Monday, December 30, 2013

Movie Monday: Holiday Affair

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Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey, and Gordon Gebert in Holiday Affair!
 
Every year around our house, we tend to watch nothing but Christmas movies from Thanksgiving through New Year's. We have a small contingent that we rotate through (Scrooged, Elf, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Bad Santa, White Christmas) but I was interested in finding some new ones to add to the mix, so we gave this one a try:
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Initially, it was the presence of Robert Mitchum in his prime that intrigued me the most. Sleepy-eyed tough guy Robert Mitchum in a Christmas movie? How would that even work?

Well, short answer: it kinda doesn't. After meeting our main character, single mom Connie (Janet Leigh) and her screechingly annoying son Timmy (Gordon Gebert), we discover Mitchum as Steve, a guy who...runs the toy counter in a department store:
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The idea of someone who looks and acts like Robert Mitchum working with children I thought so preposterous that I wondered where in his career did this movie arrive--maybe it was before his tough guy screen persona had been minted? More on that in a moment.

Anyway, this movie is basically a love triangle. Connie is a widow, but she has a gentleman suitor named Carl, played by the normally reliable Wendell Corey:
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This is a thankless role for Corey, since Carl is dull, dull, dull. Not that Corey was a particularly electrifying performer, but when used effectively (see: Rear Window, The Killer is Loose) he was a solid supporting player. But as an erstwhile leading man? Not so much.

Carl loves Connie, and seems to like Timmy well enough. Connie seems to love Carl, and hate the laconic, smart-ass Steve, but of course we all know what's going to happen. The film looks and feels like a TV drama of the time, except for a couple of visual flairs that director Don Hartman chose to employ, mostly I'm guessing just to keep the audience awake.

Case in point: after Steve gets a new tie from Connie for Xmas, he gives his old one to a seemingly homeless man in the park, which leads to a series of miscommunications ending with a police detective showing up to arrest Steve. This sequence is shot a bit like film noir, with the camera tracking the mysterious fedora-d guy from behind as he interrupts the holiday festivities:

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Following this is my favorite scene, which features the late, great Harry Morgan as the Police Lieutenant who wants to get to the bottom of how Steve ended up with a set of salt and pepper shakers:
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Morgan is lively and fun, playing off against Mitchum's in-your-face attitude, something he seemed constitutionally incapable of not doing when dealing with authority figures.

It all gets solved in the end, and of course Steve, Connie, and Timmy end up as a family, on a scene in a train that involves yet another neat little bit of special effects: the camera pans out of the train car featuring the actors, and in one unbroken shot pans out to a toy train set that kicked off the whole story in the first place:
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...The End!

As I mentioned earlier, I was curious why anyone would cast Mitchum in such an atypical role. It turns out this was his first film after his highly-publicized marijuana bust, so the studio was determined to soften his image a bit. They jammed him into this piece of romantic fluff, hoping people would forget the bad press.

Yet they still wanted to hedge their bets: here's one of the posters for the film, which looks just like the kind of film noirs that he was so famous for:
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(Speaking of posters, check out Leigh's sexy short shorts at the poster up top. She wears nothing so revealing in the movie--after all, this is Winter in New York!)

Watching Holiday Affair, it reminded me why Robert Mitchum was such a Hollywood legend. He is by far the best thing in the movie, giving his character a quirky specificity. Mitchum's line readings seem to be mocking all that's going on around, while fully being part of it at the same time. If this film had starred someone more bland, I think Holiday Affair would be forgotten entirely.

But at a crisp, inoffensive 87 minutes, Holiday Affair goes down easy, and is probably the perfect holiday movie to put on while you're baking cookies, wrapping presents, or putting up holiday decorations.


Monday, November 11, 2013

Movie Monday: Lost Horizon

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All Singing! All Dancing! All Eastern Mysticism! It's Lost Horizon!
 
James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon is one of my all-time favorite books, and the 1937 Frank Capra film adaptation is, IMO, an underrated mini-classic. So of course I was interested in other film versions of the story, of which there is only one other: the 1973 musical! Musical? Yes, Musical!
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Produced by Big Time ShowBiz Mogul Ross Hunter, the 1973 Lost Horizon musical was, and is, one of Hollywood's most notorious bombs. Clocking in at about 2 1/2 hours, the film--featuring a score by legendary composers Burt Bacharach and Hal David--was essentially laughed off the screen almost from the get-go, and was buried in a shallow grave by Columbia, not to be seen again until 2011, when it was finally released on DVD. But is it really all that bad?

The film opens in an unknown country, where a bunch of Americans (played by Peter Finch, Michael York, George Kennedy, Sally Kellerman, and Bobby Van) are in the middle of some sort of violent revolution. People are rioting, fires are burning, things are blowing up:
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Finch, who plays a foreign diplomat Richard Conway, bangs on the door to the cockpit and yells at the pilot to take off, now. We see a hand pop into the frame, lock the door from the inside, and the plane takes off. In the chaos, no one realizes they haven't actually seen the pilot. But the plane is taking off, so who cares?

While the plane is in the air, we are briefly introduced to the characters: Conway the diplomat, his brother George (York), a reporter (Kellerman), an architect on the run from the law (Kennedy), and nightclub comedian Harry Lovett (Van). After everyone gets some sleep, Lovett realizes the sun is rising on the wrong side of the plane: they're going the wrong way!

Yes, the plane is headed further East, eventually crashing in the Himalayas. They are met by some sherpas, and guided to a mysterious valley that seems like a mirage:
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They are introduced to a man known as Chang (John Gielgud, because, you know, English=Asian), who explains that this place is the land known as Shangri-La, thought to be a myth by the outside world. Because of Shangri-La's location (surrounded on all sides by mountains), the valley is a virtual paradise, yet completely hidden from view.

Shangri-La seems idyllic; the people there are gentle and welcoming, and soon Finch's Conway meets a schoolteacher (Liv Ullmann), who he takes liking too. Pretty much everyone except York's character seems to like this place.

Okay...so far, so good. The story is fairly well told; if a little on the bland side. But it's around this point that things take a turn for the weird:
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We meet a beautiful young woman known as Maria (Olivia Hussey), and during a dinner scene, she starts breaking into song! What the what?

Yes, it's about the 40 minute mark that the songs start. And while I can't fault the film's structure--waiting to get to Shangri-La before the musical numbers begin--IMO the minute people start singing it just completely derails the tension the film has been trying so hard to build. It's not that I have a problem with musicals per se (White Christmas is on my Top 10 Favorite Films of all time list), but trying to fit musical numbers into this story feels so odd, so misplaced, that Lost Horizon never recovers.

Conway meets the High Lama of Shangri-La (the legendary Charles Boyer), a man who seems to be many hundreds of years old. He explains to Conway that it wasn't an accident that he and his friends were brought here; the plan was all along that he be brought here, with the intention that he, Richard Conway, will eventually become the High Lama.
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York's character is the only real malcontent; he falls in love with Maria and together the plot to leave Shangri-La. They try and talk the others into joining them, but everyone is too busy singing and dancing their cares away to even consider leaving:
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Conway The Younger plants enough doubt in his older sibling about the veracity of Chang and The High Lama's stories about Shangri-La that they decide to leave, with Maria in tow. Chang warns that Maria is almost a hundred years old, and will begin to age again if she leaves; but they don't listen and head out into the snowy wastes of the Himalayas.

The sherpas grow tired of being slowed down by the Conways, and leave them behind. They take refuge in a cave, and the truth about Maria is evident:
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York becomes so upset he runs out into the snow, falling off a ledge in a scene so abrupt and awkwardly staged it becomes inadvertent comedy. Conway--the still breathing one--keeps going, and is eventually found by members of the outside world. He wakes up in a hospital, and the doctors questions him about his half-unconscious mutterings about a lost world.

Conway realizes that he wants to go back, and sneaks out of his room before some governmental colleagues arrive. When last we see him, Conway is looking for Shangri-La, and it appears he has found it:
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...The End!


Considering its reputation as one of the biggest turkeys ever made, I was expecting a truly jaw-dropping example of cinematic wrongheadedness. And don't get me wrong; trying to make this material a musical was very, very wrongheaded. Maybe--maybe--if the music had been of a more modern variety, it might have worked. After all, the concept of people wanting to escape the modern world during the depths of the 1960s (riots, assassinations, Vietnam) is a perfectly workable one, and Hilton's original story could have easily been updated to address modern concerns.

But the songs by Hal David and Burt Bacharach are so old school, so Hollywood schmaltzy, making them so jarring I half expected the film strip to fall off the camera sprockets ala Gremlins 2. The actors are in there pitching (Kellerman, who started her career as a singer, seems the most comfortable), but it just plain doesn't work. I've read a number of articles by people who are fans of Bacharach's music who say that if you listen to the songs on their own, they're actually pretty good (one, "The World is A Circle", has been covered enough that is approaches being a Standard), but as they are presented here, it just seems so very, very odd.

I truly believe the people who made this movie (the aforementioned Ross Hunter, director Charles Jarrott) had all the best intentions in the world, thinking this story could be retold. Lord knows the cast is distinguished, and the costumes and sets are reasonably good (tho the Shangri-La seen in Capra's 1937 version is far more visually striking than the one seen here). But, sometimes, you can have all the right ingredients in the cake, but the damn thing just won't rise. At 2 1/2 hours, the film was shooting for being an Epic, and when epics don't work, they don't work on a giant scale.

There's a precedent for movies that were planned as musicals, only to have all the musical numbers removed when it became "clear" that the film didn't work as planned. I wonder what a version of Lost Horizon with all the songs removed would feel like; whether it would be a tight, if a little bloodless, adventure story, or an even more incoherent mess.

Eventually enough time will pass where the memory of this version will have faded entirely (as if it hasn't already), and maybe Lost Horizon will get another workout. It's a gut-level, compelling story, and if Hollywood ever decides to try again they've got my money!


Monday, November 4, 2013

Movie Monday: Look What's Happened To Rosemary's Baby

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For Halloween, I cranked up Rosemary's Baby and (re)enjoyed one of the greatest horror movies ever made on the perfect night for such things. For some reason, a few days later I then subjected myself to the 1976 sequel, Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby.

Most people don't even know there ever was a sequel to Rosemary's Baby, and with good reason; after it's initial airing on ABC, the film essentially disappeared, never to be seen again. I don't think it was ever put on VHS, so unless you can find it in bootleg form (guilty), LWHTRB is simply not available in any way.
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Directed by Rosemary's Baby editor Sam O'Steen, Look takes place sometime in the mid-70s; Rosemary Woodhouse (now played by Patty Duke) lives with her son Andrew (now around six or seven), more or less under the thumb of the devil cult we saw in the previous film. It's clear that Rosemary has been planning some sort of escape for a while, but she didn't put much thought into it: she runs away into a nearby town (we are most definitely not in Manhattan, as before). With seemingly no money and no supplies, she is forced to hide out in a synagogue while a rainstorm falls. Right off the bat, we see that director O'Steen trades the original's subtlety and nuance for in-your-face horror movie cliches: creepy lighting, thunderclaps, people making spooky faces into the camera at every turn.

Pursuing Rosemary are the Castanets, played by Ruth Gordon (the sole returning cast member from the movie; she should have known better) and Ray Milland, sitting in for Sidney Blackmer:
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Rosemary calls her estranged husband Guy (George Maharis), now a big star in Hollywood. She threatens to kill their son unless he wires her money in various cities; meanwhile, Andrew is accosted by some local kids and he uses what we guess are his dark powers to fend them off, complete with 1970s-style creepy devil music, with a little wah-wah pedal thrown in for good measure.

Rosemary and Andrew meet the town's local harlot Marjean (Tina Louise--yes, Ginger from Gilligan's Island) who takes them in. Turns out that Marjean is in cahoots with the cult, and tricks Rosemary onto a bus, trapping her, and then running off with Andrew. As the bus departs, Rosemary discovers it is driven by no one! She pounds on the glass, to no avail, and we watch as she is dragged off, presumably to Hell:

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This is by far the film's best scene; spooky and nightmarish, it delivers on some of the implied menace from the devil cult, who in this film are mostly just comical. The problem is, Rosemary is never seen again! She is essentially killed off in the story, which seems like an arbitrary move, and not a fitting end for the character.

The film then jumps head twenty years (making it take place around 1995!) and Andrew (Steven McHattie)--now going by the name the cult referred to him with, Adrian--has been living all these years with Marjean:
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The devil cult--still around, despite the fact that everyone in it must now be pushing a hundred years old--is using Adrian for their weird rituals, partly against his will. At one point they dress him up in costume and devil make-up, attempting to call Satan. This sort of works, leading to the possession of a bunch of young rock and roll fans and the death of Adrian's best friend Peter.

Adrian wakes up, suffering from amnesia, in a mental hospital where he is cared for by a comely nurse named Ellen (Donna Mills). He tells her his story, and she helps him escape, and they end up in a motel. It's here that Ellen reveals she is also a member of the cult, and after drugging him, she rapes Adrian so she can become impregnated with Satan's grandchild. During this scene there are some cutaways, with Mills donning (she what I did there?) some of sort of devil chicken outfit:
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Guy Woodhouse, thinking Adrian will try and kill him (what?), shows up and tries to run his son over in a car. He misses, hitting Ellen, then dying himself in the crash. Adrian fights off some cops, who assumed he is "on" something (it is the 70s, after all), and runs off into the night.

We then rejoin the Castanets, who are visiting their pregnant granddaughter during a visit with her obstetrician, who says the baby she's carrying is a-ok! The camera pans over Mills, who is swinging for the fences, and up to a painting on a wall, exactly the kind of thing you'd see in an average obstetrician's office:
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...not the end! Actually, it is.

Post-credits, there's a scene of Rosemary's Grandbaby being born, which tells us nothing new; we're told at the end of the movie that the pregnancy is coming along fine, so seeing a newborn infant is (I guess) supposed to be one final shock but instead it's an "Um...Ok" moment just as the whole thing fades to black.

No two ways about it, Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby is pretty much a complete failure, and that's even if it wasn't a sequel to one of the spookiest, most masterfully created horror movies of all time. Steven McHattie as Adrian/Andrew is a total blank; he spends the whole movie wandering around in a stupor, pushed from place to place and scene to scene. There are sequences with him and other assorted proto-hippies playing rock music that seem to go on for ages, and go nowhere.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Castanets and their cult, as presented here, are about as frightening as the Apple Dumpling Gang. They seem incompetent at best, unable to keep Rosemary from escaping, and then taking almost twenty years(!) to actually do anything with Adrian that will bring about Satan. And now that we see they're starting all over with Ellen's baby, it'll probably take another twenty! Do Ruth Gordon Ray Milland have that kind of time?

The biggest mistake of all is getting rid of Rosemary a third of the way into the film--she is our hero here, not the baby, and killing her off so unceremoniously just feels completely wrongheaded. Not that Patty Duke gets much to do other than scream and run around, but a story where she finally escapes the cult and has to remain on the run would have been a much more effective follow-up rather than The Son of Satan's Rock and Roll Adventures.

I'd like to imagine what Roman Polanski's reaction was to this film, but this was right around the time he was busy being a complete and utter scumbag, so I guess he probably missed it.



Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Comic Book Creator #2

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There are a number of reasons why you should buy the Joe Kubert Tribute issue of Comic Book Creator magazine:

1)It's features tons of Joe Kubert art

2)It's the newest magazine from Jon B. Cooke, the guy who brought you Comic Book Artist

3)It features a small piece about Joe as a teacher from little ol' me!


Monday, July 29, 2013

Movie Monday: Sextette

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I'm bringing back Movie Mondays for a one-off post because I watched a movie and....I see no need to suffer alone.

As you can guess, the movie is 1978's Sextette. For those of you not familiar, the film stars and was based on a play written by Mae West. Yes, that Mae West. And yes, I said 1978.
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Mae West "plays" (more on those quotes in a minute) glamorous movie legend and headline-maker Marlo Manners, and the first ten or so minutes of the film is devoted to the after-effects of Marlo getting married--for the sixth time. The press is uniformly dying to cover it, and as they run after the wedding limo, we're treated to a song telling us just how awesome Marlo Manners is. The film also features opening narration by Regis Philbin, playing himself.

While it appears that Marlo--like the woman playing her--is very, very old, her new husband is young hunk Sir Michael Barrington, played by a pre-007 Timothy Dalton:
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Some of you might be wondering: "Wait a minute: Mae West - Timothy Dalton = something like fifty years." And you'd be right. In this movie, no one comments on the fact that Marlo Manners is clearly an octogenarian, and yet her new husband is in his mid-20s. 

There is a plot, such as it is, which involves the U.S. Government hiring Marlo to seduce a truculent Soviet delegate (Tony Curtis), who also is head over heels in lust for her, and then the covering up of a tape Marlo made that is supposedly scandalous, blah blah blah. Also appearing in the film is The Who's Keith Moon (as a flaming queen dress designer), Ringo Starr (a movie director and former husband to Marlo), Dom DeLuise as her manager, George Raft as himself, George Hamilton as another former husband, a President Jimmy Carter lookalike, and Alice Cooper as a singing doorman.

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The scenes with Mae West are not only disturbing, but even though the everyone in the movie pretends that Marlo is not pushing ninety, every scene can't help but underline it: she barely moves, other than waving her arms a bit; more often West is laying or sitting down. Also, most of her dialogue seems to have been dubbed in later, and she never seems to be looking at her co-stars. It gives one the feeling that a low-rent FX team dropped a stop-motion Mae West into pre-shot footage and couldn't quite line the eye lines up right.

There are a lot of reviews of this film online--of course there are, because its so goddamn weird that it seems designed to be a cult film. Many of the reviews some version of the line "Must be seen to be believed" and while that's true, its really not a movie that you should make any effort to see.

Not only is it just jaw-droppingly sad and creepy to see this aged former movie star repeat her old lines ("When I'm good, I'm very good, when I'm bad, I'm better", etc.) decades after they had lost whatever edge they had, but Sextette is painfully unfunny and dull. The movie seems beamed in from another planet, made by aliens who saw some movies forty years ago and figured earthling entertainment had not changed in that time. It's only about 90 minutes long, but at around the thirty minute mark I started looking for other things to do.

The film's "best" moment is probably Mae West and Timothy Dalton singing a duet of "Love Will Keep Us Together", click here to see more Sextette than you will ever need in your life. How Dalton kept a straight face during this is beyond us mere mortals to contemplate.



Monday, February 11, 2013

Movie Monday: Batman Year One

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This week's Movie Monday is the animated movie Batman Year One!

I have found that the animated movies DC and Warner Bros. has produced in the last couple years to be very hit-or-miss; too juvenile for adults but too dark for kids, for the most part they seem neither fish nor fowl. So even though I love the subject matter, I haven't made a whole lot of effort to catch all of them.

But when I saw that Batman Year One was on Netflix WI, I put it on immediately. The original Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli mini-series is one of my all-time favorite Batman stories; it's terse brilliance not having dimmed much at all in the decades since it was published; and that's even considering all the thematic and visual pilfering from it by other comics and movies.
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If you haven't read Batman Year One, I suggest you do, post haste. In case you haven't though, I'm not going to get into the plot details too heavily here; suffice it to say it tells two parallel stories: that of the young Bruce Wayne, just returning from years overseas, ready to bring unorthodox justice to Gotham; and honest cop Jim Gordon, banished to one of the most crime-ridden cities in the United States with a pregnant wife in tow:
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The adaptation part by the filmmakers is spot on: there are large chunks of the comic directly transplanted to the screen (most of the stills you see above are Mazzucchelli's originals), and they do their best to approximate the linework that made the book so distinctive.

The problem I had with Batman Year One--and to me it's a near-fatal one--is the length. The movie runs just 64 minutes, which is simply too short to really do justice to the material, which was densely plotted and loaded with dialogue. To that end, large chunks of the story are cut away, with other scenes from the book being reproduced faithfully but having no impact, because none of these characters really resonate. The closest the movie comes is Jim Gordon (voiced by Bryan Cranston, a brilliant piece of casting that I would love to see repeated into live action when the Batman movies are rebooted), and that's because he get the majority of the screentime.

Batman (voiced robotically by Ben McKenzie) flits in and out of the story, and he's a big zero in the movie. None of the self-doubt and barely-controlled rage from the comic is present in this Dark Knight; he just meanders through scenes as the movie rushes to get to the next one. There are some other great actors at work here--Eliza Dushku as Catwoman and Katee Sackhoff as Sarah Essen--but again they get so little screentime that they don't make much of an impact. For instance, Essen is introduced in one scene, flirts with Gordon the next, is having an affair with him in the third, and the whole relationship is ended right after that. It feels like a minor detail in the movie, when in the comic it formed a large part of Gordon's complex character.

One of the other very distinctive parts of the Batman Year One comic series was the coloring by Richmond Lewis, who brought a wonderfully painterly, very non-comic book-y look that contrasted wonderfully against the giant slabs of black that make up Gotham City. Instead, there are scenes where the colors are almost neon in their brightness which seems like the wrong approach to take when trying to so faithfully replicate the comic book.

After watching the movie, I searched out reviews of it, most of which are uniformly positive. I have to admit I was flummoxed by this response, and while I don't ever want to impugn other people's motives, I have to wonder how many of these people who think it's one (or the) best comic book adaptations ever have read and loved the comic, and are filling in the gaps themselves and giving the movie a pass because of it. (I have a similar blind spot for the two adaptations of my favorite book The Razor's Edge; I love both movies but I think they probably don't work for anyone who hasn't read the book, as I have dozens of times).

I really wanted to like--love--Batman Year One, because I thought here was a chance to make down-and-dirty gritty crime thriller that just happened to have Batman in it, which is pretty much what the comic was. And while I appreciate the obvious love the filmmakers had for the source material, I think that devotional approach should have been jettisoned once it became clear that so much was going to have to be left out. As it stands, the animated version is a Cliff Notes version of the epic that is Batman Year One.



Post Script: Today will be the last Movie Monday post. Several factors were involved in this decision, and I don't come to it lightly, because once I start something I like to keep it going forever, especially when people are enjoying it. But my (mostly self-imposed) schedule has just become unmanageable, so something(s) had to give--and since Movie Monday's readership has been steadily decreasing over time, it felt like this was a good thing to give up. Thanks to everyone who followed along!

 

Monday, February 4, 2013

Movie Monday: Journey to the Seventh Planet

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This week's Movie Monday is the 1962 sci-fi epic Journey to the Seventh Planet!

Okay, "epic" is pushing it a little. Okay, a lot: despite the amazing poster (virtually none of which takes place in the movie), Journey to the Seventh Planet is an example of trying to make a sci-fi epic extravaganza on the budget of your average Perry Mason episode:
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Journey was a Danish production for American-International, produced and directed by the wonderfully named Sid Pink. Starring American C-level leading man John Agar (looking very skinny) and a host of Danish actors, it's about a ship of astronauts on their way to Uranus (pronounced, without exception, as "your-ah-niss" to prevent giggling):
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Not only has the world by this time developed the ability to travel at a really fast clip (our intrepid heroes mention going from the Moon to Mars in under an hour), but there is nothing on Earth but peace, thanks to it being under total control by the United Nations (Glenn Beck was right!). So this trip is basically just one of exploration, not survival or a need to conquer.

On the way, the astronauts are met by some sort of being that is represented by a disembodied voice. It warns them of impending doom, putting them all to sleep for a week. Despite this, they continue on with the mission. Soon, the astronauts land on the titular seventh planet and learn that Uranus looks...just like home?

Turns out that all that the astronauts are seeing are replicated memories made real. That includes houses, trees, the sky, and, of course, dames!
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It takes the astronauts a little while to figure these are all illusions, and eventually they make their way into an ice cave where they fight a series of monsters, concluding with the physical being that threatened them earlier:
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Our heroes defeat the evil brain, and get back on the rocket to head home. One of the astronauts tries to bring his lady friend back with him, only to learn that she, too, is an illusion. The End.

Apparently director/producer Pink had all the SFX done in Denmark, thinking they were top flight. American-International got one look at them, and their jaws dropped to the floor. They quickly hobbled together new monsters and dropped the footage in (you never see the astronauts and the dinosaur-type creature in the same shot, for instance), in a desperate attempt to salvage the movie.

They didn't. Journey to the Seventh Planet is so cheap, so slack, that even though it's only 77 minutes the film feels interminable. All the characters are dull as dishwater, and the women are sexy in a Pat Nixon/Mamie Eisenhower kind of way. That worked for Dick and Ike, but as eye candy they are the Halloween equivalent of getting an apple for Halloween.

Strangely enough, the most visually compelling stuff comes last: the end credits are delightful, with the text flying in and out of the screen at crazy angles, wrapping around the planets while a fun little toy rocket flies about: 
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The idea of a big alien being mostly a thought monster was a bit ahead of it's time--this seems like the idea sci-fi movie for hippie kids to get stoned to just a few years hence--and filling a planet full of the astronauts' own thoughts has an invasive, unsettling feel. But other than some fancy lights superimposed over the actors (it's a far-out freak-out!), not much else is done with this hook. The astronauts take to the news that none of what they see is real with a shrug, and basically just walk around until they fight something to shoo their laser guns at.

With all the remakes being made nowadays, there is no earthly reason (ha! see what I did there?) that Journey to the Seventh Planet's basic premise couldn't be given the big-budget reboot treatment. And then maybe we'd get something half as interesting as the poster.


  
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