Happy Friday everybody!
Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing Judy...
...and the caper comedy Raising Buchanan...
...about a scheme to steal the body of President James Buchanan and hold it for ransom. That tired old plot device again.
Also opening this week:
Abominable--Following last year's peculiar Smallfoot, here's another CGI animated feature about Yetis. This one is peculiar, too.
In this Chinese-American co-production, a teenage Chinese city girl finds a fuzzy, sweet-natured Yeti hiding on the roof of her apartment building; he's escaped from a cruel scientific facility. She feeds him steamed pork buns and plays her violin for him, and then, with the help of two friends from the building, tries to smuggle him back to his home in the mountains, with the forces of the nasty collector hot in pursuit. The movie is of a New-Agey-bent; in the course of the odyssey we learn that the creature is tune with the forces of nature, and when he hums the sound causes flowers to blossom and blueberries to grow enormous.
As is almost invariably the case with wide-release animated features of the last few decades, the obligatory elements in Abominable, the stock villains and the stock character motivations, are highly tedious. This template for has been so successful for so long that it's hard to see it going away anytime soon, but it sure makes these films wearisomely repetitive.
That said, the characterizations of the Yeti and the kids are winning, and the Chinese setting is different and colorful. And this is almost certainly the only film to contain the line "Don't body-shame my yak!"
Finally, if you happen to be here in the Phoenix area, you could check out The House That Dripped Blood at 10 p.m. this evening, September 27, at FilmBar. This 1971 British horror anthology, scripted by Robert Bloch and featuring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Jon Pertwee and Denholm Elliot, has long been a fave of mine, largely on the basis of the scene near the end in which supremely sultry and statuesque vampiress Ingrid Pitt levitates and...her high-heeled shoes drop off her feet to the floor. I don't know why, but for some reason that detail remains one of the most deliriously sexy moments in movies for me.
Friday, September 27, 2019
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
145 MILLION + 50 YEARS OLD
Since this year’s 50th anniversaries include the
Moon Landing, Woodstock
and The Brady Bunch, I suppose I
shouldn’t expect much hoopla around a silly sci-fi fantasy film hitting the
half-century mark. Nonetheless, this month also sees the 50th
anniversary of the release of The Valley
of Gwangi...
...that special effects spectacle in which cowboys find a hidden
valley in Mexico
full of leftover dinosaurs.
At the age of 6 or 7, I would surely have told you it was
the finest movie ever made. I still love it; I watched it just a week or so ago
on Turner Classic Movies, where it’s shown fairly often. My fondness for the
film, in part, stems from the fascination I’ve always had for dinosaurs, and
for movies of the “creature feature” variety. But in the case of Gwangi,
I’m sure it’s also connected to the circumstances in which I saw the film, at a
drive-in, with a bunch of relations stuffed into a car on a flawless early-fall
Saturday evening in Pennsylvania.
While we all gobbled popcorn, the little kids, especially me, sat thunderstruck
by the tale, and my older sisters cracked wise about it, while nonetheless
admiring Uruguayan actor Gustavo Rojo, one of the handsomer cast members. Even
allowing for the refinements of nostalgia, it seems like one of those perfect
childhood memories.
Based on an idea by Willis O’Brien, the animator of the
original King Kong, Gwangi’s plot follows the Kong template: Sometime around the turn
of the century, a group of cowboys from a Wild West show finds its way into a
mysterious valley inhabited by surviving prehistoric beasts. They run afoul of
a purplish allosaurus, the Valley’s apex predator, known as “Gwangi” to the
local gypsies. The cowboys capture Gwangi and bring him to civilization as an
attraction; he escapes, and heartache ensues.
The cinematic appeal in all this is that Gwangi and several
other monsters are brought to life by the special effects master Ray Harryhausen, the greatest of the stop-motion animators, that Quixotic specialty
class of film artists who tortuously shoot one frame at a time of articulated
puppets, changing their position the slightest bit between frames to create a
skittish, jerky and irresistible sense of motion. As an attempt at a realistic
illusion of life, CGI has long since made stop-motion animation obsolete, but
for some of us--I suppose it's a cinematic equivalent to being a "vinylhead" among record enthusiasts--stop-motion has a human charm and a low-tech vibrancy that even
the finest CGI can’t claim.
The Valley of Gwangi
is an example of this. Gwangi was a typical, irritable Harryhausen brute, loaded
with loutish personality. At the end [spoiler alert!], the poor creature,
dragged against his will to a civilization he wanted no part of, comes to a
grim demise in a burning cathedral. The final scene pans across the faces of a
crowd watching the church burn with Gwangi trapped inside, then comes to rest
on the face of the little boy who went on the expedition, now with tears
streaming down his cheeks. That kid stood in for at least one little kid out in
the audience.
Labels:
DINOSAURS,
GUSTAVO ROJO,
RAY HARRYHAUSEN,
THE VALLEY OF GWANGI
Friday, September 20, 2019
STALLONE AGAIN, NATURALLY
Happy Friday! Check out my review of Rambo: Last Blood...
...online at Phoenix Magazine. Have a great weekend everybody!
...online at Phoenix Magazine. Have a great weekend everybody!
Friday, September 13, 2019
GOLDFINCH/THRUSH
Happy Friday all!
Check out my Friday Flicks column, online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of The Goldfinch...
...and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice...
Have a great weekend!
Check out my Friday Flicks column, online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of The Goldfinch...
Have a great weekend!
Friday, September 6, 2019
SYSTEM OF A CLOWN
Happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of the harrowing documentary One Child Nation...
...the harrowing political thriller Official Secrets...
and It Chapter Two...
Also from the September issue of Phoenix Magazine...
...check out my "Four Corners" column on tasty eats for fall, whenever that longed-for season decides to show up here in the Valley; September is clearly too optimistic...
Have a great weekend!
...the harrowing political thriller Official Secrets...
and It Chapter Two...
Also from the September issue of Phoenix Magazine...
...check out my "Four Corners" column on tasty eats for fall, whenever that longed-for season decides to show up here in the Valley; September is clearly too optimistic...
Have a great weekend!
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
BALD COMPANY
My pal Stan has been unearthing lots of weird old photos recently, and sending them to me; including this freaky series he did in the mid-'80s while I shaved my head and attempted a Nosferatu makeup...
When the head-shaving was about half-done, he also captured one of me as sort of a Miami Vice drug dealer villain (that really was the sort of shirt I routinely wore in those days, however)...
He sent me several others, like this one of Stan (taken by me, I guess?) channeling The Great Waldo Pepper; western Pennsylvania, mid-'80s...
...me, same vintage, apparently trying to look like a henchman from an episode of MacGyver...
...Stan, my nephew Zack and me, southern Ohio, 1984...
...and me displaying all the maturity customarily associated with a 22-year-old, giving some poor mannequin her #MeToo moment...
When the head-shaving was about half-done, he also captured one of me as sort of a Miami Vice drug dealer villain (that really was the sort of shirt I routinely wore in those days, however)...
He sent me several others, like this one of Stan (taken by me, I guess?) channeling The Great Waldo Pepper; western Pennsylvania, mid-'80s...
...me, same vintage, apparently trying to look like a henchman from an episode of MacGyver...
...Stan, my nephew Zack and me, southern Ohio, 1984...
...and me displaying all the maturity customarily associated with a 22-year-old, giving some poor mannequin her #MeToo moment...
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