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In general, I have never been a huge fan of the “average guy who is secretly a super crime-fighter” trope.   As a general rule, stories where characters have to lead secret double-lives a la Batman and Superman strike me as illogical.  But there was one such character who I always thought was pretty awesome: Doctor Syn, or more properly, his alter-ego, the Scarecrow.

There are lots of stories about him, beginning with the series of pulpy novels by Russell Thorndike.  I’ve never read those; they look to be on the along the lines of the Zorro stories.  I’ve only watched the Disney movie version of the story with Patrick McGoohan, one of my favorite actors, playing the lead.  That was enough for me to decide he was a pretty cool character.

By day, he is Doctor Christopher Syn, a humble vicar in a small, 18th-Century English village.  But at night, Doctor Syn dons this awesome mask–more on that later–and becomes “the Scarecrow”.  He’s tough to describe–what he does is basically the standard Robin Hood, steal-from-rich, give-to-poor act, but the character himself is more of a Batman-like figure.  He has no supernatural powers; he is just a very skilled fighter and horseback rider.  He is also quite sinister looking, even though he is the hero.  His costume puts every other super-hero outfit I’ve seen to shame.  And McGoohan does a great job with the role.

What really makes the series so eerie is the setting.  The evocative cinematography is surprisingly good.  The splendid England coast atmosphere is wonderfully spooky.  It is especially fun to watch around Halloween. I think what I like most about the series is the historical setting.

I should mention that the Scarecrow is, for a Disney movie anyway, a pretty edgy hero.  He’s not an anti-hero, but he does some pretty devious stuff nonetheless.  (I get the impression that he’s an even darker, more outright anti-hero kind of character in the books.)

Back to the Scarecrow’s mask: the thing is brilliantly designed, part of it is mask and part of it is painted, and it really looks convincing.  It has to be one of the coolest props made in that era. On the 2008 edition DVD release, there’s a little feature on how they made it.  Even to fairly critical eyes, it holds up pretty well against the best C.G.I. tricks of modern film-making.  I’d post a picture, but stills don’t do it justice.  You have to see it in motion.

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P.M. Prescott’s comment on this post reminded me of an issue I’ve wanted to write about on here for a while: TV commercials.  Are they worth it?

I almost always mute commercials when they come on, unless they’re for something I am already interested in.  I can’t think of any time in my life when I’ve decided to buy something just because I saw a commercial for it.  I generally research any major purchases first.

And then there are the commercials for small things, like soft drinks.  Maybe other people are different, but I don’t see those commercials and go “well, I’ve just got to go buy a [X soft drink] right now.”  My soft drink purchase decisions are made purely on the basis of what’s most convenient; I don’t care about brands enough to spend extra time hunting down a particular drink.

Some say that commercials work subliminally.  Well, maybe.  But how effective can the ads be when they produce no noticeable change in my behavior?  Even if it’s subliminal, I would notice that I suddenly had a desire to go out and buy particular things.

Especially interesting to me are political ads. (With which we are about to be deluged, incidentally)  Is anybody really going to vote based on what a TV ad said?  I just assume that all political ads are telling half-truths at best, and so I tune them out automatically.

Given all that, I have to think that companies are overpaying for ads.  The return on it can’t be that much, can it?   I think a company gets more benefit from announcing at the beginning of a program that they are sponsoring the whole thing without commercial interruption than they do from advertising during it.  Because, in general, commercials annoy the viewer who is just trying to watch something.

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I touched on this with my last post about the movie Rudy: it can be fun to come up with alternative interpretations of movies that the directors and writers didn’t think of.  With Rudy, I was saying that I found the hero character’s fixation on football to be an unhealthy obsession, rather than the inspirational determination it is presented as being.

Some movies have much more elaborate alternative interpretations.  Take the Star Wars movies for example: most people assumed that the Empire is evil just because the opening crawl said so.  But, in Phantom Menace, it’s pretty clear that what Palpatine says about the Old Republic being “mired” by “bureaucrats” is true.  They can’t even get it together to go do something when one of their planets gets invaded and occupied.  If nothing else, the Empire runs a more efficient operation.

If I know politics, a few years after ROTJ, there would be a massive campaign to rehabilitate Palpatine’s image.

This does not even take into account the Jedi, who claim to be good–although the only people who really seem to feel this way are the Jedi themselves–but who are shown to brainwash people from a young age to indoctrinate them into their cult.  They say the Sith are evil, but in the movies, at least, the Sith wait until you’re an adult before asking you to join.  Count Dooku was a former Jedi and an aristocrat of some sort before he opted to try his hand at Sith Lording in his retirement.

Also, of course, there’s the fact that everything the Jedi do turns out to be an abysmal failure.  The Sith are clearly the only ones capable of creating a plan and seeing it through to the end in that galaxy.  Even at the end, in Return of the Jedi, all the Jedi stuff Luke had been taught goes by the boards, and the Emperor is overthrown not by him, but by the actions of a renegade Sith.

George Lucas probably didn’t intend any of these interpretations (and the “Expanded Universe” contradicts a lot of them), but I think the movies can definitely be viewed that way.  Personally, I think it makes more sense in some ways.

Or take Oliver Stone’s movie JFK.  It was controversial for its promotion of conspiracy theories.  I have a different take on it: I think Kevin Costner’s character is an unreliable narrator (he’s not really the narrator, but the film is very much from his perspective) who has this weird obsession with conspiracies.  Donald Sutherland’s character “X” is a figment of his imagination, whom he created to fulfill his dreams of uncovering a massive plot.  Try watching JFK and then A Beautiful Mind and see if you don’t agree.

I know there’s also a famous alternate interpretation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off–although Freddie DeBoer doesn’t buy it–but I have never seen that movie, so I wouldn’t know.

What movies do you interpret differently than may have been originally intended?

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Saw the movie Rudy on TV the other day.  It was about what I always expect sports movies to be.  Totally predictable, and thus somewhat dull, even though the acting, cinematography and music were all pretty good.  It’s based on a true story, and to its credit remained relatively true to the actual events.  You can see film of the actual play  by Daniel Ruettiger here.

What surprised me a little about the movie was the extent to which it is a giant ad for the University of Notre Dame.  That, and the fact that Rudy, as depicted in the film, seemed a little unhinged in his obsession with playing football for them. I don’t know if the real  guy was like that–probably not–but the character as shown in the movie seems overly fixated on it to me.

I’m not saying a person shouldn’t want to play football for their favorite team, and I am totally behind the “don’t give up on your dreams” message, but still, there’s a difference between “never giving up” and “obsessing to the point of madness”.  It made it difficult for me to relate to the character.

 

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In the trailer for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.

This movie really surprised me.  It was made in 1948, around the time of what is called the “Second Red Scare“, when concern about communist infiltration was very high.  Given that, the content of the movie is astounding.

Fred Dobbs (Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are unemployed guys looking for work.  They convince an old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston) to help them on an expedition for gold in the Sierra Madre mountains.  The first remarkable thing about the movie is a speech given by Howard in his first scene:

Howard: Say, answer me this one, will you? Why is gold worth some twenty bucks an ounce?
Flophouse Bum: I don’t know. Because it’s scarce.
Howard: A thousand men, say, go searchin’ for gold. After six months, one of them’s lucky: one out of a thousand. His find represents not only his own labor, but that of nine hundred and ninety-nine others to boot. That’s six thousand months, five hundred years, scramblin’ over a mountain, goin’ hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it.
Flophouse Bum: I never thought of it just like that.
Howard: Well, there’s no other explanation, mister. Gold itself ain’t good for nothing except making jewelry with and gold teeth.

What’s so remarkable about that, you wonder?  Well, what Howard is describing there is what is known as a Labor Theory of Value–the value of something is determined by the labor put forth to get it.  This is an economic idea that is commonly associated with a fellow named Karl Marx.  And it’s a response to the claim that gold’s value derives from its scarcity–a major component of non-Marxian, liberal economics.

Also in the trailer for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”

So, about twenty minutes into the movie, we have gotten a lecture on Marxian economics.  This is all the more interesting because the rest of the movie is devoted to proving over and over that greed for wealth corrupts people–specifically, Dobbs.  Howard repeatedly predicts that the gold will drive men to madness, and does it ever.

Dobbs’s inevitable corruption is fun to watch–that Bogart guy was a pretty good actor, you know that?–and Walter Huston  is excellent, even though his role is fairly predictable.  He is, essentially, an infallible sage, and normally those characters are pretty dull, but Huston imbues him with personality.  What is not clear to me is why he bothered to come along, since he believes almost from the outset that the expedition will be a disaster, and it proves to be exactly that.

It was odd to me that the movie’s most famous, yet often mis-quoted, line: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges” was spoken by a rather poorly-acted, bandit character.  I thought his character was pretty weak.  In fact, I felt that the bandits had too big a role in the film, when all they really needed to do was show up at the end when Dobbs’s luck runs out.

I keep coming back to the economic “moral” of the movie, though.  It’s a very socialist message, what with the capitalist who desires to earn for himself being depicted as either a monster or a buffoon, and the character who opens up describing the labor theory of value depicted as a wise and thoughtful figure.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking: “Well, this is it– Mysterious Man has finally gone completely crazy and is now seeing communist conspiracies everywhere.  He must have been listening to Glenn Beck too much, and he just lost his tenuous grip on reality.”

1950s anti-communist pamphlet

To be clear, I’m not saying I think this movie was some kind of evil communist-Hollywood indoctrination plot.  It was based on a book by a mysterious German called “B. Traven“, who was apparently a socialist.  Well, when your movie is based on a book by a German socialist, you can’t be surprised if some German socialism creeps in.  I doubt John Huston wanted to make Marxist propaganda; he just wanted to make a Western, and the book he adapted it from had some Marxist propaganda in it.

What surprises me is that, despite how popular accusing people in Hollywood of communism was at the time, the film wasn’t banned or censored, and John Huston wasn’t hauled up before the H.U.A.C. to explain himself.  I’m not saying any of that should have happened, I’m just saying it’s weird that the film apparently got released without any censorship or controversy, which is kind of amazing given the zeitgeist.

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Image via Wikipedia
Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in “Strangers on a Train.”

So, I finally saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train after friends of mine mentioned it to me nine months or so ago.   Yeah, I take my time with these things.

To put it briefly, my comment here about Hitchcock’s work applies perfectly.  It’s an amusing film, but by no means a masterpiece.  I’ll try to avoid spoiling everything in this review, but I will discuss certain plot elements, so be warned!   If you are the kind of sick, deranged person who reads reviews of movies they have not seen (me too)  there is a synopsis here.

The character of Bruno Anthony, played by Robert Walker,  carries the whole movie.  The guy seems completely mad and yet strangely charismatic, which is precisely what the role demands.

The problem is, this kind of works against the story even though it is really fun to watch.  It is so obvious that Bruno is not playing with a full deck that it seems like Guy Haines would have no trouble convincing the police that Bruno’s claims about him are nothing more than the ravings of a maniac.  Of course, then there would be no drama, and it would be a pretty dull movie. So…

…Haines gets enmeshed in a convoluted plot controlled by the madman. There wasn’t much that stood out about it to me, but there were two scenes that caught my interest.  One is the tennis match that comes at a pivotal point in the film.  Although fairly contrived, it was still somehow exciting to watch, even though I knew more or less how it would play out.  This alone may qualify Hitchcock as a great director.  It is one of the most effective uses of sport I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The other thing I really liked was the next-to-last scene.  I love the fact that even in his final moments, Bruno still lies to Guy and the police.  He has no reason to, he has to know that his deception going to be found out as soon as his fist unclenches and he drops Guy’s lighter, and in any event he is mortally wounded; but he lies to them anyway.  That little detail totally sums up the character and how detached he is from reality.  I love that.

Unfortunately, the movie is pretty weak otherwise.  The direction, editing and cinematography are all quite good, but the acting is pretty poor apart from Robert Walker.  Also, once you stop suspending disbelief, which I did whenever Bruno wasn’t around, you realize the whole plot is fairly far-fetched.  [Aside: is suspending disbelief the same as resuming belief? Discuss.]  The other problem with the movie is that even the “good” characters aren’t very likeable, so it was hard to really get invested in how things worked out for them.

Overall, an enjoyable thriller, but not a great one.

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Oh, wow, I had never heard this before.  Studio executives had wanted the Harry Potter movies to be set in America.  I didn’t like the Potter flicks much–certainly, all except the last two installments were but pale shades of the books–but if they’d messed around with them even more they could have been an outright disaster.  That article kind of makes me more forgiving towards the filmmakers’ general disregard for the stuff in the books.  The fact that they couldn’t be bothered to make Tonks’s hair look like the book describes seems minor in comparison to the prospect of seeing Hogwarts relocated to the outskirts of Los Angeles.

As an American, I am vaguely insulted by the idea that people suspected Americans wouldn’t be interested in a movie that wasn’t about them.  Do they think we’re that ignorant and narcissistic?  Man, that would have been an awful series of movies.  I mean, in my eyes, the major draw of the movies was the chance to see skilled British actors plying their trade.  Take that away and they would be nothing.

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There’s an article in the New York Times about the prevalence of trolls in online gaming.  The article focuses particularly on their attacks on female gamers, but it also speaks to a larger point about trolls in general.  The key line is: “For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.”

This is absolutely true, and the core of understanding troll behavior.  Trolls are not deeply committed to racist, sexist, or homophobic ideologies.  They are simply interested in causing as much trouble as they possibly can, and see such insults as a means of doing this.

The difficulty with online gaming–and this is another reason I avoid it–is that seems to have been inadvertently designed as an almost perfect platform for trolls.   Frankly, the primary purpose of online gaming seems to me to be to encourage trash-talking, and trolling is but a mutated form of trash-talking.

Everything I have seen indicates that the online experience delivers, on average, no better of an experience than playing the A.I.  For every highly-skilled player, there are ten unskilled players whose performance is below that of a competent A.I.  The only advantage online offers over offline is the ability to compete with some stranger, and beat him or her at the game.  And then, of course, the trash-talking.  Trash-talking a machine is simply not as satisfying.

To me personally, trash-talking in any venue is a pointless and stupid activity.  I hate it when athletes do it, I hate it when people on internet forums do it, and I hate it when gamers do it.  The difficulty, as highlighted in the NYT article, is how to manage it so it stays within decent bounds.  But the online gaming services won’t eliminate it outright, however, because they would be destroying their own market.  A blogger named Ferrerman wrote some posts about a related phenomenon on internet forums. (Be warned: he uses a lot of strong language to make his point.)

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It’s not Citizen Kane anymore.  It’s now Vertigo.  Strange that it took Sight & Sound so long to notice a movie made in 1958 was better than a movie made in 1941.

To be perfectly frank, I always thought Kane was a bit overrated.  Not that it’s a bad film by any means; it’s  just not anywhere close to being the greatest ever.  It’s a well-acted drama and nothing more, in my opinion.  Also, there seems to be a massive plot hole at the center of it which has always kind of detracted from it.

I also wonder: did the people who were polled watch every single movie ever made before voting?  I kind of doubt it.  For one thing, think of how many languages they would have had to learn first.  (Watching with subtitles is not at all the same thing.)  What if the real greatest movie ever is a Japanese film that no one in the U.S. or Britain has heard of?

I won’t even begin to address the question of how there can be a single greatest movie when there are so many different genres.  I like Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady, but it’s hard to really compare the two.  This is why they do genre rankings, although even then there are problems, like why is Star Wars always listed under “sci-fi” when the man who created it says it isn’t?

The sound effects are *awful* by today’s standards!

Finally, there are technical issues, like: if a film was great “in its time”, does that mean it’s always great?  Metropolis is considered a very great film, but if it were made today, would anybody think it was any good?  Moreover, if a new technique is created and used with great success in a film, it is inevitably copied by other films, thus diminishing the value of it for future viewers.  Does a film deserve bonus “greatness points” for being the first to try something that eventually becomes common?  And when a viewer fifty years later sees a transition or camera angle that is familiar to him, but was brand new at the time, how will he ever be able to appreciate it?

I think that many critics are aware of this issue, and so overcompensate by giving undue weight to older movies.  It’s similar to what I was talking about here with video game rankings. In some cases, you have to admit, “well it was certainly great then, but there can be little doubt the special effects would be much better if they could have made it today.”  What was yesterday’s special effects masterpiece may look awful to the viewer of nowadays.

That’s not saying, by the way, that newer movies are automatically better.  Sometimes, they have better special effects, but vastly worse acting, characters, dialogue and story.  In fact this happens rather a lot.  But from a technical point of view, it makes ranking difficult.

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Famous scene from the 1922 film “Nosferatu”. The shadow is scarier than the actual monster (see below) because your imagination fills in the details.

Saw the movie House of Dracula on TV the other night.  It’s a 1945 Universal Monsters flick that contains three of their most popular monsters: Dracula (duh) the Wolf-Man, and Frankenstein’s monster.  It was fairly well-done for what it was.  John Carradine is great as Dracula.  Also, the film features the stereotypical hunch-backed assistant to the mad scientist, but for a change the character is female, and fairly attractive apart from the hunch-back. It’s an unusual role, and the actress, Jane Adams, does a pretty good job.

But what was especially notable about the movie was that it falls into the awful horror movie pitfall of trying to explain the source of the horror scientifically.  So, it turns out that Dracula has a blood disease, and that the Wolf-Man can be cured by brain surgery and some kind of weird fungus that the aforementioned scientist grows in his castle.

Folly!  I’ve blogged about this before: horror movies should not rationalize or explain the horror in any way.  When they do, it becomes less frightening.  They make this mistake all the time in horror movies.  It’s much better when the scientifically-inclined are skeptics and shown to be wrong, and the monster is an inexplicable violation of the laws of nature.   The intelligent, scientific  types being wrong is how you know you’re in trouble.

If you try to explain everything, it is less scary.  This applies not only to trying to give explanations for the monster’s origin or condition or whatever, but to every element in any scary story.  Just give people a few hints of the monster, and  let them piece together the rest, that’s what I say.

See what I mean?