Jasmine ,'Power Play'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Abel Gance is interesting. If only his films weren't so damn long.
Not one of Hitchcock's prouder moments, by a long stretch, but you've got Laughton camping it up and Robert Newton as the good guy in a pirate movie. Hitchcock knew he was coming to America by this point, so he just plowed through it and got out of England.
While not my least favorite (which would probably be Under Capricorn or The Paradine Case maybe), it has always seemed to be the least "Hitchcock".
Under Capricorn
I like it for the use of long takes (I'm a sucker for Style), but storywise it's mighty tedious. And making Ingrid Bergman tedious takes some doing.
The end of the theatrical version of The Shining was so disappointing compared to the book as well. A nice creepy visual, but meh. The book, as is so often the case, was so much better.
Although the guy who played the butler was kind of perfectly cast.
Although the guy who played the butler was kind of perfectly cast.
Heh, he also played Alex's father in Clockwork Orange.
Lon Chaney
Loves!
I think I'm with Frank on The Shining. At least, I think Frank is saying what I say about The Shining. I thought the movie was much more clever than the book. Kubrick scrapped the idea of the Overlook as your standard-issue Stephen King bad place that wants you to kill, kill, kill (and, on that note, has anyone watched Garth Merengi's Dark Place on Adult Swim?) in favor of the quieter horror of the world unraveling around a frustrated domestic bully. I'm not a huge Kubrick fan, but I've long thought The Shining to be a good example of filming the truly unsetting core of some turgid source material.
I always felt that the book suffered from too much of King's standard occult-menace-ambushes-helpless-protagonist-every-five-minutes trope. While I liked the idea of it being the hotel itself that was menacing rather than a particular ghost within it, it seemed like every time Danny so much as looked at a piece of carpet lint some traumatic psychic episode occurred, and the stuff with the hedges was really just far too overt and fairy tale-magical.
Interview with Guillermo del Toro at TORN - where he apparently has been posting.
has anyone watched Garth Merengi's Dark Place on Adult Swim?Yes! Well, not on AS, but my Brit correspondent sent me the DVDs a while back. There are in-character commentaries. It's wonderful.
in-character commentaries
Awesome! Considering the in-show commentaries (such as Merengi detailing all of the appropriate uses of slow-motion to pad out the shows), having another level of in-character commentaries brings the double-meta funny.