The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)

     I'll be honest I've been getting a bit fatigued with Bond. The last two movies I watched for this blog were barely coherent vehicals for increasingly silly and problematic setpieces. It seems to me that Diamonds are Forever was the peak of that style of Bond film. The type that forgets that movies typically have a narrative and just wants to show us fun action setpiece after fun action setpiece. That this was all I could expect from The Man with the Golden Gun was the attitude I entered the film with. 

Live and Let Die (1973)

     You know what? I think I had James Bond pegged all wrong. My initial experiances and the way people seem to talk about the franchise led me to believe that Bond movies were all fairly typical action blockbusters lightly flavored with cold war era spy fiction and sci-fi with an unusually high level of racism and mysogyny due to the franchise's adhirance to tradition, and the power fantasy it was created to cater to. However, as we move further along the franchise into the seventies I can't help but get the sense that, while they are spy/sci fiction action blockbusters they aren't at all typical.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

     You know what I find most interesting about James Bond? Just behind Godzilla it is the second longest running movie franchise. That's not the only thing the seem to have in common: they also seem to have gotten really silly at around the same times too, and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) seems to be prime evidence of this. Although, it is worth mentioning that the Godzilla movie it most reminds me of was released two years later: Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973).

Goldfinger (1964)

     (CW: Discussion of rape) Coming out of Dr. No (1962) it occured to me that older Bond might just be too vapid to hold any interest beyond modeling a gross male powerfantasy that really doesn't appeal to me. I wondered if I would even be capable of enjoying any Bond movie made before about 1980 or so. I remember enjoying the two times I saw From Russia With Love (1964) but the last time I saw that was years ago and I was a very different person then. As a result it was with some trepidation that I pressed play on Goldfinger.

Dr. No (1962)

    Well we did it. We all survived 2020, and now it's 2021. Now things probably won't be getting much better for a while now, but fitting for the fresh start of the new year the scratch off poster I'm using to structure this blog has led me to a survey of sorts of James Bond films; hitting a few of the highlights of bond over the years. Over the next few weeks I'll be covering Dr. No, Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun, Moonraker, Octopussy, Licence to Kill, Goldeneye (for some reason labeled "The Golden Eye") and finally The World is Not Enough. It's worth reiterating that this poster only covers the 20th century so there will be nothing past 1999. So this week we'll start with the first Bond film: Dr. No

Apocalypse Now (1979)

     To some extent Apocalypse Now (1979) weirdly belongs in the same category of films as Gone With the Wind (1939). Both are titans of cinema; undertakings as successful as they are grand, and incredibly difficult for me to watch. I was dreading rewatching Apocalypse Now as soon as I finished my first viewing. I guessed a rewatch would be inevitable. After all I didn’t really feel like I truly “got it”. In truth I still don’t think I do, but now more than ever I’m pretty sure I don’t really want to.

Cabaret (1972)

     10 months 2 jobs later in a year besotten by a pandemic I return to the old film blog. It's nice to know that no matter how often I abandon it I can always come back to post more musings. I've gone back to the old scratch off poster again fulfilling a promise I made just over a year ago that I'd muse on Cabaret (1972). So I done did a watch of the movie so lets do a talk about it.

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I'm sure you've noticed I've redecorated. The pitiful human vessel I now inhabit has such mediocre and generic tastes. For the time being I Pf'Iloigoth The Servant of Spook control his form as well as his pitiful blog. A musical about 1930's Germany and the rise of fascism may be scary but it is not in the spirit of Spook. So I am altering the course of this blog. Until the dimensional walls reassert themselves I, Pf'Iloigoth will use my vessel's experience and knowledge of film to discuss movies that are in the spirit of Spook. Beginning with the classic 1980's slasher movie Friday the 13th (1980)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

I've loved Stanley Kubrick's work pretty much ever since I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when I was... about 10 I think. Yeah, I had a pretty kick ass attention span for a kid when it came to sci-fi movies at least. I even remember enjoying Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) (accurately nicknamed Star Trek: The Slowmotion Picture). Of course it wasn't until much later that I saw some of Kubrick's other movies like The Shining (1980) and today's film A Clockwork Orange. The film has very strong themes of sexual and state violence so inevitably I will be discussing such concepts. If these topics are especially distressing to you it might be a good idea to skip this post.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Anyone else notice that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is pretty similar to the later Fast and Furious movies? You got this pair of criminals who are also close friends doing death defying stunts usually involving some kind of mode of transportation while on the run from supernaturally capable and powerful law enforcement. No? Just me? Okay then.

The Pink Panther (1963)

Conventional wisdom tells me that it's generally not a good idea for a comedy film to be overlong. running gags can really only work well 2-3 times before they get stale, and with a single setup and set of characters there is typically only so much iteration you can do before you start to repeat your self. Imagine my surprise then that The Pink Panther (1963), a movie I've seen a few times and generally regard as a light quick comedy, is actually a nicely plump 2 hours. It certainly feels a lot quicker.

The Miracle Worker (1962)

We all had some good laughs last week with Some Like it Hot, (potentially problematic bi-representation aside), and to be honest I didn't really wanna let that fun go to get into another drama as The Miracle Worker (1962), being based on the early life of the famously blind and deaf woman Helen Keller, most obviously is. Especially since the past few dramas I've reviewed for the blog have been... well... awful for one reason or another. As The Miracle Worker opened with a mother and father literally screaming at their blind, deaf baby hoping to elicit some reaction I felt as though my fears would be made manifest. That feeling didn't last long.

Some Like it Hot (1959)

After Tuesday's overwrought and, quite frankly unpleasant, drama I needed a good laugh, but I must admit I had some concern over Some Like it Hot (1959). A comedy about men cross-dressing made 60 years ago? It's really tough to intuit if it could stand up to scrutiny in 2019 now that gender-fluid and non-conforming individuals are less of a target of mockery. I have to admit I was fairly charmed and impressed by the film.

An American in Paris (1951)

I love the glitz and excess of "The Musical" as it as been mythologized in the public consciousness and especially in the movies. However, with an industry wide shift in the 70's toward realism ,"the Musical" became less popular as a film genre to the point where musicals really only exist in the modern industry as gritty dark awards bait films like Les Miserables. It seems they can only exist if their song and dance is balanced out with a realistic narrative, characters, and visual style. An American in Paris is very much not that.

Raw Deal (1948)

Raw Deal (1948) is absolutely another standard Film Noir like Born to Kill (1947). However this particular Film Noir proved to be far more interesting than I could have anticipated. But, before I get into that I need to point out a bit of language used in the opening credits. The credits read that the movie was "suggested by a story by Arnold B. Armstrong and Audrey Ashley". Can we use that language more often? It seems most movie adaptations of books, real events, and other works are more "suggested by" than "based on". That language would really apply to the crappy Percy Jackson movies; certainly movies "suggested by" Riordan's work and not based on.

Born to Kill (1947)

Since taking a class focusing on the genre Film Noir has been my favorite genre of a bygone era. Gaining prominence just after the second World War film noir was born out of the cynicism and nuclear fears of the 40's and 50's. It is characterized by morally ambiguous heroes, manipulative femme fatales, plots of murder, large sums of money, and a general feeling of darkness and cynicism. Born To Kill (1947) is fairly exemplary example of this genre.

The Great Dictator (1940)

Having done a bit of research on this film (actually just glancing at the wikipedia page) I learned that in his biography Charlie Chaplin stated that he would not have made The Great Dictator (1940) if he had known the true extent of the violence committed against the Jewish people in Germany. Perhaps this would have been the right decision in 1940 when Hitler was still in power and the threat he represented wasn't widely known. Trivializing dangerous people can give them power by disguising their threat, however in 2019, to quote Mel Brooks, "Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths."

A Symphony of Horror

It's shocking how much things have changed since 100 years ago. Nosferatu is a 1922 horror film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that was entirely unofficial and unauthorized. Even Asylum's mockbusters (Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim etc...) don't have the guts to use identical plot and characters to their "inspirations". Aside from the usual adaptation changes of shortening and simplifying the original work the only things F.W. Murnau changed from the book original were the names and locales, and even then not very much.

The Pawnshop and A Dog's Life

When you go back far enough into the history of popular art you reach a point where works get increasingly hard to talk about due to the almost alien cultural context within which they were created and initially seen. This is not to say that art can't be timeless, many paintings, music, books etc... are received in much the same way now as they were when they were created, but many popluar works lose or change their meaning over time and this can be alienating. This is very evident when viewing the cinema of the early 20th century today. The tools filmmakers had to work with were more restrictive and that certainly does have an alienating effect, but there were also vastly different cultural expectations as to what moving pictures were expected to accomplish.

Beginnings of Cinema: 4 Silent films

This week is going to be the start of a somewhat new direction for this blog. I've been having some difficulty coming up with topics twice a week, and this hobby of mine isn't actually encouraging me to see movies I haven't seen or to reconsider movies I have seen. So what I need is some kind of guiding structure to guide my topics and push me to more interesting things, and I think I have just the thing.