 |
| By Chris Samnee |
 |
| By William Stout |
 |
| By M.W. Kaluta |
 |
| By Adam Hughes |
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Picture Perfect Special:
Princesses of Mars, Part One
Princesses of Mars, Part One
Friday, December 24, 2010
Picture Perfect Special: Christmas Visions
 |
| By Franklin Booth |
And to close it out, here are links to a couple of interesting Christmas picture posts at other blogs.
Meanwhile, over at Fantasy Ink, we get to see Christmas in Riverdale via some original cover art for Archie Comics. (Actually, there are a whole slew of neat Christmas-related posts there. Click here to see them all.)
I hope everyone reading this has a Merry Christmas and I hope you all have a nice, relaxing time with love ones, family, and friends.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Picture Perfect Wednesday:
Christmas Visitor for Naughty Kids
Christmas Visitor for Naughty Kids
In 1925, a young Joan Crawford posed for this Christmas-themed publicity photo. It doesn't have the playful air these things usually have. I can't quite decide whether she looks unhappy, stern, or angry. I imagine they were going for seductive, but Crawford didn't manage to project that.
So, what is going on in the photo?
For me, this picture portrays the elf who visits really naughty kids on Christmas Eve and takes gifts they got from people other than Santa and either leaves coal or broken toys in their place.
(What? You thought I was going somewhere else?)
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Greed, lust, love, and justice have 'Impact'
Impact (1949)
Starring: Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Helen Walker, Charles Coburn, Anna May Wong, and Tony Barrett
Director: Arthur Lubin
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars
After his gold-digging wife (Walker) and her sleazy lover (Barrett) fail in their attempt to murder him, through-and-through nice-guy and self-made business tycoon Walter Williams (Donlevy) hides out and recovers in a small Idaho town as he reads newspapers accounts of his wife's ongoing trail for his murder. Although his heart is full of hunger for revenge--a revenge he hopes to see delivered when his wife is executed for supposedly murdering him--his growing romance with the widowed owner of a gas station and car repair shop (Raines) who hired him as a mechanic, causes his inherently good side to reassert itself and he returns to San Francisco to clear his wife and set the facts straight. But things don't go quite as he had planned....
"Impact" is an interesting and unpredictable film from beginning to end with talented actors portraying interesting characters as they deliver sharply written dialogue and move through a story that features a number of film noir and mystery genre standards being deployed in unexpected ways. The creators of this film even managed to do successfully what so many try and fail at: Just when you think the film is about to be over--when it reaches the point where many lesser films would be over--things instead get really bad for our poor hero and the film changes gears and keeps going for another 15-20 minutes. More often than not, when filmmakers do this, my reaction is, "Oh, for God's sake... you just blew the perfect ending and now you're wasting my time with unnecessary crap and undermining your movie." But not this time.
"Impact" stars in a film-noirish vein, with viewers quickly realizing that both Fate and his evil bitch of a wife are conspiring to make the life of Brian Donlevy's character--a man who is no-nonsense and gruff in his business dealings but who is endlessly kind and compassionate to his friends and loved ones--very unpleasant. But after the attempted murder, the film breaks away from that tone and instead places Donlevy's character in a peaceful town full of nice people. Instead of going darker and following Walter Williams on a revenge spree, it instead lightens up a bit... even if there is still quite a bit of darkness in the sense that Williams is passively watching the justice system move his wife ever-closer to execution for a murder she didn't manage to pull off. But even as he nurses his hatred, the kindness of the characters around him eventually draws out his true, fundamentally good nature. And once Williams reveals to the authorities that he is not dead, the film enters yet a third mode, as it becomes a courtroom drama, with a little bit of film noir coloring for good measure.
The genre-mashing and shifts in tone that go on in this film could well have doomed it, especially the final portion. It's a testament to the skill of the writers, the director, and the actors that the audience is drawn deeper into the story and becomes more eager to see how it will all turn out instead of being put off.
Naturally, the actors have a great deal to do with the success of a film, and "Impact" is no exception; a bad actor can ruin the most well-developed character and spoil the most finely crafted lines.
In this film we're treated to Brian Donlevy playing a sensitive male before they were in vogue... and he even has a scene where he cries without seeming wimpy or laughable. I'm not able at the moment to think of another Guy Moment quite as heartbreaking as the ragged sob that issues forth from Walter Williams when the realization that the person he loves above all else was behind the violent attempt on his life; it's made even greater by the fact that Donlevy was such a tough character, both in his screen roles and in real life. An extension of the unexpected depth of Donlevy's character is the relationship that develops between him and the widow played by Ella Raines. It's a mature relationship, between two mature people that have both loved and lost and who realize that it's time to give love and life a second chance. It's the sort of relationship that any adult should hope to be in, as well as the kind of relationship that isn't often portrayed in movies. Raines' performance strikes the exact right balance between tough self-reliance and vulnerability to make her character the ideal match for Donlevy's Williams.
Another great performance comes from Helen Walker, Williams' despicable wife. For the majority of the film, she is a run-of-the-mill femme fatale that the audience is eagerly waiting to be served her just rewards, but in the scene where she is confronted by her supposedly dead husband, Walker conveys more with body language and facial expression than pages of dialogue would be able to do. In that scene, Walker shows her character's emotions going from surprise, to panic, to defeat, to the realization that she she can still take advantage of her husband's kind heart to save herself and destroy him even now, with barely an uttered word. She also manages to fully convey the depths of evil within the woman. It's a scene that clearly shows what a tragedy it is for movie lovers that she never achieved the leading lady status that she would have been more than capable of handling.
"Impact" is one of hundreds of movies from the 1930s and 1940s that were in danger of slipping into oblivion but was brought to the public again with the advent of the digital age and the DVD. It's a film that any lover of classic mysteries needs to check out, and both sources for it feature an excellent, crystal-clear print. (I rarely bother to comment on the quality of these public domain films on DVD, but this one was so well preserved that it's worth noting.)
(Trivia: Brian Donlevy lied about his age and joined the U.S. Army at 14. He also loved to write poetry. When he retired from acting, he turned to short story writing.)
Starring: Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Helen Walker, Charles Coburn, Anna May Wong, and Tony Barrett
Director: Arthur Lubin
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars
After his gold-digging wife (Walker) and her sleazy lover (Barrett) fail in their attempt to murder him, through-and-through nice-guy and self-made business tycoon Walter Williams (Donlevy) hides out and recovers in a small Idaho town as he reads newspapers accounts of his wife's ongoing trail for his murder. Although his heart is full of hunger for revenge--a revenge he hopes to see delivered when his wife is executed for supposedly murdering him--his growing romance with the widowed owner of a gas station and car repair shop (Raines) who hired him as a mechanic, causes his inherently good side to reassert itself and he returns to San Francisco to clear his wife and set the facts straight. But things don't go quite as he had planned....
"Impact" is an interesting and unpredictable film from beginning to end with talented actors portraying interesting characters as they deliver sharply written dialogue and move through a story that features a number of film noir and mystery genre standards being deployed in unexpected ways. The creators of this film even managed to do successfully what so many try and fail at: Just when you think the film is about to be over--when it reaches the point where many lesser films would be over--things instead get really bad for our poor hero and the film changes gears and keeps going for another 15-20 minutes. More often than not, when filmmakers do this, my reaction is, "Oh, for God's sake... you just blew the perfect ending and now you're wasting my time with unnecessary crap and undermining your movie." But not this time.
"Impact" stars in a film-noirish vein, with viewers quickly realizing that both Fate and his evil bitch of a wife are conspiring to make the life of Brian Donlevy's character--a man who is no-nonsense and gruff in his business dealings but who is endlessly kind and compassionate to his friends and loved ones--very unpleasant. But after the attempted murder, the film breaks away from that tone and instead places Donlevy's character in a peaceful town full of nice people. Instead of going darker and following Walter Williams on a revenge spree, it instead lightens up a bit... even if there is still quite a bit of darkness in the sense that Williams is passively watching the justice system move his wife ever-closer to execution for a murder she didn't manage to pull off. But even as he nurses his hatred, the kindness of the characters around him eventually draws out his true, fundamentally good nature. And once Williams reveals to the authorities that he is not dead, the film enters yet a third mode, as it becomes a courtroom drama, with a little bit of film noir coloring for good measure.
The genre-mashing and shifts in tone that go on in this film could well have doomed it, especially the final portion. It's a testament to the skill of the writers, the director, and the actors that the audience is drawn deeper into the story and becomes more eager to see how it will all turn out instead of being put off.
Naturally, the actors have a great deal to do with the success of a film, and "Impact" is no exception; a bad actor can ruin the most well-developed character and spoil the most finely crafted lines.
In this film we're treated to Brian Donlevy playing a sensitive male before they were in vogue... and he even has a scene where he cries without seeming wimpy or laughable. I'm not able at the moment to think of another Guy Moment quite as heartbreaking as the ragged sob that issues forth from Walter Williams when the realization that the person he loves above all else was behind the violent attempt on his life; it's made even greater by the fact that Donlevy was such a tough character, both in his screen roles and in real life. An extension of the unexpected depth of Donlevy's character is the relationship that develops between him and the widow played by Ella Raines. It's a mature relationship, between two mature people that have both loved and lost and who realize that it's time to give love and life a second chance. It's the sort of relationship that any adult should hope to be in, as well as the kind of relationship that isn't often portrayed in movies. Raines' performance strikes the exact right balance between tough self-reliance and vulnerability to make her character the ideal match for Donlevy's Williams.
Another great performance comes from Helen Walker, Williams' despicable wife. For the majority of the film, she is a run-of-the-mill femme fatale that the audience is eagerly waiting to be served her just rewards, but in the scene where she is confronted by her supposedly dead husband, Walker conveys more with body language and facial expression than pages of dialogue would be able to do. In that scene, Walker shows her character's emotions going from surprise, to panic, to defeat, to the realization that she she can still take advantage of her husband's kind heart to save herself and destroy him even now, with barely an uttered word. She also manages to fully convey the depths of evil within the woman. It's a scene that clearly shows what a tragedy it is for movie lovers that she never achieved the leading lady status that she would have been more than capable of handling.
"Impact" is one of hundreds of movies from the 1930s and 1940s that were in danger of slipping into oblivion but was brought to the public again with the advent of the digital age and the DVD. It's a film that any lover of classic mysteries needs to check out, and both sources for it feature an excellent, crystal-clear print. (I rarely bother to comment on the quality of these public domain films on DVD, but this one was so well preserved that it's worth noting.)
(Trivia: Brian Donlevy lied about his age and joined the U.S. Army at 14. He also loved to write poetry. When he retired from acting, he turned to short story writing.)
Monday, December 20, 2010
Mohammed Monday:
The Prophet's Christmas Message
The Prophet's Christmas Message
Merry Christmas... Mo-Mo-Mo!
(May pecan pie be upon him.)
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Picture Perfect Wednesday:
Ten Days to Christmas!
Ten Days to Christmas!
Janet Leigh reminds everyone that you have ten days to get Christmas cards and presents to the people you love (or even me, your kind host).
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
'The Moth' is not worth catching
The Moth (1934)
Starring: Sally O'Neil, Paul Page, Wilfred Lucas, Rae Dagget, Fred Kelsey, and Duncan Renaldo
Director: Fred C. Newmeyer
Rating: Four of Ten Stars
Wild-child heiress Diane Wyman (O'Neil) loses her fortune when her guardian (Lucas) invokes a morality clause in her father's will following one media scandal too many. The lecherous old man helped engineered the scandal, hoping to force her completely under his power, but she runs off to New Orleans, where she naively falls in with a pair of jewel thieves (Dagget and Renaldo). The thieves pretend to be her friends, but they are just setting her up to take the fall for their latest heist and make a detective who has pursued them from New York that the disgraced socialite is actually the mysterious jewel thief known as "The Moth." Will George (Page), the handsome engineer who has become infatuated with her, manage to save Diane from the many sinister forces arrayed against her?
"The Moth" is an almost inappropriately light-hearted movie, given the fairly vile characters that are set to destroy the naive young woman who is its focal character, be it the dirty old man who is supposed to be looking out for her best interests but really just wants to possess her; or the cold-hearted thieves, who take advantage of her to cover their escape. Of course, given that it's so sloppily written movie that relies on coincidence after coincidence to keep the plot going, fails to be funny in most places where it's supposed to be, and the straight-forwardness of the plot makes the build-up of suspense nearly non-existent, it's hard to tell if its creators failed to make a drama or created one of the least funny comedies ever made.
The film is especially unfunny in the sense that the disgusting character who is Diane's guardian is supposed to be comic relief, and the screen writers and director blow both their key moments of suspense--when it looks like Diane is going to be caught with the stolen jewels, and when one of the thieves wants to turn to murder to insure his get-away--by introducing the threats and disposing of them before the audience even has time to grow concerned about them. It's rare to find a movie as brief as this one where the pacing is off, but that is the major flaw here.
Another flaw is the directing and the acting, both of which were more suitable to the silent movies where the director and much of the cast got their starts. While it's easy to see why the very pretty Sally O'Neil was a big star, it's equally easy to understand why she couldn't make a successful transition to the talkies. While she had charisma and beauty, she had an acting style more suitable for theatre or the always larger-than-life pantomimes needed to convey action and emotion in silent films. By 1937, her screen career was over, and O'Neil returned to theatre where her career had started.
Despite my criticism of her performance, O'Neil and her character of Diane Wyman are the only thing that makes this movie worth watching. She is by far the most interesting performer in the film, and even the most cynical viewer will want this likable, if none-to-bright, character to somehow recognize that the only person around who cares at all for her well-being is George, the one person she keeps pushing away and abusing.
Still, this is not a movie that's really worth seeking out. It's one of those films that's been from oblivion and once again put in front of the public by the advent of digital media and the relative ease of manufacturing DVDs, but unlike so many hidden treasures found in the Alpha Video catalogue, I doubt anyone would have missed "The Moth" had vanished forever. (Although I must congratulate the art department at Alpha Video for coming up with a cover design far more interesting than the movie; it was the cover alone that prompted me to buy the disc. It's got nothing at all to do with the movie, but it's pretty cool... almost like the days of the exploitation films where the crappier the movie, the more exciting the poster. The Roger Corman Marketing Team Spirit is alive and well in DVD Land!)
Starring: Sally O'Neil, Paul Page, Wilfred Lucas, Rae Dagget, Fred Kelsey, and Duncan Renaldo
Director: Fred C. Newmeyer
Rating: Four of Ten Stars
 |
"The Moth" is an almost inappropriately light-hearted movie, given the fairly vile characters that are set to destroy the naive young woman who is its focal character, be it the dirty old man who is supposed to be looking out for her best interests but really just wants to possess her; or the cold-hearted thieves, who take advantage of her to cover their escape. Of course, given that it's so sloppily written movie that relies on coincidence after coincidence to keep the plot going, fails to be funny in most places where it's supposed to be, and the straight-forwardness of the plot makes the build-up of suspense nearly non-existent, it's hard to tell if its creators failed to make a drama or created one of the least funny comedies ever made.
The film is especially unfunny in the sense that the disgusting character who is Diane's guardian is supposed to be comic relief, and the screen writers and director blow both their key moments of suspense--when it looks like Diane is going to be caught with the stolen jewels, and when one of the thieves wants to turn to murder to insure his get-away--by introducing the threats and disposing of them before the audience even has time to grow concerned about them. It's rare to find a movie as brief as this one where the pacing is off, but that is the major flaw here.
Another flaw is the directing and the acting, both of which were more suitable to the silent movies where the director and much of the cast got their starts. While it's easy to see why the very pretty Sally O'Neil was a big star, it's equally easy to understand why she couldn't make a successful transition to the talkies. While she had charisma and beauty, she had an acting style more suitable for theatre or the always larger-than-life pantomimes needed to convey action and emotion in silent films. By 1937, her screen career was over, and O'Neil returned to theatre where her career had started.
Despite my criticism of her performance, O'Neil and her character of Diane Wyman are the only thing that makes this movie worth watching. She is by far the most interesting performer in the film, and even the most cynical viewer will want this likable, if none-to-bright, character to somehow recognize that the only person around who cares at all for her well-being is George, the one person she keeps pushing away and abusing.
Still, this is not a movie that's really worth seeking out. It's one of those films that's been from oblivion and once again put in front of the public by the advent of digital media and the relative ease of manufacturing DVDs, but unlike so many hidden treasures found in the Alpha Video catalogue, I doubt anyone would have missed "The Moth" had vanished forever. (Although I must congratulate the art department at Alpha Video for coming up with a cover design far more interesting than the movie; it was the cover alone that prompted me to buy the disc. It's got nothing at all to do with the movie, but it's pretty cool... almost like the days of the exploitation films where the crappier the movie, the more exciting the poster. The Roger Corman Marketing Team Spirit is alive and well in DVD Land!)Monday, December 13, 2010
Mohammad Monday: Correcting Islam's Image
Here's another sampling of the long-running strip "Jesus and Mo". I think there are "holy men" out there once again saying exactly what Mo is reporting, given the adherent of the Islamic Death Cult who failed at his attempted mass-murder in Stockholm this weekend.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
.jpg)
