Look who’s in town
Kinda. I understand Michael Caine is staying in the beautiful town of Rye and filming a movie in nearby Camber Sands.
It’s about an old man who escapes a care home to go to 70th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings.
That’s his co star, Glenda Jackson. If you don’t recognize her, this is what they looked like when they last worked together.
He’s 89 now. She’s 86.
The production company is looking for extras. They’ve put out a call for people who look especially old and frail.
It’s hilarious watching all the old dears in my social circle act like they couldn’t possibly qualify.
October 3, 2022 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 7
Tales from the Klondike
The actual Klondike, not my living room today (though it sure am cold in here).
Dawson City grew up around the Klondike Gold Rush. It went from a remote Indian camp to a city of 40,000 back down to a town of 8,000 when the gold rush ended in 1899. It’s hovered around 1,000 ever since.
But it had a movie theater. And because it was so remote, it was the end of the line for the movie circuit. That is, after the movies were shown, they were thrown away.
In 1978, a construction company accidentally stumbled over them, buried under a hockey rink. They dated from 1903 to 1929. In all, there were 533 reels of film, some from silents that were thought to have been lost forever. Many were damaged, but I imagine the cold helped preserve them. We know how nitrate film likes to burst into flames.
Wikipedia on the Dawson Film Find.
Dawson City: Frozen Time is a 2016 documentary put together from the reels, though I gather “documentary” is not a very good description. It’s something altogether more dreamy and strange.
You can watch the official trailer on YouTube.
What? No. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m waiting to find a used copy. I use this blog as a notepad, you know.
p.s. Bonus. The totally unrelated short film Battle at Big Rock is totally worth ten minutes of your life. Stick around for the credits.
February 9, 2021 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 9
Shiny.
We watched The Dig over the weekend, the Netflix dramatization of the dig for Sutton Hoo just before the outbreak of WWII. It was 4/5 a brilliant film that somehow decided to spend its last twenty minutes tying up a minor subplot I didn’t give a shit about. With any luck, there will be a director’s cut with that excised.
Still a recommend.
They worked with the British Museum to get the costumes and sets right. There’s an interesting blog post from the BM here that describes the process. Spoilers, I guess.
And you can take a virtual walk around Room 41 that they’ve somehow built using Google Street View technology.
Very cool.
February 2, 2021 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 12
Warming to my theme…
Gloria Swanson was 51 when she played Norma Desmond.
My teenage impression of Norma Desmond, she was a thousand years old. But, thinking about it, it the story works better if she is way too old for a comeback, but not clownishly, ridiculously too old.
God, the makeup didn’t do them any favors, though, did it? Like the way your mom’s high school graduation picture made her look about 42.
Oh, speaking of clownish and ridiculous, I’ll close with Carol Burnett’s Norma Desmond. I don’t recommend looking up any of the skits — too broad, too long and totally belabor the joke — but holy shit the stills of her crack me up every time.
February 26, 2019 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 9
G’bye
Well. Carol Channing has died, age 97. As often happens, I didn’t realize she was still alive, and now she’s not.
Banging around the tubes, I found the above: Carol with Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews. Thoroughly Modern Millie, which I never saw.
One of the signature songs from that film was “Jazz Baby” from 1919, which Wikipedia says they had to buy back from the Washburn-Crosby Company, manufacturers of Wheaties, who had used it with variations for an advertising jingle since 1926.
The link from the Wikipedia article is dead to me (“not released in my country”), but I found this 1926 Wheaties jingle which…honestly doesn’t sound anything like “Jazz Baby” to me, but someone in the comments says it’s the first use of a jingle in a radio ad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While you’re there, please enjoy all these other Wheaties ads. Said it before, I’ll say it again — there needs to be a word for that thing you do where you start off with a simple Google search and find yourself an hour later squinting at Bruce Jenner eating Wheaties.
p.s. oh, yah — congratulations to peacelovewoodstock who wins the Dead Pool with Carol Channing. Y’all know what that means!
January 15, 2019 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 18
RIP Dr Stanley
Ralph Stanley died last week, and that’s an end to all the original men of Bluegrass, I suppose.
I know it doesn’t seem like it, but Bluegrass was strictly a Twentieth Century musical style. It borrowed heavily from traditional music, of course, but it was a highly formalized and particular form that started with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys (hence the name), particularly when Earl Scruggs joined them in 1945.
Stanley and his brother Carter had performed together since the late Forties, though Carter drank himself to death in the Sixties. Their sound was very heavily Appalachian. Ralph’s singing style was typical of the genre — a high-pitched, whining sort of sound called “high lonesome” and often compared to a ghost wailing through a forest. It’s eerie. And probably an acquired taste.
Listen to the chorus of The Fields Have Turned Brown to hear what I mean.
Stanley’s career had a sudden resurgence late in life when he did the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou. The album — particularly the song Man of Constant Sorrow — was a surprise hit.
As a personal aside, I hated that fucking film. It was the beginning of the end for me and the Coen Brothers. Films like Fargo poked fun of people but seemed to do it with affection, but O Brother was full of tone deafness and sneering contempt. But good on Ralph for ending his life on a high note (oh, pun, I suppose).
And thus a sad footnote to a strange week. Good weekend, everyone!
July 1, 2016 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 13
Say no to racial stereotyping of weasels
Snuck out of work to catch a matinee performance of Zootopia today, Disney’s latest kids flick. It was purty and fun.
It tried to be a message flick, and the message was that predators and prey animals can live together in harmony if they overcome their prejudices. But the message was ruined by the fact that…no. They can’t. Really.
I doubt even eight-year-olds are buyin’ it.
Not quite as dumb as the one where dinosaurs were socialist environmentalists. What was that, Land Before Time? You could go nutty trying to analyze the messages in Disney flicks, most of which are charmingly dumb and harmless.
Anyway, we see above more of the typical Hollywood anti-mustelid prejudice.
April 12, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 13
And your little d’….awww g’wan witcha
I just love seeing the Wicked Witch of the West crack up laughing. This is from Margaret Hamilton’s makeup test. An early one.
I’m struck by how much she looks like Carl Sagan here.
March 8, 2016 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 10
Oh, wait…I thought it said sub*lingual*
Here’s an interesting stinker we ran across while searching for a good ol’ atmospheric Saturday night flick: 1958’s My World Dies Screaming, AKA Terror in the Haunted House (link goes to full movie; be warned). We only sat through the first ten minutes, which seemed stupid and forgettable. Except for the psycho-rama part, which was stupid and slightly amusing.
It means subliminal images. The movie starts with a dream sequence (or a narration of a dream sequence), one that is dotted with still pictures, each on-screen for a fraction of a second. The year makes sense:
The birth of subliminal advertising as we know it dates to 1957 when a market researcher named James Vicary inserted the words “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” into a movie.
The words appeared for a single frame, allegedly long enough for the subconscious to pick up, but too short for the viewer to be aware of it. The subliminal ads supposedly created an 18.1% increase in Coke sales and a 57.8% increase in popcorn sales.
Okay, here’s the thing: Uncle B was only aware that the screen flashed in an odd way. Me, I was able to see the pictures clearly. Or, actually, I thought I could see the pictures clearly. When I slowed down the film and extracted the individual frames, it turns out I only really saw the top half of each. The bottom was a complete surprise.
Whoever wouldn’t mind sitting through the first three plus minutes, I’d be very interested to hear what you see, if anything.
I’ll give you some hints: the opening sequence has seven instances of two different pictures, A, B, B, B, A, A, A (per the IMDB entry, other pictures happen later in the film. I didn’t sit through the whole thing). In the version I linked, the pictures appear at 1:34:22, 1:42:20, 1:54:27, 2:06:27, 3:00, 3:06 and 3:09:12, each for about one one-hundredth of a second. Feel free to back up and try again (we did, several times).
When you’ve done that, if you care to, I’ll save you the trouble of firing up your video editing software: Picture A and Picture B.
What did you see?
November 30, 2015 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 9
Oops! Lookit the time!
So I’ve totally figured out how to drive the Chromecast, which means (among other things), any video I can find on YouTube I can share with Onkle B on the big screen.
We’ve done Ninja Kitty, Cats are Assholes, Cats versus Cucumbers, badger cubs, stoaty fun, happy snow leopards, the One Of Us scene from Freaks, the entire Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (funny, but not p’raps the gut-buster I remembered), the puMAman theme…and I’m wearing the bastard down at last!
What are some of your favorite ‘tubes? No need to post links, just enough of a description that they turn up on a search. If I make him sit through just a few more choice hits, I feel sure we can turn him ‘Murican.
Good weekend, all!
November 27, 2015 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 44