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If Thy Feathers Offend Thee, Pluck Them Out
A man goes great lengths to redeem his name from the charge of cowardice in 1939's The Four Feathers. Every source I read on this film sees fit to mention it is "widely regarded as the best of numerous film adaptations of the 1902 novel" it's based on. I've never read the novel nor seen the other adaptations but the 1939 film is damned good ( Read more... ) -
Star Trek: Mad Tumble
Netflix needs a feature that keeps track of when I fall asleep during a show. I fell asleep during the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Dauphin" and woke up in the middle of the next one, called "Contagion". I woke up and Geordi LaForge was tumbling about in a turbolift and I had no idea why. It occurred to me it would be kind of ( Read more... ) -
A Gulf Demanding a Bridge
A grown woman poses as a twelve year old to get cheaper train fare and winds up in a military officer's cabin in 1942's The Major and the Minor. This was the first American film directed by Billy Wilder and he hit the ground running with one of the cleverest and most engaging comedies of all time ( Read more... ) -
Tie Your Shoes
American politics are really pathetic at the moment. I was thinking yesterday about Trump's executive orders and contrasting it with the swirling cloud of disaster around Emilia Perez, the 2024 Oscar frontrunner with thirteen nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. It already cleaned up at the Golden Globes and Cannes ( Read more... ) -
Another Disrupted Vacation
Fleeing from a plague ridden ship into the Malayan jungle are the subjects of 1934's Four Frightened People, a smaller adventure film Cecil B. DeMille made between two of his massive spectacles. It doesn't rank among his best but it is charming ( Read more... ) -
Pasta Bondage
A man's need for a green card and a woman's desire to become an escape artist come together in 1991's The Linguini Incident, an S&M allegory comedy starring David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette. It's cute ( Read more... ) -
It's that Day Again and Again
Happy Groundhog Day to people in the U.S. for whom it it is still February 2nd. To-day is already February 3rd here in Japan. I watched the 1993 movie once again last night. It's called 恋はデジャ・ブ, Koiwa deja vu or "Love is Deja Vu" because most people haven't heard of the holiday in Japan. Of course, the holiday wasn't well known in the U.S. before ( Read more... ) -
Marianne Faithfull
That's Marianne Faithfull, who passed away yesterday, performing her breakout hit "As Tears Go By" in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. Typical for Godard in the period, he places a singer in an unusual context to illustrate how music manipulates the audience. It also suits Faithfull as one of the most earth-bound artists ever to break ( Read more... ) -
How Do You Want the Machine to Scare You?
With fears rising lately regarding AI, it's perhaps edifying to look back on how the topic manifested in fiction in the past. The 1993 episode of The X-Files called "Ghost in the Machine" depicts an AI gone mad and killing people by electrocuting them and sabotaging elevators. Oh, well. It's a fun episode ( Read more... )
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