Jurassic Plateau

Film: The Lost World (1925)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

Some movies are important because of the story they tell, the quality of what happens on screen, a break-out role for an actor, or are formative in the career of the director. Then, there are films like The Lost World from 1925, which is important because of technology. While not the first stop-motion film, it is the first one of feature length, or at least the first American feature-length film to feature stop-motion prominently. And how do you appeal to the sensibilities of the early movie-going public? You give them stop-motion dinosaurs, and a lot of them.

The Lost World is based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, who appears at the beginning of some prints of the film. This is a film that was considered lost in full—only a number of abridged copies remained, but an almost-full restoration has been created, giving us almost the entire original film. The original running time was about 106 minutes; the version I found runs about 102 with a short intro about the restoration, so maybe a total of 5 minutes missing.

Electric Sheep?

Film: Robot Dreams
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

On my list of Oscar movies from 2023, there are two that have been impossible to find for me. I’m going to have to do a trial of HBO to get The Zone of Interest, I suppose. The one that was more problematic until recently was Robot Dreams, which wasn’t even streaming for pay anywhere. But, suddenly, it’s streaming on Hulu, and I finally got the chance to watch it and complete the Best Animated Feature category from last year.

Robot Dreams is fascinating for a number of reasons. The first is that there is no dialogue in the film. There’s music with lyrics and there are some vocalizations, but no one really speaks through the entirety of the film. This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course, but it is pretty unusual. Another interesting part of this film is that despite having anthropomorphized animals for most of the characters, this takes place in the real world. Our characters don’t just go to baseball games, but are Mets fans. They drink Tropicana and read Stephen King books and eat Nathan’s hot dogs with (gasp) Heinz ketchup. This, incidentally, is more evidence that the film takes place in New York; no self-respecting Chicagoan would ever put ketchup on a hot dog.

Nature Fights Back

Film: Long Weekend
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

When the environmental movement really got running in the 1970s, one of the results was the subgenre of environmental horror. Sure, you got all of the nuclear-powered stuff from decades earlier. There’s a whole slew of 1950s irradiated giant bug movies and Godzilla is straight out of this genre as well. But in the 1970s, it was less about nuclear radiation and the results of The Bomb and more about humankind’s purposeful destruction of the environment. The Food of the Gods, Frogs, The Prophecy, Squirm, Grizzly, Phase IV and even some straight science fiction like Silent Running were focused on the idea that mankind had it in for Mother Nature. Few were as directly targeted as Long Weekend, where the idea of Man vs. Nature is taken at its most literal.

There’s not a massive amount of plot in Lost Weekend. In Australia, two people, Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) head out for a long weekend (hence the title) with John’s dog Cricket. The idea is to get back to nature for a few days—swim and sunbathe on an isolated beach—and perhaps work on the problems in their relationship, which are legion. As the squabbling intensifies, we learn that evidently both Peter and Marcia have had affairs, and recently Marcia has had an abortion after an affair with another man—something insisted on by Peter since he was convinced the child wasn’t his.

What I've Caught Up With, November 2024 Part 2

On the television front, I finished what I had planned in November. I completed NOS4A2 (the first season is much better than the second) and have moved on to Peaky Blinders for my workout show. I also completed Schitt’s Creek, The Good Place, and Boston Legal. If you haven’t watched, The Good Place has arguably the best final episode in television history. I’ve started up with Parks and Recreation and Killing Eve, both of which I’m enjoying a great deal so far.

What I've Caught Up With, November 2024 Part 1

While I didn’t post a ton of reviews in November, I did get through a lot of movies on the giant list of films to watch. It always feels like an uphill battle getting through the list, but I made a concerted effort to watch movies from all eras this month. What that means essentially is that I watched at least one movie from every decade from the 1930s to the 2020s including the full review of Barbarian.

It's Not a Prison Movie, I Promise

Film: Lady in a Cage
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

It’s often interesting to see the early films of someone who turned into a star. It's fun to see someone who ened up having a great career starring in something kind of trashy. That’s definitely the case with Lady in a Cage, which features the second role and first-ever credited role for James Caan. This is a good half decade or so before Brian’s Song. Seeing him playing a young tough (he’s about 23 in this) is one of the more interesting parts of this film.

The easiest film connection to make with Lady in a Cage is that this is like a salacious and vulgar version of Wait Until Dark. The reality, though, is that Lady in a Cage came first by three years. This is much closer to a sort of “youth in revolt” picture that focuses on the victim instead of the youths. If you’re an old school MST3K fan, think something along the lines of Wild Rebels or The Hellcats, but from the point of view of their victims.

The Last Night of the World

Film: Silent Night
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

There has been a long fascination with the idea of the end of the world. I’m not specifically talking about the eschatology of Christianity in this case, but more in the literal “the world is going to end” sense, whether through nuclear devastation, climate peril, or disease. There’s a part of us that seems to yearn for the species-wide abyss. Probably my first two encounters with this idea were stories—Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 and Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World. Roshwald’s book is about a man living in the deepest bunker after a nuclear war while Bradbury’s story is more about the world simply switching off. I bring these up because both stories are far more interesting than Silent Night, and that shouldn’t be the case.

This is an “end of the world” story, and unlike the bombastic 2012, the action-oriented Snowpiercer, or the darkly comic Don’t Look Up, this is a film much closer to The Happening, in a sense. Essentially, humanity has dry-humped the planet so badly that the planet is fighting back. A massive noxious poison cloud has begun engulfing the world, and what everyone is getting for Christmas this year is death.