What was the last movie you saw?

[j. d. worthington]

Watched John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) with John Barrymore. Again, I have the good fortune to have a copy of the restored print, and it really is a lovely film in a lot of ways. Barrymore, like Mansfield, did the transformation in one single, unedited take (save for the closeup of the hands immediately afterward), which is really quite remarkable, given the way he managed to change his appearance without aid of makeup or special effects. It remains relatively faithful to the plot of Stevenson's book, and even several of the philosophical queries it raises, though it does introduce a few rather hackneyed points (Millicent's father "tempting" Jekyll into his fall much the same way as Lord Henry Wotton tempted Dorian Gray, for example), but these weren't particularly overdone, and didn't detract from the film as a whole. Interesting that Barrymore's Hyde varies (depending on his emotions at the time) from being a somewhat shaky, almost doddering creature, to a spidery figure, to an absolutely manic, primate-in-a-rage characterization which certainly captures the fiendishness of the figure, if not the exact physical description given by the author. (For one thing, Barrymore is much too tall to quite manage that.)

An interesting and enjoyable take on the story, if quite short (67 minutes).

Tonight -- circumstances permitting, I'll be tackling what is often considered the definitive film version, the Rouben Mamoulian film of 1931, starring Fredric March....

[Diggler]

The Day After Tomorrow

A guilty pleasure of mine on Blu-Ray (which made it even more guilty)

[Diggler]

Originally Posted by jojajihisc

Adventureland

Mediocre comedy about a carnival worker.

This was definitely marketed as something that it was not. It really was nothing more than a teen romance with smatterings of comedy. Just re-watch Superbad instead.

[Hilarious Joke]

500 Days of Summer

Has already become one of my favourite movies.

[blacknorth]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Continuing on my current trend, I last night watched Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff.

Doesn't this feature the wonderful, ahem, Zita Johann? I've set aside one of her rare film appearances for watching this weekend - The Sin of Nora Moran.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by clovis-man

The close-up of Karloff in the film seems to provide a very strong clue, however.

I'd have thought so, yes; but it's surprising the number of people who just don't "get" it with that one. It's almost as if, if it ain't wearing those rotting bandages, it ain't a mummy! (Or somesuch....)

Originally Posted by blacknorth

Doesn't this feature the wonderful, ahem, Zita Johann? I've set aside one of her rare film appearances for watching this weekend - The Sin of Nora Moran.

Eeee-yep. You know, I don't believe I've ever seen anything else with her. She did rather well, I think, with the material here; certainly she plays the character with more complexity than one would expect. I'll have to see if I can't find a few of her other films and see...

And I have also watched James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933), with Claude Rains. Even more than with Frankenstein or The Old Dark House, Jimmy Whale's theatrical background is in evidence here. Nor do I consider this an entirely bad thing; he is excellent with his pacing and staging a scene and knows how to pull out tremendous performances from very divergent actors. (I mean, one would expect Una O'Connor, with that teeth-grating shriek of hers and her broad comedy approach, to quite spoil things; but Whale uses her not inconsiderable talent to very good effect here, just as he did later with The Bride of Frankenstein.) (Speaking of which: all the other things aside, it was a stroke of sheer genius-cum-chutzpah to cast her in the same film with Ernest Thesiger, a man who practically defined -- without ever quite stepping over that boundary into excess -- the term "camp".)

By the way... for those who don't know, this was Claude Rains' film debut; and, as has been said, it would be difficult to come up with a more unusual debut as a film actor than to play a character whose face the audience never sees until the last few seconds of the film! Yet Rains puts in a magnificent performance, managing to elicit a certain amount of sympathy while nonetheless being one of the most horrifically cold human monsters in cinema history.

Oh, and a correction on dates (see, Hoops, you ain't the only one!): The Rouben Mamoulian Jekyll and Hyde was released, apparently, in 1932, not 1931....

[Lobolover]

The Prince and Me (grunt), do not even ask

And, this may come as a shocker , but this pile of crap actualy has two sequels , exceding even the horrificly terryfying Princes Diariess - and the third movie seems to undermine the only creditable (however small) achievement the original movie had by picking a real country . The third movie, however , due to lack of creativity, takes place in an invented country that has just about as much existence as "Genovia" . Granted I did not see it, but the plot summary is sufficient for me , especialy since that was the only creditable part in the first film - granted they shot Copenhagen in Prague, gave the Prince the most Danish name they could think of (Edward) , did not notice there has been a queen in Denmark for over 30 years, and actualy showed their complete lack of knowledge about danish history by mentioning a "KIng Gustav IV. in 1502" - except there has never been a Gustav regnant in Denmark , as oposed to Sweden . Yes, maybe I am being a littlee to detailed, but with a movie so bereft of things to keep you interested, the "minor" flaws come out prety quickly .

I would have to say that even Fran Drescher's cinematic opus "The Beast and the Beautician" made more sense (though the main actor just gave up looking his role halfway through the film by shaving his moustache, looking like an american actor that just got lost on a tour of the palace)

[Happy Joe]

Speaking of piles...

I saw "Land of the Lost" last night.
If you thought last summer's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was intellectual entertainment then you might like this one...

Enjoy!

P.S. save your time and avoid this flick.

[j. d. worthington]

Last night's offering was Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), with Bela Lugosi. This one is something of a disappointment, really. Even though its only real connections to Poe's tale are the central plot element of the murderer, and the presence of Dupin, I could forgive that. There are some interesting ideas here, too, but they aren't given enough time to develop properly. Lugosi is fun to watch, of course, though he does take it over the top here a fair amount; and Leon Ames (credited here as Leon Waycoff) as Dupin, though not Poe's Dupin, nonetheless puts in a good performance, as does the female lead, Sidney Fox. But the main problem is that it varies between some very good ideas and hackneyed development, not enough attention to atmosphere (though where it is there, it is quite good), and too little time to really develop the story well.

That said, Freund's cinematography is first class -- the use of the camera here is quite creative, and adds entire layers of meaning to what is going on on the screen; the majority of the secondary players here put in very good performances; the comic aspects, whether farcical or gallows' humor, are actually quite good in most cases; and they don't rely too much on the man in the ape suit, preferring to go for a genuine primate as much as possible, and utilizing the stand-in only for sequences where such would not have been feasible, or for long shots. Unfortunately, it still looks like a man in an ape suit (albeit a well-constructed one), so lessens the effect considerably.

All in all, a mixed bag; worth seeing, but hardly as good as it could have been with the talent involved -- including a young John Huston, who wrote some of the additional dialogue.....

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

And yes, that production of The Innocents is very much worth catching. A superb adaptation of Henry James' tale, which manages to both maintain the ambiguity as to the genuineness of the haunting and have a truly terrifying performance by Wyngarde as Peter Quint... even given his small amount of screen time and lack of dialogue!

Okay, I'm afraid you finally lost me with this one. And don't get me wrong. I wasn't front-loaded to dislike this movie. First of all, I'm a big Deborah Kerr fan. I think I've been infatuated with her ever since King Solomon's Mines. And a few other little films like An Affair To Remember weren't half bad either.

I guess, in a couple of ways this was a period piece. First of course, was the 19th century setting. But second were the 1961 mores and folkways which governed the character portrayals. One could only hint at despicable behavior, never spell it out. But even though I was a citizen of those times, I found the melodramatics difficult to endure. Only a couple of years later, The Haunting, from Shirley Jackson's novel, with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom portrayed a supernatural tale with much more panache and zeal.

The Innocents just didn't work for me.

[Lobolover]

JK.D. from what I gather, Lugosi did not speak english and only memorised the lines by heart .

[AE35Unit]

Monsters V Aliens
Just too good to keep to the kids!!

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Lobolover

JK.D. from what I gather, Lugosi did not speak english and only memorised the lines by heart .

That was true when he was playing Dracula on the stage; but by the time he had made the film, he had become a (relatively) fluent English speaker; by the mid-1930s, as far as his comprehension and vocabulary -- not the pronunciation, which always remained strongly influenced by his origins -- he could well have been a native of the U.S.; much as was the case with Peter Lorre....

[HoopyFrood]

Watching Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson (I mean he's in the film, not sitting next to me also watching it) at the moment.

[Happy Joe]

I got a surprise over the weekend;
Saw "This Island Earth" on DVD; I was amazed that it was in color...
The last time that I saw it was in the 50s or early 60s on a black and white television. After viewing you really see where a lot of shows got many of their ideas (star trek and others).
This one is a keeper and is going on the library shelf (and the hard drive).

Enjoy!