves the day.  But he does give the regimental bhisti his due.  And the actors portraying the army officers and the officious Bertie Higginbotham, all acquit themselves with the expected amount of British bluster.

So, what makes this movie fun?  Despite the well-acted lead characters, I think the success of this movie is thanks to the unflagging action, both comic and adventure.  The heroes are constantly fighting savage tribesmen, jumping off cliffs into rivers, breaking out of jail by means of elephant powered building demolition and fighting their way through a saloon full of Scottish highlanders.  They only slow down when poisoning Bertie Higginbotham at an engagement party.  Armies of strangling Thuggees are no match for these soldiers three as they roll out their “three musketeers / all for one and one for all” routine to frustrate the Thug Guru’s master plan to defeat the British and restore India to the greatness it had known before Alexander the Great had slapped it around in the fourth century BC.

So, I have to state which of the three sergeants is my personal favorite.  Now Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s Sgt. Ballantine is never in the running.  He’s the romantic lead and thereby much abused by his fiancée’s humiliating attentions.  And despite the excellent work done by Cary Grant as the ebullient Sgt. Archibald Cutter I have to give the win to Victor McLaglen’s Sgt. MacChesney.  Just on the strength of the facial expressions that he manages when the Colonel confronts him with the prospect of Bertie Higginbotham replacing Ballantine, I’d have to give him the prize.  But there are just so many great scenes where he steals the show.  Even pleading with an elephant using “baby talk” to get it to take medicine always cracks me up.  And it really is McLaglen with his hand in the elephant’s mouth.

So why can’t they make movies like this anymore?  I don’t think it’s the actors.  There are plenty of those who could perform these parts.  It’s the writers and directors.  Either they can’t or won’t give us good stories.  Maybe the producers just won’t allow them.  But whatever it is, that’s where we are.  And I can live with that.  I have my DVD and it’ll last for longer than I will.

“Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.”

Rudyard Kipling

She-Hulk X

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I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?

Christmas Movie Time

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Here it is two days before Christmas and I’ve already eaten so many cookies that I feel like a drunk in the middle of a four-day bender.  Well, there’s no avoiding the excesses.  Camera Girl is fiendish in her strategies to kill me with food.  She should hide these evil foods somewhere far away.  Instead, she lays them out all over the kitchen where even a man with a will of iron must succumb.  I’ve kept up my exercise regimen as best I can but exercise deals in hundreds of calories while pastries are measured in the thousands.  The pain, the pain.

Yesterday I watched, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in its entirety.  That’s something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years.  Many years ago, I overdosed on it.  I watched it too many times and it became played out.  But yesterday I found it fresh and enjoyable.  Of course, every scene in the movie was extremely familiar down to the slightest word and even gesture of the actors.  But I was able to appreciate just how fine the acting and directing was.  And as highly emotional as the ending of the movie obviously is I wasn’t put off at all by it.  Maybe this American Christmas Carol is fitting for the time and place we live in.  Maybe people are ready to hope for miracles again.  It’s certainly true that we need a few of them.  I’m not going to claim that heaven interceded and put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Kamala Harris.  At best maybe a divine force kept him from intersecting with that bullet that grazed his ear.  I’m afraid that heaven is not going to let us off the hook for the situation we find ourselves in.  But maybe we are being given a chance to straighten things out on our own.  The headaches that will entail are already beginning to emerge.  Well, we’ll leave the future to next year for now.

Today it was time to begin my annual “Christmas Carol” viewing experience.  I chose the George C Scott version.  And it did not disappoint.  Marley’s ghost, the Cratchit Christmas dinner and the final scene in Scrooge’s office provide all the correct notes to ensure my approval.  And as always Tiny Tim is pathetically frail and impossibly uncomplaining.  I noted to Camera Girl at the appropriate moment that Mrs. Cratchit’s railing against Scrooge during the toast moment was pitch perfect.  I could imagine and probably have heard equivalent protest from Camera Girl when some acquaintance of ours overstepped the bounds of propriety according to Camera Girl’s standards.  She does have a highly developed sense of outrage, especially when she decides that I will have to be the one to enforce it.  Women have that propensity.  Bless them.

Well, time is running out.  I’ll have to fit in the Alistair Sim and Reginald Owen versions in tomorrow.  That should be doable but I don’t think I’ll be able to get through “The Holly and Ivy” tomorrow.  Well, that can wait till Christmas Eve morning.  Christmas Eve and Christmas will be full days and I am not sure what my posting will be like.  The quotes and the photos are all pre-scheduled but my patented rants are a daily chore so I’ll have to do the best I can to put together something fitting.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  But Christmas week is here and away we go.