I also liked how Van Helsing doesn't pussyfoot around like a lot of movie scientists. He's like "these bite marks indicate it's a vampire, therefore vampires are real, deal with it." Also enjoyable whenever Mina would glare really hard at her Zeppo-esque fiance trying to work vampire magic on him.
The ending was super disappointing! Dracula gets staked offscreen and you don't get to see what could be a great Bela Lugosi death scene.
Since Jeanne Thornton is a big Guy Maddin fan I decided it would be cool if I could get him to autograph my Dracula ticket to her, so after the show I looked around for him, but he had disappeared... like a vampire! Or like a guy with
something to do other than watch the movie he introduced.
(If the tone of this review seems different from usual it's because I basically copy-and-pasted it from an email thread with Jeanne.)
Anyway, around 1989 I remember a movie about black cowboys came out (I don't remember the name and can't find it) and it was... not controversial, but it was remarked upon as unusual. But having discovered old movies after starting Film Roundup, I've learned that that movie would have been right at home in Hollywood fifteen years earlier. The 1970s saw tons of action movies and thrillers that have been stuffed into the "blaxploitation" box, plus a good number of westerns and comedies by and for African-Americans.
Something happened in the 1980s, maybe due to the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster, and now we mainly remember Blazing Saddles (1974), a movie directed by a white guy that plays the "black cowboy" idea for laughs. Blazing Saddles is a really funny movie, but it came out in the context of movies like this which took the same topic seriously. So it's like we're yukking it up at Spaceballs, but all we remember is Buck Rogers and we've all forgotten about Star Wars.
You don't need a "reason" to put black characters in a period genre piece, but this movie has a very good reason and it gives the plot, which is basically cribbed from Wagon Master, some real heft. It helps that the ending isn't a big disappointment like Wagon Master's was. A really solid movie overall.
I could have used a little more of Harry Belafonte's con-man preacher. There's a great scene where he's sweet-talking himself into Sunday dinner and you can see the pioneer ladies thinking "He's obviously a con man, but it's not like we have a real preacher..." But probably the best scene is one where Buck and the Preacher rob a telegraph office, but they can't get at the money, and rather than let it become a Dog Day Afternoon situation they just cross the street and rob the bank as well!
On the plus side, when we went to Paris this made me feel better about skipping the Louvre. There were specific works of art I wanted to see in Paris, but they were all in the Pompidou Centre.
The movie itself is pretty light fare, but it's an enjoyable rom-dram that doesn't settle for easy answers, and it's got hot jazz and great shots of nighttime Paris. I got a strong Commander Riker vibe watching Paul Newman pretend (?) to play the trombone.
Anyway, I would have liked this movie a lot more if there had been less crazy John Lithgow and more John Travolta out in the woods with a shotgun mic. My recommendation is to watch The Parallax View and The Conversation (1974) instead of seeing this. Sure, it takes more time to watch two really good movies instead of one mediocre movie, but you can't rush quality.
Shuffle Along is a good time. It's an all-black musical about the creation and staging of another all-black musical. It deals with serious topics in a funny way, it's got great old-timey costumes and tap dancing. If I saw a musical every week I too might be thinking "yes, this is a cut above, a true classic", and recommending it to all. But since I don't, it was well within the range of "normal musical" to me. The love story was meh. The history bits suffered from major show-don't-tell issues (occasionally also a problem with Hamilton).
We saw a preview, so maybe everything has been improved 100%, but what hasn't changed is that tickets start at eighty bucks a pop. I'm not prepared to pay that much for entertainment on a regular basis. And this strategy has worked really well for me. In all my years in New York the only live performance I've regretted missing was Bryan Cranston in All The Way, and they're turning that into a movie, so no harm done.
For me, the best cop stories are stories about systemic problems that the cops can't fix or are making worse. Zootopia is that kind of story, but this could easily have been an accident that happened in the course of building a more superficial story about the same topics. According to IMDB trivia a lot of the movie was reworked after the first test screenings in 2014, so that could have caused it, or maybe the creators of the movie didn't want to "overthink" things. (Bah!)
The Discworld Watch novels also deal with the topic of the responsibilities of a police force in a multispecies society. In fact I think it gets a little tiresome seeing the Watch novels deal with this issue over and over again, but Terry Pratchett clearly gets it. And I don't think Zootopia does because it creates problems of systemic racism and addresses them as though they are problems of personal prejudice (which it nails with cringey gags).
Is a shrew crime boss terrorizing your city? Maybe his grip would be less secure if he didn't know 100% that there are no shrews on the police force! That sort of thing. It's hard to fault Zootopia for being "unrealistic" in this regard, since very similar things happen in real life. And I'm spending a lot of time on this because Zootopia does seem aware that something deeper is going on, and interested in addressing it, but it feels like the edges got sanded off.
Having written all this I can't square it with the fact that my favorite cop movie is Hot Fuzz (2007), a cinematic tribute to all the cop movies I hate. Could it be that I contain... multitudes?
Speaking of the shrew crime boss... The Godfather came out in 1972, long before I was born. When I was a kid you'd sometimes get a Saturday morning cartoon doing the Godfather bit, and it felt a little old-fashioned, like seeing Clark Gable in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Now it's 2016. This movie came out forty years ago and we're still doing extended riffs on it. Not a 'parody' per se, but a long reenactment with no twists or jokes. I love some Maurice LaMarche but it feels like this bit came out of a "Man, have you heard LaMarche do Brando? It's incredible, we gotta put him in the movie!" type discussion. They shoulda had him do the frozen peas commercial instead.
IMDB trivia: "This is the tenth film from Walt Disney Animation Studios to feature a character who is revealed to be the villain of the movie as a surprise[.]" Not much of a surprise anymore, is it?
It's tempting to say something like "you'd think this wouldn't work," but why wouldn't it work? It works fine. You know exactly what's going to happen in a Bertie Wooster story, but it's still hilarious. What doesn't "work" is lazy mystery shows that assume they can fool us because we don't know how to watch television. As with many TV shows, Columbo's plots are a metaphor for the process of the show's production: the triumph of patient competence over flashy genius.
I came into Columbo a few years ago because Sumana's parents were big fans. I'd heard of it, sure, but thought it was just another 70s cop show like Kojak. But you put them side by side and there's no contest. Columbo might be the earliest fully modern television show. It's the Tristam Shandy of TV.
That said, individual episodes can flop. Each episode is basically a long face-off, so it succeeds or fails on the chemistry between Falk and the guest star. And the 70s episodes are a lot better than the 90s episodes. But overall, a hell of an achievement. As your guide to sorting out the good from the bad, I recommend the Columbo podcast Just One More Thing.
Well, see you next—ow! I banged my shin on Tomorrowland (2015), which for some reason is sitting right in the middle of this high-traffic dread threshold! Oh, right, the curse. Well, only one way to undo my hasty decision—express an opinion about the movie! It was a nice surprise to see Hugh Laurie as the scenery-chewing villain. Bye!
Sun May 01 2016 18:10 April Film Roundup:
Man, this took forever to put together. I can't believe how many movies I saw in April, given that we spent a week in France, where everyone knows they don't have movies. Enjoy:
That's probably why it's not in the guidebooks; it's kind of
old-fashioned and disjointed. You'll walk through a bunch of
exhibits that don't seem to have changed since the 1960s, and then
suddenly jump forward in museum time to the electronics age (mid-1990s I'd say). You
check out some cool old computers and awkard "interactive" exhibits,
then you walk through a doorway or around a corner, and you're back
in the 1960s with things behind glass in wooden cases.
Nonetheless, if you're reading this weblog, this is a must-see
museum when you're in Paris, because the amount and type of
incredible stuff they have is off the charts. Here's just a sample
to whet your appetite:
Then you turn the crank on the right to rotate the mirror
(everything had a rotating mirror back then), and the resonant
frequencies of whatever sound you're playing show up visually as wavy
lines across the mirror, versus the undisturbed lines of all the
frequencies not present. There's almost no signage on this thing and I
had to sit through a slow five-minute audioguide explanation to figure
out what's going on here but it was worth it!
Tue May 17 2016 21:45 Paris Pictures: Musée des Arts et Métiers:
Hey, how's it going? I've got a ton of important stuff to do, but that
just means I can procrastinate by putting up pictures from
our Paris trip. Today I'd like to introduce you to the Musée des Arts et
Métiers, a museum not found in either of our guidebooks but
recommended by every French person we talked to. You know how The
Da Vinci Code starts in the Louvre? Well, Foucault's
Pendulum isn't having any of that mainstream nonsense--it starts
off in Arts et Métiers, a museum of Science
and Invention with none of that postmodern self-reflection seen
in museums whose exhibits were updated after, say, 1995.
I figured out who buys all that Statue of Liberty kitsch in New York
—it's tourists visiting from Paris! Parisians love the Statue of
Liberty. There's a 1/4 scale model on the banks of the Siene, there's
this thing (I think a 1/16) in front of the museum, another one
outside the Musée d'Orsay. Look, you gave it away, it's ours
now... don't make this weird, France.
This is the sort of thing you come to the museum for: Léon Foucault's 1862 apparatus for
measuring the speed of light with a rapidly rotating mirror. To see
how it works you can either watch a very slow video or promise yourself you'll
read
the Wikipedia page later and then never get around to it.
Or how about this wicked bastard? This is a steampunk oscilloscope, made
by Rudolph Koenig in the 19th century. On the left is a big stack of
Hemholz resonators, each designed to pick up one specific frequency
and dampen all other frequencies. Each resonator is attached to a
little gaslight. You set all the gaslights blasting away, and when a
resonator vibrates it makes the flame of the attached gaslight
wobble.
Perhaps the plastic arts are more your speed. Here's a show-offy
piece by Colville from the 1855 Universal Exposition, which
demonstrates all the colors the manufacturer is capable of slapping
onto a piece of porcelain. It really reminded me of the DOS color
palette the way there are adjacent dark and light versions of the
same color.
Or maybe you're too pure, too abstract for such material
concerns. Maybe you'd like to take this sample case door-to-door,
selling geometric solids to the public? This was briefly a popular
business model among the Willie Loman types of nineteenth-century France, who eventually gave up and
used the shapes to study geometry. These two pieces are by Louis
Dupin (1846) and Baradelle (1805).
You know that the French Revolution gave birth to the metric system
and had its own calendar, but did you know they also used decimal
time? Tragically, counterrevolutionary clocks, like this two-faced
example, made it easy for slackers to continue using the old system,
and decimal time was only the law of the land for about a year. Look
at it! The decimal time face is the tiny one on the bottom! They're
not even taking it seriously!
Sumana with a model of the Jacquard loom, distant ancestor to the
mighty general-purpose computer. What we didn't expect was all
the other looms that came beforehand! They were all here in
one big room that people walked right through, not knowing how cool
the things they were seeing are.
Here's an example: a model of an earlier loom controlled by holes
punched in paper. Now that's computery! Looks just like 1980s
dot-matrix printer paper. (We also saw a full-size loom that basically
ran off a player piano roll.) The problem here is that it's one
huge sheet of paper. If you want to add or remove an
"instruction", sucks to be you. It's like programming in BASIC when
you can't change the line numbers. Whereas the Jacquard loom is
programmed by small cards that are tied together. It's a lot easier
to go in and change something.
There was a whole exhibit hall about keyboards and other input
devices, a section I like to call "Telegraphy and Typewriters". The
museum is full of unusual keyboard layouts. You'll have to trust me
on this because I'm showing you a stenography typewriter, and those
still have weird keyboard layouts. The second picture shows the
box the stenography keyboard came in, and another, more spidery
stenography keyboard in the background.
Here's perhaps my favorie piece from the "Telegraphy" section of
that exhibit hall. This brave inventor refused to succumb to Not
Invented Here syndrome. In an era when everyone was inventing weird
telegraphy keyboards, this person thought "We already have
keyboards! The keyboard has been around and successful for hundreds
of years! I'm not going to reinvent the wheel!"
I'm going to close with this shot of the classic
Minitel terminal. The museum had a very Pavel Chekhov rah-rah
attitude towards all things French, and I don't begrudge this
attitude—technologically the French have a lot to
be proud of. But sometimes it was kind of a stretch. Did you know
that the European ground station for the Telstar satellite was in
France? I don't really think that's sufficient grounds to
display a model of the Telstar in a museum exhibit and do a whole
thing about it. You made Minitel! Minitel was
amazing! You should do a whole Hall of Minitel! Just a suggestion.
