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

After a brief trip through the back-yard to retrieve some Izze as part of my “rummy-up” this evening, I got to witness some of that which makes me love this place soo… The nearly always light (or not-so-light) raining out there. It makes me feel oh-so-cozy. If only we still had a fireplace…

But now, on to subjects regarding the modern home’s fireplace…

As an addendum to last week, maybe I need to rethink some things. I had forgotten that the Thickets do a House of Clocks song. Hearing that after watching the movie made me decide that maybe I should keep it after all. I think maybe I judge some of these horrors too harshly (either that or I will endlessly justify keeping any ol’ dvd). So we’ll see, I may end up pulling more things out of the toss-pile.. Who knows… For more words on this sickness, here is a nice article at Video WatchBlog.

Anyway, on to this week. I finally decided, after break of over a year, to try and finish my beloved Adventures of Tintin set. The next in line was Destination moon… Though, odd as it may seem, for it is a book that I am fond of, I find this one rather boring as an episode. Sadly, that’s only as far as I got this time around. I will finish the last two discs soon. In terms of things to say? Well, they seem to look pretty much exactly like the books and I find them lots of fun. If you have a region-free (or like Asian boots) and like Tintin, I would oh-soo-highly suggest you pick these up!

Next in the endless series of great classics I are finally watching, I took in All About Eve. Yet, another wonderful film: great dialogue (chock full of wonderful one liners), I very much liked the critic character (well, maybe not the character, but the actor at least) and a great plot. Some parts of it (when one particular character was lying through her teeth) even made me uncomfortable. Eve’s pretentious accent I found very annoying, for someone who wasn’t intended to seem pretentious. The film carried lots of nice twists very well. All around a very fine film. Also, it was nice to see Marilyn in an early role, not yet the scene overwhelming star she became, just Marilyn Monroe grand in her gloriously silly way, acting the young starlet we all love to remember her fondly as. Classic and a highly recommended film.

This week, I also actually went out to a theater and watched a movie! Night Watch. The old “not quite what I expected” rang true here, but I found it very entertaining. It was very enjoyable to look at and had lots of action and crazy CGI all around the place. The lead character was a bit of a bore but the movie was a lot of fun with vampires and blood drinking and medieval knights. I hear that this version is 20 minutes shorter than the original russian cut (though I’m not convinced that’s true) and that the new subtitles change the story a bit, so I hope (quite futilely, I imagine) that there will be a DVD with both versions on it. But if you have any interest in CGI violence, comic-book style films, I would highly suggest checking this one out.

And since Brian hadn’t seen it, we watched Vertigo. One of those movies that I could easily watch once or twice a year without tiring of it in the slightest and one of the three greatest Hitchcock films in my mind. The story never weakens with time, following the treachery and decline is always a great pleasure to watch, wonderfully filmed (of course) with great, well-aged, but still wonderful, effects and a great cast! The story is captivating and a nice bit twisted as the films goes on (yes, not just twisting, but twisted).

vertigo 1:16:34

Last night we watched Vanity Fair. I suppose it was fine. I am still getting adjusted to these English period dramas that we’ve been seeing lately since I’ve seen very few prior to these days. Of the ones I’ve taken in (mainly BBC related Dickens and Austen), this one easily seems the least of the lot. Strangely though, it seems that the source material could have been very strong, but a minimum of 45 minutes must have been cut out, throughout the whole film, it felt as if character and story building scenes had been removed and the story moved to fast to be a story… It was more just like speed reading through it. Too bad though because the story seemed strong and the characters were good, it made me feel compelled to either read the book or watch the earlier film. I’m not to sure of the casting either, but it was hard to tell with how undeveloped the story was (this, of course, doesn’t count Hoskins, he is always a pleasure to see… If only he always used his east accent…). I looked through the special features to watch the deleted scenes, again they seemed a weird batch of scenes, they wouldn’t have helped the film much. One can only hope that there are more deleted scenes lying about somewhere. Anyway, it was fine but it was a bit flat and rushed and that made it a bit hard to get absorbed into.

A Room with a View. Which was absolutely nothing like what I had thought it was, this was another very good movie. I really liked the casting: Julian Sands was great (and not in the movie too much to make it too creepy), Day-Lewis was great as Cecil and of course, Denholm Elliot always makes me feel at home. I was surprised, in IMDB’ing this movie, to learn that he passed on 14 years ago! I feel like I see him in movies all the time and I always like what he brings to the characters he plays! So that was sad. But the movie was fun and the story was engaging.

And since I happen to be the in the process or re-reading the Lovecraft stories and since, this week, Stewart Gordon’s segment of the Masters of Horror, Dreams in the Witch-House was released on DVD, the timing was not to be ignored! I read the story and then watched the movie. Yes, always a precarious situation, but I dared and lived! Well, it was alright…. I didn’t really like this Ezra Godden fellow in Dagon and I’m still not taken with him here. Though more on my mind was waiting to see what happened with things that I had just read… As with all of Gordon’s Lovecraft films, or at least the 4 that come to mind, he throws in the “nude girl and/or love interest” aspect… Of course, I am not opposed to such things in films but face it, Lovecraft didn’t really tend to utilize lady characters in his writings, being a sort of Victorian men’s adventure/horror story kind of thing, so sometimes the story has to be changed around a bit to get this stuff in. It seemed very evident in this film, a little too evident throwing in the girl whenever he wished. More bothersome though is that the story itself is so visually heady (as are most HPL outings) that a film like this just doesn’t really do that aspect justice.

the dreams in the witch-house 0:31:59

Regardless, it was worth seeing, just to see…