6 May, 2013
One of the brilliant scenes in Murnau’s Nosferatu that’s not in the original source.
My Top 5:
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…)
29 October, 2012
Words guaranteed to bring a good (and gory) time.
When Star Wars was released in 1977, it had a lot of things going for it. One of those things was the casting. Diane Crittenden, Irene Lamb and Vic Ramos, the casting directors for the film had done their job perfectly. We had three relative unknowns in the main lead roles. But to supplement their performances, we had two great British actors. The first, of course, was Sir Alec Guinness, already an Oscar winner, and, back in the 50′s, star of the Ealing Comedies, one of the best group of films ever created in a single genre by a single studio (see a future post). But for the villain, they brought in Peter Cushing. By this time, Guinness had been in 37 films (including two Best Picture winners and two Graham Greene adaptations) and Cushing had appeared in 83 films (including a different Best Picture winner and a different Graham Greene adaptation), but they had never done a film together (and wouldn’t in a sense here, either, because they never appear onscreen together). Part of this was that while Guinness was rising with David Lean films and starring at Ealing, Cushing was further east, on the other side of Heathrow Airport, starring in another great group of films created in a single genre by a single studio. He was one of the two key actors in the Hammer Horror films. And rather appropriately, Christopher Lee, who would be his onscreen enemy in so many of these films, would eventually take over the role of Star Wars villain starting with Attack of the Clones.
There had been great Horror films before. In fact, none of the films that Hammer would make would rival the best of the films produced by Universal between 1923 and 1935. But while Universal had a great run of success with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, The Man Who Laughs, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein, it trailed off badly after that. There was also irony going on during that stretch. While those films combined for one measly Oscar nomination (Bride of Frankenstein – Best Sound), it was Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that would actually win a major Academy Award (Best Actor for 1932-33 – Frederic March). There were a couple of other Horror gems during this time (Vampyr, King Kong), but after 1935, it all went south. I have not seen a single Horror film released between 1935 and 1956 better than a mid *** except The Body Snatcher. There were just endless sequels, getting worse and worse, as budgets got lower and lower and acting became nonexistent. They weren’t even good entertainment anymore, they couldn’t frighten and they were just boring.
Then came 1957 and a film called The Curse of Frankenstein. (more…)
7 August, 2010
The wonderful Annotated editions of The Wizard of Oz and Classic Fairy Tales from W.W. Norton
Back in 2000, Norton, that wonderful publisher that has ruled the roost of critical editions for great works of literature for decades, released The Annotated Alice. It was a large hardcover book, almost the size of a coffee-table book. It had wonderful annotations throughout the text as well as wonderful illustrations throughout the entire text of both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It was not a brand new book, however. It was a reprint of a book originally printed by Crown Publishers in 1960 (it has been printed both by Bramhall House and by Clarkson N. Potter – both of them were imprints of Crown, but I can’t tell what was published by which and when). It was apparently the brainchild of Clarkson N. Potter, a publisher with some great ideas. After Alice, he spent the next two decades culling some of the great works of literature and having them all printed in these large hardcover formats with illustrations and annotations throughout. (more…)
27 April, 2010
One of the amazing surreal scenes in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
As I have gone through each year in film, both in covering the year, and later, in covering the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I have included very little of my own nominees. Partially it’s because I don’t want to throw too much of my own stuff in these and partially because I included all of my own nominees in my History of the Academy Awards series as I covered each category.
But, as I finish each decade, I’d like to take a look back and cover the best of each decade in each category. So, I’ll go with each current Oscar category (other than documentaries and shorts) and I’ll list my top 5 covering an entire decade (in this case, covering all of film history up until 1929).
Because I’m covering a whole decade at a time, I am doing away with my requirement to keep to Academy eligible years and I just go with the original release date. (more…)
12 February, 2010
The 1967 Modern Library dust jacket of Dracula
12 November, 2009
My Top 10:
Charlie Chaplin in the final, touching scene in City Lights
6 November, 2008
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Don’t you ever just read for enjoyment? You can’t read Faulkner all the time! It’s too difficult, too depressing. You must unwind and relax a bit sometimes.
That’s the argument, anyway, and I hear it a lot. Of course I do. Like I said, there are plenty of books I love that wouldn’t necessarily make my top novels list. So to that end, I hereby present my 25 favorite novels to read, the ones I read over and over again. And there’s no Faulkner.
There is Michael Crichton, though. For a long time he was a very enjoyable author to read. I read Jurassic Park in high school, knowing that Spielberg was working on the film, and I not only loved it, it actually changed the way I view the world (seriously).
So, to the author of Jurassic Park, The Great Train Robbery, Sphere and The Andromeda Strain (all highly enjoyable), in honor of his untimely death yesterday, I dedicate my following list.
There are a few books that in the end, surprisingly didn’t make my list, some brilliant but damn enjoyable (Catch-22, 100 Years of Solitude, The Stranger), some more of a pleasure (The Big Sleep, Hound of the Baskervilles, The Golden Compass), some because I love the author but couldn’t pin down a specific book (Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Moore), and, then, the Harry Potter series, because I just couldn’t figure out which one, yet didn’t want to put the whole series, because the last four books are so much better than the first three.
8 August, 2008
The Golden Age of Horror - 6 of the top 25 Horror Films
There are 13 basic genres of film: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Foreign, Horror, Kids, Musical, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Sci-Fi, War and Western. Almost every film can be broken down into one of those categories. You could even cull it further down and just do Action, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Foreign, Horror, Kids and Musical and fit all films into one of those 8. When AFI recently did their genre lists they did 10 genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Western, Romantic Comedy (Comedy), Courtroom Drama (Drama), Animation (Kids), Epics (a lot of War films), Gangster (Crime), and Sports (some Action films). They had already done an entire list of Musicals. They had already messed up the concept by using several sub-genres (Sports, Courtroom Drama, Romantic Comedy, etc.) instead of the actual full genre. And they don’t deal with Foreign films. But that still leaves an entire basic genre out in the dark: Horror, of course.
Because Horror films are often thought of as the latest pathetic slasher sequel designed to make quick money (they are amazingly profitable), their long and treasured legacy in film history is overlooked. But they have been around since the early days of film and include some of the great films in history. I will rectify AFI’s mistake before moving on to other genres. My list is 25 because the Golden Age of Horror films was the Universal films of the 20′s and 30′s and a good number of those ended up between 10 and 20 on my list. I also have included a few foreign films on this list. They are part of this grand tradition after all, and really, if you’re a silent film, does it matter what was the language of origin?
A quick note: my originally ranked 1, 2 and 4 films I decided not to include. I categorize A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting and Taxi Driver as Urban Horror films, because like Dead Ringers and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, they are psychological in bent and focused less towards action (like Crime films) and more towards horror. But they are not included here. (more…)
