Movie Hodgepodge!

 Again, thank you, YouTube!

This is actually about a TV show, but I have long had a crush on Tricia Helfer and Katee Sackhoff:

The current generation seems to me seriously against anything that is older than last year; here is proof of how much they are missing out on:

Ignorance may be bliss; if only the ignorant did not so loudly trumpet their ignorance!

After this, I had a lifelong crush on Gena Rowland:

Let me scare you with a black & white move - even scarier, it is a Hitchcock movie! (And no one probably recognizes that name when once it was a household name.)

Let us never forget Peter Lorre, either.

Very much of its time, while still capable of upsetting our nerves.

A thought came to me while watching this movie, we know the hero must win. It would not do under the British censorship laws for the killer to succeed, so the point of a Hitchcock movie is how to stop the killer. But what might a Hitchcock movie look like where the killing happened? The closest example we have for that is his Suspicion.

A French con man movie that I loved - of course, anything with Jean Reno is worth watching!

Speaking of Burt Reynolds (see above), here is one that I never got to see quite all of back in the day. YouTube remedied this. Take it on its own, or as a run-up for Smokey and the Bandit.

One of my favorite actors talking about one of my favorite movies:

And my most favorite actor being interviewed:

Bill Hader does not loom large in my mind in the way Klaus Kinski does. More proof that the current film culture is, at best, anemic.

Somebody might say Quentin Tarantino proves my thesis about current film culture is wrong. However, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs is more than 30 years old.

If you have not seen "Big Trouble in Little China" then do so now - or watch the following, and then find the movie.

Probably no one remembers Robert Mitchum:

I have an opinion about the Hayes Code - it dumbed Americans down, and made us also a more prurient nation. Prurience being the companion of Puritanism. Here is what cartoons looked like before the Hayes Code:

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Alexandra Wilson's The decline and fall of period drama reviews a documentary on Merchant Ivory Productions.

A Room with a View (1985) was the breakthrough hit for producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory – partners both in art and in life, though the latter fact was long carefully concealed. Ivory hadn’t been keen to make another period drama straight after The Bostonians and it almost didn’t get made, yet the film would be the making of the pair, far exceeding expected takings for an ‘arthouse’ film. The Merchant Ivory heyday endured for almost a decade, encompassing seminal masterpieces such as Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Ample space is devoted in Soucy’s comprehensive documentary to these major works, but he also has much to say about the lesser-known Merchant Ivory oeuvre, spanning the period from the early 1960s to the late 2000s. The first films were often set in India (notably 1965’s Shakespeare Wallah, which starred Felicity Kendal in a story based on her father’s real-life acting troupe). Late ones included further historical adaptations (The Golden Bowl) but also biopics (Surviving Picasso) and, increasingly, adaptations of contemporary novels (Le Divorce, The City of Your Final Destination). It was an irony that when big Hollywood money stepped in, critical ratings went down.

Barbara Stanwyck gives advice on the movies and shows off her intelligence:

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Gloria Grahame has been getting recognition of late - very much too late - and I think there is a movie out about her last days. Hurray for Hollywood.

Crisis:

Worth watching.

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I really like noir. As a genre, it makes me wonder if our parents and grandparents had more on the ball than we do. Maybe they lacked Google and color televisions, but we do not see the shadows in our characters.

There must be idealism for there to be film noir, this was what instilled idealism in me as a child:

Nosferatu was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by J. S. Barnes. The review makes several good points, maybe even a fee great ones, but I take exception to the one-note theme. It is more like a runaway train, this movie. Terror is pretty much what one would expect from being on a runaway train. I also think this is a bit beyond the point, too. Although I noticed the difference in make-up, only those who have seen the original would have any problem with the difference in appearance.

It is in the figure of Orlok himself – as played by Bill Skarsgård – where the film’s oddities are most clearly to be seen. Skarsgård adopts a weird deep voice that allows few opportunities for subtlety. His vampire is pure appetite, an unstoppable evil, and there is little for the actor to play beyond this. His vocal choices restrict him still further, while he is buried in make-up to a greater degree even than Schreck in the original. Eggers shoots him out of focus and at the edges of the picture, choices that serve, inadvertently, to marginalize his performance. The decision not to use an approximation of the original make-up is also questionable; dressed in a military greatcoat, with a long drooping moustache (a nod to Stoker’s description), his Orlok seems more human than in Murnau’s vision, and consequently less frightening.

He seemed frightening enough to me. 

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