Imaginary time capsule

Some people have a type of character they're always drawn to, you know? Like they watch a movie or read a book and they come across this character and he/she/it ticks off all the right boxes.

One of mine: The villain's second in command. A bit foppish, a bit vain, often a little (or a lot) less clever than their boss, but always ready to do some backstabbing if there's something in it for them. The moment a character like that gets introduced I know I'm gonna have a good time.

I'd decided it was high time for me to be exposed to The Prisoner of Zenda. All I knew was it featured fencing and was an extremely influential story. I decided to go for the 1937 movie because it had Raymond Massey as Black Michael and I wanted to finally see a Ronald Colman movie. And it was great fun, and then Douglas Fairbanks Jr. slinked onto the scene as Count Rupert.

I can't believe I've been avoiding Fairbanks Jr. just because I don't like his father's movies very much. That was so dumb of me.


The rest of the movie, enjoyable as it was, became secondary. Rupert primly smoking cigarettes, delivering threats with heavy-lidded eyes, cocking his hat, admiring himself in the mirror, wearing very tight trousers. He had more costume changes than the heroine, for goodness' sake. He didn't leave a single box unticked. Now I don't know if I want to watch more Fairbanks Jr. movies or just keep rewatching this one.

I went to a screening of Withnail and I at the Cinematheque in Oslo last night. I know I keep saying I'll stop going to screenings of films I own on DVD, but this was subtitled and there are parts of the film where the mumbling/accents/sound design makes the dialogue incomprehensible to me.

It's also been a few years since I saw the film in its entirety. When I saw the collection of "party hard" college boys who'd showed up to the screening I was thinking maybe I'd outgrown the film and would just find it childish and dumb. But no. It's still hilarious, and has so many laugh-out-loud moments for me you could hear me laughing over the din of the audience. The final sequence is equally heart-breaking, and every scene in the movie adds a facet to Withnail and Marwood's relationship. It's a great film.

Except for Monty.

God, that part has always bothered me intensely. When I first saw the movie as a teenager I felt really conflicted about liking the film at all. The "depraved homosexual" element is just so vile. These days I've come more to terms with how the majority of entertainment has more or less problematic elements, and I'm allowed to like things -- have guilty pleasures, even -- in spite of them, if I acknowledge that they're there. (No "But I like the film so it's not problematic!")

( stuff )

On a lighter note; I remember when as a teenager I was just dying about Paul McGann's long curly hair and Renaissance angel looks in W&I. Now at 27 I was thinking "He's good looking, but a very predictable kind of good looking. ...Did Richard E. Grant have that unusual and ethereal beauty the last time I watched this film?" (Seriously, what a fascinating face!)

I'm not entirely sure what brought it on, but I had this idea I'd watch all the big Robin Hood movies in order. And then, I dunno, compare them I guess.

So I've seen the 1922 Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, regarded as one of the first big business Hollwyood productions (a cast of thousands, humongous sets, and the first ever movie gala premiere); And a bloated, overlong melodrama it is too. Over two hours long, and Fairbanks spends more than half of it as plain ol' Earl of Huntingdon, knight to King Richard.

The entire first act of the film deals, oddly enough, with Richard thinking Robin (sorry, Huntingdon) spending all his time wrestling with his manfriends and shunning women is all a bit inappropriate, and he lays several plots to force Robin to like ladies. Then of course comes Marion and fixes Robin's homosexuality shyness.

Despite the film's length, the story is very pared down compared to, say, every single other Robin Hood film. Prince John is the primary villain, obviously. Sir Guy spends most of the movie in The Holy Lands, even after Robin leaves for home, and the Sheriff I forgot was even in the movie until he was mentioned in the climactic scene.

Most of the scenes where Robin comes head-to-head with authority reads more like Keystone Cops gags than tense melodrama, except once in a while Robin stops to murder one of his pursuers and immediately throws his head back and laughs like the cold-blooded motherfucker he is.

I'm probably being too hard on the film. It's 1922, that's pretty damn early. In any case it had some absolutely beautiful posters:

My failure to see the appeal of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. had me thinking maybe swashbuckling movies weren't as good in the silent film days as they would get in the Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn era.

But no more.

See, I used to think John Barrymore was exclusively a talkies (and stage) actor, with his sing-songy delivery and sonorous voice. Not the case, as I found out.

In talkies, he's pretty entertaining. In silent films he's an absolute delight -- agile, flamboyant, sexy, and with one of the best-looking noses I've ever seen captured on film (they didn't call him The Great Profile for nothing).

Tonight I watched Don Juan from 1926 and apart from being a surprisingly sophisticated film, you cannot convince me this wasn't made primarily for a female demographic. From the moment Barrymore first appears as the Don exiting his bedroom, post-coitus and half undressed, the camera doesn't so much capture him as suggestively linger on his body. There were no women in the movie as revealingly dressed as Mr. Barrymore. What a silhouette!


A lot of pre-Code movies strike me as sort of lewd (and very male gaze-y), but this was an elegantly suggestive movie even though it mostly centered around sex.

(Another silent Barrymore vehicle I've seen, The Beloved Rogue, features Conrad Veidt in his first Hollywood movie, and is hands-down the most homoerotic silent movie I've ever seen. You just won't believe how much pawing, caressing and embracing those two get up to in between Barrymore's fencing sequences.)

Ah, swashbucklers. Proving that all you have to do is don some tights, swing on a chandelier and leap on a table, sword in hand, and I'll love you unconditionally (except Fairbanks).

Finally got around to watching Thor: The Dark World and oooooh that was fun! Definitely one of the stronger Marvel films to date, and superior to the IMHO kinda boring first Thor film (which, granted, had a wonderful final act). I'm so glad I got to watch it at the movie theatre, there's something magic about the audience reacting with spontaneous applause to Stellan Skarsgård not wearing trousers. I generally laughed harder at this film than I've done in a while. That quick little cameo by a certain member of the Avengers had the whole audience rolling in the aisles.

Also, God, so many delish men! Which is a thing Marvel movies tend to be so refreshingly upfront about (slow pan over Hemsworth's abs, the lighting and angles highlighting Hiddleston's cheekbones just so), so I'm going to be too. Just yum. When Idris Elba finally got to remove that clunky helmet I was all "Yessss".

And man, how great was Christopher Eccleston? I loved his character design too; To be honest the Dark Elf design was my favourite thing about the entire movie. Like this dude:


If I'm gonna criticize anything it's that it's like the movies have taken another step further into scifi cliché land. Laser guns that go pew pew. The space ships. I thought that was trite in The Avengers, it disappoints me even more in Thor's world which had this fun half fantasy, half scifi setting going on. And the movie didn't really waste any time explaining what all the science meant; It wasn't a dealbreaker, but I still like to have some concept of what I'm looking at (even if it's just explained by Skarsgård knocking two shoes together).

But all in all, a pretty good Marvel movie! (And don't worry, I'm definitely going pick it apart and look at the Norse mythology references in another entry -- it actually had some pretty obscure details in it).

I watched Safety Last! on the big screen, the one where Harold Lloyd dangles from the clock face over the city. To my shame, my knowledge of silent comedies up to this point encompass only Keaton and Chaplin (though to be fair I've watched a whole lot of them both), so it's hard not to compare Lloyd to them. So that's what I'll do.

The first thing that struck me about Lloyd is how ordinary he looks. He doesn't have Chaplin's greasepaint or Keaton's unique face; I'd say Lloyd is more handsome than funny-looking -- not handsome enough to base his schtick on that, sure (and I have to say I think both Keaton and Chaplin were quite handsome too), but quite attractive in his own right. With the makeup just accentuating his eyebrows and lips, and only a pair of glasses to hide behind his character (which I've learned is referred to as simply "Glasses") really looks like an everyday guy.


And I get that feeling from his acting too, in a way. To me Lloyd seems way less theatrical than C. and K., he's a bit more low-key, he has a little more subtlety in this double-takes in a way that feels almost modern. I was half-expecting to find he'd avoided vaudeville altogether and gone straight into movies (not the case, as I found out), but I feel I can tell he didn't grow up in vaudeville like C. and K. did. Lloyd's subtleties are pretty intriguing for such an early movie, but they sometimes come at the cost of a good punchline.

The comedy falls somewhere between Chaplin and Keaton for me -- not as sentimental and childlike as Chaplin, not as dark or physical as Keaton. Some good gags, but fairly forgettable (though that monkey crawl through the department store had me in stitches). It's the climb that's the lynchpin of the movie, and the audience and I gasped in turn -- and then I learn there were doubles involved. Disappointing.

See, that's sort of my take on Lloyd. A good actor but not brimming with talent like Chaplin and Keaton -- they were also good comedic actors, but they picked up all these other little things for their entertainment value, and put them in their movies as little treats for the audience. Safety Last! is a fun movie, but it didn't offer any treats, and Lloyd didn't really leave me craving more.

I've spent the last hour trying to figure out which movie a half-forgotten scene came from. So frustrating.

Leslie Howard and the female lead are going to elope. It's a period picture, so they figure her elaborate gown is impractical in the eloping scheme of things, and he starts to undress her. But under the gown is an underskirt, and then another, and then another and another, and the underskirts just go on and on and on (I can perfectly hear his incredulous cry; "Another one?!"), and people are knocking on the door as Howard grows increasingly desperate and the pile of underskirts grows improbably high. It's hilarious.

I thought I'd found it in a 1933 movie called Berkeley Square. Leslie Howard in period costume, check. But then it wasn't.

But that's alright, because Berkeley Square was very memroable on its own: It's about a guy obsessed with history who travels back in time to the Civil War era (Howard plays an American, the oddness just goes on). At first I was less than charmed by the movie because I thought the main character was really unsympathetic (during a minuet he mumbles "Back where I come from people dance like the nig-" and then he checks himself), but then I came to realize the movie agrees with me. All the people from his own time finds him insufferable and creepy, and the Civil War folks find him scary and creepy.

It was a very odd movie. It was remade in 1951 as a Tyrone Power vehicle titled The House in the Square, or: I'll Never Forget You. Might have to give that a watch some day.

ETA: I found out what movie that scene was from! I had the correct year, anyway: The 1933 film Secrets, with Mary Pickford. Even found the first part of the scene on YouTube.

I went to the movies and saw Les Misérables with my mum.

I've mentioned it before, I'm a recovering Les Mis obsessive (both book and musical). So when friends who've never cared one jot about musicals suddenly got obsessive about this one movie I was puzzled. Was it because the performances in it were so mind blowing, or just because the musical is so darn good?

( This gon' get wordy )

So when the DVD comes, yeah I guess I'll have to splurge on it, even if there were elements that annoyed me to hell and back. In the meantime, mum has said we need to watch "the real one" (the tenth anniversary concert, you can't beat that Dream Cast) soon, and trying to remember the names of the ABC students made me realize it's high-time I reread the book (How many times have it been now? I stopped counting after the fourth read-through).

I couldn't access LJ on New Year's Eve to post my 2012 movie list, and then I subsequently forgot. But here it is, an actual internet page dedicated to it this time:

MOVIES 2012

That's 189 movies, not counting the rewatches. That's more than previous years', probably because I haven't had a very good year and among the multitude of reasons why I love movies, escapism ranks pretty highly.

There have been, as usual, some recurring names and themes among the movies I've seen. Some intended (Spencer Tracy, George Sanders, Bollywood, Busby Berkeley, Herbert Marshall) and some surprises (William Bendix sure popped up a lot somehow!).

My absolute favourite movie this year was a romantic comedy from 1932, Trouble in Paradise. Usually romantic comedies and love triangles are not my thing, but the story of a gentleman thief living in sin with a female confidence trickster (they first meet when they try to scam each other, thinking each other rich) who then falls in love with his next mark is just so absolutely delightful and I'm in love with all the characters. It's so wonderfully, elegantly risqué as well, without being crude.

Anyway, it was fun fiddling about with the HTML and posters for this year's list. I used Imgur to host the images, which means the poster images will eventually break - but it works for now.

You might know that Donald Duck is big business in Norway. There's the hugely successful weekly comic release Donald Duck & Co. (which I and absolutely all my friends used to read slavishly as kids), and lately I've noticed another magazine in the shelves, the bimonthly Donald Ekstra. The former I stopped reading when I reached the age of twelve or so, and the latter I've now began reading at the age of twenty-five. Hah.

It's partly a nostalgia thing - Donald Ekstra reprints the best Duckverse stories I remember from my childhood: Those by Don Rosa. And even when the stories are unfamiliar they're likely to hit me right in the nostalgia as well. Like 'The Three Caballeros Ride Again' - I can't remember having read it when it was new but I sure as hell remember The Three Caballeros (Donald, the Brazilian parrot José Carioca and the Mexican rooster Panchito) from the 1940 Disney films.

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I've spent the day rewatching the movies (Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros and Blame It on the Samba). They're just as surreal as I remember them. Whoever joked about them representing Donald Duck's "lost weekend" were right. There's partying, women, and, uh, substance abuse perhaps? (That last one made a lasting impression on me as a child for some reason.)

Rewatching them as an adult I understand more about the politics that went into them (trying to improve relations with South America), but I'm still impressed with 1940s Disney going overseas to hire talent - even the voice actors are Brazilian and Mexican, instead of North Americans doing bad accents.

Huh, to think I'd mostly forgotten about all this!