They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures – I’d love another shot at ‘Roots of Heaven’ – and make them good?
Huston said it–they should do remakes of lousy movies, books and games. Not necessarily the worst of the worst, but the ones that had potential and fell flat. The gameDaikatana was actually a good concept, it just didn’t work out. They should take another try at it. Alfred Hitchcock remade his own film The Man Who Knew Too Much. And I think many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories could have benefited from a reworking, especially The Shadow Out of Time.
Oh, well. I guess it makes economic sense that only popular things get remade, but it makes no artistic sense.
The first time I saw Robert Wise’s 1963 movie The Haunting, I was pretty young and I didn’t like it much. Too boring, I thought. But upon subsequent viewings I have come to think it’s actually a pretty effective horror film, because it does not rely on the grotesque and horrible to instill fear, but rather on subtle psychological manipulation.
In brief, the story concerns a paranormal researcher’s study of a reputedly haunted house. The film focuses on one participant, Eleanor Lance, who is apparently sensitive to the supernatural. Gradually, it begins to seem that the unexplainable phenomena of the “haunting” is directed at her.
What makes the movie interesting is that it’s hard to tell whether Eleanor is truly being haunted by anything or if she is just going insane. The ambiguity makes for a good “let the viewer decide” puzzle, which I like very much. I suppose the closing narration does tip the balance somewhat in favor of a supernatural explanation, but still, it’s very good.
One weakness in the movie is that Eleanor herself is not very sympathetic. I think the viewer is supposed to pity her, and I guess I kind of did, but to an extent it made her seem so vulnerable that it doesn’t seem that surprising that the house would cause her such distress.
The other problem I have isn’t so much with this movie in particular as it is with the whole “Haunted House” genre, which is that haunted houses aren’t especially scary unless you go inside them. Apparently, as the opening narration makes clear, “Hill House has stood for 90 years”, and hasn’t hurt anybody except those who decided to live in it during that time. This isn’t really that scary, because you know that as long as you don’t go in the place, you will be okay. It may pose a threat to sensitive souls like Eleanor, but not to the world at large.
To me, that isn’t frightening in the way that Lovecraftian monsters or even creatures like the Wolf Man and such are, because those things are autonomous and can go all around spreading terror. While haunted houses just sit there, being haunted.
However, with that said, it’s still very effective; the House itself looks very sinister, and the cinematography does a great job conveying unseen threat. If the “Haunted House” concept isn’t all that frightening upon reflection, it certainly is easy to forget that while watching the movie.
I know they remade the movie in 1999. I haven’t seen the remake, but I have heard it was much less subtle than the original, and made the supernatural much more explicit. I won’t judge without seeing it, but seems plausible. Horror movies have declined a great deal since the ’60s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? Metropolisis 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.
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.
I tried to read the first book of theHunger Games series awhile back, and although I thought it was well-written and had a good setting, it was hard for me to get into it because it was fairly predictable. I’m sure that’s partially because it was written for a younger audience, but I think it also is a just a little too cliche filled. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s a decent book, but I pretty much knew where it was going from a very early point. This is a problem I have with a lot of dystopian fiction–it all seems cut from the same cloth.
You know, I had an idea for a dystopian movie once. It would be set at an undefined place and time, in a country where a totalitarian, fascist government had taken over. The main character would be some kind of violent goon for the government who went around suppressing all dissenters. And the whole film would present him as the hero–he’d be played by a “leading man”, the camera angles would present him heroically–the whole film would seemingly approve of the dystopian society. Then, at the end, there would be some kind of title card or something telling the audience that this was a propaganda film approved by the fictional government, perhaps even detailing some of the techniques involved.
The point of this would be to pull the rug out from under the audience; see how many of them would have found themselves being subtly seduced into rooting for the main character–and the society he represents–by the film’s technique. The “plot twist” would actually be a test to see how much people would start to buy into something awful because of good cinematography. Then they would have to re-evaluate what they had just watched.
The trouble is, this is more of a science experiment than an entertainment movie. The trick of the movie is that usually, in dystopian stories, the protagonist begins to question his society, and through him, the audience is told about the society’s problems. (e.g. Winston Smith in 1984, Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451) There would be none of that in this movie. He’d be 100% behind the society, and looking to maintain it. It would be kind of like 1984 from O’Brien’s perspective.
The thing about my idea–and I’m not saying it’s a good idea–is that it plays with the tropes of the dystopian genre. Dystopian stories give the audience some character they can turn to to see the dystopia’s flaws; or at least the “tone” of the piece, or the “voice” of the narrative give it away. Here, there are no societal outcasts or anything like that for people to turn to. (The main character takes care of that.) I thought this up largely from noticing that every dystopian story seems to rely on the same devices, and that makes them pretty predictable.
