In which, having nothing to say, we point somewhere else

http://www.masterworksbroadway.com/blog/happy-eighty-ninth-angela-lansbury

Via Boing Boing

"When a man is tired of Star Trek, he is tired of life." — S. Johnson

Best recommendation ever, from O’C’s comment on Star Trek: Into Darkness, Part 2, The Reboot, Continued, Will it Never End: “It was predictable, hackneyed, and derivative. It wasn't very good. Yet somehow, I enjoyed it, and I suspect you'd enjoy it, too.”

Well, that’s got me rushing out to a theater nearby.

I was going to write up a whole thingie on Hollywood’s creative vacuum, but that’s about as imaginative as, well, Hollywood’s creative vacuum. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s nothing but rehashes except on those occasions when it’s the exact same hash. Fortunately good work still occasionally gets through, and there is some entertainment for grownups. I don’t mind popcorn pictures, but I need them to be good popcorn pictures. The thing is, though, as there are fewer and fewer good films making it to theaters nearby the proverbial chez, I fall more and more out of the habit of going and, more to the point, less and less interested in movies, period. I mean, I can watch them as videos easily enough, and I don’t even do that much anymore. I’ve been catching up on last year’s big films, and there were a handful of good ones and interesting ones, but I’ve gone through that handful pretty quickly, and the interruption to my not watching movies at home is over and I’ll go back to the default. I used to watch two or three movies a week, old and new. It was a habit, even an addiction, and like any user, I enjoyed it in mindless absorption. Not so much anymore. There’s yet another reboot of Superman coming out this Summer. for instance. How many does this make? How many versions of Superman can one person live through before they lose interest not just in Superman movies but movies in general? And let’s face it: most of the looked-forward-to pictures disappoint, the latest Star Trek being a good example. The hype going in was beyond the beyond, with all the Cumberbitches going into the ether at the thought that he might be Khan. (For all I know, he is Khan, but Khan was a villain from the original TV show who livened up the second feature film over 30 years ago. That’s exciting?) The reviews when it was finally released, like O'C's, were less than ethereal. On to the next tentpole.

I’m not trying to put down O’C here. He is a true scholar obviously well aware of the contexts and subtexts of his film interests, and no one who has seen Willow that many times is unaware of his personal ironies. I will probably watch the new Star Trek on video, just out of curiosity, as I am a fan of the franchise in general. It’s just that franchises as a whole have come to have less and less interest to me as time goes by, and certainly not enough interest to motivate me to go to the theater unless they come surrounded by incredibly positive reviews. In fact, the progression of franchise installments is positively enervating. And this saddens me because I used to be in love with movies. All movies. Now, I can just look back at movies as an old love affair with occasionally a flame licking up out of the embers. Tis a pity.

"Burglekutt, you're troll dung!"

Bereft as I am of debate for the next few months, I simply could not keep myself away from O’C’s screening of Willow at the new Cruz Cantina.

Oy.

Saturday was one beautiful day. Everybody’s been so put off by bad weather lately that any excuse for a nice day would suffice, but Saturday genuinely was nice, which made it all the better. I started up at the Met, checking out some small exhibits and roaming into nooks and crannies that I don’t normally visit, discovering all sorts of works I had never seen, or else completely forgotten. Then I strolled my way down to O’C’s downtown, stopping hither and yon, weaving through the tourists, generally just enjoying the elements, much like everyone else.

I can’t compare the new Cruz Cantina to the old one, having never visited the previous digs, but the new one is quite respectable, if you’re not afraid of tripping over the odd AT-AT scale model. I brought some apparently non-kosher prosciutto down from Eataly, JV supplied a bottle of wine, O’C spread out various cheeses, and Kate supplied the drunken brownies, in honor of the afternoon’s screening. We established that, since he bought this particular Blu-ray disc a fortnight ago, O’C had already watched it three times. He also admitted that he had been in Prequel Denial (except for Jar-Jar Binks, who even O’C never liked), and that, as Tchaikovsky only wrote 3 symphonies, the 4th, the 5th and the 6th, Lucas only made 3 Star Wars films, episodes 4, 5 and 6, although O’C didn’t exactly use the Tchaikovsky reference, which would have been apt, considering how most of the soundtrack of the movie we were about to see was themes drawn from said Russian and twisted around just enough so that Lucas & Co. wouldn’t be sued for international property theft at The Hague.

Eventually the movie began. I vaguely remembered it from when it came out as being rather so-so, but I must have been generous at the time. The acting made you wonder why they couldn’t have just grabbed up some freshman Dec speakers, who would have sounded a hell of a lot better. The plot was often scene for scene borrowed from some other Lucas movie (he produced this; Ron Howard bears the blame for actual direction, or as I guess it should be called, re-direction). The dialog was classic Lucas, as in, Oh, I guess Tom Stoppard was busy yet again when the call came in. “The bones have spoken.” Yeah, right. The best thing of all is the unexplained change of allegiance by the daughter of the villainess, presumably herself a villainess-in-training. For that you have to watch the extras for some footage stolen from the Camelot cutting room floor. The extras (great googly-moogly, I can’t believe we actually watched extras, but O’C wouldn’t turn the damned thing off) also included the unforgettable Fish Boy sequence, which started great amounts of discussion on our parts of Chekhov, guns on the wall and the use of all of one’s acorns.

I guess I should be happy that Howard the Duck isn’t on Blu-ray yet.

Afterwards, those of us who didn’t have yet other social engagements to pursue, or those of us who weren’t scarred for life and had to run home screaming, had a nice meal at the old Cuban restaurant we all like, and a splendid time was had by all.

When does debate start up again?

Video: Someone watched all of Atlas Shrugged so that you wouldn't have to

The funny thing is, even at 3 minutes and a few seconds, it's one of the most boring things you'll ever see.

A nice little treat: great animation

12 Essential American Cartoons

Absolutely—a fine selection. If you haven't seen some of these, stop everything now.

Short film: Monster Roll

This is a proof of concept for a feature film. More details at Underwire.

How come this never happens when I'm around?

More links with little comment: Early Spielberg, boys' outfits, 2 kinds of people, the Beatles and the Bard, Pentatonix

More good stuff that speaks for itself:

• Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Directed as a Teenager That about says it all. Remarkably unamateurish, for some reason.
  
  
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  I feel like I'm looking at something from another universe with this stuff: The Best Dressed Boys of 1930. Think knickerbockers will be coming back any time soon? Oh. Wait a minute. Now we call them below-the-knee shorts. I call them homey pants. Whatever.
  
  
• There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. (That's a sign posted in the classroom where we hold debate meetings.) I say that in the spirit of the following clip collection.
  
  
  
  
• I remember seeing this when it was made, and hadn't seen it since. Gotta love the interwebs for keeping everything alive forever.
  
  
  
  
• Plenty of these guys' stuff is popular enough that you probably know them already. My take is that I love a cappella so much that I even like covers of songs I don't like. Then again, I like this original. So I'm posting this for the Boomers who also remember the original, and have no idea who Pentatonix is. (Are?)
  
  
  
  

P. G. Wodehouse

There are some people in the world who think that the character name Gussie Fink-Nottle is about as good as it gets. And that's just one of the folks created, of course, by Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in his legendary series of Bertie and Jeeves stories. Needless to say, one ought to read Wodehouse, who was a master of language, and for that matter, listening to him via audiobooks is highly recommended, but no one ever went wrong watching Fry and Laurie take on the roles.





Others have also played the parts, with various levels of success, and there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber show, your opinion of which may depend on your love, or lack thereof, for Andrew Lloyd Webber.



Old Plum, as he was known, got into a bit of trouble with the Nazis, raising the question of whether he was, in fact, a sympathizer or merely a naive dupe. Who knows? I have a sense from what I've read that he was pretty much just so wrapped up in his work that he was rather stupidly ignorant, but he's not the first artist to fall into that category. Anyhow, in addition to his books and stories, he did a lot of theater work, including the songs from this little ditty. Talk about a more innocent age...



In the hall of fame it will be Jeeves and Bertie who last the longest. Which is only right. Today is also Michel Foucault's birthday, but I have found that his work is seldom as comic as Wodehouse's, hence I have chosen to profile the one rather than the other.

Let us get this out of our system, and we'll never have to mention it again

Movie pot pourri: Chaplin, Miles, Zisek, Cinerama, Welles

A collection of movies to watch, and postings about movies.

• Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (Full Film) Arguably Chaplin's best feature. Note that it was made during the sound era; Chaplin was nothing if not dedicated to his own beliefs.
  
  
• GENIUS, HUSTLER, SUPERSTAR: ‘THE MILES DAVIS STORY’ Lots of good music, lots of Miles, who was probably the coolest guy in the room (in the true meaning of cool) his entire life.
  
  
• This is Slavoj Zisek on Vertigo. The Vast Coachean Army already knows my opinion of this movie lording it over all the rest at the top of the 50, but that doesn't make it, in my estimation, a bad movie. In any case, watch it (elsewhere) and judge for yourself, then listen to what SZ has to say
  
  
  
  
• The wayward charms of Cinerama Once upon a time, Cinerama was a big thing (no pun intended). As this article says, it was something of a precursor to IMAX, but the concept was much more surrounding and horizontal. To be honest, it really didn't work all that well, but there is something to be said for seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in this format, which I did the first time I saw it. Anyhow, it's one for the history books now, but movie technology buffs will enjoy this.
  
  
• There is lively debate over whether Chimes at Midnight is, well, any good. It is, at times, wildly creative, and at times, a little dull. Here's the whole thing. At the very least, watch them fight in the mud, starting at about 54:00.
  
  
  
  

Best PSA ever?

More links with little comment: Garbo, snake venom wine, the really original Disneyland, how to use the telephone, Flash fights

More good stuff that speaks for itself:

• Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Exquisite Garbo It amazes me how dead old movies are to most people. Then again, most old things are dead to most people, and it's their loss. As soon as someone can provide for me a link between new and good, I'll change my tune. Anyhow, Garbo is Garbo, and at least film fans will enjoy this one.
  
  
• If you are not a fan of snakes, don't look at this: Asian snake venom wine (It’s a real thing).
  
  
• The original concept map for Disneyland, blown up so that you can load it into a separate tab and practically walk around in it! Herb Ryman's Disneyland Map Artwork
  
  
• Once upon a time, there were no telephones. Then there were. Here's the online user guide: How to Use the Telephone, 1917
  
  
• Caught this one on BoingBoing. My jaw is still hanging open:
  
  
  
  
  
  

His Girl Friday

Haven't ever seen this movie? Just go watch it. Now. Don't come back until you're done.

Now you can thank me.

If you have seen the movie, watch this, which will make you want to watch it again.

Spike Lee's first big break

From Media Bistro:

More links with little comment: SFF art, "Ed Wood", Mad Ave 70s, design 40s, Bond music

More good stuff that speaks for itself:

• A Visual History of the Best Professional Artist Hugo Award Winners: Luscious stuff.
  
• Ed Wood is Burton's best film? Well, yeah. This essay might convince you, too, if you need convincing. (What were you thinking? Mars Attacks? Ed Wood (1994)
  
• These look more 60s to me than 70s, but Madison Avenue usually took a little time to catch up with the real world, at which point they spit it out in their imitative fashion and the originators made sure they had moved on completely. Anyhow, interesting snapshot of a time and style. Bedding Ads, 1970s
  
• On a similar (but different looking note) graphic design in 1942. Quite intriguing. Selling Design in 1942
  
• After 50 years of Bond, we need to look at all the theme songs, regardless of whether they were covered by GNR. The James Bond Theme Song Dossier
  
  

And you thought only actors were in movies

Dangerous Minds calls this the "Worst (best!) movie death scene in Turkish cinema, ever?"

Yeah.

Thurber

I didn't want to toss this into a pile with other entries because I just love Thurber way too much. Most people can't write funny. Thurber could, consistently. I don't know how much he is read these days, but most of his work is timeless. Certainly "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is probably tossed about in classrooms somewhere, as it should be. Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa and all that.

I wasn't the only person rather taken aback by the idea of a Ben Stiller Mitty movie. Nor was I the only person who was taken aback by the old Danny Kaye movie. This is Thurber writing about the script: "He [the notoriously inarticulate Sam Goldwyn] told me the first sixty pages were all right and asked me not to read the last 100 pages, which he said were too 'blood and thirsty.' I read the entire script, of course, and I was horror and struck." Thurber wasn't particularly fond of the finished product either, needless to say.

The Hollywood Life Of "Walter Mitty" by Maria Bustillos does a great job of profiling Thurber, then talking about the disaster that was the first movie. Read it, think of Ben Stiller, and pray.

The best Hitchcock film ever made by Martin Scorsese

That says it all. Watch it to the end. Brilliant!