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Was it really this easy to start a mob rampage in the ’40s?

I’ve been watching the “Universal Monsters” movies on TV lately.  It’s a Mystery Science Theater 3000-like comedy show called “Svengoolie“, but for the most part the comic interruptions do little to either enhance or detract from the film.

It is rather amusing how all the movies follow the same basic templates, but it kind of makes sense once you remember these movies were made in the 1930s and ’40s and it must have been a treat just to get to see a movie, even if it was almost the same as the previous movie.  People were probably less critical of movies then.

It’s also hilarious how often a torch-wielding mob shows up in these flicks.  There’s a scene in The Mummy’s Tomb where the Sheriff or somebody says to the assembled townspeople: “You’re not gonna believe this, but there’s a 3000 year-old monster on the loose. We’ve got to run him down.” (Close paraphrase.) The next scene is a mob of people marching to the cemetery with torches, on the grounds that somebody saw an Egyptian guy there the other day.

I never liked the Mummy movies; he moves hilariously slow.  And the plot is just too sloppy and incoherent, even by horror movie standards.  The only Mummy movie I ever liked was the 1999 one, which wasn’t even a horror movie, but a very amusing action-adventure.

Now, the Dracula movies were much better, even if they were also very predictable.  But Dracula seemed like a dangerous monster, what with the turning into a bat and a wolf and magically opening locked doors and whatnot.

One other note: The Mummy’s Tomb has a character in it who looks exactly like Ron Paul.  At least, I thought he did.  (I admit I tend to see resemblances to people in movie characters very often, and my fellow viewers don’t know what I’m talking about.  It’s like the TMBG song “Certain People I Could Name“.) That was perhaps the most frightening thing in the whole movie.  The actor’s name, by the way, was Otto Hoffman.

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Cool:

Japanese scientists have devised a mathematical formula that can predict the box office performance of a movie based on the level of related activity on social networks and other websites before and during its release.

It’s a good idea, but there sample size was too small; only 25 movies were used.  Even so, I bet movie studios and PR firms are going to try to do a lot more looking into this, because it’s a pretty cool idea.  Especially in terms of giving them advance warning if they have a “bomb” on their hands.

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I honestly cannot believe that Hollywood has been reduced to making movies based on board games. I haven’t seen the movie, but from the trailer it’s not clear to me if it has anything to do with the game “Battleship” besides the license and the fact that it has battleships in it. I’d say this is the clearest sign yet that they’re running out of ideas.

So, what other board or pen-and-paper guessing games could get the Hollywood treatment? I’m thinking “Parcheesi” myself. Although they could also do an adaptation of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and say it’s a “Hangman” movie. The posters almost make themselves:

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I watched the season finale of Sherlock 2 last night. I watched the adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles the week before that, and I watched the first installment of the first season when it aired, but I haven’t seen the rest of the series.

My thoughts on what I’ve seen: the acting is all very good, but the characters are often unpredictable. In the finale, for instance, it seems absurd that Lestrade, after trusting Sherlock all that time, would so easily be willing to believe that he committed the crimes. Also, Sherlock shows too much emotion too often.

Moreover, the attempt to update the stories works pretty well for the most part, but every now and again, there are some rough patches. The solution to the “Baskerville” one felt especially bad. In terms of satisfying the audience, it was barely any better than one of the solutions found in Stephen Leacock‘s humorous survey of the mystery genre:  “the murder had been committed by somebody else altogether different.”

They do a pretty good job of updating it to the real world without being too obnoxious with the “Sherlock Holmes has a cell phone” aspect, but it still feels pretty much pointless to me.

As for what Sherlock did at the conclusion of the finale, I assume that his words to Watson “keep your eyes on me” are of significance, but I don’t know all the details. The trouble is, after the “Baskerville” episode, pretty much anything is on the table, so there’s really not much point in speculating. For all we know, Watson is dreaming the whole thing.

All in all, I can’t help bu think they would have been better off writing a new series with new characters–still the same actors, of course–than trying to re-do something that’s been done too many times already. The only “Sherlock Holmes in the modern day” riff that I’ve ever thought was really good was the one with John Cleese, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It.

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I read this Slate review of the movie Crooked Arrows, which is apparently a fairly predictable movie about lacrosse. I’d never heard of it till I saw the article. But from this review, it seems that it simply reinforces what I’ve said before about sports movies being dull and predictable.

I still like my idea for a movie about a super dominant team that destroys their plucky opposition. I envision a football movie, about a team on a quest for its second undefeated season in a row. I’m thinking it would be a musical, with the big number sung by the half-Lombardi-esque, half-Belichickean head coach. (I’ve thought about this too much.)

Even that would just be a satire of the sports movie genre, though. It couldn’t be a lasting formula for films, just a one-off. The problem is that sports are dramatic affairs themselves. And they’re more dramatic than movies, because they are harder to predict. If Hollywood had written it, the Cardinals would have beaten the Steelers. The Giants and Patriots wouldn’t have even been in it last year in the movies. The unpredictability is what makes it good.

I think the best sports movies are the ones that involve rigging and corruption in the game. That way, the drama of the game is subjugated to serve the larger drama of behind-the-scenes machinations. Political issues and sports might work, too. I’ve never seen all of Invictus, but I’ve watched some scenes from it, and it seems pretty good because of the larger political issues at stake in the movie. The outcome of the big game doesn’t even matter to the real point of the movie, because it’s more about what the South African rugby team means to the country.

Figures I’d have to find a way to work conspiracies and political intrigue into my sports movies, doesn’t it?

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Over at Thingy’s blog, she and Sue J. are discussing the new Three Stooges film. Neither of them are big Stooges fans. I can’t say that I consider them the height of comedy, but I usually do find their little flicks good for a chuckle. The above clip is a good example; it’s four minutes of labored jokes and contrived misunderstandings, but Curly’s last line is pretty funny.

In general, I’ve noticed that men tend to be much more amused by the Stooges’ antics than women are. Maybe women have more sophisticated senses of humor than men do.

I think my favorite Stooges short was “Goofs and Saddles”, a western-themed outing at the conclusion of which Curly knocks a box of bullets into a meat grinder, which miraculously works like a machine gun, and forces their pursuers to retreat. So, not exactly the most understated and urbane humor ever.

Maybe it’s the slapstick violence; after all, I think women in general tend to prefer less violence in their entertainment than do men. Thus, it amuses the male of the species when Moe hits Curly on the head with, for instance, a sledgehammer and the sound of a loud bell is heard, but the female thinks it is just stupid. Or maybe it’s that women know that when kids see the Stooges, their first instinct will be to imitate them. Women know this is unlikely to end well. I hate to resort to stereotypes like that, though, so maybe it’s something else.

That said, I do not intend to see the new Three Stooges flick, which looks moronic without being charming. Frankly, I don’t understand why it was ever made, for almost precisely the same reasons I don’t understand why the movie Game Change was made.

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Entertainment Weekly has a slideshow of movie errors that bother people. I have to say, most of them are quite minor, and the sort of thing very few people would notice. (The one about Pi did bother me, though.)

But I guess we all have different things that annoy us in movies. I never did understand why the giant laser guns in Revenge of the Sith seem to be ejecting casings. That makes no sense.

The best errors, though, usually come in movies about some historical event, like people wearing wristwatches in the movie Spartacus. The most glaring examples I can think of come from the movie Battle of the Bulge, in which the German tanks are actually American M47s. Even more jarring is the fact that the final stage of the battle appears to be fought in a desert. There is, as far as I know, no desert in the Ardennes.

But some people probably wouldn’t be bothered at all by things like that. For one thing, in the EW article, a lot of people mentioned being bothered by characters going in the wrong direction to reach their supposed destination. I have a lousy sense of direction, so I would never notice that kind of thing.

What kind of movie errors irritate you?

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I saw a trailer for the upcoming movie The Raven on TV yesterday. It seems to me like it would have made more sense to release it around Halloween, but I guess it is right in time for Walpurgis Night.

I read up on the movie, and it sounded like kind of a cool concept, although it’s gotten terrible reviews so far. It sounds like they have, as modern filmmakers always do, relied on the grotesque and not the cerebral to make the film scary.

There’s nothing terribly violent in the poem “The Raven”, you’ll notice, and yet it is a masterpiece. You would think that this might suggest something to present-day practitioners of the genre, but it does not seem to.

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Someday a statistician will have to write a paper about the probability, if one tunes in at random to the film The Ten Commandments, of the first thing one sees being Yul Brynner saying “So let it be written. So let it be done.” I flipped the TV on yesterday, and sure enough, that’s what I saw. That’s the only line I–and most people I’ve talked to about it–can ever remember clearly from the film.

It’s kind of sad that a cheesy, 60-year old movie that I have seen 10 times already was still the best thing on television last night. Add to this that I’m not religious, and it becomes even more pathetic.

But that’s not the point. The point is that, although the picture quality in the film was great, there were some times when it made obvious special-effects look all the worse. For instance, in the scene where Rameses is exiling Moses from Egypt, Rameses and Moses are looking at each other, a few feet apart. When the camera is on Rameses, he is standing in front of what is fairly obviously a painting of the Nile. Cut to Moses, who is standing in a very real desert, with a vast wasteland stretching out behind him. The shots of Moses are great; they could have come from a modern-day film. The shots of Rameses are laughably bad, even for 1956. It’s jarring.

Obviously, though, that hasn’t hurt the movie’s popularity. Even I enjoy it, although it’s not anywhere close to what I’d call a “great” movie.

Oh, and happy Easter.