p e n g u i n d e v i l

So I finally watched my first Michael Powell film, Peeping Tom. Well, what can I say but “mmmm.. yes, very nice, very nice indeed.” Peeping Tom seems to have virtually ended Powell’s film career, sadly because it is a wonderful film about a not-so wonderful chap. Mark Lewis is an awkward fellow, he is a mild-mannered, creepy and shy film crew member by day and a creepy and lethal photographer of racy images by night. He is well played by Carl Boehm, though it did take me a while to get used to him, the character came across as a bit too awkward at the beginning but then it started to work for me and I actually started to like the guy.

Mark goes nowhere without his camera, and he lets no one see the “documentary” that he is making. You see, he was raised as almost a test subject by his psychologist father (who studied fear in children) so he is himself fixated on recording (with film) peoples ultimate fear. Of course, to get his models to react correctly, there are some unsavory lines he must cross. It is an interesting film, not so much a slasher (no blood or gore to speak of, but then, it was 1960) as it is a mild-Hitchcockian thriller about obsession. Boehm could well be a prototype for a Hitchcock character and the storyline wouldn’t be too out of place there either.

It is a beautiful film, nicely shot, richly colored and the sets are pleasantly designed. The story is intriguing and “our hero” manages to seem innocent and sympathetic. Really just a great, fun and dramatic film.

Also on the disc, there is an interesting documentary “A Very British Hitchcock” that is pretty interesting and also covers the connection between the film and 84 Charing Cross Road.

look who’s watching
first, you take the camera like this…
so many layers Okay then, well, we watched The Hills Have Eyes remake. I have mixed feelings about this one. Of course, as a general rule I am opposed to remakes, but this one is actually pretty good and entertaining. There is a lot of blood and some great and in your face gore scenes and make-up effects. In terms of the story, a lot of it pretty much just follows the original along and it’s brought to you by the folks who made Haute Tension. That all sounds good… What is the problem? Well, the problems revolve around what’s been added…It includes a bunch of political/historical exposition that I don’t remember being in the first one. It’s done to such an extent that instead of fleshing the story out it seems irrelevant and heavy-handed yet makes it weaker and harder to buy into.A big Hollywood budget that turns it away from seemingly like the experience of watching something happen to the experience of watching a movie about something happening. As a long time fan of the classic 70’s films, I feel that their low budget and low production values, instead of making them seem cheesy, made them seem genuine… Like you were witness to the events. Here the actors looked like they just stepped out of their trailers after long hours of having make-up applied. In a movie like this one, Hollywood budgets don’t drag me in, they push me away.

Finally, it felt like it was The Hills Have Eyes shot by the Haute Tension people with some Saw like dumb scenes, irritating cuts and out of place obnoxious music thrown in for good measure. Which I guess it was. All in all, if you don’t plan on or haven’t seen the 1977 original, you may as well watch this. But personally, I’d go for the real deal. Or watch them both.

Finally I found a solution to a problem I have been having… Getting songs played on my iPod to scrobble to Last.fm. Well I found a program that, though it is still in beta, works quite well. It is scrobblepod. So if you have the silly Last.fm habit and are an iPod user…

Now if only I could get iTunes to stop crashing…