Each Labor Day weekend, we begin a new year of Consortium of Seven: A Daily Blog. To find current posts, just follow THIS LINK.
Seven writers each take a day of the week to say something. Currently a few authors rotate to post on Wednesday.
Each Labor Day weekend, we begin a new year of Consortium of Seven: A Daily Blog. To find current posts, just follow THIS LINK.
(Oh,
while I'm mentioning Pinocchio, off in December we'll have a
stop-motion version by Guiellermo del Toro arriving on Netflix. More on
that as it draws near.)
Another arrival for Disney Day is the latest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, big screen releases, Thor: Love & Thunder.
Entertaining in parts, and with several good performances, but it
struck me as lacking in story weight, deferring instead to jokes --
which would have been a touch more forgivable if more of the jokes
really landed.
I'll
be curious to see if it plays better for me in a second viewing, both
because I'll be more aware of what's coming (and what isn't), and will
be able to pause it at will, and not have my attentions repeatedly torn
between the film and my aging bladder, the latter super-charged on
diuretics. Here's that trailer again:
That won't be my go-to Disney+ item on Thursday, though, as that's also when the latest episode of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law
arrives. Abysmal title (which the show more or less makes a running
commentary on), but very entertaining show. That'll be the fourth
episode, out of the season's nine.
There'll also be Making of/Behind the Scenes specials covering both the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and Thor: Love & Thunder, which I may take a look at.
Recently
I came across a film on Amazon Prime I'd been unaware of. From just
four years ago, it stars Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning. It's a
post-apocalyptic scenario set in a small town. The source and specifics
of the apocalypse - why nearly everyone suddenly died where they stood
or sat on a Tuesday afternoon - is never addressed, ultimately being
unimportant to the story we're being told, and, really, to the
characters themselves. Knowing will not restore the dead and bring back
the world that was, nor is it likely to be significantly knowable and
useful knowledge for these characters. That could very well be a driving
force for some other survivor, elsewhere, but that would be a different
film. I think it's best to rip that band-aid off ahead of time, because
most of the negative reviews this little film received were from people
who were looking for a different movie, and so were disappointed at
what was largely just a little, human story.
The
title remains an odd, potentially distracting choice, especially as it
calls to mind for at least some swath of the potential audience, a pop
song of some vintage. It's going to be a function of age whether they
remember it as Del Shannon or Tiffany. Either way, it's no part of this
film. I now imagine some misguided soul watching it, waiting for it to
show up as a title track. Heh. Now I'm wondering if there was anyone who
went to see M. Night Shyamalan's 2008 The Happening (a film I still like much more than the vocal Most) waiting for
Diana Ross and the Supremes' 1967 hit to start playing. (This as
opposed to the 1967 Anthony Quinn/George Maharis picture of the same
name, where the song did appear -- for little reason beyond marketing.)
Dinklage
plays Del, a man who had worked at the local library, but largely due
to his physical condition had been an outsider all his life. While he'd
interacted with many of the people, in a fundamental way he'd been alone. A quiet, orderly man, he's made a mission of methodically
clearing each house of their dead, burying them, and generally tidying
things up. Part of that's library-centered, too, as he gives special
attention to retrieving library books that were on loan to the people
who died, including the occasional scofflaw who'd been seriously overdue prior to having the excuse of death.
There's a moment in the film when Del's
talking with Grace (Fanning), the young woman who suddenly wandered into
town, where she asks him if he's lonely. He tells her he used to be
lonely -- when all of the people were still alive.
As
mentioned, I came across this by accident, and so with no
preconceptions. It must have gotten some press when it was new, as in
2018 Dinklage was still a core player in the then immensely popular Game of Thrones,
so even a little film like this that debuted at Sundance had to have
gotten a spotlight. For whatever combination of reasons, though, it went
past me unnoticed then.
I've checked, and it's
still there as a free-to-subscribers item -- always have to check with
Prime, where things can suddenly move back behind paywalls. It's I Think We're Alone Now (2018 R 99m)
Happy Thursday, everyone! It's the first day of fall here in the Northern Hemisphere and last weekend we finally took a ride out to Charlottesville in western Virginia, almost to the mountains. An absolutely lovely drive from Richmond and my goodness, the shopping district of Charlottesville has a bunch of very nice bookstores. (2nd Act Books and Blue Whale, in particular, are very much worth your time if you're ever in the area.) So naturally, I went all highbrow and...bought a bunch of Star Trek paperbacks. So let's check them out in publication order.
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Okay, so this is less review and more story time, because I haven't actually finished this beast. You have been warned.
So back in like, November of '21 hubby and I found the four-part Russian language epic film of War and Peace on HBOMax. Over the course of that month, we watched it. When I tell you that this was one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, I absolutely mean it. Costumes? Stunning! Cinematography? Perfect! Staging? Immaculate! (Seriously, every scene and shot is perfectly balanced like a Renaissance master's painting) 10/10, totally recomend, totally worth it.
This was when Hubby and I seriously began discussing taking a stab at this literal literary Everest. It had all of the postmarks for a reasonable goal. One chapter a day for a year. I made a calendar to measure my progress and everything!
On January 1, 2022, we began. The chapters are short and fairly staccato, making establishing character identities and relationships a struggle if you are holding yourself to one chapter a day. I started keeping a notebook so I could track who was whom and how they related to everyone else. If I hadn't watched the film I would have been hopelessly lost.
Honestly, I still got lost, which was where my notebook came in handy. I had let myself fall behind so I could catch up at the pace of three-ish chapters a day on my lunch break. This made figuring out relationships so much easier. I was finally starting to get into the stride of the thing at three chapters, when hubby told me he was ready to call it. Honestly, glide or not, I was ready to step away before annoyance turned to hatred. Then I would never be able to fully enjoy that gorgeous film again. We made it to March which is a good initial attempt. My Kindle says I made it 15% into the tome. I realize that this doesn't sound like much, but I felt every word. It had begun to feel like a bad reading assignment in highschool that just... Would. Not. End. I had a similar bad experience with "Anna Kareneina" a few years back ( I am planning to try this one again though)so I may just not be a Tolstoy reader.
Maybe I'll take another stab at it another time, but for me, I'll stick to the movies (Hot Take: Some movies are better than their source material). That said, don't let me discourage you from trying. Who knows? "War and Peace" just might be the story that changes your life!
If you have paid attention to stuff Ive been doing online, you realize that I like gardening, accordions, and mummy movies. I really, really like the last of these. While I love the best-known Hollywood mummy flicks, the familiar ones made by Universal, I also like mummy movies from other cultures.
Embalming plus the dry sands of Egypt and enclosure in stone pyramids preserved the bodies of Ancient Egypiian nobility, but clay did the same thing for people of the Yucatan, where they also had pyramids. These were actually Mayan structures, but "The Aztec Mummy" sounded cooler when movie producers needed a scary-movie title. (Later, an English-language version released in the U.S.was given the title "Attack of the Mayan Mummy.")
A studio called Calderon had been making films since 1943, starting with a horror film with a title which means "Inn of Blood." Fourteen years later, the studio scored a hit with "The Aztec Mummy," then did the same kind of series which brought Universal success. There were three movies, the second being "Curse of the Aztec Mummy." All three films were shot at the same time, and then the scenes were divided up into different movies.
Calderon seems to have switched over from horror to sex comedies in the 1970s, and they made movies for another twenty years after the changeover. Low-budget all the way, as you can see from these stills from the DVD intro. We are taken through a graveyard to a mausoleum called "The Crypt of Terror." All the epitaphs and the entrance sign for the crypt were done in the kind of text design used to make poster headings in word processing programs. The raven with outspread wings is sort of cool, though.
Once we enter The Crypt of Terror, the DVD menu options are on the doors to buiral vaults, and choosing any of them makes ketchup-colored blood splashes appear on the metal door plaques.
In the "Extras" vault menu, we get to see some film stills and lobby posters, and there's also this movie poster stuck to a marble pillar. The posters and stills are for all three Aztec Mummy flicks, including the last one, "The Aztec Mummy vs. The Robot Monster."
Another burial vault is marked Play so here we go, starting with title cards.Next, we briefly tour the Great Questions of All Time. Don't worry as it's all scientific and fiction is all right as long as it's also factual. Ish.
It's nice to be able to turn on the English subtitles so we can tell what's going on.
All that science and spiritual searching, and then we have gratuitous gangsters versus cops film noir shootout because there's about to be dialogue scenes to set up our story and the director wants audiences to know things will get exciting soon.
Meanwhile, there's a convention of psychic researchers in town, and we're about to see the keynote address.
The speaker is not the father, just old enough to be. He's this woman's boyfriend.
The reception to the doctor's presentation, alas, is poor. An hour or two later, he and his supporters are back at stately Wayne Manor. Or the castle where the French Knight taunts people from a turret.
Ooh, cliffhanger end to this first part of our look at "The Aztec Mummy." We'll pick up the story next week right from this point, sinister shadow and all.