Expelled Grey Matter

It has now been two years since Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released.  True to current fandom, about a month or so was spent praising it for bringing back the feel of the Star Wars franchise after the lackluster prequels.  The rest of the time?  Complaining that it was a rehash of the original movie, while speculating on Rey's parents and who this Snoke guy was.  While some explanations fit in with the new canon, much of what could explain the rise of the First Order was wiped out when years of world building was relegated to "Legends" status. I will give some credit where it is due.  While expanding the Star Wars universe and adding some interesting new characters, while dispatching an old favorite, The Force Awakens felt like it had to in some ways incorporate elements of Star Wars in order to put things back on track.  What was truly unexpected would be that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , the first entry in the standalone series of movies, wou...

It is almost a guarantee that come Christmas there will be some new adaptation, or parody, of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol .  Now that It's a Wonderful Life is back under copyright, the other typical go-to is a little harder, but the story of old man Scrooge and his visitation by three ghosts is fair game.  The 1951 version starring Alastair Sim is probably the most popular straight reading, while for comedic versions I have always enjoyed the Blackadder Christmas special. For many, though, Scrooged has become required holiday viewing.  I saw it originally a couple years after it came out, and wasn't all that impressed.  I didn't hate it as much as some of the critics did at the time, but I felt so much potential was wasted.  I appreciate a late '80s effects movie revisiting the old theme once again, but I remembered very little over the years other than the movie is practically yelling at the audience throughout.  From what I have read, Bill Mu...

And then... along came Bruce. No, not Bruce Lee.  Unfortunately he had been gone for 15 years by the time this came out.  It would have been interesting seeing him kick the butts of a bunch of bad guys taking over the fictional Nakatomi Plaza.  Maybe in some alternative dimension.  Still, I don't think even that particular Bruce would have made Die Hard as iconic and memorable as Bruce Willis. At the time Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris were the big three, with Jean-Claude Van Damme and and Steven Seagal interesting newcomers.  Bruce Willis, on the other hand, was the start of a television detective/romance drama called Moonlighting , which was still in production at the same time Die Hard was filming.  Some of the big names were considered for the part of John McLane, but Willis had a certain everyman quality the others lacked. Thus, we suddenly had another big action star on our hands, along with a major franchise and, ...

Sam Raimi has been one of my favorite directors ever since I first saw Evil Dead II .  Not only was he able to do quite a lot on a small budget, but his direction was unique.  I later came to find out that was what I like about many horror directors.  You occasionally had your mainstream auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, but many independent horror directors were able to develop their own style simply because to do what they wanted to do, and do it cheaply, required a bit of extra thought. The Evil Dead was Raimi's first feature-length film, famously financed by Raimi, producer Rob Tapert and lead actor Bruce Campbell going to extreme lengths to make sure the movie got made and found an audience.  Despite freezing temperatures, dangerous filming conditions and a number of injuries, it did, and it became one of the most important horror films of the 1980s. Friends Scotty (Richard DeManincor) and Ash (Campbell) head to a remote cabin for a weekend o...

With films, much like literature, we are told there are certain films that we need to watch.  Not that we'll enjoy them or get anything from them, but because of some innovation or decree of the critical powers that be.  Often they are part of some movement of some sort, and elements of the film were revolutionary at the time it was done.  We are looked down upon with scorn if some reason we are not blown away by the genius of the movie. When I finally get around to watching these movies I am often underwhelmed.  Take Belle du jour , for instance.  A big deal was made a number of years ago when it got re-released, and it's hailed as one of Luis Buñuel's greatest films, if not his masterpiece.  When I finally watched it I thought it was surprisingly straightforward for a Buñuel film, but didn't see anything striking or amazing about it.  It's good, but Buñuel has done better.  Jean-Luc Godard is hailed as one of the foremost innovators of Fr...

Whenever any date prior to 1967 is mentioned in television shows or movies these days the topics mentioned have nothing to do with economic stability, technological advances or the general state of optimism that existed, but rather two things: the oppression of women and minorities.  If it is to be believed, our grandparents and great-grandparents were barely one step above a plantation overseer, dedicating every day of their life to making sure the world around them stayed a pure, unchallenged white. There were major issues, and a good part of the last half of the 20th century was spent in dealing with them.  In truth, we'll probably be dealing with them for decades to come, as being awful to others that are not exactly like us seems to be programmed into humanity, largely as a leftover survival instinct from the times when someone who didn't look like you very likely did want to kill you and your family.  What seems to be left out is that, although there were fre...

Australia has a bit of a reputation as a rough-and-tumble desert full of snakes, spiders, serial killers and psychotic bikers.  It's a place where men are men, beer is - well, the exact opposite of whatever Foster's is.  It's a place so tough that the only protection you have from the roving gangs is black-leather wearing police in their souped-up muscle cars. Of course, other than spiders and snakes (and, unfortunately, the serial killers), none of this is true.  In fact, the movies that pushed this stereotype were a rather recent development, as Australia's version of the Hayes Code was stricter than that in the U.S., and it lasted all the way until the early 1970s.  It was so strict, in fact, that there was practically no local film industry.  This changed when Australia adopted something from the U.S. - the "R", or Restricted, rating. While this coincided with the birth of serious Australian cinema (often referred to as the Australian New Wave) in t...

Gary, Indiana.  It was a steel town, and it still is.  United Steel still has their factory there, although it, like the city, is a ghost of its former self.  My grandfather lived and worked there as one of the many Europeans that settled down to work in the steel industry.  My mother and her brothers were born there.  This was the 1930s and 1940s.  Like many cities that depended on a major industry for their life blood, once the world began to change the town did as well.  Gary fell into ruin and decay as most of the population left.  It increasingly became a symbol of blight and crime in the United States.  Former NFL player and famous blaxploitation actor Fred Williamson is one of the many celebrities (the entire Jackson musical clan, for instance) that came from Gary.  It's no surprise that when he got the chance he decided to make a tribute to the movies that made him famous he also decided to feature his home city and return t...

This movie is practically the KLF of movies. Not familiar with the KLF?  They were Bill Drummond and James Cauty, and are often given credit with creating the trance genre of electronic dance music.  Originally called the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu (or the JAMMs, for short), they originally gained notoriety after being sued by ABBA for using unlicensed samples on their first album.  Though they continued their rebellious stance (KLF stands for Kopyright Liberation Front), they eventually learned to pay for their samples and eventually evolved their sound, their vital first singles were using samples to create their sound in a more blatant fashion that P-Diddy. At least the KLF created something worthwhile.  What we have here is another prehistoric adventure with close-ups of lizards standing in for dinosaurs.  To add insult to injury, they couldn't even use their own lizard close-ups. It's 1881 in Algeria, and Frenchman Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova) ...

I still believe that of all the attempts to adapt television shows to the big screen, outside of science fiction, the only one I can think of that's been truly successful was the two Addams Family movies.  I think that is because the original show used subversive humor to satirize society at the time it was made, and because of being framed in a "spooky" manner it got away with much more than I would expect from a television show that started at the same time the Beatles were becoming popular in the United States.  Instead of doing some sort of ironic take on the show, director Barry Sonnenfeld wisely just updated it to the '90s and let things play out. It does help that the Addams Family themselves always happily existed as outsiders, with much of the humor coming from their confrontations with "normal" people and their general misunderstanding of how the world works.  Other adaptations like The Brady Bunch and The Beverly Hillbillies , while occasiona...

As Hammer was beginning to wind down, the budgets becoming less and less and the movies often being sad shadows of what they were in their heyday, Christopher Lee decided to use his name and his success to start producing his own movies.  Charlemagne Pictures Ltd. would of course have the benefit of having Lee as an actor, and it also had Peter Cushing in its first movie as well.  It was an easy transition for Hammer fans. In the end, despite planning a trilogy of movies based on John Blackburn novels, Nothing But the Night was the only film produced by Charlemagne Films.  It seemed that working in film production took so much time that he found himself turning down acting roles, something that he rarely did even if he did constantly complain about the roles he was given. A number of trustees for the Van Traylen Orphanage keep turning up dead, including founder Helen Van Traylen (Beatrice Kane).  All the killings have the appearance of possible homicide, but t...

Normally when referencing Lon Chaney we are talking about Junior, who had a much longer career than his father did.  It was the original Lon Chaney, however, that pioneered makeup effects and techniques in film.  It didn't hurt that he was quite an actor. Lon Chaney died in 1930, on the cusp of relaying his fame into talking films.  As makeup techniques advanced it would have been interesting to see what he would have done, far beyond the Universal monster canon that was popular at the time.  In fact, Lon Chaney films were treated as events, largely to see what he would do next.  One of the earliest in this line was The Penalty . The up and coming Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary) is treating a child who has been run over by a wagon.  Thinking it is the right thing to do, he amputates the child's legs, but ignores the contusion on the back of his head as that is beyond his skill.  Dr. Ferris's father double checks everything and realizes that the legs d...