goatgodschild | Entries tagged with da flickers

Richard Chamberlain passed away on Saturday night in Hawaii. He is survived by his husband.

www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/richard-chamberlain-tv-actor-who-starred-in-dr-kildare-dies-at-90/ar-AA1BWxkn

I was inspired by the "Moment of Silence" series done by Ysabetwordsmith ( ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/ )

ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/tag/moment+of+silence

My persona for the Galactic Journey, George Pritchard, has a crush on his portrayal of Dr. Kildare, and owns his EP.

(I plan to add more onto this later.)

Roger Corman has passed away, according to the Washington Post. He was 98 years old.

His output as a director was incredibly wide, and I first became acquainted with him through Mystery Science Theater 3000, where some of his less popular films showed up. It Conquered the World, Teenage Caveman, The Undead, Gunslinger, The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, and (my personal favorite) Attack of the Giant Leeches.

More popular films of his include the original Little Shop of Horrors, Death Race 2000, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death. I've seen all the ones I listed just now. except for Pendulum, and my favorite was Masque of the Red Death.

Beasts (1976) is a mixed bag, and I don’t like it. There are six episodes, and I only liked one of them. The unfortunate fact is that, even if there’s things you like, a plot or theme you think can’t be botched, there will be versions that you can’t stand (see The Changeling (2023), which I will talk about once I finish slogging through it).

“Buddyboy” is so exclusively, particularly, 1976 that it seems like it was born from a Mad Libs page.

Martin Shaw is an owner of an adult movie theater who is trying to buy a property that’s gone out of business. While investigating the property (no doubt for Legionnaires Disease), he meets a far-out hippie girl with a New Wave outfit, who tells him that something went afoul with the dolphin exhibit. The leader of the dolphins, the titular Buddyboy, has returned from beyond the grave to seek his revenge, and that’s why the sweaty business guy wants to get rid of the property!

One of the best things about “Buddyboy” is that we’ve got about two likable characters who are in the same room as each other. Martin Shaw is pretty much playing the same character as Doyle on The Professionals, equal parts slinky and street, affable and sly. He’s a character who’s smart enough to know he’s smarter than people guess from his lower-class origins, and is going to make good money on his way up. Maybe you wouldn’t want to marry the guy, or even hang out with him for too long in real life, but he’s not actively abhorrent. The fact I’m praising him for being against animal and labor abuse is a very telling low bar for Beasts.

The sympathetic (yet far-out) hippie girl is played by Pamela Moiseiwitsch, who is fairly middle-of-the-road by the standards of Pros girls. She’s not an all-out screamer, and is a decent actress, but she’s still got a fairly difficult role to fill, and I don’t know if she is able to cover all those bases in the time she’s given. But she’s given more time to be a proactive character than most other female characters in Beasts, which is another bad sign.

Every other episode of Beasts is slimy and uncomfortable, stories of sad people being unlikeable, hating others, and then either dying or being hurt beyond repair. At its best moments, Beasts has bit parts that suggest more interesting lives and stories taking place just offscreen.

    “Special Offer” has the branch manager of a “we couldn’t afford 7/11”-type bodega turn out to be a wizard/occultist/magical detective. It illustrates something I enjoy about the big tent currently labeled "folk horror" -- that magic can only get you so far, and its practitioners cannot be truly full-time. Frankly, this is one of the most realistic portrayals of a practitioner I've ever seen.

    The plot of “During Barty’s Party” involves a local spooky-themed DJ, the titular Barty -- think Vincent Price doing morning zoo radio.

    “Baby” has an affable (if tricksy) country vet and his wife, who have a very lived-in relationship and clearly care about each other. It also has a construction guy/folklore expert in a kangol hat, which is another example of “occultist at their day job” that has so much potential.

    “What Big Eyes” has an RSPCA inspector meeting the abused daughter of an attempted lycanthrope. I want to know what happens after this, especially since the RSPCA guy is an absolute delight (he should be, he went on to play Foyle in Foyle’s War!). They have an incredibly touching chemistry, which would be great if the story did anything with it, and if the actress didn’t play an abuse survivor so perfectly.

    I haven’t watched the final episode, and I don’t really want to.

I don’t know if you would call the stories misogynistic, exactly -- they’re more of what Roger Ebert called “anti-life”.

I'm going to put down a recommendation for the film Enys Men (2023), as it is, so far, everything we love about the Fens.

Will elaborate on more, later.

Gone to Earth is the most Changeling work I have been through, or at least most tied to my perception of the Changeling. I can well understand how Webb was hugely popular at the time, and how her stories (like Kingsley's political writing) dropped off the map. The reason these immediately tie together in my mind is their shared imagery of the fox-hunt, displaying it as the ultimate destructive example of how squires (and, by extension, the upper class) treat the lower classes and the land they are sworn to protect.

The film and book diverge the most with the character of Reddin. Quite frankly, the book has an approach to sexuality, and even gender, that I don't know if a mainstream film made at the time could have pulled off. Or, well, the film that the filmmakers wanted to make. I'm not going to call Gone to Earth equivalent to Some Like It Hot (not to mention, the latter came out almost a decade later), and Glen or Glenda is closer to grindhouse or outsider art than anything else. The book is allowed to be more explicit, although it's still "1917 non-porn" explicit. But it's definitely unsettling in a way that's very similar to Tess of the D'Ubervilles, where the rapists can make your skin crawl over a century later (horror lasts longer than sexy, I think -- for all its impact, Las-Bas is more of a reference than something that's actually sexually appealing).

Gone to Earth (1950) is, in my opinion, a very good film, and the alterations/direction choices fascinate rather than anger me. In 1950, the highest-grossing film in English was still Gone With The Wind, and the film often seems like an attempt to make the film into a lower-budget British version of Gone With the Wind. From the change of hair color and style to the way Reddin is played, it seems like there was an attempt at that from behind the scenes. At the same time, it was also seen as being so incredibly (rural) British that it was apparently recut for a USAian version not long after. Which also makes sense, because the accents are especially noteworthy, and may be nearly extinct in the wild. It's easy enough to locate a clipped posh accent, or standard London, but the wording and stresses in Gone to Earth are definitely region-specific (this is less significant in the book, as written accents are common throughout Isles writing).

In the book (as the narrator almost relishes in stating), Reddin is a pathetic piece of work, a forty year old manchild and almost wholly incapable of love. His family home is falling apart and he seems to take as little notice of that of anything else. Scenes with him feel like a cross between dealing with an abusive boss/creepy teacher, and that one roommate/boyfriend everyone seems to have had in their lives, who somehow got old enough to drink while not otherwise changing from who he was at 13. It is Hazel that allows him to feel something resembling love, although it is mostly based around confusion. In the movie, however, there's a very different base character concept at play, especially given that Reddin is played by David Farrar.

Now, you should always get your Clark Gable at a reliable breeder of Clark Gables. Farrar played bad boy antihero sex magnets (especially in Black Narcissus, which had only been a few years prior), and so it seems like it would make him a good Clark Gable type. In Black Narcissus, he's a mountain man tempered and tempted by the world around him, his will rubbing up against that of the sisters. In class and behavior, he comes off as an early sketch of Han Solo, the world-weary traveler drawn to the fiercely determined princess. But the essential adhesion point between the love interests in Gone With the Wind and Black Narcissus are absent in Gone to Earth. Sister Clodagh and Scarlett O'Hara are determined, ambitious, sexually engaged, and willing to be jerks to get what they want. Meanwhile, both in book and film, Hazel is most certainly not those things.

When I was younger, Jareth scared me no end, as well, as did Legolas, for related reasons.

It all started with this book, Fairies and Elves. It has beautiful art, but this particular book terrified me at the beginning of puberty. It makes no bones about how attraction to elf men, (and women, for that matter) nine times out of ten ends in an unpleasant death or mutilation of the human partner. If they want you as a partner at all, and not as something to use as a servant (serving food, nursing children, etc.).
They enjoy killing for the pleasure of it, feeding on you one way or other. You can protect yourself with what you can, but that's protecting the body, not the mind.

I trained my mind to clamp down in terror at physically attractive elves, believing that this was how I would be able to keep myself from being stolen away and mutilated.

In this reading, Jareth isn't read as an egregore, or a sexy monster, but someone who is, in all likelihood, maneuvering to use Sarah as either breeding stock or livestock. Most likely, she's not coming out of this sane -- the ending isn't triumphant, it's horrifying. I viewed the happy ending as a comfortable lie, told to get the story past the censors. You have to tack on a happy ending, so they did.
I want to underscore, this is what I believed then. Not now.

The other reason Jareth scared me was basically that his treatment of Hoggle reminded me of how more socially able girls treated me, but that's on me.

I have heard nothing but good things about Triangle of Sadness, but I guess I'm just not the kind of person that it appeals to. I watched Aguirre earlier this month and loved it, so it's not a matter of disliking survival stories that comment on capitalism/imperialism/power and are also about terrible, delusional people stuck on a boat.

I also bounced off The Menu and The White Lotus, although I have loved both Knives Out films.

Claire says that she doesn't like recommending things to me, because she cannot predict what media I will like or dislike. Unfortunately, I agree -- I can have vague guesses, but often I have completely sideways reactions to a piece. I find Midsommar hilarious, for instance, but I can't stand Toy Story OR Shrek.

There’s this thing in writing that I’ve started calling “creepy masculinity”, as distinct from “toxic masculinity”.

To my mind, toxic masculinity is what you call it when trying to perform/extract a standard of masculinity from yourself and others becomes dangerous, and harms both you and the people around you. My go-to example of this is Marty Hart from True Detective: The Long Bright Dark, TD for short.

Marty, by the time we meet him, both in the present day and in flashbacks, is a mess. He’s violent to the people he doesn’t care about, whiny to the ones he does, damages every relationship he comes in contact with for not providing the proof (to him) that he’s a “real man”. He refuses to call his daughters by their names, only referring to them by pet names or insults, and has no pictures of them in his house (although there are his fishing trophies and several blown-up pictures of him in his college football outfit). He sleeps around because he thinks that it will prove to himself and to everyone else that he’s still young (he’s 32-ish at the time). Every man he meets, he first describes in terms of whether or not they could beat him up, or if he could beat them up.

By the end of TD, he’s learned to be a marginally better person, but it took being completely single and friendless for years, plus getting an axe to the chest. The narrative does not shy away from the fact that it was probably sheer laziness that kept Marty from being a serial killer, that Marty is bad and should feel bad.

Creepy masculinity is when the story shows that, objectively speaking, this man is terrible, but the story assures us that his actions are ultimately correct and “normal”. I’m not sure what a good TV/film example would be that a lot of people I know have seen, but Garth Ennis writes it in spades.

When I was eleven, I considered myself, as many eleven-year-olds do, highly urbane. Oh, I didn't have cable, but I had our local newspaper's Arts&Music section, and "the part of the news with the comics" -- political editorials. And the best part about the Arts&Music (yes, it was typed as one word) section, of course, was the movie reviews, which were only on Thursdays, but what a treat to look forwards to!

Living in a retirement and tourist town, our theaters didn't show a lot of children's movies, or fantasy movies, and definitely not science fiction, but the paper generally reviewed films that would eventually hit the Oscars. Since I wasn't old enough to see most of them, this meant I would get all my information on the Oscar contenders from these reviews, as well as the clips shown on Oscar Night. Despite this thin amount of information, my interest continued. The following paragraphs show the thought processes of an 11-13 year old, so, fair warning.

One Thursday, in December of 2009, I opened the newspaper to the movie reviews, and saw, on the first page, what looked to be an Elf (I had only recently seen the Lord of the Rings films), except painted with beautiful colors. I flipped to the next page, which had a review of Did You Hear About The Morgans?, before thinking:

Wait, did I see that right? There's a movie, with an Elf, and it's playing HERE? RIGHT NOW??? I don't care what else happens in the movie, I just want to know who that Elf is with the beautiful blue-and-green colors. And I think she's a girl and surrounded by fire.
And that was the beginning of my years-long love of the film Avatar. As indicated, it didn't hurt that the still my local newspaper picked for the film seems to have been designed to attract people attracted to lesbian monster/elf warriors. I think there could have been a lot less hate for the film, long-term, if that particular marketing had followed through. The more I learned about it, the better the movie seemed -- so good, in fact, that I was willing to get over my long-time fear of theaters to watch it! It was the first film I ever saw all the way through in an enclosed theater. My dad and I got ice cream afterwards, too, which was really nice.

My love of the film continued for at least a year and change, and it was one of my top-10 interstellar destinations I wanted to reach. I thought it just seemed like such a lovely place! Who wouldn't want to be somewhere where everything is bioluminescent?
Not only that, but by being a Na'vi, you get:
- a free, telepathically joined horse
- a free, telepathically joined dragon
- barbecue shrimp every night, except for the nights where you get venison.
- a free hammock/sleeping bag combo that you get to by stairway and ladder, like a treehouse version of the bunk bed your parents won't spring for.
- your own tail. And not an ugly vestigial tail, a long sleek cat-dragon tail, with a beautiful plume!
- being able to be in a simultaneous library AND chatroom with anyone you want to talk to, ever (if they want to talk to you), while hiking. This way, your mom would never get on your case about spending all your free time on fanfiction.net
- a tiny pet dragon (if you so wish, and who wouldn't?!)
- to only need to wear the most sensible of clothing: jewelry, weapons, a sports bra if you need it, and pockets. No pants, just pockets. And maybe a robe, if you're feeling fancy.

I want to get some editing software and make a fan edit of this thing, because The Essex Serpent has a perfectly good two-and-a-half hour (or less!) film in it, but it's padded to all ends. Not in the "MST3K" type of padding, where every shot is taken slightly longer than it needs to be, dull, ham-faced men dully repeat everything they can, and stock footage is added on to fill in where that last can't. Instead, it's the "prestige drama" type of padding, where plots are added on for the sake of adding on plots, and absolutely no more than two people can talk to each other at once, meaning that any significant news can be stretched to two hours.

The show is set in the 1860's, but the hair/costumes/dialogue is all over the place. More than Midsommar, it feels like a natural outgrowth of 1970's folk horror/Hammer horror, where historical accuracy takes a backseat to:
- whatever "old timey" costumes the production had on hand that week
- affording one actual star
Which means that you end up with films like The Blood on Satan's Claw, where one of the main characters, a peasant boy of the 18th century, has a perm. In that same vein, I'm enjoying the trend of increasingly colorblind casting in historical dramas as well. Like "we need a stuffy, old-timer politician", and "we need a medical student who's good-hearted, but a bit of a dandy" are played by people of color for no more reason than that the actors showed up and fit the part.

Speaking of parts, I don't like Tom Hiddleston's character as much as I wanted to. He just sounds and acts way too Eton, for a story set in the sticks. He can be a lot louder and weirder, but he isn't, here -- which means I'm left baffled at why his character is where he is.