From: psperson@old.netcom.invalid
On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 05:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
wrote:
>Summer hits!
>
>In addition to summer things, which is among the reasons I'm posting this
late, there was a lot more than DVDs to watch. Paramount unexpectedly put
season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds up for free for the month on
Youtube, and all the new
classic movies on TV caught up to me; I've been using a new method for
watching and deleting from the DVR, such that when it filled up about the
middle of the month (about 100 movies) I had the oldest thirty-some watched
and could be deleted and about
half the next thirty-some watched -- ideally it would have been every other
one, so I could watch one and delete two -- still working my way going
alternately between the oldest and the newest.
>
>Working through my DVD collection, I watched:
>
>The Ape (1940) A Monogram Picture starring Karloff as a mad scientist -- as
he's a kindly old man, let's call him unconventional -- seeking a cure for a
paralyzing disease using human spinal fluid. Meanwhile, a carnival ape has
killed its abusive
owner and escaped. This was a rewatch from May, because when we came to the
part that tied the two plots together, I was lost. Had I fallen asleep? (I
still have 1953's "House of Wax" to rewatch after falling asleep, should have
done that closer to
having first seen it, now I'll probably have to go through the whole movie
again.) No, the first connection of the plots is given mostly by
implication. As most of the other plot points are given by one character or
another stepping forward to state
them in short, declarative sentences, no wonder I missed it. I wonder if the
writers were reaching for something more sophisticated than they were able to
pull off, or whether there was some last-minute censorship on the scene that
would have
>established this. As this is a Public Domain film, it's possible that the
parts of the movie that would have made it clearer to me were lost.
>
>Pardon My Sarong (1942) The four boxsets of Universal's Abbott & Costello
movies are one line in my inventory, so dealer's choice, and I hadn't seen
this before. Someone has doubtless traced the romantic subplots in this
series as it atrophied from A&
C being comic relief in "One Night in the Tropics" to it essential being
-what?- "plot relief?" to the comedy the audience came to see. Here we take a
major part of the running time to get to the tropical island of the theme, as
we pause each step for a
comedy setpiece. This is probably the only A&C I haven't yetseen that can
sidestream into sf, as nogoodniks on the island are pulling the god gambit
with a volcano.
>
>The Skin Game (1931) Alfred "The Master of Suspense" Hitchcock got his
Public Domain movies thrown into a horror megapack. No, the title is not some
predecessor to "Psycho." It's not a horror or suspense, or even mystery,
although there are some
family secrets, and a tense auction scene. This is just a note.
I've always taken it to be about the decline of the Entitled Classes
and the rise of the Grubby Industrialists. JRRT would have been
rooting for the Entitled Classes.
Which may have made it (or the play it was based on) topical at the
time it was done.
>And that seems to be it.
>
>July is shaping up to be much the same, with activities and with cable
bringing me movies as fast as I can empty the DVR.
>August will be a theme month on TCM, "Summer Under the Stars" with each day
devoted to one star. I may have seen a lot of the major motion pictures they
might choose.
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
