July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014
The death of actor Robin Williams was of course quite a shock.
Like pretty much everyone around my age, I grew up with Williams due to his roles in movies like Hook, Aladdin, and Mrs. Doubtfire. But my two favorite performances of his are in movies I didn't see until I was much older.
I had trouble sleeping (insert Insomnia joke here) when I was a teenager. I would just lie in bed, watching the same movie over and over again every night. I'd go through different phases where I'd watch a certain movie every night for around two weeks and then I'd pick a different movie from our very limited collection of DVD's or cassette tapes. For some reason we had a copy of Good Will Hunting on VHS, so that was one I regularly watched on school nights when I couldn't sleep.
I hated English class all throughout high school. I could go on and on about why, but this isn't the place for that. Once in a while though we'd read a good book or watch a good movie. One teacher who I didn't even particularly like showed us a few things I still love to this day, including a movie that affected me profoundly: Dead Poets Society. It always amused me that rather than attempting to inspire his own students, my teacher showed us a movie about another teacher inspiring his.
Summer Classic Film Series 2014
A local theater (or 'theatre' as they spell it... for some reason I can't see it spelled that way without hearing Tobias Funke say it in my head.) has been playing several classic films this summer. My friend and I decided to go see a few. Rear Window, King Kong, and Creature From The Black Lagoon. I had already seen them before, but never on the big screen.
The picture quality of all three films was gorgeous, but the sound could have been better. I think the acoustics in the theater were to blame. There was this reverb with a long decay, like in a cathedral, and it made the whole soundtrack muddy, especially the dialogue and sound effects. And that's a shame, because I love the attention to detail in the sound design of Rear Window. The sounds of all the little things happening at the apartments. By the way, how wonderful is it that the score's mostly made up of the beautiful piano piece L.B. Jefferies' songwriting neighbor is composing throughout the film? I love all of the quirky neighbors too, and the voyeuristic little glimpses we get into their lives.
King Kong and Creature From The Black Lagoon was actually a double feature, and I thought that was a really cool pairing. Both are influential black and white monster movies. Each monster infatuated with a beautiful woman.
Creature From The Black Lagoon is of course a Universal Monster movie, and it's easily one of my favorites of those that I've seen. Its influence on Jaws, one of my favorite movies period, is undeniable. I'm really amazed by how well the gill-man still holds up. Something about the material of the suit, and the way various parts of the head move makes it just seem like a real creature to me instead of an actor in a costume.
I have of course mentioned in a post before that the stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien in King Kong inspired a young Ray Harryhausen. So I was thinking about how, in that way, it was kind of linked to the triple feature I saw at another local theater last year. The only thing that doesn't really hold up in King Kong is the close ups of Kong's face, which were done using a large bust of the ape's head. The stop-motion is still beautiful to me though, and I'm an absolute sucker for stop-motion dinosaurs.
My friend and I gave spare tickets to a woman and her two children. She thanked us multiple times, but if I understood, I guess the kids weren't particularly thrilled to be seeing a black and white movie. They had said they were probably only staying for one movie, which is understandable because they were playing pretty late. About a minute after King Kong ended, and I was back to reality, I remembered them and wondered what they thought of the movie. I turned around to ask, and they were already gone. And so I was left wondering...
Wondering out into the wasteland...
Oh, I'm sorry. I got distracted by how great the Mad Max: Fury Road trailer is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)