Contents Originally Published: mostly 1932-1934 in Weird Tales
Publisher: Del Rey
Pages: 463
First Line (sort-of): ”Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs into dawn.”
Film Version: Conan the Barbarian (1982 - *** – dir. John Milius), Conan the Destroyer (1984 - ** - dir. Richard Fleischer), Conan the Barbarian (2011 - *.5 - dir. Marcus Nispel)
You can read more about this year in film here. The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees. There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end. If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom. Films in red won the Oscar in that category. Films in blue were nominated. But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the second year of the Oscars (and, in fact, several fewer than the year before).
One of the brilliant scenes in Murnau’s Nosferatu that’s not in the original source.
My Top 5:
Nosferatu
L’Argent
The Wind
The Docks of New York
Street Angel
Note: There is only a top 5 for this year. There were more than enough adapted screenplays to have a Top 10 if the quality of the scripts had merited it. They do not. And there wouldn’t even have been 5 if I hadn’t seen L’Argent last week. (more…)
You can read more about this year in film here. The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees. There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end. If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom. Films in red won the Oscar in that category. Films in blue were nominated. But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the first year of the Oscars.
Look forward to a review. It won’t be as complimentary as one from Seth MacFarlane would be.
Why, you ask, are you starting a new series when you just started two new ones and have barely done any?
Well, for two reasons.
The first is that I had this idea before I even started the two current series (Adapted Screenplay and the Nighthawk Awards) and I want to be able to parse it in at certain points.
The second is that those two series are taking an agonizingly long time to write. So, along with the Great Reads, I want something to be appearing other than long stretches without posts. Plus, these are easier to write, and so they can be popped out quicker than the other posts.
So what is this series? Well, I want to go back and look at a certain group of films. These are all films which I watched a lot and had opinions regarding before I ever started thinking critically about film, before I had a rating system, before I started writing down all the movies I had seen. So, to qualify, these have to be films that I first saw before February of 1989, and preferably saw a lot before then. So, for the most part, films from the early to mid 80′s; I can’t imagine anything released after 1987 will qualify. They will also be films I haven’t already written about with a critical eye. So, there won’t be new reviews of Star Wars and Raiders, because what’s the point of that. Some of them will be films I loved as a kid (Battlestar Gallactica, say), some will be ones I didn’t love so much as a kid (Superman III, perhaps) and some will be ones I enjoyed when I was younger, but dropped my opinion considerably when looking at them from a more critical eye (see that poster up above, for example). Some of them will be movies I haven’t seen in a really long time that I’ll be going back to (The Secret of Nimh comes to mind). But I’ll be trying to look at them anew and I’ll be writing about them both in terms of what I thought as a kid and what I think now. They’re not Oscar nominees and not **** films (probably – I don’t know for certain what I will write about, we’ll have to see how it goes). They’re fun films from when I was a kid.
So, while I try to get back to finishing reading The Man Who Laughs and getting my post on 1927-28 done, next up will be the first RCM film: Clash of the Titans.
Some idiotic State Senator from Arkansas who doesn’t deserve to have his name mentioned decided to tweet out yesterday, when my entire metro area was in lockdown, that us liberals are probably cowering wishing we had guns now.
We weren’t cowering because we don’t cower. And we don’t wish we had any guns because we didn’t need them. We stood back and let law enforcement do their job and they did it. And as a result, we have a captured live suspect instead of a dead one. For, as Richard Russo once wrote “He’d been shot at before and guessed that my mother wasn’t really trying to hit him, but those were precisely the situations that got you shot. He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn’t have been nearly such a hazardous affair.” Instead, we didn’t have to have any guns whatsoever.
But, aside from the gun issue, it was an insult to this city. To my city.
I have strong feelings about living here and that was why I came back in 2005. There are strong undercurrents of violence here – this is the kind of place where I have been threatened when crossing the street for daring to stop the light and be irritated when people don’t stop and I have been threatened by shoplifters as they were stealing things. But there are great things here. There are the ducks in the Boston Public Garden. There is the bas-relief at the Common for the 54th. There are my beloved sports teams, those teams that Chicago embraced on Tuesday morning because they showed the kindness of human compassion.
Boston is both large and small. There are well over a million people in the metro area. So I didn’t know anyone who was directly hurt this week. But, we are also a small place. I worked at Copley Square for 3 years. I have stood in that spot that was bombed, stood there on a Marathon Monday with my son, who is 8. My favorite steak place is Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington and I’m pretty sure Krystie Campbell was working the last time we went there. I have one former co-worker who was friends with Sean Collier. One current co-worker’s mother was having her house in Watertown searched when the police reacted to the shots last night. None of this touched me directly and all of it did.
But I love where I live, for much the same reasons that Dennis Lehane does. And I love that the people of this city came together yesterday and did what needs to be done and let those who needed to do their job do it. And I love that Dunkin stayed open to give donuts to all the law enforcement. And I marvel at the video I saw yesterday out someone’s window of the shots going off and one cop hearing it and sprinting towards it. They did their job and we let them do it and now maybe we can get some answers. And then we can all go on.
It has been both hard to live here, far from family, in a place where the people sometimes scare me. But I also love to live here and think of all the mornings where, instead of getting out at Copley, I got out at Park Street and walked through the Common and the Gardens to work in the snow. The Standells said it first, though the Dropkicks sing it better.
